Ralph Breaks the Box Office
Have a nice Thanksgiving, dear reader? Had your fill of turkey? Asking Santa Claus for roomier sweatpants? Well, my friends, you have company. You’re not the only ones who stuffed yourselves over the Thanksgiving weekend. Take Disney, for instance, which cooked Ralph Breaks the Internet for Thanksgiving film feasters. The sly and sweetish animated flick […]
Culture Clips: Closing the Book on Magazines?
The world will have a few more trees in the future … but fewer magazines. Back in the most ancient of days, when the internet still had its new-tech smell, many predicted that print was on its way out. And while that hasn’t been true across the board (books are doing just fine, thanks much), […]
Grindelwald Grabs Gold
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald stole the box-office championship win this weekend, snatched an estimated $62.2 million in North America. (We won’t blame the movie’s notoriously sticky-pawed Niffler, but its presence couldn’t have hurt.) That’s about $13 million less than its predecessor pitchforked into its own monetary barn, but still certainly enough to keep […]
How Stan Lee Changed the World
As you’ve probably heard by now, Stan Lee died yesterday at the age of 95. Many have eulogized Lee as a “comics legend,” and that’s wholly fair. As a writer, editor, publisher and eventually chairman of Marvel Comics, he created or co-created some of the world’s most famous superheroes and helped redefine the genre itself. […]
The Grinch in a Cinch
In theaters high and theaters low, Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch stole the whole show. It earned $66 million, or so they say, The weekend’s top movie, far and away. Bohemian Rhapsody was a wee-distant two, $30.8 mil. was the best it could do. But cry not for Freddy and the rest of the band. Its […]
Bohemian Rhapsody is the Champion, My Friend
Audiences had just four words for the box office this weekend: Long live the Queen. Bohemian Rhapsody, a melodious docudrama about the 1970s-80s rock band Queen and its frontman Freddy Mercury, performed a kind of magic thanks to its money-spending fans, rocking the box office for an estimated $50 million stateside. Add in its overseas […]
Culture Clips: For Halloween, Some Scary Screens
Halloween is a big deal in the United States. The average American will spend $185.50 for the hallo-day, including $76 on candy. But we’ve got another major day to commemorate this week as well (without so many bite-size candy bars, presumably): On Nov. 1, the MPAA ratings system will turn 50. And to mark the […]
Halloween Scares Up Another Win
Most of the movies at the multiplex turned on all their lights and hid in their secret basement bunkers this weekend. After all, Michael Myers was on the prowl again, and he had its competition running scared. Myers, the masked boogeyman from the Halloween movies, dragged the franchise’s latest iteration to its second-straight win, hacking […]
Culture Clips: It’s a Boo-tiful World
As we fill big bowls with candy in preparation for next week’s onslaught of little ghosts and goblins, then eat all the candy and fill the bowls again, we know that we live in a time of fearsome frights. And I’m not just talking about Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House, which is apparently keeping […]
Halloween Does Its Tricks, Gets Its Treats
Forget the candy corn. Forget the bite-size chocolate bars. Halloween came a-knocking this weekend, and audiences filled its bag with lots of cold, hard cash. Halloween, a direct sequel to that 40-year-old slasher “classic” once again starring Jamie Lee Curtis, knifed its way to an estimated $77.5 million in North America. That would’ve been an […]