Archery scores hits at the box office

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OK, it’s official: with Disney and Pixar's Brave coming out in theaters this weekend, and The Hunger Games and The Avengers already dominating the spring box office, it’s safe to say archery is in for 2012.

Add in Green Arrow, who returns to the small screen this fall on the CW in Arrow (although not from the same universe as the network’s Smallville version of the Emerald Archer), plus William, Snow’s childhood friend in this month’s Snow White and the Huntsman, and the trend starts to look like it might be picking up the same kind of ubiquity as vampires have been the past few years.

The popularity of Merida, Katniss, Hawkeye and Oliver Queen’s chosen sport is likely to pique interest in competition of the non-fiction variety in the upcoming summer Olympics, where the Team USA is expected to continue its streak of dominance.

Archery instructor and Wired’s GeekDad contributor Jim MacQuarrie sums it up nicely:

“Then we’ll have the 2012 Olympics. The United States is currently dominating the sport; our archery team features the No. 1 and No. 2 archers in the world, the team has broken more than 100 world records in the last four years, and Brady Ellison has won gold in at least the last five or six international competitions (usually with Jake Kaminsky not far behind him). Butch Johnson will be shooting in his fifth Olympiad, making for one heck of a human-interest story.”

In a series of posts for GeekDad, MacQuarrie examines the shooting skills and techniques of Merida, Katniss, Green Arrow, and Hawkeye, who range from pitch perfect (the animators at Pixar’s work on Merida) to awful (Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye).

“Frankly, he shoots like a rank amateur,” MacQuerrie writes of Renner. “Does this ruin the movie? No. But if they’d gotten it right, the film would be even better; attention to the details is usually an indicator of attention to the big picture.”