Last Jedi Still First
Star Wars: The Last Jedi continued to dominate the box office during the holiday weekend. According to Box Office Mojo, Episode VIII earned almost $100 million in its second weekend in cinemas. Currently, The Last Jedi‘s total worldwide gross stands at $842 million. Therefore, it’s hardly surprising that Kathleen Kennedy and other Disney executives already picked the movie’s director and head writer Rian Johnson to helm the next Star Wars trilogy.
In the second place with $55.4 million is the newcomer Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, a stand-alone sequel to a 1995 adventure comedy that was, in turn, based on a 1981 children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg. Third place of the weekend box office belongs to yet another newcomer – Pitch Perfect 3. This musical starring Anna Kendrick, Anna Camp, and Hailee Steinfeld earned $26.4 million in its opening weekend. In the fourth place with $14.4 million is the musical The Greatest Showman, in which Hugh Jackman portrays P. T Barnum, a despicable 19th-century fraud presented here as a patron saint of the society’s outcasts. Finally, in the fifth place is the last week’s newcomer, Ferdinand, with a bit over $10 million.
Netflix Renews Dark, Plans Bright 2
Following its ambitious new policy to release eighty original movies in 2018, Netflix has recently renewed several of its latest projects. AV Club reports that the streaming giant has already renewed German TV series Dark, first released early in December. This brooding sci-fi thriller follows residents of a small German town as they deal with missing children and time travel.
Netflix has also been looking to produce a number of its own movies. Its most ambitious film to date is Bright – an urban fantasy cop drama starring Will Smith, Joel Edgerton, and Noomi Rapace. A day before the movie was released on Netflix, Bloomberg reported that the company has already signed on Will Smith to appear in the movie’s sequel. Set in the contemporary Los Angeles populated not only by humans but also fantasy races like orcs, centaurs, and elves, Bright follows two cops (Smith and Edgerton) as they try to survive the night in the bad neighborhood.
Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek Moves Forward
A couple of weeks ago, we reported that Quentin Tarantino is pitching his idea for a Star Trek movie to Paramount. In any other year, this kind of story would sound like a bizarre idea doomed to failure. However, as 2017 proved, we now apparently live in a strange alternate timeline in which this project is somehow, incredibly, moving forward.
According to a report by Deadline, Tarantino first pitched his idea for a new Star Trek movie to Paramount with a help of the producer J. J. Abrams. The executives were so impressed by the idea they even allowed the proposed movie to be R-rated – a previously unthinkable occurrence in this venerable space opera franchise. Tarantino will supposedly only direct it since he’s busy making a movie about the Charles Manson murders – because of course he is. Therefore, Paramount picked Mark L. Smith to write the movie’s screenplay. Smith previously wrote Revenant, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s adventure drama starring Leonardo DiCaprio that, in 2015, got nominated for twelve Academy Awards and won three.
