Author: Sutter Cane

Yeah, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End made tons of money this weekend, set records for the Memorial Day weekend, yadda yadda… we’ll get to that. But first, I have a more pressing question: How in the world did Wild Hogs find its way back into the top ten this weekend?

Well, Spiderman 3‘s opening weekend records held off the first serious contender, and look to stand for at least another week as Shrek the Third opened very well- but not record-setting well- with $122 million from 4,122 screens and a $29k average. Spiderman 3‘s claims to history may very well fall next weekend when Pirates [...]

As expected, Spiderman 3 remained atop the box office charts this past weekend, collecting $60 million, maintaining a $14k average, and raising its domestic haul to $242 million. What’s more troubling for Sam Raimi and Sony is that it fell 60% from last weekend, and it’s strongest competition was the well-reviewed but starless 28 Weeks [...]

Today we’re continuing our countdown of the ten movies I love so much I could watch them on a loop (just putting this column together has prompted me to revisit some of them). These are the crème de la crème, the cream of the crop, and possibly some other metaphor involving dairy products that I [...]

Maybe I should have done this way back when I started this column. I know some of my illustrious commenters did, and I guess I’m just slow for not catching on until now. But I’ve always felt that you could tell a lot about a person based on their taste in movies, and lets face [...]

You know, some Sundays I wake up, watch Sunday Morning Shootout on AMC (which any serious industry buff should be watching), then sit down at my computer to look at the weekend’s box office returns, and think: “what in the hell am I going to write about this week?” Well, not so this Sunday. There [...]

You may remember back when Will Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness opened that I said something like ‘never underestimate the power of a movie star.’ Well, someone more knowledgeable than me (I know that’s hard to imagine, but to be fair I am referring to the great screenwriter and film philosopher William Goldman) also said [...]

Lighthearted and snarky is usually the order of the day here at moviegasm. But sometimes things happen in the world outside of Hollywood (a world that’s easy to forget about from inside Hollywood) that just hit me like a ton of bricks. I’m talking, of course, about the Virginia Tech shootings. As it happens, and [...]

Actually, Disturbia took the box office crown again on what was a relatively lackluster weekend, but I hate repeating the titles on these things, so second place Fracture gets the headline. The official numbers came in with Disturbia doing $13.4 million, a decent slide of 39%, and a $40 million total off a $20 million [...]

Well, it took awhile, but something has finally come out of Project Greenlight that’s making money. It’s tempting to insert some Ben Affleck joke here, but instead I’ll get right to the point: I’m referring, of course, to the engaging young star of that competition’s second film, The Battle for Shaker Heights, Shai LaBeouf, whose [...]

Blades of Glory hung on to the top spot at the box office in spite of a trio of well-hyped new releases, slipping just 30% in its second week to $23 million, making its total $68 million on a budget of $61 million. It’ll clear triple-digits easily. Meet the Robinsons remained in second with $17 [...]

Folks, it’s not often I get to say this, but watch out for Joon-ho Bong (stop snickering, Cheech). The Korean director most recently made the critically-hailed monster movie (yes, you’re reading that correctly) The Host, which actually played at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. I had the good fortune to catch The Host a while [...]

Will Ferrell had a tough run there for a while. After launching himself to A-list, $20 mil-a-picture status with Old School, Elf, and Anchorman, it seemed like his agents convinced him to say yes to any project willing to accommodate his price tag. Thus we were subjected to Kicking and Screaming, Bewitched, and The Producers, [...]

Obviously, I watch many more movies than I actually review on this site. Generally I feel like I have to have something to say, some perspective that’s worth sharing with you because I’m not seeing it in mainstream reviews or on other sites. Usually, I like it to be a good movie that’s not getting [...]

< Among a slew of new films crowding the box office this weekend, the new CGI incarnation ofTMNT (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for the uninitiated) took the crown with $25.4 million from 3100 theatres or an $8k average. A tight $34 million budget makes me wonder what those Disney accountants are doing with all the [...]

The same two movies dominated the top two spots at the box office this weekend, which is normally bad news for me. That means that nothing as interesting as 300‘s $70 million opening happened, of course, but I suppose it’s too much to expect numbers like that every weekend. 300 held on to the top [...]

Let me just say right out that I am not one of those David Fincher junkies. You know, those people that prattle on and on about Fight Club (frequently the same people that will go on and on about Magnolia), and how cool it is, while they throw around words like consumerism without being really [...]

You know, normally when I sit down to discuss the weekend’s box office returns with you, I try to come up with some angle, story, or take on the figures that you won’t find anywhere else. For the most part, that won’t be the case today, because everyone who keeps even half an eye on [...]

This may rank as the worst pun in the short history of moviegasm, but audiences went hog-wild for Wild Hogs this weekend as it brought in a strong $38 million from 3,287 theatres for an $11.5k average per screen. It’s easy to look at a figure like this, especially compared to Zodiac‘s paltry $13 million [...]

