mellicious | Entries tagged with female-centered movies

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.)

(I was the first person to post on Holidailies this year, not because I was dying to be first but because I wrote my post ahead of time, as I said, so at midnight I was like, well, might as well post it!!)

OK, so, movies. The last movie we've seen is She Said, which is practically the same movie as Spotlight, except here the it's the Times instead of the Globe and the evildoer is Harvey Weinstein rather than priests. (OK, not exactly the same....) I really liked it, but then I always like these movies about newspapers (Spotlight, The Post, All the President's Men...). One thing - we noticed that Rob was possibly the only man in the theater, and there were quite a few people there. I read that this movie was basically considered to be a bomb - the reviews are good, but it's not making money. My guess about that is that the subject is something a lot of men don't want to go to a movie about. (I developed that theory even before we went to see it, but I still suspect I'm basically correct.)

(I would also like to point out, in case the very thought of him puts you off, that Mr Weinstein himself barely appears in the movie. You hear his voice a couple of times and there's one scene toward the end where he - or rather an actor who looks vaguely like him - comes in and yells briefly at the editors before stomping out, as I recall.)

Before that, the last movie *I* saw, anyway - because, y'know, my husband and his horror movies, more on which below - was Wakanda Forever. It wasn't as good as the first one, because how could it possibly be? but it was still pretty good. I think we'll probably go back to that one sometime this month.

Every movie I saw in a theater in fall 2022:

She Said
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
The Woman King

Honestly, this just tells you the state of the movie industry (i.e., still recovering from covid, I guess?) that I couldn't find a damn thing I wanted to see for over a month at a time in here. (But on the bright side, look at how female-focused all three of those movies are! You used to be lucky if you got one movie like that a year.)

And I said it before: horror movies got made during the pandemic, at least the low-budget ones (Terrifier 2) did, when not much else did. Although that particular one was released on such a microscopic number of screens that if I hadn't poked around the movie release list and said, "hey, this sounds like something you'd like" and then got online and found a place where it was actually showing, Rob might have never seen that one. But that's an outlier, really. (It was unrated and I think they said it cost $300,000 to make, or something absurdly low like that.) Things like X - still small-budget but not that small - are more like the norm, I think. But I'm not an expert on this subject, I'm just married to a really big fan.

Anyway... in addition to the movies I saw above, Rob also saw:

Bones and All
The Menu
Terrifier 2
Halloween Ends (twice)

Sometimes getting Rob's opinions is a chore. I know he liked Terrifier 2 and he seemed to like Bones and All pretty well. The Menu, I'm not so sure about, although he did try to explain the plot to me at more length than I was really interested in hearing. And he said Halloween Ends was not that great, but he still liked it enough to go see it twice!

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In case you really want to know, here's the whole list:

Movies I saw in a theater so far in 2022, newest to oldest:

She Said
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
The Woman King
Nope
Kiki's Delivery Service (Ghiblifest)
Thor: Love & Thunder
Dr Strange & the Multiverse of Madness
The Northman
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
Everything Everywhere All At Once
The Batman (twice)
Cyrano
Belfast
Spider-Man: No Way Home (our third time seeing it)
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (our second time seeing it)

And Rob also saw:

Bones and All
The Menu
Terrifier 2
Halloween Ends (twice)
Smile
Pearl (which is a prequel to X, below - and is also super-low-budget)
Barbarian
Orphan: First Kill (twice)
Beast
Nope (without me, then later on with me!)
The Black Phone
The Thing (40th anniversary re-release)
Men
X
The Cursed
Scream

Hey, I have a Black Widow icon! I think I've had it for a couple of years, actually, but still, feels like karma or something, that I came to post for the first time in ages and that's my default icon. (Silly, but there you go.)

Well, I wasn't sure about the Black Widow movie going in, but I liked it, it wasn't great but it was watchable, and entertaining. That's about all I ask. I knew some reviewers didn't like it, so maybe that lowered my expectations a little, which is helpful sometimes.

It was weird to be in a theater with more than a sprinkling of other people. We did go to the occasional movie last year, even, but there was never anybody there to speak of. Sometimes we were the only people in an auditorium.

Anyway, I didn't actually come to post specifically about Black Widow at all - I went through my planner and made a list of what we've seen this year, and I thought I would post that. I've been to eight movies and Rob has been to seventeen, no less. Horror movies were practically the only thing coming out for a while. (Plus he went alone some weeks when I just wasn't in the mood, so his list is not all horror.)

