A couple of offers on console bundles have popped up recently on eBay. The first, from NewEgg’s portal, has the Xbox One S Minecraft bundle for the low price of $200.
The bundle includes a white, 500GB Xbox One S, and a copy of Minecraft. This is a pretty good price, even if you’re not interested in Minecraft. The deal is available for 29 days, or until supplies last.
Then we have the PlayStation 4 Uncharted 4 bundle from seller Antonline. Priced $210, this one comes with a PS4 Slim and a copy of the game. This is also the 500GB version, available until supplies last.
One thing to note with the PS4 bundle, though, is that you can only see the price at checkout.
Saturday AM writethru after Friday 3rd UPDATE: Paramount is seeing slightly better numbers on a film that opened this past Tuesday in previews and has been stuck in second gear. The latest pic in its franchise —Transformers: The Last Knight — is on track to take in about $40M+ for the three-day and is looking at a $63.9M five-day, which would be the lowest opening in the series of five films. The last time out, Transformers: Age of Extinction grabbed $100M in its opening weekend in 2014 also in June. It seems the studio and Hasbro has squeezed every drop out of this film franchise; audiences are clearly growing tired of it.
Meanwhile, Warner Bros./DC’s Wonder Womancleared the $300M mark yesterday with $7.3M and is expected to hit $319.4M by Sunday. Currently, the Patty Jenkins-directed movie is expected to pull in $26.17M for the weekend, which would inch out Dark Knight ($26.11M) to become the best fourth weekend for a Warner Bros. release ever at the domestic box office. Soon, Wonder Woman will overtake Suicide Squad ($325.1M) and Batman v. Superman ($330.3M) to become the third highest grossing DC title ever after TheDark Knight ($534.9M) and The Dark Knight Rises ($448.1M).
In its second weekend out, Cars 3 should drive past the $100M mark for Disney/Pixar, depending on how strong the family audience attendance is today and Sunday. That would mean a 52% drop for $25.6M. The picture that is just tanking in its second weekend is the Tupac Shakur biopic All Eyez on Me, which kept its theaters but it sinking like a stone in its sophomore frame, down possibly 78% with $5.88M.
REX/Shutterstock
More interesting are the performances of films in the Specialty box office. The Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan comedy The Big Sick from Amazon and Lionsgate could pull off $80K per screen in its five theaters its first weekend out. To date in 2017, that’s the best opening theater average beating Beauty and the Beast‘s $42K. The husband/wife duo promoted this film at CinemaCon earlier this year and it was one of the highlights of the convention, primarily because Nanjiani had everyone in stitches. As reported exclusively by Deadline, Amazon scooped up The Big Sick at Sundance for $12M. Can they make their money back? Given the notable per theater here, an expansion is obviously in store. The movie is certified fresh by Rotten Tomatoes at 97% and that equals more foot traffic.
Focus Features
Sofia Coppola’s drama The Beguiled, which premiered this year at Cannes and stars Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning, is also in a handful of theaters and may pull in a per screen average of around $65,6K from its four theaters. The Beguiled is also in its first weekend. While Beguiled is 74% fresh, it has the distinction of having Cannes kudos best director for Coppola as well as Nicole Kidman’s special 70th anniversary prize.
Other indies, like the Mike White/Miguel Arteta satirical comedy Beatriz for Dinner expanded to 491 theaters after a great performance for distributor Roadside Attractions’ last weekend. The film, which has been getting critical kudos since it premiered at Sundance, stars Salma Hayek and Jonathan Lithgow. And you gotta give kudos to the marketing team on this one for the fun trailer and visuals.
