Scott Mendelson
@scottmendelson
A box office columnist for Puck News, but also head over to The Outside Scoop at Substack for everything else worth reading (box office, reviews, analysis, think pieces, etc.)
‘The End of Oak Street’ is shockingly good. It’s stupendously well-constructed and staged, with terrific performances (Anne Hathaway is 4/4 this year, with ‘Verity’ still on deck), a macabre sense of humor, unapologetically raw melodrama and genuinely scary set pieces. It rocks.
Don’t forget the big one - I now realize what I must become to stop... *cats* like this. Dogs are dying, Ryder. What should I do? (No more dead pups!) Endure, Chase. They’ll hate you for it, but isn’t that the point of PAW Patrol? Today, we find what the PAW Patrol can’t do. We can’t endure... this.
Marvel’s superhero sequel (starring Tom Holland, Zendaya and Jon Bernthal) and Universal’s R-rated action epic (starring, uh, Tom Holland, Zendaya and Jon Bernthal) are essentially benefiting each other and providing a kind of two-stop shop for everything moviegoers might want...
Spider-Man: Brand New Day (a $655 million domestic and $1.67 billion worldwide cume) and The Odyssey (now at $461 million/$1.105 billion) are posting weekend drops and box office grosses that would be aspirational even if they weren’t playing concurrently...
I look forward to Ryan Gosling’s 'The Place Behind The Place Beyond The Pines’
When you’re strutting onto the stage to accept your PhD diploma after finishing your doctoral dissertation roughly 30 years behind schedule...
“You ready to follow Black Panther 3 into theaters?” “Hell no. But a Ryan Coogler tentpole, starring David Jonsson, who deserved an Oscar nom for The Long Walk and tricked us into thinking Alien Romulus was good...?"
'The Adventures of Milo and Otis' Proves It: Audiences Want Movies Made the Hard Way
Not a war crime, but a key difference between the SOCIAL NETWORK “character posters” and the new ones for SOCIAL RECKONING is that the former buried Jesse Eisenberg’s face amid text, while the new posters frame the text around the actors’ faces (thus centering their noses).
So, #TheFurious should earn ≈ $3 million over the weekend after a ≈ $1.4 million Friday. On a curve, that’s pretty good. To wit: 2023’s KILL earned $1.7M in total 2014’s THE RAID 2 finished with $2.6M 2012’s THE RAID legged out to $4.1M The last three ROUNDUP flicks totaled $2.875M
“Ben Stone once asked me if I was a detective who was a sheep, or a sheep who was a detective. All those years, I thought I was the former. All those years I was wrong.”
Didn’t love DEVIL WEARS PRADA and didn’t hate DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2. But it’s another weird recent example of a sequel to a small-scale, adult-skewing character study that puts the characters in a glorified “We gotta save the world!” plot with a tone akin to a G-rated kids’ flick.
Should I quickly read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ‘Gods of Mars’ so as to prepare myself for ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’?
I can only hope this is a bot, because the film got a 95% fresh rating and (more importantly) an 8.3/10 average critic score from nearly 300 critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Hell, I'm one of the least favorable critics and even I think it's pretty good and worth seeing in theaters.
Bad-faith misreading of the film’s finale notwithstanding, I for one look forward to LILO & STITCH 2: BRING HER BACK.
While #TheSheepDetectives looks pretty delightful, I’m pretty sure I’ve already solved this mystery...
I am currently on jury duty for the day. So... if I run into any gaslighting, self-pitying, "Boo hoo, you'll never hear my song again!" drama queens, they are going straight to whale jail!
When Universal trumpets the (terrific) $109 million worldwide debut of FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S 2 as the studio’s second-biggest horror opening ever behind the first FNAF…
Am I the author of all of this pain? Or did I accidentally create #Avatar’s biggest pop culture “footprint” by writing 11 years ago (on its 5th anniversary, as a note of post-theatrical curiosity, not a criticism of the film) that it left no pop culture footprint? Did I incept all of this?!
It may not be a career defining turn, but I loved Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa's delightful spoof of his own onscreen villainy in BALLS OF FURY.