Wrath

It was funny. Because of some wrangling between movie chains, the theater that showed it near me is the one that usually does the more arty, adult stuff while the theater that normally does the blockbusters isn't carrying it. And apparently there's a thing where they're intentionally not showing the same flicks. So while you'd expect a film like this to have trailers for BvS and Warcraft and whatnot, instead we got trailers for stuff like Carol, Joy, and the Danish Girl. The Revenant trailer was probably the only one that was even vaguely thematically correct and even that was a stretch for an audience half full of kids.

I agree. During the first few scenes after Rey and Finn met Han and Chewy, I kept thinking "They're doing a really nice job of blending the old and the new."

Well, I wouldn't object, but I'm afraid you're the only one who's really fired up about making it happen.

"Come to the Dark Side. We have candy." That having been said, I bet Han and Leia actually weren't cool parents. They loved each other, but they probably fought constantly and the relationship was really unstable. I bet Leia could be really self-righteous and judgy, and Han was impulsive and unreliable. Han was probably a cool but totally unreliable dad who could be really fun when he was around, but didn't really model good behavior and you couldn't really count on him to deliver anything. He seems like the kind of dad who'd promise to take you to the circus tomorrow, but would instead totally bail on you without saying anything after getting into a huge fight with Leia and not come back for a couple months. And Leia, while reliable, was unavailable because she always had some "important" thing she was giving 110% and it didn't involve you. Luke was probably pretty cool, since by that point he was long past his apparently genetic "whiny teens and early 20s" stage and was super zen about everything. As an alienated kid with anger issues and a lot of insecurity, probably stemming from a bad relationship with his parents, Luke might have been really hard to relate to.

Totally disagree. I thought Adam Driver killed it as someone with both light and dark warring inside. I can only dream of a world where Hayden Christensen was capable of that. On another note, I was thinking about the plot and felt a great disturbance in the force. As though a hundred books cried out in terror... and became non-cannonical. I know only a couple dozen of them are actually canon, but I think even some of them are up the creek now.

Absolutely. My absolute favorite part of the movie came about 10 minutes in when I realized that I'd seen enough of the movie to know that while parts of it might be up and down, it wasn't going to suck. Its floor was RoS or higher, and that made me really, really happy. Overall, I think its my 3rd favorite of the Star Wars movies, but its just barely a hair behind A New Hope and there are now 3 great Star Wars movies (to go with 2 decent ones and 2 bad ones).

Boyega seemed kinda silly and out of place until the second act. He was all jitters and panic in what I kinda consider the prologue. But once he's into the desert he produces about as much comedy as the other 6 movies combined. At first it felt misplaced, but about mid-may through the second act, really, about the time when Chewy starts hamming it up a bit himself, that it started working for me. Boyega really makes it work, and I applaud him for it. In fact, by the end, I liked comedy Finn better than enthusiastic Finn. I thought Boyega and Driver were the strongest. I thought Ridley was actually a little wooden, though being wooden worked fine for Hamill and she's a lot less wooden than he was. Plus, she's up there with Driver as the two most interesting characters in the movie, and arguably two of the three most interesting in the entire series, depending on how much you like Yoda or Darth Maul. Ford was his old awesome Han Solo self, and it was probably the best use of Chewie in any of the movies ("I can tell you were really brave." LOL). Mayhew is a genius at physical comedy, acting underneath that huge costume.

Well, the big thing Finn had going for him was that Ren was already badly wounded and bleeding thanks to Chewy. I suspect that a full-health Ren would have carved through Finn in about 5 seconds, and probably would have handled Rey in relatively short order as well.

Plus, he's a guy who's good at heart (or at least was), but he's insecure as hell and has a ton of unresolved rage issues. I wish they'd gone into that a bit more, though I suspect we'll get a lot of that in 8. He's about the most-layered character (other than Anakin. Ugh) we've seen in the Star Wars universe.

Funny, I was just reading that same article. Hilarious that he was *that* stormtrooper.

Driver killed it.

