Weekly Update: Fringe Renewed!!! Plus Avatar Wins 3 Oscars though Not Best Picture and Alice is Wonderful at the Box Office
March 8th, 2010 CommentsCategories: Box Office Results, Cancellation Watch, News and Updates, Sci Fi Scroll
Well apparently that Johnny Jay guy knows what he is talking about in his Cancellation Watch column as Entertainment Weekly has reported that FOX will renew J.J. Abrams’ Fringe for a third season. The series has struggled all season in the ratings since the network moved it to Thursday nights where it has to compete with powerhouses CSI on CBS and Grey’s Anatomy on ABC and many sources across the internet have listed it as a “bubble” show or endangered for most of the season. John J. Joex, though, has insisted throughout the season that FOX would stick with it, especially seeing how it has improved that network’s numbers on Thursday where it previously had little success. There is no word on whether the show will remain in the Thursday 9 PM EST timeslot next year or whether this was a 13 episode or 22 episode pickup. Still, fans of the show can now put aside their worries that Fringe would not continue beyond its current season.
Once again a James Cameron movie collected multiple Oscars, but this time around not as many as (the incredibly overrated) Titanic and not Best Picture. Avatar lost out to The Hurt Locker in the Best Picture category but did get wins in the Visual Effects, Art Direction, and Cinematography categories. Two other Science Fiction and Fantasy movies took home Oscars last night as well with Star Trek winning the Makeup statue (the first time the franchise has received an award from the Academy) and Up scoring in the Best Animated Film and Best Original Score categories. District 9, which made it to the nominees for Best Picture, got shut out. You can see all of the results from last night’s awards at the Oscar website. And one night before the Academy Awards, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen took top honors at the Razzies.
Critics may not have been enamored with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (including our own Johnny Jay), but audiences definitely flocked to the theaters to see the latest visual adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic book. The movie scored an estimated $116 million domestically, coming in way ahead of expectations and delivering the highest grossing March weekend on record. In fact, the movie had the highest opening ever for a film released outside of the typical mega-blockbuster months: May, July, and November. When you tack on the $94 million that movie also made outside of the states, it brings its opening total to $210 million which finally managed to knock Avatar out of the Number 1 spot globally (that movie fell from Number 1 domestically several weeks ago). If Johnny Jay’s assumption is correct that Disney wanted to launch a new name-brand fantasy franchise with this movie, then it has definitely gotten off to the right start. Falling this weekend were Avatar which went from Number 4 to 5 despite its Oscar buzz, and The Crazies which went from Number 3 to 6 though that one has managed to recoup its budget with its domestic take so far. You can see the full Box Office results from the weekend at Box Office Mojo.
Both ABC and NBC announced their Summer schedules and neither included anything of interest to Science Fiction and Fantasy fans. Both of those networks had offered several entries in the genre during the hot months over the last couple of years like Defying Gravity, Merlin, The Listener, and Fear Itself along with several mini-series and burn-off episodes of cancelled shows like Pushing Daisies, Eli Stone, and Kings. However, none of these shows did much to lure viewers to their televisions during the Summer eveings so apparently both networks decided not to bother this year. For fans of the BBC produced Merlin which NBC aired last Summer, Syfy has picked up that show and will begin airing the first season in April followed immediately by the second season. BBC has also commissioned a third season of the series which will eventually make its way stateside as well.
For more Science Fiction and Fantasy related stories from around the Net, check out our reddit.com page The Sci Fi Scroll (where you can also sign up and submit your own stories).

Survivors of the 1980’s will certainly remember one of the first ever computer animated characters Max Headroom who made a splash in that decade as the spokesperson for Coca Cola (actually, the much reviled “New Coke”) and who also had his own talk show. However, they may or may not remember the short-lived Science Fiction series that featured the character and ran on ABC from 1987-1988. Based on the British TV movie 20 Minutes into the Future, the series starred Matt Frewer (the real-life actor that the digital character was modeled after) and focused on a dystopian near-future where television dominates the lives of every person (wait isn’t that present day society?) and ratings and shows are monitored on a minute-by-minute basis and can get cancelled within a moments notice (that is today!). Max Headroom gave us the first attempt to bring cyber-punk to television (and it was actually one of the very few examples of the genre in this medium) and was really ahead of its time and a bit too heady for Prime Time audiences who preferred to tune into Dallas or Dynasty or Matlock. And it unfortunately disappeared after its initial run with little expose in subsequent years (it was available for online viewing briefly at AOL’s In2TV, but has since been pulled). Fortunately, the series is 