Pacific Rim: Uprising Trailer Breakdown

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Four years ago the geek world was changed forever with the release of Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim.  The film helped kick off the Kaiju craze that’s continued with a new entry every year like clockwork, as well as introducing the term Kaiju into the common parlance.  More than that, the film redefined what it meant to be a success in the modern era.  Despite failing to make back its budget in America and losing the #1 box office spot to Grown Ups 2 the film made big bucks overseas- 3X its American gross.  That overseas success combined with a massive cultural impact that’s continued to fuel fan hype and purchasing power has finally translated into a new movie, coming next year.  Directed by Steven DeKnight and starring John Boyega, Pacific Rim: Uprising finally has its first trailer- let’s take a look. 

Cover Story - Top 10 Sentinels Covers

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This coming Monday marks the premiere of The Gifted, a new series from Fox tying into the X-Men mythos.  The X-Men have honestly kind of struggled for modern relevance, as the Avengers became Marvel’s moneymaking brand, which has always struck me as odd.  I mean, we live in an age of mass struggle by marginalized groups for basic human rights- that’s always been the X-Men’s greatest element.  It’s just hard to think that in an era of Black Lives Matter, the Refugee Crisis, the Mexican Border Wall, Muslim travel ban, ICE, and the struggle for Trans rights the X-Men can’t find a foothold.  

The Gifted looks to change that by zeroing in on the X-Men’s most topical bad guy- the Sentinels, basically a domestic anti-mutant drone army.  When they were created that particular idea sounded a lot more like science fiction than a real policy that’s probably just around the corner but regardless let’s dig into X-Men history to see why these big purple robots have always been so enduring. 

Cover Story - Top 12 Power Rangers Covers

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It’s probably most accurate to say I have a strange relationship with Power Rangers.  I wasn’t in the right age bracket to get into the show as a kid and even as an adult I’ve never really enjoyed any of the various branded media.  However, I am familiar with the franchise history and origin and even though I don’t like it I definitely respect it.  Power Rangers has run, consecutively in one form or another, for 25 years straight, that’s a level of success you can’t ignore.  What’s more, the unique blend of aesthetics between Japanese superheroes and American TV standards has always been a fascinating one.  

The franchise basically re-invented the way we imagine live-action superhero adventures on a level that only a handful of others can actually reach.  Sure, the structure of disposable bad guys, shouting villains with an entourage of lieutenants, giant doomsday weapons, and a heroic bunker might feel generic now but without Power Rangers pioneering it we might not have had stuff like Avengers or The Flash TV show.  As such, I’ve chosen to honor the blockbuster film adaptation with a dive into the recent run of BOOM! Studios Power Rangers comics, let’s dig in. 

Filmland - 8 Kaiju That Should Join the MonsterVerse

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We’re now a couple weeks out from Kong: Skull Island, the 2^nd installment of Legendary’s proposed “Monster-Universe” of films.  For those not in the know, this is a planned shared universe of giant monsters movies that’s been in the works for a while now.  The concept originated with Legendary’s desire to reboot Godzilla for the modern blockbuster age when they came across the script for Pacific Rim.  They like some of the concepts but ultimately ended up deciding to make a Marvel-style shared universe instead.  The first installment in this was 2014’s Godzilla, directed by Garreth Edwards, which wasn’t great. 

However, Kong: Skull Island looks fresh and Godzilla: King of Monsters is showing a lot of promise, bringing in Michael Dougherty, director of Krampus and Trick r Treat, as a new director along with three classic monsters in Rodan, Mothra, and Ghidorah.  All of this is leading up to an eventual King Kong vs. Godzilla remake, though there’s plenty of room for franchise expansion beyond that.  That subject of franchise development is what I’m here to talk about today with 8 classic Toho Kaiju who should appear next in the giant monster-verse. 

Kong: Skull Island Trailer 2 Analysis

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One of the more obnoxious trends of the 2010s is every studio under the sun trying to scare up a bit of the Marvel shared universe magic.  While I like the Marvel movies, I do think people put a little too much stock in their shared universe angle being why they’re successful.  The truth is that if Iron Man, Avengers, or Civil War hadn’t been good movies all the continuity in the world wouldn’t have saved them; see The Incredible Hulk. 

While there are a lot of reasons studios have come to obsess over shared universes none of them seem to be the thing that actually makes shared universes fun.  See, studios love shared universes for the online marketing hype machine of clues and threads or the way it brings syndicated storytelling to the movies, making films binge-able when the thing that makes them fun is that they allow several different genres to co-exist.  This is where Kong: Skull Island comes in. 

Kong: Skull Island First Trailer

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Edited by Robert Beach

One of the more bizarre stories of the 21^st century is the bizarre disconnect between the companies that make movies and the companies that simply finance and distribute them. This has become an even more central part of the story of film production in the age of franchises and sagas where every studio is looking for their multi-film, years-long movie series. 

The most recent example of this would have to be the case of Legendary Entertainment, who recently broke with former partners Warner Brothers and had spent the last three years trying to prove themselves a viable investment through their growing slate of prospective giant monster movies. 

This started in 2013 with their push for Pacific Rim and then broke into the big time in 2014 with Godzilla. Godzilla’s the film that proved them a solvent business, so in 2015, they announced plans for a whole slate of Kaiju flicks based around Godzilla 2, Kong: Skull Island, and finally a remake of King Kong vs. Godzilla. This year, we’ve got our first look at that ambitious plan with the debut trailer for Kong: Skull Island. 