Not at all. Luke's been in hiding for *decades* and someone shows up out of the blue and hands him his lightsaber? She could be Rhea Perlman and it'd be an incredibly dramatic moment. I think the reviews were spot on. Its not as good as ESB, but its about as good as A New Hope and miles better than everything else. Hmm, A New Hope might be a tiny hair better, but they're within rounding of each other. Its really good. There's no suggestion Luke's got kids, but he certainly has cousins who are also presumably very mitichlorian-gifted.

Terrorist group. The Resistance was an organization that operated inside the systems controlled by the First Order. But the Resistance received their support from a faction of worlds which had broken away from the First Order. Those worlds being the Republic.

Oh my god. It was actually great. I'm so happy it was actually great. I was sure they were going to screw it up, and they didn't.

4. Evolution's Opening Day ($4.43M) vs Revenant and Hateful 8's combined total gross by the end of the year. *Revenant and Hateful 8* 9. Evolution's German gross ($7.08M) vs Sisters' Opening Weekend *Sisters*

Huh. Weird. I was sure I answered this already, but apparently not. Glad I decided to check in on it before the deadline. 1. Will Star Wars' OW exceed $150M? *YES* 2. Will Star Wars' OW exceed $200M? 2000 *YES* 3. Will Star Wars' OW exceed $250M? 3000 *NO* 4. Will Star Wars' OW exceed $300M? *NO* 5. Will Star Wars' Opening Day (including previews) exceed $100M? 2000 *YES* 6. Will Star Wars' Opening Day (including previews) exceed 33.33% of it's OW total? *YES* 7. Will Alvin open to more than $15M? *NO* 8. Will Alvin's OW be at least 5% of Star Wars' OW? 2000 *YES* 9. Will Sisters Open in the top 3? *YES* 10. Will Alvin and Sisters' OW combine to more than $25M? *NO* 11. Will Star Wars' OW exceed 85% of the entire weekend gross of all films? *YES* 12. Will Star Wars' OW exceed 90% of the entire weekend gross of all films? 3000 *NO* 13. Will Heart of the Sea drop less than 65%? *YES* 14. Will Hunger Games stay in the top 5? 2000 *YES* 15. Will Creed have the best drop in the top 10 (excluding anything that may be expanding)? *NO* 16. Will Extraction have a PTA above $2500? *YES* 17. Will The Good Dinosaur have a Friday Increase of at least 190% *NO* 18. Will Star Wars' Thursday Previews total exceed the total gross of 2nd to 5th places' 3 day weekend? 3000 *YES* 19. Will Chipmunks have a better Sunday drop than Peanuts? *YES* 20. Will The Night Before drop less than 35% this weekend? *YES* 21. Name any one film in the top 15 that drops more than 70% (or state none)? 3000 *NONE* 22. Will The Good Dinosaur cross $100M? 2000 *NO* 23. Will Mojin: The Lost Legend enter in the top 18? *YES* 24. Will Peanuts have a weekend above $1M? *YES* 25. Will Star Wars cross $400M WW by the end of Sunday? *YES* 26. Will Star Wars cross $500M WW by the end of Sunday? 3000 *YES* 27. Will Brooklyn end the weekend with 400k of Spotlight? *YES* 28. Will Frankenstein have a weekend below 125k? 2000 *YES* 29. Name the film that finishes 4th this weekend? *Good Dinosaur* 30. Were there enough Star Wars questions in this week's section? *Obviously not, or you wouldn't be asking this one." Bonuses 20/30 - 2000 21/30 - 3000 22/30 - 4000 23/30 - 5000 24/30 - 6000 25/30 - 8000 26/30 - 10000 27/30 - 12000 28/30 - 15000 29/30 - 20000 30/30 - 25000 Part 2 1. Fine! What will the OW actually be? 234.5M 2. What will Alvin and Sisters' combined OW be? 23.3M 3. What will Hunger Games total gross be by sunday? 254.5M Part 3. 1. Star Wars 3. Sisters 5. MJ2 8. Krampus 10. Spectre 12. Peanuts

