The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced the 15 films that have been selected for consideration for Achievement in Visual Effects for the 84th Academy Awards.

In early January members of the Academy’s Visual Effects Branch Executive Committee will narrow the list down to 10, and then on January 19th the 5 official nominations will be selected after members view 10-minute excerpts from each film.

Here’s the list of films in alphabetical order:

“Captain America: The First Avenger”
“Cowboys & Aliens”
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2″
“Hugo”
“Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol”
“Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides”
“Real Steel”
“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”
“Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows”
“Sucker Punch”
“Super 8″
“Thor”
“Transformers: Dark of the Moon”
“The Tree of Life”
“X-Men: First Class”

The 84th Academy Awards nominations will be announced live on Tuesday, January 24, 2012. Billy Crystal will host the actual ceremony on Sunday, February 26, 2012.

Which movies do you think should get a VFX nod?

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Warner Bros. has announced a June 28th release date for Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch on DVD and Blu-ray, which will contain an additional 18 minutes of unseen footage.

Sucker Punch got a good kicking from crtics (only 22% on Rotten Tomatoes) when it was released in March, and in the end it made just under $90 million at the worldwide box office, which Warner Bros. were no doubt disappointed with considering it cost them around $82 million to make it.

Here are the Blu-ray features which have been revealed so far:

Theatrical PG-13 Cut (110 minutes)
Extended Cut with 18 Additional Power-Packed Minutes
Maximum Movie Mode: Immersive Movie Exploration Hosted by Director Zack Snyder featuring Picture-In-Picture, Director Walk-Ons and Much More!
Animated Shorts: Sucker Punch Prequel Stories

No word on what the DVD will contain, but it is likely to be limited as studios continue on their quest to persuade people to buy Blu-ray instead.

Set in the 1950s, Sucker Punch follows Babydoll (Emily Browning) who is confined to a mental institution by her stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days. While there, she imagines an alternative reality to hide her from the pain, and in that world, she begins planning her escape, needing to steal five objects to help get her out before she is deflowered by a vile man. The film also stars Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Carla Gugino, Jena Malone, Jamie Chung and Jon Hamm.

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Battle: Los Angeles remained number one after a photo finish with Rango, a movie that passed a certain mark last weekend worldwide. On the other end Sucker Punch was abysmal even compared to its North American performance, more of this and others after the break.

Battle: Los Angeles scored $16.3 million compared to the $16.2 million that Rango had. Worldwide Battle now stands at $153.4 million on a $70 million budget while Rango passed the $200 million mark worldwide thanks to a new international total of $95.2 million. Unfortunately Rango cost about twice as much as Battle: Los Angeles so it still has a bit more to gross before it can be called a financial success.

Just Go With It found its way to 3rd place thanks to the $9 million it made last weekend, $62.6 million internationally and with the $100.5 million it has made so far in North America, this stinker has now grossed $163.2 million worldwide on an $80 million budget. On what the hell did they spend $80 million?

Gnomeo and Juliet was 4th with $8.2 million for $70.2 million and a worldwide total of $166.3 million. Depending on how much this cost (my gut says no more then $60 million, Wiki says $10 million but I don’t buy that) we might not be to far from Gnomeo and Juliet 2.

Limitless is slowly gaining ground, $6.6 million for $14.3 million in just 13 markets and a worldwide total (that will at least double in a month or so) of $58.1 million, all on a $27 million budget.

Sucker Punch, oh Sucker Punch, you were supposed to be this big blockbuster and instead you turned into a big disappointment. In 23 markets (including Spain, Italy, Mexico and Brazil) Sucker Punch only made $6.5 million and now it is looking at a worst case scenario final performance of $90 million worldwide while the best case scenario is $150 million and only if the movie makes a killing in the strong Asian markets (China, South Korea and Japan). Considering the $82 million budget, Sucker Punch won’t make Warner Bros money in its box office run, sorry Zack.

In 7th place The King’s Speech seems to still be going with $6 million and a mind blowing $373.4 million worldwide gross. This is a historical drama people, an R rated historical drama, $15 million budget, no flashy visuals, no 3D, yet it now stands as the 14th highest grossing movie of 2010 and will probably finish 13th above Tron Legacy.

In 8th place The Adjustment Bureau is strong with $5.5 million for $39.6 million and $95.2 million worldwide, $50 million budget on this one, looking good.

The Rite was surprisingly 9th $4.1 million while Red Riding Hood was 10th with a tiny bit less then that. Finally Yogi Bear somehow managed to pass the $200 million mark worldwide so probably based on how well DVD and Blue-Ray sales are, they might be looking at the prospect of a sequel, oh boy.

