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For generations of families in Denver, Casa Bonita was more than just a restaurant—it was an experience. Perched atop a pink stucco tower that could be seen from all across the city, Casa Bonita drew people in with the promise of culinary delights and whimsical entertainment within. Inside, visitors of all ages were transported to a world of make-believe, exploring “haunted” caves, watching daring cliff divers plunge into the pool, and getting lost in the labyrinthine corridors.

Two eager patrons who could often be found soaking up the atmosphere of Casa Bonita in their youth were Trey Parker and Matt Stone. As co-creators of the beloved animated series South Park, the pair celebrated their love for the eccentric establishment in a famous 2003 episode. Yet while the show brought Casa Bonita worldwide fame, by the 2010s the once-grand destination had fallen into disrepair. When the pandemic eventually forced its permanent closure,...

The documentary may be finished, but the story of Casa Bonita is far from over.

Just weeks after the release of ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!, the acclaimed film chronicling the highs and lows of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s extensive (and expensive) renovation of the iconic Colorado eatery, some major news concerning the future of Casa Bonita dropped.

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The restaurant’s in-house performers, including cliff divers, puppeteers, actors and magicians, are moving to unionize with IATSE and Actors’ Equity Association. According to a union press release, employees are simply looking for “fair pay” as well as “benefits” and “clearer communication between workers and management.” All of which sounds pretty reasonable.

They also have concerns about “insufficient training” and “abusive patrons emboldened by alcohol.” And really, who amongst us would want to perform a children’s puppet show for crowd of rowdy South Park fans who have been day-drinking...

Entertainers and crewmembers at the Casa Bonita immersive restaurant, owned by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are looking to unionize with Actors’ Equity and IATSE.

The restaurant, based in Lakewood, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, recently reopened after being bought out of bankruptcy by Parker and Stone. The restaurant features cliff divers, actors, puppeteers, magicians and more as part of the dining experience, supported by crewmembers.

These workers are looking to unionize due to a range of concerns, starting with safety at work, and including insufficient training, as well as fair pay, greater benefits, and better communication between workers and management. The workers asked for, but did not receive, voluntary recognition, and are now filing with the National Labor Relations Board for an election.

The bargaining unit includes around 60 performers, divided into wet and dry entertainers, and about 20 crewmembers, who are looking for representation with IATSE.

Casa...

Before it became a Broadway smash hit, “The Book of Mormon” could have gone animated.

Josh Gad, who originated the role of Elder Arnold Cunningham in the 2011 production, said during Sony Music Entertainment’s “Dinner’s On Me” podcast that co-writers Trey Parker and Matt Stone originally set out to make “Book of Mormon” in the vein of beloved animated satirical film “Team America: World Police.”

However, after the live reading of the script, it became clear that “Book of Mormon” was best suited to Broadway.

“Trey and Matt thought that they were going to do it as an animated film. It was going to be their follow up to ‘Team America.’ And we ended it,” Gad said to host Jesse Tyler Ferguson. “The response was effusive. I’ll be it, people were definitely taken aback and shocked. And they had a huddle and they decided in that moment, let...

In a TV production climate that saw a 20% plummet in Los Angeles last year and an overall drop-off of 40% since 2022, risky, large-scale prestige projects are no longer the name of the game. But Roku Media content chief David Eilenberg sees a way to keep “risk built into the system”: social media influencers.

Speaking at TheWrap’s annual Grill conference on Tuesday at the DGA Theater Complex, the entertainment executive posited that looking to “that convergence of the digital world with the TV world” and nurturing young talent is “one way to make sure that there’s still enough creative risk” in an industry that’s averse to taking any.

“It’s going to be interesting over the next five years to see some of the talents who came up via YouTube, came up via social channels, have their visions for what TV and film can mean to them,” Eilenberg...

If you love stories about wealthy cartoonists pouring millions of dollars into Mexican novelty restaurants riddled with building code violations, boy do we have the movie for you. The new documentary ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! chronicles South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s efforts to renovate Denver’s giantest, pinkest eatery, in defiance of all common sense and financial logic.

