Hobbs & Shaw is First and Furious
Luke Hobbs and Deckard Shaw have never liked each other much. But when did a little mutual loathing ever get in the way of success? Hobbs & Shaw’s titular characters stopped bickering long enough to push aside The Lion King and take the weekend’s box office win. The film—the latest in the Fast & the […]
With MAD Magazine Gone, is the Future of Satire … Christian?
MAD Magazine, after 67 years of serving as America’s gap-toothed jester-king of satire, is no more. Oh, it’s not completely gone. Its creators say a year-end issue will come out (presumably at year’s end), along with the occasional special collection. But its days as an entertainment/cultural bellweather and influencer is done. Make no mistake, MAD […]
Tech Tuesday: Make Money at Home! Play Fortnite!
This just in: Fortnite Battle Royale, the wildly popular online shooter game, isn’t as wildly popular as it once was. Part of that dip is apparently the fault of Fortnite itself: Players were disgruntled with the tweaks made to the game in recent weeks and moved away from it—at least temporarily. But simple game fatigue […]
Lion King Roars to Another Win
Quentin Tarantino’s Hollywood (circa 1969) is a place of beauty, decay and brutality. A little like a jungle. But while his characters fit in that world like a hand in glove, you know who’s the real king of the jungle. The Lion King took its second-straight win this weekend, topping Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time […]
Tech Tuesday: What’s the Real King in The Lion King? Technology.
The original Lion King, released in 1994, was a cartoon of the highest order—perhaps traditional Disney 2D animation at its peak. Hand-drawn manes flowed in the animated breeze, and a generation of families flocked to theaters to watch young Simba reclaim his birthright. The film made nearly $1 billion worldwide, which makes it—even 25 years […]
The Lion King Takes the Throne
King of the Jungle? Try King of the Box Office. The Lion King, the computer-animated remake of Disney’s classic cartoon, felt the love of its fans this weekend. It clawed its way to an estimated $185 million in North America—a record for the month of July and the seventh-highest opening ever—and outdistanced its nearest competitor […]
House of Lies
With Love Island, a sleazy British dating show making its stateside debut on CBS recently, television viewers have been reminded of an important truth: Reality TV is just the worst. Is that a fair statement? Most of us instinctively think it is. We think about Big Brother or RuPaul’s Drag Race or even The Radkes, […]
Culture Clips: The Upside Down Edition
Netflix will face some pretty serious challenges in the coming months. Right after NBCUniversal announced that it’ll pull The Office from the popular streaming site when its contract runs out (in 2021), Time Warner chimed in and said it’ll yank another wildly popular sitcom, Friends, in 2020 and slap it on HBO Max. Forbes’ Stephen […]
Spider-Man Swings to No. 1
Last week, I asked this question: Will superhero fans still flock to see a post-Endgame web-slinger? Answer: Yes. Boy howdy, yes. Spider-Man: Far From Home, the first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to land in theaters since the MCU’s climactic Avengers: Endgame, has earned a huge $185.1 million since its unusual Tuesday opening. That’s […]
Culture Clips: Fireworks Galore
We shan’t be talking tomorrow, so let me wish you all (or, at least, you Americans) a very happy Independence Day. But I also need to let you know right off the bat that according to Gallup, pride in our home country is at an all-time low. Why are we so glum? That’s a complicated […]