How much Star Wars is too much Star Wars?

Disney announced two days ago that their new plans, having previously purchased Lucasfilm for $4 billion, aren't just to make a new trilogy of Star Wars episodes, nor even to make a few spin-off films set in the same universe.  No, they are planning to make one Star Wars movie every single year, with off-shoot films alternating with official new 'episodes'.  How much Star Wars is too much Star Wars? The idea of a new trilogy of Star Wars films, set to debut ten years after the finale of the prequel trilogy, is perhaps also exciting, even as J.J. Abrams replacing George Lucas as the proverbial leader of this specific universe calls for cautious optimism (Is Star Wars without any real input from George Lucas really Star Wars?  Discuss...).  But how long will the casual fans remain excited about the prospect of new Star Wars films when they appear as frequently as Thanksgiving dinner for years and years on end?

Real Tragedy vs. Reel Tragedy: A History of Films Released in the Shadow of Non-Fiction Horror

For much of the last six months, many hardcore Star Trek fans have been somewhat annoyed that the upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness has been marketed as a somewhat generic grim-n-gritty 'dark sequel' focused not on space exploration but on Kirk and his crew pursuing a seemingly unstoppable super villain (Benedict Cumberbatch).  I've jokingly referred to the marketing as Skyfall Into The Dark Knight, but the irony is that Paramount may now be regretting their 'sell this to generic action fans' approach.  If, and this is a big "if", the perpetrator behind Monday's Boston Marathon attack turns out to be a domestic terrorist with a grudge against allegedly tyrannical government forces, how will Paramount handle their prime summer tent pole, which has been centered around a domestic terrorist with an apparent grudge against Starfleet blowing up populated areas?  This is sadly not the first time we've had this kind of discussion.  But it's worth noting that it's having to happen with increasing frequency.

Summer Movie Marketing Challenge: Tease, Don't Spoil!

Can Fox And Dreamworks Combined Challenge Disney's Animation Empire?

 

During the summer of 2013, there will be six animated (or live-action/animated hybrid) entries.  At a glance, it would seem like healthy competition as each of the major current players are offering an official entry into the summer box office sweepstakes.  You've got 20th Century Fox taking a shot at proving they can do more than Ice Age sequels, delivering the somewhat on-the-nose-titled Epic over Memorial Day weekend.  Pixar unleashes their official summer entry, the Monsters Inc. prequel Monsters University on June 21st.  Universal delivers its trump card with Despicable Me 2 over July 4th weekend while Dreamworks releases its snail-racing comedy Turbo on July 17th, a frankly unusual release date for them, but no matter.  Sony delivers The Smurfs 2 on July 31st while Disney offers up the previously straight-to-DVD entry Planes on August 9th.

Press Release: Finding Dory swimming into theaters 11/25/15.

STILL SWIMMING!

Disney•Pixar’s “Finding Dory” to Dive into Theaters

November 25, 2015

Ellen DeGeneres, the Voice of the Beloved Blue Tang Fish in 2003’s “Finding Nemo,” Shares Plans for the All-New Big-Screen Adventure

Movies I love more than anyone else: Meet the Robinsons.

 This is the next entry of a reoccurring feature of sorts, spotlighting the movies that aren't just my favorites, but films that I probably hold in higher esteem than anyone else out there in the critical community.  Next up is a film that celebrates its sixth-anniversary this Saturday.  But I saw it six years ago today at a press screening.  No, I'm not talking about Blades of Glory, but the inexplicably wonderful Meet the Robinsons. I walked into said press screening for this one knowing almost nothing about it, save for a few pieces of promotional art and something about musical 'wiseguy' frogs.  I distinctly remember walking out of the press screening, my eyes more than a little watery, and immediately calling my wife to inform her that I had just wasted a Wednesday afternoon. I had just seen something truly special and she was going to have to accompany me for a repeat viewing as soon as possible.

Disney unleashes the terrific opening credit sequence from Oz: The Great And Powerful. Watch it now (or whenever)!

The best thing I can say about the 3D work in Oz: The Great and Powerful is that I could tell, even in my 2D screening, that it probably looked spectacular in 3D.  Anyway, Disney has released the terrific opening credit sequence for our viewing pleasure.  Obviously it's spoiler-free.  Yes, I'm basically killing time until I get the chance to finish my Olympus Has Fallen review, but so be it.

