Oscar-nominee Adam Driver has been busy post-Star Wars as the actor has cozened up to director Ridley Scott joining both The Last Duel and his upcoming crime drama Gucci.
Deadline reports that Driver has nabbed a leading role in a mysterious science fiction thriller for Sony Pictures titled 65. The project will be written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the screenwriters of A Quiet Place.
Sam Raimi, who is about to direct Marvel’s Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness will be producing via Raimi Productions.
There isn’t much in the way of plot details but the title could suggest a setting of 1965 and possibly link to the Kecksburg UFO incident.
Netflix announced today via Variety that Zack Snyder’s upcoming zombie genre action flick Army of The Dead will be getting a prequel film and an “anime” series.
Following a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, a group of mercenaries take the ultimate gamble, venturing into the quarantine zone to pull off the greatest heist ever attempted.
Army of The Dead’s cast consists of Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Ana De La Reguera, Theo Rossi, Huma Qureshi, Omari Hardwick, Hiroyuki Sanada, Garret Dillahunt, Matthias Schweighöfer, Raúl Castillo, Nora Arnezeder, and Samantha Win.
It was recently announced that stand-up comedian and actress Tig Notaro would be joining the film as well.
Shay Hatten will write the prequel and anime series.
Matthias Schweighöfer, who plays Ludwig Dieter will direct and focuses on his character.
The anime series titled Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas follows Dave Bautista’s character with Jay Oliva (The Dark Knight Returns) showrunning and directing a couple of episodes.
Most of the shows being labeled as anime by Netflix aren’t part of that genre and it seems to be a blanket marketing term used by the streaming service, we’ll have to wait and see if it applies to this show.
As Marvel Studios tries to figure out how to resume productions safely and when to roll out their upcoming slate of films and television shows, we have some new insight on Chloe Zhao’s upcoming cosmic superhero film Eternals after a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
The director talked-up her experience with manga being a big influence on the film and how she attempted to bridge East and West.
ZHAO: “I have such deep, strong, manga roots. I brought some of that into Eternals. And I look forward to pushing more of that marriage of East and West. How much further and bigger can we go after [Avengers:] Endgame? Because I’m not just making the film as a director. I’m making the film as a fan.”
Kevin Feige named dropping One-Punch Man is a manga she digs.
FEIGE: “Chloé will go toe to toe about Malick, or as esoteric and small a film as has ever been made, but also on Star Wars or on [Japanese superhero franchise] One-Punch Man in a way that is quite unique and quite spectacular.”
The Eternals are a group of cosmic heroes created by comic book legend Jack Kirby taking cues from books such as Chariots of The Gods, which explores the idea of aliens seeding Earth (Prometheus also explored this with The Engineers) and in the case of Eternals that would be giant cosmic beings known as The Celestials. They are tasked as immortal god-like beings to be the protectors of humanity from The Deviants, an off-shoot sect of humanoids that also have powers but have a more monstrous appearance. Some of these Deviants break from ranks and join the superhero team such as Kro and Karkas.
Eternals spans thousands of years of human history and will likely be doing a little time jumping. However, it seems like they’ll be mainly focusing on a connection between Sersi and The Black Knight, who happen to be members of the Avengers. It’s said there will be a love triangle that most likely includes Ikaris in the mix.
The Celestials are also behind tinkering with early humans inserting the mutant gene into their DNA, which could be how mutants are explained in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for their X-Men reboot.
Chloe also mentions how her vision for Eternals differed from other teams in the MCU as she saw them as outsiders rather than a regular group of jocks, potentially referring to them as being a direct contrast to The Avengers or even The Justice League.
ZHAO: “I wanted it to reflect the world we live in. But also I wanted to put a cast together that feels like a group of misfits. I didn’t want the jocks. I want you to walk away at the end of the movie not thinking, ‘This person is this ethnicity, that person is that nationality.’ No. I want you to walk away thinking, ‘That’s a family.’ You don’t think about what they represent. You see them as individuals.”
