It's bad enough that they're filming a gender-swapped remake of 90s high school movie She's All That featuring TikTok star Addison Rae, but shutting down testing sites? Throw the whole thing away.
Hollywood is floundering. On the one hand, people are consuming more entertainment content than ever, while on the other Hollywood is struggling to resume production on new projects amidst a verifiable second wave of COVID which, according to the CDC, is particularly rampant in big cities like Los Angeles.
It seems every week the tentative production of a highly anticipated movie is paused due to Coronavirus scares — from Olivia Wilde's Don't Worry Darling starring Harry Styles and Florence Pugh, to the Batman remake starring Robert Pattinson and Zoe Kravitz.
While there's a part of me that's desperate for new film releases, this one I don't need.
When they announced that Addison Rae, a Tik Tok famous teen with no acting experience whatsoever, would be starring in a remake of the seminal Freddie Prinze Jr and Jodi Lyn O'Keefe film, I thought it couldn't get any worse. Then they announced it would be a gender-swapped version in which the social media star would play a popular mean girl tasked with transforming a less popular male.
Now this.
504 Los Angeles residents scheduled for tests at the busy DTLA Union Station Covid test kiosk for December 1st were notified that they would have to reschedule. The original notification mentioned a vague "event" but it did not take long to figure out why — the remake was planning to shoot at Union Station.
Naturally, people were outraged. It's one thing for TikTok to take over your virtual life, it's another for it to disrupt your real life. The decision to close the kiosk felt especially heinous given, as many residents noted, the spiking Covid cases in Los Angeles.
Thankfully, Mayor Eric Garcetti assured all affected that the kiosk would remain open and their appointments would be kept. Neither FilmLA, who approved the permit to close the kiosk, nor the studio behind the reboot claimed to know their plans would disrupt testing, but Angelenos were not appeased.
The question is, as the film industry struggles to get back on its feet, will public health concerns fall to the wayside? Not for now, at least. And especially not for Addison Rae.