Scott Mendelson

Iron Man 3 gets a photoshop poster spectacular!

I was holding off on posting those lovely character posters for Iron Man 3 because I wanted to put them all in one post, with the presumption that Rebecca Hall would get her own poster as well.  Alas, Hall is a no-go both for her own poster as well as even getting billing on the main IMAX poster.  That is a bit odd as her character in "Extremis" is basically a co-lead while Guy Pearce's scientist um... it's a small part in the original comic book arc.  I'll let others discuss the usual gender boilerplate here (expanding the guy's role while seemingly minimizing the female character's role, keeping the women on the poster to no more than one, etc.), and merely point out that this is basically a giant mash-up of several prior character posters smushed into one image, which may remind fans of the Batman Forever poster campaign from 1995 (with the five character posters copied and pasted into the theatrical one-sheet).  At least no one is unleashing exploding farts like the last time around...  Anyway, since they are apparently done for now, I'm including the rest of the solid Iron Man 3 posters after the jump, including the general theatrical one-sheet.  Iron Man 3 opens overseas on April 25th and April 26th but not until May 3rd in America.  As always, we'll see.

Scott Mendelson

Speculation: Disney's "Avengers" endgame for the current round of live-action Fairy Tale Theatre?

What do you get when combine the Wizard of Oz, Alice from Wonderland, the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella?  Disney has announced plans to produce a "darker" live-action reboot of Beauty and the Beast, currently titled "The Beast".  Now putting aside the alleged Guillermo del Toro Beauty and the Beast that was intended to star Emma Watson, this is yet another Disney project that basically takes one of their beloved animated films or (in the case of Oz: The Great and Powerful) a beloved family classic and make a Disney live-action franchise-starter out of it.  We've seen movement on a Kenneth Branagh-helmed Cinderella, which ironically was supposed to star Emma Watson until she dropped out over the last couple days.  Filming is underway on Robert Stromberg's Maleficent, which will star Angelina Jolie and Elle Fanning in a villain-centric retelling of Sleeping Beauty.  Disney tried to do something with Snow White before bowing out due to the two other 2012 adaptations, but it may try again.  So what is the point, in the long-run, of these fairy-tale revamps?

Weekend Box Office: Oz: The Great and Powerful summons $80 million, with all signs pointing towards a leggy run.

I've said this before, but one of the problems with modern box office analysis is that it treats studio tracking numbers, which are supposed to be internal figures that can be used to adjust marketing in the run up to release, as ironclad box office predictions.  More often than not, pundits use tracking in a way that creates a preemptive doom-and-gloom scenario where a new release is painted as a box office turkey before it even opens *or* its used to give unrealistic expectations to a new release so that studios are then forced to defend what is actually a solid debut.  Such is the case with Oz: The Great and Powerful (trailer/posters).  The $215 million Disney prequel debuted with a strong $80.3 million this weekend.  Alas, due to rumblings and arbitrary presumptions that the film would open with as much as $100 million over the weekend, mostly due to the project's token similarities with Alice In Wonderland, Disney may now be forced to defend what is easily the biggest opening of 2013 by more than double and the third-biggest March debut ever behind Alice In Wonderland ($116 million) and The Hunger Games ($153 million).

The good news/bad news regarding the decidedly un-feminist female characters in Oz: The Great and Powerful.

Full-on spoiler warning...

Unfortunately pretty much everything I feared about Oz: The Great and Powerful, right from the second trailer, turned out to be true, at least from a gender perspective.  It is indeed about three seemingly powerful women sitting around and waiting for a random man who fell out of the sky to not only attempt to save Oz but, more importantly, shape all three of their respective destinies.  The film also equates beauty with virtue in a rather explicit fashion, with somewhat laughable scenes of Rachel Weisz's Evanora complaining of jealousy over Michelle Williams 'pretty face' seemingly oblivious to the fact that said evil witch is played by *Rachel Weisz* (spoiler: Rachel Weisz is insanely hot). It's not just that Mila Kunis and Michelle Williams play seemingly strong female characters who constantly yap about needing some prophesied male wizard to swoop down and save their asses. The biggest problem in the film is that it allows its feeble and somewhat selfish male hero to basically define them and their actions.

Dumb parent worries: Will my kid get spooked by PG-13 trailers like After Earth in front of PG-rated movies like Oz?

