Deadpool might need to watch his back. IT, the latest adaptation of Stephen King’s horror epic, just broke one of the R-rated box office champ’s records — and is primed to break a couple more before the end of the weekend. It’s doubtful that Pennywise will come close to overtaking the Merc With a Mouth’s massive box office haul, but it’s quite a win for the new horror film from Andy Muschietti, which already has a sequel in the works for 2019.
Although X-Men: Apocalypse and the latest Fantastic Four reboot were fairly notable disappointments for 20th Century Fox, the studio is doing pretty, pretty, prett-ay good in the Marvel department. Thanks to the critical and commercial success of Deadpool and Logan, Fox’s X-universe has been revitalized, and even if the next X-Men movie underperforms, they still have New Mutants, X-Force and Deadpool 2 on the way — and it looks as though that may be the tip of the iceberg.
Josh Brolin’s Cable is, at this point, the most anticipated part of Deadpool 2, and as we have seen, he’s very game to get to get into full time-traveling cyborg warrior shape. He’s also game to have some weird-looking blue molds taken of his face, apparently, as his latest Instagram tease of his characters shows.
Anyone who ever scrolls through the occasional Business Insider article knows that disruptors — companies that enter a marketplace and change the way people do business — don’t stay disruptors for very long. Take an organization like Uber. For years, Uber was the scrappy little underdog, a technology startup that used technology to upend the established taxi market. In the past few years, however, Uber has gone from the underdog to the dominant player, the company that other technology startups are looking to take down. Success breeds imitation, and imitation breeds improvement.
In the superhero movie business, ratings have until now seemed like a pretty simple business. The way to get the biggest audience while also keeping in as much fantasy violence and perilous situations to stay true to the comics was to shoot for the middle ground, a nice, nonthreatening PG-13. No full-on nudity, no blood splatter, and relegate your one allocated f-word to Wolverine. But the times, they are a-changin’, and superhero movies are changing right along with them, starting with shooting for the more mature, edgier R-rating. As it turns out, this is exactly the direction audiences want them to go.
When is a superhero movie like Game of Thrones? When it’s the most pirated movie of the year, of course. On a new list of all the movies downloaded from popular torrenting site BitTorrent, the merc with a mouth tops the chart over Batman v. Superman, Captain America: Civil War, and The Force Awakens.
The Internet Movie Database is a fount of helpful information. With a few simple clicks, users can learn who shot the Miley Cyrus vehicle So Undercover (Things to Come cinematographer Denis Lenoir), which sequel in the Hellraiser franchise featured a performance from a young Adam Scott (the fourth one), or how old Taraji P. Henson is (who looks that good at 46?!). As a repository for loose factoids from in and around the world of screen entertainment, it can’t be beat. As a source for critical perspectives on those same films, however... hoo boy. Just take a gander at any comment section for a movie’s page and marvel at the IMDb is the site where rabid anti-Ghostbusters zealots congregated to downvote Paul Feig’s movie into oblivion weeks before its actual release, and the newly-released IMDb Top 10 provides an even clearer view of its user base.