We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free early screening of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. The long-awaited sequel stars Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, and Jack Black.
SYNOPSIS: In the brand new adventure Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, the tables are turned as four teenagers in detention are sucked into the world of Jumanji.
When they discover an old video game console with a game they’ve never heard of, they are immediately thrust into the game’s jungle setting, into the bodies of their avatars, played by Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, and Karen Gillan. What they discover is that you don’t just play Jumanji-Jumanji plays you. They’ll have to go on the most dangerous adventure of their lives, or they’ll be stuck in the game forever…
The screening takes place on Monday, December 18th at 7:00pm at Regal Majestic in Silver Spring. If you’d like to attend, simply complete the required steps in the Rafflecopter contest form below. Winners will be selected on Sunday, December 3rd and notified by email. Good luck!
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle opens December 20th.
Rotten Tomatoes takes a lot of heat for having too much influence, and maybe that’s true. But it’s also kinda cool to have so many well-regarded critics all putting their two cents in on a movie. And that makes it very tough to have a uniform opinion on anything. Damn near impossible is for anything to achieve a 100% Fresh rating, especially a movie in wide to semi-wide release that may have dozens, if not hundreds, of reviews. And that’s what makes the achievement by Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird so extraordinary.
Lady Bird has achieved a 100% rating with 164 reviews. That’s crazy. The previous record holder was Toy Story 2 which has 100% and 163 reviews.
So obviously Lady Bird > Toy Story 2, right?
So obviously Lady Bird > EVERYTHING!!!!
Nah, obviously it doesn’t work like that, but this is one Hell of a feather in Gerwig’s cap, especially for her directorial debut. Talk about setting the bar for yourself super high.
Record broken! With 164 Fresh reviews and 0 Rotten, #LadyBird now tops the list of 100% movies with the most amount of reviews at 164. Congrats to Greta Gerwig and @A24
The last time Rooney Mara teamed with director Garth Davis was for Lion, and she was mostly overlooked by stars Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman. Nothing wrong with that, they were both fantastic and so was she, there just wasn’t enough praise to go around during the awards season. Well, Davis has made it up to her in a big way, by casting her as the title role in Mary Magdalene, and now we have our first look at her as Christ’s most faithful follower.
Also starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Peter and Tahar Rahim as Judas, the biblical drama follows Mary as she leaves behind humble beginnings to join Christ’s flock. Here’s the synopsis:
Set in the Holy Land in the first century C.E., a young woman leaves her small fishing village and traditional family behind to join a radical new social movement. At its head is a charismatic leader, Jesus of Nazareth, who promises that the world is changing. Mary is searching for a new way of living, and an authenticity that is denied her by the rigid hierarchies of the day. As the notoriety of the group spread and more are drawn to follow Jesus’ inspirational message, Mary’s spiritual journey places her at the heart of a story that will lead to the capital city of Jerusalem, where she must confront the reality of Jesus’ destiny and her own place within it.
Mary Magdalene is scheduled to open on March 30th 2018, but it may change since that was a date given to it by The Weinstein Company. [IndieWire]
Show of hands, who is really excited for James Cameron’s Avatar sequels? Anybody? It’s been a long time since Cameron hit the $2.7B mark with the first movie in 2009, and I think opinions on it have soured. Record breaking it may have been, but there wasn’t a lot of demand to see more. Cameron has been steadfast in returning to the world of Pandora, though, but even he recognizes, as voiced in a new Vanity Fair piece, that none of the four proposed sequels are guaranteed. Each film will need to be successful to see his entire vision through to the end…
”It was highly optimistic that we could start quickly until scripts are written. If there’s no scripts, there’s nothing, right? The scripts took four years. You can call that a delay, but it’s not really a delay because from the time we pushed the button to really go make the movies [until now,] we’re clicking along perfectly. We’re doing very well because of all the time that we had to develop the system and the pipeline and all that. We weren’t wasting time, we were putting it into tech development and design. So when all the scripts were approved, everything was designed. Every character, every creature, every setting. In a funny way it was to the benefit of the film because the design team had more time to work.”
He continued…
“Most of the actors, the key principals, have all read all four scripts, so they know exactly what their character arcs are, they know where they’re going, they know how to modulate their arc now across the first two films. We all know where we’re supposed to be dramatically in the saga, and that’s great. Let’s face it, if ‘Avatar 2‘ and ‘3‘ don’t make enough money, there’s not going to be a ‘4‘ and ‘5.’ They’re fully encapsulated stories in and of themselves. It builds across the five films to a greater kind of meta narrative, but they’re fully formed films in their own right, unlike, say, ‘The Lord of the Rings‘ trilogy, where you really just had to sort of go, ‘Oh, shit, all right, well I guess I better come back next year.’ Even though that all worked and everybody did.”
