Kenneth Atchity's Blog, page 28

Warners’ “Meg 2: The Trench” is the dominant title on this week’s VOD charts.

Warner Bros. isn’t happy with industry consensus appointing “Gran Turismo” as the weekend’s top-grossing film, beating “Barbie.” (Sony’s total included all advance shows including sneaks over two weekends. My verdict: Aggressive, yes; outside accepted standards, no). It will be small solace, but Warners’ “Meg 2: The Trench” is the dominant title on this week’s VOD charts.

“Meg 2” moved to PVOD after 21 days — a quick turnaround previously reserved for Max exclusives and/or lower-budget titles like “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” and “House Party.” However, “Meg 2” is the $130 million sequel to a film that grossed over $500 million worldwide.

It dropped Friday and quickly reached #1 at iTunes. It also is #1 at Vudu, more impressive since its chart covers seven days and “it “Meg 2” was available for only three of them. Google Play, as always lagging a few days behind, has it at #3 and rising.
Read more

FREE August 28 - September 1! Seven Ways to Die by William Diehl with Kenneth Atchity⁠

 

AVAILBLE ON AMAZON 

Manhattan Murders... by the book! There are seven basic ways to die. In 1969 Dr. John C. Cavanaugh catalogued them all in his Primer of Forensic Pathology-Case Studies for the Novice M.E. and someone is using it as a handbook to kill!⁠⁠From the New York Times bestselling author of PRIMAL FEAR and SHARKY'S MACHINE -- From the Nez Perce Indian reservation in Idaho to New York's Central Park is a straight line right through Bill Diehl's last and most intriguing lead character, Micah Cody.⁠

Meg 2: The Trench Arrives on Digital August 25 The film also hits 4K and Blu-ray on October 24.

 Meg 2: The Trench is coming to digital TODAY!


The Ben Wheatley-directed thriller will be available to buy at home for $24.99 and for 48-hour rental via PVOD for $19.99 SRP on participating digital platforms, including Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, Google Play, and Vudu, among others.

Meg 2: The Trench will also be available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD on October 24.

The premium digital ownership, 4K UHD, and Blu-ray releases will contain the following special features:
The Making of Meg 2: The Trench – Cast and crew revisit the making of the film and working with new and returning cast members, then highlight the beauty and challenges of working with a Meg they can't see!​

Up From the Depths: Even More Beasts - Director Ben Wheatley, cast, and producers guide fans through the creation and design of the new creatures seen in Meg 2: The Trench.

Watch an exclusive sneak peek at “The Making of Meg 2: The Trench” via IGN

Meg 3: Will the Shark Thriller Get a Threequel?

The thrilling success of Meg 2 at the box office and its recent release in August 2023 have ignited fervent stalment. Director Ben Wheatley’s expressed enthusiasm for the project further fuels the excitement among dedicated fans. With tantalizing possibilities on the horizospeculation and eager anticipation for a possible third inn, let’s dive into what we know about Meg 3 and what might await us in the next chapter of this shark-infested universe.
Potential Release Date for Meg 3: Patience is Key

While an official release date for Meg 3 is yet to be revealed, the franchise’s history suggests that eager fans might have to exercise patience. Given the recent release of the sequel and the essential time required for script development and production, it’s reasonable to anticipate a significant gap before the premiere of the third instalment. Despite the wait, the vast potential of unexplored content in the realm of ‘shark movies’ assures us that the delay will likely be well worth it.

As speculation suggests, a potential release date could be sometime around 2026 or beyond. The franchise’s enduring popularity and ample source material from Steve Alten’s book series create a strong case for continuing the saga.
Meg 2’s Impact on Meg 3: Setting the Stage

While Meg 2: The Trench did not feature post-credit scenes, it effectively laid the foundation for the story’s next phase. The sequel, focusing on the dynamic between humanity and the untamed ocean realm, introduced new elements with immense potential for future chapters. Fresh technologies and characters could seamlessly guide the narrative towards exciting and uncharted territories.

It’s anticipated that Meg 3 will draw inspiration from the 2004 novel Primal Waters, although it’s important to note that the films often take creative liberties with the source material. While specific plot details remain under wraps, the groundwork laid by Meg 2 hints at a thrilling continuation that promises to captivate audiences once again.

While the official cast lineup for Meg 3 has not been confirmed, casting decisions are often intricate due to scheduling constraints and other logistical factors. Assuming all the stars align, it’s reasonable to expect core cast members to reprise their roles. Jason Statham as Jonas Taylor, Page Kennedy as DJ, and Cliff Curtis as James “Mac” Mackreides are among those likely to return. Wu Jing as Jiuming, Sophia Cai as Meiying Zhang, and Kelly the Dog as Pippin could also make a comeback.

