Still no message from Vilya, starting to fear the worst now. Even when he was weak, he managed a few lines.
His last post was on 8/16/2021. He must be really to have not posted for this long. If anyone knows his name and location maybe they could find out more info.
“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” delivered the sizzle that struggling movie theaters so desperately needed, debuting to $71.4 million in its inaugural weekend. The Marvel adventure is on pace to rack up a mighty $83.5 million over the four-day Labor Day weekend, trumping expectations that had anticipated a debut of between $45 million to $50 million while also shattering barriers for Asian representation on screen.
The film’s three-day figure is the second best of the pandemic era, falling just behind “Black Widow’s” $80.3 million haul and edging out “F9’s” $70 million bow. It also marks a record for Labor Day openings, which is traditionally a sluggish weekend at the box office, besting the previous high-water mark set by 2007’s “Halloween,” which pulled in $30.6 million more than a decade ago and at a time when catastrophic, global pandemics seemed like the stuff of sci-fi movies.
Unlike “Black Widow,” “Shang-Chi” was showing exclusively in theaters. “Black Widow” opted for a hybrid release and debuted on Disney Plus, where it was available to rent for $30, at the same time it opened in theaters, something that may have caused ticket sales to crater in subsequent weeks of release. The strong reception for “Shang-Chi” could impact the way that Disney rolls out future superhero adventures during COVID-19. The studio has yet to make a decision about whether or not “The Eternals,” its next comic book epic, will have an exclusive theatrical debut. Globally, “Shang-Chi” has pulled in $127.6 million after opening in key markets such as France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, Brazil and Mexico.
“Shang-Chi” centers on a former assassin who must contend with the legacy of his evil father and the crime syndicate he operates. It’s the first Marvel movie to have an Asian superhero as its protagonist. Destin Daniel Cretton (“Just Mercy”) directs a cast that includes Awkwafina, Michelle Yeoh, Tony Leung and Meng’er Zhang. Newcomer Simu Liu, who previously appeared in the Canadian sitcom “Kim’s Convenience,” plays the title role. The audience for “Shang-Chi” was primarily younger men, with males making up 61% of ticket buyers. The highest percentage of ticket buyers were between the ages of 18 to 24 with the second highest block comprised of consumers between 25 to 34.
Last weekend’s champion, Universal’s “Candyman,” pulled in an estimated $10.5 million over the three-day weekend. The horror film is on pace to earn $13.4 million over the four-day holiday. That would bring its total to $41.9 million, an impressive figure given its $25 million budget.
“Free Guy,” the Ryan Reynolds action-adventure from Disney and 20th Century Studios, earned an estimated $8.7 million over the three-days and should bring in $11.2 million over the holiday for a third place finish. It has grossed $91.8 million since opening four weeks ago.
Paramount’s “Paw Patrol” captured fourth place with $4 million over the three-day weekend and should make $5.2 million over the holiday. The family film has grossed $31.5 million. Disney’s “Jungle Cruise” rounded out the top five with $3.9 million over the three-day weekend and $5.2 million over the holiday. It has earned $106.8 million in six weeks of release.
Look for theater owners to seize on “Shang-Chi’s” hefty opening weekend numbers to pressure studios to avoid debuting their films in cinemas at the same time they hit video on-demand. That’s a battle they’d like to win by the time the next spandex-sporting Marvel hero makes their way to the big screen.
Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has been a highly anticipated movie in the MCU. The superhero adventure features the first lead Asian protagonist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and there are many who have been waiting to see just what this new Avenger can do. But the movie has not been without its controversies, and it appears that a new one has reared its head. This latest snafu will pose some serious problems for the movie's box office tally.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will be the first MCU film since the pandemic started to exclusively release in theaters, but when it hits theaters this weekend, there will be one major market that Shang Chi will not be shown in.
Comic Book 101: Shang-Chi in Marvel Comics Explained
Shang-Chi has not been approved for distribution in China, which will cause a major hit to the box office gross. MCU films tend to take ten to twenty percent of their box office from China. Without the Chinese box office money, Shang Chi is almost certainly guaranteed to have a lower box office tally than other comparable MCU films. Since 2012′s The Avengers, China has been the second-highest grossing box office for all Marvel movies, just behind the U.S. and Canada.
The underlying controversy seems to stem from the film's casting and the perception of the comic book series that Shang Chi is based on. The comic books on which the film is based have been considered racist and filled with reductive stereotypes. Marvel Studios' head Kevin Feige has assured the public that the subject matter will be handled with racial sensitivity, but that does not seem to be enough to save the movie from being banned in China.
