Interstellar And Captain America Top The Saturn Award Nominations
Sci-fi may not fare well at the Oscars, outside of a few technical awards now and again, but at this point, do any of us really put much stock in what the Academy thinks? Almost none of my favorite films from 2014 were nominated for much of anything in any of the usual glut of self-congratulatory awards shows, but one that is always more in line with our general aesthetic are the Saturn Awards, and now the nominees for this year have been released.
As the Academy of Science Fiction Fantasy, and Horror Films chooses the nominees and winners, you can imagine they’re a wee bit different than the more mainstream celebrations, and the list for the 41st Annual Saturn Awards is no different. You’ve got big blockbuster comic book movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America: The Winter Soldier right up there along with independent horror, like The Babadook and The Guest. We’re talking about awards that honor movies like Lucy and Snowpiercer and Paddington, you know it’s a different sort of animal.
Are hotels generally not terrifying enough for you? Do you wake up refreshed and well rested after a night of sleeping on nice clean, crisp sheets wishing that there was more danger of being crushed to death during your stay? Do you lament the fact that there’s not a giant, skyscraper tall monster peeking in your window as you sip your morning coffee? If that’s the case, this awesome 
Ticket sales at the box office may have been at a 20-year low in 2014, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything worth seeing. I’m a firm believer that, no matter the state of the industry, there will always be people making exciting, interesting films, you just might have to look for them. Regardless of what this means for studios and their bottom lines, sci-fi fans had a lot to dig into over the past year. There were huge, spectacle style blockbusters right along side quiet, introspective independent features more concerned with ideas than eye candy, as well as everything in between. There are a few gaps in my genre viewing for the year—I still have yet to watch titles like Young Ones, The Zero Theorem, and Under the Skin for some reason—but in this spirit, here are my top sci-fi movies of 2014.
It’s that time of the year when every inch of the Internet is packed with end-of-the-year lists, from the usual “best and worst” to more eclectic assemblages of data. In this age of widespread broadband, one annual metric that’s always interesting to check is what the most pirated films of the year were. You might think the list is inevitably going to parallel the films with the highest profile or box office — after all, more interest and more word of mouth should theoretically make it more likely that a potential pirate would have a given film in his or her cross-hairs. But that’s not always the case, and this year’s list of most pirated films does contain several surprises…and a whole lot of science fiction.
There’s no denying just how hugely popular Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla reboot was, taking in over $200 million here in the U.S. and another $324 million around the world. The moody disaster flick was also a huge hit in Japan, and that got the original Godzilla production company, Toho, thinking about dollar signs. So it makes perfect sense that the studio announced it will begin developing its first Godzilla movie in ten years, with a release tentatively scheduled for 2016. Is there a Japanese equivalent to 
