December in Review

This is a sample issue meant to give everyone a taste of The Popcorner before our official launch. The polls are live, though, so feel free to participate. Thank you in advance for reading and you can click here to subscribe :).

Happy new year! It is once again early January and I am once again attempting to work out regularly. But this time is different, I swear. I actually have a goal that’s something other than wanting to be fit: I want to be able to comfortably carry my cat with one arm, which currently is not possible even though he only weighs 11 pounds.

Today’s feeling: Sore 🤕

What have we been watching?

Arguably, Netflix had the biggest releases of the month and kept them pretty close to the chest—titles like Matilda the Musical, The Witcher: Blood Origin, and the highly anticipated Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery didn’t drop until just before or on Christmas here in the US. We also saw the premiere of Yellowstone prequel series 1923. All this Yellowstone talk is tempting me to watch it, but my TV Time watchlist isn’t so keen on the idea.

What kept you guys cozy this month? Drop it in the poll below! I barely watched any holiday movies, which is truly a bummer, but I did—like a lot of you it seems—watch the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special and it confirmed my opinion that Mantis is easily the most powerful guardian in the bunch. What a queen.

Weekly top 10s for TV

This month, I’m introducing some awards. The first award is The Serpent 🐍 and goes to anything that manages to stay on the chart for the whole 4/5 weeks. This isn’t super hard for tv shows to do, but tracking it is fun so indulge me.

We had 3 winners in December: Wednesday, Tulsa King, and Mythic Quest. Wednesday comes as no surprise, seeing as how its streaming numbers are off the charts. Mythic Quest has stayed fairly low on the chart since its first appearance, but it’s also stayed on for a full 8 weeks and is the current title holder of our next award, The Marathoner 🏃🏾‍♀️. Very cool, cool, cool.

Willow and Doom Patrol are both holding strong at 4 weeks so far. I’ll keep an eye on them and see how they fare in January. Whether I catch up with Doom Patrol is a different conversation but after all of the candle-wax madness at the end of season 2, I’d be a fool not to.

Weekly top 10s for movies

Our Serpent champion of November, Enola Holmes 2, was immediately supplanted in the first weekend of December by The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. Mantis, Drax, and Kevin Bacon now share the title along with Bullet Train, which hit Netflix that same weekend. Congrats to my favorite twins Tangerine & Lemon!

For the first time ever (since I started tracking this data), we have not just one but TWO winners of the Leap Frog award 🐸. Falling for Christmas and Zoolander both dropped off of the chart only to bounce back the next week. That’s just the power of being really, really, really, ridiculously good-looking, I suppose.

While I wish these stats were based on the full weeks rather than weekends, the fluidity of movies compared to TV gives us a lot more titles to look at, which is incredibly fun for me. I have a strong feeling that we’ll see Glass Onion and Top Gun: Maverick on the chart well into January, especially considering how slow the beginning months tend to be in terms of releases.

What’s on the schedule next month?

We've entered what I like to call the breather period of the year. January is notorious for being the dumping ground month, where studios put projects that they’re not entirely sure will do super well. Though, as the years progress, that seems to be becoming less and less true. Case and point, The Last of Us. The adaptation of the highly acclaimed video game series premieres on HBO on the 15th, and will probably be the biggest show for the next few months.

We’re also seeing the release of Kenya Barris’ You People on Netflix at the end of the month. This movie’s very much in the vein of Guess Who (2005) starring Bernie Mac, which was a play on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). It’s also similar to Our Family Wedding (2010) and countless other films, no doubt. Considering its cast, it could be really funny! But it could also just be another Netflix Original and their track record is…mild, to say the least.

This isn’t a streaming release but I’ve been anticipating Sony’s Missing for a while. I was a really big fan of 2018’s Searching so when I heard that that team was doing a pseudo-sequel, I knew I’d be tuning in for sure.

Let me know what you guys are looking forward to this month in the poll below and I will talk to you all in February! 💕