An exploration of the musical biopic genre + Elvis Review

Warner Bros.' "Elvis"

One of the current popular trends in Hollywood is that of the musical biopic. It seems like everyone who has been influential in the music industry is getting their turn in the spotlight and so naturally it only makes sense that the king himself is the next in line. One might wonder why this hasn’t been done before. Well, it has. Kinda. Movies with Elvis Presley as a character in them do exist, but perhaps not to this scale where he is the focal point of his own musical biopic. Like most human beings who exist on Earth, I would certainly consider myself an Elvis fan. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t at least like a song or two from him, I would think. So this seems like a winning formula, right?

Well, not so fast. Not for me, anyways. Sure, it’s Elvis Presley. I love his music. He certainly had a life and a career that’s worth diving into and learning about. And it’s directed by Baz Luhrmann, who often only does a feature length movie once every five years or so. His entire feature length filmography (so not counting short films, TV, music videos, or anything like that) is “Strictly Ballroom” (1992), “Romeo + Juliet” (1996), “Moulin Rouge!” (2001), “Australia” (2008), “The Great Gatsby” (2013), and now “Elvis” (2022). 30 years. 6 movies. An average of 5.8 years in between each. So when he shows up, I think it’s worth paying attention to at the very least, especially considering some of those on the list.

So what’s the hesitation on my part?

Well… it’s the genre.

Honestly, I wasn’t planning on doing any sort of deep dive into this. I’ve been a tad bit behind on some of the films I’ve seen recently. And as you may have noticed, I’ve been selective of which movies get their own review on this blog. For the most part I’ve been doing shorter “mini reviews” on Facebook and other social media. I have reasons for this that are not worth diving into at this current time. But when I finally caught up with “Elvis” this past week and gave myself time to ponder over it, I realized this required more than just a quick Facebook post. Especially considering the response. Certified fresh from critics at 78 percent, a 94 percent Rotten Tomatoes audience score, and a 7.8 on IMDb. Clearly there is plenty of enjoyment of this film going on. And I’ll be straight up right up front here and say that I was not one of them. Yet the reasons for that go slightly beyond the individual points of this one film. As I’ve said, the musical biopic genre as a whole is one that I’ve been growing more and more frustrated with and I think my dislike of “Elvis” requires a tad bit of context in that regard.

I say that this is a popular trend in Hollywood right now. But it’s certainly not a new one. Musical biopics have been around for quite some time. There’s just been a heavy uptick of late that probably has everything to do with “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 2018 earning $886.9 million worldwide and scoring 5 Oscar nominations, which included best picture. It won four of those, all but the best picture. Since Hollywood is a copycat business, many filmmakers have desperately been trying to cash in on that trend. And it seems to me that quantity is the theme here rather than quality. Filmmakers taking big names in the music world and throwing together a biopic of them without taking much time to figure out what makes a good musical biopic. And I feel that there’s also a bit of a backwards train of thought in determining who gets the next one. Instead of finding a musician with a good story to tell that would fit nicely into a Hollywood movie, it feels like they’re going down the checklist of popular bands or artists based solely on popularity and starting production on their biopic without thinking twice about what the focus is going to be about or what story they’re planning to tell.

20th Century Fox's "Bohemian Rhapsody"

The result of this is a long string of musical biopics that I honestly haven’t cared for. And a handful I haven’t even bothered to see. In fact, I came close to just not watching “Elvis,” but did so because my options at the moment weren’t very plentiful as I’d seen all the major blockbusters dominating the screens right now.

The other thing that has bothered me is that a lot of these movies seem to have learned the wrong lessons from “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which to me is a textbook example of how to NOT make a musical biopic. Yet because it became so popular, filmmakers have started to read and copy from this erroneous textbook, which has seemingly caused things to spiral out of control in regards to degrading quality in a genre that I’m not so sure Hollywood ever figured out how to properly do in the first place. The good ones seem to be more of an accidental success than anything else. In fact, to this point of Hollywood never really figuring this out, there was a movie in 2007 called “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” which is a fictional parody of the musical biopic genre. While it wasn’t a resounding success upon initial release, some film circles have really gone back to this movie to the point where they feel this movie should’ve ended the musical biopic genre. Or at least caused Hollywood to learn from it. But instead of paying attention to the things that “Walk Hard” directly made fun of and attempting to change and be different, many musical biopics that followed have continued to do the exact same things, which is a bit bewildering in my mind.

