IT'S BAAAAACK!! Ultimate League JUL-SEP (test league)

[Walleye413]

Yah Baby - let's do this!

Space Jam - 21
Roadrunner - 4
Snake Eyes - 17
Stillwater - 7
Shang Chi - 35
Show Me the Father - 4
Eyes of Tammy Faye - 5
Dear Evan Hanson - 6

$99

[silversurfer19]

Feels so strange to be playing this again, with pretty much no knowledge of any movies it seems! Here goes though...

Black Widow $43
Enemies of the State $3
Annette $4
Old $14
Don't Breathe 2 $10
Candyman $13
The Card Counter $5
Venom 2 $8

[Shrykespeare]

Feels so strange to be playing this again, with pretty much no knowledge of any movies it seems! Here goes though...

Black Widow $43
Enemies of the State $3
Annette $4
Old $14
Don't Breathe 2 $10
Candyman $13
The Card Counter $5
Venom 2 $8

Wow, Surf. You and Six are sharing the same brain!!

[Buscemi2]

Keep in mind that Annette will hit Prime Video two weeks after its theatrical run, so it might not report box office.

[Shrykespeare]

Box Office Report's Weekend Predictions:

1. F9, $27M
2. Boss Baby: Family Business, $16.5M
3. The Forever Purge, $11.7M
4. A Quiet Place II, $4M
5. Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway, $3M
6. Cruella, $2.8M
7. Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard, $2.7M
8. Zola, $1.9M
9. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, $1.6M
10. In the Heights, $1.3M

[Screen203]

Don't think Fast goes that high. Word of mouth dosen't seem that strong, and the series has always been frontloaded.

[Shrykespeare]

Those numbers may include Monday, as it's part of the four-day holiday weekend.

[Shrykespeare]

Friday numbers:

1. F9, $8.1M
2. Boss Baby, $7.2M
3. Forever Purge, $5.7M
4. Cruella, $865K
5. Peter Rabbit 2, $850K

[Walleye413]

Anybody watched the Purge movies? I've never seen a one and I'm curious. Obviously they tap into some twisted part of our American psyche. Do they play as well in the rest of the world? Is this how the rest of the world sees Americans?

[Buscemi2]

Tranny loves them. Personally, I view them as nothing more than violent right-wing fantasies that tap into the bloodlust of angry white guys who want nothing more than to get away with murder. It amazes me that critics can view them as satire when they come off as anything but.

A while back, I came with a theory that the Purge series was developed as what the franchise's creator wanted to do to critics after they trashed Jack. I think he should have taken it as a sign to write better movies.

As for the international take on these films, only The First Purge came close to matching the domestic gross. These are American films through and through.

[transformers2]

Boosh's synopsis of the series would only be accurate if the Purgers were portrayed as the heroes, which is not even close to the case. A common thread between all 5 films is that all of the people purging are either trained killers being hired by the government to wipe out certain neighborhoods in a city or people that pose a threat to overturning the annual holiday, bigots looking to "purify" their land of people that they don't feel belong on American soil or just random psychopaths that don't understand the true intention behind the free crime holiday.

The Purge franchise is a very blunt metaphor for classism, systemic racism and how the continued perpetuation of these things breeds an endless cycle of poverty and violence that just happens to rest within the framework of a bloody action horror movie. In the past 2 films, themes involving white supremacy, nationalism, immigration, colonialism and how political parties embracing violent rhetoric can boil over into horrific real world violence (let's just that this current installment gained an unintended level of eeriness thanks to its year-long delay...) have also been incorporated. Clearly these aren't exclusively American problems, but it tackles them in a very overt, chaotic fashion that to me at least makes its messaging more effective because it's a very American way to deal with them.

[Buscemi2]

You must not understand how viewers see these horror franchises then. A lot of fans in the horror community sympathize with the villains. Look at Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers. If they weren't so beloved by fans, they wouldn't keep showing up after we are led to believe they are dead. The same thing applies to The Purge. The audience actively roots for the killers because they are living out their fantasies through them. Even if they lose, those characters, and by extension, the target audience, return to kill and kill again.

They do not care about the message. They just want to see mayhem and bloodshed. If Universal cared about the message, they wouldn't be making them still. All they see is the $9 from the legions of angry white people that fuel this franchise's rage.

[transformers2]

There's no doubt that some people are too dense to figure out what the real messaging is, but The Purge is built around mostly faceless villains-so the slasher murderer worship theory can't really be applied in this case.

I'm going to regret entertaining a baseless blanket statement about a fanbase that isn't particularly vocal or prominent in the grand scheme of the world at large, but a quick search would reveal that the Purge franchise tends to bring out the standard, relatively diverse audience that mainstream horror projects attract (ex: According to PostTrak, Forever Purge drew a 52/48 male/female split with 61% of the audience being non-Whites). In fact, the angry white dudes espousing hateful garbage online who you believe are driving the grosses are the same people spamming the IMDb pages of the last 3 installments with 1 star reviews due to their not exactly subtle anti-Republican/pro-immigrant narratives.

[Shrykespeare]

Weekend Estimates

1. F9: The Fast Saga, $22.86M
2. The Boss Baby: Family BUsiness, $16.04M
3. The Forever Purge, $12.48M
4. A Quiet Place Part II, $4.075M
5. The Hitman Wife's Bodyguard, $3.006M

[NicodemustheSage]

Mmm. Well, as a robustly "right-wing" cinema aficianado, I DESPISE the "Purge" films. I saw the first one, and half, roughly, of the second, and it's just American neo-Wild West anarchy-gospel murder porn. It is to politics, what the "Saw" series is to sadism, what "Natural Born Killers" was to mass murder, and what "Twilight" is to toxic relationships. It may CLAIM to have a noble "point", but all I can see is a celebration of mob justice and classist / tribalist vendetta-settling.

IF the "Purge" films dared to move beyond its fatuous social finger-painting, to drill down to expose some of the exposed nerve endings and foundational reasons behind the how and the why of how our modern America is cracking at the welds, daring to be a social commentary along the lines of "A Clockwork Orange", "THX 1138", or, Hell, even "RoboCop", it would have some real value. Instead, it's little more than a (generously, now) cinematic Skrewdriver song. I realize "The Purge" has its fans, and, I'm not going to denigrate them. It's possible I miss some subtlety in its execution... But I don't care enough to expose myself to it any more than I already have. Its version of "America" is one that makes me want to throw up. I don't see these films as warnings; they celebrate their mayhem far too much for that. I have heard some very good friends, on ALL sides of the political spectrum, lament that we haven't yet HAD an actual "Purge", and that makes me very, very sad.