Only 20 percent of reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes, roughly one out of five, recommend April's military-themed romance The Lucky One, about an ex-Marine who walks across the country to find the girl whose photograph he believes saved his life overseas. But having already seen it on opening weekend months ago I've been waiting for today, the day it hits DVD and Blu-ray, for one very special reason: Zac Efron.
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Johnny Depp wanted his and Tim Burton's gothic vampire comedy Dark Shadows to be anything but Twilight. Mission accomplished, I suppose: The film fizzled into a very distant second place behind another jaw-dropping performance by The Avengers, which continued to rewrite the blockbuster history books in its second weekend. Your Weekend Receipts are here.
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Marvel's The Avengers broke virtually every box-office record known to Hollywood over the weekend, becoming the first film to surpass $200 million domestic on an opening weekend and hurtling toward $1 billion worldwide in what should be a matter of days. Consider the superhero gauntlet thrown down before The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises. Your Weekend Receipts (for what they're worth) are here.
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The last weekend before summer blockbuster madness ensues proved to be a wrenching one for Hollywood, which watched as four new openings stumbled out of the gate behind tested literary thoroughbreds Think Like a Man and The Lucky One. Is the Apatow comedy machine broken? Has America lost its taste for the Stath? Your Weekend Receipts are here.
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After nearly a month in first place, The Hunger Games surrendered its banner to another big-league bestseller-adaptation — and not the one that you (or I, for that matter) were expecting. Your eye-opening Weekend Receipts are here.
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There are a number of givens when one is confronted with a Nicholas Sparks story, the surest thing being that you will cry. Oh yes, you will weep. That is, if you're one of the many out there predisposed to falling under the spell of Sparks's carefully crafted, timeworn magic formula of love, tears, and tragedy. But how does this week's Zac Efron-starring The Lucky One measure up to its predecessors in terms of The Sparks Quotient?
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Nicholas Sparks. The name alone conjures up images of a romantic connection leaping between two people like an electric current, of fireworks illuminating the sky behind a couple canoodling at the side of a silvery lake somewhere and swearing they'll never be parted — except that she's dying of terminal amnesia and he has to leave tomorrow for an 50-year deployment in the Middle East, oh no!
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You only have to wait four and a half more months until you rally your book club for an opening night screening of the latest Nicholas Sparks adaptation, The Lucky One. In a new featurette for the movie -- which shares enough striking similarities to The Notebook to list after the jump -- star Zac Efron wonders aloud about love, destiny and other people's favorite books in between shots of him wooing Taylor Schilling onscreen.
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The next Nicholas Sparks joint, The Lucky One, comes out April 20, but Zac Efron gives us everything we need to survive the five-month wait -- namely, a killer pout. He stars in The Lucky One as an Iraq War vet who comes home to locate the unknown woman who served as his "good luck charm during the war." In the film's poster, he appears to have found her: Taylor Schilling, of the unfairly canceled NBC drama Mercy, stands in frame. Pretty damn Notebook-y all around.
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