Almost to the end, folks. But before we finally recap the best (or, err, my favorites) of 2012, let's take a pit stop to discuss what are arguably the worst films of 2012. Now as always, I can't presume that I've seen every probable terrible movie out there (I generally avoid Adam Sandler comedies and didn't catch Parental Guidance in time), but I tried to highlight films that were both very bad and whose respective failures meant something more than just their artistic inadequacy. As always, the films below are in alphabetical order. So, without further ado, let's dive in!Alex Cross:
To William Hurt in A History of Violence, "How to do you f*** that up?!" You have a long-running detective series filled with larger-than-life villains and often insanely over-the-top violence. You have Tyler Perry, if perhaps cast against type than at least hungry to prove that he can do something different. You have Matthew Fox theoretically willing to chew up every bit of available scenery. And you have audiences primed for a kind of old-school adult-skewing genre picture that the previous two Morgan Freeman-starring Alex Cross films (Kiss the Girls and Along Came A Spider) represented back in the 1990s. How in the world do you make this film this incredibly boring? First of all, you take an explicitly R-rated story and neuter it into a still-inappropriate PG-13. Then you pile on generic cliche on top of generic cliche. Then you instruct every actor other than Fox to be as lifeless as possible. Finally, you never decide to make a down-to-Earth crime thriller or a would-be superhero/super villain story. The end result is a painfully dull would-be thriller that can't hold a candle to the most average episode of Criminal Minds.
As most of you know, the ambitious and expensive Cloud Atlas will be opening this weekend with around $10 million for the weekend. Even with Warner Bros. merely on the hook for distribution and marketing and even with the film's $100 million budget covered by foreign pre-sales, this is not a pleasant figure for a rather impressive movie. There will be finger-pointing and blame to go around over the next few days. But I would argue that the primary reason for its box office failure is actually a net positive. In short, Cloud Atlas had the bad luck to open during what can only be called a plethora of adult films. I've talked quite a bit about the slow and steady comeback of adult cinema in an age of non-stop tentpoles, but there is one downside to the current deluge. It can be argued that there is actually too much adult product out there in the current marketplace. And as we all know, a large majority of adult moviegoers aren't quite as frequent as the younger crowd. The stereotypical adult moviegoer, the one with a family and a job and various responsibilities, maybe only goes to the movies once a month. And if they went to the movies this weekend, they probably went to see Argo.
As always, check out John Gosling's insanely informative 'preview' of this weekend's new releases 
Along with Tim Burton's Frankweenie and the return of Liam Neeson in Taken 2, last weekend's surprise chart entry, Pitch Perfect expands into wide release. Frankenweenie's origins stretch right back to 1984, when Tim Burton worked at Disney. The young director got his first break thanks to a short film he made while at college, entitled Stalk of the Celery Monster. The short drew Disney's attention, who offered him an animation apprenticeship, where he would work on The Black Cauldron and The Fox and The Hound, amongst others. In 1982, he made his first stop-motion short for Disney, an ode to his childhood hero, Vincent Price. 'Vincent' played the Chicago film festival and was followed up by the director's first foray into live action in the guise of Hansel and Gretel. Burton gave the Grimm fairy-tale a Japanese spin, culminating with the titular heroes in a kung fu battle against the evil witch. The film aired just once and prints have since become so scarce that for a number of years many thought the project was a myth. By 1984, the young director/animator was ready for his next live action short, a tale of a boy whose dog is killed by a car and his attempts to bring it back to life. A homage to Frankenstein, Frankenweenie ended up getting Burton fired from his job at Disney, who felt he had squandered time and money on a film that was too scary for children (It had been set to debut with the re-release of Pinocchio). 
Yes yes, last weekend's box office was the worst since after the 9/11 attacks. Normally cumulative weekend box office doesn't mean a damn thing, but this weekend deserves study as a prime example of missed opportunities. The actual reasons for this are interesting for two reasons. A) Just like 9/11, the six degrees-of-separation reason is once again rooted in an act of mass violence. Had the Aurora shootings not occurred on July 20th or had Warner Bros. shown a token amount of backbone, The Gangster Squad would have been the big opener of the weekend and surely would have delivered a better debut than The Words, which turned out to be the sole truly wide release. Moreover, the weekend shows us how much we've become accustomed to weekly blockbuster opening weekends each and every frame. But the real question of last weekend is why didn't any studio bother to move a token major action release onto the September 7th slot. Yes, I know Lionsgate randomly dumped The Cold Light of Day onto 1,500 screens with next-to-no advertising, but considering the coming storm of major genre fare over just the next three weeks, you have to wonder why a studio, any studio, didn't think to jump into the near-vacant slot and avoid the coming storm.