This past weekend provided ample opportunities to pay to watch people get punched a lot. If that’s not your thing, there wasn’t much to do other than pretend that Kate’s new baby will somehow bring meaning to your life from an ocean away or watch horses run on a track.
But back to the punching. This weekend brought us two very anticipated pieces of entertainment: Avengers: Age of Ultron and the Floyd Mayweather/Manny Pacquiao boxing match. Each made more money than I will ever be able to dream of as I sit here and eat Ramen noodles for breakfast. Age of Ultron brought in $84.5 million dollars on Friday alone (finally, people have something other than Paul Blart to go see) and the MayPac fight is estimated to have brought in $400 million.
Of course, they were not equal in the bang-for-your-buck department. Ultron costs between $10 and $20 a ticket, depending on how gullible you still are to see movies in 3D. The MayPac fight cost $100 through pay-per-view, and the usual method of mooching off a bar’s subscription wasn’t really an option. Also, most people seem to feel that the MayPac fight was a waste of time. I don’t follow or know much about boxing (who does?), but from what I’ve been able to gather from Twitter and Google News searches as I sit here in my underwear eating another bag of Ramen noodles, the fight was really boring. Pacquiao landed one punch in the fourth round, but otherwise, Mayweather defensively jabbed Pacquiao enough times to be declared the winner after 12 rounds. He won based on judges and points, which makes boxing just like gymnastics and figure skating, I guess.
Ultron, by contrast, seems to be getting a positive reception. And despite not doing anything with Quicksilver anywhere near as cool as what Days of Future Past did, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s as fun as summer blockbusters get. Plus, even as they are punching the shit out of robots and/or Hulks, the superheroes actually act like heroes, are aware of the collateral damage they’re causing and go out of their way to minimize it while getting innocent civilians out of danger’s way. Unlike some Superpeople.
Either way, it was a fine weekend for fulfilling our basic human desire to watch things get hit real good. Hopefully all the brain trauma will help us ignore the fact that Adam Sandler is using makeup to darken minority actors’ skin for his upcoming western “comedy.”