The weirdest part of the whole Holiday pool is the mini-break that always happens after the Thanksgiving movies. What’s often a two-week span of November leftovers became a three-week span this year due to the early Thanksgiving and the lack of any studios having any faith in their films to open during the Holidaze shopping period. You don’t think if Black Panther or Star Wars came out on November 30 people wouldn’t go see it?! If people can find a way to get porn without Starbucks, I’m pretty sure they can find a way to get to the theaters for something they actually want to see.

Many questions were aroused when Universal green-lit another variation of How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Wasn’t it too soon since the live-action Jim Carrey version? Can you trust the diminishing returns of the Despicable Me team to pull this off? And based on the initial trailer, is this supposed to be funny? Somehow people forgot, it’s called How The Grinch Stole Christmas and it prints its own money, people! Dr. Seuss’ cautionary tale about the commercialization of Christmas makes bank and it always has… Cue the Alanis Morissette song.

After the biggest October on record at the box-office, the 2018 Holiday Movie Pool kicked off November with a party of its own. There was music from the 20th century, music from the 19th century, and dollar signs from the 21st century which was music to the ears of movie-execs everywhere.

The Party City costumes have been picked over, the lawn sprinkler restrictions are back on, and, just like last year, after tonight’s Dodgers game I’m looking for some eggnog to spike, so it's time for the 22th Annual Holiday Movie Pool!

Holy Moly, we’ve had four months of movies just fly by! We had big-budget smashes, low budget scares, indy documentaries, animated hi-jinks, and a whole lot of “Wait, what did I see this summer” whenever people ask what you saw. It’s almost like we’ve become that dust at the end of Infinity War where everything we do sort of just slips away. “I’m pretty sure I was playing in the Summer Movie Pool, but the updates were so infrequent, maybe I forgot to play this year?”

With the summer starting to wind down, this was the time for some films to heat up. The low hanging fruit of Solo’s $210 million was ripe for the plucking. Here came some of the biggest things in the last 40 years: ABBA, Denzel, and Tom Cruise. Could they turn the tide or would they be eating tide pods?

While we pretend the summer weekend that only meekly offered Uncle Drew and Sicario 2 never happened, July tried to lay the thunder as June had done. Oh wait, June started off with Adrift and the “meh” Ocean’s 8. Raise your MoviePass if you saw history repeating itself coming.