Jason Mamoa, Gal Gadot, and Ray Fisher in Justice League

In Theaters This Week (11/17/2017): Justice League, Wonder, and The Star

Jason Tremblay and Julia Roberts in Wonder

Each Thursday we look at what is going to be coming out in theaters this weekend, show you the trailers for the big releases, predict the box office winner and just generally give you enough of a carrot to pull you through the rest of the work week.  This week brings the last comic book film of the year to theaters and two other movies it will crush.

The Star

Justice League has had a long, tortured journey to the screen and the critical consensus is that journey should’ve taken a little longer.  The DCEU epic is sitting at 40%  on RT at time of writing (WB owns a stake in RT and wouldn’t let them reveal reviews until today).  For a film that had a director transition and massive reshoots and cuts, it’s kind of a miracle they made the release date, but given that there isn’t another DCEU film until Aquaman next December, you have to wonder if they’d been better off pushing the film back to 2018 and smoothing it out.  It won’t affect the opening box office, but I doubt the film will have the legs Wonder Woman did.

Your other options this weekend are both doing well with the critics.  Monster seems engineered to make people weep, while The Star heralds the beginning of Christmas films.


 

Justice League (Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, PG-13, 2hr 1m)

The Star (Kelly Clarkson, Zachary Levi, PG, 1hr 26m)


Wonder (Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson, PG, 1hr 53m)

How Did We Do Last Week? KT correctly picked Thor: Ragnarok to stay atop the box office in its second week.  The 17th MCU film pulled in another $56.6 million atop the charts while Will Ferrell’s Daddy’s Home 2 opened in second with $30.1 million.  Ragnarok has already surpassed the global totals for the previous two Thor films, and it’ll be interesting to see what kind of legs it has going through the holidays.  It’s already the #9 film of the year domestically, and should be #6 or 7 after this weekend.
(2017 Prediction Record: 41-5; Lifetime prediction record 79-10).

Mark Ruffalo in Thor: Ragnarok

WHO WILL WIN THE WEEKEND?
DCEU movies are review-proof so far, so it honestly doesn’t matter what the final RT rating is, the movie is going to make bank.  With a production budget of $300 million, will it make the kind of profit that WB initially hoped, probably not, but it will still easily win this week.  It’ll be interesting to see how it fares in its second week against Disney Pixar’s Coco.
Ezra Miller in Justice League

 

25 thoughts on “In Theaters This Week (11/17/2017): Justice League, Wonder, and The Star”

      1. It’s sooooo much better than I expected. if JL is not a total disaster, I will eat my hat with gusto, like Charlie Chaplin with the shoe. I want all these movies to succeed. I want to be able to think of the DCEU as a dependable fix.


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      2. Still waaaaay better than what I expected. Thank god my tickets had to be for Sunday, l will walk in knowing exactly what to expect. Hey, WB! You think i still care enough to stay unspoiled? Think again, bozos! (Laughs long and loud while chomping down on cigar and driving away).


        Sorry, I am being uncharacteristically hard on this movie, but i think there is a possibility it might take the cake. I’ve loved these characters all my life, and thier current stewards are worse than Denithor.

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      3. Sorry, misspelled Denethor. I know i’m being obsessive but i cannot let that kind of thing stand.


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      4. Just out of curiosity, how many times have you read Tolkien’s works? I want to gauge the level of your fanaticism. I’m a fan, but I’m sure you can tell that I’m a lightweight compared to you. I’ve only read LOTR three times all the way through since I read it the first time in fifth grade, and The Silmarillion once. The Hobbit I reread a lot, but I was a kid at the time. It has been many, many years. But i think I’m one of the few people on the planet who has read the entire History of Middle Earth. So there’s that.


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      5. I have read LOTR five times, Silmarillion three, Hobbit….lost count, History of ME all 12 volumes, the expanded Beren and Luthien and Children of Hurin once and The Unfinished Tales 3 times. ….ish

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      6. You can get lost in it, can’t you? It’s why I can’t get too mad at Christopher. Imagine if your entire life consisted of poring over your father’s writings, and editing them, and explicating them, and they all mostly pertained to this one gigantic THING. You could lose your mind, and not even know it. Did you ever read Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf that I told you to read a long time ago? I thought it was the most wonderful version of Beowulf I had ever read (I keep track of these things. It makes me fun at parties). And that was just something Christopher discovered lying in a drawer.


        Sigh. I cannot believe the mess that is about to be made out of Tolkien’s legacy, for money. If Amazon wants a GOT, there are so many worthy properties out there, and now that the gloves are off, and classic works are being expanded on and sequelized and prequelized with wild abandon, they could make anything fit that they wanted to. Did you ever read the Gormangast trilogy, by Mervin Peake? They made it into a BBC series some time ago, but it was not very good, and the books are ripe for a reinterpretation, and it would be wild, like GOT on acid. How about His Dark Materials? The movie bombed, and I find the material repugnant personally, but there’s enough to that world to last for years. Maybe tell the story of Camelot? Never been done before, not well at least. Maybe just tell the story of all of Baum’s Oz books. No cute/clever spins, just acknowledge that Baum wrote like 20 books set in that world, and put them on film for once. Fantasy is littered with epic properties that are NOT LOTR.

