Spider-Man: Far From Home Opens With $185 Million

The latest weekend box office numbers are in via Entertainment Weekly, and Sony’s Spider-Man: Far From Home was easily No. 1 for the weekend. It made a massive $93.6 million in the US and Canada over the July 5-7 weekend, which was close to setting a new record for the 4th of July weekend.

The record-holder continues to be 2011’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which made $97.9 million over the 4th of July weekend years ago.

The numbers and analysis for Far From Home are not traditional because the movie opened on a Tuesday compared to the usual Friday premiere for many big films. Far From Home set the record for biggest domestic Tuesday ever with $39.3 million. The Amazing Spider-Man was the previous record-holder for a Tuesday, bringing it $35 million when it opened on Tuesday, July 3, 2012.

Looking at the six-day box office period from Tuesday through Sunday, Far From Home made $185 million in the US and Canada. That’s a six-day 4th of July record, surpassing Spider-Man 2.

With domestic and international figures combined, Far From Home has already made $580 million worldwide after less than a week. The movie picked up an excellent A rating on CinemaScore, which suggests positive world-of-mouth will keep ticket sales strong in Week 2 and beyond.

Toy Story 4 was No. 2 this weekend with $34.3 million, while Danny Boyle’s Yesterday made $10.8 million. Another entrant, Hereditary director Ari Aster’s new horror movie Midsommar, made $6.7 million to finish No. 6. The movie actually premiered on Wednesday, and with the full five-day period accounted for, Midsommar made $10.9 million. Producer A24 says that’s the best opening for an indie movie so far in 2019.

July 5-7 US/Canada Box Office

Via EW

  1. Spider-Man: Far From Home — $93.6 million
  2. Toy Story 4 — $34.3 million
  3. Yesterday — $10.8 million
  4. Annabelle Comes Home — $9.8 million
  5. Aladdin — $7.6 million
  6. Midsommar — $6.7 million
  7. The Secret Life of Pets 2 — $4.8 million
  8. Men In Black International — $3.6 million
  9. Avengers: Endgame — $3.1 million
  10. Rocketman — $2.8 million

The Outer Worlds Is Not A “Politically Charged” Game, Co-Director Says

As was made clear from the first teasers and trailers for The Outer Worlds, it is a game where megacorporations are taking over planets throughout space. As such, the game appears to have something to say about capitalism and power. And now, co-director Leonard Boyarsky has come forward to talk about how the game doesn’t aim to be “politically charged.”

“I don’t want people to think this is a really hard, politically charged game: it’s supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to be humorous,” he explained to VGC.

The game is more about how power is used against people who don’t have it rather than acting as a critique of capitalism. “It can be insidious; the way which people control the stories you tell about the world. If you let other people control that narrative, then they can control you to a certain degree. That can be any form of government: if it wasn’t capitalism it could be something else,” he said.

Boyarsky added that development on The Outer Worlds began in April 2016, which was before “things happened [in world politics]” that “nobody expected.” He didn’t mention any specific events but you can read into what he’s saying.

He and other members of the development team grew up during the “onslaught of consumer culture.” As such, the developers are familiar with those events and will use the game to “poke fun at it,” Boyarsky said.

Boyarsky said the team at Obsidian has been “very careful” about how it tells its story about power imbalances, just Boyarsky did with the 2001 RPG Arcanum that dealt with racial issues. Overall, Obsidian’s aim with The Outer Worlds is to tell a story and write characters that look at “all aspects of issues.”

“The last thing we want to do is make a game that people feel is lecturing them,” Boyarsky said.

The Outer Worlds launches on October 25. Though it is developed by the Microsoft-owned Obsidian, the game is published byGrand Theft Auto V parent publisher Take-Two Interactive’s new indie games label, Private Division.

The game is coming to Xbox One and PlayStation 4, as well as PC where it’s exclusive to the Epic Games Store for a period of time. It’ll come to Steam sometime in 2020. Like all of Microsoft’s other games, it’ll be playable at no extra charge for Xbox Game Pass subscribers.

