When Disco Elysium came onto the scene in 2019 it completely shook up RPG storytelling, spearheading new ways to immerse players and build worlds. Surely it was just the start of something new, bold, and exciting. Instead, things got very messy, very quickly. Now, multiple teams made up of former staff are racing to…
When Disco Elysium came onto the scene in 2019 it completely shook up RPG storytelling, spearheading new ways to immerse players and build worlds. Surely it was just the start of something new, bold, and exciting. Instead, things got very messy, very quickly. Now, multiple teams made up of former staff are racing to…
Damien Leone’s Art the Clown is back to sink an ax into the box office with Terrifier 3, just in time for the lead-up to Halloween! On Thursday, the unrated Cineverse slasher reached $2.5M in previews, with screenings beginning at 8 p.m. Reports indicate Terrifier 3 only cost $5 million for its acquisition and publicity. It’s worth mentioning that Art the Clown is a hit at Spirit Halloween stores this holiday, with various costumes, props, apparel, and animatronic decorations throughout the limited-time Halloween-themed outlet. If Terrifier 3 only costs $5M to bring to cinemas and has already made $2.5M, the splatterpunk sequel could become another mega-hit for the studio.
While Art’s got a big smile at the thought of making audiences puke from his hyper-violent antics, Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux feels the opposite. Analysts expect Terrifier 3 to overtake Joker: Folie à Deux at the box office this weekend with an $11M debut. Terrifier 3 holds a 94% Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes despite audiences exiting the film early to refund their popcorn into a theater restroom toilet.
“The early box office numbers putting Terrifier 3 at No. 1 after early previews are far beyond our expectations and we are thrilled to see how strongly the Terrifier fanbase has come out in support of the franchise’s new chapter,” said Cineverse Chairman/CEO Chris McGurk in a statement this AM. “This success is proof that a quality indie film can hold its own theatrically despite being unrated and going up against big studio features and buzzy festival darlings, and is a testament to Phil and Damien’s vision and connection to those most passionate about the horror genre.”
Meanwhile, Joker: Folie à Deux slowly danced through its first week with $44.5M. That’s 19% behind the first week of Marvel Studios’ The Marvels, which took home $54.8M. Other previews include the Pharrell Williams LEGO documentary Piece by Piece, which stacked $450K from 1,500 theaters, with analysts expecting a $3M-$9M weekend debut. Toho International’s My Hero Academia: You’re Next punched its way to $413K in previews in 1,845 theaters. You’re Next is a thrilling roller coaster of action, superhero spectacle, and character-building. Check out our full review of My Hero Academia: You’re Next here!
Elsewhere, the SNL origin movie Saturday Night banked $370K in previews, with showtimes beginning at 2 p.m. As positive word of mouth spreads, the film could earn $3M-$5M during the weekends. Finally, Briarcliff Entertainment’s The Apprentice, about a young Donald Trump and his mentor Roy Cohn, borderline bombed with a $150K debut. Critics love The Apprentice, but general audiences could feel Trumped out because of the ongoing and exhaustive election cycle.
Are you going to the movies this weekend? What do you plan on seeing? Let us know in the comments section below.
The post Terrifier 3 shoves a chainsaw up $2.5M as it carves its way through a box office launch while Joker 2 isn’t laughing at its first week with $44.6M appeared first on JoBlo.
PLOT: The life of Pharrell Williams, as told through the lens of Lego animation.
REVIEW: Let’s get one thing out of the way first – Morgan Neville’s Piece by Piece would be a conventional music documentary if not for the central conceit: the whole movie is animated in the style of The Lego Movie. It’s an interesting choice which gives Pharrell’s story a glossy twist and likely opens the film up to a much younger audience that would have initially seen a more conventional hip-hop documentary. Indeed, with its PG rating, this is a family-friendly take on the life of perhaps the most influential music producer of his time, although it can’t help but feel like total hagiography at times, with it free of even a whiff of controversy throughout.
To be sure, Pharrell’s rise and fall (and rise again) is free from too much rock star excess, as he never went down that route. Instead, the whole thing feels like kind of a fairy tale, as Pharrell, as part of The Neptunes, rises to become an artist whose stamp is on virtually every pop hit that came out over a good ten-year period in the early 2000s.
However, if you remove the Lego animation, Piece by Piece isn’t that different from a conventional documentary that might have found its home on HBO. It’s full of talking (Lego) heads, and director Neville manages to nab seemingly everyone Pharrell’s ever worked with, including Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Snoop Dogg, and many, many more.
