Hoodwinked Too! goes to court.

First the release date came and went. Then the Burger King promo came and went. But still there is no sign of the movie itself.

Now, reports the Los Angeles Times, the production company behind Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil and its 2005 predecessor has gone to court to force the distributor "to begin arbitration proceedings to resolve disputes between the two companies over the production and release of" the animated sequel.

Hoodwinked Too!, which has had a PG rating since July of last year (and is thus presumably more-or-less complete), was originally slated to come out January 15, but its release was delayed indefinitely in December, and the film was conspicuously absent from the list of upcoming films released by the Weinstein Company just last week.

However, the film was reportedly included in a DVD distribution deal that the Weinsteins signed with Sony last month.

Kanbar Entertainment, the company that got the first Hoodwinked! going before it even had a distributor, "charges that Weinstein is in breach of its joint-production agreement" for the sequel "because it never presented a plan to market and distribute the film or make a trailer for it, per the agreement," reports the Times.

Presumably the film will be released to the public in some form or other eventually. But for now it's an open question, even more so than before, as to when and how that will happen.

Incidentally, the original Hoodwinked! is currently the Weinstein Company's third-highest-grossing movie ever, behind Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Scary Movie 4 (2006).

APR 3 UPDATE: Variety has some more details. And someone has posted an intriguing but anonymous comment at The Playlist to the effect that: "After the way Kanbar treated the creators of this franchise, a little phrase about karma comes to mind..."

Canadian box-office stats -- March 28

Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest.

She's Out of My League -- CDN $3,190,000 -- N.AM $25,586,560 -- 12.5%
Avatar -- CDN $92,150,000 -- N.AM $740,440,529 -- 12.4%
Green Zone -- CDN $3,650,000 -- N.AM $30,475,005 -- 12.0%
The Bounty Hunter -- CDN $4,030,000 -- N.AM $38,418,433 -- 10.5%
Shutter Island -- CDN $12,630,000 -- N.AM $120,612,552 -- 10.5%
Alice in Wonderland -- CDN $30,660,000 -- N.AM $293,534,935 -- 10.4%
Repo Men -- CDN $1,030,000 -- N.AM $11,304,730 -- 9.1%
Hot Tub Time Machine -- CDN $1,190,000 -- N.AM $14,020,502 -- 8.5%
How to Train Your Dragon -- CDN $3,430,000 -- N.AM $43,732,319 -- 7.8%
Diary of a Wimpy Kid -- CDN $2,670,000 -- N.AM $35,898,390 -- 7.4%

A couple of discrepancies: Avatar was #6 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Our Family Wedding was #10 on the North American chart (it was nowhere in the Canadian Top 20).

Being one with a machine for all eternity.

The other day I came across a segment on Trailers from Hell in which Edgar Wright talks about growing up with the Disney sci-fi movie The Black Hole (1979). Like Wright, I too saw the film when it first came out in theatres, and like Wright, I too used to play with Black Hole action figures. But unlike Wright, I haven't revisited the film at all in the past 31 years, so I was a bit surprised when he mentioned that the movie ends with the bad guy going to Hell and the good guys going to Heaven. I didn't have any memory of that bit, and it certainly isn't in the comic book adaptation that I own.

So I ran a quick search on YouTube to see if the ending of The Black Hole might be on there -- and, sure enough, it is. (I have embedded it at the end of this post, so feel free to watch it below.) And truth be told, once I saw the footage with my own two eyes, it did begin to feel somewhat familiar. I now have a vague recollection that my nine-year-old self might have found it all a bit strange or confusing, and that I might have tried to figure it out with my dad on the drive home from the theatre.

But one thing that struck me on seeing the footage again just now was how it kind of, sort of, has something in common with the climax to Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), which came out in theatres only two weeks before The Black Hole did. And it was the first image above, of the evil red robot leaning in towards Dr. Reinhardt -- while Dr. Reinhardt grabs the robot's arms in a sort of desperate embrace -- that particularly brought the Star Trek movie to mind.

Here is the common element: Both of these films end with a man being joined to a machine for all eternity, but in one film this is portrayed as a bad thing while in the other film it is portrayed as a good thing.

In The Black Hole, Dr. Reinhardt is ultimately imprisoned within the body of the robot that had once been his servant, and the robot, in turn, is lost in a dark and fiery world that looks rather like certain medieval depictions of Hell.

In Star Trek, on the other hand, Captain Decker bonds with the space probe V'Ger partly to save planet Earth from V'Ger's assault, but also because this will reunite him, on some level, with a former lover of his who has since been turned into a robot by V'Ger -- a robot that is such a perfect replica of Decker's lover that it even seems to have retained some of her feelings for him. (That's Decker and the robot facing each other in the second picture above.)

And the coup de grace? When Kirk and Spock return to the Enterprise and ponder what it is that just transpired between Decker and V'Ger, Spock states: "We witnessed a birth. Possibly a next step in our evolution."

So the two films share a certain climactic plot element, but what the two films do with this element couldn't be more different. In one, it's tied to a punishment straight out of an old-fashioned religious sensibility, while in the other, it's tied to a humanist belief in progress, progress, progress!

I wonder if anybody back in 1979 noticed this parallel. Like I say, the films came out only two weeks apart, so it wouldn't have been hard to do. And hey, V'Ger traveled through a black hole, too!

Canadian box-office stats -- March 21

Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest.

