Jurassic World Dominion is #1

For the weekend of June 10-12, 2022, Jurassic World Dominion managed to out-open The Batman and Top Gun Maverick to be the second largest opening of 2022, behind only Doctor Strange 2. The sixth installment, billed as the final one of the Jurassic franchise, opened just barely below Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom's numbers, but Universal has to be thrilled, especially since it's receiving the worst reviews of the six, even below Jurassic Park III. It will face immediate competition this Friday with Pixar's Lightyear, the first Pixar movie to not go straight-to-DisneyPlus since Onward.

Paramount's pleased with the long legs of Maverick, its third $100 million grosser of 2022 and it'll easily get to $400 million and has an outside shot at $500 million domestic. It's already by far the highest domestic grosser of Tom Cruise's career and will soon pass Mission Impossible Fallout as his highest worldwide grosser.

Opens June 10

LIGHTYEAR with the voices of Chris Evans, Keke Palmer and Taika Waititi.

Top Gun Maverick #1 in 2nd week

For the weekend of June 3-5, 2022, Top Gun: Maverick held strong, dropping a mere 32.1% its second week. In fact it's the 8th best second weekend in box office history. It's well on its way to become Paramount's second highest grosser ever, and with these legs, it could catch Titanic. 

But it also benefitted from not much competition. No new big-budget releases this week, only horror flicks and arthouse fare. David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future failed to find an audience, even with Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart headlining it. Vikram, a 3-hour action thriller from India, wound up doing best.

Opens June 10

JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION with Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard and Jeff Goldblum.

Kingsman 2 hangs on to #1 at box office

For the weekend of September 29-October 1, 2017, Kingsman: The Golden Circle managed to hold off American Made to stay #1 for the second week. Kingsman is already almost to $200 million worldwide and is on pace to be profitable.

American Made, following The Mummy, demonstrates that Tom Cruise isn't as bankable as he used to be in non-Mission Impossible movies. He's still big overseas, so this'll eventually break even (as did The Mummy), but it's the lowest domestic opener for him since Jack Reacher.

Flatliners had bad reviews and a weak opener and I imagine it will disappear from our collective memory the way unmemorable remakes like Fame and Footloose have. Other new releases (Til Death Do Us Part, A Question of Faith) didn't make much of a dent.

It continues to be a juggernaut, grossing over $550 million worldwide.

Battle of the Sexes and Stronger are getting great reviews, but they haven't been able to find their audiences. Victoria & Abdul is staying strong after adding some screens.

Opens October 6
BLADE RUNNER 2049 with Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Robin Wright and Jared Leto.
THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US with Idris Elba and Kate Winslet.
MY LITTLE PONY with the voices of Emily Blunt and Kristen Chenoweth.

The Mummy - Movie Review

Starring Tom Cruise, Annabelle Wallis, Russell Crowe, Sofia Boutella, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. Vance and Marwan Kenzari.
Written by David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, Dylan Kussman, Jon Spaihts, Alex Kurtzman & Jenny Lumet.
Directed by Alex Kurtzman.

★½

This is the first movie in a planned Dark Universe franchise. Their first priority should have been to just make a good movie that can stand on its own. All it needed to do was be better than the Brendan Fraser version, and this is not.

Tom Cruise plays Nick, a soldier who happens to steal ancient artifacts in the Middle East. He and his buddy (Jake Johnson) are fleeing some insurgents when they stumble upon the tomb of Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), an evil ancient Egyptian princess who was buried 1000 miles away from home.

This movie isn't sure what it is. Is it horror? Is it action? What is its aim here? Nick is supposed to be this selfish weasel, and it's the first time I feel like the 55-year-old Cruise has been miscast. 39-year-old Jake Johnson as Nick would have been more like it.

Russell Crowe shows up as Dr. Jekyll, and the Oscar winner did not elevate the material. This is just a confused project that in trying to be many things winds up being nothing.

Wonder Woman buries Mummy at box office

For the weekend of June 9-11, 2017, Wonder Woman managed to hold off Tom Cruise and any other challengers to her box office throne. Anything less than a 50% drop in a second week is a great sign for longevity.

The Mummy is off to a rough start for the planned Dark Universe, where Frankenstein, Wolf-Man, Creature of the Black Lagoon, etc., are supposed to be part of this eventual franchise. It's the first big-budget movie Alex Kurtzman has directed. He's known mainly for producing films like Cowboys & Aliens and Star Trek into Darkness. Critics hated it. I expect it to break even thanks to overseas business.