The film’s cast includes Gemma Chan as Sersi, Kit Harington as Dane Whitman aka Black Knight, Barry Keoghan as Druig, Richard Madden as Ikaris, Angelina Jolie as Thena, Kumail Nanjiani as Kingo, Lauren Ridloff as Makkari, Brian Tyree Henry as Phastos, Salma Hayek as Ajak, Lia McHugh as Sprite, and Don Lee as Gilgamesh.
It was also confirmed in the article that Kumail Nanjiani’s Kingo will indeed by a Bollywood star.
Oddly enough, while the Deviants will appear in the film it hasn’t been officially announced who exactly is playing them and this may suggest they’ll be motion-capture characters not unlike Thanos’ Children in Avengers: Infinity War with voice actors added to the cast closer to the release date.
A trailer for Eternals has yet to be unleashed by Marvel Studios leading to multiple people taking their guesses when it could drop with the film’s release date set for February 12th, 2021.
A new trailer for Daniel Craig’s No Time To Die has been officially released.
The new footage gives a little more context to the villain Safin revealing that he’s going to attempt to kill millions of people for his own means.
Safin’s mask and hideout seem to be direct cues to the Bond villain Dr. No.
The cast will include Daniel Craig as James Bond, Lea Seydoux as Madeleine Swann, Rami Malek (Bohemian Rapsody) as a new villain named Safin (Dr. No?), Jeffrey Wright (Westworld) as Felix Leiter, Ralph Fiennes (The King’s Man) as M, Christoph Waltz returning as Spectre’s Blofeld, Naomie Harris as Moneypenny, Lashana Lynch (Captain Marvel) as Nomi aka the new Agent 007, Ana de Armas (Blade Runner 2049) as Paloma, Ben Whishaw as Q, Billy Magnussen, Rory Kinnear as Bill Tanner, David Dencik, and Dali Benssalah.
In No Time To Die, Bond has left active service and is enjoying a tranquil life in Jamaica. His peace is short-lived when his old friend Felix Leiter from the CIA turns up asking for help. The mission to rescue a kidnapped scientist turns out to be far more treacherous than expected, leading Bond onto the trail of a mysterious villain armed with dangerous new technology.
We’ve all been extremely interested in what direction the Alien franchise could be getting in the wake of the Disney merger with 21st Century Studios, as it had been confirmed by Ridley Scott himself that he was speaking with studio executives about making a third movie that had once been referred to by the title Alien: Awakening.
While promoting his upcoming science fiction series Raised By Wolves, Ridley Scott has confirmed to Forbes that there is still active development on a third untitled Alien film and potentially gives insight on a new direction for the film, rather than continuing his string of prequels trying to make a new path via Michael Fassbender’s David.
Scott doesn’t come out and say this third movie will be a new take, he alludes that it might not be similar or connected to Prometheus and Covenant.
Here is that quick blurb from his interview with Forbes.
SCOTT: “That’s in process. We went down a route to try and reinvent the wheel with Prometheus and Covenant. Whether or not we go directly back to that is doubtful because Prometheus woke it up very well. But you know, you’re asking fundamental questions like, ‘Has the Alien himself, the facehugger, the chestburster, have they all run out of steam? Do you have to rethink the whole bloody thing and simply use the word to franchise?’ That’s always the fundamental question.”
Some of the ideas for Alien: Awakening were to fill gaps between the events of the last two films or directly seeing David getting his hands on Covenant’s colony of human settlers for future xenomorph experiments leading into the original Alien from 1979 explaining how the derelict ship got on LV-426. However, a lot of fans are not really in favor of Scott misidentifying that element of the original movie.
Another idea for the film was that surviving Engineers from other planets seeking out David to avenge his mass murder on Paradise.
I was a massive fan of all the Engineer and bio-weapon stuff from Prometheus but when Alien: Covenant abandoned all that to become a generic sci-fi slasher it sort of left a bad taste in my mouth. Such wasted potential after Scott spent all that time focusing on the Engineers being such important figures in the Alien universe/mythology only to have David commit genocide against them.
