"Every one of us is worried about how 'Jerusalem' will fare on Broadway," Mr. Rylance said as he curled up in an Edwardian armchair in the lounge of the Algonquin Hotel, taking off his shoes and tucking his socked feet beneath his underside.
"I don't know how he will fare on the political level.
Last week, the Hollywood Reporter described the box office "tracking" system, which studios use to predict how well movies will fare on a given weekend, as "broken".
The race-to-judge phenomenon is fed in part by increasing competition between movie bloggers and box-office Web sites, which have started predicting how a movie will fare on opening weekend far in advance.
The BBC is hopeful that a new 10pm show being developed for BBC2 will have something of the Saturday Night Live about it, although how it will fare on UK budgets – a fraction of those in the US – remains to be seen.
Yao Ming, China's 21-year-old center, who is 7 feet 5 inches tall and weighs around 290 pounds, was selected by the Houston Rockets as the No. 1 pick in this year's N.B.A. draft, and there is great curiosity as to how he will fare, on a regular basis, against the best players in the world.
