Box Office Battle - August 5th

Today is a Friday. In fact, some may even call it a freaky Friday. Why? Probably because we have two major films releasing, one of which involves genetically mutated super animals and the other one stars the deadly duo of James Franco and Tom Felton. I seem to have mostly righted the ship - minus America's penchant for those damn Smurfs and the Katy Perry/Neil Patrick Harris combo - after a string of lackluster weeks, though my numbers and guesses could always use a bit more improvement. So today I am going to cross the streams, channel the super powered gas (that is totally legal and not a hallucinogen), and luck myself in to a couple of predictions that you can take to the bank. Or at least to your bookie. It should be noted that I take no responsibility for any actions you may or may not take as a result of this article. We're making some money this week baby! And so are movies, well at least one of them anyhow.

I Am Just Different

X-Men: First Class (Vaughn, 2011)

By and large, I think of the first X-Men film to be one of the paramount movies to usher in the recent comic book movie craze, and I have actually enjoyed all of the X-Men films I have seen up to this point. Sure I skipped out on what looked to be an abysmal spin off entry with the recent X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but with a cast that bolsters Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, James McAvoy, and Jennifer Lawrence, a script from Bryan Singer, and at least an experienced hand orchestrating everything in Matthew Vaughn I was excited to go back in time and really see the characters who set this universe in action. But, given my adverse reaction to Vaughn's previous film, Kick-Ass, I entered with tempered expectations, hoping for more, but expecting little outside of another run of the mill origin story.