With the adversaries of Meg 2 meeting their fates, new and formidable characters may step into the spotlight, adding fresh dynamics to the story.
Trailers and Future Uncertainties: Waiting for the Next Glimpse

Currently, no trailers or footage are available for Meg 3. The fate of the third instalment hinges on the reception of Meg 2 and its ability to maintain the franchise’s competitive cinematic landscape. The expectation for a sequel to match the engagement and response of its predecessors, especially considering the time lapse since the initial release, adds an extra layer of challenge for the creators.

While the road ahead is uncertain, the enthusiasm and zeal surrounding Meg 3 are undeniably high. As developments emerge and updates are unveiled, fans can eagerly anticipate further information about the potential continuation of this thrilling and shark-filled saga.

via Open Sky

'Meg 2: The Trench' Delivers Monster Returns at the Global Box Office

If anyone was ever in doubt about how important the overseas box office is for certain films, look no further than Meg 2: The Trench, the sequel to 2018's surprise hit The Meg, which starred Jason Statham as Jonas Taylor. The Meg was a fun, if slightly too serious film given the subject matter—enormous prehistoric shark terrorising panicking undersea fodder—but the film ended up making $529 million worldwide.

The sequel brought Ben Wheatley aboard, the director behind the harrowing and bleak movies like In The Earth, High Rise, Kill List and Sightseers. However, Wheatley's movies all have a streak of very dark humour in them, and that humour's been brought out tenfold in Meg 2, which sees Statham return to punch three megalodons instead of just one. Despite what was considered an underwhelming opening weekend of $30 million domestic, the movie has absolutely exploded overseas, reaching a total of $316 million in just 16 days. More importantly, $250 million of this has come from the international box office.

That's vitally important, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it marks 79% of the film's total gross but also underlines how crucial the international co-operation on the film is. As with The Meg, Meg 2 was a co-production between the United States and China, as CMC Pictures (China Media Capital) was a heavy contributor in the funding of the film. It also features Chinese megastar Wu Jing in a starring, and heroic, role in the movie. Jing, coincidentally, starred in The Battle of Lake Changjin, an enormous box office sensation that holds the distinction of being both the highest grossing Chinese movie of all time, the highest grossing film in worldwide history to never top the domestic box office, a distinction it may lose soon.
Fine China

The film never bashes this co-operation over the audience's head, and is all the better for it. And it's been rewarded with that worldwide haul of money, as the film continues to play very strongly overseas. Almost a third of the global takings ($94.8 million) have come from China, while the film carried a budget of $129 million. So once again, if you ever underestimated the importance of foreign markets, look no further than Statham and his shark-punching friends. Meg 3 seems all but assured at this point.
via Collider

The Meg’s Author Approved Of Jason Statham’s Casting, But Had Another Fast Saga Vet In Mind For The Lead In The Past

There was a time a different Fast & Furious alum might have played Jonas Taylor.

Blockbusters like Meg 2: The Trench live and die by the decisions made behind the scenes. With decades of development paving the way for the Ben Wheatley-directed return of Jason Statham’s Jonas Taylor, the hero created by author Steve Alten has waged war with prehistoric beasties yet again. Yet in earlier phases of development, another Fast Saga vet had Alten’s imagination held captive in the casting department.

This was something I had learned from my recent interview with Steve Alten, as we were gathered to honor not only the recent release of the sequel to 2018’s The Meg, but also the new collected edition of Alten novels named Meg: Legacy. As such, the past, present and future was on the table for the taking; which led Steve to reveal the most ridiculous Meg change from an earlier iteration. 

However, if we saw The Meg adapted in its 1997, or perhaps even with its 2005 attempts, Steve Alten admitted to CinemaBlend that he had the following actor in mind: 

I would say…Snake Plisken. Yes, a younger Kurt Russell. I thought he’d be perfect for it at the time. Jason Statham was my choice in 2016/2017.

 

Read more at Cinemablend 

MEG 2 Intertnational Success Explained

While previously a reliable market for big Hollywood releases, an increasing number of films are underperforming in the region, making Wheatley's sequel an interesting anomaly. Much of this is due to a changed movie landscape following the COVID-19 pandemic. Avatar: The Way of Water, for example, had a strong showing in China, but Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, by contrast, significantly underperformed. The Little Mermaid, too, essentially bombed in the country.

Meg 2: The Trench's box office opening weekend in China beat Jurassic World Dominion, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, and more than doubled the take of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. A big factor in Meg 2: The Trench's international success is that the film has been designed specifically to appeal to global audiences, with a concept that is accessible regardless of language and a diverse array of actors, including Jing Wu, who is major star in China.

