The Roundup with Jeff Stockton (Season 37 Round 4)

 

Round 4 was weird. Not bad. Not great. Just weird. We got a PlayStation history lesson disguised as an animated adventure, an X-Men spin-off that somehow wandered into road comedy territory, and a horror movie that forgot the most important requirement of being a horror movie. At least the studio made money. Mostly.

ASTRO BOT

I’ll give Astro Bot this: It absolutely understands why people love PlayStation. The movie is basically a guided tour through decades of Sony history, pulling characters, worlds, and references from all across the brand and trying to turn that nostalgia into an actual story.

Does that story always make sense? Not exactly. In fact, it somehow manages to feel both too thin and too complicated at the same time, which is a pretty impressive contradiction. But I appreciated the intent. There’s something genuinely charming about watching filmmakers treat gaming history like mythology instead of disposable fan service. The references aren’t just there so people can point at the screen and yell, “I KNOW THAT GUY!” There’s a real attempt to celebrate what made PlayStation matter to multiple generations of players. Messy? Absolutely. But I’d rather watch an ambitious mess made with affection than another soulless brand exercise.

X-FORCE

This was not the X-Men spin-off I expected Dwight Gallo to write. At all. Instead of another grim sci-fi meditation about mutants being persecuted by society, X-Force plays almost like a deranged road movie. Honestly? It gave me Midnight Run vibes. Just with mutants, automatic weapons, exploding body parts, and Andy Samberg playing Deadpool. And somehow it works.

The tone is radically different from the main X-Men series, but that’s exactly why the movie feels refreshing. Jeffrey Dean Morgan gives Cable the necessary gruff center while everyone around him is allowed to be considerably more ridiculous. There’s violence. There’s gore. There’s dark humor. There are characters behaving like complete lunatics. That’s probably the correct recipe for X-Force. Not every corner of the X-Men universe needs to feel like the end of civilization. Sometimes mutants should just be allowed to shoot people.

PROFITS

Two out of three. I’ll take it. Bloodsong lost money. Astro Bot made enough to essentially cover that damage. Which leaves X-Force doing the actual work for Round 4. Not exactly the most diversified financial portfolio, but profit is profit. After spending portions of Season 36 watching one disastrous release erase multiple successful ones, there’s something comforting about a round where the math ends with a plus sign. Would I prefer three profitable movies? Obviously. But two out of three? Meat Loaf had a point.

BLOODSONG

Here’s the frustrating thing about Bloodsong: The story itself is perfectly functional. Characters have motivations. Events progress logically. The structure works. All the basic pieces are there.

Unfortunately, someone forgot the horror. I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t unsettled. I wasn’t particularly disturbed. And if you’re making a horror movie, those are fairly significant problems. The Native American historical elements give the story a compelling foundation, and there are ideas here that could have produced something genuinely haunting. But horror can’t survive entirely on concept. Eventually the movie has to make the audience feel something other than admiration for its research. Bloodsong never did that for me.

ASTRO BOT

Yep. Both sections. Because Astro Bot is one of those movies where I enjoyed myself while simultaneously wondering what the hell the screenplay was doing. The concept is charming. The visual imagination is strong. The PlayStation nostalgia works. The storytelling? Not so much.

Characters appear because the movie needs another reference. Plot rules get introduced and discarded. The narrative keeps expanding even though the central story was never particularly complicated to begin with. At times, it feels less like a movie and more like someone trying to connect fifty different PlayStation Easter eggs with red string on a corkboard. I had fun. I also wanted somebody to grab the screenplay and say, “Okay, but what is the actual story?” Sometimes enthusiasm needs an editor.

STARS

This round was missing something. Star power. And I think the box office reflected it. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is excellent. Sophia Lillis is talented. Devery Jacobs is talented. Emma Corrin is talented. There are plenty of good actors scattered across these films. But there’s a difference between being a good actor and being the person whose face sells the movie. Nobody in Round 4 really brought that. There wasn’t a Tom Cruise. There wasn’t a Margot Robbie. There wasn’t even somebody who felt like they were clearly ascending into that territory. X-Force had the franchise. Astro Bot had PlayStation. Bloodsong had its concept. But none of them had a lead where I thought, “People are buying tickets because that person is on the poster.” That matters. Maybe less than it used to. But it still matters. And this round felt like proof.