#during the ghost protocol (2011) era
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TOM CRUISE casually sitting on top of the burj khalifa
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After Michael Bay’s second or third Transformers movie, it became clear that this franchise would be offering nothing but loud robot fights, incoherent plotting, and stereotype-driven humor. But audiences were happy to go along for the ride to a certain extent. It wasn’t until Bay’s fifth entry in the series, 2017’s The Last Knight, that Transformers’ reign over the box office came under threat.
RELATED: Transformers: 5 Things Bumblebee Got Right (& 5 It Got Wrong)
Just when it seemed like the Transformers franchise was dead in the water, Travis Knight came along with Bumblebee, an ‘80s-set spin-off. Bumblebee isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it is more enjoyable than all the previous Transformers movies combined. Now, the franchise just might have a chance.
10 Bumblebee (2018)
The opening prologue of Bumblebee set on Cybertron is the Transformers movie fans had wanted to see for over a decade. Michael Bay made a string of action movies about cars turning into robots and punching each other, but this is a rich sci-fi universe.
Travis Knight injected some fun back into the Transformers franchise after it had devolved into incomprehensible dull action scenes (complete with distracting aspect ratio changes) and eye-rolling “jokes.” Hailee Steinfeld’s Charlie Watson is a far more compelling human lead than Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky or Mark Wahlberg’s Cade Yeager ever were.
9 Fast Five (2011)
When Vin Diesel and Paul Walker returned to The Fast and the Furious franchise for the fourth installment, a pseudo-reboot titled Fast & Furious, they turned it from a street racing series into a straightforward action franchise. But that movie was pretty weak.
In 2011, Diesel and Walker knocked it out of the park and turned Fast & Furious into a must-see blockbuster franchise with Fast Five. With the story of Toretto’s crew embarking on a daring heist in Rio, this became a series of large-scale actioners about mercenaries getting involved in big, explosive set pieces across the world. With bigger and bigger action sequences, The Fast Saga has essentially become an exercise in cinematic one-upmanship since Fast Five shook things up.
8 Batman Begins (2005)
George Clooney joked publicly that his movie Batman & Robin was so bad that it may have killed the franchise. This almost became a reality, as Warner Bros. struggled to find a director with a vision for a Batman reboot that would redeem the property in the eyes of fans who were still scorned by Joel Schumacher’s infamous movie.
Of course, the franchise was saved when Christopher Nolan came along with a gritty, semi-realistic take on the Bat’s origin story. Batman Begins’ dark tone changed the face of blockbusters forever.
7 Skyfall (2012)
After Daniel Craig’s stint as James Bond got off to a terrific start with the breathtaking realism of Casino Royale, his second outing Quantum of Solace arrived as a bitter disappointment. It’s just a generic action movie when Bond movies can be so much more (as demonstrated by Goldfinger, The Spy Who Loved Me, and GoldenEye).
RELATED: 007: 5 Things Skyfall Got Right (& 5 It Got Wrong)
Then, with Craig’s third Bond movie Skyfall, director Sam Mendes married Martin Campbell’s gritty realism from Casino Royale with the silly gadgets and formulaic plotting of the franchise’s classic era. The result was the first Bond movie to top $1 billion at the box office.
6 Scream 4 (2011)
The first Scream movie was praised as a sharp satire of slashers, then the second one tackled slasher sequels. With Scream 3, the franchise risked settling into the kind of humdrum slash-‘em-up series it had originally sought to lampoon.
Then, with Scream 4, the franchise was redeemed. The fourth movie updated the franchise’s satire and commented on the rise of torture porn in contemporary horror cinema.
5 Star Trek (2009)
After years of critically panned Star Trek movies revolving around The Next Generation cast, J.J. Abrams rebooted the series with new actors playing the iconic roles from The Original Series. This could’ve easily gone terribly, but the 2009 Star Trek reboot is surprisingly great.
Although Abrams’ action-driven, planet-hopping storytelling is more akin to Star Wars than Star Trek, the movie did succeed in getting casual moviegoers interested in Trek. And Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto were perfectly matched as Kirk and Spock.
