Category: Disney News

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” led the North American box office for a third straight weekend as Walt Disney Co.’s revival of the beloved space-adventure series continues to pull in fans.

“The Force Awakens” generated $88.3 million in sales in U.S. and Canadian theaters, for a domestic total so far of $740.3 million, researcher Rentrak Corp. said Sunday in a statement. Disney said the global total reached $1.51 billion. Quentin Tarantino’s “Hateful Eight,” a Weinstein Co. film that expanded nationwide, collected $16.2 million and placed third.

There’s little standing in the way of “Star Wars,” suggesting it could hold the lead next week and maybe beyond. The performance gives theater operators a strong kickoff to 2016, following a year when North American ticket sales topped $11 billion for the first time. Disney has another “Star Wars” film, a standalone feature, slated for December 2016.

“They should make a reservation in the $2 billion club, because Star Wars is on the way,” Paul Dergarabedian, senior analyst at Rentrak, said in a phone interview, referring to total global sales for the movie. “They’ve been extraordinarily successful with this release, really a pitch-perfect strategy for this movie and it’s just continuing to pay dividends now and going forward.”

As of Dec. 30, “The Force Awakens” had overtaken Disney’s 2013 hit “Frozen” to become No. 8 in global sales, Rentrak said. It’s also in reach of the $760.5 million domestic record set by “Avatar.”

The “Star Wars” movie contributed to record worldwide film receipts of more than $38 billion in 2015, Rentrak said.

“The Force Awakens,” featuring a new cast of young actors alongside the original stars, missed the weekend forecast of $98 million by analysts at BoxOffice.com. Still, the tally was high enough to break the $64.5 million record for a third weekend set by “Avatar.”

The movie has enjoyed mostly positive reviews. One critic was George Lucas, who created “Star Wars” and sold his company to Disney for $4 billion. On a show that aired Christmas Day, he told interviewer Charlie Rose that the new movie was too “retro” for his tastes.

Written and directed by Tarantino, “The Hateful Eight” is the filmmaker’s eighth movie. It missed BoxOffice.com’s forecast for $25 million on its nationwide debut.

The R-rated western features Kurt Russell as John Ruth, a bounty hunter transporting fugitive Daisy Domergue, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, to Red Rock where he will bring her to justice.

Along the way they meet Major Marquis Warren, a black former union soldier turned infamous bounty hunter played by Samuel L Jackson, and Chris Mannix, a Southern renegade who claims to be Red Rock’s new sheriff. Caught in a blizzard, they seek refuge in a haberdashery where a battle unfolds. The film was well received by critics, with 75 percent positive reviews, according to Rottentomatoes.com. It’s already on receiving end of Oscar buzz.

“Tarantino writes like a flamethrower in this western whodunit,” Peter Travers wrote in Rolling Stone. “He brings the war home, baby, with all the political, geographical, social, sexual and racial implications we’re still wrangling with today.”

Among returning films, the Paramount Pictures’ comedy “Daddy’s Home” placed second with $29 million in ticket sales. Weekend sales for the top 10 films rose 56 percent to $196.8 million from a year earlier, Rentrak said. The following table has U.S. box-office figures provided by studios to Rentrak. The amounts are based on actual ticket sales for Jan. 1 and Jan. 2, and estimates for Sunday.

                    Rev.    Pct.             Avg./  Total
 Movie             (mln)    Chg. Theaters  Theater  (mln)   Wks
================================================================
 1 Star Wars       $88.3    -41    4,134   $21,359  $740.3   3
 2 Daddy’s Home     29.0    -25    3,342     8,677    93.7   2
 3 Hateful Eight    16.2    252    2,474     6,564    29.6   2
 4 Sisters          12.6    -11    2,978     4,225    61.7   3
 5 The Chipmunks    11.8    -10    3,474     3,397    67.4   3
 6 Joy              10.4    -39    2,924     3,557    38.7   2
 7 Big Short, The    9.0    -15    1,588     5,668    33.0   4
 8 Concussion        8.0    -24    2,841     2,816    25.4   2
 9 Point Break       6.8    -30    2,910     2,352    22.4   2
10 Hunger Games      4.6    -12    1,485     3,114   274.2   7

