Coming Attractions – May 1

Sumofale Week 1! Here’s what’s coming out this weekend. (There are actually some limited releases coming out this weekend as well, but I wrote… um… quite a bit on the Avengers, so maybe I’ll recap those things next week if they end up getting drafted on Sunday)

Avengers: Age of Ultron (Not Owned)

The question is not whether Disney’s Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron will make a billion dollars, it’s how fast will it make a billion dollars? Earlier this year, like 3 weeks ago, the Vin Diesel-The Rock car smashysmashfest, Furious 7, set the record for fastest (oh the puns!) movie to make $1 billion worldwide. Can Avengers 2 do it faster? Yeah, I’ll take the under. It’s already made $200 million worldwide (44 markets), and that doesn’t include China, Japan and the ol’ US of A.

Sidenote: All the Marvel movies and all the Fast & Furious movies make a metric shit-ton of money in China. Isn’t there some kind of debt relief program we can work out with this. Can’t we just be like, “Okay China, we’ll give you guys 2 Marvel movies and 1 Fast & Furious movie every year for the next 5 years and everyone in your country can go see these movies for free, but you have to forgive all of our debt”? Seems like a win-win to me.

Here’s the thing, this movie’s going to fucking dominate. DOMINATE. Industry muckity-mucks have conservative estimates at $200 million its opening weekend. The first one set a record for an opening weekend gross with $207 million. So their worst-case scenario is “not breaking a record, but coming pretty close.” (said with a grimace and a dismissive wave of your hand while wearing the fucking Monopoly guy outfit) Not-so-conservative estimates range from $210 million up to $230 million! That’s at least 10% more than the previous record!

And they’re probably right. On MovieTickets.com, the movie has out-preordered?… pre-outsold?… out-presold?… had almost 4 times the amount of people who bought advance tickets to the original Avengers buy tickets for Age of Ultron. And Fandango Chief Correspondent Dave Karger reports “‘Age of Ultron’ is a robust follow-up to one of the highest-grossing movies ever released, and it comes with sensational buzz for its new characters and returning favorites. The result is a rare 100 [out of 100] Fanticipation score and what could be the biggest opening weekend of all time.” Whatever the fuck “Fanticipation” means.

The real thing we need to be talking about is, how goddamn handsome is this cast? Look at these people:

Well, except for that ginger on the left. Just take a minute to admire all those cheekbones. Mmmmmmm.

Am I going to see this movie? Of course! There’s an 87.5% chance I’ll see it begrudgingly, and proceed to talk jealous shit about it all year. But, there’s that 12.5% chance that I’ll go see this movie in a D-Box theater sitting in one of those rumble seats like it was dryer at an empty, late-night laundromat. I’ll be running around knocking popcorn out of people’s hands doing Jesse Pinkman impressions.

I am getting a certain amount of comic book movie fatigue, but I think that’s mainly coming from, well, aside from the fact that I’ve seen 15 comic book movies in the last 4 years, that I just sat through that dogshit of a Batman v Superman trailer. Hey Zack Snyder, way to completely miss the tone of the MOST ICONIC SUPERHERO OF ALL TIME. Oh, but Superman’s boring, we need to make it dark and brooding to make it interesting. Nope! That’s just lazy filmmaking. Actually someone who is always just and good in a world full of shitty people is actually intriguing. Here, watch this. All they did was turn up the color for the same exact shots and suddenly I want to see that movie. Well, that, and they also don’t show all the mass murder when 75 percent of the city is leveled. Why did we give the keys to the two most popular superheroes ever to this terrible hack? Sorry for going off on a rant there, but sometimes it helps to get your feelings out, you know?

Comic book movie fatigue aside (Sounds like an SNL sketch waiting to happen), the first Avengers was perfectly entertaining. This one will be perfectly entertaining too, I’m sure. And it is, currently it has a RT score of 76%. I’m positive half of those negative reviews are snooty FILM critics who are like “I just don’t see the appeal”. There’s two more factors to this movie making a bajillion dollars: 1) This shit is like homework at this point. This is the big payoff for putting in all that work seeing the other 42 movies leading up to this one. Well, until the next one comes out. And 2)  FOMO. Never underestimate the fear of missing out on the biggest movie of the summer. Seriously, even my mom will see this movie. In August, but still.

Hot Take: This movie will displace Avatar (Thankfully. Remember that movie? That movie sucked.) as the highest grossing movie of all time. It’ll make $3 billion worldwide, and $800 million domestic before everything is said and done.

Don’t take Prometheus 2 with your first pick.