Read more: https://screenrant.com/meg-2-movie-bo...

Nobody Ever Read American Literature Like This Guy Did

 Inflamed, impertinent and deeply insightful, D.H. Lawrence’s “Studies in Classic American Literature” remains startlingly relevant 100 years after it was originally published.

Every American is “a torn divided monster,”D.H. Lawrence wrote, in a book that saw in the nation’s literature a key to itssoul.Credit...Fine Art Images/HeritageImages, via Getty Images

It has been a hundred years since D.H. Lawrence published “Studies in Classic American Literature,” and in the annals of literary criticism the book may still claim the widest discrepancy between title and content.

Not with respect to subject matter: As advertised, this compact volume consists of essays on canonical American authors of the 18th and 19th centuries — a familiar gathering of dead white men. Some (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman) are still household names more than a century later, while others (Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Richard Henry Dana Jr.) have faded into relative obscurity. By the 1950s, when American literature was fully established as a respectable field of academic study, Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and Crèvecoeur’s “Letters From an American Farmer” had become staples of the college and grad school syllabus, which is where I and many others found them in the later decades of the 20th century. Thank goodness Lawrence got there first.

This is not going to be one of those laments about how nobody reads the great old books anymore. Not many people read them when they first appeared, either. My point is that nobody ever read them like Lawrence did — as madly, as wildly or as insightfully.

That’s what I mean about the gap between the book and its title. “Studies in Classic American Literature” is as dull a phrase as any committee of professors could devise. Just try to say those five words without yawning. But look inside and you will be jolted awake.

Lawrence’s deep reading and idiosyncratic learning are abundantly evident — he tosses off snippets of French, German, Italian and Latin, sprinkling his pages with allusions to ancient poetry and modern philosophy — but his tone is the opposite of scholarly. With its one-sentence paragraphs (“Flop goes spiritual love.”), jabbing exclamations (“Freedom!”), semi-rhetorical questions (“But what of Walt Whitman?”) and heavy use of italics and all-caps, the book can read like a scroll of social-media rants. Its manner is neither respectable nor respectful. Lawrence harangues his subjects in the second person (“Nathaniel!”), and subjects them to parodic paraphrase and withering, ad hominem judgment. “I do not like him,” he says of Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin!

The irreverence is refreshing, but these studies are far from frivolous. Lawrence’s bristling, inflamed, impertinent language provides a reminder that criticism is not just the work of the brain, but of the gut and the spleen as well. The intellectual refinement of his argument — fine-grained evaluations of style and form that still startle with their incisiveness; breathtaking conceptual leaps from history to myth and back again — is unthinkable without the churn of instinct and feeling beneath it. This is the work of a writer whose fiction — including his briefly banned masterpiece “The Rainbow” and his long-suppressed “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” — makes much of the conflict between decorum and desire. 

In that respect, the book is the mirror of its subject. Each of the writers under scrutiny, like the culture that spawned them, is a divided soul, pulled between contrary impulses. On one side, there is a moralizing, do-gooding, civilizing imperative, a force that Lawrence variously identifies with idealism, “saviorism” and democracy, none of which he much cares for. Franklin is one avatar of this tendency — “the pattern American, this dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat” — which explains Lawrence’s dislike:

Here am I now in tatters and scratched to ribbons, sitting in the middle of Benjamin’s America looking at the barbed wire, and the fat sheep crawling under the fence to get fat outside, and the watchdogs yelling at the gate lest by chance anyone should get out by the proper exit. Oh America! Oh Benjamin! And I utter a long loud curse against Benjamin and the American corral.

But Franklin is not the only American writer bound by the constraints of careful morality. Even the wildest of Lawrence’s specimens — the feverish Edgar Allan Poe, the restless Melville, the ecstatic Whitman — are corralled by various forms of propriety and high-minded sentiment.

The thorniest part of Lawrence’s argument — the strain in the book that feels scandalous, even dangerous, at present — is that he identifies those sentiments with what many Americans would consider the positive substance of our national identity. His hostility to the idea of democracy and the ideal of equality partly reflects a general philosophical bias. “Damn all ideas and all ideals,” he rails, seeing such abstraction as an impediment to authentic human connection: “If only people would meet in their very selves.” But this idea of authenticity is bound up with a mystical ideology of race, sex, blood and destiny that is apt to trouble 21st-century sensibilities.

Or maybe not. Like some other modernist writers — W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis — Lawrence, who died in 1930, dabbled in a mode of aesthetic anti-liberalism that may be making a comeback. His critique of America, where he had traveled in the early 1920s, living for a time in Taos, N.M., was a broadside against the nation’s progressive traditions. Its writers were both his antagonists and his allies. Or rather, their expressed beliefs were anathema, while their work revealed what to him was a more congenial truth.

