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Didn’t Jackie Chan retire from action movies? Did I dream that? Google seems to back me up; about five years ago, Chan said he was done with the action films that made him an international superstar. A year later, though, Chan said he wasn’t retired, and four years after that he’s continued to appear in various martial-arts and action projects. And now here’s The Foreigner, with Chan cast as a guy who regularly flips dudes through tables.
The spotlight in the DC Extended Universe is squarely on women right now. Wonder Woman is still tying moviegoers in knots; just one more good weekend will make it the second biggest DCEU movie in the U.S., and it could pass Batman v Superman for the top spot not long after. Princess Diana will get back in the spotlight in Justice League this fall, and last summer was all about Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn stealing scenes from Will Smith and the rest of the Suicide Squad. Basically DC sisters are doing it for themselves.
I don’t quite understand why, but people really seem to want to eat the Minions, the lovable yellow goobers from the Despicable Me franchise. When Minions came out, there were Minions Twinkies, and there have been Minions menus at IHOP too. Now generally I am a big fan of movie food, but this goes beyond my limits. The Minions are sentient beings; why would you want to consume them?!?
Every time Pixar releases another sequel like Monsters University or Cars 3, a hefty portion of fans wring their hands and declare that the studio is past its prime or lost its edge. And there’s probably a certain amount of truth to the idea that Pixar is more about extending franchises than creating new one (although they’ve still pumped out a fair amount of new movies lately, like The Good Dinosaur, Brave, and Inside Out, which might be the best Pixar production ever).
If I had to pick the most egregious example of product placement ever, I would nominate the scene from Transformers: Age of Extinction, when the entire movie stops to examine the wreckage of a crash involving an alien spaceship and a Bud Light truck. The camera pans across a street littered with Bud Light bottles; then Mark Wahlberg picks one up, cracks it open, and takes a healthy swig. And while he’s shilling beer, there’s a second product placement in the background; just over his shoulder, very much in focus, is a giant Goodyear Tires sign.
Just last week, we were commemorating the anniversary of the release of Ghostbusters II, which opened in theaters on June 16, 1989. The movie came out 28 years ago, which means the twin babies who played Sigourney Weaver’s son Oscar in the film were about that age too. That makes this story even sadder; TMZ reports that Hank Deutschendorf has died of an apparent suicide.
Has any franchise ever been more successful and less beloved than Transformers? Even before this week’s release of Transformers: The Last Knight, the series had made almost $3.8 billion worldwide, despite an average Rotten Tomatoes score of 32 and three straight sequels that run the gamut from “kind of crummy” to “possibly the actual worst mega-budget blockbuster ever made.”
We’re still reeling from the news that Phil Lord and Chris Miller have walked off (or been fired from) the Han Solo spinoff Star Wars anthology film, but this movie has a release date in less than a year, and it is coming to theaters, with Lord/Miller or not. Although the news that the directing duo was not finishing Han Solo was announced today, the search for a replacement was already underway. Deadline says that Lucasfilm’s top pick at the moment is Ron Howard, the Oscar-winning filmmaker of movies like Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, and The Da Vinci Code:
You know the Transformers series, which unveils its fifth film, The Last Knight, later this week. But did you know that the franchise largely exists because of the war in Iraq? It’s true; producer Don Murphy originally pitched Hasbro on making a G.I. Joe film series, but because of the political climate in the early 2003 after 9/11, they were hesitant and suggested Murphy instead devote his energies to the Transformers. Hasbro did eventually make two big-budget G.I. Joes, but only after the Transformers became a massive success with Paramount and DreamWorks. That’s just one of the facts featured in the latest installment of You Think You Know Movies!
It’s happened to all of us. You’re watching the movie, and you’re into it, and then... a character makes a catastrophic mistake. They run upstairs when they should go out the front door. They bring the Transformer back to life rather than leaving it in a dump where they found it. They break quarantine when they’ve been screaming for the last 20 minutes how now matter what happens, they can’t let the virus escape. And you sit there, squirming in your seat, because there’s nothing you can do about it.
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