Jacob Hall

After a slow start, September 2015 is shaping up to be a pretty solid month for the box office. After last week’s solid numbers, Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials and Black Mass picked up the baton and ran with it, leading another strong weekend.

The world wasn’t exactly crying out for a remake of Point Break, but here we are. We didn’t ask for a modern take on Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 action semi-classic, but maybe we did something to deserve it. Then again, if the new trailer is any indication, we don’t know what anyone could have possibly done to deserve this movie happening to them.

Alex Trebek is a cultural institution, a beacon of knowledge and grace under pressure. Everyone loves him. Which is why it’s always amusing to watch the unflappable host of Jeopardy say silly words and phrases in that reliable deadpan of his. A recent episode of the immortal game show saw him forced to say the name “Turd Ferguson,” which should amuse anyone with a passing knowledge of modern comedy.

With Star Wars: The Force Awakens only three months away from release, Disney and Lucasfilm are waist-deep in their plan to ensure that every human being on the planet with access to a movie theater will go see their new movie. Now, the next phase is upon us: put all six films on Netflix, to remind any doubters that they like Star Wars.

There are few performers as easy to watch as Justin Timberlake and Anna Kendrick. Both are blessed with that most uncommon superpower – they walk on screen and you instantly like them, no strings attached. So any movie that casts them side-by-side deserves your attention. If that movie is a musical, that movie becomes an instant must-see. But now Hollywood have decided to test your devotion by making them the leads in the upcoming Trolls, an animated musical based on those creepy Troll dolls.

The Divergent series has never reached the culture-saturating heights of the Hunger Games movies, but it’s done well for itself. Divergent and its awkwardly titled sequel, The Divergent Series: Insurgent, left fans satisfied and made their fare share of cash at the box office. The first trailer for The Divergent Series: Allegiant (ugh, that title) is preaching to the choir. No one put off by the first two films will be won over by this footage and no one who skipped the first two will be able to follow any of this, but this movie doesn’t need your approval. It just needs the approval of the faithful.

Regal Cinemas is betting big on Spectre being a good movie. More specifically, they are betting that you, being the devoted James Bond fan that you are, will think Spectre is a good movie. Scratch that. They are betting on you thinking Spectre is a great movie, a movie worth seeing over and over and over again while it’s in theaters. That’s why they’re offering you the chance to buy an unlimited pass that will allow you see the 24th 007 adventure as many times as you’d like.

After September opened with a whimper, we were prepared for a dull couple of weeks. It looks like we shouldn’t have been so quick to judge. The one-two punch of The Perfect Guy and The Visit have suddenly made the least interesting month of the year interesting, opening big and opening close enough to one another to make for an interesting race. In the slower movie months, weekends like these are rare treats.

Summer is officially over, September is here, and the movies stink. While the big releases and heavy-hitters of the fall movie season make the festival rounds or rev up their marketing campaigns, audiences have to tough it out and wade through a lot of not-so-good movies. Welcome to September. It’s like this every year. Get ready for an excruciating month at the movies and at the box office.

The final Harry Potter novel was full of grand battles and grander revelations, but it also featured a tiny detail that radically changed the saga’s timeline. Although J.K. Rowling’s first book in the beloved series was published in 1997 and the final book in 2007, a date on a gravestone revealed that the events of the final novel take place in 1997. That means that Harry Potter himself was born in 1980. Which means that he’s 35 in 2015. And according to Rowling herself, that makes today, September 1, 2015, the first day of school at Hogwarts for Harry’s eldest son.

There’s one reason and one reason only why we’re getting a Ghostbusters remake in 2016 instead of an actual Ghostbusters 3 five years ago. That reason is named Bill Murray and he’s been the not-so-secret sequel roadblock for as long as we can remember. But then he accepted a small role in the new reboot, because he’s Bill Murray and Bill Murray does whatever he wants. Sometimes that means randomly showing up at your birthday party. Sometimes that means popping up in a film franchise that he seemingly had zero desire to revisit. Now, Murray explains his reasons for joining a new Ghostbusters movie he was so vocally against.

All summer movie seasons end with a whimper and 2015 was no different. The final weekend of August was a pretty sad display across the board, with Straight Outta Compton nabbing the number one spot by default while just about every new release faltered. You know it’s a slow weekend when a movie promoted exclusively to faith-based audiences nabs the number two spot.

We’ve known for a long time that Star Wars: The Force Awakens would screen in IMAX theaters because director J.J. Abrams filmed one key sequence with IMAX cameras. But now, we’ve learned the full extent of Disney and Lucasfilm’s plans for large format presentation and it’s exactly what you’d expect from a studio that has the most popular movie franchise on the planet and the power to do whatever it wants with it. The new Star Wars movie has booked pretty much every IMAX screen in the world for four weeks. Everyone with the desire to see this movie on the biggest movie screens in the world now has plenty of time to do so.

Yesterday, photos of Bruce Willis filming director Woody Allen’s latest (and currently untitled) movie surfaced online and the everything seemed fine. Just another late-era Allen production that inexplicably features a killer line-up of movie stars! Move along, nothing to see here! However, something seems to have gone horribly wrong between yesterday and today because Willis has abruptly dropped out of the film. That’s the news. What follows is gossip, albeit interesting gossip.

The original The Karate Kid is one of those seemingly untouchable slices of ‘80s nostalgia. Everyone above a certain age has a soft spot for it. It has effortlessly merged with general pop culture, with characters like Mr. Miyagi and lines like “Wax on, wax off” existing outside of the film that created them. It’s a touchstone … but what if it’s a touchstone that we have been misunderstanding for the past 31 years? What if Ralph Macchio’s Daniel isn’t the hero of the film, but actually – dun dun DUN – the real bad guy?

Straight Outta Compton dominated the box office for the second weekend in a row, ensuring that every other movie in the top 10 that doesn’t feature Tom Cruise trembled in its mighty wake. Anyone with their finger on the cultural pulse foresaw the N.W.A. biopic doing well, but it’s performing above and beyond all expectations.

Every time a movie about and for audiences who aren’t white and male does well, everyone acts like it’s a big surprise. “Black people and women like movies? Who’da thunk it?” It’s actually not surprising at all that Straight Outta Compton had a massive opening, handily defeating its more standard competition. Because all kinds of people like movies and when you make movies for all kinds of people, you end up with huge weekends at the box office.

Hey, did you know there was going to be an Inside Out sequel short included in the film’s Blu-ray and DVD release? We didn’t either! But there’s going to one and the first clip from the short, titled “Riley’s First Date,” is online and everything.

Ride Along was one of the surprise hits of 2014, making a massive pile of cash in the traditionally slow month of January. A sequel was inevitable. Like clockwork, Ride Along 2 is set to arrive almost exactly two years to the day after the first film. Which means the second outing of Ice Cube and Kevin Hart’s mismatched buddy cops was written, shot, edited and will be released in the space of 728 days.

All of Peter Jackson’s Middle-Earth movies have pushed the boundaries of the PG-13 rating, but it looks like the extended edition of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies may be the Halfling that breaks the Oliphaunt’s back. It seems that the longer version of the trilogy capper, which is returning to theaters this October, has been slapped with an R-rating by the MPAA.