“The artist,” he writes in one of the most frequently quoted passages, “usually sets out — or used to — to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”

The tale that classic American literature tells, in the aggregate, is largely one of violence, conflict and cruelty, whether it unfolds on Cooper’s frontier, in Hawthorne’s Salem, in Poe’s fantastical mansions or on Melville’s South Seas. There is a remorseless clarity to Lawrence’s perception of this bloody tapestry, summed up in his description of Cooper’s Natty Bumppo:

But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.

This is a hard formulation to accept, but it is also not an easy one to dismiss. Much as we may wish to deny it, racial violence is a central fact of our history. And as distasteful as it may be to imagine this country defined by Cooper’s “essential American” on one hand and Franklin’s industrious, positive-thinking “pattern American” on the other, the tension between them might be more than just a literary conceit. Without it, American literature might not exist at all.

What Lawrence saw in his eccentric, passionate reading of that literature was division, polarization and contradiction. Not so much among factions, parties, regions or races — ordinary politics doesn’t really enter his field of vision — as within individual hearts and the collective soul. Every American is “a torn divided monster,” he writes at one point.

And elsewhere, a century ago that might as well have been last week: “America has never been easy, and is not easy today.”

via A.O. Scott 

Critic at large for the Book Review. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism."More about A.O. Scott"

HELLO IOWA: Meet the Author: Steve Alten by: Megan Reuther

 

The Meg author Steve Alten recalls ‘killing off’ critic and how he really feels about loyal Megheads

 

The fact that The Meg has spawned a sequel will be no surprise to those long-dedicated fans of the franchise, as the map for sequels has already been set out in the source material; a series of deep-diving adventure novels by Steve Alten, who spoke with Metro.co.uk about the past and future of the franchise on both the screen and page. 

Alten, 63, first kicked off The Meg franchise back in 1997 with the publication of the first novel Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror. From there, began a long road to the big screen that saw the likes of Guillermo del Toro and Eli Roth come and go – but you can’t keep a good shark project down. 

From Jaws to Deep Blue Sea, there’s always been a fascination with those black-eyed fish with a sharp set of teeth, something that began for Alten at a very young age. 

‘When I was younger. I used to love to read, you know, picture books with dinosaurs and marine reptiles, and I know that the marine reptiles were always the ones that were much cooler to me because they had these sharp teeth, and that’s before I even learned about the big shark that came around the Miocene period over 30 million years ago.’  

Similar to most of us with a love of sharks, that fascination only grew with the publication of Peter Benchley’s Jaws novel and Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film adaptation. 

‘I read Jaws when I was 15 and then decided I wanted to read as much as I could about real shark attacks and real great whites. 

There was always a little blurb with a black and white photo of scientists sitting in a big jaw on the Smithsonian and that led me to the Megalodon.’ 

That startling image of a giant set of gnashers may have caught the imagination of the young Alten, leading him to discover more about the Megalodon, but finding there was little else to read at the time, the Meg receded to the depths of his imagination, only to be reawakened some 20 years later. 

After pursuing a career in sports administration and coaching, Alten was struck by a Time Magazine article featuring a deep water creature on the cover, an Anglerfish, with the article going even further into the secret world beneath the depths, and chiefly the Mariana trench.

‘Here was this 1,500-mile long, 40-mile wide, seven-mile deep gorge that was unexplored,’ Alten explains. 

‘And if there were hydrothermal events in it which I was pretty sure there was, it just made sense to me that if you got all this mineralized hot water it’s rising out at the bottom at some point. It’s going to coagulate and form a ceiling of soot above it. Which would seal in the warmth and so that’s what I wrote about,’ – an ideal concept for envisioning a world where long-thought-extinct species could survive.

While a work of fiction Alten makes sure to do his research, and the idea of life forms that deep in the ocean has become less and less of a hypothetical fantasy since his original novel was published back in 1997 – although it’s doubtful a giant prehistoric beast is roaming around down there.

At the time, some critics were quick to point out the seemingly ridiculous notions of life deep in the ocean in Alten’s novels, with Alten saying one LA Times writer in particular ‘ripped it apart, everything from the name Meg to claiming that there were hydrothermal events at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.’

The impressive jaws of the Megladon (Picture: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

‘I didn’t know it was real, but I wrote it as it was, and then it turned out to be true. So I wrote that critic into the sequel novel [The Trench] and had him killed off – anyone that wrote a bad review of The Meg got killed in The Trench,’ he recalled.

via Metro News