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Jaws turns 40, returns to theaters for another feeding

From ew, Summer movies, as we know them, began 40 years ago. For decades, the warm-weather months had been a dumping ground for Hollywood’s genre fare and B-movies. But in 1975, a different kind of movie was unleashed in theaters. Jaws was like chum to the media and movie audiences, who couldn’t get enough of Steven Spielberg’s terrifying adaptation of Peter Benchley’s best-seller. It became an instant and defining blockbuster, with repeat customers who still jumped with fright at the scariest moments—even though John Williams’ score warned them that danger lurked beneath the waves.

On June 21, fans of Jaws will have another opportunity to see the classic on the big screen, as it was intended. Fathom Events, Turner Classic Movies, and Universal Pictures will present special screenings in nearly 500 theaters around the country. TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz will provide a special introduction for an afternoon and evening showing, as well as an encore presentation on June 24. “Jaws is a classic thriller enjoyed by generations and it is ready for a comeback,” said Fathom Events vice president of programming Kymberli Frueh-Owens. “Movie buffs will love seeing their favorite killer shark larger than life on the big screen. No risk of shark bite!”

There’s the famous anecdote that Spielberg tells how he knew Jaws was going to be a huge hit only after a member of the audience rushed out of a preview screening in the middle of the movie, threw up in the lobby… and then hurried back in to watch the rest. For those types of Jaws nerds, fans who rightfully treatQuint’s Indianapolis soliloquoy with Shakespearean reverance and already know every behind-the-scenes story about the near-disastrous making of the film on and around Martha’s Vineyard, the June screenings will be a celebration of a movie that helped define their childhood. And for the younger generation, which may not have been introduced toJaws yet despite frequent Blu-ray editions and constant cable showings, it’s about time to dip their toes in the water, and finally see why Williams simple score still has the power to get swimmers out of the water.

Tickets can be purchased at FathomEvents.com, or at participating theaters.

'Mad Max: Fury Road' B-Roll Confirms This Stuff Was Really Real and Awesome

From iwatchstuff, As everyone who has seen it won't shut up about, Mad Max: Fury Road is filled with such palpably-visceral, awe-inspiring stunts, it feels like they have to be almost entirely real. These people have been the farmers market crowd telling you how you've been consuming factory-produced bullshit as they dined on the vital and real.

But has it really been so real? Well, in this case, it turns out, yeah, it has been--as is confirmed with this B-roll footage from the film. Most of those exploding cars? They totally exploded. And you can see that happen, and it is very real, and very cool, and now you can live out that lovely day below. Enjoy!

Point Break remake trailer

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Holiday Box Office Lowest Since 2001

From huffingtonpost, This was a Memorial Day Hollywood would love to forget.

Typically the fourth weekend of May is one of the biggest of the year at the box office. This year, the industry’s estimated take between Friday and Monday in the U.S. and Canada was $190 million, according to Rentrak. That is the lowest since 2001—particularly bad when considering that average ticket prices have risen 44% over that time, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners.

The key reason for the empty multiplexes was the weak performance of “Tomorrowland,” the weekend’s sole new big-budget movie and a rare misfire for Walt Disney Co.Borrowing its title from an area at Disneyland but featuring an original story, the science-fiction film garnered mixed reviews and opened to an estimated $41.7 million over the four-day holiday weekend.

Last year, “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” grossed $110.6 million on Memorial Day weekend. The prior year, “Fast & Furious 6” opened to $97.4 million.

“Tomorrowland” featured a rare attempt by the company to spend big money—$180 million in this case—on a movie that didn’t feature characters or a fictional world already well known to audiences. Like “The Lone Ranger” and “John Carter,” more-expensive attempts by Disney to jump-start franchises, “Tomorrowland” has had difficulty drawing audiences.

The studio behind “Tomorrowland,” Walt Disney Pictures, has struggled to launch new film franchises, though it has had recent success with live-action adaptations of animated classics like “Maleficent,” based on “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Cinderella.”

Particularly disappointing to the company was that the PG-rated movie, directed by Brad Bird of “The Incredibles” and “Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol” fame and starringGeorge Clooney, wasn’t a big draw with families. Only 30% of audiences Saturday were families, according to exit polls.

“I do think an original [story] plays a part in parents waiting to hear from other parents,” said Disney’s executive vice president of distribution, Dave Hollis. “We also played on the mystery” in the marketing and “weren’t as explicit about what it is.”