Avatar -- CDN $91,300,000 -- N.AM $736,881,000 -- 12.4%
She's Out of My League -- CDN $2,410,000 -- N.AM $19,954,000 -- 12.1%
Green Zone -- CDN $2,890,000 -- N.AM $24,702,000 -- 11.7%
Remember Me -- CDN $1,510,000 -- N.AM $13,900,000 -- 10.9%
Shutter Island -- CDN $11,980,000 -- N.AM $115,770,000 -- 10.3%
Alice in Wonderland -- CDN $27,130,000 -- N.AM $265,800,000 -- 10.2%
The Bounty Hunter -- CDN $2,020,000 -- N.AM $21,000,000 -- 9.6%
Repo Men -- CDN $517,530 -- N.AM $6,151,000 -- 8.4%
Diary of a Wimpy Kid -- CDN $1,650,000 -- N.AM $21,800,000 -- 7.6%
The Ghost Writer -- CDN $432,647 -- N.AM $6,800,000 -- 6.4%

A couple of discrepancies: The Ghost Writer was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Our Family Wedding was #9 on the North American chart (it was #17 in Canada).

Pixar shorts and the grooming of new talent.

I seem to be on a bit of a Pixar kick this week, but oh well.

Jim Hill reports that John Lasseter gave a presentation at ShoWest last week in which he said that Pixar's short films would serve as a proving ground for new directors who could one day take the reins of Pixar's feature films -- and I have to admit that, on reading that, my first reaction was a skeptical one.

I don't deny that short films can be a rite of passage, of sorts, for up-and-coming auteurs. And I think it would be good for Pixar to maintain a separate identity of sorts while it passes the baton to a new generation of filmmakers, instead of simply letting the company be folded into the rest of the Disney empire the way that, say, Miramax was. But so far, Pixar's own track record in this area is, well, not so good.

At least twice now, Pixar has given one of its short-film directors the opportunity to direct a feature film, and on both occasions, the director in question never got to finish the job. In the case of Ratatouille (2007), Pixar took the project away from original director Jan Pinkava, who had previously directed the short film Geri's Game (1997); and in the case of Newt -- which was going to be directed by Gary Rydstrom, director of the short film Lifted (2006) -- Pixar has simply let the film die altogether.

The simple fact is that nearly every feature film released by Pixar to date has been directed by Lasseter or by one of the co-writers or co-directors who worked with him on the first two Toy Story movies (1995-1999). The only exceptions to this are The Incredibles (2004) and the final version of Ratatouille, which were both directed by Brad Bird, a former classmate of Lasseter's who had already established himself as a director of animated features by making The Iron Giant (1999) for Warner Brothers.

And what of Pixar's upcoming roster? Of the three films that have been officially announced and are still in production:

1. Toy Story 3 is being directed by Lee Unkrich, who was a co-director on three previous Pixar films including Toy Story 2;
   
   
2. The Bear and the Bow (which may or may not be retitled Brave) is being directed by Brenda Chapman, who has already established herself as a director of animated features by making The Prince of Egypt (1998) for DreamWorks; and
   
   
3. Cars 2 is being directed by Brad Lewis, who has no previous directorial credits at the IMDb whatsoever, apart from a making-of featurette -- but, interestingly enough, he was a producer on Antz (1998), the DreamWorks film that coincided with Pixar's A Bug's Life (1998), thereby prompting people at Pixar to accuse DreamWorks of stealing their idea.

So there you go. With the exception of Lasseter, who built the company's reputation over the course of several short films before directing the original Toy Story, not a single one of Pixar's past, present or future features is the work of one of their short-film directors; and whenever Pixar has turned to someone who didn't work on the original Toy Story movies, it has turned to a filmmaker who had already directed or produced a feature film for someone else. It may be that Pixar will promote one of its own short-film makers to the big leagues some day, but so far, this is not that day.

And for what it's worth, it should be noted that Lasseter is said to be heavily involved in rewriting Cars 2 right now, to the point where it is even being said that he has become that film's de facto co-director, regardless of whether he will be credited as such when the film is complete.

Make of all that what you will.

From an ancient city to a modern(ish) town.

Peter Brosnan was 30 years old when he first heard about the Egyptian city buried under the sands near Guadalupe, California. Cecil B. DeMille had built this city for the silent version of The Ten Commandments (1923) and then, rather than let rival filmmakers use the set, he had it bulldozed into a trench. Brosnan decided to find these buried ruins, dig them out of the sand, and make a film documenting his discovery.

That was in 1982. Brosnan was still raising funds for his project when I interviewed him for Bible Review in 1998, for a sidebar to an article I had written on cinematic depictions of the Exodus. (If memory serves, I chanced upon a story about one of Brosnan's fundraisers while browsing Variety magazine's headlines. I had been online for only four years myself at that point, and I was scouring the internet for obscure stories even then.)

And now it is 2010. It has been nearly 28 years since Brosnan first heard about DeMille's Egyptian city, and after spending nearly half of his life on this project, Brosnan is no closer to unearthing those monuments than he ever was. He has, however, amassed a lot of material on the town of Guadalupe over the years, and he now hopes to turn this material into a documentary about the town itself and the residents who often got involved in the Hollywood projects that came their way back then. He hasn't quite got the funding for that yet, though, and he is still talking to Paramount about using footage from The Ten Commandments itself.

See the Los Angeles Times for the full story.

The detached eye sees everything.