Lower-budget fare like It Comes at Night and Megan Leavey didn't break out either.

Opens June 16
CARS 3 with the voices of Owen Wilson, Bonnie Hunt and Larry the Cable Guy.
ROUGH NIGHT with Scarlett Johansson, Kate McKinnon and Jillian Bell.
ALL EYEZ ON ME with Demetrius Shipp Jr., Danai Gurira and Kat Graham.
47 METERS DOWN with Mandy Moore, Claire Holt and Matthew Modine.

Boo! Madea Wins the Weekend Box Office

For the weekend of October 21-23, 2016, Tyler Perry is back on the map. Boo! A Madea Halloween is the biggest opening for Perry since 2010's Why Did I Get Married Too? and the fourth biggest opening of his sixteen films.

Tom Cruise went back to mid-budget range for Jack Reacher 2. It opened better than the first film, but only Cruise is returning from the first film.  Rosamund Pike, Richard Jenkins, David Oyelowo and Robert Duvall have been traded for Cobie Smulders (The Avengers), Holt McCallany (Sully), Aldis Hodge (Straight Outta Compton's MC Ren) and Jason Douglas (The Walking Dead's Tobin).

Cruise's last two original movies - expensive sci-fi adventures Oblivion and Edge of Tomorrow - both failed to make their money back. Could be a factor why he made this film after Mission Impossible 5.

Ouija: Origin of Evil did great for its low budget. Doing not so great was Keeping Up with the Joneses, a movie that looked less appealing the closer it got. Maybe Zack Galifianakis should not be top-billed.

Opens October 28
INFERNO with Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Ben Foster, Irrfan Khan and Omar Sy.

Random Movie Stuff - 6/1/13

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Friday Box Office Estimates
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1. Fast & Furious 6 - $10.5 million ($146.34) - 8 days
2. Now You See Me - $10.05 - 1 day
3. After Earth - $9.8 - 1 day
4. The Hangover Part III - $5.23 ($77.39) - 9 days
5. Star Trek into Darkness - $4.44 ($169.19) - 16 days
6. Epic - $4.15 ($52.91) - 8 days
7. Iron Man 3 - $2.2 ($378.95) - 29 days
8. The Great Gatsby - $1.94 ($123.93) - 22 days

After Earth is going to be the infamous bomb of the summer.  Its Scientology-based theology and general hokeyness is drawing comparisons to Battlefield Earth, and it's another stinker for M. Night Shyamalan, who should probably try to direct something low-budget and written by the guys behind Insidious or Sinister.

Now You See Me improved in tracking as it got closer, but just last week it was expected to get $22 million compared to $37 million for After Earth.  Now it looks like it'll actually beat it.  It will probably wind up with $27-28 million, and AE more of a $25-26 million range.

In other news:

- Tom Cruise has dropped out of Guy Ritchie's big-screen take on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. due to scheduling conflicts with his upcoming Mission Impossible 5.  Henry Cavill (Man of Steel) has been mentioned as a replacement.

- Glenn Close will play top cop in Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy movie. She'll play the head of Nova Corp, the intergalactic space patrol.  The film co-stars Zoe Saldana, Chris Pratt, John C. Reilly, Dave Bautista and Michael Rooker.

- Eric Roberts has joined the cast of The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence.

Oblivion - Movie Review

Starring Tom Cruise, Andrea Riseborough, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, Melissa Leo and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.  Directed by Joseph Kosinski.

★★★

This movie reminded me of three other sci-fi movies.  One was Wall-E, and the other two I don't want to mention simply because it'd give away some second-half developments if I did.

Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper, a technician working clean-up crew on Earth in 2077.  A long time ago, or a few years from now, some aliens destroyed the Earth's moon, and it killed half the planet.  Then the aliens invaded, so the countries of the world launched their nukes.  Now the Earth is a wasteland, and most of humanity that has survived has moved to Titan, one of Saturn's moons.  Meanwhile there's a giant triangular space-station in the sky called the Tet that overseas the conversion of Earth's ocean-water to fusion energy.  Once the water's dried up, the Tet and the last of humanity will abandon Earth for good.

Jack and his partner Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are the only two humans on Earth's surface (or are they?) and each morning, he goes out to repair the drones that protect the fusion converters from the "Scavs", the aliens left behind that steal or sabotage any machinery they can find.