Top 10 Films Grosses

     This Week     Year Ago    Pct.
     (mln)         (mln)       Chg.
===================================
     $196.8        $125.9      +56

Year-to-date Revenue

     2016          2015
     YTD           YTD        Pct.
     (mln)         (mln)      Chg.
===================================
     $220          $177       +25

Source: Rentrak Corp.

If you haven’t ridden Disney’s Soarin’ ride in awhile you may want to head down to Epcot today.

Starting tomorrow Disney is shutting down the ride for refurbishment.

Disney released this video showing a behind the scenes look at the making of “Soarin’ Around the World.” It features many locations, one being the Great Wall of China.

Disney says the ride will re-open this summer.

Back in the summer of 2015, Disney’s D23 Expo offered a first look at the animation studio’s next adventure, Moana. The film will introduce a new Disney princess from the South Pacific who is strong-willed, spirited and not afraid to set sail on the dangerous oceans. So far we’ve only seen some concept art and character stills from the film, but now the first footage from the movie has been teased in a quick new sneak peek video.

Disney Channel gave their viewers some sneak peeks at upcoming projects from the House of Mouse while ringing in the New Year, and as long as you can handle the young personalities hosting this quick sneak peek, you can catch some briefMoana footage (via JoBlo):

There isn’t more than a few seconds of footage here, but it does give us a good idea of the kind of shenanigans we can expect from Dwayne Johnson voicing the once powerful demi-god named Maui. The character looks like he’ll be pretty lively, likely offering the comic relief along with furthering the adventure, like the Genie to Aladdin or Mushu to Mulan.

In addition, we also get to see a nice shot of Moana, who we learned last fall will be voiced by 14-year old actress Auli’i Cravalho, a native of Oahu, Hawaii and a newcomer on the acting scene. Landing the role was a dream come true for the young actress who said:

“From baby time to now, I wanted to be a Disney princess and then I wanted to be a singer or an actress. Moana is such an amazing character. She’s brave, she is so empowered, she knows what she wants and she’s not afraid to get it, and I think that’s something that I can relate to as well. I just love watching how she goes along in this wonderful movie and grows as a person and helps her culture along the way.”

Since she mentions wanting to be a singer and actress, it sounds like she’ll be doing her own singing in the film that is also a traditional animated musical from Disney, and Dwayne Johnson will be belting out some tunes as well. We’re not sure when we’ll actually get to hear that happening, but maybe the first teaser will arrive with Disney’s Zootopia in March. If you want to know more about the film, check out our recap of the D23 panel with some footage description.

In the ancient South Pacific world of Oceania, Moana, a born navigator, sets sail in search of a fabled island. During her incredible journey, she teams up with her hero, the legendary demi-god Maui, to traverse the open ocean on an action-packed voyage, encountering enormous sea creatures, breathtaking underworlds and ancient folklore.

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You would be forgiven for thinking that the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens, sticks all too closely to the template of A New Hope. The three leads are once again two men and one woman, all with immense and easy chemistry that could, like Star Wars’ original trilogy, set up a love triangle in future instalments. But if the filmmakers heed the internet chatter since the film’s first screenings, it would not be Daisy Ridley’s Rey at the apex of that triangle, but John Boyega’s Finn as a love interest for both Rey and Oscar Isaac’s hotshot pilot Poe Dameron. Internet fandom would have us believe that there’s a romantic spark on Poe’s part, because Poe is gay.

