Entertainment
Bone Temple's Flop Should End Hollywood's Most Annoying Trend
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
The moment Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury turned up after the credits of Iron Man was the moment that entertainment changed forever. Every film had to be part of a larger universe, with each one teasing that the next would be bigger and better. The natural end result of this trend has been studios filming multiple movies back-to-back and planning from the beginning that, no matter the audience reaction, this will be another epic universe of interconnected films.
The long-awaited 28 Years Later ran headfirst into both trends, ending with a tease for the second film in a trilogy, and then 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple fell flat months later when confused audiences rejected it as too much, too soon, and too confusing.
The Bone Temple Doesn’t Sound Like A Sequel
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple picks up right where 28 Years Later leaves off and devotes its entire runtime to Spike (Alfie Williams) and the Jimmys, a strange gang based on the British personality Jimmy Saville (in the film’s timeline, Saville’s sex crimes were never exposed). The film itself is a great entry in the growing franchise by keeping the story’s focus tight on the group, which starts off as larger than you’d expect for a horror film, but quickly gets whittled down. It culminates in an insane sequence set to Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast that proves Ralph Fiennes can do anything. The problem isn’t with the film, The Bone Temple is well worth watching, but the problem comes from Hollywood’s fascination with milking every aspect of every successful film before anyone knows it’s a hit or not.
Thankfully for everyone involved, 28 Years Later was a hit during the summer of 2025. It would have been awkward for the already filmed and edited sequel if the first film had crashed and burned. Unfortunately, the summer of 2025 was only a few months ago, and the general audience didn’t think 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was a sequel only six months later. Hollywood’s “everything is a franchise” hubris finally caught up with it, and the result was a truly unique horror film that earned less domestically than Tron: Ares.
2 Fast 2 Furious is a stupid name for a movie, but it makes it clear that it’s a sequel. M3GAN 2.0 was another disaster, but the 2 is right there. The Bone Temple doesn’t denote it’s a sequel, especially since the Bone Temple itself was a major part of the first film. It sounds like a director’s cut version of the first film.
Fans Rejected The Jimmy Gang Months Ago
Working against 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the first appearance of the Jimmys at the end of the first film. Watching a group of color-coordinated tracksuit-clad survivors ripping apart infected like post-apocalyptic Power Rangers was such a tonal shift from the rest of the film’s meditation on grief and death that it immediately turned off a part of the film’s fanbase. Which is unfortunate, because the cast and crew had a three-week break between wrapping one film and starting another back in 2024, long before the public reaction to the wild twist.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple earned $13 million domestically during its opening weekend and a total of $46 million, which isn’t bad, but it’s lagging significantly behind 28 Years Later. An estimated budget of $68 million means that director Nia DaCosta’s follow-up to The Marvels is again going to bring in a respectable sum for most films, but the budget kills it. Once again, the talented DaCosta was saddled with bringing the studio’s vision to life, no matter what the fans said they wanted.
The Bone Temple underperforming won’t stop studios from purposely stretching out stories into multiple movies, and it won’t stop the trend of filming movies back-to-back before anyone knows what the fanbase is going to latch onto. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple ends with another tease for the third, and hopefully, final film. Years of Marvel post-credit teases that have gone nowhere haven’t left audiences waiting for every film to promise a bigger, better sequel; it’s done the opposite, and now audiences roll their eyes out of annoyance. Studios need to cut their losses and go back to focusing on telling one great story before any other fan-favorite franchises fall victim.
Entertainment
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Entertainment
Star Trek’s First Broadcast Episode Was Very Carefully Chosen, Because It Was Boring
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
These days, Star Trek is a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. But during the development of The Original Series, there was anxiety that the general public wouldn’t really understand Gene Roddenberry’s mashing up Western tropes with a sci-fi setting. Making matters worse was that the original pilot, “The Cage,” had been rejected by NBC for being too brainy. Fortunately, Roddenberry got a chance to shoot another pilot, one which impressed the network enough to order an entire season worth of episodes.
Several episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series had already been shot when the time came for this new show to make its broadcast premiere. The first episode that the general public saw was “The Man Trap,” which featured a shapeshifting monster that was revealed to be an alien salt vampire. This good-but-not-great episode was an odd choice, and it was one that the cast and crew hated. As it turns out, though, this episode was very carefully selected by executives because it served as an inoffensive, relatively straightforward encapsulation of everything Star Trek had to offer.
It’s A Trap!
Most of the information we have about why “The Man Trap” was selected as Star Trek’s first episode comes from the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. Within this impressive reference tome, Robert H. Justman and Herbert F. Solow revealed something surprising: NBC had several other episodes to choose from for the premiere, including “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Charlie X,” “Mudd’s Women,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and “The Naked Time.” All of them had already been shot and were mostly finished, so it was just a matter of figuring out which episode would serve as the best introduction to Star Trek, a heretofore unknown sci-fi series.
“The Man Trap” won out, mostly because the powers that be worried that other episodes would be off-putting to general audiences in some very specific ways. For example, they worried that audiences would find “Charlie X” a story that was “too gentle” because it focused on an adolescent with special powers. This was probably the right call, in retrospect: when Variety gave a negative review of “The Man Trap” (an episode chosen, in part, because of its relative maturity), they declared that Star Trek: The Original Series was “better suited to the Saturday morning kidvid bloc” (ouch!).
A Monster Hit Of An Episode
“The Corbomite Maneuver” was a great potential choice, but this episode’s impressive special effects were still in post-production, and almost all of its action took place on the ship. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” really outlined the premise of the new show, but it was deemed “expository” for general audiences expecting more action and danger. Justman thought “The Naked Time” was a killer introduction to the crew’s personalities, but the network passed, presumably because of how over-the-top (half-naked, swashbuckling Sulu? Oh, my!) that episode gets. “Mudd’s Women,” meanwhile, was deemed too offensive because the plot involved literally selling women to miners.
Through this process of elimination, executives decided that “The Man Trap” was the best intro to Star Trek. It had cool scenes on both the Enterprise and a distant outpost (a strange new world) and featured a straightforward action plot you didn’t have to be a sci-fi aficionado to understand. Finally, it was all about finding and defeating a creepy monster, which offered thrills to audiences of all ages. The network’s choice paid off, and Star Trek: The Original Series became the most popular sci-fi show in television history, even though the cast (including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy) thought “The Man Trap” was the worst possible episode they could have chosen.
All of this is a keen reminder of how much thought and work went into putting Star Trek’s best foot forward. It might be a reminder that Paramount’s current upper leadership needs, as Starfleet Academy hit the ground running with the worst episodes of Season 1. The show got better after that, but it didn’t matter because the prospective audience had already been driven away. As it turns out, today’s execs need to learn something that the network execs of the ‘60s had learned very well: series succeed when you give the audience what they want to see and not what you want to show!
Entertainment
How A Fantasy Box Office Bomb Lost $200 Million In Theaters, And Suddenly Became A Streaming Hit
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
For the last decade as streaming has taken off in homes around the world, it’s become possible for films that lost historical amounts of money in theaters to find success, even if it might be the post-Mystery Science Theater 3000 trend of “so bad it’s good.” That’s why a massive flop, for example say, Morbius, and films that slightly missed the mark like The Fall Guy can turn it around and become a streaming success.
What’s even more impressive is the amazing turnaround of 2013’s Jack the Giant Slayer, which lost Legendary Pictures an alleged $200 million, only to end up topping streaming charts in 2025.
The Classic Fairy Tale With A Twist
Everyone knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, the classic fairy tale about selling a horse for magic beans and climbing a beanstalk to find a giant living in the clouds. It’s simple, contains multiple morals, and can be easily adjusted to turn Jack into the villain, but Jack the Giant Slayer instead asks, “What if there was no moral, and instead of one giant, there was an entire army of evil giants?” The movie is the classic story, as you’ve never seen it before, and it almost works.
Nicholas Hoult plays Jack, the young man who finds himself trading his horse to a monk in exchange for beans that he can’t allow to get wet, ever. Like the rules in Gremlins, it’s not long before Jack accidentally gets the beans wet and a beanstalk grows under his house with the princess, Isabell (Eleanor Tomlinson), trapped inside as it grows into the sky. All the king’s men gather to rescue the princess, including Lord Roderick (Stanley Tucci), who, thankfully, Jack the Giant Slayer makes obvious is very evil, very quickly.
It’s up to Jack, Isabell, and the loyal Knight, Elmont (Ewan McGregor) to save the kingdom and stop the invasion of giants led by Roderick and the giant two-headed General Fallon (Bill Nighy). If there’s one thing Jack the Giant Slayer does better than every other adaptation, it’s the third act featuring a full-blown war between humans and giants, with a touch of humor and absurdity. Watching a giant toss a windmill like the glaive from Krull is the perfect amount of off-beat to distract from a surprising amount of body horror in both the giant’s designs and Fallon’s ultimate fate.
A Movie For No One
Jack the Giant Slayer looks too good, and the star-studded cast is having way too much fun for it to be a truly bad movie. The problem is that the pacing is off: it takes a little too long to get to the good stuff, then it feels a little too rushed, and though it is a fun adventure, it’s also, like the source material, simplistic. It’s not like the movie wasn’t watched in theaters; it made $197 million worldwide, which would be a great haul except it cost $185 million to make, and that’s not including the extensive marketing campaign.
The push and pull of director Bryan Singer’s vision of a dark take on the fable, complete with actual people-eating on screen, and the sanitized version that hit theaters, which was still too dark for children, since the film is surprisingly rated PG-13, meant it ended up being a film for no one. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings, of 52 percent from critics and 55 percent from the audience, are proof that the final product is not great, but not bad; it’s a movie that will keep you watching for a few hours and then leave no lasting impression. These days, Lionsgate and Sony wish they’d release a movie that is that well-received, as even Jack the Giant Slayer looks like a masterpiece compared to Borderlands or Kraven the Hunter.
Streaming is the perfect home for Jack the Giant Slayer, and 10 years later, it no longer matters that the movie lost hundreds of millions in theaters. It finally gets to stand on its own as a fun, if unremarkable, fantasy adventure.
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