Monday, July 20th, 2009

It was no big shock when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince took the top spot at this weekend's box office, raking in nearly $78 million, approximately $60 million more than the second spot Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. However, the big news in the box office report today wasn't the sixth Potter film, but in the number five spot, Todd Phillips' raunchy comedy The Hangover. Coming in at around $8 million, the film hangs on to the top five, beating out high profile films Public Enemies and The Taking of Pelham 123, despite being released later. Not only does the film hang on for some extra glory, it surpassed Beverly Hills Cop as the top grossing R rated comedy of all time, and behind only The Passion of the Christ and The Matrix Reloaded as top grossing R rated film of any genre. The film deserves it, and let's hope this catapults Zach Galifiankis' career past ever doing a film like the upcoming G-Force ever again.

The Hollywood Reporter has taken a look at DC Comics' upcoming films. The list is very impressive, although it doesn't elaborate on really anything. It announces that The Losers has started principal photography in Puerto Rico, and stars among others Watchmen's Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Star Trek's Zoe Saldana. I don't know much about Losers, so I can't comment too much about the casting news, but seeing that both of them did justice to geek relics thus far, I imagine the fans can't be that upset. The article also mentions The Green Lantern news of Ryan Reynolds' casting, as well as name dropping Jonah Hex. Possibly the biggest news was all as brief as possible, David Howard and Robert Gordon are writing a version of Bizarro Superman, a sequel to the film Constantine is in the works, and two concurrent screenplays for a solo shot of The Green Arrow are being worked on. Charles Roven is already looking into producing a big screen adaptation of The Flash, and Akiva Goldsman will be behind a version of the Teen Titans. Yeah, that last one worries me a little, but all in all, a bundle of possible great news from DC, and I'm going to go look up The Losers as soon as I'm done blogging.

More really awesome news for the day. TheOneRing has posted pictures of the re-building of Hobbiton, getting us all way too psyched up for The Hobbit to more than two years away.

Saw VI has a motion poster. I am going to throw a prediction out, that this poster will be more intriguing and entertaining than the actual film.

In real world news, today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. If you haven't already been today, Google is themed for the event, giving a link to an Apollo 11 search, which while looking through it, came upon a story on how sad it is that Stanley Kubrick will go uncredited for the famous video of the landing. I like that this conspiracy theory will never die. In other news of the occasion, Cinematical has a poll up requesting our favorite moon movie. Out of the choices is the 1902 Georges Melies classic A Trip to the Moon, the wonderful Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey and the recently released Moon. Sadly, The Adventures of Pluto Nash is also a choice and holds 5% of the vote. Here's hoping that those five percent were either joking, and will be weeded out via natural selection in the next few days or so. Oh, by the way, despite loving 2001, Melies' monumental milestone of a film was my pick. The current leader is Ron Howard's Apollo 13, which isn't too shabby either.