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The movie is undoubtedly funny, engaging and even heartwarming, but it also feels like a fairly calculated promotional tool for the restaurant which, perhaps not coincidentally, opened to the public in the very same week that the documentary was released.

According to the film’s director, Arthur Bradford, there’s a very good reason for this. Speaking with The Wrap, Bradford revealed that the project began, not as a feature film, but as an “online marketing video” for Casa Bonita, one that could be shown inside the...

While securing reservations to Casa Bonita is about as easy as scoring front-row tickets to an alien autopsy performed by Taylor Swift, at least we can all get a taste (not literally) of what it’s like to visit the novelty Mexican restaurant, thanks to the new documentary ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!.

The acclaimed doc is now available on Paramount+, the streaming home of South Park and Frasier Crane’s nonstop bullshit. It’s certainly an entertaining and funny account of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s efforts to re-open the troubled venue, but it’s also surprisingly sincere and even heartwarming, ending on a bittersweet note that oddly parallels the classic South Park episode that made the restaurant world famous.

The doc also largely avoids the most highly-publicized controversy surrounding Casa Bonita 2.0: the issue of employee compensation.

In some ways, this omission may not be all that surprising,...

When “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker thought they might buy the beloved Denver restaurant Casa Bonita, one of the first calls they made was to director Arthur Bradford. The two Comedy Central powerhouses have worked with the filmmaker for nearly a decade and a half, going back to when he directed their 2011 making-of documentary, “Six Days to Air.”

“Whenever they had a new project or just something that seemed interesting to film, I was always after them to let me do it,” Bradford told TheWrap. The director is currently on the set of Stone and Parker’s upcoming live-action comedy with Kendrick Lamar, working on another making-of film.

Initially, “¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!” was envisioned to be an “online marketing video” that could be shown as people waited for their food. But as Bradford and his long-standing photography director P.H. O’Brien worked on the project, it became...

If you can’t make the trip to Denver to eat at the famous Casa Bonita restaurant, watching the documentary “¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!” is the next best thing. And you can do it very soon, as the doc is hitting Paramount+ on Wednesday, the streaming service announced Monday.

“¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!” tells the story of the “rise, fall, and revival” of the iconic Lakewood, Colo. landmark, which opened in 1974, went bankrupt in 2021, and was rescued by “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who grew up going to Casa Bonita and immortalized it in a classic 2003 “South Park” episode. The documentary covers Parker and Stone’s ambitious attempt to restore the restaurant to its former glory, which they approach with the same intensity documented in the Emmy-nominated making-of-“South Park” documentary “6 Days to Air,” which shares producers with “¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!” The project quickly becomes a...

Start planning your fiestas now: Hit documentary “¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!” will launch on Paramount+ this week.

The film tells the story of how “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker worked to save beloved Colorado-based Mexican restaurant Casa Bonita, which was immortalized in a classic episode of their animated show.

“¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!” will have its streaming debut on Paramount+ Wednesday, October 2 in the United States. The film has had a very limited theatrical run, but it has performed exceptionally well for a documentary, bringing in just shy of $125,000. “¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!” has been one of the highest-grossing documentaries of the year.

IndieWire previously reported that after the film played on just a single screen in Denver, it had already achieved the highest per-screen average for any documentary film released theatrically in 2024.

Arthur Bradford directed “¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!,” and the film shows how “South Park...

¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!, the new documentary about Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s restaurant side-hustle/$40 million midlife crisis, is a big hit with audiences so far. Which isn’t all that surprising considering that cable TV has already proven that people like both South Park and watching strangers go through hellish ordeals in restaurants.

Well, soon we’re going to be getting yet another feature-length doc about the exploits of Parker and Stone, thanks to good old physical media. And it also involves the culinary arts — to some degree at least.

