I don’t know if you follow Film Drunk but they talked about a fun idea for a fantasy league for summer movies in their last podcast. Basically, they held a draft where they each picked which movies they thought would score big box office takes this summer. You can read about/listen to it here. (Film Drunk apparently got the idea from the makers of this podcast, who apparently got it from someone else, and so on to infinity).
Anyway. It sounded like fun, so Kris and I held our own little draft over the weekend. We started by picking five movies we thought would have the biggest opening weekends by box office gross. Kris picked first, nabbing the final Harry Potter film, a very good pick and a guarantee to score huge. For my first pick, I debated between the Speilberg/Abrams lens-flareaganza, Super 8, and Michael Bay’s Transformers 3: Even More Fucking Robots. I know they’ll both be huge, but I figure Abrams not showing a monster in the trailers won’t draw as big a crowd as Bay showing a million fucking robots in the trailers. So, I went with T3, and my wife immediately snapped up Super 8 as her next pick.
We also each snagged a kid’s movie, and a comedy. Here’s our five picks for biggest opening weekend, from June-August:
Kris
1) Harry Potter and The Same Guy He’s Always Fighting
2) Super 8
3) Cowboys & Aliens
4) Horrible Bosses
5) Winnie The Pooh
Christopher
1) Transformers: Robots Robots Robots
2) Cars 2
3) Captain America
4) Green Lantern
5) Bad Teacher
We also made three picks each for lowest combined tomato-meter score on Rotten Tomatoes. This was tough because summer films aren’t know for being critically acclaimed, so there was a lot to pick from and it’s going to be a painful race to the bottom.
Our choices for worst Tomato scores:
Kris
1) Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks going to school with Julia Roberts or something, looks ham-fisted and awful)
2) Rise of the Planet of the Apes (James Franco’s latest prank on moviegoers)
3) Spy Kids 4 (Can’t imagine a 4th film in a kids’ series getting high marks)
Chris
1) Transformers 3 (Again! I know you can do it, Michael Bay! All my eggs are in your CGI basket!)
2) Zookeeper (I think this may wind up being the worst score not just of the summer but of all time)
3) Mr. Popper’s Penguins (This simply has to suck)
Finally, we picked one film each that we thought might actually be good, and that we actually wanted to see, both of them indie films. Highest Tomato score wins.
Kris
1) Another Earth (interesting-looking indie sci-fi)
Chris
1) Submarine (Richard Ayoade’s quirky coming of age film)
So, we’ll see who does best! I think I may be a lock for Lowest Score, thanks to nabbing Zookeeper. I regret picking Green Lantern for Box Office instead of Lowest Score, because it looks really stupid and pointless and I’m sorta thinking it may completely tank. Kris’ picks of Potter, Super 8, and Cowboys & Aliens may be insurmountable for Box Office Gross, but I’m hoping Captain America manages a monstrous weekend, and they’ve been advertising Bad Teacher like crazy.
Kris and Chris. Does that ever get confusing?
I can usually remember which one I am.
I think I made a mistake with Winnie the Pooh. Sentimental and thoughtful? Where was my head? It’s Summertime!
I really don’t understand how they’ve made a prequel to planet of the apes. Just what the hell.
No mention of X-Men First Class? I think it could be a dark horse.
Well, X-Men was already out when we did the draft, so I think we just skipped it.
I don’t get why they didn’t just call it Rise of the apes rather than Rise of the Planet of the Apes which is bleeding mouthfull. It looks so stupid though, when I first saw the trailer I thought this has to be joke, this must be some cheesy b movie schlock, it can’t be serious? Oh crap.
I don’t get the premise — didn’t the last Apes movie imply that one of the apes came through the time portal wormhole whatsit, and that’s why we got the planet of the apes? But now James Franco is inventing them, too? None of it makes any sense. And the title is awful. And I imagine it’s going to suck very hard.
I’ve forgotten a lot of the original apes movies (which I enjoyed), but maybe this one is more in line with the older Heston ones and not the new Wahlberg one. They kept the name of the important chimp from the older ones, “Caesar.” Anyway, that’s what you get when you name something Caesar, idiots.
Some of those movies are out now: Most of them aren’t doing great. Looks like you did well to avoid Super 8 Chris, as its not doing as well as everyone expected.
Meanwhile I will be seeing transformers opening night, because I love transformers and I don’t care how hard he rapes them. I will enjoy the movie, even as I weep loudly into my popcorn.
Yeah, Super 8 didn’t open as big as we thought it would, and Green Lantern did better than I expected. We’ll have to see how Harry Potter does vs. Transformers.