Here’s the chart as of Saturday AM:
1). Transformers: The Last Knight (PAR), 4,069 theaters / $15.65M Wed. (includes Tuesday preview of $5.5M) / $8.1M Thurs. / $13.7M Fri. / 3-day cume: $40.1M / Total cume: $63.9M / Wk 1
Book of Henry (FOC), 646 theaters (+67) / $325K Fri. / 3-day cume: $1.1M (-21%) / Per screen: $1,741 / Total: $3.2M / Wk 2
The Big Sick (AMAZ/LGF), 5 theaters / $105K Fri. / 3-day cume: $322K to $400K / Per screen: $64Kto $80K / Wk 1
The Beguiled (FOC), 4 theaters / $68K Fri. / 3-day cume: $210K / Per screen: $52,190 / Wk 1
— Anita Busch reported Friday night numbers. Anthony D’Alessandro handled Saturday AM writethru
2nd UPDATE, Friday, 12:24 PM: Paramount’s Transformers: The Last Knightis looking at an estimated $12.5 million today based off of midday matinees, with a current outlook that’s just under $60M over five days. That number could fall if these estimates don’t maintain themselves into the night. Three-day already is estimated at $36.5M.
Again, this is a waning property stateside, which many in town believe Paramount strictly made for China, which is bound to clear a $100M opening per Deadline’s Nancy Tartaglione. That territory repped close to a third of Age Of Extinction‘s $1.1 billion take. And even though China for Last Knight is pacing ahead of Extinction by 69%, some analysts believe it may not even finish in the $300M-plus range when all is said and done.
After drawing a profit of $250M on the last movie (merchandise alone generated $30M), it only made sense financially for Paramount to make another Transformers film, and a prolific writers roundtable led by Akiva Goldsman cannot put these robots back together again when there’s the dominant, repetitive, hyper-CGI vision of director Michael Bay (who apparently says its his last Transformers). As we’ve pointed out, critics have zero patience for Last Knight and moviegoers’ interest is on the decline.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros/DC’sWonder Woman, which is clicking past Universal’s Mamma Mia! on a worldwide basis to become the highest-grossing live-action movie directed by a female with $610M, will stay planted in second place with an estimated $26M take (down a marvelous 37%). By Sunday, the Patty Jenkins-directed movie will hurl itself past $319.2M, just $5.8M shy of taking out Suicide Squad and another $11.1M before Wonder Woman shows Batman V. Superman ($330.3M) who exactly is the boss at the box office. Wonder Woman is looking at an estimated $7M today.
Disney/Pixar’s Cars 3 is also driving toward $7M today, but as of this minute is expected to come in under Wonder Woman in third with $23M, down 57% from last week, for a running 10-day take of $97.7M by Sunday.
Lionsgate’s Codeblack Entertainment’s All Eyez On Meis expected to gross $2.7M today for a second weekend of $8M, down 70%, for a 10-day total of $40.8M.
We’ll have more updates tonight.
PREVIOUS, Friday 7:32 AM: Thursday wasn’t expected to be high for Paramount’sTransformers: The Last Knight at the domestic box office,but the downer $8.1 million day, off 48% from its $15.65M opening, doesn’t help the Hasbro pic’s five-day opening.
Through two days, Last Knight counts an estimated $23.7M at 4,069 venues, and some analysts even think there’s a chance the Michael Bay title may even fall below $60M in its five-day opening. Last Knight cost a reported $217M before P&A and will rely on overseas ticket sales to get it to any profit point. The last movie, which grossed a then-domestic final low of $245.4M, minted $1.1 billion worldwide good for a $250M profit after all post-theatrical streams were counted. We’ll have a better idea by noon where domestic lies for Last Knight, and overseas results will be coming in soon. What’s interesting is that no other studio dared to counter-program Last Knight, which is funny because it’s not like the movie is vacuuming up the weekend’s business.
