Matthew Monagle
Weekend Box Office Report: Audiences Take a Shine to ‘The Hitman’s Bodyguard’
Welcome to Augusts, where overall weekend grosses can decline for three consecutive weekends — $122, $116, and $95 million, respectively — and a new action-comedy can be the surprise winner of the weekend. Audiences might still be interested in creepy dolls, but it was a hyper-violent buddy film about professional killers that took home the gold. Here’s the box office projections, as of Sunday afternoon:
Many, Many Unaccredited Writers Worked on the ‘Wonder Woman’ Story
Audiences have grown accustomed to seeing a slew of screenwriter credits on summer blockbusters. A few studios, like Universal and Paramount, have put together writers’ rooms for their biggest franchises; some films also have a host of different writers who either worked to develop the story or hammered out the final screenplay itself. Therefore, fans probably won’t bat an eye when they see three different writers’ names pop up in the Wonder Woman opening credits, but to hear one of the film’s producers tell it, that’s only part of the story. The road to bring Wonder Woman to the big screen involved a whole host of writers who didn’t end up mentioned in the final product.
Weekend Box Office Report: The ‘Boss Baby’ Takes Care of Business
In a parallel universe where Paramount Pictures doesn’t alienate its fanbase, we might be talking about Ghost in the Shell as the big winner of this weekend and the de facto start of a new wave of Japanese Hollywood adaptations. Instead, DreamWorks Animation and The Boss Baby blew up the box office, no doubt delighting a handful of DreamWorks executives who watched the Ghost in the Shell controversy unfold with glasses of champagne in hand. After all, nobody’s going to boycott a movie about a baby who wears a suit.
Bill Paxton, Star of ‘Aliens’ and ‘Twister,’ Passes Away at 61
As a teenager in the ’90s, no actor better represented blockbuster movies than Bill Paxton. Although Paxton wasn’t typically a leading man in those movies — he would often play the brother, the second-in-command, or the comic relief — he served as a kind of talisman of quality. If you saw Paxton’s name in the opening credits of a movie, you knew that the film was going to be better for it.