Timur Berkmambetov’s $100 million remake of Ben-Hur chariots into theaters next weekend and it represents a massive and expensive risk from Paramount Pictures. The Biblical epic has actually been produced numerous times, though most famously in 1959 in the Oscar-winning Charlton Heston extravaganza.
This time around, Jack Huston is the title character with Morgan Freeman, Toby Kebbell, Nazanin Bonialdi, and Rodrigo Santoro (as Jesus) among the supporting cast. The director is best known for 2008’s hit Wanted and 2012’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
Early reports have signaled a bumpy road ahead for this with projections in the mid-teens. For starters, people who are in their mid-teens and even older aren’t overly familiar with the source material. More mature audiences who hold the 1959 pic in high regard may not be clamoring for an action fueled remake. It begs the question: who will turn out for this?
Paramount is likely hoping Christian moviegoers will show up. That could be its best hope at hitting $20 million or over. Yet I’m skeptical. The stories indicating a weak teens opening will probably turn out to be accurate in my judgment and that means a costly flop for the studio. The similarly themed Gods of Egypt bombed with just $14.1 million earlier this year. I’ll say manages to slightly outdo that, but not by much.
Three summers ago, the magic caper Now You See Me came out of nowhere with a $29 million opening and eventual $117M domestic gross. This was probably never looked at by Summit Entertainment as a potential franchise, but those numbers mean sequel and Now You See Me 2 is out next weekend. Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Alfred (Michael Caine), and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) are all back, as are Woody Harrelson and Dave Franco. Lizzy Caplan and Harry Potter himself (Daniel Radcliffe) join the party. Jon M. Chu, whose varied credits include Justin Bieber: Never Say Never and G.I. Joe: Retaliation, takes over directorial duties from Louis Leterrier.
Unlike 2013, NYSM2 comes with expectations and also with stiff competition. Another sequel to a summer 2013 hit, The Conjuring 2, should have the leg up for opening weekend earnings and there’s also the high-profile Warcraft competing for eyeballs.
While I have the Conjuring follow-up slightly outdoing its predecessor out of the gate, I’ll predict this sequel comes in a bit under what the original accomplished for what will still be a pretty decent debut.
Now You See Me 2 opening weekend prediction: $24.1 million
In 2013, there was a showdown of terrorism at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave pics between Olympus Has Fallen and Roland Emmerich’s White House Down. It is the latter that was expected to win the contest, but it didn’t turn out that way. Olympus debuted to $30.3 million on its way to a $98M domestic haul in the spring while its competitor opened at $24.8 million with a disappointing $73M overall gross.
While we won’t see Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx in White House Down Again, we do have London Has Fallen out next weekend. The sequel returns Gerard Butler’s Secret Service agent, Aaron Eckhart’s POTUS, Melissa Leo’s Secretary of Defense and the soothing sounds of Morgan Freeman as the Speaker of the House alongside new cast members Angela Bassett and Jackie Earle Haley.
Olympus was well liked by critics and audiences, though I’m not totally confident that a follow-up is being clamored for. I have doubts that it will match the $30M achieved by its predecessor and it probably won’t reach its reported $105 million budget domestically. I’ll say a premiere in the lower to mid 20s is the safest bet.
London Has Fallen opening weekend prediction: $24.6 million
It’s been a little while, but this evening on the blog – we continue with my ongoing series of Oscar History posts and we’ve arrived at 2009. That year’s Academy Awards are notable for a couple of reasons. First, this was the year where the decision was made to expand the list of Best Picture nominees from five to ten. It’s likely not an accident that this occurred just one year after 2008’s commercial and critical smash The Dark Knight failed to make the five pic cut. This was the Academy’s way of including more commercially successful ventures. After all, there’s a direct correlation between hit pictures being nominated and the ratings of the telecast itself. Secondly, the real battle of nominated entries came down between the efforts of a couple that was married and divorced – James Cameron for his smash hit Avatar (which demolished all box office records) and ex wife Kathryn Bigelow for her war drama The Hurt Locker.
It would be Bigelow who would come out on top as The Hurt Locker would take Best Picture over her ex-husband’s blockbuster. The other eight nominated features: The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, Up, and Up in the Air. The success of Hurt Locker would relegate Avatar to winning only the tech categories.
