As the entertainment industry exponentially expands, so does its constant coverage — blogs, podcasts, YouTube shows, and magazines to cover every episode, casting announcement, trailer, and movie release that happens during the course of the week.

Add in all of those “New On Netflix This Week” articles out there and the influx of information for the average pop culture nerd can become overwhelming.

But what if someone fixed that? What if someone compiled all of the must-see trailers, all of the trendiest rumors, all of the pending release dates, all of the most fuego latest gear into one easy-to-consume article?

What if the hero we deserve and the hero we need is actually just a weekly entertainment newsletter?

Wonder no more, because The Hot Box Office is here.

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News & Rumor Roundup

-George Lucas cut “the best lightsaber battle” out of the Star Wars prequels. [read more]

-Ryan Reynolds on who he thinks Deadpool would drunk text. [read more]

-Quentin Tarantino says ‘Kill Bill 3’ is “definitely in the cards.” [read more]

–Star Wars actor John Boyega doesn’t agree with narrative choices made by The Last Jedi. [read more]

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“What’s Dropping Slime?”

6 Underground (Netflix) – Friday, December 12

Jumanji: The Next Level – Friday, December 12

Richard Jewell – Friday, December 12

Bombshell – Friday, December 12

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Trailers & Tings

Ryan Reynolds on who Deadpool would drunk text.

Sneaker Shopping with Jeff Goldblum.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife Trailer

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Classic Sitcom Moment of the Week

“Threat Level Midnight” – The Office (Season 7, Episode 17)

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Throwback Watch of the Week

Official Synopsis: “A young man grows up in the mob and works very hard to advance himself through the ranks. He enjoys his life of money and luxury, but is oblivious to the horror that he causes. A drug addiction and a few mistakes ultimately unravel his climb to the top.”

Our Review: When people ask me how my career as a writer came to be, I already know the answer I’m going to give before the question even finishes rolling off their tongue: my mother’s love for Goodfellas.

Now, to be clear, my Mom is no arthouse, indie film snob — in fact, far from it, as she spent her career working with numbers as a Vice President at Citibank and as a math teacher at Peauqunock Middle School. Her native tongue is numbers. But she’s simply story lover: she loves movies, albeit largely the mainstream ones, and she loves to read. And thus, by the time I was about 11 or 12ish years old, she made sure that I’d seen Goodfellas. Actually, both that and Pulp Fiction. 

While I was likely far too young to fully appreciate either of those films at the time, they had profound impacts on the way my life would unfold, as my love of movies ultimately led me to pursue a career in writing about them.

To this day, despite it being over 15 years since it happened, I still remember the first time I saw Tommy DeVito repeatedly plunge an almost comically large steak knife into the chest of a helpless trunk-bound beaten-to-a-pulp Billy Batts.

As Pesci’s wild eyes — illuminated by the blood-red glow of his ’61 Chevy Impala’s taillights — took a man’s life in the most violent fashion I’d ever seen before, I knew I was seeing something different — this is a different type of movie.

And after seeing Goodfellas, my world was never the same. I couldn’t shake the notion that’s what movies should be. Narrations, tracking shots, classic rock, freeze frames, slick-talking and sharply dressed bad guys who you root for as if they were good guys, Martin Scorsese shaped my — and many others — view of entertainment, and therefore, shaped my life.

From that point forward, I wanted all my favorite movies to look, sound, smell, and feel like Goodfellas — the slickness of the Copacabana shot, the smell of the cigarette smoke in the backroom poker game, the tone of Bob De Niro asking Frankie Carbone and Johnny Roastbeef what the hell is the matter with them, the violence of Henry Hill obliterating his handsy neighbor’s nose to pieces.

Simply put, Goodfellas is one of the great American cinematic masterpieces in history.

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Pop-Culture Must-Cops

Martin Scorsese: Triple Feature (Goodfellas / The Aviator / The Departed) – BUY IT HERE

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Eric is a New York City-based writer who still isn’t quite sure how he’s allowed to have this much fun for a living and will tell anyone who listens that Gotham City is canonically in New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter @eric_ital for movie and soccer takes or contact him eric@brobible.com