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Like many have been reporting for a while now, Sucker Punch got sucker punched by Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, the sequel to the breakout hit Diary of a Wimpy Kid, released just 1 year ago. So what exactly happened to Sucker Punch and how does Wimpy 2 compare to the first Wimpy, after the break.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules made $23.7 million, so a bit more then the $22.1 million that the original Diary of a Wimpy Kid grossed back in the middle of March in 2010. First one cost only $15 million so having made a total of $75.7 million worldwide, it was a given that a sequel would follow (not to mention it is based on a long running series of children books). With Rodrick Rules they upped the budget to $21 million so obviously expectations are now higher. Based on this opening weekend it is safe to say that Diary of a Wimpy Kid 3 will follow next year.

Sucker Punch, the movie that was supposed to blow us away, got blown away. This is the third strike for director Zack Snyder after Watchmen and Legend of the Guardians, so if Superman doesn’t do well then he is not going to find anymore support from Warner for his other future projects. Now don’t get me wrong, the movie ain’t half bad, it has some good ideas but Zack should seriously consider hiring a writer next time, he is a great visual director but as a screenwriter, he is not that good. Sucker Punch only made $19 million last weekend, Zack Snyder’s worst live-action opening yet (Legend of the Guardians, an animated flick, opened to $16.1 million 6 months ago). Thankfully Sucker Punch didn’t cost that much, “only” about $82 million, so worst case scenario, it won’t lose to much money (no more then $40 million, of the production budget that is). From this point on don’t expect Sucker Punch performing better then say Kick-Ass last year, so around $50 million in North America in total (Kick-Ass opened to $19.8 and finished with $48 million).

In 3rd place we have a surprising Limitless dropping only 20.4% to $15 million for a new total of $42.3 million in 11 days. With The Hangover Part 2 coming later this year, 2011 is going to be a good year for Bradley Copper.

The Lincoln Lawyer had an even better hold, down only 18.6% to $10.7 million and $29.6 million in 11 days. Not bad for the ever shirtless Matthew McConaughey.

My personal favorite among this movies, Rango, was 5th with $9.7 million and a total of $107 million after 25 days.

In other news, Adam Sandler comedy Just Go With It passed the $100 million mark in North America becoming his 12th movie to do that. Also if it wasn’t for Funny People 2 years ago, this would be his 5th consecutive movie to reach that milestone.

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After spending his career creating film adaptations of other people’s content, Zack Snyder (along with co-writer Steve Shibuya) delves into writing for the first time with Sucker Punch. Snyder’s trademark visuals are on full display, but anyone expecting this movie to be anything more than visual gratification will surely be disappointed. This movie is like a Cadbury cream egg that’s been pricked with a needle and slowly drained of the nougat inside: we’re upset all the substance is gone, but at least the chocolate shell is still tasty. On the most basic level, the film succeeds at being an entertaining piece of pop art that has some of the most ridiculous visuals ever committed to celluloid. What other movie has fire-breathing dragons, zeppelins, giant samurai with Gatling guns, robots, and machine gun-toting reanimated zombie Nazis?

Is Sucker Punch a good movie? Absolutely not. The script is riddled with as many cliches as there are spent bullet casings, with laughably bad dialogue and stilted performances throughout. Snyder reaches for epic ideas of survival and sacrifice, but because the film is so outrageous, it’s hard to take him seriously; it’s tough transitioning from a 10 minute slow motion action sequence to pretending to care about the death of a character in whom we’ve never truly been invested.

But was Snyder trying to make a “good movie” in the widely accepted sense of the phrase? I’m not sure, but I’m leaning towards “no” on that one, too. Sucker Punch is one of the best examples of a film playing to its demographic that I can think of; the intended audience – teenage guys – will go nuts for this thing. Come for the guns and dragons, stay for the over-sexualized fetishization of its female actors.

More on that later. First, let’s go over the plot. This should take about forty seconds, considering there really isn’t much of one. Baby Doll is institutionalized in the first five minutes of the film for an accidental crime, and in order to cope with her upcoming lobotomy (organized by her skeezy step-father and set to be performed by Jon Hamm, who is hideously underused in about three total minutes of screen time), she creates an alternate reality. The first layer replaces the asylum with an old-timey theater, in which the inmate girls are no longer prisoners to be gawked and violated by corrupt guards and cooks, but now dancers and prostitutes for high rollers and greasy politicians. When it’s Baby Doll’s turn to dance, she goes into a trance and imagines herself in another layer altogether: different each time, but with her and her fellow inmates as warriors battling robot ninjas and the like. Her mission: gain the items necessary for escape.