Today, the makers of Clash of the Titans unveiled a brand-new clip from their upcoming film -- and it reminded me, of all things, of the most recent trailer for Toy Story 3.

Why did it remind me of this? Because both of these videos include point-of-view shots taken from the perspective of a detached eye; in Clash of the Titans, it is the eye shared by the three Stygian witches, while in Toy Story 3, it is one of the eyes that belong to Mrs. Potato Head.

Now, if only there were a third example of this out there right now, we'd have an official trend on our hands.

Anyway, speaking of Clash of the Titans, there have been a few more updates to pass along since the last time I mentioned that film here. So, in no particular order:

-- The filmmakers are already talking about turning this remake into a trilogy. (MTV Movies Blog)

-- The last-minute conversion of this film from 2D to 3D has been getting some pretty mixed reviews. (Matt Holmes, Patrick Goldstein)

-- Harry Hamlin, who starred in the original Clash of the Titans back in 1981, says he's "sure" the new version will be "better", at least on a technical level. (Los Angeles Times)

-- The filmmakers knew what it would take to ensure that their film got a PG-13 rating in the United States, rather than an R: "It's fine to kill monsters. It's harder to kill real people . . . The blood can't be red. If it's black, it's OK." (Variety)

The three phases of Pixar history, redux.

Steven D. Greydanus has posted an excellent follow-up to my post yesterday on the three phases of Pixar history. The term, "three phases", is Steve's, though it does articulate what I was getting at -- and it isn't the only area where he improves on what I was trying to say. I particularly appreciate this bit:

I’m not sure it’s entirely persuasive to say, as Peter does, that the three phase 2 films, initiated when Pixar was likely thinking outside the Disney box, necessarily “aim higher” than the seven films of phase 1. In particular, I think The Incredibles aims as high as any film in Pixar’s oeuvre.

I would put it this way: The basic premise of each of Pixar’s first seven films fits comfortably within mainstream expectations for Hollywood animated family films. Anthropomorphic toys, bugs or cars; friendly monsters saddled with a human child; a father-and-son fish story; even a family of incognito super heroes — these are all concepts that could easily be pitched to Disney execs without making anyone blink or sweat. Pixar might take these concepts in brilliant directions, but there’s nothing about the basic concept of any of these films that especially pushes the envelope of family entertainment.

With the next three films, on the other hand, there is something audacious and outside-the-box about the premise itself, in terms of family-film expectations. A talky picture about a French rat who wants to be a chef? A substantially dialogue-free slapstick adventure about a lone robot in a post-apocalyptic world of trash? An elderly widower absconding with his house via balloon to South America? None of these hits you over the head as a ready-made idea for an animated family film. There is something counter-intuitive about each of them. Here is where Pixar pushes the envelope, not just in terms of how to make a animated family film, but even what it is possible for an animated Hollywood family film to be.

Phrases like "pushes the envelope" and "something audacious and outside-the-box" are precisely the kind of thing I was thinking of when I used the phrase "aims higher". I certainly never meant to suggest that Pixar hadn't aimed for excellence with any of its previous films!

Perhaps -- to steal an idea from Daniel Thomas MacInnes at The Ghibli Blog -- it would help to draw an analogy to, say, the Beatles. When the band started out, they were basically writing and performing the same kind of love songs as most other rock bands of their era -- but they aimed to be the best in their field, to the point where they could even cover someone else's song and it is their version, rather than the original, that everybody knows today (cf. 'Twist and Shout'). Then they began to push the envelope by broadening their horizons and using the sort of music and lyrics that nobody had really used in a pop song before.

And so it was that MacInnes argued a couple years ago, based on Ratatouille (2007) and WALL•E (2008), that Pixar was now in its "Rubber Soul phase", pushing the boundaries of animation just as the Beatles once pushed the boundaries of pop music. But MacInnes didn't think Pixar had quite arrived at its big breakthrough yet, and so he wrote:

. . . when Pixar finally breaks the barriers imposed upon American animation, the new paradigm will prove a surprise. It will be different. How? In what way? I can't say. They must be willing to push themselves further than ever before, and push the audiences further than ever before.

Alas, that does not seem to have happened. Even as MacInnes wrote this, Pixar had already announced plans to make Toy Story 3 and Cars 2; and since then, word has leaked out about their plans for Monsters Inc. 2. It is, you could argue, as though the Beatles had decided to abandon their plans for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and had gone back to covering songs that had already been covered by the Isley Brothers.

As Steve notes:

Pixar’s roster of coming films are all well within the “Disney box.” They may turn out to be excellent films and worthy successors to their predecessors, but there’s nothing envelope-pushing about any of them.

To this I would add that Pixar's slate of upcoming films is, if anything, even more Disney than Disney. And what I mean by that is this: Disney has produced any number of animated sequels and spin-offs over the years, but nearly every single one of them has been made for TV or the straight-to-video market. Of the 50 films produced by Disney's feature-film division, only two have been sequels, namely The Rescuers Down Under (1990) and Fantasia 2000 (1999) -- but Pixar will have already made three sequels, with another reportedly on the way, by the time its 12th movie, Cars 2, comes out next year.

Anyway. That was more than I was going to say, but one thought led to another, and there you go. I do want to respond to two other minor points in Steve's post, though.

