Culture Clips: Unwrapping a Streaming Service for Christmas?
Christmas Day is over, and some of us are still swimming through used wrapping paper in our living rooms. But we’re not the only ones who gave and/or got a few gifts in our stockings. Burgeoning streaming services did, too—even if they came at the expense of other streaming services. Take the upstart Disney+, for […]
Plugged In’s Christmas Eve Star Wars Showdown
Answer or answer not: There is no try. But that didn’t stop a couple of Plugged In’s intrepid members—Associate Editor Kristin Smith and Plugged In Director Adam Holz—from answering a few Star Wars-related questions for me. The catch: Adam’s a lifelong Star Wars aficionado, and Kristin … is not. And whether you lined up in […]
Star Wars Rises to the Top of the Box Office
The Empire lives! The empire of the mouse, that is. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker skipped through hyperspace all the way to No. 1 at the box office, surprising absolutely no one. It earned an estimated $175.5 million in North America en route—a figure that under most circumstances would be absolutely flabbergasting, but in […]
Top Television 2019: Plugged In’s Year-End Picks
Of all the entertainment media we write about here, television shows might be the most difficult for Plugged In to reliably define as “the best.” A song? It’s only four minutes long. A game? Sure, some seem to go on forever, but they still each have an endpoint. In other realms, most every entertainment product, […]
Culture Clips: Santa Feels Neglected
It’s pretty lonely up at the North Pole these days. Oh, sure, Santa has his elves and reindeer to keep him company. But not many kids actually mail the jolly old elf letters these days—just emails and, if they’ve got connections, maybe an occasional text. Even when St. Nick makes his annual December trek to […]
Jumanji Takes It to the Next Level
Elsa, that Disney maven of ice and snow, is a pretty powerful princess, to be sure. She and her chilly cohorts spent three whole weeks warding off all cinematic comers. But sometimes even the nicest of ice crystals can get knocked off its perch by a well-placed Rock. Jumanji: The Next Level ended Frozen II’s […]
Culture Clips: Tis the Season … for Awards
Forget the snowball fights so picturesquely common this time of year. In 2019—at least at Netflix’s movie headquarters—they’ll be pelting each other with Golden Globes. OK, so perhaps we’re being a bit premature. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association hasn’t handed out any actual statuettes just yet, just the nominations. But one thing’s for sure: The […]
Frozen II Ices Another Win
Sometimes we don’t want something new. Sometimes, during Christmas, kids open their presents, take a quick glance at their shiny new toys and pick up a doll that was made sometime during the Nixon administration. This weekend’s box office was a little like that. Frozen II once again escaped a tangled field and became this […]
All I Want For Christmas is … a New VeggieTales Episode?
My family’s first encounter with the VeggieTales franchise came waaaaay back in 1996, when my kids were young, Phil Vischer’s veggies were still garden fresh and the technology that brought them to life was still in its infancy, too. “The Toy That Saved Christmas” was the very first episode we ever watched, and it was […]
Frozen II Proves It’s No Turkey
Frozen II entered its second week as, technically, a leftover. But as any Thanksgiving-loving American knows, sometimes leftovers are the best. So no one was particularly surprised when Disney’s Anna and Elsa once again snagged the biggest piece of pie. Frozen II iced its second win by gobbling up another $85.3 million (according to early […]