Marvel's Eternals may also face issues in China, but for different reasons. Director Chloe Zhao has become persona-non-grata in China after certain comments she has said about the country made their way online. Her achievements have been stricken from the Chinese web, and it is reasonable to assume that movies she directs in the future will face bans in China.
Just a FYI
“Shang-Chi” has been bombarded with nationalist complaints for months now because of the character Fu Manchu, who is Shang-Chi’s father and primary nemesis in the comic books. Fu Manchu has been widely seen through the years as being racist and an embodiment of the Yellow Peril stereotype. Feige stressed that Fu Manchu is not involved in the film in any capacity. While Shang-Chi’s father is a major role in the movie played by Tony Leung, the character is not Fu Manchu.
Carnage will be unleashed a little early next month. Sony has moved up Venom: Let There Be Carnage two weeks to Oct. 1, from its previous date of Oct. 15.
The move comes on the heels of the strong performance of fellow comic book film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, from Disney and Marvel Studios. That title, released exclusively in theaters this weekend, broke Labor Day records with $90 million in a win for the domestic box office still roiled by the delta variant and competition from studios sending titles day-and-date to streaming services.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage stars Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock, a journalist who has an alien symbiote living within him. Together, they are Venom. Woody Harrelson stars as killer Cletus Kasady, whom he played in the post-credits scene for the first Venom (2018). This time around, Harrelson’s Kasady transforms into Carnage, a villain known as Venom’s chief antagonist in the comics. The first Venom earned $850 million globally.
Andy Serkis directs Venom: Let There Be Carnage. The Columbia Pictures film (in association with Marvel and Tencent Pictures) also stars Michelle Williams, Reid Scott and Naomie Harris as the comic book villain Shriek. The film is produced by Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, Amy Pascal and Hutch Parker.
Tickets for the new film will go on sale Wednesday, and it will be available in 3D, Imax and premium large format screens. In August, Sony pushed back the film from Sept. 24 to Oct. 15 amid uncertainty over theater going and the delta variant.
China will be the only major theatrical market for Chris Pratt's 'The Tomorrow War,' since the film was acquired by Amazon Prime Video for most of the rest of the world.
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20th Century and Disney’s Ryan Reynolds hit Free Guy cruised to an easy second-weekend win at China’s box office, earning $18.3 million for a 10-day total of $56.6 million.
The performance makes Free Guy already the third biggest new Hollywood release in China this year, behind Universal’s F9: The Fast Saga ($203.8 million) and Legendary/Warner Bros.’ Godzilla vs. Kong ($188.7 million).
Skydance Media’s The Tomorrow War, starring Chris Pratt, also received a rare theatrical release in China over the weekend after being acquired by Amazon Prime Video for most of the rest of the world early in the summer. The sci-fi action film opened to $8 million and received a good-to-middling set of social scores, ranking 8.6/10 on ticketing service Maoyan and 6/10 on movie buff site Douban. Thanks to Amazon’s streaming release, the film has been widely available on Chinese piracy networks for weeks.
Local Chinese blockbuster Raging Fire slipped to third place, adding $6.2 million for a total of $175.5 million after six weekends. Disney/Pixar’s Luca landed in fourth with $1.3 million for a $12.8 million haul.
China has relaxed its summer blackout on imported Hollywood releases, but several major U.S. studio titles, such as Disney/Marvel’s Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, remain undated.
Yes a reminder that when a subscription service streams mainstream movies they are within a day pirated to multiple sites. This article shows how bad it is.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings — the new Marvel movie out now in cinemas — has leaked onto torrent sites and other networks that enable piracy, in differing versions of quality and file size (from 847MB to 2.2GB). While most copies are arguably genuine, given the attached screenshots and user comments attesting to their legitimacy, some are fraudulent and merely exist as a trap to load viruses, malware, and whatnot onto the computers of unsuspecting individuals. But even with those genuine cases, the illegal Shang-Chi copies are of remarkably poor quality, feature hard-coded subtitles, and/ or are filled with advertisements. Gadgets 360 does not condone illegal file-sharing. It is against the law and filmmakers deserve to be paid for the content they create.
The first legitimate leaked version of Shang-Chi showed up on torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and Zooqle on Thursday, September 2, with the label “CAM” suggesting it was filmed with a video camera in cinemas. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings released this week in theatres worldwide, including India, the US, and the UK. According to publicly-available comments and screenshots, the illegal Shang-Chi rip features hardcoded French subtitles, and is filled with ads — in English, Hindi, and Spanish — for an online gambling and betting website. The former are present on the film itself, while the latter have been inserted digitally.
