BadAtGender

I laughed out loud at that, but I'm not sure anyone else in the theater did. Overally, me (and my friends) really had fun with this. It's not a subtle film. The references its making to Apocalypse Now, Moby Dick, and whatnot are pretty much worn freely on the sleeve. But it's managing a neat trick of homaging a lot of serious stuff while still being playful and having fun with the fact it's about a giant ape. It might be a bit fluffy, but it's entertainingly fluffy from start to finish. Comparing it to Godzilla feels a bit apples to oranges, IMO. Godzilla is a really interesting, oblique directorial take on the giant monster concept, but it's held back by a pretty cruddy script. (Don't kill off your most interesting character in the first act, mostly.) Plus, ATJ was pretty much cardboard throughout Godzilla. Hiddleston and Larson might not be playing characters with any more depth, but they're really working hard to be engaging and embracing the fun, which helps a lot for entertainment value. I doubt I'd say that Kong is going to be a great film, but it's a solidly fun viewing experience, which counts for a lot. It slots above most recent big budget genre fare. 4/5

Some of the directing choices in Godzilla are more interesting. I like the pastiche of the 70s period in Kong a lot, but how Edwards constructed the slow burn in Godzilla is pretty keen. However, Kong's script is better. And the actors are overall more engaging.

Not really. She was pretty much doing what the rest of the film was: setting itself contextually in the era (end of the Vietnam war) and doing that honestly while still embracing that it's a film about a giant ape. Just because it is a ridiculous situation doesn't mean that it can't be an honest portrayal of the role the photojournalist played at the time.

I'm pretty sure they do. It's one of those perennial books. It's sold about 14 million copies since it was published in '62. That's slightly more than Old Man and the Sea and slightly less than The Grapes of Wrath. It's about the same as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

My friends and I really enjoyed this. It was a pretty excellent birthday movie. (I'm so happy that March gets some nice blockbuster fare, now, so I do have some good options for my birthday.)

Jeez. Moana is having some pretty great late legs. Yes, the amount it's pulling in is small, but the PTA is holding up remarkably well and it's going to have its fourth straight sub-25% weekend drop. Kinda shocking, because it wasn't holding that well in January, and it looked like it was going to fade pretty rapidly, but here it's still trucking along. I think it's even more shocking it's holding up this well despite coming out on video last week.

I thought La La Land was supposed to end up the highest grossing musical of all time or something.

Going to try to see it preview night, but it's Easter weekend, so it might not be possible for me to sneak away.

I trust Devlin. He directed 16 episodes of Leverage, which was one of the most consistently entertaining TV shows ever. (And several episodes of The Librarians, which might not be Leverage good, but it's still pretty damn fun.)

From the link, they're doing one day of shooting. It's probably not anything major, just that they saw the need for a little additional scene to make the film work better.

Hey, now. We also got The Core, which is also amazing.

Andy Garcia is playing the President. This is going to be amazing.

I don't believe that's the case. If a film enters the public domain, it's freely available for someone to distribute, which shouldn't cause any trademark violations. The trademark prevention would just stop anyone from merchandising anything off of the film, though. For instance, the Max Fleishcher Superman cartoons have been in the public domain for decades. WB still owns the trademark for Superman, his logo, and so forth, but several other companies have released the cartoons. However, WB still owns the original prints, so they tend to have the ability to release the best quality versions of the films.

In terms of 10 day grosses, here's the total percentage each X-Men film had earned by that point: Deadpool: 65% X3: 75% DoFP: 69% X2: 69% Origins: 72% X1: 63% Apoc: 75% First Class: 67% Wolverine: 71% We can see some comparison points. DoFP had the same general release date as Apocalypse and X3, but it got considerably better word of mouth. Deadpool also had a holiday opening weekend (although not quite to the same degree), and did great. The solo Wolverine films tend to have a bit worse legs than the team films in similar situations. Origins held on worse than X2 (although not quite as bad as I thought, considering it did half its business in 4 days. The Wolverine is a touch below the other later summer openers (X1, and First Class.) If we're assuming Logan is getting good word of mouth, and it seems to be, it's probably going to get a slightly better result, but it's still probably going to be near the 68-70% mark. Roughly estimating that it'll be around 150m after this weekend, which probably puts a final total in the 210-220 range.

I picked the two of us because we were probably the biggest outliers, in both directions. But my point is that because the weight is so heavily towards the preseason, it's almost like we're playing box office quidditch. We spend all this time and effort doing these weekly things, only to find out, nope, it was all in something that took a comparitively small amount of time. I get that we want to reward people who do a good job of doing their early predictions. (Although there are quibbles I have there: because we're doing predictions at a fixed time AND there's a specific end date, the predictions for films late in the game are a lot more haphazard.) But I also don't like the feeling that much of the ongoing effort seems relatively meaningless. Consider three players. Player A is a pre-season monster. They make some good and lucky guesses and hit things pretty well, overall. However, they tend to lag behind on the weekly efforts. Player B is pretty balanced, they do pretty good on the preseason predictions and the weeklies. Player C is lacking in preseasons, but does very well on the weeklies. In my thinking, player B should probably have about an even score breakdown: 50% preseasons, 50% weeklies. Player A could be seeing their preseason edge up into the 60-70% range. Player C might see the reverse, their weeklies accounting for 60-70% of the total score. We still have a case where the preseasons are heavily important, but not overwhelmingly so. (Just for curiosity, I took a look at the Summer Game scores. they were quite a bit lower overall, and while the preseasons did count for more than the in-season scores, that mostly had to do with the SOTMs being far less important overall. It wasn't really a case where the preseasons had ballooned in importance, which seemed to be the case here in the Winter Game.) I don't want any of this to be taken like I'm angry. I love the game. It's probably the highlight of the forum for me.

I'm not disagreeing that the preseason should carry a lot of weight, but the degree is kind of overwhelming, considering the amount of effort required to play the game, every week. I mean, I had an exceedingly poor preseason, but it was still was worth (slightly) more than my combined weekly and SOTM score. For Wrath, his preseason was about three times the combined value of his weeklies and SOTMs.

What has been happening in this thread?

It's even more impressive considering how many SOTMs we had this season. Though I would say that it would be nice if the overall possible points were roughly balanced: 1/3rd weeklies, 1/3rd SOTMs, 1/3rd preseasons.

It's been a convention weekend, @Telemachos. I'll get a list together in the next few days.

So that's kinda fitting. Last Winter I think I was hanging around the top 5 most of the season, before a bad preseason dropped me pretty hard. Clearly I need to do better at my preseason predictions, because, oof, that was not a good final performance. Maybe it's something about the awards escalation and platform releases. Still, congrats to @Wrath for getting a win. Much deserved. And it looks like my rivalry with @Telemachos is still ongoing. We had a nice flip from the summer game where I finished strong and he was quite a ways back. I think we're two and two, now. I suppose we can take it up again for round... 5? in a few months.

That preseason score is ouch for me.

Jordan Peele probably has his pick of anything for his next project at this point.

I'm still trying to figure out how I got the second highest SOTM score. I'm BAD at SOTMs. I even forgot to do one entirely.

What the Shit?

I don't know what that is.