The last year has been a very good one for high profile comedies, with several new movies that have been both hilarious and very profitable. When that magic mixture is achieved you can be sure that the principles are going to be getting a lot more work.

Two of the more surprising successes of the year were Bridesmaids and Horrible Bosses and now it looks like key members from both films are joining forces on their next project. Deadline is exclusively reporting that director Seth Gordon has tapped Melissa McCarthy to star along side his Horrible Bosses star Jason Bateman in his next film, Identity Theft.

McCarthy was one of the best parts of Bridesmaids and has made a lot of strides towards mainstream popularity in the last twelve months. Between an Emmy for her work in Mike & Molly and stealing the show on a recent Saturday Night Live, it will be interesting to see if she can parlay that momentum into starring role success.

Seth Gordon, on the other hand, is finally showing off why people were excited about his vision after his great debut documentary The King of Kong. Hopefully working together will bring their careers to new levels of greatness, because the world can always use great female comedy leads and strong comedy directors.

In a world of constant changing protagonists, there seems to be one winner when it comes to the summer movie blockbuster season. That winner is Michael Bay’s transforming robots known as the Autobots. In its second weekend of release, Transformers 3 still managed to stay strong at #1 with an astounding $47 Million.

The film is staying strong not only in the US, but has pulled in upwards of $645 Million worldwide. Also opening this weekend, Warner’s Horrible Bosses didn’t make much of an impact with an estimated $28 Million.

Finally, and in the #3 spot this weekend, Sony’s The Zookeeper managed to draw something of an audience, with $21 Million over the weekend, and an average of $6,000 per screen. About a fourth of its $80 Million budget, so you can expect Kevin James to cause trouble in yet another occupation in the near future.

Even thought Transformers blew up for the past 2 weeks, and has made over half a billion dollars worldwide, that’s nothing in comparison to what the final Harry Potter film will do next weekend.

Opening in over 4,200 screens across the US, you can expect the film to blow this last Transformers film out of the water in the first weekend, let alone the worldwide net of the film going forward.

If The New York Times were to break the story that the NEA has been generously funding an ongoing study of manhood and brotherhood among everyday schmoes in contemporary culture, that sure would explain a lot. Surely few phenomena have been as comprehensively documented of late as the dilemma of nondescript modern men (usually lifelong buddies) forced by extreme circumstances beyond their control (roofies, bad bosses) into the type of reckless behavior (murder, breaking-and-entering, walking into a bar in the bad part of town) they would never normally contemplate.

Almost always the upshot involves:

• •  illegal drug usage (usually unintentional)
• •  first-ever encounters with law enforcement (cue bickering recrimination scene in the back seat of a squad car)
• •  uneasy encounters with The Other (usually hip, powerful, sometimes grotesque black men against whom the protagonists’ manhoods are implicitly contrasted and found vastly wanting. In the case of Hangover The Other is represented by both Mike Tyson and Ken Jeong as an Asian Mafioso. Here, it’s a very funny Jamie Foxx.)
• •  flashes of homosexual anxiety
• •  all countered by elaborate vulgarity, gross-out humor and scatological references, as well as
• •  forced interaction with that other Other: frighteningly gorgeous and overtly sexual women who positively demand to be serviced.

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Movie fans and studio execs alike both know the importance of the Independence Day weekend. It’s the coveted 3 days during which the most amount of money is made for the year. And for almost all 3 films in the Transformers franchise, Michael Bay has held that special spot.

As if we didn’t know it was going to happen, Transformers: Dark of the Moon was #1 this weekend, with a whopping 6 days covering its “opening weekend” (Wednesday to Monday) and pulling in over $180 Million domestically and an estimated $218 Million overseas.

Continuing its popularity from last weekend, Disney’s Cars 2 stayed strong at the #2 spot with $26 Million, followed by Cameron Diaz’s foray back into comedy with Bad Teacher bringing in $14.5 Million.

Also opening this weekend was the hugely disappointing romantic comedy Larry Crowne, with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. It came in fourth place with $14 Million. Finally, the Leighton Meester/Selena Gomez vehicle Monte Carlo came in at #6 with $7.4 Million.

Next weekend, we expect a bit of a lull with Zoo Keeper and Horrible Bosses opening, giving us just enough time to cleanse our collective pallets for July 15th’s Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Part 2, which is expected to have the biggest opening of the year, and possibly putting Michael Bay and his toys to shame.

While this past week had a few fun trailers, unfortunately there wasn’t anything that I’m going to be waiting in line opening night to see.  It seems that we have fully transitioned out of the exciting summer films and are now getting prepared for the mediocre releases that didn’t quite make the summer block.

This week we have a couple big budget films that I feel obligated to talk about, a couple smaller indies I’m a little more excited for, and — Moon Nazis!

Real Steel

Click to see the trailer

There was an early teaser that came out for this last year, but this is the first chance that we really get to see the story of this film.  On one level you instantly want to dismiss this film as “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots: The Movie,” sure to be filled with terrible dialogue and cheesy one-liners.  But on another level you hope that this interesting premise might actually turn out to be a fresh take on inspiring boxing films.

Hugh Jackman (X-Men, The Prestige) is usually pretty decent in whatever he does, but who I would be most interested to see is Evangeline Lilly in this role, who is most famous as Kate from Lost.  Although she was in The Hurt Locker for a bit, this will definitely be her biggest step into features.

While part of me is excited to see some fun robot violence, I feel ultimately this film has to disappoint.  Everyone is going to be expecting Transformers quality CGI, but there is no way they had the budget to pull that off.  And, I get the feeling that people are going to want this film to have more heart that it will end up having.

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