This Week in Movie Posters: Sexy Tennis, Culture War Nuns, and Garfield

The week's new posters, a box office report, and some brief hopes for 2024.

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

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There aren’t that many new posters this week (welcome to the post-awards season hangover!), so I added a few segments this week. Hope you like it! No refunds!

The Movies Are Back, Sorta!

Total domestic box office for 2023 topped $9 billion. That’s better than last year’s $7.4 billion, but still behind the $11.9 billion in 2019 before COVID. Of course, we’re not getting those massive superhero bumps that once seemed so easy propping up all the numbers. Last year also had Avatar: The Way of the Water, and this year didn’t have many easy layups like that.

The story of this year, other than the surprise success of Barbie (my review) and Oppenheimer, was probably superhero movies that failed to perform. Like Aquaman 2 (my review), which was still expanding to additional theaters this weekend (its second) while losing money (domestic gross down 34% from opening weekend). 34% isn’t a big drop, in fact it’s pretty small by the usual standards of these things, but Aquaman 2 didn’t start very high. It’s barely limping past $81 million for its total domestic run, the kind of money these movies used to make their first weekend. That one’s coming up on $255 million worldwide, which isn’t great for a movie with a $200 million+ production budget. But it seems like the studio saw the writing on the wall pretty early on and only half-heartedly marketed it.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros’ other big movie, Wonka, is still on top in its third weekend, approaching $400 million worldwide for its total run. I still haven’t seen it, because nothing really about it appeals to me, but the guy who directed it did direct the Paddington movies, which I loved, so who knows. It’s probably not that bad! It still seems more like an “if you have to” movie than a “because I want to” movie.

The other new movies out this weekend were the musical version of The Color Purple, which someone on Twitter said seems like a Simpsons bit, at $11 million; The Boys in the Boat, George Clooney’s adaptation of a book I loved, at $8.4 million; and Ferrari (my review), Michael Mann’s dad movie that was fine but could’ve (should’ve?) been better, at $4 million.

So what’s the broader story here? Probably that as one flavor of dogshit (expanded universe superhero movies) goes out of fashion, other flavors of dogshit (third reboots of stuff that was popular in the 70s; musical versions of stuff that came out in the 80s) rise to replace it. As with most things, the stuff making the most money is rarely the stuff you remember, or even necessarily the stuff the company making it wants to put on the press release.

The good stuff we get mostly seems to have snuck through partly by accident, like the Barbie movie Trojan Horsing a fun comedy inside of what was surely envisioned as a vapid cash grab, or because Apple had enough money to blow a hundred million or whatever on a Martin Scorsese movie mostly as an ad for its products, and Marty ended up making one of his best movies in years. There were lots of good movies this year, even times when I saw two or three great ones in a row.

Here’s to more subversion, happy accidents, and surpluses well spent in 2024. Smart entertainment isn’t big business, and probably it never was. Let’s hope it can just be modest business.

The Video Bobby Sent Me of the Week

A new segment, maybe!

You may remember my friend Bobby Hacker as the creator of the Cars videos and a million other hilarious things that are hard to find online anymore. Not only is he still great at making movies, he also seems to have a rare knack (penchant?) for “found comedy,” incredible videos that have 17 views, finding new and distinct flavors of online weirdos to obsess over, etc. The videos he sends me are just “different” somehow. I can’t entirely explain it, but it feels selfish not to share.

Anyway, this one has thousands of likes so it isn’t very obscure, but it feels like it fits the Bobby aesthetic perfectly.

fosterhomeorgy

A post shared by @fosterhomeorgy

This Week In Movie Posters

Welcome to the This Week In Movie Posters, the feature in which we go through all the week’s new movie posters and read way too much into them. Blessed are the paid subscribers, as without them, none of this would be possible. All posters via IMPA.

Yep, more Garfield movie posters. If they keep up this pace, it’s going to be a long five months and change until this actually comes out in May. Anyway, let’s break this down: I guess that’s supposed to be a lasagna calendar on the wall. I only know that because of Garfield canon. if I was coming to this cold I’d probably just think it was waffles or something. (Get some crust on the top, come on!)