I made an offhand joke a couple days ago about all of the big summer release trailers being dropped online and presumably into theater this week.  I'm taking my daughter to see Oz: The Great and Powerful tonight and I'm curious to see which trailers are attached to PG-rated Disney family adventure.  Obviously The Hangover part III is probably not going to make an appearance.  But what about the more mainstream PG-13 entertainments like Iron Man 3 or After Earth?  So will the first 15-20 minutes or so of my daughter's moviegoing experience consist of a series of trailers for big summer releases that she can't see?  Will I have to explain that "No, sweetie, *this* Iron Man movie is for adults."  I've had to do that before, like when when she spotted the DVD of Snow White and the Huntsman at Best Buy, and I always feel like an idiot when doing so.  The other thought that comes to mind is a 12 year old news story, one which I gave little thought to at the time.  

Iron Man 3 gets a final and frankly terrific trailer...

I'll add commentary later today.  But for the moment, this looks like a pretty terrific action thriller that just happens to be a superhero threequel.  It's good to see that the bad guy isn't just targeting Stark this time around, and this may in fact dive head-first into the politics that the second film only skirted around.  Could this finally break the curse of the comic book part 3?  Share your thoughts below...

Scott Mendelson

Rooting against action: How Die Hard 5 is like Lilo and Stitch.

There are any number of problems with A Good Day to Die Hard.  But the biggest sin is that it constructs its "story" in such a way that we end up rooting against John McClane.  No, I don't mean the film makes him a villain or anything that creative, I mean that we spend much of the film not wanting McClane to do what he does best: interfere with the carefully-laid plans of others with impromptu and kamikaze acts of violence.  The other prior Die Hard movies basically operated on a simple premise: John McClane is minding his own business when he gets reluctantly pulled into a horrible situation, a situation for which he is the only real hope to save the proverbial day.  He doesn't want to be the hero, but he damn-well is going to stick it out until the day is saved.  This time it's different.  This time John willingly inserts himself into a situation that he does not completely understand.  This time John is *correctly* viewed as an unwanted nuisance and a distraction by the other good guys who are trying to do their jobs.  For most of the film, John McClane is the problem rather than the solution.  In short, John McClane in A Good Day to Die Hard has become Stitch.

At long last, Dreamworks Land! Dreamworks SKG plays the long game to chase Disney's cultural cachet.

"It's a giant advertisement for a movie studio."  That's the thought that crosses my mind whenever I find myself once again journeying to Disney Land with family in tow on another sunny Sunday morning.  My family and I have season passes and according to the Disney web site we've visited 33 times just in the last membership cycle.  Disneyland and Disney World are not only considered 'the Happiest Place on Earth' but also the defining ultimate destination for family recreation.  For those who don't live in places like California or Florida where Disney has one of their theme parks, a trip to Disney is often considered somewhat of a once-in-a-childhood event.  But at the end of the day, it is no different than any other large-scale amusement park one can find in countless places around the world.  They have neither the fastest roller coasters nor the bumpiest bumper cars.  In fact, the entire Disney corporation, all of its theme parks and merchandise and tie-ins are basically in service of advertising an entertainment company, a movie studio.  When you consider what the Disney name means for so many people, so many children and parents, how it operates as a kind of cultural legacy, that's an incredible achievement. And now, at long last, it looks like Dreamworks is getting into the game as well. I missed the the story back in July, about Dreamworks finally getting their act together regarding amusement parks.  The first one is apparently coming to New Jersey, with another in Shanghai and three more announced today for Russia.  This is a step that I've frankly wondered why they didn't do sooner.

Movies I love more than anyone else: Shanghai Knights (2003).

This is the start of what may be a reoccurring feature of sorts, spotlighting the movies that aren't just my favorites, but films that I probably hold in higher esteem than anyone else out there in the critical community.  First up is a film that celebrates its tenth-anniversary this very day.  I'm speaking not of How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days (which I don't loathe), but rather the wonderful period-set comedy adventure Shanghai Knights.  It is a movie that yes, I love probably more than any other critic on Earth.  It is one of the few movies that was so damn good and so bloody enjoyable that I intentionally saw it in a theater three times during its first month of theatrical play.  It is one of my favorite movies from the last fifteen years and I'd argue that it is a near-perfect version of what it's attempting to be.

