Some Unsolicited Ideas for Ariana Grande’s Next Movie
The other day, my friend DJ Louie XIV, who hosts a podcast about obsessively ranking pop stars, asked me if this week — the week of Wicked’s release and the attendant glowing praise about Ariana Grande’s performance as Glinda — was the “best week to be an Arianator.” I took this question with all of its implicitly required seriousness and brought it to my younger sister, with whom I have attended every Ariana tour and who is so deeply, frighteningly invested that she follows Ariana’s cousins on Instagram (no Club Chalamet). We debated: Was the Best Arianator Week the stunningly prescient week that Ariana licked a donut and said she hated America? Was it the week she released thank u, next a mere six months after releasing her previous album, fortifying a depleted nation? Was it the time period when, as a young child, she got hit with two separate hockey pucks at Florida Panthers games, just as the prophecy foretold, marking her as the future premier vocalist of her generation? No, we ultimately decided — it was this week, when everyone agreed that Ariana was not just a pop star who is really good at doing impressions, but a genuine movie star who may win an Oscar.
Our work (as consulting Arianators) (it’s unpaid and part-time) (we have no boss or office and HR is bad) (Ariana does not condone the name “Arianator”) was not done, however. Our next fake responsibility was to ponder what she should do next. On a recent episode of Las Culturistas, Ariana warned her occasionally demonic fans (I implicate myself) that, while she’d keep doing pop, she’d be doing a lot more acting in the future: “I’m gonna say something so scary. It’s gonna scare the absolute shit out of my fans and everyone, but I love them and they’ll deal, and we’ll always be here,” she said. “I think I love acting. I love musical theater. I think reconnecting with this part of myself who started in musical theater and who loves comedy, and it heals me to do that, finding roles to use these parts of myself, and put them in little homes and characters.”
The problem is that nobody is making the proper movies for Ariana right now, because nobody else is quite doing it like her. In Wicked, Ariana is on some real Old Hollywood, screwball-heroine, Barbra Streisand–meets–Lucille Ball shit — singing live while hanging precariously from a chandelier, high-kicking in a hallway, pratfalling and preening, mastering the comedic timing and transatlantic elocution of her Golden Age forebears while also projecting deep sincerity, tears shaking at the edge of her REM Beauty–lashed doe eyes. As one thoughtful X user put it, “if anyone was truly born in the wrong generation i feel that it’s miss ariana like she should be an mgm rising star living in a beautiful villa somewhere with her gay husband and their little gay son she would have been so happy i think …”
Exactly. But what else should Ariana be doing after she wins her Oscar and buys a villa on MGM’s dollar to inhabit with her gay family? Here are some unsolicited ideas.
Recreate Barbra Streisand’s entire film career. No offense to every other working actress, but Ariana is the sole heir to Barbra Streisand’s throne. I want Ariana chomping carrots under a jaunty chapeau in a What’s Up, Doc? remake opposite Jonathan Bailey; I want Ariana in the Italian version of Yentl, in a world where women are not allowed to make fresh pasta so she dresses up as Mario (of Nintendo fame) to attend Italian culinary school; I want Ariana to put Lea Michele in the Saw basement and remake Funny Girl; I want Ariana to do a sequel to The Way We Were as Katie and Hubbell’s daughter, who sets the Plaza Hotel on fire in an act of protest and solidarity with her activist mother (Barbra has a brief, stern cameo) then goes to Rikers and falls in love with her pro bono bail lawyer, played by Jonathan Bailey.
Or Cher’s. Cher’s turn in Moonstruck, which won her an Oscar, solidified her as a true pop star turned movie star. While I don’t know that we need a Moonstruck remake, I do think Ariana needs her Moonstruck moment, which is to say, her wry, whimsical Italian romantic comedy. We strip her makeup, put her in a quotidian job, put a little scarf around her head, and give her a Brooklyn accent. Maybe she plays a jaded MTA driver. She doesn’t believe in love — not since her divorce from Mario — but she’s forced to reexamine that notion when she lightly hits someone who has fallen onto the tracks (Jonathan Bailey) to save a woman’s dog (played by Ariana’s dog Toulouse) and subsequently loses his hand (and his bride). She guiltily brings him fresh pasta at the hospital and he eats it (with his other hand) and he does so with such furious finesse that she mounts him on the gurney, ripping off her scarf to reveal she is still blonde. She takes him home to her gay brother (Frankie Grande) and no-bullshit mother (Joan Grande) and eventually they get married on the G train.
She does The Bodyguard. Ariana is Ariana Grande. Jonathan Bailey is her bodyguard. They fall in love under the surveillance state, where everyone is a stalker. Ariana goes onstage to accept her Best Supporting Actress award for Wicked and somebody throws a plate of fresh pasta at her, but Jonathan intercepts it, losing his hand in the process. At the end, they kiss passionately in front of the MTA train, which Ariana then boards to perform “I Will Always Love You” at the recently rebuilt Plaza Hotel.
She plays gay. Ariana, Kristin Chenoweth, me, and everyone who has seen Wicked agree that Glinda is “a little in the closet.” Why not let her be actually gay in her next movie? For space purposes in this blog, this can also be her Old Hollywood musical. Ariana plays an out-and-proud pasta magnate named Mia who, reeling after a breakup from her longtime lover (Cynthia Erivo, in flashback), is tasked with designing a new spaghetti shape. Mia consults famous gay art consultant Bette Porter, who lectures her in song form about appropriating art to make food (“how dare you turn to Monet/to make a plain old marinara/how dare you ask Picasso/to make a common pasto”), then successfully seduces her, despite their eight-inch height difference. Ultimately they invent bucatini (this is a period piece), which is played in a dream ballet sequence by Jonathan Bailey.
The Ari Aster–Ari Grande movie I have been gunning for for years. Ariana loves horror movies, is weird, and was once pursued by a demon. There are few better collaborators for her than Ari Aster. In my previous blog about this potential collaboration, which was only slightly more concerning than this one, I described several theoretical projects for the two of them, including a Christmas variety special and a music video about a murderous ponytail. I would also watch an Ari/Ari movie about a musical theater genius who finally lands the role of a lifetime only to realize she was tricked into a locked-up multi-picture contract with MGM and must move into a haunted villa with her gay husband (Jonathan Bailey) and gay son (Frankie Grande in miniature a la Hugh Grant in Wonka). There, she receives the above list of movie ideas and is forced to pick one to make every single year.
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