Odie’s ears also seem notably fluffy, at least compared to the rest of him. Are the ears really the fluffiest part of a dog? I say no. I guess he’s blowing a New Year’s noisemaker, and his paws are little mitten-type things. Garfield gets more fingers than Odie, for whatever reason. I guess because Garfield is smarter and more anthropomorphized, he gets to have a whole inner monologue while Odie is just a dumb dog. So Garfield gets the human fingers and Odie just gets idiot mitts. Makes sense.

Thought that pen was a tampon at first.

I saw this trailer in the theater the other day and I was 100% in. Give me all of the movies where a guy makes a dog best friend, even that guy is Mark Wahlberg. It’s one of those trailers that basically gives away every emotional beat of the movie, but it really took me on an emotional roller coaster. This trailer for the Mark Wahlberg-scruffy dog movie is my favorite movie of 2024.

“The world is too small for what I intend to do.”

Oh no, what does she intend to do?! Is she like the nun Thanos? What’s she hiding in all of those bags??

Frances Cabrini was the first American citizen canonized by the Catholic Church, so there’s probably a story there, but “from the director of the So*nd of Fre*dom” still sounds more like a threat than a tease.

I never saw that one, but an honest movie about that actual guy (rather than his own press release version) who sounds like he was taking rich people’s money to hang out at strip clubs in the Caribbean for seven hours a day and paw at his female volunteers under the guise of being “in character” seems like it would make for an incredible Coen Brothers movie. Give me the Burn After Reading version of So*nd of Fre*dom, please.

Incidentally, the director of that one is married to Ali Landry, who other dudes as old as me may remember as “the Doritos Girl.” That’s a weird thing that I know now and now you have to too.

I’m not sure what their weird culture war angle is going to be in Cabrini, but, like So*nd of Fre*dom, it does come from Angel Studios, which a recent report in Rolling Stone sure makes seems like complex money laundering scheme. Get that bag, I guess.

Between this, The Accountant, and The Beekeeper, I like this new trend of making Taken-style movies and naming them after a random job. Jason Statham is… The Beekeeper. Aaron Eckhardt is… The Bricklayer. Taylor Kitsch is… The Regional Sales Coordinator of the Third-Largest Distributor of Bunk and Trundle Beds.

I can’t resist a Simpsons reference, sorry.

My only criticism is that this doesn’t have a brick-related tagline. Come on! A brick-related tagline should be the base-level requirement for an action movie called “The Bricklayer.”

Blood is thicker than mortar. I’m just spitballing here.

I love this poster for Challengers, because it feels like the designer actually did some work. He didn’t just stick a bunch of floating heads up there with the names mismatched like a lot of these clowns do.

I mostly just like that “Luca Guadagnino thriller about a sexy love triangle in the tennis community” is a thing that exists.

The Holdovers (my review) was intended to look like it was made in the seventies, and this poster seems to adhere to the theme. Grrr, Earthtones! They sure loved their browns and oranges back then, didn’t they? Like the whole world was wearing a throwback Padres uni.

Come on, man, you can’t just remake Crazy Heart and swap out Bridges brothers thinking people won’t notice. This is Crazy Heart, right?

Twenty years ago, Wayne, a singer/songwriter, was a heartbeat away from making it in Nashville when a car crash ended his dream. Now a working man struggling to support his family, he chances to meet the washed-up country music legend, Claude Allen. [IMDB]

A country guy named “Claude?” I don’t know, man, sounds awful French for a country singer. A proper country guy needs two first names or a really stupid sounding last name, like Kenny Jake or Trev Huffy. No one is listening to pick-up truck song from a guy named Claude.

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Podcasts!

We haven’t started season five of Pod Yourself the Wire yet, but in the meantime we have a new Frotcast discussing Maestro and Matt has a new episode of Bad Hasbara. Enjoy!