The one aspect of the movie that the Lego animation truly elevates in Piece by Piece is the re-enactments in Lego of Pharrell’s youth and rise to fame, with sequences dramatizing the creation of some of his most iconic tracks, like Snoop’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot” and more.
Yet, a more unvarnished bio might have dug deeper into some of the conflicts from Pharrell’s career, such as the multi-million dollar “Blurred Lines” lawsuit and the fact that he has a very fraught relationship with his former Neptunes partner Chad Hugo (although the latter contributes to the film and both speak glowingly about each other – on film at least). In the movie, Pharrell’s only problem is depicted as his tendency to overextend himself, with him getting too caught up in the commerce of music-making rather than the artistic side of it all. It all comes to a happy ending, literally, as his song “Happy” becomes a massive, inescapable hit.
While I found Piece by Piece mostly entertaining, I did find myself wondering who exactly the film was for. Hip-hop fans will maybe be annoyed by the fact that it’s so family-friendly that many of the best songs from Pharrell’s discography, such as N.E.R.D’s “Lapdance,” are way too controversial to be included in a movie animated by LEGO. Also, don’t expect to see P. Diddy show up as a talking Lego head in this – for obvious reasons.
In the end, Piece by Piece is most suitable for younger audiences, but even if a more unvarnished music doc would have been welcome, the movie still does a good job evoking the fact that Pharrell’s had an outsized influence on modern pop music. Yet, given the animation style, it can’t help but feel a little too much like a novelty.
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Last month, JoBlo Media and Octane Multimedia teamed up to launch a new YouTube channel named JoBlo TV, which hosts multiple feature films to watch for free throughout the week. The genres we’ll be focusing on at JoBlo TV are Action, Horror, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Thrillers – but for the month of October, we’re celebrating Halloween all month long with our JoBlotober event. It’s all horror all the time!
The movies that have been released on JoBlo TV over the last week are the creepy clown movie Clowntergeist, the vampire movie Bite Night, and the supernatural horror film Curse of the Nun – and you can tell from the title what sort of supernatural threat that one deals with.
Directed by Aaron Mirtes, who crafted the script with Brad Belemjian, Clowntergeist has the following synopsis: Emma, a college student with a crippling fear of clowns, must come face to face with her worst fear when an evil spirit in the body of a clown is summoned terrorizing the town she calls home. Mirtes has an acting role in the film alongside Brittany Belland, Burt Culver, Madeleine Heil, Monica Baker, Cait Madry, Sean Patrick Murray, Tom Seidman, Johnjay Fitih, Eric Corbin, Caitlin Rigney, Ella Romero, and Jesse Mendelsohn.
Maria Lee Metheringham directed Bite Night and wrote the screenplay with Will Metheringham. Here’s the synopsis: Haunted Honeymoon meets My Best Friend is a Vampire meets Clue. When three beautiful ladies manage to grab the attention of a group of punks with their enchanting voices. They become the lucky guests or rather victims of the house of Valice. However the tables turn quite suddenly when the ladies realize they are in fact the unfortunate victims of the madness which they themselves created. The Metheringhams also star in the movie alongside Dani Thompson, Rachel Brownstein, Marcella Edgecombe-Craig, Kian Pollard, Ryan-Jay Jones, and George Walker.
Aaron Mirtes wrote and directed Curse of the Nun. The synopsis: Anna Winter, while moving out of her house, encounters the spirit of a deranged nun who wants her to stay in the house so badly, she’s prepared to kill her to make sure she does. Lacy Hartselle, Rae Hunt, Kate Kilcoyne, Alice Raver, Brad Belemjian, Cael Adcock, and Jonathan Everett star, with Michael T. Flynn and Aaron Mirtes showing up as Pizza Man #1 and Pizza Man #2. You may have noticed that Aaron Mirtes directed both Clowntergeist and Curse of the Nun, and those aren’t the only Mirtes movies we’ve shared. Other Mirtes movies on the JoBlo TV channel are American Hunt and Ouija Craft. You can have a Mirtes marathon!
To follow our JoBlo TV releases, click over to the YouTube channel and subscribe! We also recently launched a new page at JoBloYouTubeNetwork.com, where you can access all of our YouTube channels from one place.
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Crank your organ grinder (no, that’s not a euphemism) and prepare for February to get your heart pumping harder than trying to decide what to buy your partner for Valentine’s Day because Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey teaser poster is here. Perkins, who delivered one of this year’s best thrillers with Longlegs, is adapting the short story from Stephen King for screens, with James Wan and Michael Clear along for the terrifying ride. The Monkey teaser poster follows August’s trailer tease for the upcoming horror movie featuring a wind-up monkey with spiraling eyes and a Cheshire grin.
