June 9th, 2020
It is a slower week on the home market with no really big releases to talk about, at least not when you judge them by box office numbers. The Al Adamson: The Masterpiece Collection Blu-ray is massive, when you judge it by the price and the running time, but it is filled with low-budget B-movies. The biggest box office hit is The Hunt, which couldn’t ride its controversial nature to high ticket sales. As for the best releases, it was close race between Never Rarely Sometimes Always on DVD and season two Mob Psycho 100 on Blu-ray Combo Pack. Both have stellar reviews and it was a coin toss to decide which one would come out ahead, which Mob Psycho 100 won.
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November 11th, 2019
I really liked the first season of Star Trek: Discovery and thought it was the best first season of any Star Trek series since the original. Was the show able to grow and improve? Or did it peak out of the gate?
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November 27th, 2018
Star Trek: Discovery is the first TV series in the Star Trek franchise since the untimely, and well-deserved, early death of Enterprise. It was part of the launch of CBS’s streaming service and it helped increase subscriptions to that service, so in that regard, it was a success. Is it also a critical success? Or did it thrive during its first season more out of curiosity than anything else?
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December 1st, 2017
It’s an incredibly busy week with about 30 films coming out. However, the vast majority of them have too few reviews to be worth talking about. In fact, there would have been more entries in the secondary VOD than the main list, except I bent the rules a little. There are still some releases that are certainly worth checking out, including The Disaster Artist, The Other Side of Hope, A Bad Idea Gone Wrong, and The Shape of Water. If I were to pick just one, it would easily be The Shape of Water.
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January 1st, 2017
December box office numbers helped 2016 end on ... a note. The good news and the bad news almost exactly balance out. On the one hand, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will finish the year with more than $400 million after just 16 days of release. That’s a stunning amount of money that helped 2016 earn a record box office at the domestic market. However, Star Wars: The Force Awakens earned $650 million during December of 2015, so the month lost a lot of its lead over 2015, so much so that ticket sales fell behind last year’s total. The weakness at the end of the year will spill over into 2017, which is terrible news. A slow start could result in the dominant box office story being 2017 struggles compared to 2016. Bad news like this can sometimes become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sadly, 2017 is also going to get off to a slow start when it comes to wide releases / expansions. There are 16 films scheduled to open or expand wide this month and none of them are expected to get to $100 million. It is likely none of them will even get very close. xXx: Return of Xander Cage is expected to be the best of a weak bunch, but I could see it getting beat by one of the five Oscar contenders opening wide this month, if it gets off to a slow start and one of the Oscar contenders starts picking up steam. Hidden Figures got off to a great start on Christmas Day and should it continue to earn Awards Season recognition, including some Oscar nominations, it could be in wide release well into February. Last January wasn’t as busy with 13 films opening or expanding wide over five weeks. Of these, two of them, The Revenant and Kung Fu Panda 3, topped $100 million domestically, while another, Ride Along 2, came close. 2017 is going to get destroyed in the year-over-year comparison.
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