Good grief, Charlie Brown! Your studio has decided to open your new movie against a Marvel film.
20th Century Fox has rescheduled its untitled new Peanuts movie from a November 25, 2015 release to November 6, 2015 debut ... which puts it head-to-head at the box office with director Edgar Wright's Ant-Man.
Peanuts takes over the slot originally slated for a different Fox release, B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherworldly Operations, which has been shifted to September 25, 2015 instead.
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode follow...
"I know what this is. This is a les liaisons dangereuses."
"Oh s***!"
The Always Sunny Gang rebounded big time this week with "Charlie and Dee Find Love." A laugh riot through and through, this was Season 8's best episode so far, revolving around Charlie and Dee getting pulled into the life of the wealthy Taft family via beautiful siblings and heirs Trevor (Josh Casaubon) and Ruby (Alexandra Daddario).
Initially, Dennis, Mac and Frank see this an an opportunity to mooch off the rich, but then become flabbergasted when Trevor and Ruby aren't completely and utterly repulsed by Charlie and Dee during a fancy double dinner date. Man, just watching Charlie squeal when the cheese tray rolled up and then resisting for about ten seconds before just shoving his face into the entire thing like a hog was incredible. "Can the girl not smell Charlie? Can the guy not see Dee?" Dennis was totally confused, until he realized that the entire thing was an elaborate 1% "Dinner for Schmucks"-style mind game designed to humiliate the poor and revolting.
Meanwhile, Mary Elizabeth Ellis returned as "The Waitress," still never revealing her name even though she called Dennis directly in order to reach Charlie. It was a pretty funny gag, hearing only Dennis' side of the conversation, with him not being able to recognize her by whatever name she was saying. "Just say waitress next time," Dennis demanded.
Anyhow, Dennis and Mac decided to split up in order to discover Trevor and Ruby's ultimate scheme, leading to vagina punching, some shampoo laced with rat poison and Dee doing a horrifically un-sexy lap dance to "Bad Company" by Bad Company. "Let's hump!" she drunkenly commanded. One of the most gratifying things about this episode, aside from the fact that it had many hilarious exchanges, was that not everyone in The Gang was a complete moron. Sure, they were freaks, but Dennis was actually right about Dee being used by Trevor to show his frat buddies that he could find the biggest loser. Yeah, he was wrong about Charlie's situation, but Charlie still "won"; having a secret plan of his own to use Ruby in order to make The Waitress jealous.
Of course, in Charlie's mind, winning means merely going back to the way things were; with him doing insane and random stuff that he thinks helps keep The Waitress safe...from a court-imposed distance. "I guess Charlie had the cruelest intentions of all," said Dennis, halfway impressed. It isn't often that The Gang gets a win, even a tainted one, so for Dennis to actually be able to ruin Taft's big public offering announcement with his "Mac/Trevor Definitely Not Gay Sex" video was a lot of fun.
Frank didn't have much to do in this one, but I did laugh heartily when, after being discovered by The Waitress in her apartment, he said, from behind a wall, "I'm your neighbor" before jumping out and screaming at her until she ran out the front door. So yes, these are the kinds of episodes I relish. Always Sunny might not hit it out of the park each and every week, but episodes like this prove that there's still gas in the tank. To mix up my sports and car metaphors.
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and on IGN at mattfowler. No other choice you will ever make will be as easy and render such a great reward.
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode follow...
"You see free soup, you make a decision to eat it!"
Ugh, what were Mac and Charlie eating anyhow? It looked like old, cold French Onion soup without the cheese. At least that's the horrible taste I imagined when they were slurping it.
Yes, the Always Sunny gang is back for Season 8 (wow!) and kicking things off with a good old fashioned Nazi treasure hunt. Specifically, Adolph Hitler's priceless, hokey painting of a German Shepherd. A dog that Hitler must of of lost, mourned, and, according to Charlie, used an an excuse to exact vengeance upon the entire world. "Pop-Pop: The Final Solution" wasn't always killer, but it was still a decent enough way to open up the season given that we're now eight years deep into the rancid exploits of the wonderfully filthy and stupid denizens of Paddy's Pub.
The highlight of this one, for me, was Dennis and Sweet Dee discovering that they went to a racist Nazi youth camp when they were young, clearly not remembering the details of what the irate counselor was screaming at them in his speeches. But what caused them to take a trip down Aryan memory lane? Well, their dearly beloved, and currently rotting, Pop-Pop is being kept alive in a death-soaked, soup-filled hospital room by tubes and they have to decide whether or not to pull the plug on the old bastard.
