This Week In Movie Posters: June 23, 2025

World War III just started but at least we have Eddington and Happy Gilmore 2.

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Weekend Box Office

Two new movies opened this weekend: 28 Years Later (my review) and Pixar’s Elio. My anecdotal evidence of my 28 Years Later matinee being packed proved representative, as that one grossed an estimated $30 million domestically (plus another $30m internationally for $60m worldwide). Any time you can get the average Truck Nuts-style Americans and the movie fellows to agree on a movie it’s usually good for business. Ah, the magic of zombies.

That one was considered to overperform based on expectations, whereas Elio’s $21m domestic/$14m international ($35m total) was considered soft.

Pixar/Disney’s Elio did not meet expectations, lifting off with $35M global, of which a soft $14M was from 43 material overseas markets (80% of the footprint with China, Japan and Spain to come later). This is well below the pre-weekend projection despite positive audience and social reactions. Note that Elio, which skews young, opened into an international marketplace where kids’ school holidays have largely not yet begun. Elemental opened into the same corridor in 2023, albeit on a more staggered release, and ended up continuing to build. [Deadline]

So, it could keep making money, or the weak opening could be an omen. Sort of a too-early-to-tell situation. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ll keep you posted. Elemental was probably Pixar’s worst movie, but it at least this one sounds better than that (my 3-year-old loves Elemental, for what it’s worth).

Either way, an original kids’ movie opening weakly is tough news, considering how well the cheap IP-driven ones have been doing ($358m worldwide for How To Train Your Dragon, $954m worldwide for the Minecraft movies). I think it speaks less to “public appetites” than to the decline of mass advertising. We kind of broke that entire industry (which is why I’m writing here on Substack and not on a free, ad-driven major news platform, even though I feel like I did my part by helping to build one). And so now, how to actually get the word out about a new movie is an open question. Where does advertising still actually work? Things like “Minecraft” and “How to Train Your Dragon” tend to jump off a marquee in a way that “Elio” doesn’t, especially if you’re 10. 28 Years Later popping is good news, but it’s also still a sequel that’s also about zombies.

The death of advertising and the media it used to support isn’t the most important thing going on in the world right now,of course, most of which I find far too depressing to write about. I already lived through 2003. It sucked shit. The rerun is the same but even more dull (thought this was a good piece about that).

That being said, the death of accessible mainstream journalism and the rise of politicians just doing whatever the fuck they want regardless of public opinion do seem like not entirely unrelated subjects. Whenever people ask “why isn’t anyone talking about [X]? Why is story [Y] in and out of the news in a few days instead of getting weeks of coverage like something like this used to???” — usually a big part of the answer is “probably because the news business is like half the size it was 20 years to cover cities that are even bigger.”

But hey, at least we have twice as many billionaires now. We love them, don’t we, folks???

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. All posters via IMPA.

A Margot Robbie/Colin Farrell rom-com?? Those are two people I’d watch paint a house, so yeah, gimme. Also, it’s from the writer of The Menu. (Sidenote: Match up the naaaames, you bastards!!!)

I don’t have any idea what the blue and yellow umbrellas are meant to represent (purple and yellow? I’m colorblind) but I can promise you: if you start trying to do color theory on this I will call the police.

Oh yeah, they’re doing a Bruce Springsteen biopic starring the guy from The Bear. Bruce Springsteen is definitely not a guy I’ve spent my entire adult life hearing far too much about so I’m sure this will be great.

Speaking of, I trust you’ve all seen the James Urbaniak edit by now? (Substack apparently doesn’t do Twitter embeds). As someone who hates that particular song with the passion of a thousand suns I was the perfect audience for this joke.

Here’s a sort of Japanese mural-style poster for The Old Guard 2. Probably very cool but doesn’t quite hit the same at 1200-pixels wide.

Meanwhile, this old school, 80s-VHS-style poster for Eddington is absolutely perfect for this format. I would follow Ari Aster into hell.

Here’s another poster for Eddington, just in case (there’s a whole batch of character posters, I’m not going to include all of them). On the one hand, I’m very against using pull quotes for a movie that I, a member of two separate critics organizations, have not had an opportunity to see yet. On the other, I am intrigued by the prospect of make-up-free Emma Stone playing a hillbilly.

Attractive woman, great actress, but am I crazy for thinking she looks like someone whose breath would stink? Something for my therapist, perhaps.