So what exactly makes a good musical biopic?

Well, the correct answer is that there’s no right or wrong way of doing it. And if certain movies like “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Elvis” are extremely well-liked and very successful, then who am I to say that they’re doing things the wrong way. Movies are an art form and like all art, it’s 100 percent subjective. Different people can like different things and that’s OK.

But if you want my opinion on what I think makes a good musical biopic, then I suppose that’s why you clicked on this and are continuing to read. So let’s carry on.

This might sound a bit vague, but in my opinion the best musical biopics are the ones that latch onto a specific theme. There is a specific lesson to be learned that drives the narrative. And this leads to a story that feels very natural in movie form where the character arcs and plot are the strengths. These are typically films where the filmmakers saw a story from a person’s life that they wanted to tell rather than picking a popular character and figuring out how to make a movie about their life.

These are, of course, generalities in what I prefer. Things have to be taken on a case by case situation and sometimes there’s a movie that breaks the mold to what I expect that causes me enjoyment despite it not following what I want it to follow. But for the most part these are what I go in hoping or expecting out of a musical biopic and if it doesn’t feel like it is focusing on the right angles of the biopic, then it becomes easy for me to get frustrated.

One other thing that is also important to me in regards to biopics as a whole, musical or not, is accuracy. I get that most movies based on true stories often have to take certain creative liberties in order to make the movie work, but I prefer a biopic to be educational. If you’re going to make a movie about someone, I enjoy the experience of learning about that person. Some will give me pushback to that and argue that a movie’s purpose is to entertain, not to educate. Because of that, they don’t mind if the movie is completely fictional as long as the story told was one that they enjoyed. To each their own, I suppose, but it personally drives me bonkers when I put my educational hat on only to learn later on that the history lesson that was taught to me came from the figments of someone’s imagination rather than the actual historical facts. If a person’s life doesn’t follow the story that you want to tell, then find a story that does fit your narrative. Or simply create a fictional movie that tells your story. Don’t fictionalize someone’s real life in order to create your own story that you wanted to tell.

Again, I get the idea of taking certain creative liberties in order to make things work. And sometimes you have to combine events or do other things like that, but at the very least you should have the spirit of things correct in a way that accurate honors a person’s life.

Columbia Pictures' "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story"

What not to do in a musical biopic?

If you take these thoughts and connect the dots here to what I’m getting at, I honestly don’t care for musical biopics that have no real focus or theme to them. Biopics that feel like generic highlight reels of someone’s life without an interesting story to follow are often movies that I get bored with. Granted, I love myself a good slice of life type of movie. But even those - often fictional - slice of life movies have a specific purpose to them or wrap things up in a way that ties things together. If you go from Point A to Point B to Point C to Point D in an aimless fashion and nothing really ties together in an interesting way, most of the time you’ll have successfully lost me back around Point B. If I’m wondering where this is going and I never get an answer to that question, then I’ll leave confused and unsatisfied at the experience.

If you have no theme or no point to your movie, then most of the time I’ll leave wondering what the purpose of the whole thing was. Give me a reason to care or give me a take home thought for me to ponder on. Don’t just blindly guide me through a random series of events. Tie it all together in some way.

And in a very specific critique towards the musical biopic, I really don’t care too much for what I call random concert films. That being a movie about a band or an artist and the whole thing is just going from song to song to song without any connective tissue between the songs. Yes, if I like the band or the singer, I’m going to enjoy it when I hear it performed, assuming the actor does a good job performing the piece, but the songs should be there to enhance the experience, not be the sole attraction. I can open my Apple Music app and listen to songs from my favorite singers. If I want to go to a concert, I can purchase those tickets when the band is in town or search for a previously recorded concert online if it exists. But if I’m going to a musical biopic, I want it to be more than just the movie aimlessly bouncing from song to song that an actor is singing and performing.