Up would mark the first animated flick nomination (and first and only Pixar one) since 1991’s Beauty and the Beast and it hasn’t happened since. Basterds would mark Quentin Tarantino’s second pic nod after Pulp Fiction fifteen years prior.
As for movies that might have made my personal cut, I advocate for Steven Soderbergh’s underrated and hilarious The Informant! And if the Academy wanted to include high profile pictures, why not consider the acclaimed Star Trek reboot or comedy smash of the year The Hangover? I’m also a big fan of Zack Snyder’s graphic novel adaptation of Watchmen.
Bigelow would go onto make history by becoming the first female Best Director winner in Oscar history over Cameron, Lee Daniels (Precious), Jason Reitman (Up in the Air), and Tarantino. I may have found room for Neill Blomkamp’s impressive work in District 9.
Beloved actor Jeff Bridges would score his first Best Actor win for Crazy Heart, beating out George Clooney (Up in the Air), Colin Firth (A Single Man), Morgan Freeman (Invictus), and Jeremy Renner (Hurt Locker). Firth would go onto win the prize the following year for The King’s Speech. Once again, my Informant! love would have meant an inclusion for Matt Damon’s terrific work in it.
Sandra Bullock would receive her first ever nomination and a win for her hit football drama The Blind Side. Other nominees: Helen Mirren (The Last Station), Carey Mulligan (An Education), Gabourey Sidibe (Precious), and Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia). Two names I would’ve considered: Alison Lohman’s great scared crapless work in Sam Raimi’s horror tale Drag Me to Hell and Zooey Deschanel in the rom com (500) Days of Summer.
Quentin Tarantino’s knack of finding the perfect actor in the perfect role landed an at the time unknown Christoph Waltz a win in Supporting Actor for Inglourious Basterds. Other nominees were Matt Damon for Invictus, Woody Harrelson for The Messenger, Christopher Plummer in The Last Station, and Stanley Tucci for The Lovely Bones. As I’ve mentioned in these posts before, the Academy usually ignores comedies and this race would have given them an excellent opportunity to nominate Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover. Also, I may have included Jackie Earle Haley for his work in Watchmen.
Mo’Nique would win Supporting Actress in Precious over previous year’s winner Penelope Cruz (Nine), Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick (both nominated for Up in the Air), and Maggie Gyllenhaal (Crazy Heart). I would have given consideration to either Melanie Laurent or Diane Kruger for their roles in Basterds.
And that’s 2009 for you, my friends! I’ll get to 2010 at same point in the future…
Like many comedy sequels before it, Ted 2 often has a troubling time justifying its own existence. Seth MacFarlane’s follow-up to his wildly successful 2012 hit finds the director a bit more unshackled with choreographed musical numbers and more abundant political humor. This doesn’t achieve the effect of making this more funny. To go down a cliched road, Ted 2 is bearable but struggles a bit to come to life.
When we open, Ted is tying the knot with girlfriend Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth) and things are going smoothly in the talking bear’s world. Not so much for Johnny (Mark Wahlberg), who’s down on his luck after divorcing Lori (Mila Kunis, who doesn’t appear). Within a year, Ted and Tami-Lynn are fighting and they figure a solution to their problems may be a baby. Since Ted is anatomically challenged in that area, adoption comes into play and after Tom Brady humorously rejects the notion of being a sperm donor, it’s left to Ted’s longtime friend. It all leads down a dangerous road where Ted is eventually deemed not to be a person by the state and this is where our main characters enlist new lawyer and pothead Sam (Amanda Seyfried) to help.
Ted 2 clumsily draws comparisons of Ted’s plight to that of gays and African Americans. We expect nothing less from MacFarlane than seriously un-PC comedy, yet these jokes fall flat more frequently than they hit. In fact, nearly everything here just simply cannot match the freshness of the original. Returning characters like the Ted obsessed Donny (Giovanni Ribisi) and Sam Jones (Flash Gordon if you recall) aren’t granted moments as uproarious as we’ve seen before. Whereas the relationship of Johnny and Lori was a strength in Ted, the forced romance between Johnny and Sam adds little.
Even with all those negatives, like a middling Family Guy episode, there are genuine laughs to be had. Many are throwaway lines and sight gags and MacFarlane and his cowriters Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild are too talented not to have some of the material succeed. Certain celeb cameos work more than others – Liam Neeson’s is a trip. There’s also smile inducing references to 80s genre classics of the past including The Breakfast Club and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. And Morgan Freeman (as a top civil rights lawyer) is put to decent use mainly due to his voice, as Ted aptly points out when they meet.
