As expected, part two of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay took its second crown with $76 million over the five day weekend. The film is still tracking well behind its predecessors. The Good Dinosaur opened in second place to a similar paradox — its three day and five day totals, $39.2 million and $55.5 million, are both the fourth highest all time for Thanksgiving weekend, but its three day total represents Pixar’s lowest opening since the studio’s first film, Toy Story, in 1995. In third place, Creed had the highest opening ever for a Rocky film with a $29.6 million three day total and a $42.1 million five day total. The last new release, Victor Frankenstein, had one of the worst wide releases of all time, collecting just $3.6 million over the five day weekend, good for 12th place behind Oscar hopefuls Spotlight and Brooklyn, which are each playing in fewer than 1,000 theaters. Victor Frankenstein was expected to take in around $12 million and earn fourth or fifth place- Box Office Mojo
Liked that incredible one-shot fight we did? Well, here’s a slow motion shot of Johnson yelling while he runs! Totally the same thing. Photos courtesy Warner Bros.
Hailed as the best movie of the year, Creed is exactly the kind of overlong, deliriously predictable feature that comes away with its accolades for all the wrong reasons.
The movie follows Donnie Johnson (Michael B. Jordan), the illegitimate son of Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) from the first few Rocky movies. Johnson is a successful coorporate climber in his early 20s, but gives it all up to pursue a boxing career because, as much as he wants to stay out of his father’s shadow, he also wants to follow in his footsteps. No one will train him, so he moves from Los Angeles to Philadelphia to train under his father’s old rival and friend, Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) in another display of blatantly taking advantage of his heritage while also saying he doesn’t want to take advantage of it. As Balboa trains Johnson, Ricky Conlon (Tony Bellew), the light heavyweight champion of the world, has an opponent drop out due to injury, and selects the unproven main character to take his place, which, if you remember, is the exact plot from Rocky.
Pixar draws emotions. They bring us high and they bring us low. Inside Out brought critics high. The Good Dinosaur brings them low.
Arlo’s and Spot’s roles are reversed, and that’s weird as well. Arlo is supposed to be the human in this relationship, but he’s the one who can’t fend for himself. The movie wants Spot to be this wild animal that needs to be domesticated, but he’s the one feeding and defending and taking care of the dinosaur. It seems like they tried to go two different directions at once with this relationship, and it doesn’t work at all. Photos courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.
Set in an alternate timeline when the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs missed, The Good Dinosaur follows Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), an apatosaurus born to a family of corn farmers and the runt of their litter, in every imaginable sense of the term. As his siblings grow into their own and quickly start to take over the farm work, Poppa Henry (Jeffery Wright) takes the cowardly Arlo under his wing and tries to teach him how to trap and kill pests. Using a trap that his father set up everything for, Arlo catches a human child, later to be dubbed Spot (Jack Bright), that has been stealing the family’s corn, but doesn’t have the nerve to finish him. Henry angrily takes Arlo up the river after the creature, but is killed in a flash flood. Arlo is knocked out and loses his way, but is thrust together with the human child, who takes a shine to him.
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