Movie Preview – One to Watch For…
Well, last year long suffering anime fans were blessed with the more or less successful reboot of Space Battleship Yamato through the high-budget live action movie starring JDRAMA king, Takuya Kimura. Whatever one thinks of that film the fact remains that anime has always been a compelling source for live-action shows or movies although their quality vacillates wildly from utter junk to cult classics. This year there’s yet another anime favourite that is being translated to the silver screen and no, I’m not talking about the Starz network and Sam Raimi’s Western adaptation of Noir.
Summer Movie Season 2012 Preview
Seeing as we now know the release date for JJ Abrams’ Star Trek 2 is May 17, 2013 that’s too far in the future for any real box office speculation as many movies are going to be juggling release dates till the last moment. However, I’ll do a quick box office analysis in a later post but for something a bit closer let’s take a gander at the summer 2012 blockbuster season (all USA/Canada release dates) which has a lot of tentpole franchises but only one real title that has a shot at obliterating the rest of the field.
JJ Abrams’ Star Trek 2 Finally Has A Release Date
After being delayed due to a litany of different reasons JJ Abram’s sequel to his enormously successful Star Trek reboot finally has a firm release date of May 17, 2013. For those who are keeping track of such things this means a whopping four year gap between Star Trek films making it the longest period Trek fans have had to endure between sequels. Additionally, Paramount Pictures has announced that the film will be released in both 2D and 3D which is not much of a surprise considering 3D surcharges will surely drive up revenue although one hopes that it doesn’t force JJ Abrams into shooting specific shots just for the sake of making something look cool in 3D.
Marketing – You have to be joking…
Every so often I like to pull up the list of the most expensive movies of all time to take a quick look to see how many of them I ended up liking and thinking that the money was well spent. I remember back in high school I kept asking people how much certain movies cost and more often than not everyone got it wrong…very wrong.
Entertainment – Punch It!
As I began the process of exporting my old blogger site over here to WordPress I was struck at just how long ago it was that I began writing these entries and that I had started back then penning articles about the upcoming J.J. Abrams Star Trek (2009) reboot. Well, here we go again as we’re about a year away from Star Trek 12 or Abram’s Star Trek II if you prefer that nomenclature and this time around the hype machine is going to go into overdrive considering that the reboot went on to become the highest grossing Star Trek movie of all time even when taking into account inflation. Suffice to say, this next movie has the potential to really blow the doors open for Trek and blast the franchise back into the upper echelons of movie stardom. Of course, it could do a Matrix Revolutions and plunge the franchise back into the abyss but let’s hope all involved have the smarts to realize that the stakes are just as high on this sequel.
Movie Review – Broken Arrow (1996)
Lately, due to my ever expanding blu-ray collection, I’ve been on a tear revisiting some of those movies which I watched what seemed like only a few days ago. Yes, the old cliché that time does fly by without you noticing it certainly does apply. Broken Arrow was one of these films that I saw on opening day back in 1996. Frequent followers of this blog might have begun to notice after reading all these reviews on older films that I mention in nearly all of them that I saw these movies on opening night. Back then this is what I did with all my friends and even today watching a film on opening day is still the best experience possible as you are present with an audience who are dying with anticipation to see the film. Of course, if the movie outright sucks that level of hype suddenly turns sour and thus bad word of mouth is born.
TV Review – Virtuality (2009)
Originally meant to be Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor’s follow-up television science fiction series to the just concluded reimagined Battlestar Galactica, Virtuality instead ended up not being picked up by the Fox network that decided to shelve the idea of turning it into a series therefore leaving this two hour pilot suspended in limbo making fans wonder just exactly what went wrong. Instead, Fox has decided to just televise the two hour pilot as a TV movie with minimal advertising on the wasteland that is known as the Friday night prime time period. You don’t really need more information to discern that Fox had lost all appetite for the show and had basically dumped it out there for all to see without any fanfare.
Avast Ye! Or how Paramount got its groove on…
Now this is how you build buzz. While I’m still not quite ready to go into a greater box office analysis of the upcoming summer movie season I have to give props to Paramount for mounting a steadily unfurling marketing campaign that has fired on all cylinders for their May tentpole movie. Of course, I’m talking about Star Trek. What did you expect? In hindsight the decision by Paramount brass to move the film out of its initial release date last Christmas day to the more competitive summer season now seems to have paid off in spades. While we still won’t know how well it will perform there’s no doubt that buzz is building in ways I have not seen since last year.
