November 7th, 2014
Another late review, but there are special circumstances here. Fox has gone with a digital delivery system for their screeners, which means I have to stream the movie or TV show. Here's the problem with that. At any given time, I'm working on two or three projects for work and Firefox tends to quickly suck up a lot of resources, which cause me to restart the browser rather frequently to free up the RAM. (It's not uncommon for Firefox to be using more than 2 gigs of RAM at a time.) This is fine when all I'm doing is reading box office data or cast lists. But it makes it nearly impossible to stream something. Oh if only I had a separate machine I could use to watch movies. ... Oh that's right, it's called a Blu-ray player and I have one right under my computer desk. Anyhow, so after trying and failing to get the streaming to work, I just decided to buy a few of the screeners for movies and TV shows that I previously signed up to receive a physical copy. Of course, I only did this for films and TV shows I thought were going to be good, because it's my money. The first to arrive was Mr. Peabody & Sherman. I loved the original cartoons, but was the adaptation into a feature-length movie a success? Or do these characters work better in a five-minute format?
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March 1st, 2014
2014 continued its strong run in February with The Lego Movie beating even the high end expectations and will become the first film released in 2014 to reach $200 million. March doesn't look as strong, as no film is on track to hit $200 million, but there are five films that have a chance at $100 million. Granted, not all of them will get there; in fact, there's a chance only one of them will get there. Divergent is the film I think has the best shot at the century club, but it could be joined by Mr. Peabody and Sherman, for instance, which is earning surprisingly strong reviews. Noah is a big-budget Bible epic and the studio has to be hoping for at least $100 million, but the buzz is quite negative and there have been reports of troubles behind-the-scenes. Last March was led by Oz The Great and Powerful, which pulled in more than $200 million domestically. I don't think any film opening this March will match that figure. In addition, The Croods and G.I. Joe: Retaliation also hit the $100 million milestone, while Olympus Has Fallen came very close. Granted, there were also some big bombs last March, like The Host, but even so, I think 2014 will lose ground in the year-over-year comparison.
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