New 'Thor' Clip, Plus Details on Film's 'Avengers' Cameo

With the release of Marvel's Thor a little over a month away, marketing for the next piece of the Marvel pie has kicked into high gear.  The film had a presentation at this week's CinemaCon in Vegas and coming off of that, Marvel/Paramount have released a first look clip.  It's about a minute long scene taking place almost immediately after Thor's (Chris Hemsworth) banishment to Earth where Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), Darcy (Kat Dennings) and their professor (Stellan Skarsgard) find the fallen god. We've seen some of this footage already in the trailers, but the full scene gives a better feel for what to expect tonally out of the film.

In addition to the clip, CinemaCon has also provided us with confirmation and details on The Avengers tie-in cameo within Thor.  Check out both (or just the clip if you're trying to avoid spoilers) after the break.

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Harry and Voldemort Face Off in New 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2' Poster

It's almost April, so you know what that means?  Well besides baseball's Opening Day and April showers and all that crap.  The final advertising push for the summer movie season is underway.  We've already gotten a handful of new trailers and posters for this summer's studio tentpoles and now Harry Potter has come out to play.  Last week, on ABC Family, Warner Bros. showed off some behind the scenes footage for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, and now today we've got a pretty intense new poster.

Hit the jump to check out Harry and Voldey in a stare down of epic proportions.

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Happy 35th Anniversary to 'Jaws'

Yesterday marked the 35th anniversary of the release of Jaws, and by extension, the 35th anniversary of the summer movie season. Jaws was not just the first summer blockbuster, but also the first film to be released nationwide at the same time. Prior to that, movies would slowly roll out from big cities to small towns, similar to the way indie films are released these days. So, the fact that it made so much money back in the 1970s is at least partially attributable to the fact that more people could see it, making it a national phenomenon, which would in turn spur more people to see it.

Lost in all the talk about this being the first summer blockbuster, particularly in board rooms throughout the greater Los Angeles area, is how good this movie truly is. Jaws is an undeniable classic, and outside of one Pixar movie so far, summer 2010 has no classics, or anything close. Keep your fingers crossed for Inception, I guess. Far from being just a summer entertainment, Jaws was nominated for four Oscars, winning in the sound, editing, and musical score categories, losing only Best Picture to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I always thought Robert Shaw received a nomination for his work as Quint, but that's not true. I think you can argue he should have been, and this classic speech, co-written by Shaw, is a good reason why.

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Poll: What Will Be The Biggest Summer Movie?

In less than a week, the summer box office season will kick off with Iron Man 2. It has a legitimate shot of being the year's biggest movie, in spite of the fact that it has more competition behind it than any other movie this year. So can it top Transformers from last summer? It'd need $400 million to do it.

However, one point in favor of Iron Man is that once May concludes, there are really only a handful of movies that have blockbuster potential, meaning that if the sequel's great it can make more money in June than it would in a much bigger summer. But if Iron Man stumbles, it also wouldn't be the first time a summer franchise dropped the ball in May. In fact, in the past two years, the X-Men and Narnia properties both got smacked around a bit. So will Iron Man win the summer season, will the family friendly Shrek or Toy Story films take the top spot, or will Christopher Nolan's Inception or the new Twilight movie grab the most money? We'll keep this just to US box office because it's the most level playing field. And we'll limit the choices to the most likely movies to make at least $200 million. Also, if you want to make predictions about what movie will make how much money, or if you've got a suggestion not on the list, put it in the comments section below.

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Summer 2009: The Opening Weekend is Overrated

We reported last week that this was a record summer for Hollywood, edging out 2008 by about $10 million. And it was an interesting mix of success stories and failures. As expected, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was the top choice for moviegoers...except you could argue that it really wasn't. Because if this summer proved anything, it's that the open weekend is overrated.

True, Transformers earned the most money, even though critics hated it. That brought the old argument back that people don't listen to reviewers and that they simply don't matter anymore, a sentiment echoed by G.I. Joe director Stephen Sommers in early August, when he did a victory lap over the film's number one opening. Both films are from Paramount, both films had big opening weekends, but neither film continued to perform to that level once the marketing died down. That's why the real winners from this summer are those films that continued to attract audiences well after the first three days and the millions of dollars spent on advertising. In my mind, there are five enormous hits that all played by these rules and really only two that survived by the opening weekend model, Transformers and Harry Potter. And it's great if you're on one of those teams, but most of the money this summer came from films that kept finding audiences weeks after the fact and were designed to do just that. Most movies that relied on opening weekends didn't meet the challenge: Wolverine, Terminator, G.I. Joe, Land of the Lost, and The Taking of Pelham 123 were all disappointments. In order, those five movies that capitalized on word-of-mouth all summer long are The Hangover, Up, Star Trek, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, and The Proposal. From where I sit, The Hangover was hands down the movie of the summer. It wasn't even supposed to win its opening weekend, but even though it surprised with $44 million in that frame, nobody, anywhere, thought it would make $200 million, much less $270 million to become the number two comedy and the number three R-rated movie ever released.

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