It's March 12th and I haven't yet seen my tenth movie of the new year. And my highest ranked movie is only a 3.5 star movie. All the others are three or lower. (In fact, there are none lower than two, so that just makes the whole thing seem even more middling.)
I saw a great movie earlier this week called The Plague, which would easily be my favorite of 2026 so far. It's about boys bullying each other at a water polo camp in 2003. A review will be up imminently on ReelGood, linked to the right, because it's just coming out in Australia today.
Thing is, in scrutinizing the release dates on IMDB, I'm seeing that it had a limited U.S. release at the very end of December before going wide on January 2nd. For my purposes, that rules it out as a 2026 movie.
Project Hail Mary to the rescue?
I'm hoping so.
Undoubtedly the highest profile release of 2026 so far comes out in Australia next Thursday, but I'm a critic so I get to see an advanced screening of it tonight -- in IMAX no less.
Although Ryan Gosling can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned, and I do have high hopes for it, I do also have a few ... hesitations, shall we say. Although the high end for this subject matter is something like The Martian, of even better, the low end is something like Danny Boyle's disappointing Sunshine and that terrible Adam Sandler movie Spaceman from a couple years ago, which also featured a friendly alien.
Without any evidence to back it up, one of my ReelGood writers is already predicting this will be a flop -- not necessarily because it will be bad, but because audiences will shun it for whatever reason. Clearly he doesn't understand the power and box office draw of The Gos. (Does anyone call him "The Gos"?)
For me, I'm just looking for something with the sort of scale that tells me I'm in a new movie year, and not just another marginal movie on a streamer.
No comments:
Post a Comment