Linkables

Pajiba the highest grossing modern movie stars who've never made a sequel - interesting that there are so many!
The Wrap Chris McQuarrie to direct Mission: Impossible V. It'll be tough to follow Ghost Protocol so good luck
Art of the Title looks at neon Spring Breakers
Gold Standard Harry Hamlin on his Emmy nomination for Mad Men
Towleroad Spike Lee speaks about charges that he's homophobic based on his movies
Twitch Harvey Scissorhands is back! He wants 20 minutes cut from Snowpiercer. Hey, as long as they aren't Tilda Swinton's scenes... 

Salon takes Jay-Z to task for disrespecting Harry Belafonte and asks that hip hop's political sensibilities grow up a little
My New Plaid Pants Dominic Cooper posing for his life
i09 'Break the glass, Sam Rockwell, Break the glass!' He may be joining the new Poltergeist movie
Film Dr 10 shallow pleasures of 2 Guns
Cinema Blend on the generic-looking boxy head poster for Don Jon... undoubtedly a tough movie to sell... though I'm not sure I follow the assertion that the midwest can't relate to porn addictions. LOL. Speaking of the internet (and thus the world's) porn addictions...
Boy Culture have you seen this Ryan Gosling strip scene from The Place Beyond the Pines that's making the rounds? Gosling's disgust at being asked to strip in the clip is his rebuke to the internet pervily watching it!

You're Gonna Need a Bigger Link

Super Cafe Batman and Supes argue about the title of their upcoming duo movie (Batman's voice is perfect)
Pajiba 25 celebrities you didn't realize were related by marriage 
Angry Nerd has Pixar's number with the brand debasing. NO PREQUELS
Empire Director Zhang Yimou may helm the umpteenth remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Josh Brolin as Quasimodo. I'll only be satisified if Brolin sings "Out There"
Guardian looks at Nollywood (Nigerian cinema) and its depiction of LGBT people
Cinema Blend Sarah Michelle Gellar on a possible movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and, essentially, why there won't be one) 

MNPP "we three films of disorient argh" wins my vote for best blogpost title of the month and it's only August 1st! JA pontificates on The Grandmaster, Blue Jasmine, and The Call
Tim Brayton thinks its been a rough summer at the movies and in this August preview it's not looking any better
i09 Frankenstein poster sets new record for movie poster at auction
TV Blend Rob Lowe and Rashida Jones are leaving Parks & Recreation. Time to wrap it up, Pawnee. The 6th season is usually when great television starts a downward slide to ungood anyway. (See: too many examples to mention)
Coming Soon Aaron Taylor Johnson talks Quicksilver. He wants the part in The Avengers: The Age of Ultron 

Today's Watch

Our favorite couple of yesteryear filmmaker/genius Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master, Boogie Nights) and musician/genius Fiona Apple have reunited for this music video "Hot Knife". This is my favorite track on her latest "Idler Wheel" and I'm happy it brought them together again... at least for an afternoon to shoot this. Maya Rudolph is cool with it I'm sure. 

Coda
Finally, as follow up to Michael's piece about the Broken Blockbuster culture in Hollywood, /Film is warning us that the enormous grosses for Despicable Me 2 have convinced Universal that their all franchise all the time credo is the right choice. But mostly I want to suggest that you read this piece in The New York Times Magazine about Jaws (1975).

...from that point forward, the tiniest splash of a minnow could set the audience shrieking.

This is really what “Jaws” was about: Not sharks, but fear. Not action, but suspense. That’s what made it possible for the story of a single shark to scare millions of people into avoiding 71 percent of the earth’s surface.

They're right, you know. We really should stop blaming that excellent character-driven film for the terribleness of today's disappointing character-free blockbusters... even if it did make Hollywood obsessed with gobbling big profits each summer.

Burning Questions: Is the Summer Blockbuster Broken?

Michael C. here to sift through the Doomsday warnings that the Summer box office has provoked. How fitting is it that the story of this Summer’s box office is beginning to resemble one of the disaster movies Hollywood so loves to foist on audiences? 

Seldom does a Summer go by without a high profile flop or two, but these days we can’t get through a weekend without some mega-budget Summer tent-pole crashing and burning. R.I.P.D., White House Down, Lone Ranger, Turbo. One bomb after another. Slate dubbed it the Summer of the Mega-Flop, while the AV Club simply asked “Are Movies Doomed?” These are intelligent, well reasoned articles but in disaster movie terms they are the equivalent of the crackpot scientists prophesying Armageddon, warning everyone to “Look to the heavens! It’s an extinction level event!”

