It's the last Wednesday of December and I'm looking forward to the movies coming out in January.
December
But before we do that, let's look back at December.
Maybe it's because I'm off Twitter and I don't cruise Reddit's movie subreddits, but I haven't heard anything about these movies. I saw Avatar 2 bragging about winning the box office, but it was up against the sequel to a Shreck spinoff. Big whoop.
We're not at the money-counting phase for December's movies yet, but I now realize that I didn't make a prediction for Avatar 2. Given that I learned today that it grossed more than Avengers: Endgame, I probably would have been wrong, whatever I predicted.
January
M3Gan
Boo to giving away everything in a trailer, but it seems okay. I think if you do evil AI stories and keep the AI as a robot instead of a monotone person, it can be really, logically creepy and M3gan seems to hit that. It’s “I, Robot” with a bit of a twist. I admire that they didn’t slip in anything about an app and kept it as kind of a ‘timeless’ evil robot movie.
But could you please, please quit making your prototype sentient robots strong enough to bend steel?! Like, that’s gotta be a structural cost that’s way above what’s necessary; the tech bro credo about moving fast and breaking things applies to incidentals, not to specific end-goals.
It releases on Friday and it’s gonna do pretty good, but not good enough for them to have released it during Christmas: $40 million.
I can’t recap movies from last month, but I will do a post-mortem on September’s movies. Having written my October post-mortems already and not knowing how any of these movies fared, I’m gonna back-to-back prediction and result for each one.
Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul
Prediction: $12 million domestic, $1,000 international, and critical reception is good, but flawed (55/67).
Actual: $2.5 million. (71/26) Really? It looked cute and kinda clever. I’m not surprised by the critic score. Maybe it just wasn’t the movie it looked like.
Clerks III
Prediction: $6 million domestic, a ha’ penny WW, Tomatometer is -/43
Actual: $4 million domestic, $75,000 WW. (64/93). The Tomatometer score is shocking. Hey, nerds! Ask your friends if this thing was good.
Barbarian
Prediction: $25 million domestic, Tomatometer is 40/73
Actual: $41 million. 92/71. Pretty close and very far.
The Silent Twins
Prediction: $4 million domestic and total. Tomatometer is 63 because critics wanted to like it / 35
Actual: 67/76. I guess folks actually liked it. That’s good. It looked good. It opened in 10% of the theaters as Barbarian, so I guess the $200,000 take is reasonable.
Bros
Prediction: Too major a film to do sub-$10 million, but it’s mediocre and gay. $10 million, $1 million international. 55/23
Actual: $12 million domestic actually, $3 million international. Pleasantly surprised. It also did 88/90, so…better than it seemed. Maybe I’m just…a mean gay.
Don’t Worry Darling
Prediction: Too complex, but still big and sexy and tons of press. $100 million domestic. 65/65
Actual: Heyhey, $87 million…worldwide. $45 million domestic. I guess it was pretty complex. 38/74 is a fuck-you rating if I’ve ever seen one. Hard pass.
The Woman King
Prediction: $30 million, 83/63
Actual: I really underestimated this movie’s success. $67 million domestic and $94 million worldwide. 94/99
Gigi and Nate - Gods, it sucks and I hope it failed.
Prediction: $2,000,000 and 80/40
Actual: FUck YEs! $2.3 million, 16/93. I was about as wrong as I could get on the Tomatometer, but I call a victory on the shit/good split.
Smile
Prediction: $110 million WW. 63/75
Actual: $105 million domestic, with another $110 worldwide. Folks like horror. 79/77 Dang. Maybe my dinosaur little brain will learn that anything that makes nine figures will be liked by its audience.
Land of Dreams
Prediction: <$1 million, 87/75
Actual: $42,000 international (but this was probably from a 2021 release), 86/- Tomatometer. Close, but given my Tomatometer scores so far, that’s probably just coincidence.
December
Hey, it’s the main event and I guess the best movies come out in December??? Who would have guessed?
Violent Night
Look, David Harbor is pretty hot right now and he’s jumping off the Stranger Things bus as it goes over the cliff. Violent Night looks fun and violent. I do worry about the fundamentals and it’s R-rated and if you’ve cast John Leguizamo as your thuggish, mercenary villain you don’t know how to use John Leguizamo.
$44 million domestically and $20 million internationally. It might charm its way past its flaws and no one else is going to lament the underutilization of John Leguizamo: 73/90.
The Whale
If the media push for this was any harder, I’d have to ask it to step outside. I mean, “Have you heard that Brendan Fraser is back? And he overcame all of that adversity? That adversity didn’t keep him from killing it in three seasons of The Doom Patrol.
I’m not saying he hasn’t had it hard; I’m saying maybe don’t root for this movie because you think Brendan Fraser needs a win. Maybe just want a movie to be popular and well-liked because it’s a good movie. And The Whale looks good (from what little we actually have to go on).
It’s the cat from Shrek in his own spinoff. Of course Selma Hayek is also in it.
$110 million because I don’t see another family movie on the list.
Avatar: The Way of Water
No, I mean a real family movie.
The Inspection
There is a propensity for sad guys in this list. Don’t blame me; blame Hollywood for loading up the end of this year with depressed homosexual men. Actually, you can blame me a little bit for that one.
After writing this and narrowing down the list I realized that The Inspection actually came out in November, made a little more than my annual pay working offshore, and got thoroughly sucked off by Rotten Tomatoes with 82/100.
Babylon
Oh, it’s sadder than it looks, and at
Three.
Hours.
Long.
No one watching it for the titillation factor of all the boobs in the trailer is going to stick it out. They have boobs on the internet now.
