According to Deadline, Knightley will be reuniting with her Silent Night director Camille Griffin, the Christmas flick from Matthew Vaughn’s MARV Films that also co-stars Jojo Rabbit breakout Roman Griffin Davis (Camille’s son). The new sci-fi drama is titled Conception and is at Searchlight Pictures with Maven Screen Media producing.
Camille Griffin will also write Conception.
The story is set in the near future, when the British government takes authoritarian rule over parenting. It follows a vigorous License Officer (Knightley), who is a firm believer in the controversial system she upholds until an unexpected event imperils her own parental status in the very administration she enforces.
Another interesting project is assembling at the Cannes Film Market, as Deadline reports that writer/director Walter Hill (48 Hours, Red Heat, The Warriors, The Driver) is putting together a western called Dead For A Dollar that will see Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz playing another bounty hunter after playing on in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. The western will also see Willem Dafoe (John Wick, The Lighthouse) play someone that Waltz’s bounty hunter had sent to prison years ago.
The outlet added an extensive plot synopsis for Dead For A Dollar’s script that was penned by Hill and Matt Harris, which you can read below but might have a handful of spoilers.
Dead For A Dollar is set in New Mexico Territory, Chihuahua, during 1897. The story will follow Max Borlund (Waltz), a famed bounty hunter, hired to find and return Rachel Price, the politically progressive wife of Nathan Price, a successful Santa Fe businessman. Max is told she has been kidnapped by an African American army deserter, Elijah Jones, and is being held for ransom in Mexico. When Max goes south of the border he soon runs across his sworn enemy, expatriate American Joe Cribbens (Dafoe), a professional gambler, sometime outlaw, who Max had tracked down and sent to prison years before. When Borlund finds Rachel Price and Elijah hiding deep in the wilds of the Mexican desert, he discovers that Rachel has willingly fled from an abusive husband, and the runaway soldier is, in fact, her romantic partner. Max is now faced with a dilemma: does he return the wife back across the border to the man who hired him, or does he aid Rachel’s bid for freedom and fight off ruthless hired guns and his long-time criminal rival, Joe Cribbens?
The title an obvious nod to Sergio Leone’s iconic Dollars Trilogy, the trio of films was landmark work in the spaghetti western sub-genre.
Walter Hill as a writer worked on Alien (uncredited), Aliens, Alien 3, The Warriors, Red Heat, 48 Hours, The Driver, and Another 48 Hours.
Westworld co-creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan are behind the Amazon series The Peripheral, an adaptation of the William Gibson novel with Chloe Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass, Shadow In The Cloud) and Irish actor Jack Reynor (Midsommar, Free Fire) set to play the show’s leads.
The William Gibson novel centers on Flynne (Grace Moretz) and her brother Burton (Reynor). Burton, a veteran of the United States Marine Corps’ elite Haptic Recon force, is hired for a security job which takes place in what he thinks is cyberspace. When Flynne temporarily takes his place, she witnesses something that might have been murder.
The Ronin can confirm that the Amazon series has indeed enlisted production designer Jan Reolfs, who is likely best known for working on the gorgeous box office disaster Ghost In The Shell starring Scarlett Johansson, the Keanu Reeves fantasy film 47 Ronin loosely inspired by Japanese historical events, and Universal’s massive blockbuster F9 that is about cross $300 million at the global box office before it’s domestic debut later this week.
Having previously tackled the world of cyberpunk with Ghost In Shell, it would suggest The Peripheral is going to look stunning. Hopefully, it will be a stronger and compelling adaptation than the 2017 film from director Rupert Sanders.
Production will take place around London with Vincenzo Natali set to direct the show’s pilot. Natali’s extensive credits include The Stand, Westworld, American Gods, The Strain, Lost In Space, Locke & Key, Luke Cage, Hannibal, Orphan Black, Splice, and Cube.
Gibson, alongside Philip K. Dick, is considered one of the fathers of the cyberpunk genre. Dick’s work, of course, inspired feature films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. The Peripheral isn’t the only William Gibson adaptation in the works as we’ve previously reported that Luther creator Neil Cross is looking to turn his novel Pattern Recognition into a project as well and has yet to be officially announced.