Spider-Man: Far From Home Director Reveals Mysterio Deleted Scenes

True to his name, there’s much more to Spider-Man: Far From Home’s Mysterio than meets the eye. But there’s also more to his story than made it into the new Spidey film.

IGN spoke with director Jon Watts, who revealed key Mysterio deleted scenes that were cut from the movie for time. Keep reading to find out what they include, though beware, full Spider-Man: Far From Home spoilers lie ahead.

Despite Quentin Beck’s character being set up to be an older brother figure for Peter Parker for the first half of Far From Home, the characterization of Mysterio in the new movie ends up sticking pretty close to his comics origin. In the Marvel comics, Mysterio is a master of deception. It turns out here that Quentin wasn’t a good guy after all, and instead had long been plotting a sneaky way to convince Peter to hand over E.D.I.T.H. following Tony Stark’s death.

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Disney’s Live-Action Mulan Remake Gets Spectacular And Action-Packed First Trailer

The first trailer for Mulan is here. It’s the latest live-action Disney adaptation of a classic animated movie, and stars Liu Yifei as the Chinese teenager who disguises herself as a man to fight in the Imperial army against invaders.

The trailer is visually stunning and suggests that, unlike recent Disney live-action movies such as Dumbo and Aladdin, Mulan will take a slightly different approach from the original. It’s not a direct adaptation of the 1993 animated movie, and also takes influence from the original 6th Century poem “The Legend of Mulan.” The trailer starts with quiet, domestic scenes of Mulan and her family before delivering some spectacular-looking martial arts action as Mulan takes up her place to fight in the Emperor’s army. Check it out below.

Mulan’s cast also includes a number of high profile Asian stars, such as Donnie Yen, Jet Li, and Gong Li. The movie is directed by New Zealand filmmaker Niki Caro, who previously helmed The Zookeeper’s Wife. Caro previously stated that this version of Mulan won’t include any songs–and presumably Eddie Murphy’s talking dragon Mushu will be absent too. It releases on March 27, 2020.

The next live-action Disney adaptation will be The Lion King, which hits theaters later this month. It’s directed by Jon Favreau, who previously helmed the recent hit remake of The Jungle Book–check out the latest Lion King trailer. Other Disney remakes in the works include Cruella, The Little Mermaid, and Pinnochio.

Spider-Man: Far From Home – How Marvel Kept THAT Cameo Secret

Full spoilers for Spider-Man: Far From Home continue below. Read on at your own risk!

Spider-Man: Far From Home ended by doing the unthinkable in two ways: 1. Spider-Man’s real identity was revealed to the entire world, and 2. the big Peter Parker reveal was done by none other than The Daily Bugle’s J. Jonah Jameson — who was played by none other than the Sam Raimi trilogy’s J. Jonah Jameson, J.K. Simmons.

The scene was kept so top secret that it was filmed what director Jon Watts describes as “very, very late” in the production, shot in a Disney Studios conference room with Simmons sitting at JJJ’s desk against a green screen backdrop. And despite Simmons walking the Far From Home premiere red carpet in Los Angeles, the cameo was kept a secret until the movie’s release, and is a big part of setting the MCU Spider-Man movies into uncharted territory (which is good, because Tom Holland has only one Spider-Man movie left in his current contract).

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AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT – Review and Benchmarks

The day we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived. We can fully reveal the performance of AMD’s next-gen 7nm Navi GPU(s), and you can find out if it’s worth switching camps from Nvidia, or upgrading your older GPU. As a quick catch-up, this is the first GPU for AMD that uses an all-new architecture called RDNA, and it’s also the first midrange consumer GPU built on a 7nm process, so it’s quite a big deal. A second-generation (or third?) variant of this chip will be powering both next-gen consoles, so all eyes are on AMD here.

Though AMD announced that its new GPU was indeed faster than the RTX 2070 when it was unveiled at Computex, perennial Clever Girl Nvidia just released the RTX 2070 Super less than a week ago in order to ruin AMD’s launch plans. The fallout from that was a last minute price drop for the Radeon cards, though the Radeon GM tweeted it was all a big setup on their part, as they inflated the prices initially and Nvidia took the bait. We’ll never know if that really was the plan all along, but either way the GPU wars are officially back on in a very big way.

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