A Minecraft Movie has finally emerged from development hell, only to be greeted by a strangely familiar reaction. Despite critics mostly loathing it, the video game adaptation quietly and confidently went on to set box office records. The whole thing has also triggered arguments about who gets to criticize kids’ entertainment and about how some things are simply “for the fans.”  While it’s pretty tough to call A Minecraft Movie “good” in the classical sense of the word, its quality is probably the least interesting thing about the project. The far more fascinating development is that films like A Minecraft…

This article contains potential spoilers for Dune 4 and Dune 5. By this point, Robert Pattinson has firmly established himself as one of our great weirdo actors. In the past 15 years, he’s played a shut-in billionaire in Cosmopolis, a sinister and hallucinating wickie in The Lighthouse, an emo Dark Knight detective in The Batman, a croaking magical bird in The Boy and the Heron, and most recently an army of twitchy clones in Mickey 17. But it may be with Denis Villeneuve that Pattinson gets to do the greatest onscreen weirdo of all time. It appears that Pattinson is…

When Alex Garland first worked with Ray Mendoza, he was immediately struck by the latter’s precision and intuitive storytelling instincts. At the time, the pair were collaborating on Civil War, Garland’s blistering speculative fiction about, perhaps, the direction things could head in the U.S. Garland wrote and directed that movie, but Mendoza gave the violence in its title a ferocious believability as the military advisor. The way Garland tells it now, Mendoza even had a prominent hand in shaping the movie’s spectacularly kinetic, and chilling, climax wherein rebel forces shoot their way from room to room in the West Wing,…

This article contains spoilers for A Minecraft Movie. “There was no joy or creativity at all!” That’s how protagonist Steve (Jack Black) describes the Nether, a dark underworld introduced during the mandatory and expository voiceover that opens A Minecraft Movie. Of course, that description also describes A Minecraft Movie itself, a slog of IP-driven nonsense that somehow has the temerity to make its bad guys monsters bent on destroying joy and creativity in their endless search for more money. Granted, A Minecraft Movie isn’t the worst bit of IP-driven media released lately, that dishonor still belongs to The Garfield Movie.…

Some might complain that the sneak peek for Superman doesn’t actually let us peek anything new. It begins with Superman crashing into the snow and calling for his dog Krypto, just like the trailer released a few months earlier. It continues with a montage of scenes, including shots of superheroes such as Hawkgirl, Metamorpho, and the Green Lantern Guy Gardner. It ends with Superman (David Corenswet) embracing Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), all while a variation of the John Williams theme plays. Yet, there is new footage in this teaser. Well, only new in the sense that we haven’t seen this…

Even after a recent sneak peak that revealed five minutes of new footage, we still don’t know much about how James Gunn‘s Superman will handle the famed romance between Clark Kent and Lois Lane. In Superman: The Movie and in Man of Steel, we saw the beginning of this courtship, with Lois and Clark meeting and beginning to fall for each other. This is also how most television and animated adaptations approach the characters. But in promotional material for the upcoming Superman, we see the Clark (David Corenswet) and Lois (Rachel Brosnahan) exchanging knowing looks to one another, and even…

Late in The Hunt for Red October, a sweaty Jack Ryan squeezes through a tube. “Ryan, some things here don’t react well to bullets,” he says sardonically, mimicking Soviet sub commander Marko Ramius, played by Sean Connery. “Yeah, like me. I don’t react well to bullets.” It’s easy to understand Ryan’s frustration. He began the film a nervous CIA analyst who couldn’t sleep through the turbulence on the overnight flight that brought him from London to Washington. He only intended to relay information from British Intelligence, who learned about a top secret silent propulsion system in the Soviet nuclear submarine…

In an unexpected turn of events, A Minecraft Movie has broken the opening weekend box office record for a video game adaptation, surpassing the mark set by The Super Mario Bros. Movie during the same timeframe two years ago. Ringing in at an estimated $157 million domestically, Minecraft bested Mario‘s $146.3 million outing in April 2023. Additionally, A Minecraft Movie exceeded even the most lofty expectations, with most outlets estimating its box office returns from this past weekend to score less than $100 million. This begs the question, what does A Minecraft Movie‘s unprecedented success mean for the industry moving…

In the latest trailer for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, high-level military and intelligence officials discuss the threat of the rogue AI the Entity, the various disasters happening around the world, and the need for Ethan Hunt to bring peace. More importantly, it contains footage of Hunt dangling from a biplane. And that’s the reason we’re really watching, to see Tom Cruise put himself into mortal danger. What began as a star-driven continuation of a well-liked, if not particularly well-remembered television series has transformed into a celebration of old-school filmmaking with spectacular stunts. That’s an interesting development for the…

Plane crashes! Terrorists! Gun fights! That sort of stuff appears all the time in trailers for summer action movies. But it’s a little different when the movie in question is The Phoenician Scheme, written and directed by Wes Anderson. Anderson is best known for impeccably-designed comedies about incredibly privileged and incredibly talented people going on emotional journeys, movies such as The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel. To be sure, The Phoenician Scheme has all of the hallmarks of an Anderson movie. Yellow Futura font? Check. Wide-angle shots of characters standing in a straight line? Check. Actors from previous…