Partly this comes from the modern internet tendency to read all intense male friendships as secret romances – a tendency almost as damaging as assuming that none are. But there could, theoretically, be something in it this time. Poe gives Finn his name, replacing the Stormtrooper designation FN-2187, and then gives him a jacket. When reunited after believing one another dead, Poe runs towards Finn and throws himself into an embrace; if Finn were a woman, we’d be in little doubt that that was enough to signal interest. Should we doubt it just because they’re both men? The Force Awakens radically put a woman and a black man front-and-centre; why not add a gay man and complete a trifecta of the underrepresented?

“I think it’s very subtle romance that’s happening; you have to watch it a few times to see the little hints. At least I was playing romance; in the cockpit I was playing romance,” joked Oscar Isaac on Ellen the day before the movie came out. Boyega agreed, “I was playing romance,” – though it wasn’t clear that he was talking about the same scene, or that he was any more serious. Isaac finished by saying, “I won’t say with which character. It could be a droid.”

Hardly a smoking gun, and the hugs and shoulder-slapping between Poe and Finn more closely echoes the camaraderie of Han and Luke at the end of A New Hope that it does the relationship of either man with Princess Leia. The difference is that Poe has almost no connection with Rey at all, so the audience has no female love interest to mentally hang on this Han Solo-alike daredevil. And that is relatively unusual, so perhaps we are at least meant to wonder.

If Poe were to be gay, it would be a true landmark, and Star Wars would be the first major Hollywood franchise to have a central, heroic gay character. Very few big films have any LGBT characters outside comedies and awards-focused dramas. Even JK Rowling’s revelation that Dumbledore is canonically gay came after the films were released and was not referred to onscreen. Aside from two supporting characters in The Mortal Instruments: City Of Bones and some characters in the rather counter-cultural V For Vendetta, gay people are notable by their total absence from action films. Moreover, Star Wars would be the first family franchise to have a key character who is gay. ParaNorman led the way with the first openly gay character in a kids film, while Disney’s Frozen unleashed a storm of controversy over a single shot which suggested that an incidental male character might be married to another man.

The time would seem to be coming where we could and should have a hotshot X-wing pilot who happens to be gay. US public opinion is firmly behind marriage equality now, as is British opinion, and the critical raves for films like Carol suggest that it should not be too far a leap. But the Frozen outcry demonstrated that America’s right-wing is still ready and willing to scream immorality at positive portrayals of gay people, and parts of the rest of the world are similarly unwelcoming. China only removed homosexuality from the Ministry of Health’s list of mental illnesses in 2001 and has no anti-discrimination legislation to protect LGBT people, but it’s also one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative film markets in the world.

Positive depictions of gay relationships are generally censored by the Chinese film board – and with only a small number of foreign films approved for release each year, Hollywood faces a potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars if they produce a film that won’t be screened in China. The perceived Hollywood wisdom – though it’s largely untested – is that other swathes of the globe are also religiously or culturally inhospitable to gay characters. With a $4 billion investment in the Star Wars franchise to recoup, Disney faces a serious financial test of its commitment to equality if its filmmakers include a gay character and fail to break records as a result.

But the pressure to portray humanity as it is keeps growing. Right now, filmmakers – at best – leave the question of sexuality open.  Another Disney franchise, Captain America, seems to be following that model when faced with a similar internet storm. After its second instalment, The Winter Soldier, it became the subject of fervent online speculation about the passionate friendship between Steve Rogers and his childhood friend Bucky Barnes. Director Joe Russo recently said, “People have interpreted that relationship all kinds of ways, and it’s great to see people argue about it what that relationship means to them. We will never define it as filmmakers, explicitly, but however people want to interpret it they can interpret it.”

He went on, however, to claim that he saw it as more a band of brotherhood than anything else. But with Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers spending The Winter Soldier turning down dates suggested by the gorgeous Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and then Avengers: Age Of Ultron trying to set her up with Hulk, there has been little effort to put out the fire.