The entire movie uses its barely-there story as a stepping stone to jump from one action scene to the next, feeling more like an annoying interruption to a two-hour music video than a vital part of the film. Sucker Punch is half music video, half video game, complete with levels, items, and team search-and-destroy missions. But where Scott Pilgrim vs. The World used a bright color palette and the retro games of our childhoods to create a loving homage to video game culture, this movie is influenced more by the gritty dirt-stained look of more modern games like Call of Duty. Snyder eschews the typical three act structure for a level-based narrative, in which each action sequence (five in total) provides the distraction necessary for the girls to acquire a specific item in the theater layer of reality.

If you’re like me, all this talk of layers and levels may remind of you of Chris Nolan’s Inception. Warner Bros. has two of the biggest filmmakers on the planet in Snyder and Nolan, and though their styles are completely different, they’re currently working together to bring Superman back to the big screen (Snyder’s directing, Nolan’s producing). Sucker Punch is kind of like Snyder’s Inception, an original idea developed by the filmmaker after making serious bank for the studio working from other people’s concepts. And though this movie is nowhere near as effective as Nolan’s, I respect Snyder for stepping out from the shadow of other properties and trying to make it on his own. I also don’t want to imply that even the levels of reality in Sucker Punch are as well executed as Inception; instead, I bring this up to say that I had such low expectations for Sucker Punch I was pleasantly surprised when they put a bit of thought into the film’s structure instead of simply bookending it with the asylum sequences and calling it a day.

One of the biggest problems I had with the film comes in its depiction of its female characters. Listen, I love hot women as much as the next guy, but when infantilizing and fetishizing these girls reaches the point where they’re one curl away from Natalie Portman during that scene in V For Vendetta, you should probably take a step back and think about what you’re doing as a filmmaker. That’s especially true if the themes of your movie are supposed to be about empowerment. If most of this movie takes place in Baby Doll’s head, why are the characters dressed this way? To quote Morpheus, is that her “mental projection of her digital self”? (I guess technically it’s not a “digital” self here, but you get the idea.) Snyder’s trying to tell me that Baby Doll sees herself in a slutty schoolgirl outfit in her own mind’s eye, complete with charms attached to the end of her handgun? I find it a little hard to believe that she sees herself in an outfit crafted primarily to please men*, but even if Snyder thinks that’s a justifiable character decision, the message is still jumbled because on a purely visual level it enforces the very thing the film criticizes.

This is a Zack Snyder movie, after all, so let’s talk about some of the positives. Objectifying or not, the costume designs were a highlight. Jena Malone’s hair is the best direct translation of anything anime into live action I’ve ever seen. The overall production design was great, too, whether it be depicting the dingy atmosphere of the asylum or a spired castle with orcs from Lord of the Rings crawling all over it. By the time we see a giant Saturn-esque planet in the background of one of Baby Doll’s imagined worlds, you’re either along for the ride or you’re not – fortunately for me, Sucker Punch hooked me early in this regard so I could enjoy these aspects instead of resent them like many of my colleagues did.

Say what you will about the man, but Snyder can direct the hell out of an action sequence. I’ve said this before, but he knows what looks cool and uses slow motion as his tool to bring his vision to life and accent little moments to drive his point home. Same can be said here: the fight scenes have the feel of a guru behind the camera (though they all seem a bit too similar to each other for my tastes). There’s an extended sequence near the end when the girls fight robots on a train near the end which reminded me of River Tam’s epic takedown of the Reavers in Serenity (sorry Zack – Joss did it better).

You’ve probably noticed I’ve gone this far without mentioning the acting. That’s on purpose – Emily Browning seems to be a mute for half of the film, letting her sword and 9mm do most of the talking. (Her role was originally given to Amanda Seyfried, who had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts with her TV show “Big Love.”) Jena Malone and Abbie Cornish are occasionally called upon to actually emote, but  it’s really tough to care when the film itself doesn’t seem to put any importance into what anyone is saying. Hudgens and Chung are essentially worthless, filling out the posse and that’s about it. Like this movie, they all look fantastic, but there’s nothing really going on beneath the surface.