Thankfully for Disney, Marvel Studios, and the Shang-Chi cast and crew, the quality of the cam-recorded illegal Shang-Chi rips is downright terrible. Per publicly available screenshots, Gadgets 360 can tell that they exhibit severe issues with sharpness, detail, contrast, cropping, and/ or colour. We won't be posting any screenshots out of not wanting to spoil any part of the film. Gadgets 360 has not been able to verify audio quality, though user comments suggest that it's echo-y, muffled, and hard to hear. The Shang-Chi full movie leaks only reinforce the fact that you should check out the movie when it's officially available in theatres where you live.
Periodically China does arrest and shut down torrent sites that you see in the news, so a lot of former sites have abandoned this practice and turned legit and supports its booming online video market in China.
A federal judge is persuaded that the streamers aren't "video service providers" under a franchise fee law.
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Netflix and Hulu have convinced a federal judge that they are more than mere video service providers. That’s important because a ruling on Friday will allow Netflix and Hulu to dodge a lawsuit demanding the streamers pay the type of fees imposed on cable operators.
The suit came from the city of Reno, Nevada, and is one of about two dozen lawsuits around the country on the subject of franchise fees. Towns and cities once collected a portion of revenue from cable companies needing to dig up the ground and lay their lines. In the era of cord-cutting, though, the question arises whether local municipalities may impose fees on services that are now feeding movies and TV shows to the citizenry. That entails complicated analysis on everything from the First Amendment to the Internet Tax Freedom Act, a federal statute designed to prevent local taxes on electronic commerce. Until now, Netflix and Hulu have been suffering a losing streak in court although no definitive defeat.
With that context comes a new decision from a Nevada federal court who has decided to dismiss the putative class action filed by Reno.
U.S. District Court Judge Miranda Du looks at how in 2007, Nevada’s state legislature amended the regulatory structure for video service providers. The goal was some conformity on franchise fees in the state. Under the revised statute, local governments were allowed to require video service providers to pay fees, but there was an exception for "any video content provided solely as part of, and through, a service which enables users to access content, information, electronic mail or other services that are offered via the public Internet.”
The city of Reno argued that Netflix and Hulu weren’t offering video service “as part of” a larger service. (Netflix doesn’t offer an email service, for example.) Moreover, the city argued that since these were paid services, the vice content didn’t come “via the public Internet.”
Judge Du rejects this reading of the law.
“The individual films and individual television programs Defendants provide are each a piece of their video content library and thus a ‘part of’ a service, and not the ‘entire’ service,” she writes. “Plaintiff’s argument suggests the Court read ‘any’ as ‘all’ video content, but that simply is not the statutory language, and the Court declines to read it as so. As such, Plaintiff’s argument that Defendants’ video content is the ‘entire’ and not ‘part of’ the services provided, and therefore not excluded, does not persuade the Court to agree that Defendants are video service providers.”
As if the cities weren't crooked enough, that they try to apply franchise fee laws to streaming sources on the open internet.
AT&T's plan to shutter its 3G network early next year would create "a significant public safety risk" and put "an extraordinary strain on the resources of law enforcement," claims a company that makes electronic monitoring devices.
That's because law enforcement agencies around the country use monitoring devices to keep track of offenders who aren't in jail, and some of those devices still connect to 3G networks operated by AT&T and Verizon. Verizon plans to shutter its 3G network at the end of 2022 (a date it settled on after several delays), but AT&T wants to do so on February 22, 2022.
"The February 2022 3G network shutdown date announced by AT&T is a more pressing concern for the EM [electronic monitoring] industry because the manufacture, testing and swap out of 4G modules and devices has had to be largely suspended over the past 18 months due to COVID-19 shutdowns," Alcohol Monitoring Systems Inc. (AMS) argued in a filing to the FCC. The company makes electronic monitoring equipment for the criminal justice system, and it warned that an unspecified number of the 250,000 offenders using such gadgets would be affected by AT&T's shutdown plans.
Continued AMS: "In recent weeks and months, the industry's redoubled efforts to make up for lost time continue to be thwarted by diminished inventories and the slow restart of global supply chains. These forces are much too great for any one company, let alone an entire industry, to counteract."
The company urged the FCC to require AT&T to delay its 3G shutdown.
AMS joins the Alarm Industry Communications Committee, which argued earlier this year that millions of alarms installed in homes and businesses around the US would be affected by AT&T's 3G network shutdown plans.
AT&T fights back
AT&T this week responded to the alarm industry's concerns. As noted by FierceWireless, the company said it cannot delay its 3G network shutdown because doing so would affect its efforts to improve its 5G network.