Despite the disappointing holiday weekend, Hollywood has high hopes for the rest of the summer, pinned on much-anticipated “tent-pole” movies including “Jurassic World,” “Terminator: Genisys,” “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation” and the “Despicable Me” spinoff “Minions”—all jumping off from existing fan favorites.

Disney’s Mr. Hollis said he hoped “Tomorrowland” would perform better with families in the coming weeks, as there isn’t a new PG-rated movie until Disney’s own “Inside Out,” from Pixar Animation Studios, on June 19.

International audiences were even less willing than Americans to take a risk on an a movie with an unfamiliar premise. “Tomorrowland” opened to a weak $26.7 million in 65 foreign markets.

Its highest grossing foreign country was Russia, with just $3.6 million. By contrast, “Mad Max: Fury Road” opened to $6 million there last weekend. In the U.K. “Tomorrowland” opened to $2.1 million, while “Mad Max” outgrossed it with $4 million on its second weekend.

“It’s less than we hoped for on the international side, but it’s a little too early to judge how we really feel,” said Mr. Hollis, pointing to the film’s high-stakes opening in China on Tuesday.

“Tomorrowland” barely beat “Pitch Perfect 2,” which grossed $37.9 million over four days. The hit a capella sequel from Comcast Corp.’s Universal Pictures has now collected a strong $125.4 million domestically and $187.1 million world-wide.

Also new in theaters this weekend was a remake of the 1982 horror classic “Poltergeist,” which was released by 21st Century Fox’s Twentieth Century Fox and co-financed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. It opened to an estimated $26.5 million, a decent start for a film that cost $35 million to make.

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The Gallows official trailer

The lesson nobody learned from Empire Strikes Back

From ew, The Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars movie. And because it’s the only movie without a single victory—because the Rebels lose the Battle of Hoth, and Han gets his carbonite coma, and Luke can’t even fully kill one measly Wampa—its place in history has always been assured as The Dark Star Wars Movie. The movie came out 35 years ago today, and in the ensuing three-plus decades, the easiest way for a nerd-friendly director to dredge up fan excitement over a sequel was to compare it to Empire Strikes Back.

What, precisely, did that mean—to make your franchise’s Empire Strikes Back? The definitions get hazy. Most blockbuster movies don’t let their characters lose. Most blockbuster movies don’t kick off with an Act I battle sequence that ends with everyone you like running away from the bad guy. Most blockbuster movies don’t cut the hands off their handsome protagonists. But the vogue for darkness stuck with geek culture on every level. You don’t really hear directors say their sequel is going to be lighter, or looser, or less serious. Darkness just becomes another buzzword, a marketing trope. (Iron Man 3 is a wacky Shane Black romp with a couple depressive interludes; the first trailer for Iron Man 3makes it look like No Country For Old Men plus bad t-shirts.)

But that whole notion of Empire—the Dark, Mature, Serious one—was always overblown. You want dark?Jaws kills a woman, kills a kid, kills the third lead very, very slowly, chomp chomp chomp. (Empire kills Dak.) You want mature themes? Aliens is the space-Vietnam movie Lucas always wanted to make—andAliens has more than one female character. (Empire Strikes Back and women: Princess Leia, and the lady who says “Stand by Ion Control. Fire.” In the theatrical cut, the Emperor was voiced by a man but played by a woman; thinkpiece ho!) You want a serious movie about the nature of good and evil? Ingmar Bergman awaits.

Counter-argument: The Dark Star Wars Movie is Star Wars. Luke’s cute-sweet aunt and cute-tough uncle get burned to hell. The wacky little Jawas are shot up, their ship spackled with extremely accurate blast points. (Way too accurate for Sand People!) Leia gets Abu Ghraib’d by a probing torture-bot. Alec Guinness was the most famous actor in the movie—and he dies. The villains who aren’t Vader all die. Star Wars is the one Star Wars movie where a lightsaber doesn’t cauterize a wound—by which I mean, the onlyStar Wars movie that acknowledges the existence of blood.

Also, the Death Star blows up an entire populated planet.

Perhaps the real genius of Empire Strikes Back is that it doesn’t try to one-up that moment. Or rather, it doesn’t think that the way to make a better Star Wars movie is to make the threat bigger. The Empire Strikes Back cost twice as much as the first film, but the bigness of the budget doesn’t filter into the movie’s subtext, the way it does into nearly every blockbuster movie made after Don Simpson tried cocaine. The AT-ATs have maybe one-hundred-millionth the kill capacity of a Death Star—but they’re a more interesting nemesis. (The Death Star was a moon with a laser; the AT-ATs are robo-dino Dali monsters.)

