The newest Leonardo DiCaprio/Martin Scorsese pairing has a trailer, and it looks like it's all about wretched excess:

Something weird to think about: Robert De Niro and Scorsese made eight films together. DiCaprio and Scorsese have now made five. I think Leo's going for the record.

Last night, I published a rumor that the Landmark Theatres chain would be closing the Egyptian Theatre at the end of this month. As far as I can see, Landmark hasn't released any statement on the theater's closing, and they haven't gotten back to my requests for comment.

I just got off the phone with Janet Grimley, the interim director of communications for Seattle Central Community College, which bought the Egyptian building in 1992. Grimley confirms: "Landmark informed our person that handles those leases on May 1st that they were going to be out by the end of June." Grimley says she doesn't know why Landmark made that decision.

So what's going to happen to the building? "We own it, and we intend to keep it," Grimley says. She can't confirm that SCCC will definitely keep the space as a movie theater, saying that "we’re open to suggestions or ideas" for what to do with the space. So has anybody made overtures on the space? "Nothing has gotten serious," Grimley says, and then she clarifies, "nothing that I’m aware of."

UPDATE 12:39 PM: Just got an e-mail from Lauren Kleiman at Landmark Theatres. She confirms: "The theatre will be closing, with the last day of film set for Thursday, June 27."

Paramount announced a test program for select theaters in Pennsylvania, California, Texas, and Georgia: For $50, you can buy a "mega ticket" to World War Z. According to JoBlo, a mega ticket involves:

-One (1) adult admission ticket to the 6/19 advance 3D show of World War Z
-One (1) HD digital copy of movie when available*
-One (1) pair of World War Z collector's custom 3D glasses**
-One (1) official limited-edition movie poster
-One (1) small popcorn

I like the idea of bundling a downloadable digital copy of the movie with the price of a ticket, but the rest of this—the advance screening, the poster, the custom 3D glasses—doesn't really interest me. And I can't believe they're not throwing a soda in with the small popcorn. But how about you?

This week’s short film is “Put A Rainbow On It,” a fine piece of comedy by two local directors, Sid Jordan & Selma Al-Aswad, who are members of the group Reteaching Gender and Sexuality. We all know that the rainbow flag stands for gay pride. But is the flag enough? Or, more worrying yet, is it in danger of becoming meaningless—what you get is just the flag as the beginning and end of gayness? Inspired by Portlandia's "Put a Bird on It" skit, the short provides answers to these questions with intelligent and expertly timed wit.

So they've finally made a sequel to 300, and here's the trailer:

Meanwhile, Arnold Schwartzenegger has announced that filming on Terminator 5 starts in January, and that he'll be starring as the Terminator.

And! If Man of Steel does as well as expected—read my review here—Warner Bros. wants to immediately follow with another Man of Steel, then a Justice League movie, and then Aquaman and Wonder Woman movies. I just don't think an Aquaman movie can be good.

And while I'm interested in the idea of a Wonder Woman movie, Warner Bros. hired Joss Whedon to make a Wonder Woman movie, and then they dumped him. Because who'd want to see a superhero movie directed and written by Joss Whedon? When they eventually make a Wonder Woman movie, I'll have a hard time not comparing it in my head to the Whedon Wonder Woman that never was.

So my question is:

Cienna Madrid on This Is the End:

Settle your fears, Seth Rogen–loving stoners: This Is the End is hilarious—more hilarious than Superbad, more outrageous than Pineapple Express, so shockingly hilarious that you'll marvel it doesn't have a NC-17 rating.

The setup isn't terribly original, but it is every Christian's wet dream: James Franco is having a house party when the apocalypse hits. Brimstone blossoms in the Hollywood Hills, fire rains from the sky, and the earth opens up and swallows celebrities whole. Meanwhile, heaven sucks up the worthy, and everyone else—including Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, and Danny McBride, all playing warped versions of themselves—is left to fight over the last scraps of food and licks of water...