There had been a huge fan response to Neill Blomkamp’s purposed Alien 5 and the return of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, the normally coy actress had already been convinced by a pitch from Neill and was on board even before the studio agreed to allow him to develop it formally.
Alien 5 was expected to negate the events of Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection, making it a direct sequel to James Cameron’s beloved Aliens with characters such as Newt, Hicks, and Bishop expected to make a return. Cameron seemingly was a fan of the film’s script calling it “gangbusters” during the Aliens 30th Anniversary panel at San Diego Comic-Con in 2016.
Jim’s comments contradicted statements made by Ridley that a script didn’t exist.
The idea had been that while Ripley would have been the main hero of the film, Newt (most likely recast with a new actress) would have taken over the mantle in a hypothetical Alien 6 movie as previously outlined by Neill Blomkamp when he was explaining his vision for his film and how it could revitalize the franchise.
However, there seemed to be a bit of a power struggle behind the scenes between Ridley Scott’s desire to get Alien: Covenant made and fandom’s overwhelming support to see Sigourney return to the Alien franchise with Blomkamp’s film. The two projects may have been in direct competition and Ridley was in a position of power as a producer on Alien 5 to have 20th Century greenlight his sequel instead.
Scott was so hellbent on getting Alien: Covenant made he handed the reigns of Blade Runner 2049 over to Denis Villeneuve and stepped down as that project’s director.
Blomkamp has since moved on to other projects and doesn’t seem very keen on the idea of returning to Alien 5 anytime soon.
This year a new treatment for Alien 5 was making news after franchise screenwriter Walter Hill revealed that he and his partner David Giler tackled a script dated March 2020 that may or may not feed into Blomkamp’s idea of removing Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection from franchise canon, teasing those events may have been a dream.
Scott himself is a busy bee as he has to finish filming his period thriller The Last Duel and is planning on shooting his drama Gucci sometime in the next year or so. At one point, Ridley was attached to direct a Merlin prequel film for Disney but for whatever reason pivoted to other projects instead.
Raised By Wolves debuts today on HBO Max.
RAISED BY WOLVES – The ambitious new sci-fi series centers on two androids tasked with raising human children on a mysterious virgin planet. As the burgeoning colony of humans threatens to be torn apart by religious differences, the androids learn that controlling the beliefs of humans is a treacherous and difficult task.
The Dark Knight trilogy director Christopher Nolan was briefly asked by Geeks of Color about his Tenet star John David Washington playing DC Comics hero Green Lantern and the possibility of him directing the project.
NOLAN: “I think my DC days are over but I think he’d be an excellent choice, he certainly gets my vote.”
I’m not terribly sure how much pull Nolan has considering during the press tour for Dunkirk he endorsed star Tom Hardy as the next James Bond, we’ll see if the ringing endorsement actually sways anyone at the studio.
Plans for a new Green Lantern film have seemingly stalled in recent years after David S. Goyer and Justin Rhodes had been tasked to pen Green Lantern Corps. a while ago with then Geoff Johns taking a stab at a script.
It was announced that there are plans at HBO Max to make a Green Lantern television series but it’s unknown how that will directly impact future films.
There is a chance the series could be connected to the film as The Batman is getting a tie-in Gotham PD series taking place a year before the events of the upcoming film.
With the Star Wars franchise behind him, John Boyega has spoken with GQ about his experience making the recent trilogy and he basically feels that Lucasfilm/Disney had no idea what to with his character Finn in the two sequels after making him a huge deal during the marketing leading up to the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
BOYEGA: “You get yourself involved in projects and you’re not necessarily going to like everything. [But] what I would say to Disney is do not bring out a black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are and then have them pushed to the side. It’s not good. I’ll say it straight up.”
