Ananas

It's hard to make a bad movie on $200 million. Don't get me wrong, Hollywood does it, plenty, but it was a story people loved and even with Jar Jar Binks, I'd say they were all at the very least good movies.

Awesome, now we can get Inspirations with Brother Gerard an hour earlier!

What ROC said, then the first of what Skumfrog said and add to that Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. Seriously, I could listen to her stuff for hours. She's got amazingly vivid lyrics, reasonably complex compositions and one of the best voices anywhere.

You know, for a band that supposedly has such "bad blood", Tom and Zack certainly seem to be chummy in these recent pictures.

They're 4-6 against the top three AL East teams. I'd love to see how they'd do if they were here more often.

This news wasn't terrible until I read that last line. Fuck. Maybe they'll form that band with Chuck D they almost did after Zack left. Or maybe the RATM bad blood will cool when both sides realise they've got nothing to do. Either way, this news will either be bad or horrible depending on how good this third Audioslave album is.

AD had some painfully bad episodes around the time Charlize Theron was on, but it was otherwise frighteningly consistent. I never got to see the last few episodes so I'll definitely pick this set up. Hopefully they make the AD movie Mitchell Hurwitz has talked about.

Just from a perspective of how much I laughed the first time I saw them: 1. Scary Movie 2. Clerks 3. Clerks II 4. American Pie 5. Billy Madison 6. Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back 7. Old School 8. Anchorman 9. Animal House 10. Monty Python And the Holy Grail

The cast and one of the writers of "Nobody's Watching" on the phone with Kevin Reilly on "Last Call with Carson Daly". My opinion of Kevin Reilly has completely changed in the past few months. First he comes out with an ace fall schedule, then he expands NBC's web presence into something impressive, now this.

Clerks II - 9/10 Clearly Kevin Smith took to heart the saying "you can't go home again". In that spirit, he burnt the fucking thing to the ground, and built himself one of the sharpest, most complete comedies since, well, the last time he visited the View Askewniverse. Clerks II is the sequel to a 12 year old film, but with this age old adage about recreating the past in mind, Smith has created a story that not only works in 2006, it seems likely to work with the latest generation as much as the original worked with Gen X-ers. The sequel is also buoyed by the addition of two new characters, Rosario Dawson as Becky and Trevor Fehrman as Elias, who serve both the dramatic and comedic elements respectively. Compared side by side, it's hard to say whether "the second coming" of Clerks matches up to the original, but compared to any comedy in recent years, it's more than equal. 2006 has it's first great movie.

It's awesome. Instant Kevin Smith classic, and exactly the film he needed to make to reassure his fanbase. The cameos from VA alumni are generally all very brief, but effective in their own right. It very succinctly balances between being the kind of sharp comedy that the first one was, and having a good deal of dramatic weight as it examines, as Smith puts it "What happens to the angry young man when he turns thirty." If this is Kevin's new direction, I'm behind it all the way.

From Wikipedia, so I don't need to muster the creativity to describe it:

Didn't Shea leave Boston on poor terms? He's been bitching about the lack of starts all year, and it's pathetic, because you didn't see Reed Johnson bitching when he was platooning in left before Rios got hurt and he got the everyday spot for a while. Difference between Johnson and Hillenbrand is modesty and about 50 points on the batting average. Buh-bye Shea, we've already got a solid hitting infield and you're no longer needed.

Heh, apparently as this Siegel-Smith controversy has developed, Clerks II has been silently building in both buzz and theatre counts. On Sunday it was only expected on 1,900 screens; now it's got 2,100. Keep talkin' Joel, let's make this film a blockbuster!

Let's just do a bit of speculative math. Superman Returns: Domestic Tally To Date - $164,316,103 International Tally To Date - $77,000,000 Worldwide Total - $241,316,103 The studio's take is usually half of that, so the low number in studio revenue so far is $120,658,051.50. However, with a frontloaded blockbuster like Superman I can see the take being as high as 2/3, due to the studio taking it's highest percentage on opening weekend, and to the fact that blockbusters occasionally get better revenue deals. We can probably put the high number at around $160,877,402. Now for the costs. The budget was originally reported at $260,000,000, but Bryan Singer claimed it was a more modest $185,000,000. In addition, I'll make the conservative estimate that the marketing budget was about $25 million, which is pretty much standard fare for the July 4th blockbusters. So going in, you're looking at anywhere between $210,000,000 and $285,000,000 as the total cost (and that's not including the hundred and fifty million in developing the aborted projects, as since Singer seems attached to a sequel I doubt we'll see that problem). With that, the amount of cash they're in the whole on box office alone is anywhere from $50 million to $165 million. Logic seems to cast doubt on the higher budget estimate, so we'll say realistically that the numer is in fact between $50-90 million. Whether merchandise is on its own enough to tip the scales and put the film in the black is one thing, but then again you've gotta include DVD sales as well. Successful DVD releases can match, and even exceed a film's box office totals, and this applies to more than just indy releases. The first "Lord Of the Rings" film did $315 million dollars at box office, but on DVD it did a further $500 million in sales. The first "Pirates Of the Caribbean" took in $305 million in theatres, but when it hit DVD it sold over $324 million in DVD's. If the "Superman Returns" DVD is marketed in even a decent way, it should more than recoup the film company's costs. So in short, nah, it won't impact the sequel. >_>