Free Republic

It’s lights out and away we go at the box office as “F1,” a big-budget racing drama starring Brad Pitt, impressively revs to $55.6 million in its domestic opening weekend. With great reviews and a promising “A” grade on CinemaScore exit polls, “F1” landed in the middle of expectations of $50 million to $60 million. At the international box office, the film collected a strong $88.4 million from 78 markets. Those initial ticket sales are significant given “F1” is an adult-skewing tentpole that’s not part of an existing film franchise — a rarity in today’s I.P.-dominated movie theater landscape. Directed...

Disney is exploring a reboot of its billion dollar Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The studio has met with the writing team of Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick and they are in early talks to write the script. Reese & Wernick are the writers behind the first two Deadpool blockbusters, and before that wrote Zombieland and its sequel, and 6 Underground, the action film that Michael Bay is directing for Netflix with Ryan Reynolds starring. Jerry Bruckheimer will continue to captain the ship as producer on Pirates of the Caribbean, but at this point it is too early to say...

To see how Jeb Bush and Scott Walker are approaching the 2016 presidential campaign, listen to the background music in the web videos their respective campaigns released Tuesday. The soundtrack to Mr. Bush’s video is a series of simple piano scales, from low to high notes, representing the sort of happy-warrior optimism from a candidate who said he’d only seek the White House if he could do so “joyfully.” Mr. Bush narrates the video from footage acquired at his various campaign events. For Mr. Walker’s video – a setup to his planned campaign launch next Monday – the foreboding orchestral...

The popular CBS reality show "The Amazing Race” is under fire for featuring an episode set in Hanoi, Vietnam, where contestants go to a B-52 Memorial, which is the wreckage of an American bomber plane shot down during the Vietnam War, to find the next clue in their televised round-the-world journey. In the episode, the twisted metal of the downed plane is treated as any other prop, with a bright ‘Amazing Race’ ‘Double-U-Turn’ signed planted in front of it, signifying to contestants the next phase of their scavenger hunt. The show also had contestants learn a song that was performed...

DB here: More informative about American history than Fahrenheit 9/11. More brain-teasing, and far more enjoyable, than I’m Not There. Less graphically violent than almost any other movie you’re likely to see. What else could I be talking about but National Treasure: Book of Secrets? Jerry Bruckheimer is, in my view, the most astute producer now working in Hollywood. I could cite many proofs, but let’s stick just to the first National Treasure. Here’s a movie with no pop music, no cusswords, no naked ladies, no drugs, no screwing, and scarcely any violence. (One bad guy accidentally falls to his...

From combined dispatches Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., the world's fifth-largest media company and owner of the Fox broadcast network and Fox News Channel, adopted a plan to thwart any hostile takeover after John Malone's Liberty Media Corp. sa