4 Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)
Brian De Palma’s initial Mission: Impossible movie was an agreeable spy thriller whose central set piece — Tom Cruise hanging from wires during a daring infiltration — has become iconic. John Woo’s second one was a little too silly to be entertaining, then J.J. Abrams’ threequel settled into mediocre action movie territory.
RELATED: Mission: Impossible: 5 Ways Fallout Is The Best Movie (& 5 Ghost Protocol Is A Close Second)
Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol reinvigorated the franchise by sending Cruise out onto the facade of the tallest building in the world. Now, the Mission: Impossible movies are must-see actioners, because Cruise keeps pushing himself to do crazier and crazier stunts.
3 Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
After The Amazing Spider-Man 2 did almost everything wrong — making all the same mistakes as Spider-Man 3 and a bunch of new ones for good measure — Jon Watts’ Spider-Man: Homecoming reinvigorated the Spidey solo movies.
Hot off his highly anticipated debut in Captain America: Civil War, Tom Holland deftly proved he could carry his own movie in Homecoming. Watts made the film as a John Hughes-style high school comedy, which gave it a fresh, unique feel. A year later, a new bar was set for the Spider-Man franchise by the animated masterpiece Into the Spider-Verse.
2 Men In Black 3 (2012)
As has been pointed out, the critically panned Men in Black II just rehashed all the jokes from the first Men in Black movie and repackaged them as winks to the audience.
The third movie, Men in Black 3, shook up the formula with a time travel plot that saw Will Smith’s Agent J going back to the ‘60s to team up with the younger version of Tommy Lee Jones’ Agent M, played by Josh Brolin (whose Jones impression is spot-on).
1 Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
George Miller’s third Mad Max movie, Beyond Thunderdome, was one of the ‘80s-est movies of the ‘80s. The fourth movie was stuck in development hell for years. Miller spent so long trying to get it made that at the beginning of pre-production, Mel Gibson was supposed to stay in the role of Max.
After Beyond Thunderdome had lost the visceral intensity of The Road Warrior, Fury Road brought it back in spades with a feature-length car chase through a post-apocalyptic wasteland that’s been praised as one of the greatest action movies ever made.
NEXT: Jaws & 9 Other Timeless Classics That Didn't Need Sequels
Bumblebee & 9 Other Movies That Saved A Dying Franchise from https://ift.tt/3s3bCUH
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WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND -- MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT, TEEN TITANS GO! TO THE MOVIES
Both Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again and The Equalizer 2 did better than expected (and my predictions) last weekend, which was fairly heartening when you realize how late in the summer it is and how inundated this summer has been with sequels. This weekend, we get one more, so if the summer is gonna end with one big bang before the notoriously slower and more difficult month of August, then Tom Cruise’s highly popular franchise is going to be a great “last movie” for many.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT (Paramount)
This will be the fourth Mission: Impossible movie I’ve written about in terms of box office, and not only might it be the best movie in the series, but it also might be the most expensive with a budget around $250 million. Fortunately, Tom Cruise is still considered a mega-star world over, and a lot of that has to do with the popularity of this series.
When the first Mission: Impossible, directed by Brian De Palma, hit theaters in May 1996, Cruise was already a famous and popular star having five movies that grossed over $100 million, coming off a trio of hits with Interview with a Vampire, The Firmand A Few Good Men. He also had one Best Actor Oscar nomination under his belt and would be nominated for a second with Jerry Maguirethe following year. The first MI movie opened with $45.4 million which was great for 20 years ago when a movie being released into 3,012 theaters was HUGE. (Spielberg’s Jurassic Parkopened in just 2,400 theaters three years earlier.) With $180 million domestic, it quickly surpassedTop Gunas Cruise’s highest domestic grosser.
The 2000 sequel Mission: Impossible II did even better, grossing $215 million after a $57.8 million opening -- again, well before $100 million openers were a regular thing. And then came the whole thing with Katie Holmes and Cruise going bonkers and all the Scientology backlash, so when TV hot-shot J.J. Abrams was brought on to direct Mission: Impossible III in 2006, that backlash was felt as it only grossed $134 million, $100 million less than Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds a year earlier.
