BadAtGender

Happy and Everything is Awesome got nominated. A feel-good tune from an animated film is a solid bet for a nom. Unlikely to win, but it could be in the running. Best Original Song is a crapshoot category. Things that seem obvious may miss. Things that aren't even close to the radar get a nom.

Seriously? DWA's lowest CGI flicks come in at 83m. You think this is going to throw under Turbo and Penguins? Besides those, every single one of their CGI films is above the $100m mark. Even Peabody & Sherman and Rise of the Guardians got there.

What's that joke about Speed 2? When it came time to make Under Siege 2, they didn't have a script, so they took the Speed 2 script and filed off the serial numbers. But then they wanted to make Speed 2, so they took the Die Hard 3 script and switched it up. But then they wanted to make Die Hard 3, so they took the Lethal Weapon 4 script and very slightly altered the characters. Then they made Lethal Weapon 4 and said, "fuck it, who needs a script?"

Second highest grosses score and it's still negative. I have to work on that.

Dammit. The Cinerama is having a 70mm festival, so I was hoping that I'd get a chance to finally see Lawrence of Arabia. However, the showing for tomorrow is sold out AND I've been called into work when it's happening. And the showing next Saturday only has 14 seats left, plus it's incredibly likely I'll get called into work. (I've worked every Saturday since I started, and I don't expect the situation to change any time soon.) So I guess I'll just have to wait until the next time they show it. Next year or something. @NuTella Lover of Sky Beams is probably so disappointed in me.

I'm glad there were no challenges this year.

Actually, it wasn't the top 15 that I was worried about, it was the worldwide top 10 and weekends... which... I did not fare too well at. (And China, but I abstained.) When I saw that I'd dropped down to 9th thanks to those, I thought it was over. Too much ground to make up, and I thought that Sausage Party had doomed me because TMNT2 went from a painful yet acceptable overprediction to another double hit. Along with Neighbors 2 and... Ice Age 5, I think were my top 15 misses. But I suppose that since nobody did better than 12 correct, it evened out. And there were plenty of people who were in the same boat with TMNT dropping to 16th. Anyway, today's been fun. I got called into work, so I was checking things in the morning before i got in there, which got me through @JJ-8's various tables. And then I was working for 4 hours, so I couldn't see @chasmmi do the live countdown. Once i got off work, I put on a podcast and started scrolling through the results. I was both relieved that I didn't futz things enough for a third near tie with @NuTella Lover of Sky Beams. (Which, if you remember, is exactly what happened in the Winter Game. I hovered around the top 5 all season, and even had one week where i got a perfect score, but an abysmal preseason dropped me to 14th.) And then to see I'd cracked the top 10. So then I'm reading down, enjoying the commentary (hey! where's that best and worst stuff for the top 3, Chas? Get on that!). Top 9, 7, 5. Feeling pretty good about myself. Last year I was 6th or 5th, I can't remember exactly, I just know it was literally one question away from Tele, but it looked like I'd be doing better this time around. Personal improvement is important and all. Top 4, yes. Okay, I made it to the top 3, and then... I shit you not, my phone died right then. Podcast died, screen went blank. Empty battery. And I'm sitting on a bus, with no way to keep reading until I got home. Which took another 45 minutes or so. Ride the bus, grab some lunch, walk the half dozen blocks to my place and finally, FINALLY, get back online to see the results. Man, what a feeling. To hold it out in an amazingly close final tally. I'm glad I took my advice after the Winter Game and didn't completely SO many things could have upset these scores. If @Chewy hadn't disappeared for the last part of the game, he'd have gotten it easily. If I had edited my preseason stuffs and lost that week 0 score, I'd probably be doing much worse. (Granted, much of that would probably have been to adding another hundred million to CACW and killing my accuracy bonuses, not specifically the loss of 30+k points from the week.) If I hadn't really, really agonized over my choices for SOTM-5. (Has anyone calculated what the best possible selection of movies is? I'm curious about that.) If, if, if. Anyway, Thanks to Chasmmi and JJ-8 for running this joint. It's a blast as always. A big thanks to @Baumer loves Oogieloves for starting this whole shebang. I'm a relative newcomer, but it's something I now look forward to each summer. I will admit that I had a personal goal of improving each year, so I honestly don't know how I'm going to do that next year. Thanks to Tele for being a wonderful Nemesis, even if you DIDN'T QUITE BRING IT THIS YEAR, OLD MAN! (In my head, Tele and I have this sort of relationship regarding the games: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=327) Thanks to @Exxdee @Infernus @Jake Gittes, my brother in abstention @Wrath, and the other Wrath (@WrathOfHan), for providing a challenging encouragement week in and week out to bring my A-game. There were a few weeks I thought about dropping it entirely. (On the thought of things that could have upset the final balance. Missing a single week, even one, would have spun it all different.) And Thanks to anyone else I missed there. You're all great, and it's a honor to play against you. A huge thank you to both Chewy and @darkelf, both excellent players who'd be well-deserving winners had things shifted just slightly one way or another. It is a privilege to be measured against you. Most of all, thanks to everyone who makes the forums what they are and allows them to be a place of entertainment and refuge for me. I started this summer unemployed and rather unsure about what to do with myself. I finish still somewhat unsure, but at least employed and in a better spot. This place, and the game, has no small part of keeping me in good spirits through the rough spots. Now... bring on the Winter, because there's always something I can do better. It's time for me to really hit my worldwides. See you there.

Wait, what?

