Movies

By Todd Allen Horror was crowned the champion at the Labor Day weekend box office, with The Possession taking the top spot with ~$17.7M.  This is the second Lion's Gate film in a row to...

Via Alyssa Rosenberg: Yahoo’s got an alternate look at what could have been the beginning of The Avengers, and what would have been a striking, and fascinatingly, different movie: One of the most underdeveloped elements...

So, I finally saw THE DARK KNIGHT RISES...yes, yes I know. In my defense, I tried seeing it twice and it was sold out and then I had a hard time finding three spare hours. And also...well, I'm not the biggest fan of the Nolan Batman trilogy. I get why it is so beloved and all, but the filmmaking is often sloppy to my tastes. (The horrible sound editing in DKR being one example.) Anyway, I did enjoy it, even though it was so lax in its storytelling. And I kept getting distracted by things. Like Catwoman's high heels. As soon as she appeared, I wondered "How is she running in those high heels?" And as if to answer my question, some hapless gunsel asks the same question in the film and Catwoman shows that they are really fearsome weapons. Got it.

By Todd Allen The Expendables 2 managed to win the weekly box office with a debut just south of $29M, in a bit of ho-hum weekly box office.  Nothing big broke and the largest story...

Dark Knight Rises could only hold the #1 spot for three weeks. This week, two new films claimed the top spots in their debut. The Jason Bourne saga takes a page from Doctor Who and has a new actor as another agent trained to assume the Jason Bourne identity and The Bourne Legacy resonated well enough with the audience to take the top spot. At number two, Will Farell and Zach Galifianakis star in The Campaign. When your political farce debuts at roughly the same time the Vice-Presidential is announced, you had really good scheduling.

Carlo Rambaldi, special effects wizard, has passed at the age of 86. Discover he achievements, from an era before computers.

Jaws dropped around the comics movies-o-sphere yesterday when Variety boldly announced that Ben Affleck might direct a Justice League movie. The story made a bit of sense—although the less said about his acting career the better, Affleck is growing in stature as a director, even if a three-ring circus like a JL movie would tax anyone but D.W. Griffith or Michael Bay.

Well, despite what you're thinking Affleck's directing career—THE TOWN and GONE BABY GONE—is much admired within the halls of Warners. So much so that they are thinking of giving over the proposed Justice League film to Affleck. After all, he played a superhero once. He also knows Kevin Smith personally.

On the scale of "Oh thank God," this ranks pretty high.Joss Whedon will be back to write and direct AVENGERS 2, as Disney CEO Bob Iger told an investors call. Immediately after the announcement, people started throwing money directly at Iger, just pelting him with dollars and quarters. "Take our money!" they cried. "Just take it! THE AVENGERS has already made $1.5 billion worldwide and the sequel will make even more."

In an interesting move, it looks like Marvel might extend 20th Century's 'Daredevil' contract... on the condition that Fox return certain Fantastic Four characters back to them.

Some set pics of Hugh Jackman from WOLVERINE II, currently known as THE WOLVERINE, which is set in Japan. From these photos, we can assume that in the story, Jackman's Wolverine character will have a period of extreme self doubt, which evolves into self neglect, from which he will be rescued by a period of intense study of Zen Buddhist philosophy and Japanese fighting techniques.

In another relatively quiet weekend at the Box Office, we find Batman continuing to lord over the competition in a similar fashion to Avengers, we also see a genre film launch and hear a "thud" as it hits a wall, just like Battleship didn't bouncing off the Avengers.