Here's what I've seen:
News of the World (which I think technically came out in 2020 but we saw it in January)
Promising Young Woman
Judas and the Black Messiah
Nomadland
Raya and the Last Dragon
The Courier
Army of the Dead
Black Widow

If I had to pick a favorite, I think I'd pick... hmm, either Promising Young Woman or Judas and the Black Messiah. I liked both of them and they were both depressing as hell in their different ways. (I liked Raya and the Last Dragon a lot, too. All of these were good, even freaking Army of the Dead.)

(I guess Army of the Dead is technically horror, isn't it? For some reason I'll go to a zombie movie occasionally, if it doesn't seem too too creepy. I saw World War Z and both the Zombieland movies and Shaun of the Dead, of course. I'm partial to the funny ones - I love Shaun of the Dead. Although actually I don't think we ever saw it in a theater, come to think of it.)

And then Rob saw all eight above plus these:
The Father
Nobody
The Unholy
In the Earth
Separation
Spiral (the Saw thing)
A Quiet Place 2
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
The Forever Purge

Honestly, he'll go see practically anything horror. You should see the reviews on some of those.

If you know me at all, you probably know I like to go to the movies. And so does my husband - who in fact goes to many more movies than I do since I won't go to horror movies with him. So this year has been hard on us in ways other than the ways it was hard for you guys who actually quarantined. We actually have been to a few movies since March. I made a list pulled from my planner, see below.

Here's the movies we saw in the Before Time:

1917 (twice)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Little Women
Birds of Prey (twice)
Emma

and Rob had also seen:

The Grudge
The Turning
The Lodge
The Invisible Man

Here's the post I wrote in mid-March about the movies above. (Emma was quite good, y'all should go find it. Awesome cast.)

Rob has seen many more movies since the theaters re-opened than I have because horror movies are one of the few things that actually were getting released. And before anybody asks, we looked at the reviews of Tenet and decided to skip it.

The theaters were empty, y'all. We went to movies at two different theaters, and I never felt unsafe at all because it was a wasteland. Sometimes there was nobody else there at all, but if there were other people they were far away. (Rob did say that quite a few people were at Halloween.) You do have to wear masks, of course, although (of course) you have to be able to take them off to eat your popcorn or whatever else you have to eat. - Rob likes to sneak nuts and stuff in. Don't tell.

Here's what I found that we both went to between July and December. I knew I hadn't been a lot but this was even fewer things than I thought! Two new ones, three older ones:

Inception
The Personal History of David Copperfield (really good!)
42 (which we had not previously seen) (also really good)
The Empire Strikes Back (which I probably hadn't seen in a theater since 1983)
WW84

Has anybody seen WW84 as an On Demand movie? I thought of doing some kind of a review for it and couldn't figure out what to say. It... wasn't terrible. But it was depressing, a lot of it. I found it quite disturbing, for reasons I haven't been able to put my finger on. (Pedro Pascal was really good, though!)

Rob also saw:

The Outpost
The Hunt
Unhinged
The Call
Psycho
Halloween (the 2018 one)
The Empty Man
Come Play

Honestly, what is it with the "the" names? Is it, like, considered more masculine or something? - Anyway, so all but two of those are new movies, right? If I remember I'll ask him if any of those stand out as being especially worth seeing!

No Marvel movies released this year, that made me crazy. (I did re-watch every one that I could find, in order, over the summer.)

Here's the movies I've seen so far this year:

1917 (twice)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Little Women
Birds of Prey (twice)
Emma

Concerning the two we saw twice: I really liked 1917, and Rob liked it even more than I did. Conversely, Rob did not like Birds of Prey as much as I did, but I kind of dragged him to it a 2nd time, and he said he actually liked it more the second time. I think the first time he didn't know what to expect, maybe? It's definitely a weird little movie.

Rob had already seen Once Upon a Time in H'wood, months ago, and I figured I should go see that, and we should go see Little Women, too, while they were still in the theaters just before & after the Oscars. I really liked both of them. And I liked Emma, too - but then I'm a huge fan of Austen and Alcott both, so no real surprise there. (This version of Emma was incredibly beautiful and also very funny - much better than I remember the last big Hollywood version from, what, nearly 25 years ago being. That was the Gwyneth Paltrow one.)

We went to see Emma Sunday - there were only two people in the theater with us so I don't think there was much of a social distancing issue there. I wonder if the theaters will stay open, though.

And, since I ended up talking about this last year, here's what Rob went to see that I didn't (mostly horror or horror-ish things):

The Grudge
The Turning
The Lodge (why do horror movies start with "the" so much?)
The Invisible Man

I'd have to ask Rob for a more definite statement on this, but I think he liked the last two more than the first two.

(We are still working. I'll try to remember to report back on that.)