And in stark contrast to the first Star Wars, the highest stakes are all frontloaded. The movie’s first act is Empire vs. Rebellion—although it’s not necessarily clear, in the movie, if the ice-planet outpost is meant to be “the Rebellion” or just a squad of the Rebellion. (The opening crawl describes the Hoth HQ as “a group of freedom fighters”—the implication maybe that the Hoth crew is a battalion, not a regiment.) And after the battle is over, the stakes of the movie simplify: Will the Empire catch the Falcon?

Back when he started working on Avengers 2, Joss Whedon expressed a vague hope to make something smaller and more personal. “Smaller” and “more personal” are words that loom large over the George Lucas legend—just behind “faster” and “more intense”—since the man who made Star Wars spent most of his life after Star Wars promising to make smaller, more personal films. (Instead, he made more Star Wars films.)

The consensus history says that Lucas had less to do with Empirethan any other Star Wars movie. It’s impossible to know how true that is—it’s a bit like saying God was less involved in Exodus than Genesis. But on the story level, Empire is smaller, more personal. It puts Han and Leia into one single moving location for half the movie—which means they’re free to banter off each other like screwball hate-lovers, their one-liners bouncing off the walls and over Threepio’s head.

And Empire is the blockbuster movie that treats a spirit journey like an actual spirit journey, with all the introspection and potentially-boring non-action the term implies. Luke has some cool moves on Hoth—and then he speeds off to Dagobah for a long time, hanging out with a puppet mystic and experiencing a profound-for-kids insight into the darkness in his own soul. The stuff on Dagobah is quiet like Star Warsis never quiet: Some of the best moments in the movie are just Yoda sitting peacefully by the bog. You would never describe Empire Strikes Back as slow—it’s a chase movie!—but the smaller stakes give the movie all the grace notes that most big movies can never find time for.

The climactic action sequence of The Empire Strikes Back looks beautiful: A lightsaber duel played out against Cloud City’s central air, imagined onscreen as a neon-smoky Fritz Langtopia. (Nobody ever gives Empire credit for inventing Blade Runner two years early.) But it’s important to remember that all the millions that probably went into that scene are there to support a lightsaber duel: A one-on-one battle between two fully developed characters.

The only other movie in the franchise that doesn’t end with a space battle is Revenge of the Sith—and Episode III gilds the lily with twofinal-act lightsaber duels. Also not helping matters: By Revenge of the Sith, every lightsaber duel looks like awkward white guys dance-fighting at a retirement-home rave.

You start to feel like filmmakers learned the wrong lessons fromEmpire. The Darth Vader twist is cool—but it also leads directly to our modern Abrams/Nolan culture, where everything that happens in a sequel gets treated like a mind-blowing table-flipping plot twist. AndEmpire is also the movie that moves the franchise into Chosen One storytelling; the Emperor declares that Luke “could destroy us”; the everykid from the Tatooine exurbs was secretly the son of the Empire’s Chief Enforcer the whole time. Any sequel that ends with a non-ending cliffhanger can point to the closing moments of Empire—something Joss Whedon himself complained about… presumably before Marvel wedged a few more Infinity Stones into Avengers 2.

Hating on Star Wars movies that came after Empire Strikes Back is, at this point, a boring pastime. But the movies that tried to be Star Warsmovies usually feel like the wrong Star Wars movies. Return of the Jedi brought back the Death Star and the idea that every individual battle was a zero-sum fight between good and evil. The prequels, bless them, are actually trying to be important—It’s about totalitarianism! It’s about the Bush Administration!—but all those big themes turn the characters into listless exposi-bots.

The Empire Strikes Back feels bigger because it’s smaller. It’s more romantic specifically because it doesn’t have time to be romantic. (“I love you.” “I know.”) It doesn’t feel the need to overexplain it’s weirdo detours. In Return of the Jedi, Threepio gives a long hype-man speech for the Pit of Sarlacc. In Empire Strikes Back, there’s a goddamn asteroid ringworm that lives in space—and the only explanation we get is, “This is no cave.”

The Empire Strikes Back is faster and more intense—but only because it’s smaller and more personal. Thirty-five years later, the blockbuster era Empire helped create is entering the late decadent phase. Bigger casts, bigger effects, bigger battles, bigger budgets. We have more Star Wars movies coming. Let’s hope they dare to be small.

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