Beauty vs Beast: Franchise First Class

Jason from MNPP here hoping everyone here in the States had a good holiday weekend and outside the States then just a plain good weekend, period -- I spent a good three hours (including something like half an hour of trailers) of my weekend in the theater watching the new X-Men movie, as did a few of you (not enough to make the studio happy though) and I gotta say I agree with Nat's take on it - mediocre stuff that needed to embrace its silliness more often. I'd love for just one superhero movie to be about something other than superpowers being the worst burden in all the world, ya know?

Anyway I found myself thinking a lot about Jennifer Lawrence during and after the film - god she seemed miserable, didn't she? She delivered her lines with all the passion of a smurf cadaver. That said I wouldn't be surprised if they could coerce her, with dollars, to revisit Mystique in the future... but for the time being at least she has no contractual obligations to her two big franchises. If she chose to from here on out she could make nothing but David O. Russell movies. (Imagine...) So let's look back at what was.

PREVIOUSLY It was Cillian Murphy against Rachel McAdams in a random Red Eye revisit last week, and it was Bay Breezes for everybody - McAdams' flight-bound final girl took just over 60% of the vote. Said Derreck:

"Team Lisa because she was quick and resourceful. They had the oddest chemistry going on to the point where if he wasn't all terroristy, it would have been nice if they went out for a drink at the end of the movie. But you know, murder and all tends to get in the way of that. Always the years, always the love, always the murder."

Memorial Day Long Weekend Champs

It's not the story that the media will cover but it looks like the winners of Memorial Day weekend are... limited releases. Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman's funny Jane Austen adaptation cracked the top ten list on just 500-ish screens. The Lobster also had a great weekend on just over 100 screens. 

The other significant happening: Captain America: Civil War overtook Deadpool this weekend to become 2016's biggest hit.

 

Otherwise the long weekend was disappointing with two underperfoming blockbusters as the big tickets. Though Apocalypse's $80 million would be spectacular for many films its still a disappointment as its a far lower opening gross than that of its X-Men predecessor Days of Future Past. Meanwhile Alice Through the Looking Glass, a sequel no one was clamoring for from a film that was a fluke phenomenon based mostly on its absurdly lucky timing post-Avatar back in 2010, opened to $34 million. With a $170 million budget that's rough. Not as rough as Johnny Depp's offscreen trouble though, as an ugly divorce from Amber Heard is brewing. She's accused him of domestic violence and obtained a restraining order, his friends have rushed to defend him, the internet is circling him with torches. That's how these things go.

What did you see this weekend?

Arrows indicate losing or gaining screens

TOP TEN
🔺01 X-Men Apocalypse $80 NEW  Review
🔺02 Alice Through the Looking Glass $34.1 NEW
▫️03 Angry Birds $24.6 (cum. $72.2) 
🔻04 Captain America: Civil War $19.7 (cum. $377.1)  Review
🔺05 Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising $11.4 (cum. $40.6) 
🔻06 The Jungle Book $9.2 (cum. $340.7) Articles
▫️07 The Nice Guys $8.1 (cum. $23.5) Shane Black, Review
🔻08 Money Monster $5.5 (cum. $35.2) Jack O'Connell
🔺09 Love & Friendship $3.1 (cum. $4.1)  Review
🔻10 Zootopia $1.1 (cum. $336.1)  Reviewish

TOP TEN LIMITED
Excluding previously wide & Love & Friendship which remarkably hit the top ten!
🔺01 The Lobster $942K (cum. $1.7) Reviewish, Podcast
🔻02 The Meddler $700K (cum. $3.1) Review
🔺03 The Man Who Knew Infinity $630K (cum. $2.4)
🔺04 A Bigger Splash $530K (cum. $1.4) Reviewish, Podcast
🔺05 Weiner $216K (cum. $344K) Review
🔻06 Sing Street $154K (cum. $2.8)  Review, Who's the MVP?, Podcast
🔺07 Maggie's Plan $136K (cum. $225K) Review
🔻08 Hello My Name is Doris $87K (cum. $14.2) Review, Sally Field
🔻09 Dark Horse $44K (cum. $139) Review
🔻10 A Hologram for the King $44K (cum. $4.1) Review

Review: X-Men Apocalypse

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

If you experience extreme deja vu at the movie’s this weekend, don’t panic – that’s just how summer movies play. Take X-MEN APOCALYPSE for example. The sixth film in the X-Men franchise will feel very familiar if you’ve seen any X-pictures before. And maybe even if you haven’t. So let us begin (again) with a short detour.