So now the Star Wars brain trust faces a choice. There could be some compelling reason in the already-planned stories of Episodes VIII and Episode IX why Poe should canonically be straight, in which case they could ignore the online speculation and continue as planned. But they have an opportunity to make an ardent group of fans happy, and to make history, by giving us the first openly gay lead in a major action film. There could be a financial penalty for making Poe gay, but surely Star Wars of all franchises could afford it. And there would also be a quietly powerful statement that Disney – now by some distance the most powerful pop-culture force in filmmaking – values everyone and not just the straight, white heroes of yesteryear.

The perceived wisdom is that it was a risk to have a film led by an unknown young woman and a black man, but the box-office has shattered that argument. Perhaps Star Wars can risk a few more bucks to make history once more, because if Rey and Finn show how far we’ve come, perhaps Poe shows how far we still have to go.

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Disney reportedly closed Magic Kingdom on Thursday morning to some guests due to park capacity in what is typically one of the most crowded weeks of the year.

The Phase A closing was underway as of 9:30 a.m., according to WDWMagic.com, meaning guests with single-day Magic Kingdom tickets were not being admitted.

All other parks remain fully open as of Thursday morning.

Guests being denied entry to Magic Kingdom will be given free parking for one of the other parks and free quick-service dining for up to six guests, reports say.

On Tuesday, Magic Kingdom went into a Phase A closing at 11:45 a.m. and on Monday, the park closed to guests buying one-day, one-park passes and guests park-hopping from other Disney parks.

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Star Wars creator George Lucas has apologised for calling Disney “white slavers” and criticising the latest film, The Force Awakens, in an interview.

Lucas had appeared upset in the interview at what Disney — which paid $4 billion for Lucasfilm in 2012 — did with the seventh instalment in the franchise.

He likened the sale to a painful break-up and complained the franchise had become too commercial in the interview with journalist Charlie Rose, part of which aired in November but which was broadcast in full last week.

“These are my kids. All the Star Wars films. I loved them, I created them, I’m very intimately involved in them,” the 71-year-old said.

He added, trailing off: “I sold them to the white slavers that take these things and…”

Lucas has since issued an apology, after the comments caused controversy.

“I want to clarify my interview on the Charlie Rose Show. It was for the Kennedy Center Honors and conducted prior to the premiere of the film,” he said, referring to honours he had received — seen as the highest recognition of cultural achievement in the United States.

PHOTO: Lucas has backtracked on his criticism of The Force Awakens. (Supplied: Lucasfilm)

“I misspoke and used a very inappropriate analogy and for that I apologise.

“I have been working with Disney for 40 years and chose them as the custodians of Star Wars because of my great respect for the company and (chief executive) Bob Iger’s leadership.

“Disney is doing an incredible job of taking care of and expanding the franchise.”

He said he “rarely” clarified his feelings through statements but felt it was “important to make it clear I am thrilled that Disney has the franchise and is moving it in such exciting directions”.

It seems Lucas need not worry — The Force Awakens has shattered several box office records since it hit cinemas worldwide just over two weeks ago.

It has since become Disney’s highest grossing film of all time in terms of US domestic box office at $US629 million, surpassing Marvel superhero flick The Avengers from 2012, which took in $US623.4 million.

Globally, The Force Awakens has so far earned $US1.29 billion, sending it past Disney’s animated blockbuster Frozen for the number eight spot on the all-time box office list.

In his apology statement, Lucas said he was “blown away with the record-breaking blockbuster success of the new movie”, also giving mention to director J.J. Abrams and current Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy.

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• George Lucas said he and Disney went their separate ways after it became clear they didn’t want his input
• He compared the $4bn sale of his Star Wars movies to selling his ‘kids’ to the white slavers
• Franchise creator said Disney more concerned about making a ‘retro’ movie to please fans than staying true to his sci-fi ‘soap opera’
• Lucas said he treated selling off the Star Wars movies as like going through a ‘break-up’ which was ‘very, very hard’

George Lucas has compared the $4bn sale of Star Wars to selling off his ‘kids to the white slavers’ as he complains Disney ignored his ideas when making box office smash Force Awakens.

