Here’s a fun fact to share with your disbelieving friends/cats: Before this weekend, do you know what was the highest-opening baseball movie of all time? ANSWER: The Benchwarmers, starring David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Napoleon Dynamite. Tread not on mine monocle friends, for in my surprise it has fallen. See? This is why I hate baseball. Anyway, 42 has since stolen the title (just like Jackie Robinson stealing a base!), which is nice, as it seems by all accounts to have been a perfectly fine movie. A nice movie for nice people.

1. 42 (Warner Bros.) – $27.3 million
2. Scary Movie 5 (The Weinstein Company) – $15.1 million
3. The Croods (Fox/DreamWorks) – $13.2 million ($143 mil.)
4. G.I. Joe: Retaliation (Paramount) – $10.8 million ($102 mil.)
5. Evil Dead (Sony) – $9.5 million ($41 mil.)
6. Jurassic Park 3D (Universal) – $8 million ($31 mil.)
7. Olympus Has Fallen (FilmDistrict) – $6.8 million ($81 mil.)
8. Oz: The Great and Powerful (Disney) – $4.8 million ($219 mil.)
9. Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor(Lionsgate) – $4.3 million ($45 mil.)
10. The Place Beyond The Pines (Focus) – $3.8 million ($5.1 mil.) [Indiewire]

Meanwhile, while 42 was out-pacing expectations, Scary Movie 5 was “bombing” or “tanking” depending on who you asked. True, $15.1 million is well down from Scary Movie 4‘s $40.2 million and Scary Movie 3‘s $48 million, but it also only cost $20 million to make, and even that was probably only because Lindsay Lohan was in it and robbed them blind. $15 million is a step in the right direction, but I don’t want to live in a world where Simon Rex lazily regurgitating jokes from 7 years ago earns its budget back. I want to live in a world where everyone wears foam cowboy hats with their names on them and cats are currency, but that’s another story.
Read the rest of this entry »

As we all know, 2012 was the year C-Tates broke, with the hardest twerkin man in show business scoring huge hits with The Vow ($196 million worldwide), 21 Jump Street ($202 million), and Magic Mike ($167 million). Who would’ve thought 21 Jump Street would get a sequel? People liked him so much that Paramount pushed the release of GI Joe: Retaliation back almost a year just five weeks before its originally-scheduled opening. Well guess what? It made $41.2 million over the weekend and Paramount has already ordered the sequel. He is risen.

The G.I. Joe sequel grossed an estimated $41.2 million this weekend, which ranks as the second-highest Easter debut ever behind 2010′s Clash of the Titans ($61.2 million). Including Thursday, the movie has earned $51.7 million; that’s a bit below G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra‘s $54.7 million three-day start in August 2009. For its three major stars, this is also a potent opening: it ranks third-highest for Channing Tatum, second-highest for The Rock, and it’s remarkably the top debut ever for a Bruce Willis movie.

I don’t what part of that last sentence is more incredible, that Bruce Willis’s highest-opening movie is GI Joe 2, or that Channing Tatum already has two higher-opening movies than Bruce Willis. Bruce Willis! That’s incredible. He’s been a movie star since C-Tates was sagging his diapers.

Elsewhere, Tyler Perry continued to print money with Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor, starring Kim Kardashian, which earned $22.3 million. Can you believe that’s not a joke? I’m still not convinced.

It’s also Perry’s ninth movie ever to open over $20 million; the only two other directors who have that many $20 million debuts are Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis. [BoxOfficeMojo]

Read the rest of this entry »

“Hold on, neither of you is a baller or a playboy.”

After being pushed back nearly an entire year, G.I. Joe: Retaliation finally hits theaters on March 27, and it goes without saying that the problem with this sequel is that it doesn’t have nearly enough Channing Tatum. Paramount officials tried to say the film was delayed because they wanted to add 3D and whatever, but we all know it’s because nobody wanted to watch C-Tates get killed off in the film’s opening minutes, like he’s some kind of Steven Seagal in Executive Decision.