Parker’s directorial debut, 1993’s Cannibal! The Musical, is receiving its first ever Blu-Ray release, meaning that we’ll finally be able to see the alleged flesh-eating exploits of Alfred Packer in high definition. And just imagine how crisp the audio will be on songs like “Let’s Build a Snowman” and “Shpadoinkle.”

The film is actually being released by two different companies.

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (Warner Bros.) had an unexpectedly strong second weekend. With just under $52 million, it fell 54 percent (quite decent from a $111 million start), and a domestic total of $188 million in just 10 days.

Its take made up just over half of the U.S./Canada estimated gross of $95 million. That’s up 50 percent from last year, with year to date totals now 12 percent below last year.

The “Beetlejuice” 36 years-later sequel now looks certain to top the original film’s grosses, adjusted to current ticket prices. “Twisters” (Universal), released earlier this summer, was a similar legacy project, though with a different cast. As big as it was ($266 million domestic so far), that’s about half of the adjusted total for the 1996 original.

“Beetlejuice,” however, is faring similarly to “Twisters” overseas. With the film open around most of the world, its foreign take so far is only $76 million, a smaller gross compared to domestic.

Chicago – Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com appears on “The Morning Mess” with Scott Thompson on Wbgr-fm on September 12th, reviewing the new documentary “¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!” In limited release on September 13th (see local listings).

Rating: 3.5/5.0

Trey Parker and Matt Stone of “South Park” and “The Book of Mormon” for some reason (mostly nostalgia) purchase the Denver-based Mexican themed restaurant Casa Bonita. But it’s not just any Mexican Restaurant, it’s a bizarre mishmash of tunnels, animatronic mascots, puppet shows, people in costumes running around and yes, cliff divers in a real waterfall pool, which is all available around and during the dining experience. When the reality of being restaurant owners sets into the wacky pair, an original six million dollar renovation budget starts to multiply into many times that sum.

”¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!” is in select theaters on September 13th, see local listings, and on Paramount+ later this fall.

When I first moved to Denver, Colorado, I had heard stories about the Mexican restaurant Casa Bonita. Casa Bonita, an off-beat suburban restaurant that’s seen better days, was a staple of many Denverites’ childhoods. Memories filled with exploring vast indoor cave dwellings, watching cliff jumpers dive into a massive pool of water, random gorilla sightings, and a Disneyland-like atmosphere that welcomes guests with cafeteria-style Mexican food, Casa Bonita’s popularity was attributed to a wonderment that consumed all 52,000 square feet of the humongous eatery.

Time has not been kind to one of Colorado’s most visited attractions. The Covid-19 pandemic sent the owners of Casa Bonita into bankruptcy, and many Denver area residents feared the worst: their beloved establishment would close forever. It was looking like that would be the case despite protests and campaigns to save it, but then the most famous Colorado natives decided to live out their dreams.

South Park fans and multimillion dollar novelty eatery enthusiasts are no doubt eagerly awaiting ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!, the new documentary chronicling Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s efforts to restore the beloved Colorado restaurant to its former glory.

Instead of being unceremoniously dumped onto streaming services like so many other documentaries these days, ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! is actually getting a theatrical release. In fact, it’s out right now — but only in one theater in Colorado.

While the movie is coming to select cities on September 13th, it opened this past weekend at the Alamo Drafthouse in Denver, which isn’t far from the actual Casa Bonita. The hometown release was a huge hit even before it began, with booming presales prompting the theater to adjust its screening schedule from two showings a day to “4-5 shows, possibly with more to be added.”

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice occupied the Alamo’s largest auditorium,...

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (Warner Bros.) pulled off a “Twisters”: Take a fondly regarded, pre-2000 smash that never had a sequel, tweak it enough while keeping its strongest elements intact, capitalize on premium formats, and open to terrific results.

Tim Burton’s film did $110 million, almost $30 million better than “Twisters” on its July release date and in a more crowded field. If Sunday estimates hold, it will represent close to 75 percent of all business in U.S./Canada theaters.

