More often than not, Paul Rudd is also there.
We couldn't go last year, because -- pity us -- we spent the day at Universal Studios Hollywood instead. But this is now three out of the last five years (I don't know why we missed 2023), and in two of those, it's been a Paul Rudd movie.
The most successful was 2024, when we saw Next Goal Wins, making my son the noted soccer fan very happy -- and the rest of us very happy as well. Paul Rudd is not in that. Paul Rudd is, however, in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2022) and Anaconda (2026). We enjoyed Ghostbusters quite a bit too, at least that first reboot.
Four years ago when he was only eight, my son didn't know Paul Rudd from a hole in the ground. Now, however, he recognizes all of his Avengers. We saw a trailer before Anaconda for Crime 101, which stars two of the original six: Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo. He identified Hemsworth straight off, but I had to point out Ruffalo. I didn't bother to tell him that Halle Berry had been in the original X-Men movie, because I don't think that's a reference for him.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure he knows Paul Rudd is Ant-Man and he definitely knows Jack Black, who has been in a disproportionate number of movies he's seen, most recently A Minecraft Movie.
I was hoping Anaconda would be as fun as that, even if it weren't going to be as R-rated as the original.
Unfortunately, Anaconda was not fun. It was not funny, and it was not fun. In fact I found it quite painful. In fact I couldn't believe, after it ended, that it was only 99 minutes long.
I don't really plan to give you a full Anaconda takedown in this post -- I'll probably have a review up on Monday if you want to read it -- but I did want to express my disappointment with not keeping the birthday win streak alive for my son.
Oh, I think it stayed alive for him -- he said that he really liked it, though I think he ventured this a little reluctantly, while the credits were still rolling. I said "Yeah!" in an encouraging tone, which walked the line between enthusiastically endorsing his perspective while also not saying it was actually my own. In fact, I did not speak another word about the movie, positively or otherwise, which seemed to work without being awkward. We just talked about other things on the ride home.
I couldn't tell if my wife shared my perspective, though she certainly laughed a couple of times -- which I think was partly out of a desperate desire to laugh. It's been a rough year concluded by an especially rough past few weeks.
The 15-year-old? I couldn't tell what he thought. He didn't offer up a perspective either way, he just kept his mouth shut, which maybe shows wisdom beyond his years.
I'll still go back to the Paul Rudd well if he has a new, age-appropriate movie coming out for my son's 13th birthday, but this does feel like another reminder that we can't have nice things. It's just a bit of a rotten time right now, and maybe proof of that is a disjointed, intermittenly diverting but ultimately soulless Anaconda meta reboot with weakly drawn characters and tangential bits that should have been left on the cutting room floor. (The whole part where Steve Zahn has to pee on Black's leg after Black gets bitten by a spider? CUT IT.)
I guess 2026 can only get better from here?
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