Lisa Joy is making her feature film directorial debut with the Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson dystopian cyberpunk film Reminiscence, which will hit both theaters and HBO Max on August 20.
REMINISCENCE – Nick Bannister (Jackman), a private investigator of the mind, navigates the darkly alluring world of the past by helping his clients access lost memories. Living on the fringes of the sunken Miami coast, his life is forever changed when he takes on a new client, Mae (Ferguson). A simple matter of lost and found becomes a dangerous obsession. As Bannister fights to find the truth about Mae’s disappearance, he uncovers a violent conspiracy, and must ultimately answer the question: how far would you go to hold on to the ones you love?
Filmmaker Ari Aster is looking to follow-up Midsommar with Disappointment Blvd starring Oscar-winner Joaquin Phoenix (Joker, Her, The Master), which is set to begin production sometime next week in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and wrap in October.
Details are scarce about Aster’s third film outside of Phoenix playing a successful entrepreneur.
An intimate, decades-spanning portrait of one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time.
The Ronin can confirm that Aster has brought on Oscar nominated production designer Fiona Crombie to Disappointment Blvd’s production team, who worked on the Oscar-winning period comedy The Favourite and Disney’s well-received Cruella (already getting a sequel) that both starred Emma Stone.
There is also an expectation that he’ll, yet again, reunite with his cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski after working him on Hereditary and Midsommar. The director of photography just happens to hail from Montreal and was behind the camera on the Bob Odenkirk action flick Nobody.
A24 is said to be bringing the film to the Cannes Film Market seeking distribution partners, according to Screen Daily. Having Joaquin Phoenix attached after winning a Best Actor Oscar for the billion-dollar hit Joker, likely means they’ll be fielding multiple offers.
Phoenix is set to star in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon epic Kitbag for Apple with Jodie Comer as his co-star and is newly attached to co-star with Rooney Mara in director Lynne Ramsey’s next project Polaris.
The Ronin can exclusively reveal that British director Stephen Woolfenden has joined Lucasfilm’s Willow series with production officially taking place in Wales. It’s unclear how many episodes he’ll be helming. The director’s television credits include Outlander, The Spanish Princess, Poldark, Doctor Who, Strike Back, and Fate: The Winx Saga.
Woolfenden also has an extensive career as a second unit director working on massive studio films such as Harry Potter & The Order of The Phoenix, Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows 1-2, Fantastic Beasts & Where To Find Them, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Fantastic Beasts 3, Detective Pikachu, and The Legend of Tarzan.
Willow is a direct sequel to Ron Howard and George Lucas’ original 1988 fantasy film but is set decades after those events.
Warwick Davis is reprising the role of Willow Ufgood with new additions like Erin Kellyman (The Falcon & The Winter Soldier, Solo: A Star Wars Story, The Green Knight) in the role of Jade, Ellie Bamber (Nocturnal Animals) playing Dove, Ruby Cruz (Castle Rock) taking the role of Kit after replacing Cailee Spaeny, and Tony Revolori (The Grand Budapest Hotel, Dope, Spider-Man: Homecoming) in an undisclosed part.
Jonathan Entwistle, who is attached to direct the Power Rangers reboot at Paramount Pictures, is set to helm the pilot after Jon M. Chu (In The Heights, Crazy Rich Asians) exited the fantasy series to focus on a big screen adaptation of Wicked.
Willow is said to debut on Disney+ sometime in 2022.
WILLOW – Enter the world of Willow. Journey to the far corners of your imagination, to a land of myth and magic, where dream and reality live side by side … to a place that never existed, a time that never was. It is a world where a young man named Willow lives out an adventure that explodes beyond the boundaries of his own hopes and fears.
John Wick: Chapter 4 is going to begin filming soon at Studio Babelsberg just outside Berlin, Germany, where franchise star Keanu Reeves shot The Matrix 4 last year with director Lana Wachowski.
Well, the casting has been underway for John Wick 4 with some impressive new additions such as Japanese action star Horiyuki Sanada, Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen, Atomic Blonde’s Bill Skarsgard, Stowaway’s Shamier Anderson, and the film’s female lead played by Japanese-British singer Rina Sawayama.
