Editorial

The Bottom Line: October 20, 2017: Do You Want To Build THE SNOWMAN? (It Doesn’t Have To Be THE SNOWMAN)

The Snowman The Bottom line

The Bottom Line: October 20, 2017

Michael Fassbender leads a crime thriller, Josh Brolin leads a group of firefighters, and Gerard Butler fights the weather. Find out how they will all do in this week’s edition of The Bottom Line!

Box Office Top Five

Happy Death Day continues a great year for Blumhouse by landing in the number one spot with $26.1 million. Blade Runner 2049 dropped to second place, taking in $15.5 million. Jackie Chan comeback vehicle The Foreigner opened in third place with $13.2 million, while Pennywise the clown is still going strong, taking $6.1 million for fourth place. The Mountain Between Us rounded out the top five with $5.8 million.

A Closer Look at Some of this Week’s Films.

Geostorm (PG-13) 110 mins.

Look, there’s very little chance that Geostorm will be a good movie. But will it be the kind of enjoyably bad movie that people can stumble into the theater to go see after 5 or 6 beers at the bar next door? It could be! It looks like the cheesiest of cheesy disaster movies, led by Gerard Butler, who’s spent most of his post-300 career making his fair share of mediocre action movies.

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Who’s to say? Geostorm looks dumb, but I also kind of want to half-watch it while I fall asleep when it hits HBO next year. That has to count for something, right? My guess is this opens at number three, only because it’s a big, effects-driven blockbuster and there isn’t a ton of competition.

The Snowman (R) 119 mins.

Do you wanna see The Snowman? 

Come on, I gave you all the clues

Mister Police, I’m trying here, people are dying here

And this movie’s getting lousy reviewwwwwwws

Yeah, chalk this up as a huge disappointment, considering the talent involved. Director Tomas Alfredson has made great films like Let the Right One In and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Michael Fassbender leads a phenomenal cast, and it’s based on a best-selling book. Yet, this movie currently holds a 10% on Rotten Tomatoes, which seems insane. What went wrong?

Well, according to Alfredson, it seems like they never actually finished filming the whole script, which yeah, seems like it could be a problem. So there’s no critical word-of-mouth that will be helping this film, and it’s marketing hasn’t been super strong either (unless you’re a big fan of children’s drawings of snowmen). Just because it’s a new release with some big names, I’ll say it opens at number five.

Only the Brave (PG-13) 133 mins.

Tron: Legacy and Oblivion director Joseph Kosinski leaves sci-fi behind to tell this true story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a group of firefighters who fought a wildfire in Arizona. Josh Brolin leads an ensemble cast that includes Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges, and Taylor Kitsch, and it is getting a surprising amount of critical acclaim. This is the kind of movie that will play really well with a crowd, which is why it’s my pick for number one this weekend.

The Bottom Line

Only The Brave will open in first place, while Happy Death Day will take second. Geostorm will open in third place, while Blade Runner 2049 will drop down to fourth. Finally, The Snowman will round out the top five, unless Pennywise has anything to say about it.

Movies To Look Forward To:

Jigsaw, Thank You For Your Service, Suburbicon (October 27th)

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Leave your thoughts on The Bottom Line, Geostorm, The Snowman, and Only the Brave below in the comments section. Readers seeking more The Bottom Line can visit our The Bottom Line Page. Want up-to-the-minute notification? Want up-to-the-minute notifications? FilmBook staff members publish articles by Email, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, and Facebook. 


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Michael Smith

Mike Smith is an avid filmgoer from New York who loves to hear his own voice - luckily his work as a podcaster on FilmBook allows him to do just that. Mike graduated from The College of Saint Rose in Albany with a degree in communications, and is ready to dole out critical analysis of all your pop culture fixations. Mike is the host of FilmBookCast and can frequently be seen at his local movie theater, patiently explaining to his friends that Superman Returns is a misunderstood masterpiece.
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