Author: Christopher Marc

Posted on in Film News

‘Kenobi’ Writer Joby Harold Developing A ‘Space Mountain’ Movie For Disney

It looks like Disney is starting to run out of animated films to remake into live-action.

Yesterday, it was revealed by The Hollywood Reporter by that Disney is now returning to it’s theme parks for inspiration for new film ideas and are now working on a live-action feature film based on their sci-fi themed indoor rollercoaster Space Mountain.

Logline details are being kept hidden amidst the rings of Saturn but it is described as a family adventure.

Space Mountain is an indoor roller coaster with a space-theme. The ride was first introduced in Florida’s Walt Disney World Resort in 1975, followed by installations in California’s Disneyland in 1977.

Joby Harold has been assigned to write the screenplay, who is best known for Army of The Dead, King Arthur: The Legend of The Sword, and most recently joined the Kenobi series to do some rewrites for the show. He’s also working on a Transformers film for Paramount.

Harold did uncredited writing on Edge of Tomorrow and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum that earned him producing credits.

Disney is developing two different Pirates of The Caribbean films and a new version of The Haunted Mansion. They are also releasing a feature film in 2021 based on the Jungle Cruise ride starring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt.

SOURCE: THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

Posted on in Television News

Character Lineup Revealed For HBO Max’s ‘Green Lantern’ Series – Will Be Written By Seth Grahame-Smith and Marc Guggenheim

Yesterday, HBO Max and DC Comics made a big splash with announcing their character and creative lineup for the upcoming live-action Green Lantern series for HBO Max.

The Lanterns featured in the series will include Guy Gardner, Jessica Cruz, Simon Baz, Kilowog, and will also feature Sinestro. Original Green Lantern, Alan Scott, is showing up as well and they confirm the character will be openly gay in the series.

They also announced that Seth Grahame-Smith (The Lego Batman Movie, Dark Shadows) will be showrunning the series and writing it alongside Marc Guggenheim.

Here is the official press release from DC Comics.

From DC and HBO Max and Berlanti Productions comes a bold adaptation of the iconic comic book franchise: A saga spanning decades and galaxies. GREEN LANTERN will depict the adventures of a multitude of Lanterns, including Guy Gardner, Jessica Cruz, Simon Baz and Alan Scott—Earth’s first Green Lantern, who, true to the comics, is a gay man—and many more. The series will also include fan favorites such as Sinestro and Killowog, as well as introduce new heroes to the ranks of the Green Lantern Corps.

Green Lantern comes from executive producers and writers Seth Grahame-Smith, who will serve as showrunner, and Marc Guggenheim, along with executive producers Greg Berlanti, Geoff Johns, Sarah Schechter and David Madden. Many of these names should be familiar to DCTV fans, as Berlanti has overseen most of DC’s recent small screen offerings, including The CW’s beloved “Arrowverse,” as well as recent streaming hits Titans, Stargirl and Doom Patrol. Guggenheim and Schechter have both played key roles in many of those shows, including Arrow, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Supergirl and Batwoman, among others. Guggenheim also co-wrote the 2011 Ryan Reynold’s Green Lantern movie along with Berlanti, Michael Green and Michael Goldenberg.

Grahame-Smith may not be as familiar of a name to DC fans, but Green Lantern isn’t the first DC project in which he’s been involved. Grahame-Smith co-wrote the screenplay to 2017’s The Lego Batman Movie, along with 2012’s Dark Shadows, directed by Tim Burton. Prior to that, he gained some notoriety in geek circles with his novels Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Unholy Night.

Surprising nobody, Geoff Johns was announced as the show’s executive producer.

You might remember that Seth was one of the many people tasked to write and direct Ezra Miller’s Flash movie in one of it’s various incarnations.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see what level of quality they’ll be aiming for with the Green Lantern show.

It was also previously announced that James Gunn and John Cena would be reuniting for a Peacekeeper series that would be a spinoff of the upcoming sequel The Suicide Squad.

Matt Reeves and Terrence Winter are also working on a series set in the world of Gotham Police Department that will take place a year before the events of The Batman.