Whole review here.

We've already done one poll in the last hour, so I'm not going to clog up Slog's bandwidth with a poll for your reaction to the Snowpiercer trailer. And, honestly, the Snowpiercer trailer needs no poll, because this is pure, uncut awesome. Chris Evans vs. Tilda Swinton on a world-circling train that for some reason carries all the survivors of a wintry apocalypse? Directed by Joon-ho Bong? Um, yes! Yes, please!

I cannot wait for this thing to sweep the Oscars next year.

I really dug the uncomfortable Chilean comedy Crystal Fairy, and it turns out that it was the first part of a two-pack of movies made by director Sebastián Silva and star Michael Cera. The second movie in the twofer is titled Magic Magic. It also stars Cera as a creepy American traveling in Chile, but this one looks like a horror movie. Cera seems to be playing a dim-witted sadist this time around:

Magic Magic will be released on video on August 6th. What do you think?

Here's the trailer for Woody Allen's next movie, Blue Jasmine, which features a cast including Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin, Louis C.K., and Andrew Dice Clay:

This week’s short film is “A Life Well Lived: Jim Whittaker & 50 Years of Everest,” a documentary directed by local filmmaker/cinematographer Eric Becker. The subject of the doc is Jim Whittaker, a Seattleite and handsome octogenarian who in 1963 became the first American to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. Those who are familiar with Becker’s work will not be surprised the doc’s impressive editing and photography.

Seattle is a city full of great cinema experiences, but the Cinerama will always be my favorite place to watch gigantic summer popcorn movies. The problem is, since the Cinerama's (beautiful!) renovation, the theater now has 3D capability, and lots of summer popcorn movies show in 3D. But most 3D is utter shit. So I'd go to the Cinerama and I'd like the experience a little less because I had to watch the stupid 3D with a distracting pair of cheap sunglasses over my real glasses. That's why this news is so exciting:

2D Tuesdays are a great compromise to this problem. People who love and want to support the Cinerama but who hate 3D should make sure they support this idea.

(Thanks to Slog tipper Clinton.)

It was a good run, a run that generated billions for Hollywood, a run that sent a second-rate black rapper to a very white region of stardom, the A-list. All of that is over. Smith is now a subject for historians: How did he rise? How long did he last? Why did he fall? What mood defined the twilight of his glory? How does he compare to other historical subjects like Cruise and Gibson? Can we agree that After Earth was his Water World? Box Office Guru:

Will Smith suffered the worst summer opening of his career with the big-budget flop After Earth which settled in at number three with an estimated $27M, about half of what the former bulletproof box office star would normally attract for this kind of movie. Panned by critics, and likely setting itself up for multiple Razzies next year, the Sony release averaged $7,939 from 3,401 theaters.

The father-son project starred his son Jaden Smith (who got top billing) and was directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Since hitting it big with The Sixth Sense, the filmmaker has only had one movie open worse - 2006's the Lady in the Water with $18M. With horrible reviews and awful buzz, audiences stayed away from the futuristic action pic. After Earth even fared worse that Smith's Wild Wild West from 1999 which bowed to $27.7M over the three-day portion of a long holiday weekend on its way to $113.8M.

Is Will Smith's star on the wane? After Earth's weak box office isn't the only indicator… gu.com/p/3ga35/tw

— Guardian Film (@guardianfilm) June 3, 2013

Lots of reviewers are hating the living fuck out of M. Night Shyamalan's movie After Earth. The Wall Street Journal asks if it's "the worst movie ever made," and the reviewer warns, "I've never seen a movie that moves so slowly." (That reviewer apparently doesn't watch foreign films, I guess.) As for me? I didn't totally hate it, but I wouldn't recommend it either. At least, I liked it better than the somewhat similar Tom Cruise sci-fi movie Oblivion that came out earlier this year.