Here we go. A lot of folks are chickening out on making predictions on TFA, making finding predicts for TFA more difficult than I expected. But they're devoting 100% of their attention to it anyway, so even references to Road Chip and Sisters even harder to find. Oh, well. Compared to other sides, we're a little optimistic on TFA and Road Chip, but pretty much in the middle on Sisters, given the relative lack of other predicts this weekend. To be fair, predicts are kinda all over the place on TFA. Usually, the error Ratio goes down as predicted BO goes up. MJ2 was 11.56%, Spectre was 11.39%, etc. But as has been discussed, that seems to break down once a movie is predicted to open over $100M or so. After that, it seems to slowly start working in the other direction as the pool of comparables suddenly gets really small. Anyway, I'm sure most of us are catching TFA tonight, and I'm looking forward to that. The Force Awakens Mean: 234.3M Median: 233.6M StnDev: 38.01M Ratio (StnDev/Mean): 16.22% High: 313M Low: 155M BO.com 229M Deadline 203M ScreenRant.com Variety 210M Road Chip Mean: 12.9M Median: 13.2M StnDev: 3.44M Ratio (StnDev/Mean): 26.55% High: 21.4M Low: 5M BO.com 12.5M Deadline 12M ScreenRant.com Variety 12M Sisters Mean: 13.3M Median: 13.7M StnDev: 4.69M Ratio (StnDev/Mean): 35.30% High: 22M Low: 4.5M BO.com 229M Deadline 15M ScreenRant.com Variety 13M

Oh, and as entertaining as it is, I'm not taking Boxofficerules predict at face value. I'm as amused as everyone else, and I'm extremely flexible when it comes to what constitutes a valid predict, but that's not a serious predict.

Well, sure, but everyone knew that would be the case. I mean, they probably didn't think it would be quite *this* bad, but they knew it was coming to some degree. Which is presumably why Hateful Eight is only in limited release on Christmas. My guess is it won't go fully wide for a couple weeks to let Star Wars start dying down a bit.

Star Wars - 234M Alvin - 14.5M Sisters - 10.1M

Think I'm going to go with Entertainment Weekly as the replacement predictor unless anyone has a better idea. I sort of assumed I'd go with BoxOfficeGuru, but Gitesh Pandya puts out his predicts a little late for our purposes.

No one knows about the movie itself. I remember ages ago when the trailer for Steve Martin's Sargent Bilko really did make it look hilarious, when in fact the actual film was almost a crime against humanity (in defense of my gulibility, I'd like to point out the movie not only starred Martin, but also Dan Aykroyd and Phil Hartman, and was directed Johnathon Lynn who also did My Cousin Vinny. It was at least possible it would be good). So, I'm not exactly disagreeing with you (though I'll admit I did like this trailer), just pointing out that your question will be unanswerable for the next six months.

In the Heart of the Sea Prediction: 13.4M +/- 2.3M (1 standard deviation) Actual: 11.1M (off by 2.3M, so 0.62 stndev) Not bad. Not great, but not bad either. Deadline did the best, Variety was narrowly better than us, and we were better than BO.com. Best predict was by Ethan Hunt at 11M.

DARN IT. Was helping Wrathette #1 with her homework and forgot tonight was the night. Now I'm hoping Ride Along 2 bombs hard. 10% of 13 hours 10% of N... HAHAHAHA. Absolutely no way. Edit - I bumped my 13 Hours investment from 20% down to 10%.

Well, that weekend turned out a little more boring than I'd hoped. I ended up getting busy this afternoon so I'll wrap up the weekend's results, such as they are, tomorrow morning. But other than out of a sense of completeness, I don't think anyone really cares. Because its here. This week. Its actually here. Rather than blather on any longer, I'm just going to stop now so we can have a few more seconds of enjoying this. Please provide your 12/18 - 20 Opening Weekend predicts for: Alvin Sisters Star Wars: Force Awakens Deadline is now going to be sometime between midnight Wednesday and Thursday midmorning (US Eastern time), depending on when I get to it.