Cruise then had five lighter years with few big hits or blockbusters, so he returned to the franchise with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, this time produced by Abrams and directed by Brad Bird a few years after his Pixar hit The Incredibles. That had a strong IMAX-only opening, then the December 2011 release helped it become a huge holiday hit, grossing over $200 million again. (I’m not even getting into worldwide $$$, but it nearly doubled the North American gross overseas.)
Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie came aboard for 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, moving the franchise back to the summer, and that did well enough that Cruise, Paramount, McQuarrie decided to make the first direct sequel in the franchise. Mission: Impossible – Fallout is the most expensive movie in the franchise, costing north of $250 million, mostly due to a highly-publicized injury Cruise suffered while doing one of the film’s crazy stunts. (Some of that money will be paid back from insurance.)
The crazy thing is that in the three years since Rogue Nation, Cruise hasn’t been doing great with a few bad movies and outright bombs like last year’s The Mummy (which was both). Might that change some minds of those who might go see this? Maybe, but probably not, because as we saw with Denzel Washington’s The Equalizer 2 last weekend, fans of these mega-stars tend to like them doing a certain thing, and Tom Cruise fans love him as Ethan Hunt in these movies.
It should also be mentioned that he gets support from long-time Mission: Impossible alum Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, who are back along with the wonderful Michelle Monaghan who was introduced as Hunt’s wife in MI3. Rebecca Ferguson and Alec Baldwin also return from Rogue Nation, because this is indeed a sequel, and they’re joined by Henry Cavill as Hunt’s CIA counterpart, Angela Bassett as his handler and Vanessa Shaw from The Crownas a broker known as the White Widow.
What’s strange and funny is that since the first two movies in the series, Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne stole some of Cruise’s thunder but then quickly faded away, while the longer-running James Bond franchise took cues from the latter also to become cooler for modern audiences. And yet, every time a Mission: Impossible movie is released, it almost immediately overshadows the two franchises that both influenced and were influenced by Cruise’s Ethan Hunt movies.
Even funnier is that reviews for the series have only gotten better and better since the first movie with Fallout being the third movie in a row for the franchise to end up with higher than a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. That is really unheard of this day and age of sequel and franchise burnout, but I personally thought it was much better than Rogue Nation and possibly the best in the series. (See my review below.)
For many, seeing Fallouton the biggest IMAX screen possible will be mandatory, especially after so many solid reviews have stated how amazing the movie looks on the IMAX screen, and the higher cost of IMAX will help Fallout just as it helped Ghost Protocol. On top of that, I have literally seen the trailer for this movie in front of almost every other movie I’ve seen over the past few months, so you can expect that awareness and interest to be very, very high.
Falloutis definitely looking to set a new benchmark for the series, opening higher than any other installment, probably somewhere in the low-to-mid $60 million, but I wouldn’t even be remotely surprised if it pushed $70 million. Still, some might still be wary after The Mummy and might wait to see the movie in August when there aren’t nearly as many action tentpoles. At this point, I think another $200 million might be a foregone conclusion, at least domestically.
You can also check out my full-on reviewof the movie. (Spoiler: I loved it.)
TEEN TITANS GO! TO THE MOVIES (Warner Bros)
Offering some counterprogramming and some last-bit of moviegoing for the kids that may have to start school earlier than usual in August, here comes Warner Bros’ latest attempt at having success in the animated realm, as well as with superheroes after a storied past few years with big hits (like Wonder Woman) and even bigger misses (Justice League).
The Cartoon Network began airing this comedic cartoon based on the “Junior Justice League” back in 2013, and it’s aired five seasons, proving to be very popular among the younger set who might be too young for the darker PG-13 realm of the movies and even some of the TV shows like Supergirl. The Teen Titans originated in comics back in the ‘60s to bring together all of the sidekicks, although they were revamped In the ‘80s for the edgier New Teen Titans by Marv Wolfman and George Perez. Teen Titans Go! is more based on the latter with Robin the Boy Wonder joined by Cyborg, Starfire, Beast Boy and Raven (plus lots of other DC characters make appearances).