Oscar Isaac is the internet’s current boyfriend and an amazing actor and as is required by the law of desire he’s in everything now. He was used sparingly but potently in The Force Awakens last Christmas as dashing pilot Poe Dameron and he’s in theaters again in a much larger role as the big bad of X-Men Apocalypse...

Click to read more ...

Link Rising

Vanity Fair are big changes ahead for HBO's original programming? Will they make the right calls?
Film School Rejects 38 things we learned from writer/director Robert Eggers' commentary track on The Witch 
Oscar Dances a new twitter account is replaying that Ex Machina dance scene with Oscar Isaac getting down to every song imaginable
Variety Owen Gleiberman has a smart take on the comic rise of Zac Efron in Neighbors and Neighbors 2

Comics Alliance has a fan and staff generated list of the 100 greatest X-Men of all time. Another reminder that that movies just aren't doing right by this breadth, diversity, and queerness of this team. Only 2 of their top ten (Jean Grey & Magneto) have been reasonably well served by the movies.
Antagony & Ecstasy remembers Hedwig and the Angry Inch with a stellar review
Business Insider the new practice of teasing the trailer you're actually watching online before you watch it
Forbes underperforming sequels can still generate profits if the production is smart
Pajiba Lionsgate admits that the Divergent series is a mess but shows no signs of having learned from it
Slate on the "dark future of whitewashing" in regards to Asian-American actors 
MTV "We still don't live in that kind of world" - we weren't the only ones remembering the still resonant Thelma & Louise this week 
NY Times has a fascinating report on the death of the office dress code. Love that they illustrated with Working Girl.  

Posterized: Tye Sheridan

They grow up so fast *sniffle*. Tye Sheridan, the child actor revelation from Terence Malick's The Tree of Life (quite a debut) and Mud is already 19 years old and in major demand. What accounts for his mutant super power of aging rapidly is that Tree of Life actually began shooting when Tye was just 11. Malick takes forever in post production, don'cha know. Male stars don't tend to really come into their A list own until their late 20s or early 30s. DiCaprio is the grand exception to the rule but usually the ones that break out in their late teens or early 20s more commonly have career trajectories, like, oh, Chris O'Donnell. That's partially because the juicy roles for men tend to be the ones that require a 30 or 40something actor.  So it's anyone's guess as to whether or not Sheridan can build on his rather solid first five years in the movies. Are you that anyone? Care to take a guess?

While Sheridan isn't the star of X-Men Apocalypse -- the movies are STILL obsessed with making it all about Magneto, Xavier, Wolverine, and Mystique (sigh) even though we've seen that dynamic five times already (fwiw Wolverine is reduced to a cameo this time but he takes over the movie for a couple of minutes). If the franchise can ever reach for the ensemble magnificence of its source material, Sheridan would be in a great position to collect more than just a paycheck as Scott Summers, aka Cyclops, one of the most enduring and important characters in the books. (He's also onscreens right now in Last Days in the Desert which stars Ewan McGregor as both Jesus and Satan.)

How many of his 10 pictures to date have you seen? 

Next up for Sheridan, if it gets distribution, is Detour (reviewed at Tribeca), presumably more X-Men features as well as more leading roles including Friday's Child,  the crime aftermath drama Grass Stains, the Iraq war soldier drama The Yellow Birds (which he co-leads with Alden Ehrenreich), and Spielberg's sci-fi flick Ready Player One. 2017 could be the star-making year for him if two of those break out strong.