But here's an interesting little bit of M. Night Shyamalan trivia: Business Week has created a chart showing critical responses to Shyamalan movies transposed over profitability of those Shyamalan movies. The chart seems to make sense at first: As the critical responses (as measured in Rotten Tomato scores) get worse and worse, the profitability of the films goes down. The two lines are practically parallel. But then a funny thing happens. As the critical response on his last two films, The Happening and The Last Airbender, continues on a steady path downward, the profitability begins to rise again.

This doesn't seem to make much sense at first, but here's what I think is happening: As his popularity waned, all of Shyamalan's faux-intellectualism was slowly drained from his movies. Even Lady in the Water, which is one of the worst movies I've ever seen, had a patina of smug self-satisfaction to it. It was a movie that clearly thought highly of its own intelligence. But Shyamalan finally became enough of a failure that he decided to go lowest-common-denominator, and that's when his movies became profitable again. This chart is proof of that great old Mencken quote.

So where will After Earth fall on this chart? I don't think it's quite as dumb as The Happening, and I'm sure it'll be more profitable. Even if it bombs, which is a possibility, a Will Smith bomb will be more successful than a late-Shyamalan success. And the critical response has been dreadful. Frankly, though, I'm wondering how many of the reviews are built on the director's name and reputation. Don't get me wrong: Don't bother seeing After Earth. Maybe half-watch it when you're stoned one night after you flip across it on cable. But it's definitely not the worst movie of all time. It's barely a blip, with a few very pretty moments, and not worth any sort of fuss at all.

• Yes, His Name Is Supposed To Be "Cypher Raige": How can a man in a white jumpsuit look so completely fucking dour?

After Earth opens with a jarring starship crash. A son, who we will soon learn is named, yes, "Kitai Raige" (Jaden Smith) is terrified and strapped into a seat as all around him people in futuristic jumpsuits panic and scream. Something serious is going on. Then his father, Cypher Raige (Will Smith, who also came up with the story and, one fears, the character's names) tries to console Kitai, but is blown away in a burst of explosive decompression. These few shots are tense and panicky and they make you feel like the movie started too soon. For a split second while watching these scenes, I thought to myself, "FINALLY, a popcorn sci-fi movie that drops you into the action and lets you learn about the world through context, rather than dull exposition!"

And then the exposition started, in the form of a flashback. And holy hell, is it some awful exposition, maybe the worst opening exposition in a sci-fi movie since Green Lantern. We are given the full story of After Earth in a couple minutes of stultifying voiceover. The Earth was polluted beyond repair, so humanity took to the stars. On a new world, we fought some aliens and won, but the aliens sent down these super-scary monsters (they're pale and have many legs and interesting jaws, which is to say that they look like just about every other CGI space monster created in the last few years) who are only able to see us when we're afraid of them. When a human isn't afraid of these creatures, they're totally invisible to the creature, which is called "ghosting." And the biggest, baddest monster-hunter is Cypher Raige, who never shows any fear. Cypher's son, though, is full of fear. Kitai's sister was killed by one of the monsters and he wants to follow in his father's footsteps, but he's crippled by doubt.

Finally, when we get back to the thrilling space-crash scenes, which aren't nearly as thrilling the second time around, Kitai wakes up crash-landed on Earth. His dad's legs are broken, and he needs to travel 100 kilometers to get the space-beacon that was in the tail of the starship, which broke off during the landing. What follows is your standard Hollywood hero's journey paint-by-numbers plot, or a really basic video game: Kitai encounters a series of creatures (a leech, a bunch of baboons, a giant vulture) and is challenged but eventually overcomes the creatures one at a time, building, eventually, to a fight with the big boss monster. Did I mention that one of those fear-seeing creatures was on the starship? That's probably going to be important later on. It all moves along quickly enough, and though there aren't any surprises, Jaden Smith is a competent actor, and Will Smith is forced to sit still and emote, which feels like a nice change for him. The script is relatively humorless, and it's not helped by the future-Earthling accents, which sound like a cross between the Kennedy family accent, a fake southern drawl, and a bad British butler.