It may be a fascinating, intense movie but I think that like the Hollywood it’s depicting, the image of excess and glitz it portrays is probably going to hook in a lot of unsuspecting peeps who aren’t prepared for the greyer, less pleasant realities.
It’s releasing two days before Christmas, it’s gotta be rated R, and it’s three hours long.
$60 million worldwide. $75 million if even one of those boobs belongs to Margot Robbie. 90/73
I Wanna Dance With Somebody
A Whitney Houston biopic that seems to feature the mismanagement of her money by her father. I don’t know a damned thing about Whitney Houston except for the domestic abuse and drug abuse, neither of which are mentioned in the trailer.
But clearly, as many biopics have claimed in the past, I don’t know the whole story.
It’s not yet rated, so I don’t know if they toned down either of the two things I know about Whitney Houston, but I don’t imagine it being a big family film for Christmas??? What Whitney Houston big overseas?
$40 million domestic, $20 international. 80/85. The movie will probably be solid overall, but fans of Whitney Houston will probably love it.
Empire of Light
Olivia Coleman Stop Being in Damned Good Movies Challenge (Impossible)
$3
Renegades
This is one of the worst movies I’ll ever go over to a friend’s house to watch. It looks like if predictive text made a movie starting with the phrase “Danny Trejo $900,000 script.”
It’s only on Apple+ so Tomatometer 53/67.
Spoiler Alert
I assume the title is because it’s Jim Parsons and they want to at least nod to the nerdity. I’ve always hated The Big Bang Theory, but I’m glad Jim Parsons is playing a gay man, even if I feel he’s a bit old for this role. That said, it feels very real from the trailer and while nobody wants to watch a movie where you once again bury your gays–I’d say “spoiler alert,” but I already did–it’s based on a memoir and seems authentic.
I don’t care what it makes; I might actually go see this one.
October
Amsterdam pulled in $29 million worldwide, $15 million domestically. I guessed $10-15 million, but I didn’t specify US or worldwide. That said, I’m kinda proud. Production budget was $80 million, so it did not break even.
That Korean movie, Project Wolf Hunting, only netted $3.4 million. You know I’m trying to save face when I break out the decimals: slightly shy of the $225 I estimated.
Look, I got lucky with Amsterdam. Let’s admit that before I embarrass myself.
Armageddon Time. Whoops too late. $4.01 million out of the $50 million I suggested. With a budget of $16 million that’s got to hurt.
Not as much as Call Jane though. 1. One single million dollars. I was perhaps wrongest about that one and let’s leave it at that. I’m calibrating, okay?
Detective Knight: Rogue has no numbers, as I expected BUT it does have something I didn’t expect. I thought it was a shoveled out affair where Bruce Willis shows up for one day of shooting and the producers stretch a movie out of that. I’m not too proud to admit that I was wrong. As the first movie in the Detective Knight Trilogy, that one day of shooting was stretched into 3 movies.
I’m checking these numbers as I write this so let me swing around and to the Halloween movie(s) before I finish with our (presumably) big winners.
Halloween: Another Bloody One. I’m beginning to think I copy/pasted $50 million as a placeholder and never made actual guesses. HABO made $105 million. I really thought I guessed some Rotten Tomatoes scores. I should definitely do that for movies which don’t have public take-ins.
Hellraiser: That Predator Movie Sure Was Successful Wasn’t It? Compared to The School for Good and Evil’s 38/67 Tomatometer score, 66/59 looks good. Not great, but better. I’d have guessed 40/53, but then I always assume critics will hate horror films way more than fans.
Ticket to Paradise raked in $63 million domestically versus the $75 I suggested and $100 million globally. I guess George Clooney and Julia Roberts still got it.
Two months ago, I compared the DCEU to a coked-up honey badger and threw out $450 million. Black Adam grossed $371 million worldwide. I said some shit, but I didn’t expect it to actually be bad. With a 39/89 Rotten Tomatoes score, I actually don’t know if it’s bad or just made for DECU fans.
I really enjoy Rick and Morty because I expect nothing from it aside from a few good jokes, engaging setpiece fights, and an occasionally stupid thing that's hilarious.
I don't get the concern over canon, personally. So Evil Morty did whatever with the thingamajig. I don't really care about that or whatever Rick's emotional journey is. He keeps learning valuable life lessons and also continues to be a dick. Is it even 'our' Rick? Does it matter?
Rick's entire nihilistic outlook is that that are dozens, thousands, millions? of Ricks and Mortys havin' cool adventures all the time and that's all I'm here for.
TW: Child abuse, sexual abuse. Dwayne Johnson has incredible charisma and he puts it to great use here. If you watch this sketch, you basically never have to watch Venture Brothers or Robot Chicken because The Rock does every one of their jokes better. It’s outstanding.
And evil. It's literally evil.
9. Teacher Fell Down (2018)
This isn’t just a stupid skit; it’s peak stupid skit. It’s so fucking unintelligent. So pointless. It defies expectations in that it has no jokes. Just when you think it’s going to get on track and give us a setup/punchline it just keeps being smart as rocks.
It’s a monument to Kate McKinnon’s ability to carry a skit based on nothing but pure Kate-McKinnonness. I couldn't just put "Kate McKinnon" on this list, but Teacher Fell Down is her Alesia. See also: Casablanca, all of 2016 when she played Hillary Clinton, and that 1-800-flowers one.
"Command Performance" leans heavily on Star Trek tropes, but makes good television with it and gives Halston Sage (Alara) great opportunities as one of the crew's most junior members.