Jack flies the ship; Victoria serves as eyes-and-ears back home, and she then relays any information to Mission Control, played with a suspiciously honeyed accent by Melissa Leo.

Here's a catch though: Jack and Victoria had their memory wiped before their five-year mission. If they ever captured by the Scavs, they'll have no information to be pried out of them.

All of this is fine and good.  The movie takes its time with setting up the world and the rules.  Jack puts on his uniform each day to go fly; Victoria puts on her dress and heels before she mans her desk.  Since the air is breathable, I wondered why Jack wore his uniform, and as for Victoria, wouldn't she do her job in pajamas most days?

Now everyone who saw the preview knows that Morgan Freeman will show up eventually and the twists will begin.  I think it's just before the halfway mark when he lights his cigar in the dark to show Jack that he's not the last man on Earth after all.

This movie has more twists, none of which are surprising, but it's still a pleasurable experience because the story is told so well.  So if you go to see Iron Man 3 and it's sold out, this isn't a bad alternative.

Hobbit stays #1 over Django, Les Miz

For the weekend of Dec. 28-30.

1. The Hobbit - $32.92 million ($222.7) - 3 wks (WB) -10.9%
 . . . 4100 screens / $8029 per screen
2. Django Unchained - $30.69 ($64) - 1 wk (Wein)
 . . . 3010 / $10,195
3. Les Misersables - $28.03 ($67.47) - 1 wk (U)
 . . . 2808 / $9981
4. Parental Guidance - $14.8 ($29.59) - 1 wk (Fox)
 . . . 3367 / $4396
5. Jack Reacher - $14.01 ($44.66) - 2 wks (Par) -10.2%
 . . . 3352 / $4180
6. This Is 40 - $13.19 ($37.12) - 2 wks (U) +13.9%
 . . . 2914 / $4525
7. Lincoln - $7.51 ($132.04) - 8 wks (BV) +35.9%
 . . . 1966 / $3819
8. The Guilt Trip - $6.7 ($21.1) - 2 wks (Par) +24.3%
 . . . 2431 / $2756
9. Monsters Inc. 3D - $6.36 ($18.49) - 2 wks (BV) +33.3%
 . . . 2618 / $2430
10. Rise of the Guardians - $4.9 ($90.23) - 6 wks (DW) -16.9%
 . . . 2055 / $2384
11. Skyfall - $4.6 ($289.6) - 8 wks (Sony) -2.1%
 . . . 1637 / $2810
12. Silver Linings Playbook - $4.11 ($27.36) - 7 wks (Wein) +130.7%
 . . . 745 / $5517
13. Life of Pi - $3.83 ($84.7) - 6 wks (Fox) -4.8%
 . . . 1178 / $3247
14. Breaking Dawn 2 - $2.45 ($286.13) - 7 wks (Sum) -6.7%
 . . . 1191 / $2057
15. Cirque de Soleil - $2.4 ($7.41) - 2 wks (Par) +12.4%
 . . . 840 / $2857
16. Wreck-It-Ralph - $2 ($175.66) - 9 wks (BV) +10.2%
 . . . 913 / $2196
17. Argo - $1.08 ($108.53) - 12 wks (WB) +19%
 . . . 345 / $3116

The actual number of theater tickets sold in 2012 is the highest it's been since 2002.

The Hobbit will join Skyfall and Twilight as the third movie this holiday season to pass $290 million.  Skyfall might squeak out $300 million, not sure if Twilight will get there, but all three are big hits overseas, so champagne corks are popping regardless (except it's sparkling cider for Stephenie Meyer).  Skyfall's at $1 billion total worldwide gross, and Twilight's at $800 million.

Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained and Tom Hooper's Les Miserables will both easily get to $100 million domestic, and with awards season upon, they should get longer legs once the Academy Award nominations are announced.

Old shoes Billy Crystal and Bette Midler were able to get Parental Guidance into break-even territory.  Tom Cruise wasn't able to pull off Mission Impossible magic with Jack Reacher.

Jack Reacher - Movie Review

Starring Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike, Richard Jenkins, Robert Duvall, Werner Herzog, David Oyelowo, Jai Courtney and Michael Raymond-James.
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie.

★★★

I have not read the Jack Reacher books, and my understanding is that Tom Cruise is physically nothing like what Lee Child's described.  Going solely off what I saw on the screen, it worked.  It might have worked better with a bigger, more menacing-looking guy, but Cruise has done enough action flicks that I could buy him in the role.

