Home Market Releases for July 5th, 2016

July 4th, 2016

It's a strange week on the home market, as there are no first-run releases and very few other releases to make up the difference. There are some contenders for Pick of the Week, but all of them are foreign-language films, which is again odd. In fact, two of them, Only Yesterday and The Boy and the World, are animated. However, in the end, I went with The Mermaid, which deserves to be seen by more and Blu-ray is a great way to see it. More...

2015 Awards Season: Oscar Preview

February 28th, 2016

It’s Oscar day and, if all goes to plan, I will be live-blogging the ceremony tonight. Here is the list of nominees marked according to predictions from our readers, and my personal wishes. Nominees in Bold are the ones predicted to win by our readers (we’ll have a full rundown of the predictions at noon, after the contest ends). If I am predicting a different film, those are in Italics. Meanwhile, the nominees I want to win, but don’t think will win, are Underlined. There are a few categories where the film I really think deserves the award was not even nominated, plus a few I don’t have a real opinion on.

If you haven’t done so already, it’s not too late to enter our Oscar competition, and win all Best Picture nominees on Blu-ray or DVD. More...

2015 Awards Season: Oscar Highlight: Best Feature-Length Animated Film

February 18th, 2016

With our annual Oscar Prediction contest underway, now is the best time to look at the nominees and try and figure out who the favorites are and which films should just feel honored to be nominated. Today we look at Best Feature-Length Animated Film. Inside Out has a better than 90% chance of winning. If it doesn't win, it would almost certainly be the biggest surprise of Oscar night. More...

2015 Awards Season: Oscars - Nominations

January 15th, 2016

The Oscar nominations were announced at 5:30 am Pacific time. Nothing is good that early in the morning. Worse still, this was a terrible year for snubs, especially when it comes to diversity of the nominees. The voters for the Oscars are 94% white and 77% male... but that's still more diverse than the list of nominees. The Revenant led the way with 12 nominations and it is expected to win a few of those, while it is a serious contender in most of the categories it was nominated in. More...

Per Theater Chart: The Big Short was Nearly the Biggest

December 15th, 2015

We have a new champion on top of the per theater chart this week, as The Big Short earned one of the best limited release openings of the year. Its average of $88,191 was behind only Steve Jobs for the year and Steve Jobs opened in half as many theaters as The Big Short, 8 to 4. Carol remained strong in second place with an average of $21,105 in 16 theaters. Thankfully it is expanding, but I'm worried the studio waited too long and it won't reach its potential. Yellow Day opened with an average of $13,130 in two theaters. The Danish Girl rounded out the $10,000 club with an average of $10,964 in 24 theaters. By this time next week, it could be over $1 million in total. More...

Limited and VOD Releases: Big Short Looks to Stand Tall

December 11th, 2015

Earlier this week, The Big Short picked up two SAG nominations and four Golden Globe nominations and now it is opening in limited release. It arguably has louder buzz than the rest of this week’s limited releases combined, and the reviews to back it up. Outside of this film, both The Boy and the World and The Girl in the Book deserve to find an audience. More...