Movie box office numbers for last weekend. 1. Night At The Museum – $24 million. 2. Pursuit Of Happiness – $13 million. 3. Children Of Men – $10.3 million. 4. Freedom Writers – $9.7 million. 5. Dreamgirls – $8.8 million. 6. Happily N’Ever After – $6.8 million. 7. Charlotte’s Web – $6.6 million. 8. The Good Shepherd – $6.5 million. 9. Rocky Balboa – $6.3 million. 10. We Are Marshall – $5.1 million.
I was very happily surprised to see the new DirecTV commercial. I’m talking about the commercials where they play clips of a movie and then add in new stuff with the actor talking about DirecTV. The newest one is of Back To The Future and is of the scene at the end of the movie with Marty being sent back to 1985. Doc is knocked to the ground after the time machine disappears and then gets up talking about DirecTV. Great Scott!! I loved it!!
The new season of American Idol kicks off on Tuesday night on Fox. The premiere will be a two hour show featuring the Minneapolis auditions. Idol will then air again on Wednesday night with a 2 hour show featuring the Seattle auditions. Fox put out a schedule of what they are planning for the Idol season and it looks like Tuesday, February 20th will be the first night of fan voting when the top 12 guys will perform.
This week’s movie review, You, Me, and Dupree. The movie stars Kate Hudson, Owen Wilson, Matt Dillon, and Michael Douglas. The story revolves around newlyweds, Carl and Molly. The other part of the equation is Carl’s long time best friend, Dupree. Dupree is an interesting character to say the least and is the best man in the wedding. It turns out that Dupree lost his job and in turn lost his home due to him being able to go to the wedding. Dupree hits rock bottom and was already having a tough time with his best friend getting married. So, Carl and Molly agree to let Dupree move in till he is able to get back on his feet. Comedy and problems ensue. Carl also works for Molly’s dad and let’s just say her dad wants some changes. This will set you up for the rest of the movie. I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. Just a fun story and the cast really does a good job in this movie.
I’ve finished the new Seinfeld Season 7 DVD and I give it a huge thumbs up. If companies want to release TV shows on DVD, get your blueprint on how to do it from the Seinfeld DVD sets. On disc one is the Soup Nazi episode and they have a ton of extras with it including an inside look and also commentary from Jerry Seinfeld and a couple of the other writers. I watched the episode and then watched the episode again with the commentary and I never grow tired of watching the commentaries. It’s like watching it with a group of people as they tell stories while also laughing at the episodes. If you didn’t know, the guy that the Soup Nazi episode is based off of runs a soup place in New York. They go into how the head writer of the episode had the experience with the soup guy that was seen in the episode. This was also the first episode that the writer had written. What is funny is that the episode was written and several people involved with the show started to know right away that this episode was based off a real guy cause they had been there. On the inside look and also on the commentary, it is discussed with how Jerry and a couple of others went to the real soup guy’s restaurant a little while after the episode had aired. He yelled at Jerry and just flat out went off on him saying that it was going to ruin his business and demanded an apology. So, Jerry turned around to the crowd and gave the “most sarcastic apology ever”. How is the soup guy doing now? He has expanded a ton of times and if I remember right he has 22 restaurants now?? Not sure but I think that was the number but I could be completely wrong. The writer said that the scene with Elaine going into the place for the first time was something that he had actually seen happen to a woman. I laugh quite a bit at the commentaries cause you can just tell how much fun everyone had working on the show. Other bonus features on the set include a documentary style deal on the character of Elaine that is definitely worth watching where they discuss the character and also Julia Louis Dreyfus. Always a popular extra is the newest blooper reel which runs about 20 minutes long and also a feature on Larry David leaving the show after that season.
Fox has canceled The O.C. Not much of a shocker as the show got a really low episode order from the network this season and it premiered later in the season as well. The series will wrap up on February 22nd. The show debuted to a LOT of buzz in 2003 but ratings have fallen this season. One reason for blame is obviously the timeslot as it is up against Grey’s Anatomy and CSI on Thursday night. Ouch. I watched a little of this show at the beginning of the series. I liked it all right but it was on a bad night for me. When I watched it was when they were replaying the previous episode on Monday nights so when they quit doing that, I quit watching it.
