June 20th, 2016
There are two wide releases coming out this week, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 and The Divergent Series: Allegiant, although the latter is only coming out on Video on Demand. Neither of these are big releases and it only gets much worse from there. There wasn't a lot of competition for Pick of the Week, but I went with Fantastic Planet: Criterion Collection. It's a classic, but it is also a French Surrealist animated film, so that will limit its target audience.
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May 17th, 2016
The Deadpool Blu-ray arrived last Tuesday, which is par for course for Fox, as their screeners always seem to arrive as late as possible while still technically not being late. There are updates below with the extras. On a side note, the film is so good, I was tempted to make it the Pick of the Week for the second week in a row. However, in the end I went with Dark Passage, a classic Film Noir with a famous hook. The Blu-ray is the Pick of the Week.
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April 6th, 2016
Miles Ahead led the way on the theater average chart with $28,633 in four theaters. Vaxxed: From Cover Up to Catastrophe was right behind with $28,339 in one theater. As someone who doesn't want to see measles make a comeback, this is a scary result. Everybody Wants Some earned an average of $16,440 in 19 theaters over the weekend after opening in five theaters on Wednesday. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice remained in the $10,000 club with an average of $12,062. Saturday's Warrior and Chongqing Hot Pot had very close averages at $10,671 and $10,098 respectively.
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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.
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February 24th, 2016
The Mermaid led the way as far as limited releases were concerned with $985,000 in 35 theaters for an average of $28,144. The film has broken records in China, which we will talk about more tomorrow with the international top five. The Embrace of the Serpent was next with an average of $16,985 in three theaters over the weekend, while it earned an average of $20,721 during its five-day opening. The only other film in the $10,000 club was Deadpool with an average of $15,172. On a related note, Warner Bros. has announced an R-rated Blu-ray for Batman v. Superman. The is the wrong lesson to learn from the success of Deadpool.
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February 21st, 2016
After a $132 million opening, Deadpool wasn’t under much threat at the top of the chart this weekend, so a fairly sharp 58% decline to $55 million this weekend still leaves it dominant in movie theaters. That softness might be a slight concern going forwards, but for now Fox is reveling in having a February hit that has already grossed close to $500 million worldwide (Sunday’s official estimate is $491.9 million), and having Kung Fu Panda 3 hold on to second place with $12.5 million in its fourth weekend for a domestic total of $117 million. That left the three new wide releases fighting for places lower down the chart, although their performance was by no means all doom and gloom.
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February 19th, 2016
It's a short list this week, but there are more than a few films worth talking about. The Mermaid is by far the biggest and it has already earned close to $300 million worldwide. Additionally, its director, Stephen Chow, has had some box office success here in the past. Unfortunately, it has No Reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, so it is hard to tell if it deserves breakout success here.
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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.
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