It’s worth noting that most of Cameron’s career has been about exceeding expectations. Nobody thought Avatar would be a hit much less the highest-grossing movie of all time. If anybody can quiet the critics, of which I am definitely one, it’s Cameron so I should probably keep my skepticism to myself.
Avengers 4 has long been pitched as both an ending and a beginning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe; a clear break between the old and something new. With the contracts up for the original crew, such as Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Jeremy Renner, and Scarlett Johansson, it’s been clear that the torch needs to be passed. This seems to be a mandate at Disney overall; remember Rian Johnson is tackling a new Star Wars trilogy with a very different focus. If Marvel is attempting something similar, what could that entail?
2018 will mark a decade since Iron Man launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the stratosphere, but don’t worry, it’s not coming to an end any time soon. Remember how we were all shocked when Kevin Feige said three years ago that Marvel has everything planned out through 2028? He gave an update of sorts to that in a very extensive (must-read worthy) piece from Vanity Fair, saying “[We’re] 22 movies in, and we’ve got another 20 movies on the docket that are completely different from anything that’s come before – intentionally.”
Disney CEO Bob Iger added, “we’re looking for worlds that are completely separate – geographically or in time – from the worlds that we’ve already visited.”
These are all good things. If there’s a complaint to have about Marvel it’s the lack of diversity. They’ve started to turn that around with Black Panther and Captain Marvel, but there’s always room for more. With so much time and so many characters, I’m hoping we see some stories set in the Savage Land, or the Negative Zone. And of course we gotta have a female team movie, right?
So strap in. The Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it is about to come to an end. Feige teases, “There will be two distinct periods. Everything before Avengers 4 and everything after. I know it will not be in ways people are expecting.”
Michael Pena’s sci-fi flick Extinction is…well, looking pretty damned extinct. The film, which he joined last February and was accompanied by Lizzy Caplan and Mike Colter, has been pulled from Universal’s schedule. This despite having a release date in January 2018. Why?
THR has the news but they don’t have a reason. I mean, we could toss a few speculative theories out there but what would be the point? The film was shot and presumably completed by Ben Young and was a man whose nightmare of losing his family turns into a reality when an otherworldly force invades the planet. The man comes to find an inner strength to keep his family safe from harm. James McAvoy had been eyeing the lead role for a while before Pena came aboard. Now it looks like we won’t see either of them save the day.
Oh well. It’s not like we won’t have plenty of opportunities to see the cast elsewhere. Pena will fight terrorism on horseback alongside fellow Marvel-ite Chris Hemsworth in 12 Strong, not to mention his return for Ant-Man & the Wasp; Caplan may be joining Channing Tatum in that Gambit movie, and Colter has a second season of Luke Cage when he’s not busy running through the dreams of women everywhere hoping he’ll ask them for a cup of coffee.
It’s this type of thing that would have you believing there’s an effort to undermine Warner Bros. and the DCEU, because we simply don’t see stuff like this happening to Marvel. Of course, everyone is speculating about the brand’s future with Justice League underperforming, and a few days ago a rumor started that Joss Whedon was off of his Batgirl film, a rumor that proved to be incorrect. A story also surfaced that the DCEU was being shelved completely, a bullcrap tale thatShazam director David F. Sandberg replied to personally. Well now Sandberg is back shooting down more rumors with no basis in reality.
A reddit user, and it does seem like most of these rumors are coming from reddit, said that Sandberg had been fired from Shazam for wanting to make it R-rated with “dark and gritty, sexy and violent” elements. That would be utterly ridiculous and contrary to the source material, but also contrary to the direction of the DCEU. And so Sandberg had this to say in response…
The reality is that Shazam is moving right along with Zachary Levi as the title character and Asher Angel as his alter ego, young Billy Batson. Shooting begins in February and we should see the film in theaters on April 5th 2019.
It’s happening. Ever since Fear the Walking Dead began fans have been waiting for there to be some kind of crossover with The Walking Dead, even when showrunners were insisting it wasn’t in the cards. Then in October Robert Kirkman let the cat out of the bag that, yes, a crossover was in the works. And now we know which character will be making the jump from one zombie infested wasteland to another.
