The summer weather is officially here and my butt is fully prepared to sweat through my pants for 4 straight months. Are you ready for the hottest summer on record? Well get ready, because here’s the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s prediction for this summer:
The fact that it looks like an asshole is not a coincidence. Congrats, we’re fucked!
I was going to do a preview post, but it ended up basically being just a list of movies because I wanted to save the few decent jokes I had for the Coming Attractions post about those specific movies, so I ended up keeping those joke bullets in my joke gun. Or joke gun in its joke holster? Whatever. But I do have a few predictions…
Top 5 Grossing Movies
- Captain America: Civil War
- Finding Dory
- Independence Day Resurgence
- Suicide Squad
- X-Men: Apocalypse
With no nostalgia dinosaurs to dominate the summer, Marvel superheroes are back to take all the money. There just doesn’t look like any other heavy hitters that could knock Captain America: Civil War out of the top spot, except maybe Finding Dory. Finding Nemo is probably one of the most beloved Pixar movies of all time, so a sequel is bound to make a ton of money. It was also the top grossing Pixar movie of all time, until Toy Story 3 came out in 2010, a movie that also happens to be a sequel to another beloved Pixar movie. The dark horse for this summer is Independence Day Resurgence. There apparently is a formula which takes a movie from 20 years ago and reboots it with current handsome, megastar and sprinkles in some “remember this?” and makes a gajillion dollars. It doesn’t even matter if the movie is good! I don’t think Suicide Squad looks particularly great, but people seem excited for it, so I think it’s going to do well. And X-Men could be terrible (more on that in a second!) and still make $100 million in its opening weekend.
Top 5 Floposauruses
- Warcraft
- Ben Hur
- Star Trek Beyond
- Bad Moms
- Now You See Me 2
Warcraft could not look dumber, and with the amount of CGI they put in that thing and the amount of marketing their doing, they must’ve spent hundreds of millions on this piece of poop. It’s going to be a glorious disaster. I actually had Star Trek Beyond 2nd on this list but I’m just so offended by the idea of remaking Ben Hur, that I moved that one up. There is no world in which a Ben Hur remake is good. Especially one directed by the acclaimed director of such amazing cinematic masterpieces like Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Fuck this movie and fuck all the people at MGM/Paramount who thought this was a good idea. What did they think they could turn this into the Ben Hur expanded cinematic universe? I hope this loses ALL the money.
One more observation: This year has quite a few R-Rated comedies with very transparent titles. Take Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, which is basically the same exact plot as the first movie, but instead Chloe Grace Moretz and her sorority become the neighbors. Or Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates which stars Zac Efron and Adam DeVine as Mike and Dave who bring Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza to a wedding, as their dates. Then there’s Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, starring Andy Samberg, as a popstar. There’s also Bad Moms, which features Mila Kunis and Kristen Bell as moms, who decide to be bad and Christina Applegate, who isn’t a bad mom. Sausage Party is an animated movie that stars the voices of Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Kristen Wiig, James Franco and others, as sausages. And finally there’s War Dogs, starring Jonah Hill and Miles Teller as gun runners in a time of war. It feels like Central Intelligence starring The Rock and Kevin Hart should belong on this list, but that movie’s only PG-13. These movies don’t look so bad, in fact many of them look really funny. It’s just their titles are very unoriginal.
Let’s get to this Week 1’s coming attractions.
(Note: I’ll be adding the FML pricing next to each movie, for reference)
X-Men: Apocalypse ($735)
This movie looks like the hottest of messes. Somehow the previous movie which contained two Professor X’s and two Magneto’s and TIME TRAVEL looks less confusing and bloated than this one.
Having Oscar Isaac play Apocalypse is setting off all my “Let’s have Tom Hardy play Bane, but cover-up his entire face and have him speak into an air conditioner” alarm bells.
If Mystique can alter the way she looks however she wants, then why does she have a bad dye-job? You’re telling me she CHOSE to have her roots showing? Nah bro.
According to reviews this movie is a “bumper-car disaster” (Hollywood Reporter) and a “kitchen-sink mess with a half dozen too many characters” (Entertainment Weekly) where director Bryan Singer had “so many possible directions…[and] chooses the least interesting one” (Slant) which makes it a “joyless technical exercise” (Movie Nation) with a “script [that] is just nonsense, comprised entirely of sarcastic asides, [and] portentous gobbledygook.” (Time Out New York) The rest of the reviews are, at best, mixed. Rotten Tomatoes has this scored at 48%. That makes it the second worst X-Men movie ever, only better than X-Men Origins: Wolverine (38%), a movie that starred Will I Am, made Tim Riggins look like this, and took that wise-cracking Deadpool guy you’ve heard so much about recently and sewed his mouth shut. And gave him sword arms. And lasers coming out of his eyes. So yeah, that movie was really dumb.
The price is high at $735 of your designated 1000 FML Bux (their word, not mine) and the reviews are bad to mixed, but X-Men: Days of Future Past made $110 million on Memorial Day weekend two years ago so it might be worth the high price tag.
Alice Through the Looking Glass ($501)
Ooooo featuring a White Rabbit cover by Pink! A Trent Reznor cover of Immigrant Song it is not.
I could not have less interest in seeing this movie. Why did they make this movie? It’s been SIX YEARS since Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Are you like me, wondering why they are going back to this well? Well, (heh) Alice in Wonderland made over $116 million it’s opening weekend back in 2010. That’s the 25th highest grossing weekend ever, and at the time, it was the 6th! It went on to make $334 million which is more than Guardians of the Galaxy, Shrek the Third, Transformers and Iron Man.
Oh man is this movie bad, though. Rotten Tomatoes scores it at 30%, where the consensus seems to be: Looks amazing. The story? Not so much.
To me, $501 seems like a lot for a movie that has the potential to lose to both X-Men and Angry Birds.
Shade of the Week
Also playing this weekend
- The Angry Birds Movie ($606)
- Captain America: Civil War ($154)
- Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising ($100)
- The Jungle Book ($59)
- The Nice Guys ($51)
- Money Monster ($33)
- The Darkness ($11)
- Zootopia ($10)
- Love & Friendship ($9)
- The Huntsman: Winter’s War ($6)
- A Bigger Splash ($6)
- Mother’s Day ($5)
- Barbershop: The Next Cut ($5)
Last Week’s Perfect Cineplex
The Angry Birds Movie* x2 / The Darkness x4 / The Huntsman: Winter’s War x1 / The Boss x1 = $98,244,000
*Best Performer of the Weekend = 2MM bonus
Remember your goal is to select a “cineplex” (I really want to say “team” here, and will probably just start doing that in like 3 weeks) consisting of 8 movies. Each movie has a set price, and you have $1000 to try and create the cineplex that makes the most money over the weekend. You can select movies multiple times. There is a 2MM bonus if you select the movie that has the best Gross to Price ratio (which you are eligible for if you select that movie multiple times). There’s also a 2MM penalty for every spot you leave open, so utilize those $5 movies.
Be sure to set your cineplexes, their locked at noon on Friday. Sumofale!
The Summer Movie Fantasy League 