Well hello there. Sorry I missed you last week, but it was Memorial Day weekend, and I wasn’t going to spend a beautiful weekend type-type-typing away at a computer. Plus, my MegaBus had dreadfully slow internet and it turns out I do a lot of “research” writing these things. I did manage to write 75% of a post but couldn’t bring myself to finish it, so I’m going to take the pieces of what I wrote on the bus to Providence and try to seamlessly blend them with information from this week and the upcoming movies. In other words, this post could be 2500 words. Yikes!

Last weekend saw a 16% drop from the previous weekend, with a total weekend gross of $154 million. To put it in perspective, last year’s Memorial Day weekend pulled in $232 million. The year before that pulled in $314 million! This was one of the lowest Memorial Day weekends in 15 years. The root of this lousy weekend at the box office turned out to be the lack of exciting openings. Let’s start with Tomorrowland:

The things this movie had going for it:

1. Brad Bird. Brad Bird directed The Incredibles, which is arguably the best Pixar movie ever made. Yeah, that’s right. I said it. I know your butt just clenched a little bit and you sat up straight in your chair. I know you’re furrowing your brow, and maybe shaking your head. I said arguably, which means I’m ready to argue about it! Brad Bird also wrote and directed Ratatouille, which is a brilliant title but also a French word and therefore a criminally underrated underseen movie, and The Iron Giant, which is also criminally underrated. Now those are all animated films, but he also directed Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, which even while I was watching it, I had no idea what was happening, but I was very entertained.
2. George Clooney. George Clooney does not make bad movies. Well, except Monuments Men. And The Men Who Stare at Goats. And Leatherheads, that movie looked pretty bad. And Ocean’s Twelve! Oh, and he was totally in Batman & Robin too. Okay, George Clooney, occasionally makes bad movies. But, he’s also made a LOT of good movies.

Things this movie had going against it:

1. Did you watch that trailer? I have no fucking clue what this movie is about. Sure, sure. I can tell you that a little girl finds a pin that transports her to Tomorrowland but only for a brief amount of time, and then she finds George Clooney and that he is some kind of scientisty guy who helps her fight robots and then transports her to Tomorrowland in a bathtub… but that’s like the first 20 minutes of movie! Oh and jetpacks. There’s jetpacks. But that’s it! Look, I like not having the plot spoiled before I walk into a movie. Buuuuuut, it alarm bells start going off when a trailer doesn’t give at least SOME of the plot away.
2. This movie was not very good. It only managed 49% on Rotten Tomatoes. Willie Waffle only gave it 1.5 waffles out of 4, saying it “turned out to be the dumbed down version of everything I hoped it might be.” You can really feel the disappointment.

In the end Tomorrowland won the weekend, but only managed to pull in $40 million. That was only enough to make it the 22nd biggest Memorial Day opener of all time.

The other newcomer this weekend was Poltergeist, which belongs to Tanya, because of course it does:

I’m gonna keep it short because this movie looked terrible from the trailer; ended up being terrible, with an RT score of 32%; and performed terribly in the box office, opening in 4th place and only bringing in $27 million for the long weekend.

Rounding up the rest of the weekend:

Pitch Perfect 2 continued it’s great run, coming in second this weekend, pulling in $37 million. Apparently a lot of people love to sing and dance. Well, no. A lot of people love to watch other people sing and dance. And many of those people probably weren’t actually singing and/or dancing themselves, but pretending to do so, while other people sang and danced for them. Whatever. This movie is pretty huge. It’s already pulled in $130 million, thanks in part to a gigantic weekend last weekend.

Pitch Perfect 2 won last weekend, pulling in $70 million. That total was spread across 3400 theaters for an average of $20k per theater. It became the highest opening for a musical beating out High School Musical 3 ($42 million). This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. Did you know that song where Anna Kendrick sings and plays with cups (called Cups) video has 200 MILLION views on YouTube? Yeah. Makes a bit more sense now.