Many blame the crowded media landscape vying for consumer attention. Others point to the recession limiting the disposable cash in consumer pockets. The overall crappiness of the movies themselves hasn’t gone unnoticed either (out of the many underperformers I’d say only Pacific Rim doesn’t richly deserve its fate). The truth involves some mix of all of these factors, but I think the main problem may lay somewhere deeper. I ask you, Is Hollywood’s blockbuster formula fundamentally broken? 

Click to read more ...

Box Office Notes: Pacific Rim & Sandra Bullock

giant fucking robots, the multi-franchise franchiseThis week's box office results are an example of why we can't have nice things. The top two films are both sequels. Audiences didn't get super worked up about the "original" opener, Guillermo del Toro's monster movie Pacific Rim. Yet the people decrying the general moviegoing public for "rejecting originality" -- a claim I keep hearing on twitter and on blogs -- have failed to admit that Pacific Rim looks JUST like Transformers Meets Godzilla in its advertisements. Which is not, you know a hallmark of the truly original, to look like a mashup of two excessively familiar things. Now, before I'm stomped by giant metallic or clawed kaiju feet, please note that though I haven't seen it I'm sure that Pacific Rim doesn't play like a Transformers sequel since one can't really mistake the filmmaking style of del Toro for Michael Bayisms. But audiences don't buy tickets based on how a movie is but how its perceived to be.

This wasn't a rejection of true originality. It was just a third place finish indicating half-interest in something that looked familiar but didn't sound familiar. Maybe they should have just called it Pacific Rim 2? Wouldn't it be awesome if some new franchise hopeful did just that, skipping the first film and testing the public's Pavlovian response to titles that end in numerals?

TOP O' THE CHARTS
01 DESPICABLE ME 2 $44.7 (cum. $229.2)
02 GROWN UPS 2 $42.5 *NEW*
03 PACIFIC RIM $38.3 *NEW*
04 THE HEAT $14 (cum. $112.3) Review
05 THE LONE RANGER $11.1 (cum. $71.1) Review

Of Note:  Fruitvale Station, which eerily opened on the weekend of the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin fiasco, opened to a big per screen averages but given the timid amount of screens it didn't make the top fifteen of the box office. If they're aggressive in expansion you'll undoubtedly see a lot of editorial attention in the media.

And Finally...
We'd just like to say "congratulations" to Sandra Bullock who has her umpteenth $100 million hit with The Heat. No, she didn't deserve an Oscar to commemorate her career but applause she does deserve in an industry that's notoriously resistant to appreciating its actresses. You have to hand it to her: she's been a draw for 20 years now and that's true staying power. Here, courtesy of box office mojo are her biggest hits (adjusted for inflation)

SANDRA'S TOP TEN
01 THE BLIND SIDE (2009) $264 
02 SPEED (1994) $230
03 A TIME TO KILL (1996) $195
04 THE PROPOSAL (2009) $174 
05 MISS CONGENIALITY (2000) $151 
06 WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING (1995) $147 
07 TWO WEEKS NOTICE (2002)  $124 
08 * new entry * THE HEAT (2013)  $112
09 DEMOLITION MAN (1993) $111 
10 HOPE FLOATS (1998) $101

What did you spend your money on this weekend?

Cast This: Magic Mike 2

One year ago tomorrow Magic Mike opened to leggy box office becoming Channing Tatum's third $100+ million grosser of 2012, and the most definitive piece of his A List breakthrough.

He's still routinely asked about the proposed sequel Magic Mike 2 and he's still happy to answer questions about it. He's now claiming:

It will be a road trip movie, and it will essentially be the movie that everyone thought the first one was going to be—crazy and fun and less slice-of-life and less drama. The first one, we had to make not so cheesy and campy; this one we are going to swing for the fences"

I can't quite figure out how this works since (one year old spoiler alert!) Mike was tearing off his stripping lifestyle rather than his clothes at the end of the first film. Will Mike's journey of self-rediscovery magically involve realizing that 'gotting & flaunting it' weren't such bad life choices after all!?! Or will we get a new set of strippers? I'm hoping for the latter because -- and I mean this both artistically and literally and lustfully for the success of the franchise and my pants -- FRESH MEAT!

CAST THIS!
Let's pretend they don't get lazy and think part two of two but instead think long-term prospects with continually rotating cast and semi-annual strip-a-thons. If you were on scripting and casting couch duty, which characters would you keep and which actors would you be approaching for new roles?

Think realistically. Last time they used rising or underexploited TV and film actors with hot bodies, rather than fully fledged "stars" (apart from McConaughey who was still in Career Rehabilitation Mode and completely deserved the Oscar though he wasn't even nominated. CURSE THEM). So they aren't going to be all "Hey Brad & Clooney & Matt, join our little strip-a-thon! Ewan, learn to love getting naked again!" however badly you might like them to. Think unexpected but just right. Ready, Set, (Cue Music / Lights / Fog Machine)... Go!