While the fifthquel declined to a B+ CinemaScore from the A- earned by its previous chapter Age Of Extinction, ComScore/Screen Engine’s PostTrak even shows a tiring among audiences between installments. Moviegoers gave Last Knight a mundane 75% positive score versus 84% on Age Of Extinction. Word of mouth has even declined from a 69% definite recommend on AOE to 55% on Last Knight. PostTrak shows mostly men occupying seats at Last Knight, at 61%. How that breaks down: men 25+ (33%), men under 25 (29%), women 25+ (23%), and women under 25 (16%). Most people are watching Last Knight in 3D at 53%. A bulk of Last Knight‘s sales are from walk-up business, with 80% purchasing tickets at the theater. Forty-four percent of moviegoers attended Last Knight because it’s part of a franchise they like, while 16% came for star Mark Wahlberg.
Disney/Pixar’s Cars 3 made $4.4M yesterday in second place, raising its week’s cume to $74.7M, off 10% from the first week of Cars which made $83.3M in seven days and ended its stateside run at $244M.
Entertainment Studios
Warner Bros/DC’s Wonder Woman grossed $4M in third at 4,018 for a running three week cume of $293.2M. Entertainment Studios’ 47 Meters Down rose up in the daily rankings to fourth with $1.2M at 2,270 and a week’s cume of $16.7M. Lionsgate’s Codeblack Entertainment’s All Eyez On Me made $1.09M at 2,471 and a week’s tally of $32.8M. Where’s Sony’s Rough Night? All the way down in eighth place with $878K and a seven-day take of $11.9M.
Meanwhile, hope resides for the Culver City studio with their romantic action title Baby Driver, opening Wednesday, and currently maintaining a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score.
Coding curricula is sweeping into classrooms across the country, thanks to programs such as Code.org. According to the Education Commission of States, about 20 states now require that districts allow students to apply specified computer science courses toward completion of mathematics, science or, as a foreign language. But is coding preoccupying the hearts and minds of students after school hours? This is the question that researchers at the MIT Media Lab are asking.
It was there that one of the most popular learn-to-code tools, developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group, was born in 2007. And while it has inspired a flurry of copycat offerings from other developers, Scratch has retained a loyal following: Today the platform claims over 100 million users around the world.
So what keeps these users, er, scratching their itch to code?
Upon entering the offices of the Lifelong Kindergarten groups, one immediately notices images of the whimsical orange “Scratch cat” plastered all over the walls. It is clear that the project has become a source of pride and the center’s claim to fame. That’s where we met Natalie Rusk, one of Scratch’s creators, who is now researching how kids find and sustain the motivation to code.
Rusk with the Scratch cat
To conduct this research, she interviewed over a hundred Scratch users who are active on the platform not just during or after school, but even after a student has graduated and moved on to another school. The key, Rusk found, are what she calls “interest-based communities” that play a strong role in keeping students engaged and learning to code long after school is over.
Scratch was originally built as a program to introduce children to basic programming concepts. Yet the online communities that have sprung suggest the tool wields a much larger influence. “Too often people are positioning Scratch as a stepping stone to other things, whereas we see from our interviews that Scratchers keep going deeper and broader and contribute back either online or offline to other people,” says Rusk.
She describes the Scratch community as a youth development program where many users start, some leave, but others stay and become leaders on the platform. The community, similar to those on other platforms like Reddit, is difficult to quantify since it simply consists of active members who engage with each other to the point that they call one another “friends.” Users do find ways to act on those friendships, celebrating “Scratchaversarys” (similar to an online birthday), by offering coding projects and comments as gifts to one another. Reading through the comment streams on projects, one can easily get a sense of the communal atmosphere where users congratulate each other on getting featured, wish each other happy Scratchaversarys, make jokes with one another and even share personal details about their lives.
New coding cards MIT offers to teachers to build interest-based coding activities
“Initially I was the one who questioned the word ‘community.’ I mean, they were posting projects and writing comments. How is that community?” says Rusk. But when she interviewed many of the users to see why they stayed on the platform, she found that many of them referred to each other as “friends.”