On the one hand, it makes sense to bring this to the big screen due to the popularity of the show and also the success of The LEGO Batman Movie last year, opening with $53 million and grossing $175.7 million domestically. Clearly, that continued to do well branching off of The LEGO Movie a couple years earlier. Either way, the popularity of Batman and superheroes among the younger set is fairly well documented, and that’s going to go a long way to get them into theaters, especially with the awesome trailer that played in front of The Incredibles 2. The real question is whether they’ll rush out to see this in theaters or wait for it to be seen on home video.
When talking about this movie, it’s impossible to ignore 2002’s The Powerpuff Girls Movie, which was also based on a popular Cartoon Network series, but it tanked over the 4thof July weekend and only made $11.4 million total. In the summer of 2008, Warner Bros got into the Star Wars game by releasing Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a prelude to the anticipated animated series (but unrelated to Genndy Tartakovsy’s Clone Wars shorts… Tartakovsky having been involved with both The Powerpuff Girls and Adam Sandler’s hit Hotel Transylvania movies – see how it all ties together?) Anyway, that fared better with a $14.6 million opening and $35.2 million total, which would be a good barometer for Teen Titans Go!
Granted, that was Star Wars and was released during ten-year break between George Lucas’ movies and JJ Abrams’ launch of the DC era, but Teen Titans Go!Might not get some of the older superhero or DC Comics fans in a similar way. (But that’s the whole point of counterprogramming, to basically get everyone else.) That said, the trailers have looked good and reviews, surprisingly, are right up there with Mission: Impossible, although one might think this would be a tougher sell for critics.
Thursday previews are becoming more and more common than ever and they’re getting earlier and earlier on Thursday to the point where you might wonder, “Why don’t they just open the movie Thursday?” Teen Titans Go! will already have screenings at 4pm on Thursday which should contribute to a decent opening “day” probably as high as $5 to 6 million, but that might limit its weekend legs to limit is opening in the $13 to 15 million range on its way to $50 million or so domestic.
BLINDSPOTTING (Lionsgate)
Also expanding nationwide Friday is this Sundance-premiering brainchild of Hamilton star Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, who co-wrote and star in the movie of Oakland guys caught up in the changing face of their neighborhood from race and class. I don’t have an exact number of theaters for the Sundance premiere directed by Carlos López Estrada, but it grossed $336,000 in 14 theaters this past weekend or $24,024. I think there should be enough interest in the movie to break into the lower half of the top 10 with around $3 million, although there doesn’t seem to be nearly as much buzz for it as there was for Boots Riley’s Oakland based satire Sorry to Bother You, which will still be playing nationwide as well.
Either way, the Top 10 should look something like this…
1. Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Paramount) - $63.5 million N/A
2. Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again (Universal) - $18.5 million -47%
3.The Equalizer 2 (Sony) - $17 million -53%
4. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies (Warner Bros.) - $14.2 million N/A
5. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (Sony Pictures Animation) - $13 million -45%
6. Ant-Man and the Wasp (Marvel/Disney) - $8.8 million -47%
7. The Incredibles 2 (Disney-Pixar) - $7.1 million -40%
8. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Universal) - $6.2 million -47%
9. Skyscraper (Legendary/Universal) - $5.1 million -55%
10. Blindspotting (Lionsgate) - $3 million*
(*Based on 545 theaters. This number might change if the theater count ends up being higher or lower. UPDATE: A couple minor changes based on actual theater counts.)
LIMITED RELEASES
It’s hard to believe that a movie directed by German filmmaker Robert Schwentke (R.I.P.D., Red, Insurgent) might be my “Pick of the Week” but his German-language black-and-white WWII film The Captain (Music Box Films) is absolutely fantastic, and I hope people will get out to see it. Taking place in Germany as WWII is winding down, it stars Max Hubacher as Willi Herold, a German deserter who finds and dons the discarded uniform of a Nazi captain. When others assume he actually is a captain, he claims to be following orders from the Führer and he proceeds to put together a rag-tag group of soldiers to shake things up. Without going into details about what happens, it’s an amazing film with a great performance by Hubacher that mixes political satire with heavy drama as you spend the entire movie wondering when Willi will get caught for his ruse and be killed for treason. And there are lots and lots of surprises as it builds upon that tension. It opens at the Quad Cinema in New York Friday and then at the Nuart in L.A. on August 10. DON’T MISS THIS ONE! (Oh, yeah, also it’s based on a true story.)
