Weekly Round-Up: Ant-Man/Jurassic World Box Office, Pixels Sucks

This week, The Entertainment Network debuts its latest web-show: The Weekly Round-Up. This show, which will be produced every Friday will be a quick catch-up on the biggest news stories of the week in the world of entertainment.

This week, Ant-Man's reviews and box office performance are discussed. Also on this week's episode you can find the latest news about Jurassic World's record breaking box office run, and find out just how bad Adam Sandler's Pixels really is.

The video is embedded below if you want to give it a try (we hope you do!), also below is a transcription of the episode.

Let us know any feedback you have on our new show in the comments section!
TRANSCRIPTION:

What’s up folks, it’s me David and this is The Entertainment Network’s weekly round-up, a place for you to catch-up on the week in entertainment.

Let’s kick things off this week with Ant-Man, the Marvel film that was in development hell for years finally saw a release this week, and according to review aggregate site Metacritic has had generally positive reviews. Thank. Goodness.

The film had been the subject of much concern ever since fan-favourite director Edgar Wright – the man behind such films as Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World – left Marvel Studios and the Ant-Man project after working on it for eleven years blaming “differences in their vision of the film.” This led to many assuming that corporate interference was going to ruin Ant-Man in the same way it ruined Spider-Man 3, the Amazing Spider-Man 2, and many other projects that don’t feature Spider-Man in the title role.

Fortunately, this appears not to be the case; while the film hasn’t pleased everyone and certainly has its critics, the majority of fans seem to agree that it’s a solid super-hero movie, myself included. In fact, last week on The Entertainment Network’s website I wrote a review of Ant-Man and assigned it a score of 8.2/10. I’ll put a link to my review in the video description if you have any interest in reading what I have to say, which quite frankly you may well not and I don’t blame you for a second.

Despite a reasonable amount of good press, Ant-Man’s box office performance was considered sub-par for a Marvel Studios film. Opening with a domestic weekend haul of $58 million, Ant-Man was Marvel’s lowest opening since The Incredible Hulk came out in 2008. But, that’s not to say that the film flopped; in fact, with international totals factored in it’s already made much of its budget back and will almost definitely turn a profit – the real question is just how much profit the film will make, and will that be enough to warrant the sequel that many fans are already crying out for?

In-keeping with the film finance theme, earlier this week Jurassic World became the third highest grossing film of all time taking the place that had previously been held by the first Avengers film. Jurassic World has now made over $1.5 billion, and is outdone only by the two James Cameron juggernauts Titanic and Avatar. It seems very unlikely that Jurassic World will come close to dethroning either of Cameron’s epics, but in this case third place is still a huge achievement. Jurassic World has had a generally positive reception from fans, however it has polarised some people with the film’s critics pointing to its dodgy CGI, unbelievably illogical plot developments, and sexist undertones. However, judging from these numbers it appears the majority of fans were pleased by Jurassic World and I’d be very surprised if we don’t see a sequel fast-tracked very soon.

This continues what has been a fantastic year for Universal. This is the film studio’s second billion-dollar film of the year after Furious 7 crossed the billion-dollar mark back in April.

Hitting cinemas in the United States this week, we have Paper Towns – the adaptation of John Green’s young adult novel. The last John Green adaptation, 2014’s the Fault in Our Stars was a big box office performer, and the folks at Fox 2000 will be watching closely to see if Green’s fans can create another success as they just signed a “first look” deal with the high-profile author.

Also out this week is boxing feature Southpaw; hot off the critical acclaim received by his last film Nightcrawler, Jake Gyllenhaal takes the lead role here as a successful boxer struck by misfortune who makes it his mission to redeem himself in the eyes of his loved ones. Having received mixed reviews so far it’s tough to say whether Southpaw will please anyone but Gyllenhaal’s most-dedicated fans.

Finally, the only other wide release of the week is Adam Sandler’s Pixels. I foolishly believed the film could be a return to form for the actor, given that it’s coming from the director of the first two Harry Potter films, it stars some good actors in the form of Peter Dinklage, Brian Cox and Jane Krakowski, and the trailer generated some serious buzz earlier this year. Sadly, it seems I was wrong; the reviews that have come in so far have been almost universally negative, landing the film with a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 19% at the time of writing.

That’s your round-up for this week, thank you so much for watching. I hope you’ll come back next week for another round-up and also be sure to like the video, subscribe to this channel and let me know your thoughts on this week’s top stories in the comments section below!

Posted in: Movie Shows, Movies