Revealed on tonight’s episode of Talking Dead, it will be Lennie James’ character Morgan Jones who will appear in Fear the Walking Dead. And this won’t be just a single episode cameo; he’s expected to be a regular throughout the fourth season which is just beginning production. What’s unclear is how the timelines match up. If the first two seasons of FTWD match up with TWD, then this would be a period of time that Morgan was away from Rick Grimes and off on his own. So this would help fill in the gaps of his backstory and explain the differences in his character upon returning.
Or we could see FTWD jump forward in time with the new season, and have present day Morgan leaving Rick’s crew and finding a different one. This is assuming Morgan survives the current season, of course, and with Negan running around that is a big if. It certainly sounds like James has no plans of returning to TWD. He said via satellite…
“The hardest part of it from beginning until now has been leaving The Walking Dead; leaving that cast and leaving that crew. And I’ve said my goodbyes to the cast and stuff, and I’ve said my goodbyes to the crew.”
Showrunner and producer Scott M. Gimple did add that Morgan has “a lot of story left on The Walking Dead”, but that could mean he’s got a big part to play through the end of this eighth season.
Morgan is one of TWD’s most fascinating characters and I hope he isn’t zombie food or a conquest for ol’ Lucille.
1. Coco (review)- $49M/$71.1M
Pixar’s 19th animated feature proved just as reliable as the rest, with Coco opening with $49M through the Thanksgiving holiday and $71M overall. The Mexican-flavored film about a young boy’s quest to become a musician and end a family curse, opened previously in Mexico and immediately broke box office records with $53M. It currently stands at $153M worldwide and, as expected, easily toppled Justice League from the top spot.
2. Justice League– $40.3M/$171.5M
As I said last week, there is good news and bad news about the box office for Justice League.The film fell 57% in its second weekend, which isn’t great especially if you compare it to Wonder Woman’s 43% fall. But it’s not terrible, and audiences do seem to be enjoying the film enough to keep up some decent word-of-mouth buzz, even if critics panned it. It also has $481M worldwide and seems to be rolling right along quite well overseas, so even if the domestic end falls short, the slack should be picked up internationally. If, as some have speculated, that $700M is the break-even point then it should be able to hit and surpass that number. Next week is pretty slow in terms of wide releases so I wouldn’t be shocked if it reclaims the top spot from Coco, but that could be tough.
3. Wonder– $22.3M/$69.4M Wonder had a tremendous hold in it’s second week, sliding a mere 19%. The combination of family friendly movies (along with Coco) may be the biggest hammer to Justice League‘s numbers. At $69M this is the year’s biggest live-action family drama and given the likely Oscars bump it will receive, probably will stick around for a while.
4. Thor: Ragnarok– $16.7M/$277.4M
5. Daddy’s Home 2– $13.2M/$72.6M
6. Murder On the Orient Express– $13M/$74.2M
7. The Star– $6.8M/$22M
8. A Bad Moms Christmas– $5M/$59.7M
9. Roman J. Israel, Esq. (review)- $4.5M/$6.2M
I don’t know what was to be expected from the legal thriller Roman J. Israel, Esq., but this probably wasn’t it. The film has Denzel Washington in the lead role of an activist attorney who gets into a morally untenable predicament. After opening in only 4 theaters last week Sony expanded it to over 1600 for $4.5M and $6.2M overall, which isn’t good. But there has been so little buzz since it debuted at TIFF, and the reviews, including my own, have skewed towards it being a disappointment. These types of movies are a tough sell, anyway; they really rely on strong word of mouth to succeed. And because this is such an atypical role for Denzel (he’s not “cool” by any stretch) I expect a smaller crowd than usually turns up for a Denzel film.
10. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri– $4.4M/$7.6M
It’s the second episode of Cinema Royale this week! Who says you don’t have anything to give thanks for?? Now, are these movies worth being thankful for? I’ll be joine by my homie Chris Bumbray of Joblo.com to review Denzel Washington’s legal thriller, ROMAN J. ISRAEL, Esq. That will be followed by Gary Oldman’s much talked about performance as Winston Churchill in DARKEST HOUR. And finally, Luca Guadagnino’s summer romance, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME!
All this plus lots of news on JUSTICE LEAGUE, so tune in and join in the post-Thanksgiving fun! Tune in and follow Cinema Royale on Blogtalkradio as part of Critical: The Movie Critics Network!
