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New movies Heretic and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever both debuted strongly this weekend, but neither was able to snatch the crown from Venom: The Last Dance, which earned $16.2 million from 3,905 theaters in North America, Variety reported.
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, a family-friendly movie that follows the chaotic Herdman siblings as they unexpectedly take over their town’s Christmas pageant, took second spot with $11.1 million from 3,020 locations. However, Variety noted that the figure includes $2.2 million from last week’s one-off sneak preview screening. The movie could certainly pick up momentum as we move into the festive season, propelled by a 98% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a critics’ Tomatometer score of 89%.
Heretic, a horror about two Mormon missionaries who encounter a sinister and psychologically manipulative Englishman named Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), also performed at the higher end of expectations, raking in $11 million from 3,221 venues. Rotten Tomatoes audience rating currently stands at 78%, while the critics are clearly loving it, with the Tomatometer at 93%.
To learn about the story behind the movie, check out Digital Trends’ recent interview with its creators, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, though it’s probably best to wait until after you’ve watched it.
As we mentioned at the top, it was Venom: The Last Dance that triumphed at the box office for a third successive weekend, taking $16.2 million from 3,905 North American venues. But its best days are now behind it, as the big-budget action-comedy Red One looks like a surefire bet for success this coming weekend, and the action-epic Gladiator II triumphing the weekend after that.
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
If you have to watch one Amazon Prime Video movie in November 2024, stream this one
Guillermo del Toro is one of the best filmmakers of his generation, and he’ll probably go down as the only Best Director winner at the Oscars to take home that award and Best Picture for a love story between a woman and an amphibious male. That movie was The Shape of Water, in case you were wondering. Del Toro loves making fantasy and horror movies, and he’s made several, including Hellboy, Crimson Peak, and even Blade II. But the one Amazon Prime Video movie that you have to watch in November is del Toro’s most personal work to date, Pan’s Labyrinth.
Del Toro wrote and developed Pan’s Labyrinth over a period of years before the film hit theaters in 2006. It’s a movie set during the Spanish Civil War that mixes in elements of dark fantasy. It had a lower budget — $14 million — than the most recent Hellboy movie, but it feels more alive and bursting with imagination. Despite the subtitles throughout the movie, fans in America and around the world embraced Pan’s Labyrinth and carried it to a box office take of $83 million worldwide. Nearly two decades later, a new generation has a chance to discover the movie on Prime Video. That’s why we’re sharing the reasons Pan’s Labyrinth should be at the top of your Prime Video playlist.
It’s del Toro’s passion project
All 41 seasons of Jeopardy! are finally coming to streaming
One of the longest-running game shows on TV is finally coming to streaming. Jeopardy!, all 41 seasons of it, are headed to streaming in early 2025, host Ken Jennings announced. The US Sun has reported that the show will most likely come to either Hulu or Amazon Prime Video. The reporting comes from a recent taping, where Jennings answered a behind-the-scenes question about whether the show was headed to streaming. “It is happening, indeed,” he apparently said.
Demand for some sort of on-demand way to watch Jeopardy! has been rising since the show’s dedicated Pluto TV channel disappeared in July 2024. While reruns are still available on various Pluto TV channels, the entire show has not been made available on any streaming service.
10 years ago, Disney released the most underrated Marvel superhero movie ever
The superhero genre has become remarkably overcrowded over the last 15 years. The Marvel Cinematic Universe and Christopher Nolan-led redefining of the genre in the late 2000s and early 2010s paved the way for an era of Hollywood dominated by movie characters in capes and villains with world-ending plans. Whether that era is still going is up for debate, but it led to a few years there — roughly 2014-2023 — where superhero movies and TV shows genuinely felt like they were everywhere, and sometimes to a suffocating degree. That doesn’t mean, however, that certain superhero films haven’t fallen through the cracks here and there over the past 10 years.
That seems, at least, to be the fate that has befallen Big Hero 6. Loosely inspired by the Marvel Comics superhero team of the same name, the animated Disney film received largely positive reactions from both critics and casual viewers alike when it hit theaters in 2014 and it grossed over $650 million at the worldwide box office. On top of all of that, it went on to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2015. Big Hero 6 nonetheless ranks as the most underrated superhero film of the modern era — a vibrant piece of comic-book-inspired storytelling that is oft-forgotten by fans of its genre and which strangely hasn’t received the big-screen sequel it deserves.
A superhero-sized coming-of-age story
