Box Office GROSS: The Top 50 Hit Films of 2006

This week, Box Office GROSS WINS THE PULITZER!!!! We are blessed to welcome the great Keith Phipps ( The Reveal ) on the show to help us encapsulate an absolutely perfect entry for the themes of our show: SUPERMAN RETURNS , a 200-plus-million-dollar hit featuring one of the most famous and enduring characters in the history of media, and yet a film that was considered a disappointment in the momen...

Long-long- long time pal Eric Freeman joins us to pick apart the demented Happy Madison morality play CLICK .. We discuss its curious place in Adam Sandler's filmography, and its fascinating, muddled emotional lessons, which can come off as unconsciously poignant as they are actively offensive. This is a film that seemingly accidentally comes to some meaningful existential points about being f...

Surprise! Another episode in which we deign to cover a brand new motion picture. Our War of the Worlds episode with the great Bilge Ebiri and the great Alex Watkins is one of our favorites of the 2005 season, so it felt right to catch up with Steven Spielberg as he once again goes Alien Mode with writer David Koepp in 2026. Brian was on the run from a shadow government organization during the reco...

The awesome Pete Volk ( Sports Movies That Don't Suck ) joins us for another runty-in-the-moment third film in an action series that eventually became one of the biggest franchises in the world, THE FAST & THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT . We discuss all the insane sliding-doors moments in this disparate series, from nearly being released direct-to-video, its highly-criticized lead casting, its D...

The great Alex Goldman ( Hyperfixed, Amityvilleville ) returns, in much better health than our Narnia episode, as we discuss Jared Hess's post- Napoleon Dynamite blank check, the Mexican wrestling comedy NACHO LIBRE! This film is an absolutely perfect entry for the theme of our show, a movie with an easily summarized elevator-pitch premise and famous lead that a lot of people saw and everyone...

KACHOW! KACHIKA! The great Jeb Lund (@Mobute, It's Christmastime ) returns again to cover the most merchandized film we've yet covered, the perfectly passable piece of Pixar product known as CARS ! Rob takes us DEEP on the brief history of the most prominent animation studio currently running, as we go into their first official collaboration with Disney. We discuss its benign, bullshit ori...

Two of our closest and smartest pals return in TJ DOBBIN and associate producer SHAUN SWAYNE to discuss a subject in which both have oodles of expertise: X-MEN, as we pick apart Brett Ratner's X-MEN: THE LAST STAND . The four of us have a FASCINATING conversation about all the different ways one can arrive at appreciation or loathing based on similar levels of familiarity or apathy. We discuss...

Our wonderful and erudite Chicago-ass pal Eric Marsh (@marshlands) joins us this week for a pretty terrible wannabe-Chicago-ass movie, as we all uexpectedly find ourselves on common and even ground when it comes to Peyton Reed's thin, sour anti-rom-com THE BREAK-UP! We go way out of our way to substantiate our bonafides as cinephiles, invoking the names of Stan Brakhage, Leo McCarey, Agnes Var...

Following our War of the Worlds ep last summer, we bring back the great Bilge Ebiri ( Vulture ) to cover another top-5 hit with a massive shadow and a complicated reputation: THE DA VINCI CODE ! We discuss the controversial original novel and its sensational rep as blasphemous, poorly-written and devilishly entertaining, and the relative merits of the remarkably successful hit film and its directo...

After covering 2006 entry The Devil Wears Prada to a remarkably thorough degree, he great Maura Quint circles back around and we deign to cover...a NEW MOVIE???? We have a sprawling, informal chat about 2026's newest juggernaut The Devil Wears Prada 2, how it does or does not stay true to its characters and its frothy, ludicrous plotline that is nonetheless unexpectedly attentive the realities...

Our first two-time guest ( Constantine, Sahara ), the great Matt Lynch (Scarecrow Video, The Suspense is Killing Us) makes his triumphant return to discuss another sort of maligned, underrated action hit: Mission: Impossible III ! We discuss MI3 's curious place as the runt of the franchise litter, as well as its place in mid-2000s action cinema and of star Tom Cruise's career! This is a f...

Folks, a MILLION GIRLS would KILL to guest on this episode, but we were honored to be joined by the great writer and activist Maura Quint to discuss THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA in the days leading up to the release of its legacy follow-up. We go deep on Maura's incredibly similar real life experiences to the film's events, we discuss the film's divergences from its original novel, and how th...

FOLKS, this week Box Office Gross is ROCKIN' THE SUBURBS: we grab the great Charles Star (@ugarles) on his 52 Week Podcasting Challenge, enlivening what is otherwise a real uninspiring entry in our project, the weak, sloppy animated satire OVER THE HEDGE . We discuss the film's bizarre voice cast, its' tepid, boring social commentary, and its stilted attempts at humor more perfectly su...

