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The Week in Review/The Week Ahead: The Universal Fund [UNIVX], Episode 24
We were up 4.1% last week (Saturday close-Saturday close). Most of that was a result of Pacific Rim 2 taking a bounce on the news of Steven S. DeKnight picking up the director's reins, thereby signaling that the sequel is indeed getting made after all, though obviously not with del Toro at the helm. And that's really it. There's been more varied sources for the fund's increases this week, but that will be reported in 2-3 days when I post about this week.
So let's simply move ahead with looks at the next 3 Universal properties.
The Young Messiah
I'm circling back to highlight this film, which opens wide next week on March 11th. It's a Focus release, but for some reason I hadn't had it in the portfolio until this week. I think perhaps there had been some confusion (at least on my end) whether Focus was indeed going to release it or if it was going to be handled by a different distributor. In any case, it's with Focus now.
The Young Messiah is based on the Anne Rice novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and explores Jesus' childhood, featuring a central performance by Sean Bean in the role of Roman soldier Severus. I have no idea how this will land with audiences, and so I can't really recommend it as a buy. It doesn't look particularly good to me; the real question in my mind is then whether or not it will draw the religious crowds. The best place I can look for comparison is the recently released Risen, which is currently on track to do $30-31. If The Young Messiah duplicates, there's still some room left in its current trading price for some profits, and so the fund is playing it long for the time being.
Dambusters
A penny stock about an Allied air raid on three German dams circa 1954. Had an IPO way back in 2006, and was intended to be the directorial debut of Christian Rivers (an AD & visual effects supervisor for Peter Jackson) with Jackson producing. The last news we had on it was back in 2013; it's basically dead in the water and no longer even has an in-development credit at imdb.
Delirium
A haunted mansion movie courtesy of Blumhouse, starring Topher Grace, Genesis Rodriguez, and Patricia Clarkson. It was scheduled for release on April 1st, then September 30th, and a couple of days ago it lost its date again. It's currently trading for a couple of bucks, so it's a pretty cheap investment. The question here is whether or not Blumhouse is going to finally find a release date and stick with it, or decide to dump it on VOD as they've done with some of their output. It could go either way at this point, but it's not a huge investment, and there's probably not very much downside as long as anyone who buys it watches news items and dumps it within a day or so if it does indeed forego theatrical. The upside is probably somewhere around $10-30 range if it doesn't.
So that catches us up. Universal's next release is London Has Fallen, which opens wide today.
Tag(s): UNIVX