And for crying out loud, don’t tell a fictional version of a real person’s life. If I come home and realize that the movie was completely off in left field when it comes to telling a person’s story, that might be the one thing that drives me up the wall.

And finally, if your movie hits every point that the aforementioned “Walk Hard” movie hits, then I personally don’t think you made your movie in a very good, especially if there’s no sense of genuine emotion. I get that you can take a familiar premise and turn it into a solid movie if you show that you really care about the subject matter and the execution is done well, but if every musical biopic is the same movie with different central characters, can you maybe understand why that can be tiresome in 2022? And if you combined those last two points, meaning you fictionalized someone’s life in order to fit them into a generic biopic film that hits all the cliché beats, that’s obviously a whole lot worse.

Tom Hanks in "Elvis"

If you came here for the “Elvis” review, I hope you don’t mind that you walked into an essay about what makes a good musical biopic in my eyes. If you made it this far into the review, I hope you at least found all of this informative and can use it to understand my vantage point when it comes to this.

Because “Elvis” did just about none of these things in the way that I wanted. I’m not saying it hit every egregious point that I just brought up, but it ran right through most of them.

That’s the short review. A complete swing and a miss on almost every bullet point. Use that as your pull quote from this review if you want.

The longer version of the review?

Well, first and foremost I think it’s important to point out what this movie actually did a good job at. And that’s Austin Butler as Elvis. This is a guy that’s been around a bit. His most notable role of late was that of Tex Watson in “Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood.” But this will absolutely be known as his major breakout role that should launch him into stardom. And this is a perfect example as to why casting directors should cast actors who fit the part rather than going for the big name just to get attention that way. Because you can find people like Austin Butler that can nail the part to perfection. He looks like Elvis. He sounds like Elvis. And he gets Elvis’s mannerisms down to perfection, including his classic hip movements that all the girls back in the day swooned over. And I don’t know exactly how the singing went down in this movie, but the individual Elvis performances where quite electric and absolutely on point. I don’t know if it was Butler doing the singing or if he was just expertly lip-synching, but whatever was done the movie pulled that off quite well.

But the No. 1 rule here that should be the most obvious point ever is that if you’re going to make an Elvis movie that is even called “Elvis,” then for crying out loud make the movie about Elvis. I was rather shocked to realize that Elvis felt almost like a side character in his own movie. Just about the entire focus of the movie was on a character they called “The Colonel.” Colonel Tom Parker is his full name, but I don’t know if they used Tom Parker much. This guy was Elvis’s manager. He’s narrating the film for most of it. He’s the focus. It’s about him finding Elvis and him dealing with Elvis’s unprecedented stardom and him trying to take full control of his musical career and him apparently being super shady in many ways, most notably keeping a large portion of the money for himself.

And I honestly did not care for any of that. The Colonel is played by Tom Hanks. And man alive, I have no idea what Baz was telling Tom Hanks to do, but it was just absolutely not working for me in any way, shape, or form. Tom Hanks is one of the best actors working today and I don’t know if I’ve seen a film where I thought he was bad in the movie. Not every movie of his has been perfect, but usually I can at least say that he did a good job in the movie, even if the movie around him was bad. And occasionally you might say that he is miscast in a certain role, but I honestly think that this might be my least favorite performance of his career. And I get that he was supposed to be ridiculous and annoying. He was portraying a character who is almost the antagonist of the movie in many ways. But every time he showed up on the screen, I wanted him gone. And it became increasingly frustrating that he refused to go away and pretty much had the movie to himself instead of letting Austin Butler do the heavy lifting.