My long, long, long -time internet movie pal PETER LABUZA (@labuzamovies) finally makes an appearance on our fair program to help us delve into a truly, almost inexplicably nonexistent piece of work: POSEIDON. We discuss Wolf the director of DAS BOOT and THE PERFECT STORM making a POSEIDON ADVENTURE remake with *Kurt Russell* and *Richard Dreyfuss*???? How could this flail so spectacularly? We dis...

The magnificent researcher for the Blank Check podcast, JJ Bersch joins us for a deliriously fun conversation about the absolutely demented, rollicking road comedy RV ! We delve into the entire history of director Barry Sonnenfeld and his string of curious decisions throughout the making of this film, as Rob read MULTIPLE biographies to prepare, and manages to uncover an astonishing, disgusting pi...

We bring back the rowdy hosts of Weekly Podcast Massacre to help us pick apart the SCARY MOVIE franchise, a series with zero defensibly good movies but two films near and dear to our hearts because of their ragged, youthful charm. Unfortunately, we're covering one of the other ones: the lifeless, inert SCARY MOVIE 4 . We discuss the film's one good sequence (involving a SAW parody starring...

Our lovely pal Joe Kowalski rejoins us, fresh off the Chicken Little episode last year as we serve him up another stealing pile of CGI garbage, ICE AGE: THE MELTDOWN ! We discuss this pretty dreary but extremely profitable series: its deeply weird voice cast, its lackluster plotting, its hideous CGI and its acknowledgment of the existence of Literal Christian Heaven. We also talk about The Scrat....

The beloved guest from our VERY FIRST EPISODE on the horror film White Noise , the great David Roth ( Defector Media ) makes his triumphant return to talk about...a good movie???? A *great* movie in fact, Spike Lee's twisty heist thriller INSIDE MAN . We endeavor to record THE PERFECT PODCAST. We discuss the legendary director's 21st century work building up to this, his most financial suc...

We didn't intend to put out two episodes FOR SICKOS ONLY(tm) so close together, but we had a long gestating idea for an episode covering the 2006 Oscars telecast, honoring all the films of 2005, a whooping THIRTEEN we covered on our show. We discuss the infamous controversy between Crash v. Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture, the legendary performance and victory for Three 6 Mafia, Jon Stewar...

This week, the lovely and talented Jourdain Searles joins us to remember remember the 36th highest grossing film of 2006, the dystopian political thriller V FOR VENDETTA ! We discuss the film's curiously dissonant relation to its graphic-novel source material, its resonance (or lack thereof) with its original Thatcherite origins vs. its War on Terror traipsings and its strange decision to clos...

Surprise! Rob made a 5-plus-hour drive to New Jersey to attend in person a "stop and start" 20th anniversary screening of Kevin Smith's 2006 release CLERKS II , a film that absolutely did not make the top 50 (or even the top 100!) of the 2006 box office, but it was a film and director so deeply near and dear to his heart, and an experience so worth hearing about, that we had to do an...

FOLKS! Our beloved fellow Cinemasochist Steve Carlson (guest of The Amityville Horror and The Dukes of Hazzard episodes) returns for what is, unexpectedly, perhaps Rob and I's most CONTENTIOUS DISAGREEMENT on a film yet: Tim Allen in THE SHAGGY DOG ! We discuss this shambling, wooly franchise, from its unexpected origins in Weimar-Republic-era German literature, to its massive original late '50s h...

The great Jeb Lund ( It's Christmastime, @Mobute) returns from our Longest Yard episode to cover another movie with an old football player in it, the demented high-concept rom-com Failure to Launch ! Rob and I discuss our sharp digressions on the quality of the film: he passionately defines it as a thoughtful and clever film about a man fundamentally out of step with the confines of natural la...

Our cherished pal Doug Tilley ( Cinema Smorgasbord ) makes his third appearance ( Batman Begins, The Forty-Year-Old Virgin ) on our show to cover an even more famous film: EIGHT BELOW , the forgotten Disney survival drama that takes a true story of tragedy and perseverance seminal to midcentury Japanese culture, removes most of the tragedy and all the Japanese people! We discuss this blandly profe...

The wonderful and talented writer WILL SLOAN ( Important Cinema Club Podcast, Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA ) joins us for an absolute doozy, as we dive deep into the flawed and fascinating three-ring-circus oeuvre of the playwright, filmmaker and mogul TYLER PERRY , and cover his 2006 directorial debut MADEA'S FAMILY REUNION . We dissect his offbeat, auteurism, his violent tonal shifts betwe...