Whether or not C-Tate’s life has been spared so he can make a return in G.I. Joe 3: Hey Cobra, Do U Like Deez? isn’t known, but he apparently doesn’t die and people like that better. And the mad love for C-Tates shows in one of the two new Retaliation clips released this week, as the first features The Rock… I’m sorry, Dwayne Johnson pumping his troops up with some Jay-Z. But yo playboy, Errbody knows C-Tates B down wit Nas, holla atcha Illmatic, son.

Read the rest of this entry »

We hadn’t heard anything about the Terminator franchise in a while, but if you think people forgot about it, you’re wrong (IDIOT), because today Deadline reports that Megan Ellison has enlisted her brother David to help produce a new one. If you don’t know who Megan Ellison is, you should, because she’s basically my hero. Movies that the 26-year-old daughter of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison has thus far helped finance include: Zero Dark Thirty, The Master, Killing Them Softly, Lawless, Spring Breakers, True Grit, and upcoming projects from Spike Jonze and David O. Russell. Basically, if you hear of a movie aimed at adult film-lovers and not at dumb children in the last few years, there’s a 50/50 chance Megan Ellison had something to do with it. Her older brother David is also in the movie business, leaning more toward blockbusters, working on films such as Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Jack Reacher, Star Trek Into The Darkness, and G.I. Joe: Retaliation, and now Deadline reports that they’ll be teaming up for a new Terminator movie. Which sounds like a pretty logical plan to me, but then what do I know, I’m just a guy balls deep in a dead badger.

Nearly 18 months after Megan Ellison pledged over $20 million for the rights to finish The Terminator‘s storyline with a new series of films, she has finally closed the complicated rights deal with Pacificorp. Other than the fact no progress has been made all this time on a script, the surprise here is Ellison has enlisted her brother, David Ellison, to be her financial and creative partner.

New copyright laws allow for North American rights to The Terminator to revert back to creator James Cameron in 2019 (that happens after 35 years, and The Terminator was 1984). While that law hasn’t been tested in the courts, no major film company would want to move forward on a project with a potentially catastrophic rights crisis looming. So the original pricey deal — made with the expectations there would be three films — was scaled down because the reality is they might only get to make two installments.

The project has been moving in fits and starts, and most likely that has been due to the slow pace of the rights deal. At one point, Arnold Schwarzenegger had been attached, and so was Fast & Furious helmer Justin Lin. Because Ellison expected to put the first of two pictures in production in late 2012, Lin dropped out.

I’m not sure the Terminator franchise still has stories that are screaming to be told, but it’s a positive development to hear that Megan Ellison is involved and Justin Lin isn’t. Lin previously directed three Fast/Furious movies, which, even if you like them, are about as deep as pro wrestling, and Terminator is a franchise that requires a director with a bit of a brain. And if they are going to make another Terminator movie, I’d just as soon it not suck big farts. But hey, that’s just me, a guy who f*cks dead animals.

I hope McConaughey wears this same outfit when he accepts his Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

Hey everybody, I’m back!  Did you miss me?  You know what? It doesn’t really matter because this week we’ve actually got some legit flicks to discuss.  Besides Magic Mike, there’s that President-killing-vampires movie we all decided to wait for DVD to watch, a film set during the end of the world, that doc about the Dane that looked really insane, and even some full-frontal female nudity. There’s films with Seth Rogen, Steve Carell, Tyler Perry,  and Bryan Cranston.  There’s movies about writers and real estate agents, and match-making dogs.  There’s even two flicks about deaf people, but you didn’t hear it from me. Well, you did, but it was a joke, see.  Yeah, you’re all glad I’m back.

The DVDs:
Magic Mike
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World
Take This Waltz
Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Witness Protection
The Ambassador (Also available for streaming)
Crooked Arrows
Leave
Fear And Desire
Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines
247°F
The Selling
The Invisible War
Gabe The Cupid Dog
Conned
I Am Bish

Want to know which one is a Dove Foundation-approved film about a talking dog? Continue reading.  Want to know which one is the fifth installment in a series of films?  Continue reading.  Want to know which president is killing all those vampires?  Continue reading.  Are you insulted by my estimation of your intelligence?  Skip on over to the Netflix suggestions by clicking here, but you’ll never know about the full-frontal female nudity I mentioned. Read the rest of this entry »