First, he describes The Princess and the Frog, the first Disney cartoon to be made from scratch since John Lasseter took the reins at that studio, as "pure Disney, competent but not elevated." Ironically, though, The Princess and the Frog is very much a Lasseter production, from the Randy Newman score to the A113 Easter egg; what's more, in an audio commentary on the DVD that came out this week, one of the directors states that Pixar had already toyed with making its own version of the "frog prince" story set in New Orleans, because New Orleans is "John Lasseter's favorite city in the world." So just as Lasseter brought a Pixar sensibility to Disney's Bolt (2008), which was already being developed under the title American Dog before Lasseter came along and ordered massive rewrites, so too Lasseter's influence can be felt on key aspects of The Princess and the Frog.

Second, Steve asks if anyone is talking about making a sequel to The Incredibles (2004) -- and, well, as a matter of fact, they are, at least according to a blog post that Jim Hill wrote just over a year ago. But Hill says there's no chance of that talk becoming action until director Brad Bird has gotten 1906, his movie about the San Francisco earthquake, off the ground. Uh, no pun intended.

Toy Story 3 and its place in Pixar's legacy.

A rough cut of Toy Story 3 was shown at the ShoWest event in Las Vegas yesterday, and the buzz so far is pretty ecstatic -- especially with regard to the film's final 30 minutes, which, as Jeffrey Overstreet has noted, is a nice change of pace from the last few Pixar films, where everyone agreed that the first 30 minutes were really good but opinions varied on the remainder of those stories.

Katey Rich at CinemaBlend.com does have one question, though, about this film and its place in Pixar's filmography:

The print of the film we saw was not finished, and it's likely that there will be some tweaks before the June 18 release. But when we get there I think we'll be having a conversation about the Pixar legacy, about how groundbreaking their work has become in the last few years and whether or not revisiting the movie where it all began was the right step for a company that, at its best, can legitimately be called avant garde. As much as I loved seeing all the toys again, I'm not 100% sure that this adventure-- as entertaining and lovely as it was-- was the right one for Pixar at this moment. Toy Story 3 takes many big risks, and twists your heart around as much as Wall-E and Up, but at times it felt far safer than what we've come to expect from them.

This seems like as good a time as any to dust off a brief note on Pixar's recent history that I posted at the Arts & Faith discussion board in June of last year, when Up was only a few weeks old:

- - -

Peter Suderman has openly wondered if Pixar will ever ditch the kiddie elements and make a movie that targets adults, full stop. I don't think this is likely to happen, partly because Andrew Stanton has already gone on record to the effect that Pixar films are meant to be "family films", and therefore any grown-up films developed at Pixar (such as Stanton's own John Carter of Mars, or Brad Bird's 1906) will be released by Disney under one of its other labels.

But another reason I don't think it is likely to happen is because of the upcoming roster listed near the top of this thread: of the four films that Pixar currently has in development, three are sequels to some of their kiddier hits (Toy Story 3, Cars 2, Monsters Inc. 2), and one is being billed as Pixar's "first fairy tale" (The Bear and the Bow). These films might very well rise above mere kids' fare, as Pixar's earliest films did, but they do seem to be starting and staying within that realm (as opposed to some of Pixar's more recent films, which, as Suderman suggests, have started as grown-up projects and then had kiddie elements "grafted on").

Thinking about this further, it occurs to me that the last three Pixar films -- Ratatouille, WALL-E and Up -- were probably all put into production at a time when Pixar had every reason to believe that it would no longer be tied to Disney's corporate business plan.

The original contract between Disney and Pixar (which gave Disney full ownership of the characters created under that contract) expired with Cars, and there was a famous period of a few years there where Steve Jobs was making a lot of noise about taking Pixar's future films to some other distributor; in return, Disney created Circle 7, a whole new animation department that existed purely to create sequels to Pixar films, sequels that would presumably have been sub-par and would presumably have competed with the films that Pixar made independently.

It is not too hard to imagine that the folks at Pixar decided to "raise the bar" a little with their independent films, and so Ratatouille, WALL-E (the first story reel of which was created in 2003) and Up (the writing of which began in 2004) aimed higher -- though they still kept enough "kiddie elements" so as not to lose their core audience.

But then, in January 2006, only five months before the release of Cars, Disney and Pixar shocked everyone (including, it is said, many people at Pixar itself) by announcing that Disney had not only renewed its contract with Pixar -- rather, Disney had actually bought Pixar outright. Yes, one of the terms of the deal was that Steve Jobs took a place on the Disney board of directors, and that John Lasseter took charge of Disney's homegrown feature animation (thus resulting in "Pixar lite" films like Bolt). But what sort of films did Pixar itself decide to make after that?

Well, for one thing, Disney shut down Circle 7, which had been working on a Toy Story 3 ... and then Pixar announced that it was making Toy Story 3 itself. And then Pixar announced it was making Cars 2. And now Pixar has announced it is making Monsters Inc. 2. (And somewhere in there, Pixar has decided to produce its first-ever "fairy tale".) So Pixar is now doing to its earlier films what Disney would have done with or without Pixar.

We can only imagine what stories Pixar would have told if they had allowed their Disney contract to lapse and had sailed ahead into full-blown independence. But as it stands right now, stories with primarily grown-up themes seem to be taking a back-seat to the kiddie fare.

Canadian box-office stats -- March 14

Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest.

