Corona | Coming Attractions

Amazing Spider-Man slings to top spot at the box office

Buoyed by a $35 million dollar opening day launch, The Amazing Spider-Man commanded the box office this weekend. The reboot's three-day weekend gross will come in around $65 million dollars, bringing its six-day total gross up to $140 million dollars domestic and counting.

Reviews from The Dark Knight Rises early buzz

Two weeks out from the gen pop release of The Dark Knight Rises and people have watched it.

Who are these folk? Select members of Hollywood, a smattering of film critics and members of the Hollywood foreign press. The first screening of The Dark Knight Rises for press took place two days ago on Friday. And if you read between the lines, the early articles and the tweets, the consensus from those that have seen the movie is that it's just as good, if not better than The Dark Knight.

Review: Savages

Do believe some of the hype: Savages is a return to old school Oliver Stone, the guy that brought us such violent excursions into human psyche as the 1983 Scarface and Natural Born Killers. However, Savages isn't as sharply edged as those earlier stories, and it also contains one serious and major storytelling flaw that nearly costs the film all of its good qualities.

Amazing Spider-Man on track for $125 million opening weekend

Box office ticket sales for Sony's The Amazing Spider-Man have been good. The studio released the final official tally for the movie's Tuesday, July 3 opening, and it turned out to be $35.8 million dollars.

By comparison, yesterday (Wednesday) the film is estimated to have grossed $23.4m. The Amazing Spider-Man's two day domestic total stands now at $59.2 million dollars.

Marvel mystery movie moves release date in summer 2014

Whatever it is that Marvel Studios has planned for showing us in the summer of 2014, it just got moved a little bit back. The untitled Marvel movie, which is heavily rumored to be the cosmically supercharged Guardians of the Galaxy group, has had its release date moved from May 16 to its new berth, August 1, 2014.

Several online outlets have heard that Marvel will officially announce the Guardians of the Galaxy movie during their presentation next week at Comic-Con. Marvel has already promised to talk about Iron Man 3 and the sequels to Thor and Captain America there, and likely mention what their plans are for Avengers 2.

The Dark Knight Rises run time revealed

When you go see The Dark Knight Rises, make sure that you hit the bathroom first. The run time for the highly anticipated Batman movie is finally known thanks to a published report filed by the British Board of Film Classification, and it's 164 minutes and 27 seconds.

In practical terms, that makes The Dark Knight Rises 2 hours and 44 minutes long. When it comes out it will be the longest Batman movie made to date, beating the run time of The Dark Knight by 12 more minutes.

Ted and Magic Mike have magic opening weekends

Perhaps it was aided by the heat wave that's gripping most of North America but this weekend's box office proved to be a much needed shot in the arm for the summer movie season. We've got a new number one movie, Ted, and healthy openings for three new movies.

Seth Macfarlane's raunchy comedy about a talking teddy bear named Ted emerged as the number one picture, grossing $54.1 million this weekend. With such a strong opening accomplished, Ted will soon be in the black. It's also shown that the Family Guy creator has something to offer television's bigger sister, the motion picture business.

The Amazing Spider-Man: Tag-Team Movie Mini-Review

The Amazing Spider-Man hit German theaters this week. Atrejub and I went to see it. Here are our individual takes on it.

Trailer: The Man with the Iron Fists

Very little has come out about The Man with the Iron Fists, the directoral debut of Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, aka RZA, the Wu-Tang Clan producer / singer and occasional actor and film composer. That all changed Thursday when the first trailer for RZA's movie hit the internet, offering us our first glimpse at an interesting blend of kung fu action and fantasy visuals, set to a beat of hip-hop music.

This thing's got Russell Crowe, Lucy Liu, Rick Yune, MMA fighter David Bautista, Jamie Chung, Vietnamese kickboxer Cung Le, Byron Mann (the guy who played Ryu in that Street Fighter movie years ago!) and RZA himself as the guy who makes the iron fists. And this guy named Quentin Tarantino is producing it.

Russell Crowe in a kung fu movie? Believe it in HD:

The Avengers movie crosses $600 million dollars of box office

Sometime today The Avengers will move past the $600 million dollar domestic box office mark, a mere 54 days after its release.

The superhero movie is already the third-highest grossing film of all-time, standing behind Titanic ($658.6 million) and Avatar ($760.5 million). The Avengers is also the third-highest grossing movie worldwide with $1.4 billion dollars in ticket sales (Titanic has $2.1b and Avatar $2.7b).

Proof that Keanu Reeves is making a kick-ass action movie

I didn't know that Keanu Reeves was making a kung-fu action movie in Taiwai until I learned about it on Reddit, but that's exactly what the star of The Matrix trilogy is doing. Reeves isn't just starring in Man of Tai Chi, he's also directing it too. And judging from this behind-the-scenes video that got posted on YouTube, it's looking promising.

Keanu may have picked up inspiration from watching the Wachowski brothers make their Matrix movies, but the automated dolly cam that Reeves is employing on Man of Tai Chi goes way beyond the bullet time visual style pioneered by the W's.

A new trailer for The Dark Knight Rises

Well, this was unexpected. Nokia has debuted a new trailer for The Dark Knight Rises online and it's got a lot of new footage that I haven't seen before.

If you're already amped to see TDKR, and you don't want even a slight bit of your movie experience compromised by a spoiler or two, I might consider not watching the new trailer. If you do decide to watch it, check out my comments after the video.

What I like:

 -- Bane and his presense in this trailer.

Maleficent photo released, movie begins filming

Filming has begun on Maleficent, the live-action origin tale of the evil witch from Sleeping Beauty. Angelina Jolie stars as the wicked green-skinned woman. To mark the start of shooting, Disney has released the first photo of Jolie dressed in her Maleficent costume.

Robert Stromberg called the start of action last Wednesday on June 13.

Madagascar 3 is the box office champ again

The weekend box office estimates for the third weekend of June 2012 are in and Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted has retained top spot. The animated three-quel earned $35.5 million in its second weekend of release, bringing its 10-day total up to $120.4 million dollars.

There was no change in the second place film which is held once again by Ridley Scott's Prometheus, his unofficial prequel to Alien. While the movie tumbled 60% in its second week gross to $20.2m, Prometheus has now earned $88.8m domestically, making it the highest grossing picture in the Alien movie franchise.

Prometheus video explains opening Engineer sequence

Warning: the video below explains how WETA Digital created the CG FX seen in the opening moments of Prometheus. If you haven't seen the movie yet and are avoiding spoilers, turn back now!

Ridley Scott's Prometheus is proving to be one of those films where you either like it or hate it. Regardless of how you may feel about the final result, the effects in the sci-fi spectacular are all top notch. One of the most impressive sequences comes at the start of the film and shows us a member of the Engineer race sacrificing his own life to "seed" a planet (possibly Earth) with his DNA.