I’m certainly not the Elvis expert here, but I don’t know if I even learned anything about Elvis. And I know that he had enough of a complex life for a really good educational story about him to be told, but none of that was really told. We just watched Elvis the whole time through the eyes of this really annoying manager character called the Colonel. To the point where I think they could’ve called the movie “The Colonel” instead of “Elvis.”

Covering the next major issue here, outside the “Elvis had a bad manager” angle of the movie, this is another musical biopic that seemed to just jump from song to song and from one moment of Elvis’s career to the next. But it didn’t really dive too deeply into his backstory, his upbringing, or explore his personal life too heavily. It just felt like we were going from one Elvis song to the next Elvis song while shoving down our throat that he had a bad manager in between songs. We ultimately cover 20 years of time, but rarely did I feel the transitions to each portion of his life had much of a purpose to it outside a mere obligation that the movie felt like touching on everything that he did in those 20 years before his death in 1977. And even then, we covered so much ground that most of the historical points felt like they were just lightly brushed on rather than focusing on a few key points. And again, outside “Elvis had a bad manager,” I don’t know what points I was supposed to take away from this movie. I could probably come up with some things that one could focus around in an Elvis biopic, but I don’t really feel that any of that stood out to me.

Austin Butler in "Elvis"

And if you got more out of this than I did, then I will be honest and say it’s probably because the movie is so freaking long that my attention span wandered out the door around halfway through. I will confess that my brain power was minimal going into the movie and I mistakenly went into a 10:20 p.m. without looking at the run time. But I’ve had movie experiences with low brain power where the movie captivated me so much that it energized me and I haven’t cared or noticed that it was super late. I went into this particular movie thinking I would probably get done not too long after midnight. When it finally ended, I was partially convinced that it would be dawn outside and I could immediately drive to work. Turns out it was just 1:30 a.m., but that wasn’t that much more comforting. That included your typical commercials and trailers, but the official runtime was 2 hours 39 minutes, or 159 minutes. And that is absolutely ridiculous. There’s no reason an Elvis biopic needed to be much longer than 100 or 120 minutes. Getting to 159 minutes feels inexcusable, especially with a movie that had so little to say.

I’d say that Baz Luhrmann forgot how to edit in his eight years since his last movie, but a more accurate statement would be that he forgot how to properly shorten a movie down to the length that it needed to be. Because there’s definitely a lot of editing going on. This is extremely flashy, upbeat, and a bit chaotic. Baz was definitely not interested in making this feel like a traditional biopic on a visual spectrum. Transitions from scene to scene are also this way. In many ways this is a compliment to the film. It gave it a unique flare to it that very much made it feel like a Baz Luhrmann film. But I’ll be honest and say that after a bit of this I was begging Baz to slow the thing down a bit. Give me some time to breathe a bit.

Maybe this is a movie that I need to revisit at some point. It was loud and chaotic. It was extremely long. And very little of the movie did anything to interest me. Given that I was already tired going it, and it was a late showing, this was all an extremely bad combination of events. There’s just nothing here that incentivizes me to return to this, especially when there’s always a whole lot of other things to catch up on.

And you know what, given that it’s taken me a few days to even get this post out into the world after seeing the movie, I can already feel this movie simply disappearing from my brain. Unless I get some sort of major backlash from people who loved the movie, which I honestly don’t anticipate happening, this might be a thing that I completely forget about in record time. And that’s almost the worst type of movie.

If you loved this movie, then that’s fantastic. If you’re curious enough about it, then check it out. It’s not a movie whose existence offends me. And if what you like from musical biopics goes completely the opposite way of what I’ve outlined in this post, that’s cool, too. I just hope you can understand where I’m coming from and accept that this was not the movie for me. The only thing that’ll make me mad is if you say that, “Well, you’re just not a fan of Elvis so you didn’t appreciate the movie like I did.” That’ll earn you a virtual slap in the face. People said that to me about Queen when I hated the movie “Bohemian Rhapsody” and it couldn’t be further from the truth. I love Queen. I love Elvis Presley. Hated “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Didn’t care for “Elvis.” That’s all. I hope we can still be friends.

Grade: 5/10

Movie Preview: July 2022

We’re halfway through summer of 2022 and the box office has been absolutely on fire. Sure, the landscape of the whole world will be changed forever and some things will never go back to being the quite the same again, but numbers and attendance so far have been on par with pre-COVID levels of summer fury. Already we’ve had two movies in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and “Top Gun: Maverick” top $400 million domestically, with “Jurassic World: Dominion” inching its way towards that mark. Having three $400 million films would be impressive for any summer movie season, pandemic or not. Can we add more to that list? Again, summer is only halfway done and this July suggests that we’re not slowing down quite yet. How many massive event films can be stuffed into one summer? A lot, apparently. Let’s dive in and look at the options that July has in store.

As always, release date information for this post is courtesy of the-numbers.com and boxofficepro.com. The movies listed are the ones currently scheduled for a wide release in the United States and Canada and are subject to change.

July 1 – 4

Universal's "Minions: The Rise of Gru"

Starting us off with a bang this month is the return of the crazy, little yellow guys that parents hate and children love. That’s Minions: The Rise of Gru. This is a movie that effectively serves both as a sequel to 2015’s “Minions” and a prequel to 2010’s “Despicable Me” as it connects the dots between the two in bringing in a young Gru, with Steve Carell returning to voice Gru. Now if you’re rolling your eyes and wondering why we’re getting a sequel to “Minions,” this one is an absolute no-brainer. Sure, in some circles that “Minions” movie was burned to a crisp and called one of the worst movies to ever exist. But guess what? Your 5-year-old doesn’t care about opinions of the grumpy critics and film Twitter members who’ve become keyboard warriors in trashing the little yellow guys. Point in case, did you know that “Minions,” when it came out, became the second highest grossing animated movie ever at the worldwide box office behind only “Frozen”? Currently it still stands at No. 4 on that list as only “Frozen 2” and “Incredibles 2” have passed it. Again, your 5-year-old doesn’t care about internet opinions.

The honest question going into the weekend was the state of the economy. As mentioned, the theatrical business is doing great. But most of the movies doing well have been mostly targeted at adult males, who have been the quickest audience to rush back to theaters. Is it possible that the family audiences are the ones that are less likely to rush back because parents are paying tickets for the entire family instead of a ticket just for themselves? And could that be one of the reasons why “Lightyear” failed in June despite everything around it succeeding? While that is certainly still a potential factor, coming out of the weekend the answer seems to be that “Lightyear” problems are specific to that movie alone and not the entire target audience. “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” as of me typing this, has an estimated weekend 3-day opening of $108 million and a 4-day opening of nearly $130 million, making it the fourth $100 million opener of the summer. Potential questions of franchise fatigue or the fact that it’s been five years since the last entry in the franchise and seven years since the previous “Minions” movie also seemed to have not been as big of an issue as potentially thought.

Sneaking into a moderately wide release this weekend was Bleeker Street’s Mr. Malcolm’s List. Its theater count was 1,384 theaters and the weekend estimates have it down in seventh place with $851,853. The math on that is $616 per theater, which is not particularly good. Despite not getting a whole lot of attention, the story behind this is fascinating. In 2009, author Suzanne Allain self-published her novel, “Mr. Malcom’s List,” and adapted it into a screenplay. It was discovered by filmmaker Emma Holly James in 2015 and a short film was made first. Following the success of the short film, the green light was officially given for this feature-length film and the novel was published in 2020 by Berkley Press. The book and movie itself is a PG-rated period piece about a young woman in 1800s England helping a friend get revenge on a suitor who rejected her. Given the soft opening for the movie, it’s conceivable that this hits streaming or VOD of some sort before too terribly long.

July 8 – 10

Marvel’s "Thor: Love and Thunder"

Two movies in two weekends both opening above $100 million start July off, after the busy May and June we’ve already had? Almost certainly. Because this weekend has the second MCU opening of the year with Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder. Back in 2017, Waititi pulled off an impressive feat with “Thor: Ragnarok,” completely resurrecting the character of Thor and his franchise following the first two entries that are, generally speaking, among the lesser received movies of the MCU. Not as many people cared about Thor in comparison to the likes of Iron Man and Captain America. But “Ragnarok” instantly changed that as the movie is still considered as one of the MCU’s best and made Thor an A-lister hero. Add in two more Avengers movies after “Ragnarok,” that of course being “Infinity War” and “Endgame,” and in an interesting turn of events Thor has now outlasted most of the OG Avengers in the MCU, becoming the first sub-franchise in the MCU to get a fourth film. Thor’s journey in “Love and Thunder” sees him relaxing and enjoying his “retirement” from being a superhero after we last left off in “Endgame” with him going off with the Guardians of the Galaxy, who will make an appearance here in at least the first act of the movie. But his conflict here will see him face Gorr the God Butcher, played by Christian Bale, while teaming up with ex-girlfriend Jane Foster who is now the “Female Thor” counterpart, with Natalie Portman returning to her role.

Financially speaking, after the first two Thor movies opened to $65.7 million and $85.7 million, “Ragnarok” was given a huge boost to a $122.7 million opening following the insane hype from the trailers that led to very positive word of mouth, a surprise that many didn’t see coming. It finished with $315 million domestically and $850 million worldwide, all numbers that “Love and Thunder” should be able to comfortable hit. MCU fatigue and a slew of huge movies already this summer could theoretically hinder the movie a bit. But the idea that people are getting tired of the MCU has yet to reflect in the actual box office totals. “Love and Thunder” isn’t expected to hit the numbers of the previous two MCU films, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” both of which had event level hype behind them, but it’ll probably hit somewhere between the opening of “Ragnarok” and the $187.4 million opening of “Multiverse of Madness.” Box Office Pro has it projected between $140-160 million currently, which would put it slightly ahead of March’s “The Batman,” which opened with $134 million.  

July 15 – 17

Sony Pictures' "Where the Crawdads Sing"

After two straight weekends in July with huge openings, the third weekend of July will be a bit of a cool-down weekend, which is par for the course following a big MCU release. However, there are three movies this weekend that will be throwing themselves into the race, hoping to land somewhere in the top 10 or top 5. Current tracking has Where the Crawdads Sing leading the pack. This is based on a book that has become a bit of a phenomenon in the last few years. It was published in 2018 and has already sold 12 million copies by January 2022. It was written by Delia Owens and is a mystery/thriller novel following two timelines, the first being a young girl named Kya growing up in the marshes of North Carolina and the second being a murder investigation of a local celebrity. The setting is that of the 1950s and 60s. The movie is being directed by Olivia Newman and stars Daisy Edgar-Jones in the lead role as the Marsh Girl. The current long-range forecast from Box Office Pro pegs it at $17-26 million for its opening, which would put it in line with June’s “The Black Phone,” which opened to a healthy $23.6 million.

The next movie of the weekend is another animated film, although this one being a smaller animated film called Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank. This is a cat and dog movie universe with a premise surrounding beagle named Hank who is being trained to be a samurai by a cat mentor named Jimbo so that he can beat the evil giant cat, Ika Chu, who is trying to destroy their village. If it feels like a low budget version of something like “Kung Fu Panda,” that might be accurate, although the initial idea was for it to be loosely based on Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” from 1974. It was even called “Blazing Samurai” at one point. This is an animated movie that has actually been stuck in Production Hell for quite some time, potentially as early as 2010. It’s passed through several hands and has had quite the evolution. Its initial release date was April 2017 by Open Roads and its long journey has landed it with Paramount Animation, stuck between two major animated movies on the July schedule where it will probably get mostly ignored. An opening around $10 million is the expectation.

