New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Welcome to How to Spend $20, BOP’s look at the latest Blu-ray discs and DVDs to hit stores nationwide. This week: AMC is so totally over vampires, Johnny Knoxville does something stupid and Morgan Freeman gets all theoretical.

Pick of the Week

For people who anxiously await the will it or won’t it 28 Months Later: The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season

AMC’s The Walking Dead premiered during Fearfest to 5.3 million viewers and then never looked back. Though dipping below five million for two of its half-dozen episodes, the show rebounded to 5.97 million for its season finale – a series high in total viewers and, more importantly, far and away AMC’s best performing original series to date. Mad Men, for example, hasn’t yet crossed three million viewers. And Breaking Bad can’t top two.

I know five million seems rather pithy next to shows like NCIS, which nabs audiences four times as big. But the people that watch NCIS largely don’t have disposable incomes. The Walking Dead, on the other hand, has performed tremendously in the demographic advertisers love – adults 18-49. More than four million 18-49 viewers tuned into the season finale, which was, you know, the most-watched drama series in basic cable history. Even NBC – hell, any broadcast network – would lick its lips at four million 18- to 49-year-olds.

I’ve heard good and bad things about The Walking Dead. The good is that it’s zombie horror drama done well and, I think, a show that remains faithful to the enterprise that came before it (a comic book). The bad is that the writing is, apparently, sucky.





It’ll return with a fresh batch of 13 episodes in October, a year after its Halloween-time premiere.

Disc includes: Making Of The Walking Dead featurette, Inside The Walking Dead: Episodes 1-6 featurette, A Sneak Peek with Robert Kirkman featurette, Behind the Scenes Zombie Make-up Tips featurette, Convention Panel with Producers featurette, The Walking Dead trailer, Zombie School featurette, Bicycle Girl featurette, On Set with Robert Kirkman featurette, Hanging with Steven Yeun featurette, Inside Dale’s RV featurette, On Set with Andrew Lincoln featurette

For bathroom humor enthusiasts: Jackass 3

February 2002: George W. Bush was president, the Winter Games were held in Salt Lake City and Jackass went off the air after three seasons. Seems hard to believe that at the time of Jackass 3’s release, more than eight years had passed – and yet the crude reality show was more relevant than ever. The first two movies did solid business, but their totals ($64 million and $72 million, respectively) really don’t bat an eyelash to Jackass 3’s, a flick that got off to a fast start in October 2010 by crossing $50 million in three days. When Jackass 3 exited theaters in January, it had cumed $117.2 million – or nearly six times its reported $20 million budget.

I’m not sure what the popularity of a series like Jackass says about our culture – or the studio execs who greenlit it. (Or, its stars – Johnny Knoxville is 39!) Apparently, Jackass 3 was a go after the fat cats fell in love with “the heli-cockter,” which had a fellow jackasser tethering a remote-control helicopter to his wang and then swinging it around. I don’t want to come off smug by proposing that I might be too sophisticated for this schlock. But whatever, I’ll own it. I’m too sophisticated for this.

Continued:       1       2