This week the movie choice is The Mummy, with a tone closer to the original movies than the more recent trilogy. The one thing it has in common with the more recent work is it does still look to be Action driven, rather than the original Horror underpinnings.
SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING is a perfect title, since Marvel recently negotiated getting the character back into the shared universe which includes The Avengers, and that agreement will run through at least 3 more films. It will be in theaters July 7th, and I will be there to see it in the IMAX theater, no doubt about it!
You would think this weekend would be a no-brainer, and you would be right: Wonder Woman is definitely the movie to see, and it is decades overdue. The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin upset a few folks when it announced a Women-only showing, but it sold so well they added a second showing, and may have to add a third before we hit the weekend. This is the first movie in the DC universe that has excited me as much as the string of blockbusters Marvel has been cranking out, and I can not wait to see it in IMAX 3D.
This weekend Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is the obvious winner, and I am looking forward to seeing it on the big screen. Extortionist hackers claimed they stole a copy of it and threatened Disney Studios that they would release it online if they were not paid a ton of money, but I can’t see the company paying for a number of reasons. First is it would set a precedent that would encourage hackers everywhere to attack movie studios, not a result I expect the movie industry wants to encourage. Second, you might have noticed an order of magnitude difference between IMAX and regular movies, and another order of magnitude between regular movie screens and your TV set at home. Is a low resolution illegal-but-free version going to keep the audience away from the theaters? I won’t know what the numbers might be unless they carry their threat out, but my own guestimate would be somewhere in the one half to two percent range. While that will objectively be some noticeable amount of money, again I suspect it will be a lot less than the movie studios would lose if they encouraged this kind of activity by paying up. However those details work out, I intend to be in the theater for this film, I have been waiting too long for it to see it on a tiny screen!
This time we get King Arthur: Legend of the Sword for those into historic fantasy, with a really different take on the legend and a 40 foot tall elephant. For myself, I will be seeing Absolutely Anything, starring Simon Pegg, Joanna Lumley, Kate Beckinsale, and pretty much all the surviving Monty Python members. It was also Robin Williams final film, doing the voice work for the dog, the ONLY character on Earth who seemed to understand what was going on.
This weekend is all about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and I am guaranteed to be in the IMAX 3D version, probably about 4 rows from the screen.