The legendary franchise creator appears a little bitter about Disney’s decision to dismiss his story outline for the next movie – which has now become the fastest movie to make $1 billion at cinemas across the world.

Lucas said that Disney were more concerned with making a ‘retro’ movie to please the fans than staying true to his sci-fi ‘soap opera’.

Scroll down for videos 

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Moving on: Star Wars creator George Lucas has compared the $4bn franchise sale to selling off his ‘kids to the white slavers’

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While Lucas might be unhappy with The Force Awakens, new owners Disney are likely to be delighted after it became ninth-highest box office performer ever with $1.23 billion in global box office receipts

In a recent interview with CBS This Morning, Lucas said he and Disney had gone their separate ways after it became clear the entertainment conglomerate didn’t want his input.

‘People don’t actually realize it’s actually a soap opera and it’s all about family problems – it’s not about spaceships.

‘They decided they were going to do their own thing,’ he said. ‘They weren’t that keen to have me involved anyway — but if I get in there, I’m just going to cause trouble, because they’re not going to do what I want them to do.

‘And I don’t have the control to do that anymore, and all I would do is muck everything up,’ he said. ‘And so I said, ‘OK, I will go my way, and I’ll let them go their way.’

View More: Star Wars News|Pop Culture News|Live News|More News Videos

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The Force Awakens is the first Star Wars movie the legendary filmmaker has not been involved in, after he sold his company LucasFilm to Disney for $4 billion in 2012 (pictured with his partner Mellody Hobson at the premiere)

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Lucas (pictured with new Star Wars director J.J. Abrams) said that he had treated selling off the Star Wars movies as like going through a ‘break-up’

The original 1977 cult classic Star Wars movie trailer

The Force Awakens is the first Star Wars movie the legendary filmmaker has not been involved in, after he sold his company LucasFilm to Disney for $4 billion in 2012.

He said that he had treated selling off the Star Wars movies as like going through a ‘break-up’.

‘When you break up with somebody the first rule is no phone calls,’ he said. ‘Every time you do something like that you’re opening the old wounds again you have to just put it behind you. And it’s very, very, very hard to do.’

The ‘father’ of Star Wars appeared to be struggling with the ‘break-up.’

After almost forty years with the franchise, he said he still thought of the moves as his children.

‘These are my kids, I loved them. I created them. I’m very intimately involved with them.’

When challenged why he sold off his ‘children’ to Disney he replied: ‘I sold them to the white slavers that takes these things, and… ‘before the filmmaker caught himself.

Aside from a difference in opinions over the focus of The Force Awakens and the next two films, Lucas had concerns that he might be too old to tackle a whole new trilogy which he said takes ten years to do properly.

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Family soap: George Lucas has said he sees Star Wars as a family soap opera, not a sci fi film, but that the new filmmakers wanted to go in a different direction

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Break up: The Force Awakens director JJ Abrams on set of the new Star Wars film, which was released on December 18

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Lucas said he and Disney had gone their separate ways after it became clear the entertainment conglomerate didn’t want his input on the new film (pictured)

‘Have you felt it?’: Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser

 ‘I’m 70, I don’t know if I’ll be here when I’m 80,’ he explained.

He has also complained in the past that making a new Star Wars film was tough because it’s ‘not much fun’ being criticized by fans.

The creator of the legendary films is not involved in the new film Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which will be directed by JJ Abrams.

‘You go to make a movie and all you do is get criticized. And it’s not much fun,’ Lucas told Vanity Fair. ‘You can’t experiment.’

Lucas says that his epic sagas are behind him for good. He hopes to focus on a series of much smaller experimental films.

While Lucas might be unhappy with The Force Awakens, new owners Disney are likely to be delighted after it became ninth-highest box office performer ever with $1.23 billion in global box office receipts.

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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3379784/George-Lucas-compares-Disney-White-Slavers-new-interview-admits-doesn-t-like-retro-look-smash-hit-Star-Wars-Force-Awakens.html#ixzz3vxkWCLyF
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