Rumor commentary: Joseph Gordon-Levitt may be playing Batman in the Justice League movie.

HitFix broke the story late last night and while I generally try to avoid commenting on rumors, McWeeny is a pretty trustworthy source for this kind of thing.  Anyway, long story short, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is allegedly in talks to reprise his role as John Blake (cough-Tim Drake-cough) in Warner Bros.' upcoming Justice League film.  Said superhero team-up is set to open in summer 2015 (July 17th, I'd presume), where it will square off against The Avengers 2 and Star Wars Episode VII.  So if the rumor comes to pass, it looks like John Blake will be the man in the cowl, as opposed to a new actor playing a new Bruce Wayne.  Also of note, John Blake (as Batman?) will allegedly make a post-production cameo in Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, which comes off of Snyder's comments stating that Man of Steel won't be as closed-world as he had previously indicated.  So presuming this is all true and not just a rumor or a gambit to drum up interest in next week's DVD/Blu Ray release of The Dark Knight Rises, what do I think?  Well, it's both not terribly surprising and incredibly shocking.  

Weekend Box Office (09-30-12): Hotel Transylvania scores record September debut while Looper opens strong and Pitch Perfect explodes in semi-limited debut.

As always, for historical trivia and additional context on the week's new release, John Gosling spells it out HERE.

While the whole 'measure the cumulative weekend box office' trend is usually stupid if not dangerous, I must admit that this is indeed an 'everybody wins' weekend.  Sony had the top two films, with one setting a record and the other merely opening in line with realistic expectations.  Hotel Transylvania scored a whopping $43 million this weekend, which at the very least crushes the previous September record, the $36 million debut of Sweet Home Alabama back in 2002.  The Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, those snazzy Star Wars: The Clone Wars shorts)-helmed pic had a rather large 3,8x weekend multiplier, going from an $11 million Friday to a $19 million Saturday.  In other words, it performed how a non-frontloaded non-sequel animated film is supposed to perform.  Among animated films that aren't sequels/spin-offs and weren't release by either Dreamworks or Disney/Pixar, this opening actually ranks rather high.  If you count the two Dr. Seuess adaptations (The Lorax with $70 million and Horton Hears a Who with $45 million), Hotel Transylvania is the fifth-biggest non-sequel/spin-off animated opening not released by the two animation titans.  If you only count wholly original properties, then it trails only Despicable Me ($56 million) and the first Ice Age ($46 million) and comes in just ahead of Warner Bros' Happy Feet ($41 million). 

Weekend Box Office (08-26-12): Obama's America not withstanding, summer ends with an epic whimper.

Oh my, another film explicitly targeting an under-served niche did exceptional business almost exclusively with that niche.  In a sane industry that would be called smart business, but the studios tend to treat it as a *shock* and write it off as a fluke.  It was no shock to anyone paying attention during the week, especially when the film was announced to be expanding on over 1,000 screens this weekend.  With the weak slate of new releases and little holdover interest, the market was primed for a solid debut for something preaching to a very devoted choir.  First as foremost, 2016: Obama's America earned about 1/4 as much this weekend as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 did over its opening weekend on about as many screens eight years ago.  As not-president John Kerry can attest, even the most obscenely successful political documentary of all time ($23 million opening weekend, $119 million domestic total) didn't help John Kerry defeat George W. Bush in the 2004 election (even if we can dispute the results in Ohio, Bush won the popular vote by three million).  So no, the fact that a directly-targeted group of anti-Obama moviegoers gave 2016: Obama's America $6.2 million doesn't mean anything more than the piss-poor box office of last year's The Undefeated (essay) in terms of predicting an upcoming presidential election.  

John Gosling previews the week's new releases (08/24/12).

A relatively low key weekend with just three releases, one of which is it at less than 1,000 locations. We're now in the tail end of August, where studios will often off-load movies that they're not quite sure what to do with.

Hit & Run is a romantic action comedy starring Dax Shephard, Kirsten Bell and Bradley Cooper. It follows ex-con, Charlie Bronson, who breaks out of witness protection to help his girlfriend get to Los Angeles for a once in a lifetime job opportunity. But they won't be making the journey alone as they quickly find themselves pursued by his former partners in crime and a Marshall tasked with keeping the 'witness' protected. Bell and Shephard play the couple, while Cooper plays one of the ex-partners, who ended up enduring prison as a result of Bronson's apparent betrayal. Shephard not only stars in the picture but also wrote, produced and co-directed, alongside David Palmer. The two worked together on the 2010 film, Brother Justice, a mockumentary that followed Shephard's attempts to become the next Chuck Norris style martial artist-movie star (That flick also starred Cooper and Tom Arnold, who plays Randy in this new movie). Prior to that, the actor/director had worked on Punk'd and appeared in Mike Judge's Idiocracy, amongst other films and TV appearances.