Avatar -- CDN $89,650,000 -- N.AM $730,270,443 -- 12.3%
She's Out of My League -- CDN $1,040,000 -- N.AM $9,775,278 -- 10.6%
Green Zone -- CDN $1,470,000 -- N.AM $14,309,295 -- 10.3%
Shutter Island -- CDN $10,820,000 -- N.AM $108,011,645 -- 10.0%
Alice in Wonderland -- CDN $18,820,000 -- N.AM $209,339,432 -- 9.0%
Cop Out -- CDN $3,510,000 -- N.AM $39,480,734 -- 8.9%
Remember Me -- CDN $693,141 -- N.AM $8,089,139 -- 8.6%
The Crazies -- CDN $2,690,000 -- N.AM $33,389,308 -- 8.1%
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief -- CDN $6,190,000 -- N.AM $82,270,631 -- 7.5%
Brooklyn's Finest -- CDN $1,280,000 -- N.AM $21,533,404 -- 5.9%

A couple of discrepancies: Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Our Family Wedding was #6 on the North American chart (it was #15 in Canada).

Canadian box-office stats -- March 7

Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest.

Avatar -- CDN $87,770,000 -- N.AM $720,607,444 -- 12.2%
Tooth Fairy -- CDN $5,680,000 -- N.AM $56,240,055 -- 10.1%
Shutter Island -- CDN $9,190,000 -- N.AM $95,750,005 -- 9.6%
Dear John -- CDN $7,010,000 -- N.AM $76,626,086 -- 9.1%
Valentine's Day -- CDN $9,050,000 -- N.AM $106,303,870 -- 8.5%
Cop Out -- CDN $2,690,000 -- N.AM $32,504,610 -- 8.3%
The Crazies -- CDN $2,150,000 -- N.AM $27,472,164 -- 7.8%
Alice in Wonderland -- CDN $8,630,000 -- N.AM $116,101,023 -- 7.4%
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief -- CDN $5,730,000 -- N.AM $78,057,749 -- 7.3%
Brooklyn's Finest -- CDN $696,266 -- N.AM $13,350,299 -- 5.2%

A couple of discrepancies: Tooth Fairy was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Crazy Heart was #9 on the North American chart (it was #11 in Canada).

Oscar winners slipping at the box office -- 2009

I devoted posts to this subject in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 -- so I might as well whip one up for 2009, as well.

First, a recap:

2005 marked the first time since 1996 that the Best Picture winner did not gross at least $100 million, the first time since 1985 that not one of the Best Picture nominees grossed at least $100 million, and the first time in living memory that the Best Picture winner was not one of the Top 25 grossing films of its year. In fact, the winner that year -- Crash -- grossed a mere $54.6 million and ranked way, way down at #49.

2006 brought a return to Hollywood form with the Best Picture victory of The Departed, which grossed $132.4 million and ranked #15 for the year.

Then, in 2007, the Oscars went "arthouse" again, by giving the top prize to No Country for Old Men, which grossed $74.3 million and ranked #36 for the year. Ironically, the only nominee that year to gross over $100 million was also an "independent" film, namely Juno.

And then, in 2008, the Oscars went "popular" again, by giving the top prize to Slumdog Millionaire, which, despite being an "independent" film and a quasi-foreign one to boot, wound up grossing $141.3 million and ranking #16 for the year.

And now, it is time for the nominees of 2009 -- and for the first time since the 1940s, there are ten nominees rather than five, precisely because the Academy wanted to make more room in this category for "popular", audience-friendly films. Here are their current grosses and box-office rankings, as of yesterday:

1. Avatar -- $714,464,000 -- 1st
2. Up -- $293,004,164 -- 5th
3. The Blind Side -- $249,550,000 -- 8th
4. Inglourious Basterds -- $120,540,719 -- 25th
5. District 9 -- $115,646,235 -- 27th
6. Up in the Air -- $82,403,758 -- 38th
7. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire -- $47,213,987 -- 65th
8. The Hurt Locker -- $12,671,105 -- 131st
9. An Education -- $11,679,616 -- 135th
10. A Serious Man -- $9,228,768 -- 145th

Of course, these totals can and will change, and the rankings of at least a few of these films will no doubt slide up a bit.

I'll copy the list that I compiled four years ago below, and I'll add this year's winner after it is announced tonight.

2009 -- 126 -- $14.7 million -- The Hurt Locker
2008 -- 16 -- $141.3 million -- Slumdog Millionaire
2007 -- 36 -- $74.3 million -- No Country for Old Men
2006 -- 15 -- $132.4 million -- The Departed
2005 -- 49 -- $54.6 million -- Crash
2004 -- 24 -- $100.5 million -- Million Dollar Baby
2003 -- 1 -- $377.0 million -- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
2002 -- 10 -- $170.7 million -- Chicago
2001 -- 11 -- $170.7 million -- A Beautiful Mind
2000 -- 4 -- $187.7 million -- Gladiator
1999 -- 13 -- $130.1 million -- American Beauty
1998 -- 18 -- $100.3 million -- Shakespeare in Love
1997 -- 1 -- $600.8 million -- Titanic
1996 -- 19 -- $78.7 million -- The English Patient
1995 -- 18 -- $75.6 million -- Braveheart
1994 -- 1 -- $329.7 million -- Forrest Gump
1993 -- 9 -- $96.1 million -- Schindler's List
1992 -- 11 -- $101.2 million -- Unforgiven
1991 -- 4 -- $130.7 million -- Silence of the Lambs
1990 -- 3 -- $184.2 million -- Dances with Wolves
1989 -- 8 -- $106.6 million -- Driving Miss Daisy
1988 -- 1 -- $172.8 million -- Rain Man
1987 -- 25 -- $44.0 million -- The Last Emperor
1986 -- 3 -- $138.5 million -- Platoon
1985 -- 5 -- $87.1 million -- Out of Africa
1984 -- 12 -- $52.0 million -- Amadeus
1983 -- 2 -- $108.4 million -- Terms of Endearment
1982 -- 12 -- $52.8 million -- Gandhi
1981 -- 7 -- $59.0 million -- Chariots of Fire
1980 -- 11 -- $54.8 million -- Ordinary People
1979 -- xx -- $106.3 million -- Kramer Vs. Kramer
1978 -- xx -- $49.0 million -- The Deer Hunter
1977 -- xx -- $38.3 million -- Annie Hall
1976 -- xx -- $117.2 million -- Rocky
1975 -- xx -- $109.0 million -- One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
1974 -- xx -- $47.5 million -- The Godfather Part II
1973 -- xx -- $156.0 million -- The Sting
1972 -- xx -- $133.7 million -- The Godfather
1971 -- xx -- $51.7 million -- The French Connection
1970 -- xx -- $61.7 million -- Patton