SOURCE: DC COMICS

Posted on in Television News

Ewan McGregor Says His ‘Star Wars’ Series ‘Kenobi’ Begins Shooting In March

Ewan McGregor previously chatted with Entertainment Tonight to promote Apple TV+’s Long Way Up, where he revealed that production on Kenobi has been pushed to the spring and is indeed being planned as a single standalone season. 

MCGREGOR: “Spring next year we start, I’m really excited about it. It’s gonna be great, I think. As I understand, it’s a standalone season. We’ll see. Who knows?” 

This is now an update from Ewan.

Appearing on BBC’s The Graham Norton Show he stated cameras would begin rolling in March, giving an actual start month for the Star Wars series. Originally, they had planned on starting in January.

MCGREGOR: “Yeah, it’s the Obi-Wan Kenobi story I suppose…we start shooting it in March next year.”

While speaking with ACE Universe back in June he confirmed that they would be implementing the StageCraft technology used on The Mandalorian. This could suggest they will be using the new setup at Pinewood Studios UK.

MCGREGOR: “[The prequels] were all blue screen and green screen and it was hard to imagine, but nowadays I think things have moved on so much, and I think a lot of what you see is gonna be what we see on the set. I don’t know if you’ve seen the behind-the-scenes of The Mandalorian series, but they employ that incredible screen…it’s pretty amazing. It makes you feel like you’re in the place, it’s going to feel realer for us, as actors. And I think we’ll be using some of that technology on our show.”

The Mandalorian’s Deborah Chow is directing with recent script rewrites from Army of The Dead’s Joby Harold.

While we’ve had a string of casting announcements for Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor series there haven’t been any for the Kenobi series and with a March start we will likely start hearing some news on that front in the very near future.

SOURCE: THE GRAHAM NORTON SHOW

Posted on in Film News

‘Get Out’ Actress Allison Williams To Star In Robot Horror Flick ‘M3GAN’ From Blumhouse and James Wan

Deadline reports that Get Out star Allison Williams will be reuniting with Blumhouse for a new technology horror film titled M3GAN. Williams will star as the lead character, Gemma, a brilliant robotics scientist.

She will produce alongside James Wan’s Atomic Monster as well.

Williams plays Gemma, a brilliant roboticist at a toy company. She uses artificial intelligence to develop M3GAN, a life-like doll programmed to be a kid’s greatest companion and a parent’s greatest ally. After unexpectedly gaining custody of her orphaned niece, Gemma enlists the help of the M3GAN prototype – a decision that has unimaginable consequences.

The project sounds interesting with a script penned by Akela Cooper (Malignant, The Nun 2, Luke Cage) based on a story by James Wan and will be directed by Gerard Johnstone (Housebound).

SOURCE: DEADLINE

Posted on in Film News

Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange Reportedly Joins ‘Spider-Man 3’ – Should Help Fuel Multiverse Speculation

The Hollywood Reporter has learned that Benedict Cumberbatch has joined the case of Spider-Man 3 reprising his role as Doctor Strange. However, they’re not clear when he’ll shoot his Spider-Man 3 scenes as Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness will begin shooting soon in London, while the Spidey sequel is expected to shoot in stateside in Atlanta, Georgia.

This is a crossover that really shouldn’t surprise fans as the two Steve Ditko superheroes have been interacting with each other and teaming up against villains for many decades in the pages of Marvel Comics.

I seemingly predicted the crossover news back in 2016 with this cheeky tweet stating a crossover would happen in 2020, I also do lottery numbers on request.

There has been plenty of rumblings of Spider-Man 3 tackling The Multiverse/Spider-Verse after the casting news of Jamie Foxx reprising the Electro role and the addition of Doctor Strange into the mix would certainly support that narrative. The problem becomes does Marvel go all-in with focusing on various Multiverse characters/cameos or are getting a superhero film focused on an actual plot.

As THR points out there still seems to be a scheduling issue with the two competing Marvel sequels will productions filming in two different countries at the same time. It is possible that they shoot scenes when there is a break in their schedules or do them at a later date once both films shoot most of their scenes.

I’m slightly curious if Spider-Man will now show up in the Doctor Strange sequel as that could be when theses Spider-Man 3 scenes are shot. This could be exactly how Marvel Studios finishes out the recent contract with Sony Pictures as they get one more film with Holland’s Spider-Man before it expires again.