The weekend after Labor Day can be one of the year’s worst, but studios began shifting that narrative back in 2017 when Warner Bros. released “It” to $123 million. Other studios avoided the date against a blockbuster, but they also had to contend with the NFL’s early-season games as well as some key competitions in college football.

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” benefited from demographics less devoted to football: It skewed female (Thursday previews were...

Documentary ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! with Trey Parker and Matt Stone cleaned up on one screen only in Denver and Tamil-language revenge thriller The Greatest Of All Time is the latest Indian film to pop at the North American box office with over $2 million on 530 screens for the three-day weekend and a cume of $3.5 million including previews, according to Comscore, as it sets records at home.

The Alamo Denver had Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in its biggest auditoriums with Casa Bonita showing at one 115-seater and sold out all weekend except for a a dozen or so tickets over Saturday and Sunday morning shows – meaning its $21.75k gross is about the top of what’s possible. The best per screen average for a doc post-Covid is Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s Wild Life in 2023 at over $23k each on two screens.

Casa Bonita’s afternoon and evening showings were...

Matt Stone and Trey Parker have never been scared of controversy. However, they showed they are unwilling to take on the upcoming controversies this year. As a result, the duo chose to delay the next season until 2025. The creators don’t want to deal with the real-world headaches of 2024.

Here is why Matt and Trey chose to push off South Park until 2025.

South Park Won’t Be Back Until 2025

Any fan who hoped to see a new season of South Park in 2024 will be disappointed. Many fans wanted to see Matt Stone and Trey Parker deliver their scathing criticism of the upcoming presidential election, but the creators want nothing to do with it.

Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny of ‘South Park’

While there will be plenty of chances to spoof the upcoming presidential election, Matt and Trey are tapping out. This is unusual for them since they usually attack all real-world issues with no abandon.

For almost 30 years, “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have skewered everything, from pop culture to politics, with their trademark obscene sense of humor, but after multiple seasons of covering the Trump presidency, as well as its fallout, it seems they’re finally ready for a break from the current climate.

While promoting their upcoming documentary, “¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!,” Stone and Parker spoke with Vanity Fair for a recent interview, in which they explained their reasoning for skipping election commentary in their upcoming season and why they’ve delayed production.

“We’ve tried to do ‘South Park’ through four or five presidential elections, and it is such a hard thing,” Stone said. “It’s such a mind scramble, and it seems like it takes outsized importance.”

Adding to these sentiments, Parker said, “Obviously, it’s fucking important, but it kind of takes over everything and we just have less fun.

MTV Documentary Films executives are likely dancing the salsa — and perhaps dipping chips in it — over the early returns from their new documentary “¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!”

“¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!” opened last night with just one showing on a single screen at a single Alamo Drafthouse location in Denver, but combined with pre-sales, the film already has a per-theater-average (PTA) of $19,296, IndieWire can reveal exclusively. The pre-sales figure alone, which by Thursday reached $15,600, was itself enough to have the best PTA of 2024 for a documentary, surpassing “War Game” and “Eno”.

If the numbers persist throughout the weekend, “¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!” could have the largest PTA for any documentary since Covid. Since 2020, the only film that comes close to the numbers “Casa Bonita” projects to hit is 2023’s “Anselm,” which had a PTA of $21,000 across two theaters.

“¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!” follows “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone...

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone say that haven’t felt this close to their home state of Colorado since they first left the Denver area for New York in order to become big-shot TV writers, producers and stars in the late 1990s, and it’s all thanks to some sopapillas, a few cliff divers and a $40 million investment.

It’s fair to say that nobody is more devoted to Casa Bonita than its current co-owners, and the duo has the contractor invoices to prove it. Back in 2021, Parker and Stone finalized a deal to acquire the struggling Lakewood, Colorado restaurant and family entertainment megaplex for $3.1 million, but the South Park duo quickly found that the state of disrepair at the sprawling, 52,000-square-foot cathedral was very close to death-trap territory, and they’ve spent the last three years lovingly gutting and reconstructing suburban Denver’s closest equivalent to...