The new FX show called “Dirt” started off strong in the ratings. The show stars Courteney Cox-Arquette as an editor of two celebrity tabloid magazines. 3.4 million watched the commercial free premiere and 1.6 million watched the immediate replaying of the premiere.
I hope that you got to hear about the new iPhone that is being released by Apple. It is very cool with a ton of great features on it. I would go into it but it would take forever for me to explain the stuff that it can do. Just do an internet search on it. Very impressed with it!!
The Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3 battle continues in Japan with the Wii winning so far. Japan issued their year end sales stats and 989,118 Wii’s were sold. There were 466,716 PS3’s sold in comparison.
The annual Customer Electronics Show has seen the battle between the high definition DVD competitors heat up as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD continue to push their formats. No clear winner yet and there likely won’t be for a long time although both sides are claiming victory at the show. LG unveiled their new combo player that will play both formats of high definition DVD’s. They are set to begin selling the player in the next few weeks with a price tag of $1199. One problem that has come up about the LG player and its compatibility with HD-DVD is that it won’t support HD-DVD’s interactivity but it will support Blu-Ray’s. Many are predicting that this definitely helps Blu-Ray’s chances at winning this format war.
The new Trademark Properties Flip This House show has been pushed back to debuting around March on TLC.
Album sales were once again down for the seventh year in a row. The download sales though are helping out the music industry. 588.2 million albums were sold in 2006 which is a 4.9% drop but there were 581.9 million digital tracks bought by customers which was a 65% increase. More studies into these numbers revealed that people just aren’t going out to buy music at stores like they were.
DVD rentals were up 10.3% in 2006. However, the overall rental numbers were down which is being blamed on the lack of VHS rentals. Rentals hit $7.67 billion with DVD rentals taking up $7.39 billion of it. Here are the top 20 rented movies in 2006
Top DVD Renters for 2006
Rank/ Title (Label)/ Release date/ Index*
1 “Flightplan” (Buena Vista) Jan. 24 100.0
2 “Wedding Crashers” (NL/WB) Jan. 3 98.8
3 “Walk the Line” (Fox) Feb. 28 98.6
4 “Failure to Launch” (Paramount) June 27 85.2
5 “Fun With Dick and Jane” (Sony) April 11 84.0
6 “Click” (Sony) Oct. 10 81.7
7 “Inside Man” (Universal) Aug. 8 77.5
8 “King Kong” (Universal) March 28 73.3
9 “RV” (Sony) Aug. 15 72.3
10 “Lord of War” (Lionsgate) Jan. 17 71.9
11 “The Benchwarmers” (Sony) July 25 69.8
12 “Rumor Has It…” (Warner) May 9 66.9
13 “The Break-Up” (Universal) Oct. 17 65.5
14 The Family Stone (Fox) May 2 65.3
15 “The Chronicles of Narnia” (Buena Vista) April 4 64.7
16 “Derailed” (Weinstein/Genius) March 21 64.4
17 “Jarhead” (Universal) March 7 64.2
18 “The Lake House” (Warner) Sept. 26 61.9
19 “Firewall” (Warner) June 6 61.5
20 “A History of Violence” (New Line/Warner) March 14 60.7
TV On DVD releases for Tuesday, January 16th. Doctor Who (Season 2), Father Brown (Series 1), King Of Queens (Season 7), My Hero (Season 1), Prince Valiant (Volume 2), Proof (Season 1), Rising Damp (Series 3), The Royle Family (Season 1), Space Academy (Complete Series), The Street (Season 1)
If any of you are on My Space, let me know. I know that most of you aren’t but if you are, let me know. I recently just signed up over there. It’s set to private for now so if you’re on there, let me know and I’ll send you an invite. This and The Wrestling List are posted over there and I am keeping issues up for a couple of weeks before removing them for new ones. You can leave comments or go back and read something that you missed. This is kind of a test run to see if I like it on My Space or not.
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