Jon Schnaars's blog

When are we all finally going to admit it to ourselves: the trailers for "2012" are fucking sweet.

Let the "Paranormal Activity" breakout story begin!

After a little unscheduled break, the Box Office Special is back. And after a messy streak of flops, horror looks to be back too, with "Zombieland" flying out of the gates with a number one finish in its opening weekend. Let's catch up with a handy little chart:

Labor Day, while an awesome excuse to lay around and do nothing for three days, is about as fallow a film going period as you'll find on the calendar. Just two years ago, "Halloween" set a new four-day weekend record with $30 million. Some weekends, that wouldn't even qualify for 2nd place, but on Labor Day it's a record.

Just like that it's over: one of the most highly anticipated weekends by horror fans in recent memory has come and gone. And while the merits of both "The Final Destination" and "Halloween 2" may be debated for some time, the box office results paint a far clearer picture.

In the seven weeks since "Transformers 2" opened the average budget for a weekend-winning film has been $156 million. That's an average, mind you, and it's weighed down somewhat by "Bruno," which opened at #1 after costing only a measly $42 million. Truly, this summer, big-budgets have been king. Even "Bruno" was the most expensive new release in the weekend that it won.

Before diving into this weekend, how about a little history?

With "Iron Man" having opened just three weekends earlier to a stunning $98 million dollar draw, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" jumped out of the gate Memorial Day weekend 2008 to a total just a hair over $100 million. That's two of the 12 largest openings in the span of one month.

But wait, Memorial Day 2007 there was "Pirates 3" for a total of $114 million. And that same month, "Spider-Man 3" at $151, and "Shrek the Third" at $121. All three, of course, are top 10 opening weekend totals.

Last week, "Star Trek" did quite well for itself, as it managed to take in a terrific opening haul as well as win near universal praise from critics. So, as these things tend to work, Paramount immediately rolled out its front-runner advertising campaign, which championed "Star Trek" as the nation's number one movie, etc, etc. Unfortunately, they're only going to get one week out of those ads.

As it was the season finale, I'll be eschewing my typical format for a straight review. Be warned, spoilers aplenty up ahead.

Episodes 102 and 103 of the Lost saga brought us back to the beginning in a couple of ways. Literally, the opening scenes of the season five finale take us back perhaps as far as we've ever been in the history of the Island to introduce us (finally!) to Jacob -- the long-discussed, little-seen master of all that is Lost.

As we wind down to our grand finale next week (sneak peek, the episode is called "The Incident," real informative, Lost writers...), we're back to splitting our time between the Survivors of Oceanic 815 in 1977 and Ajira Air in some approximation of present day (2008?). With a number of plot points to develop, there wasn't a whole lot of craziness, but there was a whole lot of happenings.

Episode: "Follow the Leader"