Reacher is an ex-MP, very good at what he does. When a fellow veteran is accusing of snipering five people, he asks for Reacher. They are not friends. Reacher doesn't like the guy, but Reacher has investigative skills that match his combat skills.

I liked that this was a mystery, that there were layers to peel back.

I also see why the premiere was cancelled. The opening scene is a sniper, and one of his victims is a young woman carrying a child. In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, that image takes on a new dimension. Bad timing by the movie, but this is the story they chose to tell.

I've always admired the career path that Cruise has taken, in that he tends to pick his directors carefully, and experienced co-stars. He has a mini-Days of Thunder reunion with Robert Duvall, and you also have Richard Jenkins as a DA and Werner Herzog as the head conspirator.

Now there are other Oscar-bait movies my wife and I would have seen were any of them in a theater near us last night (Les Miserables, Zero Dark Thirty, Silver Linings Playbook, etc.), but since they weren't, we went with this escapist fare, and we enjoyed it.

Rock of Ages - Movie Review

Starring Julianne Hough, Diego Boneta, Tom Cruise, Russell Brand, Paul Giamatti, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Malin Akerman, Alec Baldwin, Mary J. Blige, Bryan Cranston, Will Forte and Kevin Nash. Directed by Adam Shankman.

★★

This was one of the most bizarre experiences I've had at the movies in a while.

Adam Shankman demonstrated before he can translate a Broadway musical to the big screen with Hairspray, but whatever chops he showed there are missing here. The first couple minutes started out fine. Julianne Hough is small-town girl Sherrie, on her way to L.A. to become a singer, and on the bus she starts singing "Sister Christian" and the other people on the bus join in. It's a weird, cheesy moment, and I thought we'd be in good hands.

But then we go to the Bourbon Room where Drew (Diego Boneta) and Lonny (Russell Brand) are working and singing "Ain't Lookin' for Nothing But a Good Time" and the song is just betrayed by the movie. The editing's bad, the lip-syncing's bad, the song itself has no lift, and it didn't pull me in at all. And presiding over the Bourbon Room is Denny (a weirdly miscast Alec Baldwin). Sherrie and Drew meet cute and then we're stuck following their puppy-loving High School Musical 2 romance, their cheesy Disney Channel bubble-gum soft-rock pairing that just made me embarrassed.

My jaw was open at how bad this movie was for the first 45 minutes or so. I was stunned, just amazed in disbelief at what this movie was doing. Why is Chicago's sexy Catherine Zeta-Jones playing the uptight Tipper Gore villain? Why is her number "Hit Me with Your Best Shot" in a church? Why are the wigs on Brand and Baldwin so bad?

But then Tom Cruise shows up as tortured rock god Stacee Jaxx. He throws himself completely into the role, and his "Wanted Dead or Alive" is infused with more soulful defiance than Bon Jovi ever thought of injecting into that song. Cruise nails it, and I got those movie-magic chills.

And after that, every time Cruise wasn't on screen, I was counting the seconds until he was on screen again. I finally stopped doing that around Rock of Ages' only successful non-Cruise number, when Mary J. Blige helps turn "Anyway You Want It" into an empowering anthem for strippers.

Others that came out unscathed were Malin Akerman, whom I thought had good comedic chemistry with Cruise as a Rolling Stone reporter who falls for Jaxx, and Paul Giamatti as Jaxx's sleazy manager.

But scathed, very scathed, are our two leads Hough and Boneta. Hough's weak, but Boneta is awful, a black hole of charisma that just made me resent him every time he was on screen. How did this guy get cast? This should do for him what Xanadu did for Michael Beck.

Why the heck are Foreigner, REO Speedwagon and Warrant on this soundtrack?

So I couldn't in good conscience recommend it to anyone, and yet I hope Cruise gets nominated for Best Supporting Actor for this come award-season.

Random Movie Stuff - 5/2/12

- Due to positive reactions to Mark Ruffalo's take on the Hulk, Marvel's considering doing a stand-alone movie with him.

- Adam McKay (The Other Guys) is planning on remaking Uptown Saturday Night with Will Smith and Denzel Washignton.  The 1974 original had Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby as two normal men who get mugged, but then one learns he had the winning lottery ticket in his wallet.  They brave the criminal underworld to get the wallet back.

- Sharlto Copley (District 9, The A-Team) will star in Open Grave, about a man who wakes up in a grave filled with dead bodies and no idea how he got there.  He's also signed to play the villain in Spike Lee's Oldboy remake, which'll star Josh Brolin as a man who's kidnapped and left in isolation for 15 years, then let go without explanation.