What could be happening is that Spider-Man 3 is part one of this big Multiverse cinematic event with Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness being the final climax, possibly the final time we see Tom Holland’s Spider-Man in the MCU.

It would also give Sam Raimi another hot at directing Spider-Man again.

Jon Watts returns to direct with a release date of December 17th, 2021 (subject to change).

SOURCE: THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

Posted on in Television News

‘No Time To Die’ Director Cary Joji Fukunaga To Direct WWII Series ‘Masters of The Air’ For Apple TV+ – Produced By Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg

Deadline reports that No Time To Die director Cary Joji Fukunaga will helm at least three episodes of the upcoming WWII series Masters of The Air for Apple TV+.

The wartime series will be produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, who were behind HBO’s Band of Brothers and The Pacific. Cary’s Parliament of Owls joins the producing team alongside Amblin Television and Playtone.

HBO passed on the expensive series and it eventually landed at Apple.

I previously reported that Alien: Covenant and X-Men: First Class production designer Chris Seagers would be working on the show. Seagers is no stranger to the WWII genre as he also worked on Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan as an art director.

Here is a synopsis of the Donald L. Miller book Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, which the series is based on.

Masters of the Air is the deeply personal story of the American bomber boys in World War II who brought the war to Hitler’s doorstep. With the narrative power of fiction, Donald Miller takes you on a harrowing ride through the fire-filled skies over Berlin, Hanover, and Dresden and describes the terrible cost of bombing for the German people.

Fighting at 25,000 feet in thin, freezing air that no warriors had ever encountered before, bomber crews battled new kinds of assaults on body and mind. Air combat was deadly but intermittent: periods of inactivity and anxiety were followed by short bursts of fire and fear. Unlike infantrymen, bomber boys slept on clean sheets, drank beer in local pubs, and danced to the swing music of Glenn Miller’s Air Force band, which toured US air bases in England. But they had a much greater chance of dying than ground soldiers.

The bomber crews were an elite group of warriors who were a microcosm of America—white America, anyway. The actor Jimmy Stewart was a bomber boy, and so was the “King of Hollywood,” Clark Gable. And the air war was filmed by Oscar-winning director William Wyler and covered by reporters like Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite, all of whom flew combat missions with the men. The Anglo-American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany was the longest military campaign of World War II, a war within a war. Until Allied soldiers crossed into Germany in the final months of the war, it was the only battle fought inside the German homeland.

Masters of the Air is a story of life in wartime England and in the German prison camps, where tens of thousands of airmen spent part of the war. It ends with a vivid description of the grisly hunger marches captured airmen were forced to make near the end of the war through the country their bombs destroyed.

Cary has worked on television before with the first season of the hit HBO series True Detective. He most recently directed the final Daniel Craig era Bond movie titled No Time To Die which that has been delayed a second time from November 20th to April 2nd, 2021.

SOURCE: DEADLINE

Posted on in Film News

Natalie Portman Suggests Jane Foster’s Cancer Journey May Be Explored In ‘Thor: Love & Thunder’ – “She’s Going Through Cancer Treatment”

With filming for Thor: Love & Thunder expected to begin around January-February at Fox Studios Australia in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, we haven’t really had much of an update on the project until now.

While speaking with Yahoo! Life, franchise actress Natalie Portman briefly suggested that we might indeed be seeing Jane Foster’s going through cancer treatment in the film just like her comic book counterpart.

PORTMAN: “I can’t tell you that much. I’m really excited. I’m starting to train, to get muscles. If there can be all these female superheroes, the more of them they are, the better it is. I’m trying to think — it’s based on the graphic novel of the Mighty Thor. She’s going through cancer treatment and is a superhero on the side.”

Portman could be simply relaying plot points about the Mighty Thor story, but I don’t really see Marvel removing that important element of the hero.

It was announced at San Diego Comic-Con 2019 that Natalie Portman would be playing Lady Thor in the film giving her a strong reason to come back for the sequel and possibly allows her to play the Marvel Comics heroine for many years.