As I began though, the sequels that populate film comedy usually can’t match what made its predecessor special. That holds true here and its occasionally preachy overtones don’t help. Ted 2 made this big admirer of the original sometimes happy, but not enough to warrant its second life on the screen.
One year following the critical and commercial disappointment of A Million Ways to Die in the West, Seth MacFarlane should find himself back in the good graces of audiences with Ted 2, out Friday. The sequel to the 2012 mega hit brings back Mark Wahlberg and most importantly, that foul mouthed talking teddy bear. Mila Kunis is out and Amanda Seyfried is in with Morgan Freeman and Liam Neeson among other new cast members.
Three summers ago, Ted debuted to a terrific $54.4 million on its way to a $218 million domestic take. The real question is whether or not part two exceeds the gross of the original out of the gate. This is certainly possible and it has the potential to reach $6o million or more next weekend. Yet I’m somewhat skeptical. There is a chance that the Ted novelty may have waned slightly and that may cause a debut slightly under its predecessor’s hot start. Critics were kind to the first and we’ve yet to see if that continues here. Its numbers might improve if word of mouth approaches that of the 2012 blockbuster, but that seems unlikely.
I’ll predict Ted 2 falls just shy of the $54 million achieved when Ted became the sleeper hit of summer 2012.
Redfoo comes away the best in Last Vegas. Who’s Redfoo you ask? He’s one half of the hip hop party group LMFAO and he has a scene as a DJ for a bikini contest in the film. Redfoo will, for the rest of his life, be able to say he shared a scene with Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline. That bikini judging sequence is one of many obvious and comedically flat sequences in the picture. Yet for Redfoo, I suppose it’s pretty cool for him. The same cannot be said for the rest of the performers listed.
The film has been referred to as The Hangover for old guys and that’s a fairly accurate description. Douglas is a lifelong single man who finally decides to tie the knot with a woman less than half his age. His friends of 60 years are enlisted for a Vegas bachelor party. They are De Niro, who is a recent widower and whose late wife was involved in a love triangle long ago with Douglas’s character. There’s Freeman, whose family coddles him after he suffered a mild stroke. There’s Kline, whose sole character trait is that his wife gives him a weekend pass to sow his oats.
Once in Sin City, we experience every tired cliche one would expect to find in this type of material. The geezers are given the awesome suite due to Freeman’s gambling abilities. There’s amazement on their part about the price tags of bottle services in the club. Mary Steenburgen becomes the object of Douglas and De Niro’s affection as a lounge singer who they both manage to fall for in about 30 seconds. There isn’t a moment in Last Vegas that feels original or inspired. I didn’t expect this to reach much past the level of tolerable mediocrity, but it doesn’t even reach that unimpressive category.
50 Cent has a cameo as himself. He was supposed to stay in the Big Daddy suite and gets bumped for our grumpy old bachelor party. Even 50 gets the short shrift though as he doesn’t get to share air time with these legendary actors who are seriously slumming it. That honor, once again, belongs to Redfoo. He gets a good story out of Last Vegas’s existence. The audience? Not so much.
Your capacity to enjoy Lucy may deal with your willingness on what to do with your brain capacity while viewing it. It’s a ludicrous concoction of science fiction and action that nonetheless provides yet another showcase for Scarlett Johannson’s talents. And another for Luc Besson, known more lately for his involvement in the Taken franchise than his earlier work. That previous work included 1997’s The Fifth Element which I count among my favorite guilty pleasure flicks of the last two decades. Thankfully Lucy contains a similar spirit. It isn’t every picture that manages to weave familiar shoot em ups with Asian gangsters and a scene with a dinosaur. If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, leave this alone. If you appreciated that bizarre giant blue alien creature singing opera mixed with techno in the aforementioned Fifth Element, Lucy has that kinda vibe from time to time.
The title character is played with gusto by Johannson. When we first are introduced to her, she’s a college student in Taiwan who’s tricked into making a drug delivery to a dastardly man known as Mr. Jang (Choi Min-Sik). Turns out it’s not your regular narcotics drop when she’s knocked out and a mysterious substance makes its way into her stomach. The synthetic drug know as CPH4 soon gives her capabilities not thought humanly possible and she begins accessing portions of her brain in a…. shall we say limitless fashion? 10%. 50%. 99%. We know because flash cards show us where we are at in Lucy’s cerebral uptick clock while the bad guys try to chase her down.