“We interviewed one kid from England who said he wanted to give back on the site because he benefited so much,” explained Rusk, “But when we asked him if he also did that in school he said, no, because he moved around [to different schools] so much.” She says several students share a similar sentiment—especially those whose friends and sense of community come from the coding platform. It is those types of students who she sees as lifelong Scratchers, ready and excited to code for life.
Rusk hopes to cultivate these online communities by allowing them to explore programming projects specific to their hobbies in music, arts and games. It is their theory that by allowing students to engage in interest-based groups that they will become engrossed in the community and code beyond the classroom.
Perhaps the only online coding community that could compete with Scratch for kids’ attention is Minecraft, which aims to provide kids with a similar sense interest- and peer-based exploration. Recently its developers released a coding addition to the game that has sold over 121 million copies.
Its developers at Microsoft hope to cultivate a large, open community for teachers and students around coding. “Before we launched the Education edition [of Minecraft] we spent about a year out with the Minecraft community, listening and learning,” said Neal Manegold, a senior manager at Minecraft Education, in an interview with EdSurge.
Educators told Manegold that most of their students spend a lot of time on Minecraft projects outside of the classroom, but they don’t view the projects as educational in nature as many of them are simply playing the game.
There was already a strong community of Minecraft users, but to maximize learning on the platform, he had to build an active community of educators as well. To do this, the Minecraft team offered a mix of in-person training and online sessions, including forums, Twitter chats and live streamed workshops where educators can teach each other, something Manegold says is important to keep them engaged and creative.
Manegold says that teachers have already been using Minecraft to teach subjects such as History and Engineering by having students recreate three-dimensional replicas of ancient ruins, and he sees the addition of coding expanding the opportunities for educators to use the software for interdisciplinary learning.
“Adding coding to the platform has brought people who were coding-focused, but not necessarily Minecraft focused on to the platform,” says Manegold. “They bring a depth of expertise for people who are interested in Minecraft but don’t have expertise in Computer Science. It is exceedingly valuable to all involved.”
Following on from the recently announced “Better Together” update for Minecraft: Xbox One Edition at E3, Mojang have now revealed their next DLC in the form of a graphics pack, the “Super Duper Graphics Pack”. They do point out that this upgrade is optional, so if you like things the way they are, you don't need to change it.
This Fall, along with a free update that will allow Minecraft to be played with 4k graphics, the “Super Duper Graphics Pack” will improve a whole bunch of aspects of your game. Some of these include – “features like dynamic shadows, lighting that streams through fog, movement in leaves and grass, new textures for mobs and villagers, directional lighting, edge highlighting and more”. It all sounds very impressive, and to show it off a little bit more, we've got a trailer to share with you too.
The “Super Duper Graphics Pack” will be arriving, along with the 4k update, this Fall. It will be available for Xbox One, Xbox One X and Windows 10, with Mojang pointing out that this pack will be “performing best on high-end PCs and the Xbox One X”.
Minecraft is a global phenomenon. Nowadays it’s rare to find a gamer unfamiliar with the title itself. What originally started off on PC has expanded to nearly every device. Consoles, mobile — some gamers can even play it on their streaming devices.
Mojang made its presence felt at E3 2017. Aside from the Xbox One X 4K update, big news was revealed for fans of the series. Gamers can soon play Minecraft with friends on nearly every platform thanks to new servers. These servers will support Xbox One, PC, Switch, VR, and mobile. Check out the update reveal below.
The “Better Together” update is set to drop this summer.
It was just announced at Microsoft's E3 conference that Minecraft will become a cross play title. This means that gamers will be able to play with their friends across multiple platforms including Windows 10, VR, and console. This functionality comes with massive servers and a community marketplace in the “Better Together Update”.
The “Super Duper Graphics Pack” will also be available for the game this fall. This update is a 4K visual upgrade for the Xbox One X. Check out the trailer for it below.
Both of these updates will be coming later this year, so prepare for cross play and some blocks that are about to look a whole lot better.
