New Movies In Theaters This Week, Fri, 5-2-14

For a quick list of new movies coming out in theaters this Friday, May 2nd, 2014, we have

The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Belle - [Limited] w/  Gugu Mbatha-Raw,
Walk of Shame - [Limited] w/ Elizabeth Banks,
Ida  - [Limited] w/ Agata Kulesza
The Protector 2 - [Limited] w/ Tony Jaa, RZA

Last weekend saw The Other Woman ($24.76M) take the top spot for weekend sales, with Captain America The Winter Soldier ($16.22M) holding on to the 2nd spot, followed up by Heaven is for Real ($14.35M), Rio 2 ($13.88M) and Brick Mansions ($9.52M) rounding out the top-5 spots.

Your fellow movie-goers rated the top-10 box office movies over on IMDb, with the following scores:

The Other Woman (6.4/10)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (8.2/10)
Heaven Is for Real (5.6/10) 
Rio 2 (6.8/10) 
Brick Mansions (6.3/10) 
Transcendence (6.4/10) 
The Quiet Ones (5.6/10)
Bears (7.7/10) 
Divergent (7.5/10)
A Haunted House 2 (4.7/10)

For me, considering how much going to the movies cost, anything under a 6 warrants rental territory.  Anything over an 8, if I'm pondering seeing it in theaters, definitely helps me get my foot out the door and headed to the movie theater.  And an FYI: If you haven't gone to see Captain America yet because you weren't that enthused by the first one, this is a totally different beast of a movie, taking place in the modern era and tying up and connecting a lot of movie strings in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I felt like it was on par with The Avengers, unlike how Iron Man 3 was divergent from the Marvel world a bit more.


Either way, it's worthy, it's got lots of Easter Eggs, and it's almost as fun as The Avengers.  Almost.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The big draw this week at theaters is the much heralded

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Rated PG-13, it runs for 142 min.

In this sequel Oscorp ends up producing various supervillains that keep Peter Parker rather busy.

Director: Marc Webb
Stars:    Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Paul Giamatti

Though, what has my eye is that the metascore of this movie, after 19 reviews, sits at 56%.  Meh, movie critics have their own scale.

IMDb users, almost 30,000 of them at the time of this article, give the movie a 7.6/10. That's good enough for me but this movie has had it's trails and tribulations during the development and marketing phases.

For one, is the Spider-Man character worn out?  This Marvel character lives in his own world and has his own problems.  In this day and age when Marvel Entertainment is cross-polinating movies and TV, I can't imagine Fox not trying something similar, soon.  (Barring the Sinister-Six movie)

Then there was how the public reacted to Mary Jane being cut from the story in the early days, while not only leaving in Gwen Stacy, but teasing us with a "great fall where Spider-Man catches her."  And long-time franchise fans will know exactly what I'm talking about.

Then there are the bad guys in the film.  HOW MANY of them can we throw at one character? Let me count the known baddies:  Electro, Green Goblin, The Rhino, Alistair Smythe (AKA, Spider-Slayer)...  wait... that's only four.

Well, it almost sounds like the Anti-Avengers!  Or, the back-door test for The Sinister Six project.

In the comic world, Doctor Octopus pulls this evil org together, and it consists of Electro, Kraven the Hunter (Sergei Kravinoff), Mysterio (Quentin Beck), Sandman, and the Vulture.

And if you look at one of the movie trailers, there's a man walking past a bunch of suits or exoskeletons, and we have ourselves the beginning of the making of the six. (The 1:15 mark in the trailer.)

-

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 - OFFICIAL Trailer



-

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Follow Cinema Static on: