Monday Mixer: Is anyone out there?

Posted Monday, September 8, 2014 at 3:50 PM Central

by John Couture

Oh, what a wicked couple of weeks it has been. I do apologize to those of you who were expecting us to deliver our MM a day late last week like the garbage man, simply pushing our Monday into Tuesday.

It was a short week with a lot of stuff to do, so the MM got the short straw so to speak. Besides, all the happened two weeks ago is Guardians of the Galaxy continued to earn money, oh and everyone decided to secure their iPhones a little bit more.

This week, I'm afraid to say that not much has changed, other than a bunch of lawsuits and football finally being back in full swing. But, we are ever diligent and determined to get back on schedule, so we will trudge on.

I can't promise anything ground breaking will follow, but I can assure you that you will laugh at least once, probably twice. Without further ado, here is this week's Monday Mixer.

Box Office 411

Guardians of the Galaxy and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles continued their one-two punch for the third straight week. Guardians of the Galaxy hauled in $10 million to bring their total to over $294 million, while its Turtle cohorts squeezed out another $6.5 million to up its total to almost $175 million.

I don't know what is scarier, that Guardians of the Galaxy will surely top $300 million this week or that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles looks to finish with over $200 million. Had you told me two months ago that we would find ourselves here, I probably would have laughed at you, but this is where we find ourselves. Guardians of the Galaxy is now poised to finish with over $325 million, making it the third highest grossing Marvel movie of all time, behind only The Avengers and Iron Man 3.

August was a great month that turned in a new record performance, but September is, well, off to a very slow start. This past weekend was the slowest weekend at the box office in over two years. With the return of the NFL and schools starting back up, this sort of result was to be expected, but it's still shocking to see so few people show up in theaters.

Looking ahead to next weekend, Dolphin Tale 2 is the only real challenger out there, but will it be enough to de-throne Guardians of the Galaxy? Sure, the original film did $72 million at the box office, but I feel that those crying for a sequel are few and far between. I wouldn't be surprised to see Guardians of the Galaxy take the top spot again with a sub-$10 million weekend.

Quick Hitters

• With pot becoming legal in Colorado and Washington, perhaps this is just the beginning. Tusk had its worldwide debut over the week up at TIFF (reviews have been great by the way) and with it came news that its distributor A24 has struck a deal with a California medical marijuana dispensary to tie-in two weeds strains with the film.

  I do believe this is the first time that pot has officially been tied-in to a film's release. How long before we get a cross-over with Redbox and have "Wake and Bake" movie and pot vending machines?

• I'm going to spend the next couple of hits on some great comic content out there. First up, is a great video from the Cracked.com team about Star Wars and racism.

  Of course, thanks to Kevin Smith, we all know that Star Wars is rascist.

  "What's a Nubian?" gets me every time. While the latest video from Cracked.com does confirm the racism in Star Wars in about 20 seconds, it's another form of racism that they tackle.

  
  Why 'Star Wars' Is Secretly Racist -- powered by Cracked.com
• Speaking of comedy sites whose work that we admire, two of our faves Cinema Sins and Honest Trailer switched it up a bit and tackled The Amazing Spider-Man 2 using the other site's schtick.

  The results as you can imagine are Amazing. No pun intended.

Well, I always like to end on a laugh, so until next week, MIX WELL!