Director Elizabeth Banks had the highest weekend ever for a first time director and also scored the second highest opening weekend for a female director, losing to Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey ($85 million). She should probably stick to this directing thing and see where it can take her. (I’m just kidding, she’s in The Hunger Games, she’ll be fine) A lot of the success of this movie was the fact that it had a cast of predominately women, which resulted in an audience that was 75% female. Women, apparently a thing.

Speaking of women, coming in third place this weekend was the surprisingly(?) feminist* Mad Max Fury Road. The movie maxed out (heh) at $38 million, but that was only down 47% from last weekend’s $44 million. It seems like this is going to be this summer’s Edge of Tomorrow. A movie that didn’t do too well in the summer box office besides being loved by critics. People panned Edge of Tomorrow for having a bad name. So much so, that it was renamed Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow, which is stupid. Look, Edge of Tomorrow isn’t any better or worse of a title than like 83% of the movies out there. The only title better and more fitting than Edge of Tomorrow is “Space Groundhog Day”. Also, that movie is one of the best plane movies I’ve ever seen. The plot made zero sense, but I was 100% invested the entire time. The Tom Cruise-Emily Blunt stuff was a little weird because he’s, you know, 20 years older than she is, but thankfully they don’t try to make too much of a thing out of it.

*We don’t need to get into the “argument” of this movie being feminist and it being a “Vagina Monologues wolf in a bang-bang-explosion-action movie sheep’s clothing”. Look if you’re arguing for Men’s rights you are an idiot, are obviously very, very selfish, probably caring around a lot of unnecessary anger. So you can eat a dick. 

Rounding out the top 5 this weekend was Avengers Part Deux. The super sequel, or supequel… nope, that didn’t work… The super sequel pulled in $28 million last weekend and $38 million the week before that. The movie has also pulled in over $200 million in China, which has pushed it to more than $1.2 baby B worldwide. Through Memorial Day Avengers: Age of Ultron has made $411 million. The only good news is, that this marks 4 weeks and Avengers has been retired for Danielle’s team. So we’re now all only $400 million behind.

Quick Hits:

• Hot Pursuit continues to go from suck to blow. It made $3 million this weekend and has yet to reach $30 million in 3 weeks.
• Far From the Madding Crowd has been bumped up to 800 theaters and pulled in $2 million this weekend. This movie’s now made $5 million.
• I’ll See You in My Dreams has expanded into 23 more theaters, bringing it’s total to 26! It made only $291k this weekend, but that’s still a fine $11k per theater.
• Still no word on Hunting Elephants.
• Oh, Slow West opened last weekend:

This looks pretty awesome. I mean, even if there was no plot and the movie was just Fassbender walking around in long underwear and shooting people with a revolver, I’d be in. But the actual “plot stuff” looks good too. And I like the creepy guy from Bloodline, though he got what he deserved messing with Coach Taylor. And the aesthetics are great.

Well, guess what. For as good as this movie looks, and believe me it looks good, it turned out to actually be good, getting a score of 87% fresh. Too bad the movie only played in 50 theaters and made $67k.

Standings

1. Danielle – $411 million
2. Liz – $161 million
3. Danny – $101 million
4. Andy – $48 million
5. Tanya – $29 million
6. Rhys – $669k
7. Jenny – $0
8. Sean – $0

Okay, take a breather. We’re about to jump in on what’s coming out this weekend. Here:

Coming Attractions

San Andres (Danny)

Sure, I could spend my time talking about the greatness of The Rock. I could tell you about when I was a huge wrestling fan in high school. About when I did a book report on The Rock’s autobiography (as told by Joe Laydon) for my 11th grade American Literature class and got away with it because The Rock was an American who happened to write a book. Or about when I went to Smackdown at the Providence Civic Center and almost got beat up by a bunch of people who thought we actually were the heels we dressed up as. (Pro tip: this is probably not a good idea to do on your own, but is definitely a bad idea to do with 10 other people) Or when I gave my friend permanent knee damage when I gave him a Pedigree during a ski trip. No. I could do that, but that’s not what I’m going to do. Instead, we’re going to talk about the pure absurdity of this movie. If you didn’t want to read that article because you’ve been reading for the last 35 minutes, here’s the gist:

• “The earth will literally crack open?” Nope! That 9.1 magnitude earthquake that rattles L.A., followed by that 9.5 that rocks San Francisco? Almost impossible because the San Andreas fault isn’t deep enough. That said, the earthquake in 1906 that basically leveled San Francisco (mostly due to fire, but still, more than half the city was destroyed) was a 7.8 on the richter scale. And the article goes on to say “Researchers calculated a magnitude-7.8 would cause 1,800 deaths and 50,000 injuries.” Oh Hollywood, it’s never good enough, is it? Always gotta make it THE BIGGEST. THE WORST OF ALL TIME. Can’t it ever be like, “This is realistic and could actually happen, and if it did you’d totally die”? Now that’s scary.
• “They will feel it on the East Coast?” Nope! There is no size of earthquake that would generate seismic waves large enough that humans would actually be aware of the shaking 5000 miles away. I mean they could technically be right. The waves will eventually reach the east coast, but they’ll be too small to feel. You’re actually unaware of any earthquake under around a 3 or 4 on the richter scale. There could be an earthquake happening right now! RUN!
• Scientist predicting the biggest earthquake on record? Nope! There is no real way to predict an earthquake. “Every warning sign scrutinized — animal behavior, weather patterns, electromagnetic signals, atmospheric observations, levels of radon gas in soil or groundwater — has failed.” Scientists are hopefully because the latest technology gives you a heads up a few seconds before the massive shaking starts. We’re all fucked.
• An Earthquake creating a Tsunami so big that it’s twice the height of the Golden Gate bridge? Nope! And nope! The San Andreas fault is a strike-slip fault which moves side to side. Tsunamis are caused when one tectonic plate moves down and displaces a large amount of water. The San Andreas fault ain’t displacin’ no water. Also, tsunamis don’t get bigger than 100 feet and the Golden Gate bridge is more than twice that height in the center. The Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 (the one that Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts managed to escape while all those colored peopled died, Thank God!) was only 30 feet high (only?!) and killed 150,000 people. Again, real life is scary enough! Also, there’s no way you’re driving a fucking boat up a 100 foot wave like that. No. Way. Too. Dumb.

Sorry if I nerded out there and ruined your ability to just suspend belief and enjoy this movie. Here, I’ll make it up to you:

I don’t want to see this movie. I love The Rock, but I don’t need to see a movie where everyone dies. Even if The Rock and his family make it, which they will (Spoiler!), everyone dies in this movie. If this shit happened for real, like, 4 million people would die. That’s insane. I don’t need to see that, thanks. I do hope a lot of other people see this movie so The Rock keeps making movies. That man is too talented to let it go to waste.

It turns out the movie isn’t very good, earning a 51% on Rotten Tomatoes. But I don’t think that’s surprising anyone, they drive a boat STRAIGHT UP a gigantic fucking wall of water! If you’re going to see this movie, you’re going regardless if it’s good or not. It’s like people who went to go see Hercules. It didn’t matter if the movie was terrible (and it was, just stop. It was.), you went to see it because you knew what you were getting. People are not going to see this because it’s good, they’re going to see The Rock drop the People’s Elbow on an earthquake.

Aloha (Liz)

Be honest. How many times have you seen this movie advertised? I haven’t seen a commercial or billboard or anything about this movie. I’ve only seen this trailer twice. Once, just now, and once after the draft when I was trying to decide whether I should make fun of Liz for taking it or not.

If you thought this movie looked GAWDDAWFUL, congratulations! It sucks. This movie only managed a 14% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Unfortunately, the movie is such a mess, that none of the reviews are terribly fun to look at. Well except for this ominous looking motherfucker:

I will do anything that guy tells me to do. Don’t go to the movie? YESSIR. That dude will definitely kill you if you don’t listen to his reviews.

Prediction:

1. San Andreas – $40 million… AND MILLIONS!!!
2. Mad Max: Fury Road – $25 million
3. Pitch Perfect 2 – $23 million
4. Aloha – $18 million
5. Tomorrowland – $13 million

Ugh, I’m tired. I’m sure you are too. I’m done. I can’t even proof this thing.

Have a good weekend!