If you love seeing people fall from the sky and land with their fist in the ground, only to slowly and dramatically raise their heads with intense looks on their faces, you should love this movie: it happens more times here than in any one piece of media I can remember. Sucker Punch is fine entertainment for the pre-summer season, but I hope I’m not expecting too much when I hope for those tentpoles to be a bit smarter than this film: a shiny package, but nothing’s inside. Until next time…

*It has just come to my attention that sexy schoolgirl outfits actually have the potential to provide women with confidence instead of just objectifying them. “Sex is power,” someone once told me, and having that power over men in that way seems to be at least partially what Snyder was going for here.

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Warner Bros. has released a new trailer for Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, which is more of a music video than anything. There’s no dialogue or voice-overs. Instead, we are presented with rather stunning visuals (now pretty much complete) to the sound of “Panic Switch” by Silversun Pickups.

Watch below:

Set in the 1950s, Sucker Punch follows Babydoll (Emily Browning) who is confined to a mental institution by her stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days. While there, she imagines an alternative reality to hide her from the pain, and in that world, she begins planning her escape, needing to steal five objects to help get her out before she is deflowered by a vile man.

Sucker Punch will be released in March 25th and also stars Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Carla Gugino, Jena Malone, and Jamie Chung.

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Warner Bros. has released a new featurette for Sucker Punch which contains short snippets of talk from Jamie Chung, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Jon Hamm, along with director Zack Snyder. They talk about what the movie involves and how cool Snyder’s movies are. We also see new footage here and there.

Watch below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBcjYIjnfQ4&

Set in the 1950s, Sucker Punch follows Babydoll (Emily Browning) who is confined to a mental institution by her stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days. While there, she imagines an alternative reality to hide her from the pain, and in that world, she begins planning her escape, needing to steal five objects to help get her out before she is deflowered by a vile man.

Sucker Punch will be released in March 2011 in 2D.

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Warner Bros. has released a second trailer for Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch which is even crazier than the first. This new trailer shows us more of the story, and a lot more of the insane sequences involving dragons, robots, huge aerial battles, and giant samurai’s.

Watch below:

Set in the 1950s, Sucker Punch follows Babydoll (Browning) who is confined to a mental institution by her stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days. While there, she imagines an alternative reality to hide her from the pain, and in that world, she begins planning her escape, needing to steal five objects to help get her out before she is deflowered by a vile man.

Sucker Punch will be released in March 2011 and stars Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Carla Gugino, Jena Malone, and Jamie Chung.

Read similar posts to New Sucker Punch Trailer on Filmonic

Warner Bros. were the first studio to jump onto the 3D bandwagon in a big way following the release of Avatar. They rushed a Clash of the Titans conversion and announced both Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movies would be converted into 3D too.

It seemed to be mandatory that all their future releases be seen in three dimensions, but the studio has been easing off recently in the name of quality. Deathly Hallows: Part 1 will only be released in 2D because they didn’t have enough time for a quality conversion, and now they have decided to stick with 2D for Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch.

From Digital Spy:

“Sucker Punch was supposed to be in 3D, but when we started working on [Legend Of The Guardians] and saw what it takes to pull off the 3D, how much planning goes into every shot, we realised that to convert Sucker Punch – it wasn’t shot that way – would be a mistake,” she explained.

“We didn’t think it would live up to our expectations. So we talked to the studio (Warner Bros) and said, ‘Listen, the film is beautiful and very designed to begin with, we don’t want to ruin it’.”

Snyder added: “Too many films are jumping on the 3D bandwagon and we can’t be one of them.”

It’s good to see Warner Bros. choosing quality over profit once again, although in a year or two most of their tentpoles will be filmed in 3D so there won’t be much of an option.

Set in the 1950s, Sucker Punch follows Babydoll (Browning) who is confined to a mental institution by her stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days. While there, she imagines an alternative reality to hide her from the pain, and in that world, she begins planning her escape, needing to steal five objects to help get her out before she is deflowered by a vile man.

Sucker Punch will be released in March 2011 and stars Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Carla Gugino, Jena Malone, and Jamie Chung.

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With all the images and posters that have been released lately it was only a matter of time before Zack Snyder and Warner Bros. unleashed the trailer for Sucker Punch upon us. I would attempt to describe the footage but it is quite difficult, as you will find out. There’s dragons, robots, huge aerial battles, and a whole lot of other crazy stuff.

This trailer is actually a shortened version of what was shown at Comic-Con, but it is still awesome.

Set in the 1950s, Sucker Punch follows Babydoll (Browning) who is confined to a mental institution by her stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days. While there, she imagines an alternative reality to hide her from the pain, and in that world, she begins planning her escape, needing to steal five objects to help get her out before she is deflowered by a vile man.

Sucker Punch will be released in March 2011 and stars Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Carla Gugino, Jena Malone, and Jamie Chung.

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