MAR 10 UPDATE: Updated to include the winner for 2009.

Oscar nominations -- better late than never!

I am way, way behind on this, but the winners of this year's Oscars will be announced tonight (i.e. Sunday night), so I might as well slip this in under the wire, as it were, while I still can.

I don't have a whole lot to say about this year's nominees that I haven't already said in the current Kindlings Muse podcast or in the Academy Awards forum at the Arts & Faith discussion board (which will be hosting a live chat during the ceremony, incidentally, so feel free to join in).

But -- to repeat something that I wrote in an e-mail to a couple of discussion lists over a month ago -- I think Best Picture will probably go to either The Hurt Locker or Inglourious Basterds (my review).

That's right, I don't think Avatar's chances are very good. And here's why:

First, it wasn't nominated for its screenplay or for any of its actors, and you have to go all the way back to the earliest days of the Academy Awards -- all the way back to 1932's Grand Hotel, in fact -- to find a film that won Best Picture without having nominations in either of those departments.

Second, it's science-fiction, a genre that the Academy is not particularly fond of. In fact, it is one of only five sci-fi movies that have ever been nominated for Best Picture -- along with 1971's A Clockwork Orange, 1977's Star Wars, 1982's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and this year's District 9 -- and none of the other films have won.

Third, it has too much money. In my lifetime, pretty much all of the films that conquered the all-time box-office chart have been nominated for Best Picture, but almost none of them have won -- partly, I suspect, because they were perceived as mere genre fare, whether they were sci-fi flicks like Star Wars and E.T. or horror movies like 1975's Jaws. The one major exception to this rule is 1997's Titanic, which had just a whiff of "historical epic" about it, enough to win the Academy's respect at any rate.

In contrast, the one major hurdle that The Hurt Locker has to face is that it might not have made enough money to feel like Best Picture material to the Academy. The film has been scooping up awards left, right and centre over the past few months, so it would seem to have all the momentum working in its favour -- but if it does win Best Picture, then it will be the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner in my lifetime, by far, and quite possibly the least-seen Best Picture winner in the history of the awards.

Of course, commercial considerations shouldn't play any part at all when judging a movie's artistic merit; but the Oscars are handed out by the industry, not by critics, so the film's tepid performance at the box office is not an irrelevant factor. Hence, there are some people, such as myself, who think that Inglourious Basterds stands a chance of sneaking in there and taking the top prize when the envelopes are opened tonight.

But of course, anything is possible, even more so this year than in previous years. There are ten nominees for Best Picture, not five, and the voters are using a new "preferential voting" system that allows them to name a second, third, fourth, etc. choice if their first pick doesn't win on the first ballot. So the winner this year will not necessarily be the film with the most passionate following, but the film that has the broadest support within the Academy. All the old rules of thumb may go out the window. Or not. We shall see.

One last thought, before I post my annual list of all the Oscar nominated films: As an animation buff, I am intrigued by the fact that only one of the five Best Animated Feature nominees this year -- namely Pixar's Up -- is a completely computer-generated movie. Two of the remaining nominees are old-fashioned, hand-drawn exercises, and two are stop-motion. That's pretty cool.

And now, without further ado, here are the films that have been nominated for this year's Oscars, ranked from those with the most nominations to those with only one. The titles of those I have seen are in bold:

9 nominations:

1. Avatar -- Picture, director (James Cameron), cinematography, film editing, art direction, original score, sound editing, sound mixing, visual effects
2. The Hurt Locker -- Picture, director (Kathryn Bigelow), original screenplay, cinematography, film editing, actor (Jeremy Renner), original score, sound editing, sound mixing

8 nominations:

1. Inglourious Basterds -- Picture, director (Quentin Tarantino), original screenplay, cinematography, film editing, supporting actor (Christoph Waltz), sound editing, sound mixing

6 nominations:

1. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire -- Picture, director (Lee Daniels), adapted screenplay, film editing, actress (Gabourey Sidibe), supporting actress (Mo'Nique)

6 nominations in 5 categories:

1. Up in the Air -- Picture, director (Jason Reitman), adapted screenplay, actor (George Clooney), supporting actress (Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick)

5 nominations:

1. Up -- Picture, animated feature, original screenplay, original score, sound editing

4 nominations:

1. District 9 -- Picture, adapted screenplay, film editing, visual effects
2. Nine -- Supporting actress (Penelope Cruz), art direction, costume design, original song
3. Star Trek -- Makeup, sound editing, sound mixing, visual effects

3 nominations:

1. Crazy Heart -- Actor (Jeff Bridges), supporting actress (Maggie Gyllenhaal), original song
2. An Education -- Picture, adapted screenplay, actress (Carey Mulligan)
3. The Young Victoria -- Art direction, costume design, makeup

3 nominations in 2 categories:

1. The Princess and the Frog -- Animated feature, original song (x2)

2 nominations:

1. The Blind Side -- Picture, actress (Sandra Bullock)
2. Fantastic Mr. Fox -- Animated feature, original score
3. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus -- Art direction, costume design
4. Invictus -- Actor (Morgan Freeman), supporting actor (Matt Damon)
5. The Last Station -- Actress (Helen Mirren), supporting actor (Christopher Plummer)
6. The Messenger -- Original screenplay, supporting actor (Woody Harrelson)
7. A Serious Man -- Picture, original screenplay
8. Sherlock Holmes -- Art direction, original score
9. The White Ribbon -- Foreign language film, cinematography

1 nomination:

1. Ajami -- Foreign language film
2. Bright Star -- Costume design
3. Burma VJ -- Documentary feature
4. China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province -- Documentary short subject
5. Coco before Chanel -- Costume design
6. Coraline -- Animated feature
7. The Cove -- Documentary feature
8. The Door -- live action short film
9. El Secreto de Sus Ojos -- Foreign language film
10. Food, Inc. -- Documentary feature
11. French Roast -- Animated short film
12. Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty -- Animated short film
13. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince -- Cinematography
14. Il Divo -- Makeup
15. In the Loop -- Adapted screenplay
16. Instead of Abracadabra -- live action short film
17. Julie & Julia -- Actress (Meryl Streep)
18. Kavi -- live action short film
19. The Lady and the Reaper (La Dama y la Muerte) -- Animated short film
20. The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner -- Documentary short subject
21. The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant -- Documentary short subject
22. Logorama -- Animated short film
23. The Lovely Bones -- Supporting actor (Stanley Tucci)
24. A Matter of Loaf and Death -- Animated short film
25. The Milk of Sorrow -- Foreign language film
26. Miracle Fish -- live action short film
27. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers -- Documentary feature
28. Music by Prudence -- Documentary short subject
29. The New Tenants -- live action short film
30. Paris 36 -- Original song
31. Rabbit à la Berlin -- Documentary short subject
32. The Secret of Kells -- Animated feature
33. A Single Man -- Actor (Colin Firth)
34. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen -- Sound mixing
35. Un Prophète -- Foreign language film
36. Which Way Home -- Documentary feature

Is the Egyptian life-of-Jesus movie a go, now?

Here's one more Jesus-movie newsbite to add to the batch that I posted earlier today.

Four years ago, as longtime readers of this blog might recall, a Coptic Orthodox Christian screenwriter and a Muslim movie producer announced that they were going to make a movie about Jesus in their native Egypt -- and this proved somewhat controversial, because Jesus is considered a prophet by Muslims and certain strains of Sunni Islam forbid the depiction of the prophets. (Shi'ite Islam, on the other hand, does not forbid such things; hence entire movies have been made about Jesus and the Virgin Mary in Iran.)

That was the last I heard of that project ... until today, when Matt Page linked to an article that ran in the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram nearly two months ago. The article features an interview with Ahmed Maher, the recently appointed Muslim director of the film, and it states that the film will pay particular attention to the fact that Mary, Joseph and the young Jesus stayed in Egypt when Jesus was little more than a toddler.

Maher, who says he wants to make "a modern film about Christ", and that he intends "to present a religious story in a secular way", had this to say about the film's current subtext:

"The timing is good for two reasons. First, there is the local dimension; Egypt used to be a strong state, an empire, yet it never implemented its power with extremism and never oppressed others in an imperial way, but now that we are witnessing a historical moment containing so much extremism and sectarianism we should be concerned about our future all through the third millennium. It is therefore important to present a film in which the tolerant perspective of Egypt in the first millennium is given due credit. To my mind a free society is one in which the majority practises its right to choose, but modern democracy does not deprive minorities of their rights no matter what the choice of the majority is.

"Secondly, on the international level, it seems religious extremism has spread and become more powerful nine years after 9/11, regardless of its underlying creed. Such extremism exercises a strong influence in many parts of the world, and it is important for the West to understand that Egypt, which produced Ayman El-Zawahri and Mohamed Atta, is itself the country that embraced Christ the infant when no one else would. This is the principal issue on which the film is based."

Incidentally, this isn't the only Arabic movie about Jesus that is currently in the works. Last year, I noted that a Lebanese film called The Resurrected was being prepped with an eye towards a release date sometime around Easter 2010 ... which is now only a few weeks away. I haven't heard anything about that movie lately either, though, so I don't know how far they got with it.

Newsbites: The Jesus-movie edition!