Well, boys and girls, just like that Oscar season has come and gone, but thankfully for us blogers and journalists, the night was not only pretty entertaining, it had a few surprises in store as well, and they bode well for some young filmmakers.

In what might be seen as an affront to last night’s Oscar proceedings, Ghost Rider remained atop the box office this past weekend, pulling in $19.7 million, down a sharp but not dismal 56%, for a $78.6 million total. Budgeted at $110 million, Rider will have to do some business overseas to justify the expenditure. [...]

Day five of our Best Picture nominee countdown brings us to the movie I think is most likely to take the prize, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel. While I think most people will probably concede that Babel is either the frontrunner for the Oscar or neck-in-neck with Little Miss Sunshine, more and more I’m finding myself [...]

Well, whatever the state of other current Hollywood fads, comic book movies are definitely still in vogue, and will be for some time to come now that Sony’s Ghost Rider adaptation has opened to a very good $51.5 million over the four-day weekend from 3600 theatres for a $14k average. And not a moment too [...]

God, those titles are getting worse, aren’t they? Nevertheless, welcome to day four of our Oscar movie marathon of reviews here at moviegasm. Today we’re going to talk about the underdog indie comedy Little Miss Sunshine, which many regard as the frontrunner for Best Picture. Obviously, I don’t, this only being day four and all, [...]

The best thing I can say about Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is that I left the theatre with that uncontrollable smile, that really jazzed feeling you get after seeing a movie that’s firing on all cylinders. One that you know is really good half-way through, and you still know it’s good two hours or two [...]

Day two of our Oscar extravaganza brings us to Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima, his powerful companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers, this time telling the story of the famous battle from the perspective of our Japanese enemies.

Welcome, moviegasm fanatics, to the first of five reviews this week, each day my take on one of the year’s Best Picture nominees. For reasons I haven’t really thought about, I’m going to post them in order of their likelihood to take home the coveted statuette, which means we begin with Stephen Frears’ The Queen.

What can you say about Eddie Murphy? I mean, really? When I saw the trailer for Daddy Day Care, I knew it was going to bomb. $104 million domestic box office. And when I saw the trailer for The Haunted Mansion? I knew that was going to bomb, too. $75 million domestic box office. So [...]

You know, maybe there is something to Bill Goldman’s famous adage that nobody knows anything. I never thought that applied to me, because I’m right so much of the time. But today I am happy to announce that I was, in point of fact, wrong about something. I predicted some weeks ago that with the [...]

Before we get into the actual weekend box-office figures, I just want to take a moment for a little ha-ha-I-told-you-so moment. I’m not usually so petty, but… okay, yes, I am. But at last night’s SAG awards, who took the feature acting trophies? Forrest Whitaker, Helen Mirren, Eddie Murphy, and Jennifer Hudson. All reaffirming the [...]

Well, kids, it’s finally that time of year. The nominations for the 79th annual Academy Awards were announced yesterday, and we movie bloggers are thanking the Oscar gods that there were actually some surprises to the proceedings.

Horror films come and go in cycles more regularly than almost any other genre in. For a while they’re hot, then the returns dwindle as studios beat whatever the current formula is into the ground, then they disappear for five or ten years. You may remember from a digression in an earlier column that horror [...]

Alright, look- I’m not completely cured of my movie snobbery. I suppose I knew it would take more than Black Christmas. People don’t change overnight, after all. So you’re going to have to forgive me as I tap out my gut reaction to the news that Stomp the Yard catapulted to the top of the [...]

It’s been a long Christmas holiday, and your humble narrator chose to take a week off from the box office wrap, but I didn’t use the time to go check out Letters from Iwo Jima, or Children of Men. And I didn’t stay home and watch It’s A Wonderful Life. No, instead, I went and [...]

I recently came to a disturbing realization. It’s hard for me to admit this to all four of you at once, but… somehow, recently I think… through some weird lycanthropic transformation… I became a movie snob. I’ll give you all a minute to collect yourselves. I know that’s a shock. Believe me, it was to [...]

Ahhh, the lazy days of early January in Hollywood. Weekends like this make my job both easier and harder. Easier because everything does basically what you expect it to, and the trajectories of this or that career continues in whichever direction it’s headed. Harder because that makes my carefully considered, well-informed and meticulously researched opinions [...]

You know, the holidays screw everything up. And I don’t just mean in the stereotypical sense that your Uncle Teddy got drunk at Christmas dinner and told everyone that that your cousin Jimmy was an accident. I mean that it makes my weekly (or in this case, biweekly) task of telling you what the weekend [...]

Well, never underestimate the power of a movie star. And the phrase ‘movie star’ describes Will Smith about as well as any actor working in Hollywood today. The wise-cracking, action hero roles will be his bread and butter for some time to come, but he’s managed to parlay that tremendous box office success into a [...]

I hate to break this to anyone unfamiliar with this fact, especially if you’re one of those award show junkies, but most serious industry buffs regard the Golden Globes as kind of a joke. I realize that they tend to presage the Oscars, but with separate categories for comedy and drama in picture, actor, and [...]