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What's in the box? Hello and welcome to another Slate spoiler special.

I'm Marissa Martinelli and assistant editor here at Slate, and today we're spoiling Crazy Rich Asians, a romantic comedy based on the novel by Kevin Kwan, itself loosely based on Kwan's own childhood in Singapore.

Directed by John M. Chu, Crazy Rich Asians, marks the first major Hollywood movie since the Joy Luck Club, which came out in 1993, that is centered around the Asian-American experience.

Here to talk with me about the film is Slate staff writer Ingu Kang.

Hello, Ingu.

Hi, Maratha. And making her spoiler special debut is Shasha Leonard, who writes Slate's IT column, Try Restarting. Welcome to the Slate Spoiler Special, Shasha. Hi, thank you for having me. We are here today to talk about crazy rich Asians. I have waited so long to say that. How much hype has there been for this movie? So much hype. So much hype and it lived up to it in my opinion. Just throwing it out there. What about you, Ingu? Your review was a rave. You liked this movie too. I love this movie. But yes, the hype machine is really on steroids to mix metaphors.

Well, there was a lot of pressure on the movie, too, that comes with the hype in that, you know, much like we've seen with other movies starring minority casts, this had to be the movie as like a tester for Hollywood.

Is it going to succeed or fail? And it's actually done

really, really well. It had a great opening weekend at the box office. It's gotten hit reviews.

And we are going to talk about all of that. Has anyone read the book, Crazy Rich Asians?

So I have not. Okay. I have not either. Okay. I've read all three books. Wow. Okay. Wait. How did you come to find those books? Because I read that it was an easy, sleazy beach read. And I generally avoid those reads. Yeah. So there's a blogger by the name of Lainey Gossip, who is actually Elaine Louie.

She's a celebrity blogger who is actually very smart about sort of deconstructing celebrity narratives.

And she does this sort of weird ad hoc book club.

And I think a lot of her recommendations are quite good.

And because she's a Chinese Canadian writer herself,

she tends to provide a lot of recommendations that are books about women and people of color. So this

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