Christmas Eve gift

Note: I think I wrote this very very late on the 24th and forgot to post it!

I read a book called The Christmas Bookshop, which is a nice story about a woman reconnecting with her family and finding romance and all that feel-good kind of stuff. I like to read something like that around Christmas time, it puts you in the mood, kind of. (I also pulled out that novella that I talked about last year called "The Best Gift" and re-read it, too, for good measure.) I have some more Christmas-themed books that are new to me but it's already after midnight here and so obviously if I get any of them read this year it's likely to be post-Christmas.

We are going to my sister's tomorrow - we went to see The Fabelmans with them today but we just met them at the theater for that. I enjoyed the movie - Rob went and read some stuff about it when we got home and he came away with the impression that most of the movie is based on the real events of Spielberg's life, at least loosely speaking.

Top box office of 2022

I'm starting to think about year-end wrap-ups - books, movies, whatever - I was looking at the list of movies of 2022 in order of how much money they made, at work last week (it was really slow) and I ended up writing down the ones from that list that we'd seen, as best I remembered. I think I caught most of the ones Rob saw, too, though.

I'm interested in the pattern of how movies do at the box office. (Rob's horror movies are doing really well relative to their budgets.)

OK, so the number in the list below is the box office ranking, as of last week. Avatar 2 could end up being the #1 movie of the year, but it isn't yet. It only has a week to catch up with Maverick for 2022 champion and that doesn't seem especially likely at this point.

Also, I'm only counting things that we saw in a theater in 2022, so for example, Glass Onion, which we watched on Netflix last night at my sister's house, isn't on my list, nor is Prey, because we watched that one at home. (I liked Prey more than I liked Glass Onion, really, although I liked them both.)

2. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
3. Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness
6. The Batman
7. Thor: Love & Thunder
8. Spiderman: No Way Home
14. Nope
16. Smile (Rob only)
20. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
23. The Black Phone (Rob only)
25. Scream (Rob only)
27. Everything Everywhere All at Once
29. The Woman King
30. Halloween Ends (Rob only)
37. Barbarian (Rob only)
39. Violent Night (Rob only)
42. The Northman
43. The Menu (Rob only)
45. Beast (Rob only)
52. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
65. X (Rob only)
69. Terrifier 2 (Rob only)
76. Pearl (Rob only)
80. The Fablemans
84. Bones and All (Rob only)
88. Men (Rob only)
89. Ghostbusters: Afterlife
91. She Said
94. Orphan: First Kill (Rob only)
102. The Cursed (Rob only)
107. Cyrano
119. Belfast

The two at the very bottom are the ones that got all the Academy Award nominations last year. Well, them and Everything Everywhere. Box Office Mojo keeps talking about how that sort of "prestige movies" were doing particularly badly this year, although I'm not sure that's the term they used. (I usually call those "Oscar-bait" if I see them coming in advance.) Notice that The Fablemans is way at the bottom also (although not really at the bottom because I think there were 200 movies on the list - down at the bottom it was mostly Fathom Events and stuff like that).

Notice those three movies I mentioned a while back were totally female-centric - I believe it was Wakanda Forever, The Woman King, and She Said. Wakanda Forever did extremely well, of course, but I believe I would argue that that's in spite of it being female-centric, not because of it, and I doubt that most people even knew that coming in. It's Marvel, it's Black Panther, that's just something that a certain group - including us - goes to see automatically. The Woman King is #29, however, and its feminism is right in the title, basically, so I don't guess you can say people didn't know going in. This is probably the one that showed that people (mostly meaning men) will go see a movie with woman warriors, at least. (She Said also has its feminism in the title, but it lacks the warriors, which is my guess about why it did by far the worst.)