Box office Round up

After a short hiatus the weekly box office round up returns to Liberty Island Cantina, hopefully this will become more of a regular thing now that my schedule has settled down a bit but no promises! The main focus this week remained on Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises as it entered it second weekend.

There really seems to have been an attitude within the mainstream media this week that  a severely negative impact on the performance of The Dark Knight Rises was a foregone conclusion. While the figures this week were certainly down, I don’t think it is sensible to attribute this solely to the tragedy in Colorado. Audience figures were down throughout the top ten with this weeks top five films between them taking $108 million.

In comparison, the top five movies from this week last year (Cowboys & Aliens, The Smurfs, Captain America, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: part 2 and Crazy Stupid Love) took a total of roughly $136 million (US weekend gross). I’m putting this down as being due to a combination of factors with the main perpetrator being the Olympic games opening ceremony on Friday. I don’t doubt that a very small number of people may have been put off visiting their local multiplex by last weeks shooting, but I personally think the cinema going audience at large deserves a little more credit than that.

Anyway enough of my nattering here’s this weeks breakdown.

The Dark Knight Rises definitely slowed down this week (but still retained the number one spot), taking a 60% drop to a still pretty impressive $64 million US weekend gross. Last weeks $160 million opening was certainly a coup for Warner Brothers, with The Dark knight Rises marginally improving upon the domestic US opening weekend gross of The Dark Knight which took $158 million in its opening weekend.

This weeks figure is certainly less impressive but I think that all things considered WB have little complain about given the fact that with a total global gross of  $289.1 million, The Dark Knight Rises has the third-highest 10-day total behind The Dark Knight and The Avengers.

In second this weekend was Ice Age: Continental Drift, the incredibly scientifically inaccurate kids film. With a take of $13.3 million the film has taken only a small 34% drop from last weeks $20 million figure and is doing solid business Fox.

Why didn’t you come see our movie!?

In third was The Watch, a film that I was personally looking forward to seeing, though by looks of its number’s I’m the only one! The comedy only managed to scrape a very disappointing $13 million, and whichever way you choose to look at that figure that’s pretty poor. Reviews haven’t been particularly favorable either so I expect The Watch to sink towards the lower end of the top 10 next week.

Fourth this week with $11.8 million is another new release which has suffered a very disappointing weekend, Step Up Revolution. Now the Step Up movies are admittedly a pretty niche kind of film, but they definitely have an audience there, for some reason though they didn’t show this week. Reviews have been mixed which could explain some of the disinterest but I don’ think Step Up Revolution will have much trouble making up its $33 million budget so expect to see another one next year.

Rounding out the top five this week is Ted, which managed to take  $7.3 million in it fifth week of US release. Ted has been doing pretty well for itself these past few weeks with its current world wide total sitting at an impressive $233 million, not bad for an R Rated movie with a $50 million budget. Ted is also due to release in Europe this week so I expect the film to continue to please the executives in Universal. The remainder of the top ten was made up of The Amazing Spider-man ($6.8 m), Brave ($4.2 m), Magic Mike ($2.5 m), Savages ($1.7 m) and finally Moonrise Kingdom ($1.3 m).

So, in summary it was a disappointing week for the new releases, The Dark knight Rises remains on top of the roost despite a relatively sharp drop and proof, if any were needed that kids movies don’t need to be accurate to make mad bank.

Game Release Round Up: June

Hi all and welcome to this months game release round up. This months post is a little later than usual mostly on account of our drowning in the massive amount of news that came out of E3 last week. Anyway without further ado lets get stuck into this months gaming highlights!

First up we have the greatly anticipated Lollipop Chainsaw from Grasshopper Manufacture and Kadokawa games. Published by WB, Lollipop Chainsaw will put players in the shoes of Juliet Starling a high School Cheerleader with a dark secret, she is in fact a Zombie hunter sworn to destroy the undead wherever she finds them. Oh and she keeps her boyfriends severed head on a chain attached to her waist, he seems to be doing OK though, all things considered

Lollipop Chainsaw is already available in the USA and is due to be released in Europe on June 15th on the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Next up this month is Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, Travellers Tales much anticipated follow up to the popular Lego Batman (which was tonnes of fun by the way). The game will be available for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS, Wii, Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows, so pretty much everything you own! As with most Lego games players will have the chance to play with loads of characters, this time from the DC universe including Batman, Robin, The Joker Superman and plenty more. Another new feature of the game is the addition of a full on voice cast including Clancy Brown as Lex Luthor though further details on the cast are pretty scarce at the moment.

Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes will be available on June 19th in the USA and the 22nd of June in the UK, Ireland and Europe.

Towards the end of the month we can also look forward to the release of DarkSiders II (June 26th) which looks great, Spec Ops: The Line, which looks…dusty but possibly fun and The Amazing Spider-Man The Amazing Move Tie-in Game which doesn’t looks as horrible as the last couple of Spider-man titles so keep your fingers crossed that we will see a return to the heights of Spider-Man 2.

New Dark Knight Rises Poster

Following the tremendous success of The Avengers, this years blockbuster season is already well underway with a whole host of great looking films just around the corner including The Amazing Spider-Man and Prometheus. With that it mind Nolan and co have released a very sweet looking poster just to remind you who this years next big dog really is.

The poster is very reminiscent of the primary Dark Knight poster (shown below for comparison) from 2008. Batman’s pose is pretty similar although his head is definitely bowed here, perhaps hinting at the great weight he now carries. Also from the looks of things the fire is spreading across Gotham and looks to be out of control. Then again I might be over analysing it, but its fun! Anyway The Dark Knight Rises is set to be released on July 20th, and I cannot wait to see how Nolan is going to end the Dark Knights story.

New Amazing Spider-Man Trailer

Well that didn’t take long, it was only yesterday afternoon when we saw some new stills from Marc Webb and Andrew Garfield’s Amazing Spider-man. Apple recently had the trailer exclusively but it has since been released into the wilds of YouTube and can be seen below.

Between the Lizard and the hunt by New York’s finest  it looks like the web swinger is going to have his work cut out for him, here. The Amazing Spider-man is due out in cinemas on July 3rd.

Sneak Peek at Amazing Spider-man’s Lizard

Two new stills were recently revealed over at Empireonline giving us our first good looks at Spider-man’s latest foe The Lizard. Rhys Ifans will be playing the role of scientist Curt Connors who, in the comics anyway, became obsessed with uncovering the secrets of reptilian limb regeneration after losing an arm while working as a battlefield Surgeon in a freak blast. The first of the images (shown below) gives us a look at a really nicely detailed hand clutching at Parker’s camera. I am pretty impressed with the level of detail the designers have gone to when working on the CGI monster that will presumably be wreaking havoc across New York.

The second shot (below) is a little more interesting giving us a broad, if a little blurred, look at the Lizard towering over some poor unfortunate soul that is about to have their day ruined. The Lizard looks really imposing here just due to his size alone and that should help create a real sense of peril when the relatively small looking Spider-Man goes toe to toe with this beast.

The Amazing Spider-Man is out on July 4 but expect another trailer to be hitting the web pretty soon, in the meantime the latest trailer can be seen below.

Amazing Spider-Man Trailer

While every super-hero fans mind may well be on the impending release of Avengers Assemble, Sony Pictures has decided to fire up their hype machine for the forthcoming cinematic Spider-Man reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man, starring (among others) Andrew Garfield, Martin Sheen and Emma Stone. The film is due in cinemas on July 4th in the UK and July 3rd in the USA (more release dates can be found at Imdb here for other countries) which puts the film in the reasonably comfortable position of avoiding competition with both Avengers Assemble (May 4th) and The Dark Knight Rises (July 20th).

I can’t say I was pleased with the original decision to reboot Spidey so soon, but on reflection I think that was probably my post Spider-Man 3 nerd-rage talking. This new trailer looks pretty good, Garfield is a great actor (see Social Network if you doubt this) and I love Dr. Curt Conners/The Lizard as a villain so I have raised my expectations for this, at least a little. The fact that the creative team has gone for the old school mechanical webbing tech of the earlier comics is also pretty cool and I’m sure that there will be some scene in there where he runs out at just the wrong moment.