{"id":28934,"date":"2016-04-26T22:50:56","date_gmt":"2016-04-26T22:50:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/?page_id=28934"},"modified":"2016-04-26T22:50:56","modified_gmt":"2016-04-26T22:50:56","slug":"the-pop-of-king-my-summer-hitlist","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/king-family\/columns-king-uit-entertainment-weekly\/the-pop-of-king-my-summer-hitlist\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pop of King: My Summer hitlist"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\"kingcolumn\"<\/a>My crystal ball has been partly cloudy this year. While I did pick the 50-1 Kentucky Derby winner (you\u2019ll just have to take my word on that), I didn\u2019t have any money on the damn thing, and when it comes to how I did in EW\u2019s in-house Oscar pool… don\u2019t ask. Let\u2019s just say I was right about the Best Picture and leave it at that.
\nSo when I rashly promised to pick the big box office winners and losers of the 2005 summer season, I knew I needed help, but not from any of the traditional box office prognosticators; they\u2019re the ones who dropped the ball on Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Napoleon Dynamite, and The Passion of the Christ (ow, that must have hurt).<\/p>\n

Nope, on May 16 of this year\u2014three days before the official wide release of Star Wars III kicks off the summer movie season\u2014I went to the man I trust the most when it comes to predicting cinematic success and failure, the guy who\u2019s almost never wrong.
\nShane Leonard grew up going to the movies with my kids and still never misses a major release or a minor chopsocky flick. In the old days he was known in the neighborhood as The Longhair. Well, you know how that usually turns out\u2014he finally had to visit one of the local head-choppers in order to get a damn job\u2014but to me Shane will always be The Longhair, Peerless Guru of Movie Success, and I went to him like Luke Skywalker goes to Yoda. \u201cLonghair,\u201d I said. \u201cMake me an EW hero. Pick the summer\u2019s winners.\u201d And he did. It took him, I\u2019m gonna say, five minutes. I concur with most of his choices, although I had some quibbles.<\/p>\n

And so, without further ado: The Longhair (with some help from Steve) picks the summer\u2019s box office winners:
\n1. Star Wars III It\u2019s a no-brainer, dude, even though I am writing this before the debut… but watch grosses drop like a crippled TIE fighter after the second weekend.
\n2. War of the Worlds This remake is going to rock the house… and the cash registers. The world has been waiting for Spielberg to do bad aliens, and Spielberg is going to give the people what they want. Having Tom Cruise on board won\u2019t hurt.
\n3. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory The Longhair says Johnny Depp will appeal to both the kids and the mommies. I agree.
\n4. Batman Begins Like most early-thirtysomethings, The Longhair thought the last couple of Batman movies blew (and Catwoman\u2014let\u2019s not even go there), but he\u2019s psyched for this one, and be-lieves younger moviegoers will turn out in droves. I agree. A brilliant trailer hasn\u2019t hurt. Igor says, \u201cMaster, the Batman franchise is alive!\u201d
\n5. Fantastic Four The Longhair says it\u2019ll fly, especially with sweet positioning post-Star Wars and about 10 days after War of the Worlds. I\u2019m not so sure, but The Longhair seems positive. And with Michael Chiklis as the Thing, I\u2019m certainly pulling for it.
\n6. The Longest Yard The prisoners play the guards; Adam Sandler leads the charge. This looks like a winner, and for Sandler\u2019s sake, it better be. When funny guys cool off, it happens scary-fast. Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Dan Aykroyd, case closed. The Longhair says no sweat this time, Adam.
\n7. Must Love Dogs This is my pick for the summer\u2019s dark-horse surprise. The Longhair is doubt-ful, but I think John Cusack is poised to become the American Hugh Jackman… only funnier and sexier, because us Yanks still do everything more -er.
\n8. Land of the Dead The final film in George A. Romero\u2019s Dead Quartet (not to be confused with Paul Scott\u2019s Raj Quartet). Good or bad, it should succeed splendidly, because\u2014let\u2019s face it\u2014summer wouldn\u2019t be summer without flesh-eating zombies.
\nOther projected winners: Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (\u201cSame ho, new lo\u201d) and Dark Water (more Ring-style PG-13 horror for the junior-high\/Harry Potterset).<\/p>\n

When it comes to predicting hits, my friend\u2019s success rate is high. When it comes to predicting misses, however, The Longhair is awesome. I was surprised by some of his picks for summer losers, but when you think about it (a thing movie people don\u2019t do a lot of, possibly feeling it encourages hair loss), most make a fair amount of sense.
\nMadagascar is a word nobody can spell, about a place nobody\u2019s been, featuring more funny cartoon animals nobody\u2019s going to want to see\u2014clank! The Island looks like warmed-over Survivor, and Stealth looks like reheated Top Gun with a malevolent HAL 9000 computer thrown in for good meas-ure\u2014clunk! Bewitched has that horrible pawed-over squad-of-writers feel to it; if this year\u2019s going to have a Stepford Wives, this is it. The Pink Panther doesn\u2019t look like the real deal; neither does Herbie: Fully Loaded. And, according to The Longhair, the summer\u2019s worst idea: adapting The Dukes of Haz-zard for the big screen.
\nThose are our picks; write \u2018em down. If we hit it out of the park, someone owes us a chicken dinner. Of course, it\u2019s faintly possible that we might screw up. In that case, we\u2019ll be eating the bird associated with Thanksgiving. Side by side with summer\u2019s big-budget failures.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My crystal ball has been partly cloudy this year. While I did pick the 50-1 Kentucky Derby winner (you\u2019ll just have to take my word on that), I didn\u2019t have any money on the damn thing, and when it comes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":4585,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-28934","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28934"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28939,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28934\/revisions\/28939"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}