Eli Roth Charms Audience With a Kid-Friendly Horror Flick
Best known for his gruesome horror movies such as Hostel and Green Inferno, director Eli Roth dominated the weekend’s box office with a different, kid-friendly film. Based on a John Bellairs’ 1973 children’s mystery novel featuring illustrations by Edward Gorey, The House With A Clock In Its Walls earned $26,8 million in its opening weekend. The movie tells a story of 10-year old Lewis (Owen Vaccaro) who moves in with his uncle (Jack Black – Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) who turns out to be a warlock, while his neighbor Ms. Zimmerman (Cate Blanchett – Ocean’s 8) is a powerful witch.
According to the Box Office Mojo, in the second place is yet another literary adaptation – Paul Feig’s A Simple Favor. With a weekend gross of $10,4 million, this mystery thriller actually climbed its way up from the last week’s third place. Meanwhile, supernatural horror The Nun dropped to the third place from the last week’s second by earning $10,2 million. Shane Black’s The Predator dramatically dropped to from the last week’s first place to this week’s fourth place with $8,7 million. Finally, in the fifth place of the weekend’s box office is once again romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians that, in its sixth weekend in cinemas, earned $6,5 million thus bringing its box office total up to $159,5 million domestically.
Cary Fukunaga to Direct the Next James Bond Film
Variety reports that the director of the 25th James Bond film will be Cary Joji Fukunaga, writer, cinematographer and director best known for his work on the much-lauded, Emmy Award-winning first season of HBO’s 2014 series True Detective. Fukunaga will thus replace Academy Award-winning director Danny Boyle, who was first rumored to become the next Bond director this February. However, Boyle recently left the production due to creative differences with the movie’s producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson as well as with the movie’s lead Daniel Craig.
Over the years, Fukunaga has directed a number of critically acclaimed movies, including adventure-thriller Sin Nombre (2009), gothic drama Jane Eyre (2011) and war drama Beasts of No Nation (2015). Most recently, Fukunaga has directed the entire first season of the Netflix’s miniseries Maniac, featuring Gabriel Byrne, Sally Field, Jonah Hill, and Emma Stone. The filming of the next James Bond film will begin in March 2019 at Pinewood Studios in London while the worldwide release date has now been postponed from November 2019 to February 14, 2020.
MST3K Returns This Turkey Day!
This Thanksgiving, Netflix will give all the MST3K fans out there something to be really thankful about. AVClub reports that Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return will, well, return with an all new season on November 22. Until then, show’s new host Jonah Ray will go on a live tour alongside Joel Hodgson, show’s creator, original host, and current executive producer. As part of the show’s 30th anniversary celebration and promotion of its upcoming new season, Hodgson, Ray and the MST3K ‘bots will visit a number of cities all around the country from early October to mid-November, riffing on the movies The Brain and Deathstalker in front of a live audience.
It was thirty years ago on Thanksgiving Day 1988 that Mystery Science Theater 3000 first aired on the Minneapolis local TV station KTMA. Throughout its 200 plus episodes, MST3K has changed its networks and hosts, got cancelled and renewed, all the while becoming a cult classic among fans of horror and sci-fi movie shlock. After a hugely successful 2015 Kickstarter that earned over $5 million, Mystery Science Theater 3000 aired on Netflix in April of 2017 with Jonah Ray as the new cost, Hampton Yount as Crow T. Robot, Baron Vaugh as Tom Servo, Felicia Day as the show’s new mad scientist Kinga Forrester and and Patton Oswalt as her assistant TV’s Son of the TV’s Frank. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return proved successful so Netflix renewed it in December 2017. At the time of this writing, the exact number of episodes or titles of featured movies are unknown.
