Another salvo in the 2013 summer animation wars was fired Wednesday as DreamWorks Animation and 20th Century Fox’s Turbo opened at the midweek box office.

According to matinee returns, Turbo should gross in the $6 million range for the day, likely enough to top the Wednesday box office chart and edge out Despicable Me 2, Universal’s megahit.

Turbo is eyeing a five-day debut in the $35 million range, a solid but unspectacular start. Box office observers believe the 3D toon could suffer from animation fatigue, considering it opens only two weeks after Despicable 2 and four weeks after…

I hate to get my hopes too high, but it sure sounds like my kind of movie with good character development and good plot. I did not hate the previous film, but I was dissapointed in that I thought it could have been much better.

It is nice too, that this film is finally taking place in a post-X-Men: The Last Stand timeline. On the one hand, I like to pretend that third film does not exsist. But on the other, I’m tired of all the prequel stuff.

In any event, here is the video of Peter and Germain’s reaction.

Hey guys! We’ll me and Michael Fissel will be discussing Pacific Rim tonight on The MovieByte Pocast. You’ll want to join us for that as it should be a lot of fun! I confess (as you might have seen in my review) that I enjoyed it far more than I expected, but it did have its little issues and we’ll have some good discussion about it.

As always, we welcome you to participate and interact with us in the chat room. We’ll be broadcastling live at 7:30 Central Time (8:30 Eastern). Pop some popcorn and join in the fun!

I’ll be the first to admit it: the summer movie season is starting to wear on me. Every week, it feels like we’re subject to another mindless big budget blockbuster, another craven attempt by a big studio at minting a money-making franchise. I wasn’t sure how many more time I could witness the entire world being imperiled, only to be barely saved by our heroes-of-the-week.

Then I saw Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim. 

For me, Pacific Rim stands above the summer box office fray. Not since I first saw Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day back in 1996 have I felt as entertained and as awed…

While out promoting her latest efforts, Parker took to condemning the entertainment industry as a mean-spirited enterprise intent to thrive on people’s pain; and in turn that audiences are celebrating this by tearing down actors and films. Parker opines that, “There’s way more mean-spiritedness… It’s a mean culture - its reality TV and its watching people suffer and watching people humiliate themselves.”  She goes onto allude to shows such as “Toddlers and Tiaras” and “Celebrity Rehab” as proof of this “ugly” culture where entertainment is “like someone just lifted up a rock and that’s all…

No, no, not the new one that isn’t out yet. Man this naming scheme is confusing. I’m talking about the first Wolverine standalone film. You know, I didn’t hate it as much as the rest of the world — maybe I was just glad it was not as bad as X-Men: The Last Stand — but it certainly was not the best installment in the X-Men universe. This Honest Trailer will highight some of the very things that is wrong with that film, and in the normal, humorous way. I warn you though, you’ll want to be in a place where you can have some good, hearty laughs before you watch this!

Enjoy!

ABC was the last to announce their Fall 2013 premiere dates, but now we know!

Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. will premiere on Tuesday, September 24 at 8PM.

WooHoo! Can’t wait. I can guarantee you I’ll be watching this!

Tom Hanks and Ron Howard, the star and director, respectively, of Sony’s first two tentpole movies based on Dan Brown’s novels, are returning for Inferno, we’ve learned. Hanks had been expected to reprise his role as Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon for The Lost Symbol, the third novel in Brown’s book series. But Howard had bowed out of that project, which is now on the back burner, saying he wanted to produce it with Brian Grazer and their Imagine Entertainment but not direct. Now we’re hearing he’ll return for Inferno.

Please make the madness stop! How can we get this movie to not…

Pre-release tracking has been notably soft for R.I.P.D. considering its $130 million production budget, and it could have a hard time fending off Summit’s adult action pic Red 2 and New Line’s low-budget horror entry The Conjuring. At this point, they are all tracking to open in the $17 million to $20 million range, although those projections could shift when final tracking is released Thursday.

The three movies begin rolling out on Thursday night, while DreamWorks Animation and 20th Century Fox’s Turbo opens Wednesday.

Turbo, looking to benefit from being an original story after…