Weekend box-office sluggishness got you down? Oh. Well, either way, fortune tellers around Hollywood are saying the recent Avengers buzz has further heated up an already scorching prospect: Some tracking reports have Joss Whedon's Marvel-hero mash-up sailing beyond The Dark Knight's $158 million three-day mark from 2008, though Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2's all-time record of $169 million seems safe, 3-D and all. Stay tuned to Movieline for more box-office previews and projections — especially your own — as The Avenegers' May 4 release date draws near. [THR]
The Avengers premiered last night in Los Angeles, where luminaries, cognoscenti and unalloyed geeks took in the Marvel megaspectacle as one, big nerdy family. Afterward, with tweets permitted by Disney reps (and full reviews embargoed until the first week of May), many of those viewers took to Twitter to exhort director Joss Whedon, the nonstop action, the humor, the Hulk, and basically anything that wasn't the "worthless" 3-D. Read on for a brief round-up. [UPDATE 2:10 p.m. PDT: And starting now you can follow Jen Yamato's Avengers press conference livetweet over at @Movieline!]
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If you wanted to remain completely spoiler-free going into this summer's modest little art pic The Avengers, too bad! Disney has gone ahead and ruined the surprise. So, fine. Captain America apparently does not perish at the end of The Avengers, but will indeed live on to deal with his personal issues in Captain America 2, due to hit theaters on April 14, 2014. Find the official word and a new image after the jump.
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"'I’m very proud of John Carter. Box office doesn’t validate me as a person, or as an actor. [...] I’d love to go do John Carter 2. I really would. It’s just shitty I don’t get to work with the [John Carter] family. It really was a special thing." [EW]
The stirring 2009 documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty took us behind the scenes at Disney Animation to reveal what it's like when good things happen to good people. But before that, there was The Sweatbox, the 2002 doc that exposed how bad things happen to good people at the notoriously demanding studio — a revelation that virtually ensured the film would never see the light of day. The crackdown worked once and may yet work in the future, but for now, YouTube has all 95 unfinished minutes available for a rare look.
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Some years from now, after the dust around the megabudget John Carter debacle settles, and the heads that do wind up rolling in its aftermath come to rest, some expert arbiter of Hollywood travails will survey the carnage and write the definitive tale of what went wrong with Disney and director Andrew Stanton's sci-fi gamble. And you know what? I'd bet $10 right here and now that the real story won't deviate much from the one depicted in this no-budget animated retelling.
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Or the, uh, "Wocka Wocka" fame: "Several Muppets were on hand to receive the star including Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo, Animal, Pepe, Sweetums, and Walter, the newest Muppet, who made his debut in Disney's 2011 film," reports a press release just over the transom at ML HQ. "The Muppets' star is the 2,466th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and is located in front of the historic El Capitan Theatre." Nice real estate! And nice timing — The Muppets is out on DVD and Blu-ray today. The honor comes 57 years after Kermit's first TV appearance. No rush! And congrats to all.
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Stephanie Zacharek already kind of addressed this phenomenon in her review, but as John Carter postmortems go, yeesh: "[W]hat's really sad is when you look at the Rotten Tomatoes pages for The Lorax and John Carter. Among 'top critics,' The Lorax has a 48 percent fresh rating, and most of the reviews I've seen have been pretty respectful. (Except for the New Yorker, which says 'The badness of the picture is a shock,' and the New York Times, which called it 'a noisy, useless piece of junk.') And critics pretty much piled onto John Carter — among 'top critics,' it's at 35 percent fresh, with people outright gloating about how expensive it was and how much it falls short. It's like there's a collective agreement that The Lorax is too big and too much of a mainstream juggernaut to call out — but the herd decided it was okay to feed on John Carter." [io9]
Biggest. Bust. Ever: "In light of the theatrical performance of John Carter ($184 million global box office), we expect the film to generate an operating loss of approximately $200 million during our second fiscal quarter ending March 31. As a result, our current expectation is that the Studio segment will have an operating loss of between $80 and $120 million for the second quarter. As we look forward to the second half of the year, we are excited about the upcoming releases of The Avengers and Brave, which we believe have tremendous potential to drive value for the Studio and the rest of the company." [Disney via Deadline]
With John Carter currently drawing both mixed reviews and potentially catastrophic early box-office returns, Movieline today revisits our conversation with director Andrew Stanton and producer Lindsey Collins about the film's troubled back story — and what they and Disney really have to lose. - Ed.
A trade report last month suggested that Disney’s March sci-fi tent pole John Carter was in serious trouble owing to Pixar vet Andrew Stanton’s relative inexperience directing live-action film, citing rumors that production reshoots and late-game rejiggering had bloated the budget from $200 million to as much as $300 million. Speaking with press Thursday, Stanton called the report “a complete and utter lie,” insisting that he stayed on time and on budget – but it’s easy to see how the Pixar way of moviemaking may have made for a bumpy transition for the filmmaker.
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"Yes, because everybody's giving me a ration about it. I wish they would have named it something else because I have a weird background and now people keep accusing me of being reincarnated." I see. How about John Carter of Oklahoma? "Why are you calling? Oh. Well, he's been dead for over 10 years." [Moviefone]
And just like that, a million Halloween couple-costumes are decided. Thoughts?
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In February, a federal court threw out a suit filed by Stan Lee Media Inc. against Paradox Entertainment — a failed attempt for the plaintiff to regain the intellectual-property rights of the Conan comic character. It might seem odd enough that a company sues for a claim to the proceeds of a film that lost tens of millions of dollars last summer, but odder still is that Stan Lee himself — the comic-book mastermind responsible for The Avengers, X-Men, Spider-Man, and hundreds of other iconic characters — was neither the plaintiff nor the defendant in that suit.
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Taylor Kitsch is about to have a very big 2012. In addition to carrying Disney’s ambitious sci-fi adaptation John Carter as the titular Edgar Rice Burroughs hero, a Civil War veteran transported to Mars, he’s also fronting Peter Berg’s alien invasion actioner Battleship and starring in Oliver Stone’s Savages later this year. But as Kitsch revealed to Movieline, the John Carter job wasn’t easy to get — and the toll it took on him during production was a challenge in itself. So who better to offer pro tips on nabbing the spotlight and handling the pressure of becoming an action hero than Kitsch, on the eve of a new chapter in his career?
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Over the course of his career, Robert B. Sherman and his brother Richard wrote some of the most endearing and indelible songs tied to the Disney legacy, including their "It's a Small World (After All)" theme park ditty and the music for Mary Poppins that earned them two Academy Awards. In honor of the elder Sherman, who passed away this week at the age of 86, let's traipse down memory lane and revisit some of the Sherman Brothers' most enduring contributions.
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