There can only be two! A possible future where Disney and Warner Bros. dominate franchise tent-pole film making...

The news that has broken over the last couple days is not a little depressing.  While the Seven Samurai-esque Star Wars stand-alone film to be helmed by Zack Snyder was quickly denied, we have gotten word for Disney that there would indeed be stand-alone Star Wars films.  The bad news?  So far, they seem to be entirely centered around well-established characters from the original trilogy.  You want a stand-alone prequel involving Yoda?  Or how about films centered around a young Boba Fett or a young(er) Han Solo?  If so, you're going to be pretty happy over the next half-decade or so.  But if you thought that Disney was buying the Star Wars franchise to somewhat expand its universe rather than merely give us unneeded origins and/or backstories for the very characters we already know a good deal about, well this news won't make you happy.  In fact it reeks of the kind of lazy corporate thinking that gives entertainment corporations a bad name.  It's frankly the first bit of news that might make one thing that maybe Disney, which in general has been relatively good to the properties they have purchased over the years (Muppets, Marvel, etc.) might not be the perfect owner of Lucasfilm that we all thought.

Oz: The Great and Powerful gets an FX-packed Super Bowl tease.

I'm still not uber-impressed, but I imagine I'll like the marketing more where James Franco talks less.  It's no secret that the current season is absolutely starved for kids-faire.  My daughter literally asked me today when there would be more kids movies for her to see. Whether or not I end up dragging her to this (my wife wants to see it too apparently), I imagine it will benefit mightily from the lack of such family-friendly fare in the first two months of the year, akin to The Lorax opening to $70 million last year for the same reason.  Come what may, it reminded me that I probably ought to show her the original Wizard of Oz, as I imagine she'd enjoy that one. It's also a fine education in the whole 'color vs. black-and-white' issue since she didn't end up seeing Frankenweenie.  This certainly looks visually impressive, with a sparse and less cluttered look compared to Burton's Alice In Wonderland.  The laughing at the end pretty much rules out Michelle Williams as the 'wicked witch', so now it's just a question of whether or not Rachel Weisz (who the laughing voice sounds most like) is the real villain or merely the red herring to hide Mila Kunis's true villainy.  Anyway, this is probably the last major tease we'll see until release, give or take the usual clips released online.

Scott Mendelson        

The Lone Ranger gets a 90-second Super Bowl tease.

I'm not sure 'good enough' is quite what Disney wants to hear in regards to their very pricey summer tentpole, but that pretty much sums it up.  This Gore Verbinski film looks like solid fun, with a nice blend of humor and myth-making.  It's a bit odd to hear what I presumed is the villain (Tom Wilkinson) telling the 'comforting' story of the Lone Ranger, but I can't fault an ad for my own confusion.  The action looks grand and seems to have quite a bit of personality, and I'm partial to an action film that feels like a genuine 'jumping and swinging' adventure.  Will this set the world on fire?  I have no idea, but Disney can always just demand a Pirates of the Caribbean 5 at a reduced rate if this flops.  For those who like the western, this seems like the real deal, a genuine bit of western action-adventure on a modern tentpole scale.  And yes, on that note, it looks a lot better than Wild Wild West.

Scott Mendelson   

Iron Man 3 gets a creative and compelling Super Bowl tease.

This is the first piece of marketing we've seen since the teaser back in October, and it's actually a nice deviation.  The extended version (which only includes about 20 seconds of additional footage) is mostly stuff we've seen from the theatrical teaser while the remaining thirty seconds sets up without ruining a major action set piece.  I actually watched both Iron Man films over the last couple weeks and I have to say they have both aged very well, even the second one which is still flawed mostly in its messy third act and its weirdly kid-friendly tone when it comes to its poorly-developed villainy.  There's not much more to say, other than the set piece in question looks terrific and kinda scary (for no particular reason, the idea of being sucked out of an airplane, especially while still strapped to a seat, has always been kinda disturbing to me).  From what we've seen, it looks like Happy is the film's big death, but other than that I hope that Marvel and Disney show a little restraint especially as they actually have action sequences to market, as opposed to the last film which had just two major set pieces from which to cull footage.  I'm sure we'll get another trailer, probably attached to Oz: The Great and Powerful on March 8th.  But for now I'm glad about how little I know about the actual story, even having read the comic arc that it's loosely based on.

Scott Mendelson