Shorter cable seasons, and the ability to say just about everything except "f***" on FX, have helped preserve this show, keeping it mostly fresh a long while. But we're still years and years deep into Always Sunny and it's become harder to shock us with the gang's outrageous antics. I still expect to get two or three gems out of Season 8, like Season 7's "The Gang Goes to the Jersey Shore" and "Chardee MacDennis: The Game of Games," but I'm afraid this premiere wasn't the treasure I was hoping for. But it did show, like the Jersey Shore episode, that there's still comedy to be mined from Dennis and Dee misremembering their clearly effed-up formative years.
While Dennis and Dee went back and forth on whether or not to kill their creepy, corpse-like Pop-Pop, who was lying in a room that felt like something out of the movie Seven, Mac and Charlie were on the hunt! In a story that's sure to be adapted later into a big-budgeted "Ryan Gosling as Indiana Jones" Da Vinci Code-style thriller. It's always fun to watch these two spiral into insanity only to revisit their entire idea at the end and discover that one of them was just lying the whole time. This time it's Charlie, who was just pretending to think the dog painting was worth millions to get Mac to help him look for his favorite painting. Except, of course, Charlie had good reason to actually believe the picture could have been worth something. He just chose not to think that.
So throw in a few tasteless jokes about gassing, dog executions and a slight nod to dental torture and you've got yourself an Always Sunny stew goin'! All so that Frank, Mac and Charlie could get their hands on an "original Hitler." "It belongs in a museum!" Mac screamed, channeling his inner-Indiana. Brian Unger appeared, once again, as the gang's beleaguered attorney, providing us with one normal "real life" character to sync up with amidst the craziness. David Hornsby was also back as Cricket, with a wicked new scar on this face and a new job cleaning up giant Mastiff diarrhea at the local pound.
Not a total riot, but when placed side-by-side next to all the new, horrible network comedies that popped up this Fall,"Pop-Pop: The Final Solution" was a masterpiece. By Always Sunny standards though, it was okay.
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and on IGN at mattfowler. No other choice you will ever make will be as easy and render such a great reward.
We may know Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield as the faces of your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, but apparently there was once a time when Charlie Sheen nearly joined that roster.
"I had an office at Orion at the time, and I brought them Spider-Man," Sheen told Jay Mohr on the latest episode of his podcast Mohr Stories. "I said, 'Look, in a couple of years, I'll be too old to play Peter Parker.' And they said, 'Yeah, we're just thinking that cartoons are not the future, comic books are not the future.' And I said, 'But it's Spider-Man, I'm perfect.' And they were like, 'Nah, we're gonna wait.'"
But did Sheen really have the rights to the character? According to him, it didn't matter. "I had a guy in my pocket who was going to get them for me," he said. As for Orion, the actor added, "They didn't know s***."
Of course, it wasn't Charlie, but his father Martin Sheen, who would finally make it into the franchise as Uncle Ben in this year's reboot.
Max Nicholson is a writer for IGN, and he desperately seeks your approval. Show him some love on Twitter and IGN.
It was a bit of an awkward situation for the WWE recently when the man they’d promoted as their “Social Media Ambassador” for the 1000th episode of RAW, Charlie Sheen, quit Twitter just a couple of weeks that episode aired – cutting off his main social media connection in the process.
Sheen ended up appearing on the 1000th episode periodically via Skype, which ultimately led to a war of words between the actor and wrestler Daniel Bryan – which, given how WWE operates, most fans assume is setting up some bigger confrontation between the two, likely at SummerSlam, which will take place in Los Angeles again.
Wrestling Wrap Up: WWE RAW’s 1000th Episode
That potential turn of events hasn't been met enthusiastically by some WWE fans, who’d prefer Bryan not be in a storyline so outside the wrestling world. But for the time being, there hasn’t been any actual confirmation on Sheen returning to WWE or specifically at SummerSlam.
Today, at the TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour, I had the chance to ask Sheen about his recent appearance on WWE RAW and the controversial actor said, “Well, the numbers worked for us. Because I cancelled Twitter, I had to do that as a backup plan. It was fun. It was the deepest into that world I’d ever gone. And I guess the guy who was egging me on is a real problem. And he and I will solve that later. Print that.”
Sheen then added, “It was a promotional tool for our show [Anger Management] and I think everybody is going to win on that one. But it was exciting just to step into a different world that I didn’t ever really believe existed – and still don’t!”
When I asked him if perhaps he might look to solve those issues at a televised event on August 19th (as in, SummerSlam), Sheen replied, “Oh, there’s gonna have to be a lot of money on that one, but yeah, if it’s the right look at that moment, sure, why not?”
All of which would seem to imply... It’s probably a safe bet you’ll see him there. The question is, do you want to see him there?