1. Paul Currie, an Australian filmmaker and co-founder of Lightstream Pictures, is planning to direct a 3D animated movie called The Fourth Wise Man. There seems to be very little information out there about this project, but it stands to reason that this film will somehow concern the Nativity; who knows, it may even be based on the Henry Van Dyke short story that has been made for TV a few times now, most notably in 1985 with Martin Sheen and Alan Arkin. -- Variety

2. Spanish animation outfit Dygra Films has hired Madagascar writer Billy Frolick to work on the English-language version of Holy Night!, an upcoming cartoon that, if I have read the various sources correctly, seems to concern a clash between secular and religious Christmas decorations that takes place after Santa's sleigh and the Baby Jesus go missing. -- Variety

3. Graphic novelist Mark Millar says he's had difficulty persuading a studio to make American Jesus, an irreverent comic-book adaptation that he describes as a "sequel" to The Passion of the Christ (2004) because it concerns the Second Coming:

"People were sniffing around 'American Jesus' and everybody wanted to do it, but they were really nervous about the subject matter," continued Millar. "And genuinely, somebody [said] to me 'Is there anyway we can do 'American Jesus', but maybe take Jesus out of it?'"

"I loved that," laughed Millar. "It had to be the most brilliantly Hollywood thing I've ever heard [because] Jesus is in every scene in that book and its about the second coming. And they were saying 'can we make it some kind of analogy of Jesus? Or maybe call him David?' I was like 'No, it's got to be 'American Jesus.'' They said ' I just don't know if anybody would go and see a movie with Jesus in it.' And I [said] 'Well, 'The Passion' made $650 million!'"

4. Not The Messiah: He's A Very Naughty Boy, an oratorio based on Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), may be coming out on video in the near future; with any luck, it may get a limited theatrical release, too. I say this because it just received a PG rating "for suggestive material and language" from the MPAA. The original movie, incidentally, was rated R.

5. A couple of Jesus movies are being re-issued on DVD. Roger Young's Jesus (1999; my review), starring Jeremy Sisto as Jesus and Gary Oldman as Pontius Pilate, was released this week, along with Raffaele Mertes' Esther (1999; my review) -- just a couple days late for Purim, but oh well. (Both films were originally produced as part of The Bible Collection.)

Meanwhile, Bruce Marchiano, who played Jesus in a couple of Visual Bible productions in the mid-1990s -- and will do so again in the upcoming cartoon The Lion of Judah -- has released a 15th anniversary edition of Matthew with new bonus features, including a two-disc audio book in which Marchiano describes the making of the movie from his point of view.

Incidentally, Marchiano is currently soliciting donations to support the making of a new word-for-word adaptation of John's gospel called Jesus ... No Greater Love. I was reminded of that recently when I came across this interview with Kevin Smith in which he says he thought about letting his fans put up the money for one of his movies, too:

We got some lawyers to look at it, and it's a f*****g nightmare to accept donations to make a movie. A tax nightmare, it sounded so good in theory. And we were like, 'A people's studio!' And a people's studio could work, but you can't get money from the people, it has to start with this nut, and then work from there.

I wonder what Marchiano's lawyers would say? Maybe the rules are different if the film can be classified as a non-profit ministry tool, rather than as something made to sell tickets.

Newsbites: The random quick updates edition!

No major comments here, just noting a few items that happen to tie in to things that I have written here or elsewhere in the past.

1. Anthony Hopkins will star in The Rite, based on the book about real-life exorcists written by Matt Baglio. The movie will centre "on a disillusioned American seminary student who attends exorcism school at the Vatican and ultimately finds his faith through encounters with demonic forces. Hopkins will play a priest who is an expert in exorcisms and whose methods are not necessarily traditional." -- Hollywood Reporter

2. Universal has spent two years looking for someone to turn Sascha Rothchild's book How to Get Divorced by 30 into a romantic comedy about "starter marriages". Now, after courting many strangers, the studio has come back to Rothchild and asked her to write the script herself. -- Variety

3. The makers of East Is East (1999) -- which concerns a British family led by a Pakistani father and his English wife in the early '70s -- are now planning a sequel called West Is West, which will be set in Pakistan about five years later. They are even talking about making a third film to round out the "trilogy", which begs the question: What will they call it? -- Hollywood Reporter

4. Seann William Scott, who has appeared in a number of R-rated comedies over the past decade or so, says he used to watch his language, but his career-making turn as Stifler in American Pie (1999) marked "the first time [I] ever swore." This fits with what he told Rolling Stone at the time, regarding how his nickname in junior high school used to be "Church Boy". -- WENN

Canadian box-office stats -- February 28

Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest.

Avatar -- CDN $84,730,000 -- N.AM $706,560,068 -- 12.0%
When in Rome -- CDN $3,510,000 -- N.AM $30,861,655 -- 11.4%
Tooth Fairy -- CDN $5,190,000 -- N.AM $53,841,454 -- 9.6%
Dear John -- CDN $6,470,000 -- N.AM $72,432,096 -- 8.9%
Shutter Island -- CDN $6,360,000 -- N.AM $75,541,571 -- 8.4%
Valentine's Day -- CDN $8,220,000 -- N.AM $99,916,240 -- 8.2%
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief -- CDN $4,780,000 -- N.AM $70,998,280 -- 6.7%
The Wolfman -- CDN $3,760,000 -- N.AM $57,380,125 -- 6.6%
Cop Out -- CDN $1,110,000 -- N.AM $18,211,126 -- 6.1%
The Crazies -- CDN $954,592 -- N.AM $16,067,552 -- 5.9%

A couple of discrepancies: When in Rome was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #15 in North America as a whole), while Crazy Heart was #10 on the North American chart (it was #12 in Canada).