Tennis isn’t generally known as a sexy sport, but it certainly has the highest potential for double entendres and innuendos. Pretty much all of them have been used or will be used to describe Challengers, whether in reviews this week or in the last nine months of teasers and delays. Yet while Amazon/MGM and the other studios’ attempted union busting kept Challengers from arriving much earlier, the delays and teasing is otherwise almost fitting for such a tease of a…

If Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav didn’t spend all last summer and fall trying to destroy unions, Dune Part Two would have been out last October – after Oppenheimer and Barbie already set 2023’s blockbuster standard for box office and awards season. Instead, in a bit of extremely accidental fortune, and thanks to Zaslav and his ilk depleting the rest of 2024’s blockbuster lineup, Dune Part Two now gets to be the early big screen savior of 2024 all by…

WARNING: POSSIBLY TOO SPOILERY FOR SOME

Spider-Man: No Way Home should not work.

For one, turning Tom Holland’s third Spider-Man outing into a mega crossover with the other Spider-Man universes puts his own story into the background, or at least seemed poised to. For another, the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse already did a multiverse Spider-Man in 2018 and was an Oscar winning classic, so there seemed almost no way No Way Home could look like anything but a second-rate…

Spider-Man: Homecoming could easily be called the Star Wars: The Force Awakens phase of Spider-Man’s long movie history. Like Star Wars, Spider-Man’s big screen legacy began with two classics and a less acclaimed third chapter, before a second version of the franchise nearly tanked its good name. And with Star Wars, a Disney owned company gave Spider-Man a third movie series in an expanded cinematic universe, a more youthful direction to start over with, and a new lead slowly but…

The world wasn't the same immediately after Avengers Endgame, as Hollywood was painfully aware of after two post-Endgame months of blockbuster underachievers and critical bombs. Yet even the MCU can’t stay the same anymore, as the so-called ending of Endgame must give way to the start of a new era.

Fortunately, the safest bet to anchor an epilogue to the old era and lay the first foundations of the new one is Spider-Man, despite having to go pretty Far From…

Before there was Star Wars, and before Lord of the Rings was anywhere near big screen life, there was Dune. Author Frank Herbert’s books were a pioneer for science-fiction novels in the 1960s and 70s, yet the quest to adapt them has been perilous for decades. But now in 2021, time, technology, long overdue luck and the mind of Denis Villeneuve have finally worked in Dune’s favor.

Now decades after breaking ground on the page, it gets to shatter a…