“Like, you guys knew what to do with Daisy Ridley, you knew what to do with Adam Driver. You knew what to do with these other people, but when it came to Kelly Marie Tran, when it came to John Boyega, you know fuck all. So what do you want me to say? What they want you to say is, ‘I enjoyed being a part of it. It was a great experience…’ Nah, nah, nah. I’ll take that deal when it’s a great experience. They gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley. Let’s be honest. Daisy knows this. Adam knows this. Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything.”
It is worth noting that during the release of The Force Awakens, John Boyega received a massive backlash from racists furious that a black actor was playing a Stromtrooper and there was call for a boycott claiming “white genocide”. The main gripe seemed to be folks were upset that a black character was getting a spotlight in a predominantly white franchise, despite Mace Windu and Lando Calrissian being established characters.
I imagine most people forgot this was even a thing, but here is a refresher of what happened after the first trailer reveal.
This was a small amount of people but it’s hard to ignore that Finn’s role in the subsequent sequels was drastically decreased and he became more of a supporting player like Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron. It would be hard to argue that Finn was one of the three main characters in The Force Awakens and his diminished arc was a little upsetting given that Colin Trevorrow’s Duel of The Fates would have had Finn in much more heroic and impactful role.
There is a strong possibility to avoid more racially-fueled backlash they rolled-back Finn a bit in Star Wars: The Last Jedi as he was relegated to a side character.
Kelly Marie Tran experienced her own wave of racist online bullying from the toxic side of fandom in the wake of her role as Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which saw racial slurs being mixed into complaints of her performance and how the character was written.
This led the actress to quit social media.
Done with this disingenuous bullshit. You know the difference between not liking a movie and hatefully harassing a woman so bad she has to get off social media. And you know which of those two we’re talking about here.
In retrospect, Disney seemingly caved to both these weird racist reactions to Finn and Rose as they both saw their hierarchy in the franchise diminished, they also happened to be the two minority characters in the trilogy. Finn’s force sensitively that was teased in Star Wars: The Force Awakens was never fully realized and Rose’s screentime in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker essentially became a glorified cameo after having such a significant role in the previous film.
People also noticed that Disney’s merchandise for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker failed to include Rose leading up to the release, a possible attempt of an erasure of the character in light of the racist backlash from the last film.
It certainly feels like Disney just placed the characters into the background and pulled back on giving them a substantial journey to avoid anymore negative outrage and possibly in their minds targeted harassment. However, I think the latter would be a little harder to believe.
Disney and Lucasfilm certainly said how important the characters were in the press rounds but wasn’t really reflected on the screen.
John certainly is allowed to express his feelings and we were also frustrated by the creative choices made with his character after all the potential on display in The Force Awakens.
Alex Garland’s Dredd is considered a modern cult-hit as the film has done exceptionally well on home video and streaming despite it being a bit of a finical flop when released in theaters back in 2012. The mature comic book film was a reboot of the 2000 AD character Judge Dredd previously portrayed by action-star Sly Stallone.
There had been a grassroots campaign to get a Dredd sequel off-the-ground which never really amounted to anything outside of both actors Karl Urban (Judge Dredd) and Olivia Thirlby (Judge Anderson) suggesting they’d be willing to reprise the role if a sequel was ever put together.
Producers pointed out the original film’s sprawling international global distribution combined with the poor box office as a major roadblock to a theatrical sequel ever coming together which led to Rebellion to announce plans for a series titled Mega-City One, taking place in the world of Judge Dredd but not exactly focusing on the character himself.
Karl Urban is currently doing press rounds for the upcoming second season of Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys and reaffirmed to Screen Geek his desire to reprise the Dredd role in that Mega-City One series from Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley, that’s if they want his services.
URBAN: “Well, listen, it’s very, very early to get into any specifics on that, but I’ve gone on the record before saying that I would love to come back and be a part of that world and tell more Dredd stories. There is just a plethora of great, great stories within the Judge Dredd universe. I think that Jason [Kingsley] and his team – I think that the legacy of Judge Dredd is in great hands. And if I get the opportunity to work with those guys, you can bet your bottom dollar I will be there – because I think that it would be just a real rich and rewarding experience for, not only for us to collaborate, but for the fans. So, if that happens, that’d be fantastic and for whatever reason – and there are many – if it doesn’t happen, then I wish them the best, and I can’t wait to see what they do.”