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      7. Plus there are a wealth of great fantasy series that never had a shot before GoT. Wheel of Time is in development somewhere. You have Terry Goodkinds Sword of Truth, Pierce Browns Red Rising, Brandon Sandersons Mistborn, David Eddings The Belgariad and Mallorean. You have great fantasy epics you can stake a claim to if you want to put in the care HBO did.


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      8. My mind always instantly turns to the older classics… in fact I have not read many fantasy series since the turn of the 21st century. But I remember the Eddings stuff being GREAT. You’re right, there is a ton of stuff out there that finally has a shot at finding a mainstream audience. So much time and money is about to be wasted, and they might even take a burgeoning genre, a genre of film that is just beginning to find extreme popularity, and drive a nail into it.

        If Orson Scott Card could find a way to not speak for just five minutes… if it could be guaranteed that he would not say something jaw-dropping that would drive away audiences in droves… his Alvin Maker series would make a wonderful, wonderful series on several different levels. His Homecoming series would be a harder sell, but it feels more like fantasy than science fiction and I think it would captivate people, because it is positively Biblical.


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  1. I won’t lie: I have my tickets. But my expectations flatlined long ago. Coco and The Shape of Water are going to carry me to Star Wars. JL, and the path that led to JL, encapsulates everything that has gone horribly wrong with modern Hollywood. Gone are the days when multiple directors could toil under the yokes of illiterate studio moguls like the one in “Barton Fink,” and the Wizard of Oz or Gone With the Wind could still get produced.

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  2. justice league in a landslide. they could make wonder woman works out at golds gym and it would make 100mil. i personally will spend my cash on wonder as it is mainstream and easier for me to get to i will also see ladybird but i have to drive 25minutes to get to indie theater it is playing at.


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  3. I hope Wonder is an excellent movie and does well. I do have my doubts on both counts, but it’s very important to teach kids about compassion and kindness from a young age, as we all know. There are reviewers saying that the film is too pat and everything is wrapped up too neatly, but kids kind of need that. This is a PG family film, let it be a PG family film. Problem is, they released it on the weekend when every kid in America will be begging for JL. Counter programming only works when the target audience is not stoked for a competing film.


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      1. I just read a bunch of reviews. My hopes and expectations have been raised. We need more movies that entire families can go to together, and more than that, we need GOOD movies families can see together. And considering that they’re saying JL might not even break 100 million this weekend, maybe people have learned from history, and are not doomed to repeat it, which is encouraging. Maybe Wonder siphons a few people off.


        I didn’t know you didn’t care for Roberts. Wilson I’m agnostic about unless he gets the right role (like in Midnight in Paris, Midnight in Paris, and also Midnight in Paris) but I never got the appeal of Roberts. But in this kind of movie, the real star is never the person who is touted as the star. As long as the kid is good, the movie works, and I’ll see it and probably love it.

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      2. Julia Roberts is a personality not an actress. I’ve never been impressed by her, and it’s not that I don’t find her likable, I find her incapable of not just being Julia Roberts and a lot of men make as much money as her doing the same thing. The kids were all at JL, but it’s Thursday take was below Thor’s and it’ll make money, but not the kind of money the DCEU die hards are claiming. Especially considering it has a $300 million budget to overcome. It’s not good, it’s not godawful, it’s nothing at all. I don’t even want to write the review because I know the DC die hards are going to give me crap and it’s wearying. One thing this did was destroy any chance WB had at mounting a WW Oscar campaign in a weak year when it might have had a shot. Flashpoint, I think, just became a reset button.


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      3. I still love Mamoa’s whiskey drinking tatted up Aquaman. The best scene in the film is when WW has his lasso on him without him realizing it and he’s emoting for awhile. Cyborg was also really well done and introduced, less so the Flash but not bad. They’re not the problems. SO many others, but the actors in the league aren’t the problem.


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      4. I don’t know if they’ll do an extended cut like SS and BvS (both of which improved those films), but there has to be at least 2 hours of cut material at this point from the film.


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      5. My big question (though I have basically lost interest in this franchise at this point) is about Affleck. Is he good in this movie? Is he sleepwalking? Did they change the Batman character completely, and turn him into Pollyanna because Superman inspired him? I hear that Affleck is playing Batman for his kid now, which is new. He’s about to bail, isn’t he? Does it show?

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      6. I thought he was fine, but I also hear he wants out again now and the film makes a pointed reference twice to his age. He’s inspired. He’s certainly more in-character than what was written for him in BvS and the same goes for Cavill and Superman. Again, the League isn’t the problem. I’ll have my review up soon.

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