Matthew Monagle

It feels like we’ve been watching the same six or seven movies shift places on the charts for weeks now, which makes what happened this weekend such a breath of fresh air. With four new releases all cracking the charts, we’ve at least got a little bit of variety in the titles we’ll be discussing, and no The Emoji Movie near the list. I’ll put that down as a win in my book any day of the week. Here’s the estimated box office grosses as of Sunday afternoon:

It’s getting progressively more difficult to find anything of value to say when Ron Howard teases more behind-the-scenes photos from the Han Solo set. On the one hand, we get it, Opie, you’re deeply immersed in the Star Wars universe and doing all kinds of cool [expletive] and we’re not. On the other hand, though, we’ve reached a point where our collective interest in little tidbits is starting to wane. Let me put it to you like this: I love a good tapas restaurant as much as the next guy, right? But sometimes you just want the full three-course meal.

It’s now been two weekends since Pennywise the Dancing Clown was unleashed upon unsuspecting audiences, and Hollywood may never be the same. Seriously. The kind of box office numbers we’re seeing right now will inspire, uh, major changes in how Hollywood tries to jump on specific trends. And while two new movies made a sort of solid showing for themselves over the weekend, the fact is this: it’s Pennywise’s world. We’re just living in it. Here’s the box office projections as of Sunday afternoon:

We’re only months away from Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and already, it’s beginning to feel like a film that will be unbearably sad for all the wrong reasons. The loss of Carrie Fisher will be made fresh by her appearance in the upcoming film, and seeing her alongside Mark Hamill for the last time  —  one assumes, anyways  —  will be a touching moment for any fans of the Star Wars franchise. No less touching will be the opportunity for Fisher’s daughter Billie Lourd to share the screen with her one last time. All in all, The Last Jedi will be the ultimate Star Wars family reunion, biological and otherwise.

As we head deeper into September, two things have become pretty clear about 2017 box office numbers: one, Hollywood desperately needs to bounce back a little bit from the doldrums of August, and two, whoever decided to hedge their studio’s bets with a September release date for a movie about a killer clown is looking like a [profanity] genius right about now. We’ll get to all of that in a moment, but first, here are the box office numbers as of Sunday afternoon:

Horror has always had a knack for preying on people’s fears of new technologies. This approach has worked like gangbusters in movies like The Ring to Unfriended, both well-regarded horror films that use new media as a way to scare impressionable teenagers. So keep that in mind when you watch this trailer for Friend Request; yes, the very title itself seems to suggest a movie that is more interested in jumping on trends than breaking new ground in the horror genre, but sometimes these are the movies that end up surprising us. We’ll never know until we watch it, right?

Here’s a fun question for you: how many evil droids have there been in the Star Wars universe? There was the interrogation droid that tortured Dr. Leia in the original Star Wars; IG-88 and the jet-black C-3PO unit in The Empire Strikes Back; and a handful of trade federation robots in the Star Wars prequels, as well as K-2SO (sorta) in Rogue One. Come to think of it, while both Death Stars have always had a bunch of R2 and MSE units wandering around in the background, the Star Wars series has always been a little short on recognizable droid baddies.

In a weekend where no new releases cracked the Top 10 and six movies maintained their exact spot in the rankings, you’d think there would be less news worth sharing. That isn’t quite the case. Sure, as sites like Box Office Mojo have noted, this is a historically bad Labor Day Weekend for movies in theaters, but it’s also a uniquely static weekend for releases, one that even required me to create a second chart just to capture all the data points. Let’s start as we always do, with the box office grosses as of Sunday afternoon:

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of The Dark Tower isn’t that it failed to live up to expectations decades in the making, or even that it mangled Stephen King’s source material in a way that die-hard fans found unforgivable. No, the most frustrating aspect of The Dark Tower is that it’s just… fine. Despite the plethora of negative reviews, it isn’t some disastrous flop a movie, nor is it an ambitious mess that reached for the stars and came crashing back to earth. It’s just sorta there, a Young Adult action-fantasy film that limps through its paces before ending with a thud. Really, how do you even make a King adaptation that doesn’t have a little bit of ambition?

I’d like to think I’m not prone to hyperbole, so believe me when I say I’m putting all my remaining Marvel eggs in the Thor: Ragnarok basket. Sure, I’ve more-or-less enjoyed most of the movies in the franchise  —  this year’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, for example, might be one of their best yet  —  but superhero movies are like anything else: the more you ingest, the less you enjoy it the next time around. If Marvel is going to continue making these movies until the sun explodes, then I’m ready for things to get a little bit weird, and Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi is the right person to deliver.

One of the underrated elements of the horror community is how many of them have the opportunity to meet their heroes. When famous actors and filmmakers die, they tend to be remembered at a distance on the quality of their work; when horror icons like George Romero or Wes Craven pass, however, people have first-hand accounts of meeting them at festivals and conventions. So as word spreads today about the death of legendary Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper, you’ll hear more than a few first-hand accounts of what it was like to talk about the genre with Hooper. That’s the power of the horror community.

Now that thermonuclear war is a thing again, there’s no better time for the King of the Monsters to reclaim his dominance in science fiction. This has been a pretty great couple of months for Godzilla; not only did the beloved monster recently receive a live-action reboot in Toho Studios’ Shin Godzilla, he will also be appearing in Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong and in an upcoming animated Netflix movie titled Godzilla: Monster Planet. And now, a few months prior to the film’s release, we finally have our first full trailer for the film. Flying mech-warriors against super-sized kaiju? Plenty of people are going to be very happy this movie exists, that’s for sure.