“What do you think?” asks a drunk and sickly Doc Holliday, staring down Johnny Ringo, a man rumored to be the fastest gunslinger in the West. “Should I hate him?” When Holliday poses that question, a shiver runs through everyone in the saloon. After all, the confrontation occurs in Tombstone, a 1993 Western about an infamous gunfight, and from the very first scene, director George P. Cosmatos starts beating the drum, moving retired lawman Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) and brutal outlaw Curly Bill (Powers Boothe) toward their inevitable, bloody confrontation. So when Ringo (Michael Biehn) begins to challenge Doc in…

CinemaCon, the largest and most important gathering for the worldwide movie theater and exhibition industry, just concluded its nearly week-long festivities in Las Vegas. In that Nevada oasis there were exclusive Hollywood presentations which debuted a slate of upcoming films, premieres and surprise feature screenings, stars, producers, and directors—all there to celebrate the moviegoing experience. CinemaCon offered on-stage reveals, sizzle reels, and extended footage exclusively shown to CinemaCon goers. Among the highlights, attendees got first looks and extended footage reveals of James Gunn’s Superman, a behind-the-scenes look at Masters of the Universe, an eerie M3GAN 2.0 performance, hilarious Thunderbolts* footage,…

“You gotta listen to the way people talk,” the teenage John Connor instructs the futuristic murder robot sent to protect him. Rejecting words like “affirmative,” this Connor kid instead points the T-800 to “no problemo” and “hasta la vista, baby.” But with its heavy use of Britney Spears’ “Oops!… I Did It Again,” the M3GAN 2.0 trailer insists that its very own killer robot needs no such teaching. The flashy teaser is all verve and attitude, turning the dance sequence from the first movie that became a viral sensation into the dominant tone. Nonetheless, M3GAN 2.0 appears to follow Terminator…

A Minecraft Movie has arrived bringing the Overworld to the moviegoing masses. The family friendly romp follows siblings Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and Natalie (Emma Myers) and their animal-loving realtor Dawn (Danielle Brooks). and the video-game-obsessive Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa) as they’re sucked into the magical mines of the Overworld and into an adventure that they’ll never forget. For here they will meet the legend they call… Steve (Jack Black). We chatted to the cast and creators of the film at an awesome event in Los Angeles that threw us directly into the mines, the vegetable gardens, and the…

We’ve seen the MCU Spider-Man have his One More Day. Now it’s time for his Brand New Day. If those phrases mean nothing to you, it’s probably because you know Spidey mostly from the movies, particularly of the MCU variety and starring Tom Holland. Most of the time, that’s totally fine. The MCU is its own universe with its own history and characters, divorced from the comics. The Spider-Man movies demonstrate this, as they exist in a world in which Peter Parker’s primary love interest is Michelle Jones instead of Mary Jane Watson, his best friend is Ned Leeds (a…

Before he was an Oscar winner, and long before he dreamed of being an “Asian girl” on The White Lotus, Sam Rockwell introduced himself to millions by pushing cigarettes on children. … Or at least that is how only his second speaking role in a feature film went during Gen X and Millennial touchstone, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In a sequence which would live rent-free in the imagination of millions of arcade and karate-loving ‘90s kids, Rockwell acts as grand ambassador for the Foot Clan, a literal army of faceless, fumbling ninjas who work at the behest of the Shredder,…

You say you want a revolution? Well, at a Cinema Con event that featured multiple Spider-Men, Prowlers, and superheroes of various mediums, it was striking that the mic drop moment came not from a webslinger or one of his countless variants; it arrived by way of the cast reveal of a “four-film cinematic event;” it came from the Beatles. “Together, all four films will tell the story of the greatest band in history,” director Sam Mendes said at the Las Vegas event (via EW). Meanwhile Sony Pictures CEO Tom Rothman added that this would be “the first bingeable theatrical experience.”…

Tommy Callahan sucks as a salesman. So much so that midway through 1995’s Tommy Boy, Tommy and his unwilling sales partner Richard take a break at a diner to drown their miseries in terrible food. Richard orders a shrimp cocktail, but when Tommy requests chicken wings, the waitress shuts him down because the kitchen is closed. What follows is an incredible combination of self-loathing and obnoxious ranting. Comparing himself to a circus boy who inadvertently smothers his beloved pet, and Lenny from Of Mice and Men, Tommy picks up a bread roll that he initially strokes, but soon enough is…

Every good stuntman knows that getting knocked down is part of the job. Every time you hit the dirt, you’ve just got to get back up and keep going. With that in mind, it’s not too surprising that stuntman Cliff Booth would return for a sequel to Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood. What is surprising, however, is how the sequel will come to be. According to Deadline, the makeshift sequel—which initially began as a screenplay for Tarantino’s self-proclaimed final film, which at the time was titled The Film Critic—is alive once more after the Pulp Fiction director…

After the massive success of their supernatural teen Talk to Me, it was no surprise when YouTube powerhouses RackaRacka, also known as Danny and Micheal Philippou, were picked up to direct a new Street Fighter movie. Rising to prominence with their gory and gratuitous action and horror videos before moving into studio filmmaking, it seemed like a perfect creative fit, so it was with disappointment that fans learned last year that they were no longer connected to the video game adaptation. Now after a recent event promoting the twins’ newest film, Bring Her Back in LA, Micheal and Danny spoke…