Showbiz History: Stewart enlists, Blade returns, and Streisand's legend begins

7 random things that happened on this day, March 22nd, in showbiz history

1941 James Stewart joins the Air Corps, three weeks after winning the Oscar. He was the first American movie star to join the military for  World War II

1957 The Elvis Presley single "All Shook Up" is released, soon hitting the top of the charts and becoming one of his signature songs...

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Weekend box office: Croods is a rare pandemic hit and Nomadland just opened

by Nathaniel R

so sad we'll never get to see this one on the big screen!

We haven't been checking in with the box office regularly because it's so uneventful. But it's good to glance on occassion. Here's the US box office top ten (links go to reviews). There's a few thoughts after the jump as well.

1. The Croods New Age $1.7 (cum. $50.8)
2. The Little Things $1.2 (cum. $11.8)
3. Judas and the Black Messiah $905k (cum. $3.3)
4. Wonder Woman 1984 $805k (cum. $42.6)
5. The Marksman $781k (cum. $11.4)...

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Weekend box office: "The Croods" sequel in theaters, "Mank" at home.

U.S. weekend box office (though we still won't have theaters any time soon for some cities) 

 

1. The Croods: New Age $4.4 ($20.3 cum)
2. Half Brothers $720k *new*
3. Freaky $460k ($7.7 cum)
4. All My Life $350k *new*
5. The War With Grandpa $329k ($17.6 cum 

The Croods sequel is also doing well overseas as Deadline shares in a global box office report . That report also notes that Japan will soon have its highest grosser of all time since the animated film Demon Slayer the Movie is now approaching the numbers of its all time champ, Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (having already surpassed the previous #2, Titanic)

Home Viewing? This week we rewatched The Man Who Cried (2000/2001) of all things for Murtada's Sundays with Cate podcast as well as Citizen Kane (1941) which is as marvelous as ever and finally finished The Queens Gambit (2020) which was so so satisfying. On the Rocks on Apple was a pleasant if uneventful sit. We also took in Mank  on Netflix and a preview of News of the World (in theaters at Christmas) both of which were lush and great-looking but would have been infinitely better on a big movie screen *cries* where they could totally envelop your senses and thus your mood. What did you see this week? 

The Rise and Fall of DreamWorks Animation, Part 2: Fall

UPDATE 3/29: Well! Now Home has gone and ruined my entire beautiful narrative arc by wildly outperforming even the most rosily optimistic predictions during its opening weekend, with an estimated $54 million. With that total in its pocket, even under the worst imaginable scenario, it should still glide past $100 million in the United States with ease - $150 mil is certainly in play - and combined with its sterling overseas performance so far, it shouldn't have any problem turning a profit for DreamWorks. The day of reckoning has been put off.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. As DreamWorks's only 2015 release, the studio won't be able to build up any momentum, but it gives the powers that be a good chance to breathe easily and take a good long time to re-work their future plans. Hopefully the right lessons are learned from this ("Non-white girls can sell movies, too") and not the easier wrong ones ("That absolute piece of crap made us money! We don't ever have to try again!), and hopefully it will encourage this and all other animation companies to experiment a little bit more with new properties instead of just retrenching to sequels every time someone says "boo". -Tim

Tim here. Last week, we took a tour through the peak years of DreamWorks Animation, during which time the House That Jeffrey Katzenberg's Hatred of His Old Bosses at Disney Built established itself as the biggest gorilla in American feature animation. And as 2010 dawned, the studio was on the verge of a remarkable achievement. That year, DreamWorks released three feature-length theatrical films – the most any studio had ever produced. It proved to be a great year to do so, an extraordinary year for animation: five of the year's top ten films at both the domestic and worldwide box office were animated, an unmatched record.

That, of course, is exactly the problem. Having perfected a factory for producing animated features that anyone could follow, DreamWorks was as responsible as any studio for the glut of animation that hit in 2009 and has continued largely unabated ever since. By making its products too ubiquitous, the studio was making them routine and increasingly easy to ignore.

Not that it was apparent from the first of the year's releases, How to Train Your Dragon, which netted DreamWorks its best reviews ever and remains its highest-grossing Stateside release without the word "Shrek" in the title. [More...]

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The Best Animated Feature 2013 nominees

It's Tim, wishing everybody a Happy Nomination Day! Obviously, the above-the-line categories hog most of our attention on this holiest of holy days (and they should – they’re kind of amazing this year), but there are 20 whole categories that have nothing to do with acting. And 19 of those don’t involve gawking at the hypnotically amateurish trailer for Alone Yet Not Alone.

So with that in mind, let’s take a closer look at some of those other categories, and since I’m the resident animation guy, I assume it’s no surprise that I’m heading straight for Best Animated Feature. A race that is already kind of shocking because of an omission that, if not quite Tom Hanks/Emma Thompson scale in its “my God, did they really snub…” outrageousness, still pulled a pretty big gasp out of me this morning. I refer to the absence of Monsters University, only the second eligible Pixar film to ever miss out on a nod since the category’s creation in 2001. [more...]

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