"AT&T is working around the clock to bring the full promise of 5G to its customers nationwide," AT&T told the FCC. "To succeed, AT&T will need to make optimally efficient use of its finite spectrum assets. It must promptly repurpose from 3G to 5G all of its 850MHz spectrum with its long-range propagation and penetration characteristics to boost network performance and prevent service outages across America. And it must therefore sunset its 850MHz-based 3G network in February 2022."
AT&T explained that, due to the specifications around the UMTS standard it uses for 3G, it currently must allocate fully 10MHz of its lowband 850MHz holdings to its 3G network, despite the fact that its 3G customers use just 4% of that resulting network capacity. The company said it needs to reallocate that 10MHz of lowband spectrum to the midband 5G network it's building with the C-band spectrum licenses it purchased earlier this year. Specifically, AT&T said it needs to add its lowband 850MHz spectrum which covers wide geographic areas to the uplink portion of its midband 5G network in order to prevent dropped calls and other problems on the edges of its C-band coverage areas.
"In short, AT&T cannot repurpose that critical 850MHz spectrum for 5G until after it shuts down the 3G network," AT&T told the FCC.
It's unclear how the FCC might address the topic. However, AT&T isn't the only company facing heat over its 3G network-shutdown efforts. The California Public Utilities Commission recently warned T-Mobile it would investigate the company's plans to shut down its own 3G CDMA network early next year.
Pretty funny, the cell telecoms been buying up the spectrum, and wanted to cannibalize its 3G spectrum for the sake of mid band 5G but forgot about all the Alarm industry that uses it for monitoring millions of alarm systems including criminal justice system.
The Matrix Resurrections dropped its first trailer Thursday morning, and the tease was eye-popping with astonishing visuals that fans have come to expect from the beloved sci-fi franchise.
The Matrix Resurrections dropped its first trailer Thursday morning, and the tease was eye-popping with astonishing visuals that fans have come to expect from the beloved sci-fi franchise.
I thought Dune would be the only flick also debuting on HBO MAX that I would see in theaters, but this will definitely look and sound great at my local Dolby Cinema theater.
Halloween Kills Is Making Like Michael Myers and Coming Home
The horror sequel starring Jamie Lee Curtis will debut on Peacock the same day it hits theaters next month.
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In the Halloween franchise, the night “he” came home is usually October 31. This year though, it’s October 15. Universal, Blumhouse, and Miramax just announced that the highly anticipated horror sequel Halloween Kills will debut in your home, if you have the streaming service Peacock, on the same day the film hits theaters.
Way back when the Halloween sequel trilogy—co-written and directed by David Gordon Green, and starring series veteran Jamie Lee Curtis—was announced, this second film was supposed to debut in October 2020. Then, of course, the covid-19 pandemic happened, and to keep the film’s holiday tie-in, Universal bumped both the second and third movies a full year: 2021 for Halloween Kills, 2022 for Halloween Ends. Since then, things had been cruising along toward a full on theatrical release, just like other major Universal Pictures releases Candyman, F9, and Old had in the previous months. So this is quite the sudden shift.
Ultimately, though, it’s a good thing because anyone who wants to watch it will be able to. Plus, there are a ton of other elements to factor in. Fear and caution surrounding the delta variant, for one. A lack of buzz (and an initially “Rotten” Rotten Tomatoes score) coming off its debut at the Venice Film Festival last week. Plus, this is part two of a trilogy. Halloween Ends, the final piece of the puzzle, will be out October 2022. For that film to be a success, this one has to get eyeballs on it, and putting the film on streaming day and date with theaters will certainly do that.
And while most recent Universal titles have been theatrical only, Universal was also the first studio to skip theaters for a major release with Trolls World Tour last year, and moved another big animated sequel, The Boss Baby: Family Business, to a simultaneous theaterical and Peacock debut earlier this year. So the company has all kinds of data on how these kinds of releases work, and it seems for Halloween Kills this is the right move.
Halloween Kills picks up immediately following the events of the 2018 reboot/sequel Halloween. Laurie Strode (Curtis), her daughter (Judy Greer) and granddaughter (Andi Matichak) left Michael Myers to die in Laurie’s burning house. This film sees Michael getting out and continuing to kill, so the Strode women bring together the whole town to finally take him down. Which... they won’t. Because there’s a part three next year. But, if you’re interested in seeing what happens, now you can stay inside the house. The opposite of what Michael did.
Halloween Kills arrives in theaters and on Peacock October 15.
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to have not posted for this long. If anyone knows his name and location maybe they could find out more info.
You know Im joking, delighted to hear from you. Wish you all the best!
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