This graph shows Issa Rae’s score on our annual analysis of leading stars at the box office. The Star Score represents points assigned to each of the leading stars of the top 100 movies (based on box office) in the current year and two preceding years. For appearing in the number one movie in a year a star gets 100 points, the number two movie 99 points and so on..
Latest Ranking on Selected Box Office Record Lists
Some major movies hit streaming services this week, with Fantastic Mr. Fox debuting on Disney+, and Rocketman coming out on multiple services. I highly recommend both. There is also some original fair and some smaller releases that likely slipped beneath most people’s radar. Of these, The Lovebirds is the film I’m looking forward to the most. It was supposed to be a wide release in April, but it was one of the films affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, and was picked up by Netflix.
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We had a great start to the year, sort of. Most films that opened / expanded wide in January are going to miss expectations; however, Bad Boys for Life and 1917 are so much stronger than anticipated that they alone will more than make up the difference. Looking forward, Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) is almost guaranteed to be the biggest hit of the month. There are two questions. Firstly, is it going to top Bad Boys for Life and become the biggest hit of the year so far? Secondly, is it going to be the only $100 million hit of month? Hopefully the answers to those questions are yes and no respectively, but no to both is would still be good news overall. Sonic the Hedgehog is looking better than before and frankly Paramount needs a hit after a very troubling 2019. Meanwhile, there are several midlevel hits that could help the overall box office. Last February was a mixed month with some hits, like How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, but some disappointing results as well, like from The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part. I think it will be a close race in the year-over-year competition with 2020 winning some weeks and losing others.
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The first installment of our Holiday Gift Guide dealt with first run wide releases and one franchise box set. It wasn’t a particularly good year for high quality monster hits. Sadly, TV on DVD releases look even worse. That’s not to say there were no good TV shows that debuted last year; however, there haven’t been many TV shows that made their DVD / Blu-ray debuts recently. My favorite “new” TV show of the year was MST3K (Netflix says it’s a new show, but the creators say it is season 11 of the original MST3K, so I don’t know if I should really call it a new show), but there’s no DVD / Blu-ray release, at least not for people who didn’t back the Kickstarter. My favorite truly new show was GLOW, but again, there’s no DVD / Blu-ray release yet. Likewise, Stranger Things has no regular Blu-ray release. You know what, just assume anything from Netflix isn’t on this list, because there’s no DVD / Blu-ray, or the release is nearly featureless (as is the case with Jessica Jones). On a side note, my favorite new non-screening show was Speechless, which again has no DVD / Blu-ray release, so it’s not just Netflix that’s ignoring physical media. There are also not a lot of megasets to compensate, meaning this list might be a bit short compared to most years. I’ve even had to break my usual rule when it comes to megasets.
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