John Boyega Joining Pacific Rim 2 Changes Everything

Edited by Robert Beach 

John Boyega, a talented actor who finally broke into the mainstream in last year’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, has finally landed his first major post-Star Wars gig with Pacific Rim 2. The shaky sequel to 2013’s international hit has cast Boyega as the son of Idris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost from the first movie. This is a major announcement and a major stroke of good fortune for Pacific Rim 2. 

Since the announcement, the film's production has been on unstable footing after the Pacific Rim animated series dissolved on top of creator/director Guillermo Del Toro announced he wasn’t returning to direct the sequel, leading Legendary to drop any concrete premiere date for the film. Speaking of premiere dates, it was Godzilla 2 that slipped into Pacific Rim 2’s place on the schedule, forming an interesting rivalry. Additionally, Godzilla 2 is also facing down trouble as director Gareth Edwards won’t be returning for the sequel to his 2014 kaiju blockbuster. 

1st Godzilla 2016 Images

In case you hadn’t heard there’s a new Godzilla movie coming our way real soon.  I wouldn’t blame you for not knowing, the last one was only a couple of years ago and even though sequels come out quick these days there’s usually more of a gap than that, especially given all the production shenanigans now plaguing Legendary studios.  However, this new Godzilla film isn’t a sequel to the 2014 formula snore-fest with a better than expected ending, it’s a whole new Godzilla movie produced by Toho, the Japanese studio that invented the king of the monsters.  While none of the Godzilla films are objectively great movies the very achievement of Godzilla himself is pretty impressive, one of the truly modern pop icons that comes exclusively from the world of film. 

The entire genre of “giant monster movie” was more or less defined by Toho and it was Godzilla that helmed that flagship.  What’s more, a lot of now common ideas like broader, inter-movie continuity originated in the Toho Kaiju franchise as well as the Universal monster movies.  As such, the launch of a new Godzilla film from the people who created him is a big deal and now we have our first images and they’re absolutely terrifying. 

Movie Monthly - Robot Jox

Edited by Robert Beach 

Ah, November, the middle child of the holiday seasons. October might be the spookiest month, and December is all Christmas all the time, but November often ends up the month without a theme, mainly because there are like three different celebrations that dot the month. Aside from armistice day next week and Thanksgiving a couple weeks down the line, November is, here in America, a sports month. We just had the final game of the World Series over the weekend, and I’m told by more sports savvy individuals and pop culture at large there’s some kind of football to be enjoyed over the rest of this month.  

This November has an additional dollop of sports obsession added to it with Creed coming out later this month, the thoroughly hyped Rocky sequel/spin-off revolving around rising star Michael B. Jordan as the son of Apollo Creed coming to Rocky for training. In the spirit of all this, I’ve decided to dedicate November to sports movies. Because I remain a massive nerd who doesn’t really like most sports films, I’m adding the wrinkle that they have to be sci-fi sports films. So welcome to Cyber-Sports November with our first film: Robot Jox.

Top 12 Prequels Hollywood Should Make Instead of Die Hard

Edited by Robert Beach 

In case you hadn’t heard, there’s been some recent talk about making a new Die Hard film. The twist with this proposed 6^th installment of the most overrated action franchise the world has ever produced is it would be a prequel of some kind. Obviously, most folks have picked up on this as a terrible idea given that there’s really nothing for a Die Hard prequel to actually explore.  Everything interesting in the Die Hard universe started with the first film. 

There’s no point in extending the universe prior to that point as it’d more or less be the same as our world. That’s the thing about bad prequels, which is to say most prequels, is that they make the mistake of trying to follow a character back to a time when they were less interesting; however, this announcement has got me thinking about prequels that would be interesting to see, so here’s my top 12 prequels list.

Ant-Man Holds #1 Against Pixels

Well this is a surprise.  Last week I reported that Ant-Man had enjoyed a strong weekend opening and beat Minions at the #1 spot by a small enough margin to indicate I wasn’t at all hopeful for a sequel.  From there I had assumed, like a lot of other critics I think, that Ant-Man would respectively slip from #1 this week and settle into the middle tear slots before exiting theaters in later August.  Instead Ant-Man held the #1 spot for a second week, passing the 100,000,000 mark on projections and is currently ranked as the 16^th highest grossing film of the year.  That might seem like a high number but similarly offbeat oddities like Rise of the Planet of the Apes or Marvel’s own Thor have managed to turn top 20 success into decent box office clout.   

Obviously the year still has time left for Ant-Man to get bumped from its holding, especially given that Hunger Games, Goosebumps, Spectre, and Star Wars are all waiting in the wind but this is still big news regardless.  Meanwhile Adam Sandler’s Pixels may not be dead on arrival but it’s a strong statement of development that his movie couldn’t overcome a middling Marvel product in its 2^nd week the way Grown Ups 2 beat Pacific Rim two years ago. 

Ant-Man Box Office, Small is Bountiful

Welcome to Would You Like To Know More, a new category of post where I deal with geek news.  In these articles I’ll be relaying news stories, expanding on announcements and events, explaining obscure nerdy news, and speculating on what’s to come.  With all that said let’s talk about Ant-Man’s box office returns. 

So, the opening returns are in on Ant-Man and while the film is making solid bank and managed to take the #1 spot from Minions it is coming in a bit bellow predictions and has had one of the weakest openings of any Marvel studios film.  Audience reaction seems to be pretty evenly spread across the spectrum with some people like myself really liking the film while others have at best found it forgettably enjoyable and at worst emblematic of Marvel’s bigger issues with diverse representation in their films.  However, Ant-Man’s role in the ongoing ‘Marvel Problem’ is a discussion for a different blog post, for right now I want to talk about the impact of Ant-Man’s more modest success might have on how Marvel produces films and the future of these characters.