There had been rumblings that Blade star Wesley Snipes was joining the epic fourth installment, however, The Hollywood Reporter’s Borys Kit has now squashed that via Twitter, despite confirming early discussions with Lionsgate.
Despite some reports, action star @wesleysnipes is NOT going to be in #JohnWick 4. There were some discussions a little while ago but it didn't work out.
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum ended with John surviving the fall from the roof of The Continental hotel after Ian McShane’s Winston shot him, Winston’s motivations weren’t entirely clear as he didn’t seem shocked that Mr. Wick got away and could be giving The High Table a false sense of security. Wick eventually lands at the feet of Laurence Fishburne’s Bowery King, who had his organization taken away from him by The High Table and convinces John to go to war with him against the mysterious group of criminal syndicate puppet masters.
John Wick 4 will hit the big screen on May 27, 2022 and Lionsgate had confirmed plans to make John Wick: Chapter 5, but will no longer shoot back-to-back with the next installment. Franchise creator and architect, Derek Kolstad, stated that he won’t be involved in the next two films and suggested John Wick 5 could be the final pic.
There is a possibility that director Chad Stahelski will pivot to make his Highlander reboot next (over John Wick 5), which reportedly has Mission: Impossible -Fallout’s Henry Cavill circling an unnamed lead role. The sticking point is that we don’t have an official confirmation from Lionsgate or Stahelski that Highlander is happening anytime soon. Chad making Highlander could certainly give Keanu Reeves a bit of break after the extended shoot for The Matrix 4 took longer than expected due to the pandemic and spending the rest of the year working on John Wick 4.
The Toxic Avenger was essentially Deadpool before the mutant was ever a notion at Marvel Comics, the hyper-violent comic book hero parody debuted in 1984 and suddenly became a cult hit with multiple sequels, landing a short-lived comic book published by Marvel, the Toxic Crusaders cartoon, and a kids toyline connected to the show.
A feature film remake has been in the works for ages but finally got going when Legendary Entertainment assigned Macon Blair to write and direct the latest incarnation.
This is the story of Melvin, the Tromaville Health Club mop boy, who inadvertently and naively trusts the hedonistic, contemptuous and vain health club members, to the point of accidentally ending up in a vat of toxic waste. The devastating results then have a transmogrification effect, his alter ego is released, and the Toxic Avenger is born, to deadly and comical results. The local mop boy is now the local Superhero, the saviour of corruption, thuggish bullies and indifference.
Deadline has recently backed-up The Illuminerdi‘s report that Lord of The Rings star Elijah Wood has joined the satirical superhero film and added that British comedian Julia Davis. The Hollywood Reporter also revealing that Jonny Coyne and Sarah Niles are taking parts too.
Wood and Blair have previously worked together on the Netflix dark comedy I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore.
They’ll join an established cast that already has Peter Dinklage as Toxie, Jacob Tremblay, Taylour Paige, and the villain will be played by Kevin Bacon.
Legendary will shoot The Toxic Avenger in Bulgaria but hasn’t officially announced a release date. I’ll be slightly curious to see if the project will get a traditional theatrical release or be sold-off to a streaming service like Netflix as they recently struck a deal for Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Gundam movie.
Writer Mattson Tomlin might not be a household name but he’s been behind the Netflix superhero flick Project Power and co-wrote Robert Pattinson’s The Batman with director Matt Reeves. One of his upcoming projects that people seem to have forgotten he’s involved with is a Netflix anime series from Japan’s Production I.G set in the dystopian cyberpunk world of James Cameron’s Terminator that launched in 1984.
Well, the writer/showrunner has teased that he’s completed a draft or currently working on one as the title page credits both James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd.
THE TERMINATOR – Disguised as a human, a cyborg assassin known as a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) travels from 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). Sent to protect Sarah is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who divulges the coming of Skynet, an artificial intelligence system that will spark a nuclear holocaust. Sarah is targeted because Skynet knows that her unborn son will lead the fight against them. With the virtually unstoppable Terminator in hot pursuit, she and Kyle attempt to escape.
TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY – In this sequel set eleven years after “The Terminator,” young John Connor (Edward Furlong), the key to civilization’s victory over a future robot uprising, is the target of the shape-shifting T-1000 (Robert Patrick), a Terminator sent from the future to kill him. Another Terminator, the revamped T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger), has been sent back to protect the boy. As John and his mother (Linda Hamilton) go on the run with the T-800, the boy forms an unexpected bond with the robot.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Japanese animation company Production I.G, they were behind the original Ghost In The Shell, Ghost In Shell 2: Innocence, Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Ghost In The Shell: Arise, Blood: The Last Vampire, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth, Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion, and they made the anime segment in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol.1 that covered the origin of O’Ren Ishii.
Yesterday, it was announced by Amazon that they had acquired the Millennium Films action movie Jolt, starring British actress Kate Beckinsale best known for playing Selene in the Underworld franchise. The film will be officially heading to Prime Video and releases on July 23.
Below is the official synopsis from Amazon.
Lindy is a beautiful, sardonically-funny woman with a painful secret: Due to a lifelong, rare neurological disorder, she experiences sporadic rage-filled, murderous impulses that can only be stopped when she shocks herself with a special electrode device. Unable to find love and connection in a world that fears her bizarre condition, she finally trusts a man long enough to fall in love, only to find him murdered the next day. Heartbroken and enraged, she embarks on a revenge-filled mission to find his killer, while also being pursued by the police as the crime’s prime suspect.
Jolt sounds like an obvious proxy to Jason Statham’s Crank films, but until we get a trailer we can’t be sure it’ll have a similar wacky tone as those films were satirical and a parody of exploitation films.
Directed by Tanya Wexler with a script penned by Scott Wascha. The impressive supporting cast joining Beckinsale in the R-rated action romp include Bobby Cannavale, Jai Courtney, Laverne Cox, David Bradley, Ori Pfeffer, Susan Sarandon, and Stanley Tucci as Lindy’s therapist.
They also released three images featuring Kate Beckinsale as her character Lindy.
It’s been a while since Kate tackled an action film with Underworld: Blood Wars in 2016 and her last high-profile project was the Amazon Prime Video original series The Widow.
Millennium Films is also behind the new Red Sonja remake from director and co-writer Joey Soloway that stars Hannah John-Kamen (Ant-Man & The Wasp, Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City) as the sword-wielding warrior with former Wonder Woman contender Jaimie Alexander (plays Lady Sif in Marvel’s Thor franchise) recently teasing a possible role. I’m sort of curious if Red Sonja will end up on Amazon.
While John Wick franchise creator Derek Kolstad has stated he won’t be involved with the writing of John Wick: Chapter 4 or John Wick: Chapter 5, he’s apparently going to be busy writing a sequel to the Bob Odenkirk action movie Nobody.
The development news comes from Nobody director Ilya Naishuller (Hardcore Henry) speaking with genre outlet Jo Blo, as he has confirmed that Derek Kolstad is already working on a script, hoping it will be greenlit.
“There’s plenty of stories that can be told in this world, with the character Hutch. I know that Derek (Kolstad – the writer) has begun work on the sequel,” Naishuller told the outlet.
Kolstad recently worked on Marvel’s hit Disney+ series The Falcon & The Winter Soldier among other high-profile IP projects.
While Nobody certainly felt like low-budget John Wick, it still seemed to find an audience and a lot of people enjoyed it. Considering the budget was only $16 million and earned $61.5 million globally during the pandemic, they could crank out a bunch of these R-rated movies and I’m sure Universal Pictures would be happy with the results.
With Bob Odenkirk’s series Better Call Saul wrapping-up, he’ll have a large opening in his filming schedule to accommodate sequels. I’m also curious if producer David Leitch will attempt to connect Nobody to his other action movies like Atomic Blonde, Kate, Bullet Train, or the John Wick franchise since crossovers could be the next big kick.
NOBODY – Hutch Mansell fails to defend himself or his family when two thieves break into his suburban home one night. The aftermath of the incident soon strikes a match to his long-simmering rage. In a barrage of fists, gunfire and squealing tires, Hutch must now save his wife and son from a dangerous adversary — and ensure that he will never be underestimated again.
THE RONIN 