Outside of some pieces of concept artwork, a pilot script being written Rob Williams and Rebellion building their own studio facility Rebellion Film Studios in Oxford, England for film and television, there haven’t been any substantial updates concerning the series.
That's a wrap on 'Percival' – the first ever production in the UK to be shot *entirely* using cutting-edge ‘virtual production’ technology! Incredible work by everyone at Rebellion Film Studios this week – just look at @RebellionJason *in* the thick of the action! pic.twitter.com/pHS8JYtdh1
Urban seemingly will have a bit of a break and then jump into filming Season 3 of The Boys next year in Toronto.
DREDD – Mega City One is a vast, violent metropolis where felons rule the streets. The only law lies with cops called “judges,” who act as judge, jury and executioner, and Dredd (Karl Urban) is one of the city’s most feared. One day, Dredd is partnered with Cassandra (Olivia Thirlby), a rookie with powerful psychic abilities. A report of a terrible crime sends Dredd and Cassandra to a dangerous area controlled by Ma-Ma (Lena Headey), a drug lord who will stop at nothing to protect her empire.
Yesterday, some really bad Star Wars rumors were making the rounds from the most unreliable source, YouTube streamer Grace Randolph. She was suggesting that because a trailer for The Mandalorian Season 2 didn’t magically appear during the NBA playoffs that there were extensive Season 2 reshoots ahead and most likely delays.
Stating that Disney was unhappy with the upcoming season.
However, it looks like she was again exposed as a huckster peddling in false information as Disney officially announced today on the show’s Twitter account that episodes will begin airing on October 30th on Disney+. This news should comfort those that were silly enough to fall for those attention seeking lies.
They also includes a new logo for the second season.
Lucasfilm is hard at work on Season 3 prep with writing scripts and pre-production stages as the pandemic has shuffled the schedule a little. The Ronin revealed last week that Jon Favreau is expected to direct at least one episode and that Emmy-nominated production designer Andrew L. Jones is confirmed to be returning.
Once the promotion for Mulan’s Premier Access on Disney+ is over there is a strong expectation that Disney will release a trailer and marketing wave for The Mandalorian.
Variety has reported another new addition to the cast of Scream 5, as they’ve added Jack Quaid in an undisclosed role. Jack is best known for playing the comic book character Hughie Campbell in the Amazon Prime Video series The Boys, which will see it’s second season drop on September 4th.
Scream 5 is being called a reboot by certain trades but the title and returning cast would suggest it’s more of a continuation, if anything.
Officially, Courtney Cox and David Arquette will reprise their roles of reporter Gale Weathers and Sheriff Dewey Cox. Jack joins fellow new additions Melissa Barrera (In the Heights) and Jenna Ortega (Jane The Virgin).
Actress Neve Campbell confirmed talks for her return to play Sidney Prescott before that interview was ultimately deleted from YouTube. Her name has been absent from these casting reports, but it’s likely she’ll sign on.
Ready or Not’s Matthew Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are directing from a script penned by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick.
The original film from Wes Craven followed Sidney Prescott and her group of high school friends as a killer “Ghostface” is going around town killing students which leads to Cox’s tabloid reporter Gale Weathers to return to the town after writing a sleazy tell-all-book about the murder of Sidney’s mother. Craven’s take on the slasher was to be more of a send-up/satire of the genre itself and harped on the troupes as rules to stay alive.
It’s expected that this new film will continue the cheeky tradition of being a satire.
I know my first thought is that Jack is more or less either going to play the killer or the stand-in for Jamie Kennedy’s video store character Randy.
The horror pic will be released on January 14th, 2022 by Paramount Pictures.
THE RONIN 