Mattel acquisition of 1997 / WED 11-9-22 / Prophetess in the Torah / 1987 thriller featuring the same characters as TV's "Californication" / 1990 action film featuring the same characters as the film "Collateral"

Constructor: David Tuffs

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "same characters" — famous movies are clued as having the "same characters" as some other movies (or TV shows), only in this case the clues (obviously) mean "characters" as in "letters (in the titles),," not "roles (in the shows themselves)"

Theme answers:

• "FATAL ATTRACTION" (17A: 1987 thriller featuring the same characters as TV's "Californication"?)
• "SISTER ACT" (23A: 1992 comedy featuring the same characters as the film "Secretariat"?)
• "TOTAL RECALL" (39A: 1990 action film featuring the same characters as the film "Collateral"?)
• "DAREDEVIL" (54A: 2003 Marvel movie featuring the same characters as TV's "Riverdale"?)
• "SINGIN' IN THE RAIN" (61A: 1952 musical featuring the same characters as TV's "Stranger Things"?)

Word of the Day:"GOTTI" (22A: Travolta film with a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) —

Gotti is a 2018 American biographical crime film about New York Citymobster John Gotti, directed by Kevin Connolly, and written by Lem Dobbsand Leo Rossi. It stars John Travolta as Gotti, alongside his real-life wife Kelly Preston as Gotti's wife Victoria in her penultimate film. [...] Gotti underperformed both critically and commercially; it grossed just $6 million against a $10 million production budget and received universally negative reviews from critics, who lamented the writing, aesthetics and performances, although its use of makeup and Travolta's performance received some praise. It is one of the few films to hold an approval rating of 0% on the website Rotten Tomatoes. (wikipedia)

As for the theme, I never saw it. That is, as I was filling in the last themer ("SINGIN' IN THE RAIN"), I thought "wait, there's no revealer clue? ... what is this theme?" Then I noticed that the theme clues had information in them beyond "1987 thriller" and "2003 Marvel movie" (which had been all I'd needed to get the answers). So the first themer clue I actually read all the way through was the last one. I of course knew instantly that "SINGIN' IN THE RAIN" and "Stranger Things" don't share any characters, so I knew instantly that "characters" meant "letters." And that was that. I'm kinda glad I spared myself that revelation until the very end because it meant that as I was solving I at least had some *hope* that a clever revealer was on its way. If I'd seen the "character" pun first thing, well, the puzzle would've been even harder to endure than it was, and it was pretty hard to endure, *in spite* of being *exceedingly* easy to solve. Once again (this is happening an awful lot lately), I couldn't even make it out of the NW corner without thinking "that's a lot of subpar fill for one small corner, I hope it's not all gonna be like this." But it was. ADE to ATT to ITT to OER to OBI to ETE to IDA (crossing IDAHO). And I'm leaving a lot of other sad repeaters off that list. The fill was so complacent. So yesteryear. I don't understand the total lack of emphasis on clean grids at this establishment. The theme is (apparently) everything, and all you have to do is get the fill into plausible "yeah I've seen that before" shape. I will say that the SE corner is 10x better than the NW corner, and "I CAN'T SEE!" is an unexpected answer, lively in its urgency (41A: "It's too dark in here!"). But for the most part, filling this grid in was a dreary exercise. I was writing in answers almost as fast as I could read the clues: still dreary.