Listen to The Plot Hole every Tuesday at PlayerAffinity.com or download on iTunes. This week, Dinah,
John, Kieran, Simon, Steven and our special comic guest Dustin chat all
the summer’s big flicks, review Fast Five and look to next week’s big releases with an early review of Thor.
By the time you read this Fast Five may have crossed $100 million domestic. If not, its total worldwide haul has surpassed $180 million, easily earning back its production budget of $125 million. Fast Five may be starting a new trend, rather expanding a phenomenon not known outside of the horror genre: never-ending sequels.
Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Saw must have 100 pictures between them. When it comes to scary movies, including Scary Movie, audiences can expect the cow to be milked long after the udders have shriveled up. Seriously, even when a horror franchise is failing studios will continue to crank out an assembly line into theaters, or go straight to DVD if they have to. Now, an action movie has jumped into the mix.
This is the second half of our Top 15 most-anticipated films of the summer. All eight of us ranked our 15 movies of the summer and then we averaged each list to make one big list which broke down as follows. In addition to the list, we each provided one or more “Critic’s Picks” to highlight films that didn’t make the Top 15 that we wanted you to know about.
This
week we have at least one FX driven epic with Immortals from the visionary Tarsem Singh about a clash between
titans and the gods … hmm … sounds familiar. Patrick Wilson and Liv Tyler lead the
semi-religious thriller The Ledge
about a man forced to jump from a building to save the woman he loves and next
hot commodity Anne Hathaway joins with Brit Jim Sturgess in the adaptation of
the bestselling book One Day. Wrapping
things up is the WWII action thriller Age
of Heroes led by the one and only Sean Bean and finally the teaser trailer
for Intruders breaks featuring a
scared-looking Clive Owen. Read on, you have nothing to fear here, it’s Trailer
Tracker.
The blockbuster season is nigh. That statement can be as foreboding or as hopeful as you wish depending on your appreciation for mind-numbing explosions and excessive FX. Even if you pledge to the former camp and plan on avoiding the multiplex until Awards season rolls around once again, Player Affinity will jump back to five films that should at least get the most jaded of movie-goers into the mood. Superheroes, fast cars and aliens aplenty — this season has them all.
Very few film series manage to reach their fifth installment. Be it because of actor fatigue, lack of inspiration, or a dwindling fan base, somewhere along the way, even the biggest and best franchises fall apart. But not The Fast and the Furious; this Friday, Paul Walker and Vin Diesel will buckle up for another round of crazy street racing. So how did we get to this point? And more importantly, where can this series possibly go from here?
First off, Zombieland director Reuben Fleisher teams up with recent Oscar nominee Jesse Eisenberg in the action comedy 30 Minutes or Less, and then Paul Rudd joins a quartet of talented dames in the Sundance darling Our Idiot Brother. The body-swap comedy appears alive and well with The Change-Up featuring Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds, for which we have the R-rated clip and then things get a tad more quirky in the acclaimed British coming-of-age dramedy Submarine. Finally we get the second another-planet-enters-into-our-solar-system movie after Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia with Another Earth (though the latter almost certainly promises to be the less disturbing of the two). Come on, get your head out of the clouds, it’s Trailer Tracker.
We often scrunch up our faces and scowl at certain pairings in romantic films at first glance, but we’re sometimes rewarded with the final product. The chemistry itself plays into it, but there’s something even more special about the film when we didn’t see it coming.
Will Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon end up being a success in the romantic genre, or will this Water for Elephants end up being this decade’s equivalent of Swept Away? We’ll find out soon enough, but we at Player Affinity came up with a list of the unexpected couples in cinema that actually worked quite nicely.
Welcome to Box Office Wizard, Player Affinity’s premiere movie box office prediction competition that you ignore every week because you don’t hath the stones of a real wizard. Entering is and always has been simple, so why not get your beard on and give it a try? Just read through this post and leave a comment with, in order, what you think the top five box office finishers will be this weekend. Finish out 2011 on top and you will win something COOL.
It began with 64 films just one month ago; 64 films that represented seven different major sports (and one region of assorted sports). You voted (for the most part) week in and week out and now we are left with the last two standing. Who will take home the title of Best Sports Movie of All Time as decided by Player Affinity? That’s up to you friend. Vote by leaving a comment below. Polls close Sunday night when the clock strikes midnight.
