Gladiator: A dormant genre awakens!

In preparation for the next Smackdown Team Experience is traveling back to 2000

by Cláudio Alves

One way to confirm a work of art's importance and influence - not necessarily its quality - is to see how much subsequent creations tried to imitate it. How many creators have attempted to capture lightning in a bottle for a second time, whether by blatant copy or freeform inspiration? This is especially true of mainstream cinematic successes. A surplus of movies can triumph at the box office any given year. Not nearly as many can claim to have birthed a string of copycats or revived a genre after decades of obscurity. Say what you want about Gladiator, but that Best Picture champion did accomplish such feats, for better and worse… 

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Mid-Year Report: Blockbuster Bombs - Why Did They Flop?

by Séan McGovern

If 2017 is showing any consistency in audience tastes over the last few years it's that no amount of star power, budget or marketing gimmicks can force audiences to buy tickets, with news that the US Memorial Weekend was the lowest grossing since 1999. I've been told variances of the rule that for every production budget on a bockbuster, you can expect the marketing budget to be half if not equal to that - meaning that managing to break even is still a loss.

The year is noticeable once again for some high profile box office casualties - King Arthur, Ghost in the Shell, Power Rangers, Baywatch, possibly Alien: Covenant and the latest Pirates of the Caribbean, which regardless of its #1 spot at the Box Office has a budget of $230m (!) to recoup and turn into profit.

There is plenty of speculation that the way we watch films is contributing to the losses, but how to explain Star Wars, Guardians of the Galaxy and the Marvel Universe - huge financial successes that tick many of the same boxes as the recent failures? If we like to believe that audiences are more selective or that we truly consider the reviews, then why do the Transformers films keep getting made? (seriously please someone explain)

Full figures (and reader speculation welcome) after the jump...

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Mother's Day Weekend Box Office

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY y'all. Are you taking your mom to the movies? Does your mom even go to movies? (My mom does not unless I'm visiting her so it happens about once a year).

In its second week Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 dipped below 50% but that's par for the course for blockbusters which are super frontloaded now. It still handily took the weekend making more than the two new wide releases combined (Snatched and King Arthur). In limited release the top new films were Lowriders (starring Demian Bichir and Eva Longoria) with a good per screen average and the sniper drama The Wall which risked a nearly wide opening to uncertain results. We'll see how word of mouth goes. 

Weekend Box Office (Date)
W I D E	L I M I T E D
1. GUARDIANS VOL. 2 $63 (cum. $246.1) REVIEW	1. 🔺 LOWRIDERS $2.4 NEW (295 screens)
2.🔺 SNATCHED $17.5 NEW REVIEW	2. BAAHUBALI 2 $1.5 (374 screens) (cum. $18.9)
3.🔺 KING ARTHUR $14.7 NEW REVIEW	3. 🔺 THE WALL $891k NEW (541 screens)
4. FATE OF FURIOUS $5.3 (cum. $215) FRANCHISE RANK	4. NORMAN $409k (153 screens) (cum. $1.6)
5. BOSS BABY $4.6 (cum. $162.3) REVIEW	5. THEIR FINEST $290k (258 screens | cum. $2.9)
6. BEAUTY & THE BEAST $3.8 (cum. $493.1) REVIEW | SCORE	6. SLEIGHT $285k (364 screens) (cum. $3.6)
7. HOW TO BE A LATIN LOVER  $3.7 (cum. $26.1)	7. THE DINNER $245k (429 screens) (cum. $1.1)
8. THE CIRCLE $1.7 (cum. $18.9) REVIEW	8. 🔺  A QUIET PASSION $199k (116 screens | cum. $766k)
9. GIFTED $1.3 (cum. $21.4)	9. 🔺 THE LOVERS $140k (23 screens) (cum. $229k) REVIEW
10. SMURFS: LOST VILLAGE $1.1 (cum. $42.1)	10. COLOSSAL $115k (160 screens) (cum. $2.7) REVIEW
11. GOING IN STYLE $1.0 (cum. $42.3)	11.🔺 PARIS CAN WAIT $101k NEW (4 screens)
12. BORN IN CHINA $820k (cum. $12.3)	12. 🔺 CHUCK $79k (39 screens) (cum. $121k) REVIEW
🔺 = new or added screens numbers from box office mojo

The Lovers and Chuck, two Tribeca debuts which went immediately to theaters last weekend after the festival, charted after adding theaters this weekend. Check out the reviews in case you missed 'em linked in the chart above.

What did you see this weekend? 

Review: "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"

by Chris Feil

Guy Ritchie thrives on comedic machismo. Even when gratingly stylized or frenetically composed, his work is never less than entertaining when breaking down how buffoonish men interact. So King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a natural fit for the director’s next big budget exercise. In some ways, Arthur and his knights of the round table were the original bros...

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Posterized: Guy Ritchie

The British director Guy Ritchie never finished school and didn't attend film school either but by the time he was 28 he was on his way to making cinematic waves. His short film The Hard Case (1995) attracted the attention of financiers and his debut feature Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) was a scrappy success. Sudden fame for new directors is usually somewhat invisible since it's their names rather than faces that get the publicity. Not so for Guy Ritchie. His rise went meteoric via a marriage to global household name Madonna before people had even really learned his name. They famously wore each other's new products on t-shirts; he pushed her album "Music" across his chest in 2000 as she paraded Snatch, his second film, around on hers.

The marriage soured but his movies got bigger and bigger if not always more successful. Like any regularly working director he's had both hits and misses. His 9th feature King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is now open in theaters everywhere.

Let's look at all his movies via posterized after the jump. How many have you seen? 

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