Strange Magic

Last week, ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1’ squeaked past ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ to become the highest grossing film released in 2014. Now, it’s starting to look thing ‘American Sniper’ may clobber them both. With a massive second weekend in wide release, the Clint Eastwood war film looks practically unstoppable at this point. With little to no major competition for the next few weeks, it should easily crack $300 million.

Before he was George Lucas, the guy who changed blockbusters forever with ‘Star Wars,’ he was George Lucas, the guy who changed the way Hollywood used pop music with ‘American Graffiti.’ Though ‘Graffiti’ is maybe Lucas’ seventh most-famous movie, it was hugely influential in its day, and its massive grosses inspired so many imitators it essentially invented a new sub-genre: the radio-hit-scored ensemble coming-of-age movie. 40 years after creating that concept, Lucas returns to destroy it with ‘Strange Magic,’ a high-tech, low-brow update of that formula, with computer-generated fairies and bugs pining after one another over a soundtrack of classic pop songs.

The trailer for ‘Strange Magic’ boasts that the film comes “from the mind of George Lucas.” That great big brain has dreamed up some of the greatest movies of all time. But it’s also produced its fair share of clunkers as well. (Apologies, ‘Radioland Murders’ devotees.) It’s unfair to write off a movie based on a 150-second trailer, but so far, ‘Strange Magic’ looks a lot closer to the latter than the former. Whoa, this looks insane.

George Lucas wrote the story for an upcoming animated musical, which Disney will release on January 23, 2015.