The third movie of the weekend is Focus Features’ Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. Although scheduled as a wide release, this might be closer to a moderate release like “Mr. Malcom’s List.” Also like that movie, this is a historical drama following a British woman. The setting is a century later in the 1950s, so perhaps not a period piece for this one, but it does have a comedic undertone as a widowed cleaning lady embarks on a journey to Paris after becoming obsessed with a Dior dress. This is based on a novel from 1958 called “Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris” that had three subsequent sequels with Mrs. Harris going to New York, Parliament, and Moscow. In the U.K., it was published as “Flowers for Mrs. Harris.”

July 22 – 24

Universal's "Nope"

Not many filmmakers in today’s market can sell a movie simply by their name alone. But Jordan Peele has quickly become one of them following “Get Out” and “Us.” Really, though, he did that after his first movie, “Get Out,” became a phenomenal sensation in 2017. And now he has his next movie, Nope, coming out this weekend, getting the entire weekend to itself in regards to new releases. The premise of “Nope” has even been mostly shrouded in mystery. It’s quite simply been advertised as “Jordan Peele’s next movie” and has gotten serious hype with that alone. That said, this is a horror film, of course, and the general theory is that it has something to do with aliens and thus might dive into the sci-fi horror realm. Even with that basic knowledge, the trailers themselves have been also extremely vague and the idea is that there’s a lot that Jordan Peele has up his sleeve with this one that audiences are excited to figure out. After “Get Out” was a sensation, “Us” fed off of that to an opening of $71.1 million, the highest opening weekend ever for a horror film not based off any IP. “Nope” is expected to at least come close to that with an opening in the range of $50-70 million.

July 29 – 31

Warner Bros.' "DC League of Super Pets"

The month of July will close with another big animated movie, DC League of Super Pets. While maybe not expected to open nearly as big as “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” this one definitely has breakout potential with a lot of crossover audience as this is not just a fun family film targeted at kids, but this is also a DC film that will at least have comic book fans curious. The stars of the show are the pets of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, and Green Lantern, who themselves also have super powers. And yes, these pets are canonical to the DC comics. In addition to the comic book realm, these pets are voiced by the likes of Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart and Kate McKinnon. The movie also has John Krasinski as the voice of Superman and Keanu Reeves as the voice of Batman in limited roles. So yeah, there’s a lot of ammunition here, especially given that Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart have led quite the number of surprise hits. In regards to an animated movie about pets having a… secret life, I am reminded of the huge breakout hit that was “The Secret Life of Pets.” So don’t underestimate the potential of an animated movie about pets, even if it doesn’t hit as high as that one.

While there are a lot of pros here, there are also plenty of potential cons. While this summer has been very consistent in delivering big hits, even in pre-COVID times it was very common for some movies to fail because there are too many of them. While there will be four weeks in between “Minions” and “Super Pets,” it’s possible that “Minions” is simply the movie choice for family audiences this summer. Even though these characters are based off of comics, this is the beginning of a new attempted franchise. Especially in the realm of animation, animated sequels often play much better than original animated films. And we also have the fact that Warner Animation Group, which this is from, doesn’t have as successful of a history as the likes of Pixar, Disney, and Illumination. Not counting their COVID releases, their previous six animated movies have averaged an opening of $36.8 million. This should beat the average, but a $40-60 million opening might be a better expectation rather than matching “Minions” or “The Secret Life of Pets” in opening above $100 million.

Officially finishing off this post is another Focus Features release called Vengeance. Like Focus’s other release from this month, “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” this is likely a moderate release. That’s generally their strategy. Judging based off of the trailer, this is appears to be a blend of genres as a comedic western of sorts set in modern Texas where a podcaster and a journalist goes to Texas to investigate a murder of a girl that he once hooked up with. This is written and directed by B.J. Novak, who played Ryan Howard in “The Office,” in his feature-length directorial debut. He’s directed a handful of TV episodes, including five episodes of “The Office,” but this will be his first movie. Novak also stars as the lead role and is joined by the likes of Ashton Kutcher, Dove Cameron, Boyd Holbrook, and Issa Rae. As an alternative option to some of the bigger blockbuster affair, this could gain some traction if word of mouth ends up being solid, but it’s not likely to have a huge opening.