@NuTella Lover of Sky Beams right now:

Yeah, but now we can look forward to seeing Friday bumps above 200% again. That's always fun. And family films may see 100%+ Saturday bumps. 4x weekend multipliers. Good stuff.

I almost abstained on SOTM 13.

Well, I suppose that could have gone worse.

There's always the winter game.

Antsy to find out how our rubber match ended up?

Now I sits, and waits, and wonders how badly I screwed up this year and how many places I'll fall.

Maybe... but those are some of the best action set pieces ever filmed.

I can't even remember which side of 300 I want it to fall on.

1. Will Light between oceans Open to more than $7M? NO 2. Will Light Between Oceans Open to more than $9M? 2000 NO 3. Will Morgan make more than $5M? YES 4. Will Morgan make more than $7M? NO 5. Will Don't Breathe make more than $11m? YES 6. Will Don't Breathe make more than $13m? YES 7. Will the top three films combine to more than $25m? 3000 YES 8. Will Suicide Squad stay in the top 3? 2000 YES 9. Will Sausage Party fall more than 40%? 3000 NO 10. Will Yoga Hosers have a PTA above $3,000? YES 11. Will Klown forever have a PTA above $1,500? NO 12. Will Mechanic stay above War Dogs? NO 13. Will Bad mom's cross $100M on or before Saturday? YES 14. Will Hell or High water stay in the top 12? NO 15. Will SLOP have a higher percentage drop than Kubo? 2000 16. Will Jason Bourne have a higher PTA than Pete's Dragon? YES 17. Will Lights Out drop more than 60%? 3000 NO 18. Will Under the Sea 3D cross $35,090,000? YES 19. Will Jungle Book ever stop being in American cinemas? Presumably at some point, but who knows. Maybe it'll become the new Rocky Horror. 20. Was it confusing for the fake out bonus questions to be in 19th place and not here? A little. Does this mean there are two bonus questions? 14/20 - 2000 15/20 - 3000 16/20 - 5000 17/20 - 7000 18/20 - 9000 19/20 - 12000 20/20 - 15000 Part 2 1. Yoga Hosers' OW be? 5000 $45,678 2. What Hands of Stone's PTA be? 5000 $789 3. What film will make closest to $2,000,000 this weekend? 5000 Hands of Stone Part 3 2. Suicide Squad 4. Pete's Dragon 7. War Dogs 9. Morgan 12. Finding Dory 15. Ghostbusters 3/6 - 2000 4/6 - 5000 5/6 - 9000 6/6 - 13000

I don't think Shrek's win was a huge surprise... but it was also the first year, so I'm not sure there was a whole lot of assumption. At the time, though, I think that while MI was seen as a great film, Shrek had the pop cultural sensation going for it. MI was overshadowed in that regard in the holiday season by Harry Potter and FotR. Brave was probably a bigger surprise. It wasn't as well regarded among Pixar films, even at the time of release. (IMNSHO, a lot of the criticism against it is unfounded.) However, neither film made any particular waves. They did solid business, got good reviews, and that was basically it. Other years that were perhaps a surprise: 2005, with Wallace & Gromit over Howl's Moving Castle, and 2014. LEGO missing the nomination threw the race wide open, with solid reasons to suggest that three of the nominees could have pulled out a win instead of BH6.

Revenge of the Fallen had one thing going for it. It was one of the first post-TDK films to utilize a fair amount of IMAX footage. Of course, while watching the film, it became pretty clear that Bay didn't have a clear idea what would be the best places to use said footage. For instance, during the climactic battle around the pyramids, you'd think there'd be some extended sequence utilizing the full glory of the IMAX screen, right? Well, no. There's a lone shot of a few jets getting ready to launch from an aircraft carrier. And generally speaking, the shift in aspect ratios between shots happened haphazardly and without rhyme or reason. However! However, there was one bit that turned out to be brilliant in this, although I'm sure it was unintentional. Midway through the film, Optimus is alone and facing off against the army of Decepticons. The Autobots are racing to try and get to him. So you've got action shots of Optimus fighting in full IMAX glory (IIRC in several shots he's on screen in "actual size") while the Chevy Brand Autobots are full throttling their way through standard aspect ratio. The scene cuts between the two, IMAX, normal, IMAX, normal. Fight, race, fight race. And... it turns out that this works. The fighting shots are given the full room to give oomph, and by switching to the narrower ratio for the speeding cars, it makes them feel faster and increases the tension of "will they or won't they get there in time?" If only Bay had been able to turn the other 2 hours and 15 minutes of the film into something that worked half as well, it might have been okay overall. But, alas, he didn't.

ftfy Studio and "friends" responses are about two levels below Cinemascore in being a valuable piece of information.

Time for Kubo.

I don't actually know. It looks like Funimation currently owns the distribution rights to it, so maybe on their streaming service? Amazon only has it dubbed. There's probably few things that better show how uneven the domestic anime industry has been than how many times Akira has shifted hands. Originally Streamline, then Pioneer/Geneon when Streamline closed, then Bandai, when Geneon closed, then Funimation when Bandai closed.

The subtitle translation was new, too. (Although, I can't actually remember if Streamline/Harmony Gold released a subbed version. Probably not.)

That's the Pioneer/Geneon translation. The Streamline/Harmony Gold version was released in '89. In the original, Kaneda was voiced by Cam Clarke (Leonardo in 80s TMNT), in the newer one by Johnny Yong Bosch (Vash the Stampede in Trigun).