Picture of the week:

dammit. I wasn’t going to post anything on The Avengers this week, but then (of course) they released new photos and some of them are really cool.

Article of the week:

Not that I like talking about The Hunger Games that much, because of my inflexible disdain for the whole thing (which is my counter to all the hype). But this is really interesting article about fandom and girl’s buying power. It amazes me after the movies that have made so much money the past 5 years or so that women are still underestimated as a money wielding audience.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that the weekend audience for “The Hunger Games” was 39 percent male, “another sign of a cultural juggernaut.” The most recent “Twilight” film, the Times pointed out, attracted an audience that was only 20 percent male. But “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1? still brought in $138 million (domestic) on its first weekend…

Like the Times, you could look at these figures as an indication of how much better a movie franchise can do when it appeals to young men as well as young women — or you could just acknowledge the fact that a movie can now be a big hit without appealing to young men at all.

I also like her brief comment on marketing and the people who would attribute the huge opening weekend to the film and the marketing team (both, admittedly, were good in this case).

But a good movie and a canny promotional campaign aren’t enough to make hundreds of people camp out in a tent city to await a movie’s premiere. That kind of enthusiasm only comes from a fandom, an organized, well-networked, convivial mass of people who really, really love something and want to talk about it — a lot.

And, for the record, Overthinking It would probably disagree with my Hunger Games review where I say it has nothing of significance to say. As evidenced here.

Quote of the week:

And finally, because I have nothing else, a quote from director Rupert Sanders about Snow White and the Huntsman from this interview.

From the look of the trailer, it feels like this movie should be called Evil Queen not Snow White. How much is Kristen Stewart in this film?
She’s in it, ironically, more than the Evil Queen. I think when you market a film you have to kind of create something that people grab on to, a very simple story line. Our film has so many characters we chose one thing that people would understand and that’s the villain. And I think you will see, as the marketing gets closer, you’ll see more of Kristen woven into that.

Personally, I think Kristen Stewart can’t act and though she looks the part of Snow White, they didn’t want to feature her in trailers because why highlight the weakest link in your film? But I will reserve judgement until I actually see it.