The Monkey teaser poster is simplistic in design. It shows the sinister monkey smiling in the dark as a beam of light illuminates its blood-red eye. You can almost hear the rat-tat-tat of the monkey’s little drum as he plays a haunted song.
Perkins wrote the screenplay for The Monkey, based on King’s short story. The film tells the following story: When twin brothers Hal and Bill discover their father’s old monkey toy in the attic, a series of gruesome deaths start occurring all around them. The brothers throw the monkey away and move on, growing apart over the years. But when the mysterious deaths begin again, the brothers must reunite to find a way to destroy the monkey for good before it takes the lives of everyone close to them.
James Wan and Michael Clear are producing The Monkey for Atomic Monster, while Jason Cloth and Dave Caplan are producing for C2 Motion Picture Group. Executive producers include Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and Fred Berger of Automatik, Peter Luo and Nancy Xu of Stars Collective, John Friedberg of Black Bear, and Chris Ferguson. Atomic Monster and Stars Collective developed the project, and C2 Motion Picture Group provided the financing.
The Monkey is already getting under my skin. Haunted object horror is one of my favorite sub-genres, and my grandfather once owned a wind-up monkey that looked strikingly like the one in Perkins’ film, so I’m a little freaked out. It’s a shame we must wait until February 21, 2025, to check this one out, but if Longlegs is any indication, it’ll be worth the wait.
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Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero features a massive roster, with over 180 playable characters. But just like some other entries in this series, you don’t have access to them all at the start. There’s a bunch of ways to unlock them in the game, and we’ve broken them all down.
Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero features a massive roster, with over 180 playable characters. But just like some other entries in this series, you don’t have access to them all at the start. There’s a bunch of ways to unlock them in the game, and we’ve broken them all down.
Putting a horror twist on popular children’s story characters who are in the public domain has become a popular trend these days. Multiple Mickey Mouse horror films are making their way out into the world since the earliest Mickey cartoons are now public domain, filmmakers are working on horror versions of Goldilocks, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella, and a whole cinematic universe is being built out of horror movies based on the likes of Winnie the Pooh, Bambi, Peter Pan, and others. Last month, we learned that a movie called The 7 Dwarves, which puts a terrifying twist on the story of Snow White, is in the works and scheduled for release in March of 2025. Now we’ve gotten our hands on a pair of first look images from The 7 Dwarves, and you can check those out at the bottom of this article!
Promising a spine-chilling ride that will leave viewers on the edge of their seats, The 7 Dwarves has the following synopsis: In The 7 Dwarves, Snow White narrowly escapes the clutches of the evil witch, only to find herself lost in the eerie depths of the dark forest. But her nightmare is far from over. She soon becomes the prey of a sadistic group of dwarves (Cranky, Jolly, Drowsy, Meek, Snuffy, Wheezy, Chief, and Ditzy). Far from being her protectors, these sadistic dwarves hunt her relentlessly, forcing Snow White to fight for survival. As she outwits and eliminates each dwarf one by one, the tension rises to a blood-soaked climax in this spine-chilling horror reimagining.
Colin Patrick Ryan is directing the film from a script by producer Chris Hoyt and executive producer Galen Christy. A press release notes, “Combining suspense, horror, and a reimagined take on a familiar tale, The 7 Dwarves promises to captivate horror fans and fairytale enthusiasts alike.” Christy adds, “We’re thrilled to bring audiences a bold, new vision of Snow White like they’ve never seen before. By turning this beloved tale into a nightmarish
survival story, fans of the original will be captivated by the unexpected twists and turns that horror lovers will be talking about for years to come!“
Ryan provided the following statement: “We wanted to take a familiar story and push it to a dark, unexpected place. This isn’t your childhood fairytale. The 7 Dwarves is full of brutal action, psychological horror, and twists that will shock even the most seasoned horror fans.“
The 7 Dwarves is being produced by CTRL+N and Octane MultiMedia, and will star newcomer Lia Ryan in the role of Snow White. Hoyt is producing the film with Josh McKamie, Colin Stein, and Andy Swanson.
Are you looking forward to this movie? Check out the first look images, then share your thoughts on The 7 Dwarves by leaving a comment below.
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Throughout the 2010s one of the most interesting developers around was Telltale Games, the developer behind a number of exceptional narrative-driven adventures set in the worlds of popular franchises. The team was most known for its Walking Dead series, generally considered an emotional masterpiece. Telltale still…