by Trevor Sheffield With 2019 starting to wind down and some of its final films coming to the big screen, it’s worth noting the various accomplishments mainstream cinema has managed to achieve over the course of these last few months. Disney and Marvel released Avengers: Endgame, which went on to become the highest grossing film of all time. Disney and Pixar released Toy Story 4 to great critical acclaim and capped off the Toy Story saga (for now). Perhaps most importantly, Disney acquired 20th Century Fox and all of its entertainment assets, assimilating studios like Blue Sky and Fox Searchlight into the fold. This also brought the not-so-quiet cracking down of repeat screenings of older Fox films to give more space to things like The Lion King (2019) and Aladdin (2019), to the detriment of non-chain theaters across the country. But for all the morally-questionable victories won this year, there’s another side of the coin. 2019 made itself home to four of the biggest bombs in cinematic history: Laika’s Missing Link, STX’s Uglydolls, and AMBI’s Arctic Dogs all made headlines for flopping in their widespread theatrical releases, each progressively worse than the last. At least their U.S. releases weren’t delayed as a result of distributors going bankrupt, only for it to hit American theaters six months after being released overseas—at half the ticket price of their competitors. If I had to encapsulate everything wrong with the films I’ve seen this year into one neat, convenient package, it would be— without a doubt—Playmobil: The Movie.
Homer’s Odyssey (for dummies)
More jelly than plastic
Everything’s (not) awesome
IMDb IMDb