But the visuals in After Earth are the real star. Somehow, just when everybody finally wrote M. Night Shyamalan off as a director, he manages to do something right. While a lot of After Earth's suspense comes from standard slasher-movie jump cuts, Shyamalan often manages to sneak a gorgeous shot into the mix to make it all ten times more interesting: A membranous wall of the broken starship catches and opens and closes, as if "breathing," on the corpse of a passenger who didn't survive the crash. A pile of dead forest animals is arranged in a particularly alarming way. A toxin causes some disturbing physical side effects. At those few moments, which are scattered throughout the film at seemingly random intervals, you can almost remember a time when people straight-facedly called Shyamalan the next Spielberg. But then something hackneyed happens, and you remember all the shit that's gone down since those days. As it is, he's a gifted hack, and that works just fine for the material he's working with here.

There's not a whole lot of science in this science fiction, but I'd still call it a better sci-fi film than this spring's aggressively mediocre Tom Cruise vehicle Oblivion. While Oblivion was a pastiche of a slew of other, better sci-fi movies all wrapped up in an aesthetic cribbed straight from the Apple Store, After Earth doesn't have any pretensions about its cinematic sourcing. It's your standard father-son movie smooshed together with a child-in-the-wild adventure yarn, tossed around with some interesting-looking tech. Unlike Oblivion, After Earth at least feels honest about its pedestrian nature, and a little honesty goes a long way with a movie like this.

This news has been circling the internet for the last few days:

For those ticket buyers who feel that the trailers are the best part of their filmgoing experience, here's some bad news. According to THR, the National Association of Theater Owners (a.k.a. NATO, but not that NATO) have come up with new guidelines that will limit the length of movie trailers to two minutes. The current industry norm is for trailers to clock in at two minutes and 30 seconds.

I am one of those people who enjoys trailers as an integral part of the whole moviegoing experience. But I'm kind of ambivalent about this news. I think movie trailers could be treated as an art form independent of the movie. But as it is right now, 99% of the trailers I see feel slapped together by an automatic trailer-making program, so 20 percent less of each shitty trailer might wind up being a good thing. And you?

The big thinkers over at the Atlas Shrugged movie site are taking another poll. (Here's the last one.) They provide their commenters with two choices:

If you had to choose, which would you consider the number one priority in casting John Galt?

A. As long as the actor looks and acts like John Galt, I don't care what his personal beliefs are.
B. The actor needs to possess a deep understanding of, and passion for, Ayn Rand's ideas first and foremost.

Surprisingly, a majority of the Ayn Rand-heads don't seem to care as much about the actor's personal views as long as that actor can act. Maybe the awfulness of the last two Atlas Shrugged movies have finally convinced them that skill is more important than sincerity.

And who do the Objectivists see as the ideal John Galt? Benedict Cumberbatch seems to be a popular choice, although there are recommendations for conservative actors Gary Sinise, Kelsey Grammer, Jim Caviezel, and Tom Selleck, too. Daniel Craig, Clive Owen, Nathan Fillion, and even George Clooney are mentioned a few times. Shockingly, only one person mentions Tom Cruise, who for some reason I think would play a great self-satisfied prick.

But if the actor is a liberal, some of the Objectivists demand some sort of a fealty pledge, including the suggestion that the actor "must do a reading in front of an oral board of Ayn Rand readers." Others refuse the idea of "a known liberal" taking the role. "No pinkos should be considered," one reader huffs, while another demands that anyone who is a "major radicle" should be accepted, either.

Basically, though, none of this speculation matters. As someone who has seen both of the Atlas Shrugged movies, I assure you that John Galt will be played in the third and final movie by some soap opera bit player. Nobody will ever know that actor's name. End of discussion.