Zootopia Reigns

Animated films for the family remain the safest of original story bets, no pre-branding required. Disney's Zootopia was very strong out of the gate. The best Disney animated opening weekend strong, in fact. Meanwhile Deadpool crossed the $300 million mark. The Oscar Best Picture win helped Spotlight re-expand again adding 500 screens and nearly another $2 million (total gross $41.6) despite already being out on DVD.

I went to The Witch again and while leaving the theater this young guy with his date was like "that is the worst movie I've ever seen!" He doesn't get out much apparently!

What did you see this weekend?

WIDE BOX OFFICE
01 Zootopia $73.7 new
02 London Has Fallen $21.7 new
03 Deadpool $16.4 (cum. $311.1) Reviewish
04 Whiskey Tango Foxtrot $7.6 new Review
05 Gods of Egypt $5 (cum. $22.8) Review 
06 Risen $3.8 (cum. $28.6)
07 Kung Fu Panda 3 $3.5 (cum. $133.8) Dreamworks
08 The Revenant $3.3 (cum. $175.9) Cinematography
09 Eddie the Eagle $3.1 (cum. $10.8) Review
10 The Witch $2.5 (cum. $20.9) Michael's, Nathaniel's, and Eric's Reviews

LIMITED RELEASE
excluding previously wide
01 Other Side of the Door $1.2 new 546 screens
02 Lady in The Van  $.7 (cum. $7.1) 429 screens Review
03 The Mermaid $.3 (cum. $2.6) 106 screens
04 Where to Invade Next $.2 (cum. $2.9) 150 screens  Review & 2nd Opinion 
05 Neerja $.1 (cum. $1.5) 100 screens 
06 Son of Saul  $.1 (cum. $1.5) 180 screens Podcast, Interview, Review
07 45 Years  $.1 (cum. $3.9) 100 screens Podcast
08 Busco Novio Para Mi Mujer $.07 (cum. $1.6) 79 screens
09 Embrace of the Serpent $.06 (cum. $.3) 23 screens Interview, Review
10 Knight of Cups $.05 new 4 screens Reviewish

What's Next for this Past Season's Actors - Part 2

Murtada here to continue the conversation about upcoming projects from actors who've just walked red carpets and absorbed whatever limelight got past the Leo coronation. We've dealt with the winners and the actresses, let's turn our attention to the men.

Christian Bale: Coming up first is The Promise with Oscar Isaac and Charlotte Le Bon (The Walk), a love triangle set during the last days of the Ottoman Empire. He recently signed on to star in Scott Cooper’s Western drama Hostiles.

Click to read more ...

Ghosts of Ceremonies of Years Past

Manuel here. Love them (guilty!) or hate them (okay, sometimes I do), you have to admit that the Academy Awards are an institution, one with a long storied history. And while we've come down from last weekend's highs and lows and will soon wearily brace ourselves for what next year’s season might look like (first predictions April 1st as TFE does), whenever you need to scratch that Oscar itch take some time to look back on Oscar history before you start looking forward again.

Thankfully, the Academy is here to help. Finally embracing the 21st century they have slowly been building quite the digital archive over at oscars.org.

They now have video and photo highlights for ALL of their ceremonies. I’m sure Nathaniel and many others will cringe at the fact that they refer to this most recent ceremony as the “2016 Oscars” which as you know can sometimes get tricky. (This despite the Academy previously citing the film years (you can still see this at the tourist friendly Dolby Theater where each year the new Best Picture plaque goes up with the correct year noted (Spotlight is probably already up where the placeholder "2015" once was.)

Shouldn’t clicking 1950 give me access to the ceremony that awarded George Sanders his Best Supporting Actor win? It’s become common -- it's possibly IMDB's fault (and Jeopardy! now does it too possibly sabotaging Oscar purist trivia experts) to list by the ceremony year rather than the film year. We understand it (the 88th Academy Awards took place in 2016) but that doesn’t mean we have to like it; tying Spotlight to 2016 seems odd. 

It’s a small quibble but trust that there’s a smorgasbord of images and videos to keep you entertained should you want to leave dissecting the 2015 2016 Oscars for another day. So take a look and help us find the best/most amazing/randomest photo from ceremonies past you can find.

Sign up now, Subcreatures!

How to play
1. Watch the movie*
2. Pick its best shot
3. Post it somewhere online with why you chose it on March 8th
4. Let us know you did so and we link up that Tuesday night!

More March titles TBA soon.

*Ghostbusters (1984) is now available to stream free via Amazon Prime on March 1st. It's also available to rent at iTunes & Netflix. Join us this Tuesday by selecting your best shot.

Is "Gods of Egypt" a Bad Movie People Will Eventually Love?

The cast sees the reviews! The Horror. The Horror.The ill begotten would be blockbuster Gods of Egypt, directed by Alex Proyas (I Robot, The Crow), is currently enjoying a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes; you could call that score bad luck but for the fact that the movie fully earns it.

Still... There's something enjoyable about tallying up the ways it goes wrong. It continually charges toward its own spectacular idiocy with gusto. Despite heaps of exposition it never makes a lick of sense, explaining rules only to break them. It mounts each action sequence with zero artistry in disguising its shameful lust to earn extra $ as a video game (you half expect congratulatory text and bonus points on screen a la Scott Pilgrim vs The World). It builds its own crazy as high as its in-movie Tower of Babel. It wants to play with surreal Egyptian imagery but is so 2016 that it mistakes human gods with animal heads for organic derivatives of Michael Bay's Transformers. 

Each actor, freed from mundane concerns of "direction" or even other actors (green screens abound so half the time it's clear they're not together), does his/her own thing. The result is a hilarious hodgepodge of styles, accents, and wildly varying degrees of success at self-amusement: Egyptians with Australian accents? why not, Gerard Butler!; You once saw Pirates of the Caribbean and want to do something affected but can't quite commit to your mincing gay idea? Then do it half ass, Chadwick Boseman; You only want to entertain yourself? Thank you thank you Geoffrey Rush & Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. You are both having so much fun which is the only way to do a bad movie.

Maybe it's the time of year, the garbage dump month between serious adult films vying for metaphoric gold (it's just gold plating) and studio four-quadrant product vying for audience gold (the green stuff) but I found its monotonous/cheap aesthetic weirdly endearing; the sets and costumes are gold, the lighting is golden, some of the superpowers are fiery gold, and these Gods even bleed gold! This is not a recommendation so much as a "if you're in the mood for it" which I, surprisingly, was. It's a blockbuster dumb as Brenton Thwaites is twink pretty, but it just can't help itself.

Grade: C-/D+
Oscar Chances: Teehee. not even if 2016 ended today with only 40ish movies to choose from.