Having a superhero that is undergoing cancer treatment or is a cancer survivor can be extremely powerful to kids with cancer or in remission. I can speak from direct experience that kids really looked up to Deadpool when they discovered he has cancer in that first film.

I’m sure Chadwick Boseman, the man, will also have a huge impact on kids as well as an example of strength. In the wake of the revelation that actor Chadwick Boseman was secretly undergoing cancer treatment during the film of multiple films including Black Panther, it’s not that hard to imagine that a fictional character could juggle superhero duties while fighting cancer.

I’m sure fans will have opinions on this but I think if handled properly it could be an extremely powerful and important part of Marvel’s new direction of representation.

Joining Portman in the Thor sequel will be fellow cast members Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Taika Waititi, and Christian Bale, the latter reportedly playing a villain.

Thor: Love & Thunder is expected to be released on February 11th, 2022, unless there are further delays or shifts with the Marvel slate.

SOURCE: YAHOO! LIFE

Posted on in Film News

Josh Brolin Says Playing Cable In ‘Deadpool 2’ Was A “Business Transaction” Compared To Working With The Russo Brothers

While we’re still waiting on an official announcement concerning the fate of Deadpool 3 at Marvel Studios, Cabble actor Josh Brolin spoke to cinematographer Roger Deakins on his podcast Team Deakins (spotted by The Playlist) about the differences between working on Deadpool 2 in juxtapose to working with Marvel/The Russo Brothers on Avengers Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

BROLIN: “Deadpool was hard. Even though it was funny, it was harder. That was more of a business transaction, it was more, ‘We need to make this like this,’ which I didn’t feel that way with Avengers.”

“[The Russo Brothers] would constantly go back and reference Scarface or Dog Day Afternoon. Whether or not it was a manipulation, they knew what to throw out there to bring it back into something inspired.”

Josh’s comments here are terribly off-base as the Deadpool sequel underwent specific reshoots because producers/studio felt certain scenes didn’t test well and it’s possible that set had less of a creative environment than with The Russo Brothers.

There have been rumblings of Marvel considering a return for Brolin’s Thanos but that remains only rumor at this point. It’ll be interesting if they do end up moving forward with new Deadpool movies that if they’ll keep Brolin in the Nathan Summers aka Cable role as the only official carry-over from the Fox era is Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson.

Before the merger, the plan at 20th Century was to tackle an X-Force movie from writer/director Drew Goddard before a third solo installment.

Ryan confirmed back in December 2019 that Deadpool 3 was indeed in development at Marvel Studios but we really haven’t a solid update since.

SOURCE: TEAM DEAKINS

Posted on in Television News

‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Actress Monica Barbaro Takes Leading Role In Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Father-Daughter Spy Series At Amazon

Last month it was reported that Arnold Schwarzenegger would be returning the spy genre with an untitled show at Amazon’s Prime Video from Skydance Television and Scorpion creator Nick Santora. That would focus on a father-daughter duo. Arnold previously worked with Skydance the last two Terminator installments, Terminator: Genisys and Terminator: Dark Fate.

Today, Deadline reports that Top Gun: Maverick actress Monica Barbaro has landed that lead role of Arnold’s daughter and the show’s second lead.

Monica plays the only female fighter pilot in the upcoming Tom Cruise sequel Top Gun: Maverick.

TOP GUN: MAVERICK – After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him. When he finds himself training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen, Maverick encounters Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign: “Rooster,” the son of Maverick’s late friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick Bradshaw, aka “Goose.”

SOURCE: DEADLINE

Posted on in Film News

Universal Pushes ‘Jurassic World: Dominion’ Release Date To June 10th, 2022

Yet another Universal Pictures film has been given an release delay as Jurassic World: Dominion has been pushed from June 11th, 2021 to June 10th, 2022.

Director Colin Trevorrow said the following about the release being pushed an entire year.

TREVORROW: “For the past three months, I’ve worked with an extraordinary cast and crew on a film we can’t wait to share with the world. Even though we’ll have to wait a bit longer, it will all be worth it. Let’s stay healthy and take care of each other until then.”

The studio also released new teaser poster.

Filming had been taking place in Vancouver, London, and Malta.

SOURCE: UNIVERSAL