- Tom Cruise is going to star in a Van Helsing movie.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol - Movie Review

★★★½

Starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton, Michael Nyqvist, Vladimir Mashkov, Josh Holloway, Tom Wilkinson, Anil Kapoor, Samuli Edelmann and Lea Seydoux.
Directed by Brad Bird.

Tom Cruise has turned the Mission Impossible movies into his own James Bond franchise, and while I've enjoyed all of them, I can't say I've loved any of them. The first one was a fun mystery, the second one was John Woo's parody of himself, and the third one was fast and fun, but all three were pretty disposable. This one's easily the best in the series.

Cruise, for the couch-jumping hullabaloo and the Stepfording-of-Katie-Holmes kerfuffle and the Scientology bruhaha, is still one of the coolest movie stars working today. He's back as superhuman spy Ethan Hunt, a Jason Bourne with a perfect memory. This time around he has to stop a nuclear activist trying to start World War III so Earth can be rebuilt from the ashes.

Movies on one level are supposed to transport the viewer, and here we go from the Kremlin to Dubai to India. Director Brad Bird brings a lot of sensibilities he displayed in The Incredibles, and that's a good thing. We get sweeping shots of the cities, we get heroes barely avoiding sudden death. I saw it in IMAX, and when Cruise has to step out of the world's tallest building in Dubai, it feels like we've gone out on the ledge with him. That's exactly what I would want.

And it's funny. The makers have Cruise, they have co-action-star Jeremy Renner, they have the sexy Paula Patton, and they make full use of the comic potential of Simon Pegg's chatty Benji. One thing Iv'e appreciated about the MI franchise is while Cruise is the star, Ethan can never accomplish his missions without a team.

This was Bird's first live-action directorial effort (he also did Iron Giant and Ratatouille), and the transition is seamless. I look forward to whatever he does next (which happens to be about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.) ((Wow, he's younger than me. Man, I've made some wrong choices in life.))

Random Entertainment News 7/19/11

- Tom Cruise will play Jack Reacher in One Shot, based on Lee Child's best-selling book series. In the books, Jack is 6'5" and 250 lbs. Christopher McQuarrie will direct. Afterwards, Cruise will star in the sci-fi actioner Oblivion for director Joseph Kosinski (Tron Legacy).

- Sean Bean (Game of Thrones) is in talks to play the King to Julia Roberts's Queen in Tarsem Singh's Snow White, starring Lily Collins.

- Kevin Costner will play Leonardo DiCaprio's villainous right-hand man in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, a spaghetti western about a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) seeking revenge and to free his family.

- Dennis Quaid is the latest to join the cast of What to Expect When You're Expecting, an ensemble rom-com about pregnancy. It stars Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Banks, Anna Kendrick, Chace Crawford, Brooklyn Decker (Just Go with It) and Matthew Morrison (Glee).

- Producer Don Murphy (Transformers 3) is planning a live-action Captain Planet movie.

- Robert Redford will play a Vietnam-Era radical still on the run in The Company You Keep, co-starring Shia LaBeouf as a reporter who finds him.

- Bill Moseley (The Devil's Rejects), Alexandra Daddario (Percy Jackson), Scott Eastwood (Gran Torino) and Richard Riehle (Office Space) are among those cast in the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D movie. Gunnar Hansen, the original Leatherface, will make a cameo appearance.

- Stephen Dillane (The Hours) and Carice van Houten (Valkyrie) have been cast as Stannis Baratheon and his witch-priestess Melisandre in the second season of HBO's Game of Thrones. Stannis is the younger brother of the late King Robert and rightful heir to the throne (if you ignore Daenerys's claim).

Random Movie Stuff 5/20/11

- Joey King (Ramona & Beezus), Matthew Modine (Full Metal Jacket) and Tom Conti (The Tempest) have joined the cast of The Dark Knight Rises, starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway, Tom hardy, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Juno Temple and Nestor Carbonell.

- Tom Cruise has officially signed on for Oblivion, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi actioner directed by Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy). Cruise has Mission Impossbile 4 opening this December, and the musical Rock of Ages next summer.

- No word yet who she'll play, but Holly Hunter has joined the cast of Romeo & Juliet directed by Carlo Carlei, which will star Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) as Juliet. Hunter has also joined the cast of Still I Rise, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis as two women trying to change a public school in inner-city Pittsburgh.