I wish I was a bigger fan of Puzzle (Sony Pictures Classics), the new movie directed by Marc Turtletaub, the Oscar-nominated producer of Little Miss Sunshine, Safety Not Guaranteed and others, because it stars Kelly MacDonald who I absolutely love. It’s only Turtletaub’s second feature as a director and it stars Ms. MacDonald as a beleaguered housewife who becomes obsessed with solving jigsaw puzzles, which puts her in contact with Irrfan Khan as a puzzle-solving champ to enter a tournament, as she begins to shirk her duties as a wife and mother. The movie received high praise when it premiered at Sundance, but I was generally bored and even moreso when I tried to watch it again more recently. (I’ll run an interview with director Marc Turtletaub I did at Sundance soon. I was hoping to find another outlet to run it, but no luck.)
I was equally mixed on Matt Tyrnauer’s doc Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (Greenwich), which tells the story of Scotty Bowers, a former Marine who ended up in Hollywood after WWII and became known as a “pimp to the stars” connecting his friends with actors and actresses. The doc is fine and probably of interest to those interested in old Hollywood, but having seen Amy Berg’s An Open Secret, I feel like a lot of the behavior portrayed in that film involving young actors being sexually exploited by filmmakers seems to have been derived from some of the things that Bowers propagated. Regardless, it opens in L.A. first at the Arclight Hollywood on Friday, but then New York gets it on August 3, at the IFC Center.
This week’s IFC Midnight offering is Anthony Scott Burns’ Our House, which opens in select theaters (like the IFC Center in New York), on VOD and other digital platforms. It stars Thomas Mann as a science wiz who must leave college to care for his younger brother and sister after their parents are killed in a car crash, and he spends his free time working on a device that will bring back dead loved ones.
It’s hard to believe that a new movie starring the Oscar-nominated Timothée Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird) might be one of the weekend’s lower key releases but Elijah Bynum’s Hot Summer Nights (A24/DirecTV), which co-stars Maika Monroe and Alex Roe has been playing on DirecTV since late June and hasn’t had any press screening that I’m aware of. It’s another coming-of-age film from A24 starring Chalamet as a lonely teenager spending the summer of ’91 on Cape Cod.
I’m equally intrigued by the Brazilian film Good Manners from Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas (Hard Labor), a movie about a São Paulo nurse named Clara who is hired to be a nanny for the soon-to-be-born child of a wealthy woman but one night with a full moon changes those plans.
That’s also opening at the IFC Center which is currently playing Paula Eiselt’s doc 93 Queen (Abramorama), about a group of Hasidic women in Borough Park who create the first all-female volunteer ambulance corps. Premiering on Netflix Friday (and ALSO at the IFC Center) is Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s doc The Bleeding Edge, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. That one looks at the $400 billion medical device industry and how some of these devices have generated more health problems to those who use them then what they’re supposed to solve. One of the key devices covered is the female sterilization device Essure, which has created so many problems that there are national support groups for those suffering from the side effects… and the device finally got pulled from the market just days ago! (I’m going to be writing more about docs like this and others that actually create change over at FestWorks very soon.)
Also, the Metrograph begins a retrospective of French actor Gérard Blain, who transitioned from working with the likes of Truffaut and Chabrol to make his own films. The retrospective covers some of Blain’s work as an actor, appearing with John Wayne in Howard Hawks’ Hatari! for instance, and will screen many of Blain’s own films as a director in 35mm.
That’s it for this week… next week: Christopher Robin, The Spy Who Dumped Me, The Darkest Minds and more… in other words, it’s August, people, and there’s nowhere to go but down between now and Labor Day.
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