Oh… And there’s Morgan Freeman as a professor who kinda knows about this stuff. Clearly he’s cast because what student wouldn’t wanna listen to him drone on about scientific gobbledygook all day? My theory is Lucy could have picked lots of people to partner with, but her extreme intelligence led her to the best voice.
Interestingly, Besson’s take is that the more smart you become – the less empathetic you are. When her brain function is just beginning to increase, she cares enough to make what she believes to be her last call to her parents and provide medical assistance to her unhealthy roommate. Soon though, her actions lead to massive car pileups and rows of innocent dead people that she couldn’t seem to give a flip about. I suppose if it weren’t that way, we wouldn’t get the violent scenes we need every few minutes.
Lucy clips along at a quick runtime of an hour and a half. Nothing about the gunplay (which has an occasional Matrix-y vibe) brings much new to the table. What causes this to be worthwhile in my eyes is the vibrant central performance and Besson’s devil may care, throw in the kitchen sink and dinosaur sighting attitude that I missed. He knows this premise is as silly as The Fifth Element before it. Somehow he’s able to make it fun.
The central theme of The LEGO Movie is ultimately about allowing one’s creative impulses to be set free and not conforming to the set ways of the world. That statement could apply to the directors and writers of this picture, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. A movie based on the timeless LEGO toys might have made its studio a lot of money regardless of its quality. Yet Lord and Miller allow their creativity to run wild and what results is a highly entertaining experience that no doubt will serve as the building block (so to speak) of a new franchise.
We begin in the community of Bricksburg, where regular old construction worker Emmet (Chris Pratt) is perfectly happy with the micro-managed society that’s run with an iron fist (or acrylonitrile butadiene styrene fist, to be technically accurate) by President Business (Will Ferrell). The truth is that the dastardly President has plans to end the LEGO Universe and that Emmet may or may not be The Special or Master Builder (think Chosen One) who must save the world. Emmet’s journey partners him with Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a hipster who would be the traditional love interest if she weren’t dating Batman… yes, Batman (voiced marvelously by Will Arnett). There’s also a wise old wizard who is naturally voiced by Morgan Freeman and a humorous “good cop/bad cop” character figure voiced by Liam Neeson. The team of resistors to President Business’s schemes journey through visually splendid other worlds such as The Old West and Middle Zealand and even come across friends from a galaxy far far away. This is in addition to a little help from the 2002 NBA All Stars, which includes Shaquille O’Neal.
In case you’re already picking it up, The LEGO Movie is jam packed with pop culture references. There’s a lot here to keep adults smiling as much as the kids. Miller and Lord also get in their digs at corporate culture – many are quite clever, some are a bit well-worn. The voice over work is filled with smart choices and Chris Pratt now has two 2014 film heroes that youngsters will idolize.
There’s a “twist” later in the proceedings that truly did surprise me and it creates a level of emotion that I didn’t expect. It isn’t quite Pixar when it reaches its heart tugging heights (think another animated franchise about toys or Up), but it works very well. Emmet’s main problem for awhile is not believing he has the capability to be exceptional in a world that prides itself in conformity. President Business and others don’t want to allow for the innovations of others. The LEGO Movie shows its audience how important it is to strive to be unique and also be part of a team and that’s a good message for all of us. And kudos to Warner Bros. for allowing its filmmakers the chance to take what could have been an assembly line cash cow and make it something… well, pretty special.
Three years after its predecessor was a sleeper hit, Dolphin Tale 2 swims into theaters this Friday and will attempt a #1 opening. It’s got a very good shot. Actor turned director Charles Martin Smith is behind the camera once again and stars of Dolphin Tale Harry Connick Jr., Ashley Judd, Kris Kristofferson, and Morgan Freeman all return.
In September of 2011, the original debuted to $19.1 million on its way to a $72 million domestic gross. Those earnings were enough for Warner Bros. to green light a sequel. The big question is whether or not Dolphin Tale 2 grosses more than its predecessor and on that one, I’m skeptical. I simply don’t believe the first is beloved enough for audiences to flock to it. That being said, Dolphin Tale 2 should earn enough to get it to the #1 spot in a currently weak marketplace.
Dolphin Tale 2 opening weekend prediction: $16.4 million
All My Life... I Wanted To Be A Blogster 