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are opening up about why the animated series is delayed and why they will skip the 2024 elections.

In a new interview, Parker and Stone revealed they are not keen on joking about Donald Trump anymore, which is part of the reason Comedy Central won’t return until 2025.

“We’ve tried to do South Park through four or five presidential elections, and it is such a hard thing to—it’s such a mind scramble, and it seems like it takes outsized importance,” Stone told Vanity Fair while promoting their ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! documentary. “

Parker added, “Obviously, it’s f***ing important, but it kind of takes over everything and we just have less fun. I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump.”

Stone said that the show’s not returning until next year was “on purpose” as...

More than four years after Casa Bonita closed its doors due to a global pandemic, crumbling infrastructure and a collapsing financial situation, new owners Trey Parker and Matt Stone are finally opening the massively renovated restaurant to the general public.

On September 23, 2021, the South Park creators and Casa Bonita superfans finalized a $3.1 million acquisition of the struggling dinner entertainment megaplex in Lakewood, Colorado, almost two decades after they turned Casa Bonita into a global sensation with a classic South Park episode named for and featuring the suburban Denver restaurant. Over the past three years, Parker and Stone have poured over $40 million into an extensive renovation project that transformed the towering, pink, probably-osha-violating complex from a death trap into a tourist destination that has garnered rave reviews in its extended soft-opening phase.

Then, this past Sunday, Parker and Stone revealed to the Denver Post that they plan to open Casa Bonita...

Few pieces of media have done a better job of reflecting — or, depending on how much faith you have in art’s ability to shape the public consciousness, contributing to — the mean-spirited cynicism of 21st century America than “South Park.” Trey Parker and Matt Stone have long embraced their Comedy Central series’ status as an equal opportunity offender, finding ways to satirize every demographic and belief system so cruelly that it’s impossible to argue that they’re discriminating against anyone. The only prevailing worldview in their two-dimensional universe is that believing in anything too sincerely makes you a sucker that’s begging to be mocked.

None of which is meant to diminish the show’s brilliance, as it often points its rhetorical knives at an unserious world that deserves the contempt. But it does make the earnestness of “¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!” more than a little surprising. Arthur Bradford...

The 2024 Tribeca Festival kicked off June 5 with the world premiere of the documentary Diane Furstenberg: Woman In Charge, launching the 12-day New York-set fest that features narrative and documentary competitions as well as a slew of A-list panels that always seem to make news.

Among the 108 feature films in this year’s lineup includes world premieres of movies starring Kristen Stewart, Lily Gladstone, Elizabeth Banks, Naomie Harris and Jenna Ortega to name a few. In addition to Furstenberg, high profile documentaries include Brats, Andrew McCarthy’s look back at the Brat Pack, and ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!, about South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone restoring an iconic Colorado restaurant.

Check out Deadline’s reviews from the festival, and keep checking back as new titles are added. Click on the film’s title to read our full review.

Brats ‘Brats’

Section: Spotlight

Directors: Andrew McCarthy

With: Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy,...

Here’s a look at this week’s biggest premieres, parties and openings in Los Angeles and New York, including events for Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4, Tribeca and Pride.

Despicable Me 4 premiere

Steve Carell, Kristen Wiig, Will Ferrell, Joey King, Chloe Fineman and Miranda Cosgrove walked the red carpet at the New York premiere of the latest Despicable Me movie on Sunday.

Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig and Steve Carell Joey King Inside Out 2 premiere

Stars of the voice cast, including Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Ayo Edebiri, Kensington Tallman, Liza Lapira, Tony Hale and Lewis Black, celebrated the Pixar sequel in Los Angeles on Monday.

Liza Lapira, June Squibb, Yvette Nicole Brown, Maya Hawke, Kensington Tallman, Amy Poehler, Ayo Edebiri, Tony Hale and Lewis Black Amy Poehler A Family Affair premiere

Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron and Joey King debuted their new Netflix rom-com in Los Angeles on Thursday,...