Poster time. First up, it's "The Expendables 2," wherein Sylvester Stallone brings back his geriatric action team, including Jet Li, Jason Statham and Dolph Lundgren, along with Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme. We're generally against it, but thank god for Photoshop touchups, as this is a ghastly looking sausage party. The original film started out slow at the box office, but eventually crawled to a very respectable $274 million worldwide. Presumably the sequel can at least duplicate those numbers, otherwise, what’s the point? “The Expendables 2” is set for an August 17th release.
After that we've got the follow-up to 2008’s surprise French-made thriller “Taken” starring Liam Neeson, who played a former CIA operative who set about tracking down his daughter (Maggie Grace) after she was kidnapped by human traffickers while traveling in France. In “Taken 2,” Neeson and his ex-wife (Famke Janssen) are taken hostage by the father of a kidnapper Neeson's "I will find you!" character killed while rescuing his daughter. Hmm, maybe this former CIA operative should try and lay low? Budgeted at $25 million, “Taken” was supposed to be a B-movie thriller from the Luc Besson French B-movie thriller assembly line, but it connected with audiences, grossed $226 million worldwide, made Neeson an unlikely action hero and well, thus a sequel, which arrives on October 5th.
While its poster is pretty generic, “The Watch” is one of the more interesting 2012 stories in movie marketing. Originally titled “Neighborhood Watch,” the film and its campaign had the rug pulled from under them unexpectedly due to the the tragic and unfortunate shooting of Trayvon Martin in February — the idea of a neighborhood watch group going rogue and self-policing their gated community apparently hit a little too close to home. Directed by 'SNL' digital shorts filmmaker/ Lonely Island co-creator Akiva Schaffer, co-written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and starring Ben Stiller, Jonah Hill, Vince Vaughn, Richard Ayoade with appearances by Will Forte, Billy Crudup, Rosemarie DeWitt and more, "The Watch" has a bevy of talent at its disposal. But because of the aforementioned situation, the marketing for the film has been extremely careful, to the point that while we've seen two trailers and a few photos, this picture seems to have zero heat on it at the moment. Now that 20th Century Fox are done with their "Prometheus" promo, we assume they're going to go full steam ahead with "The Watch" awareness, but they better do it soon as the film's release date is right around the corner on July 27th.
