The Hollywood Reporter has learned that screenwriter Mattson Tomlin will be making his feature film directorial debut with an original science fiction thriller titled Mother/ Android for Miramax that has Chloe Grace Mortez attached to star as lead character Georgia.
Tomlin also penned the film.
Chloe Grace Moretz is set to star in the Miramax project as Georgia who, with her boyfriend Sam, goes on a treacherous journey to escape their country, which is caught in an unexpected war with artificial intelligence. Days away from the arrival of their first child, the couple must face No Man’s Land— a stronghold of the android uprising, in hopes of reaching safety before giving birth.
Matt Reeves, who directed Chloe in the horror remake Let Me In and co-wrote The Batman with Tomlin will be producing the project via his production company 6th & Idaho.
Tomlin was behind the recent Netflix film Project Power and is also currently working on a Mega Man film.
The young actress had been previously rumored for the lead role in Len Wiseman’s John Wick spinoff Ballerina but has yet to be confirmed.
Fresh news coming out of the virtual Toronto Film Festival market as Miramax and STXfilms has landed the next film director Guy Ritchie (Aladdin, The Gentlemen) as they aim to begin shooting next month in Europe.
Guy will return to the spy genre after making The Man From U.N.C.L.E. with a new thriller titled Five Eyes, that will star Jason Statham as MI6 Agent Orson Fortune.
Below is a synopsis of the film that was penned by The Gentlemen screenwriters Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies with some rewrites from Guy.
MI6 guns-and-steel agent Orson Fortune (Statham) is recruited by global intelligence alliance Five Eyes to track down and stop the sale of a deadly new weapons technology that threatens to disrupt the world order. Reluctantly paired with a CIA high-tech expert, Fortune sets off on a globe-trotting mission where he will have to use all of his charm, ingenuity, and stealth to track down and infiltrate billionaire arms broker.
There should be some casting news in the coming weeks.
Ritchie and Statham recently had a reunion on the thriller Cash Truck for Miramax, an English remake of the French heist film Le Convouyer that was shot in London and Los Angeles. The pair had previously worked together on Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and the misstep Revolver. The latter was the last time the two had done a film together before coming together for Cash Truck.
The Gentlemen was Ritchie’s grand return to more mature filmmaking after making movies like Sherlock Holmes and Disney’s Aladdin, which was a good effort but a far cry from his best work like Snatch. I’m looking forward to seeing how Cash Truck (possibly retitled for release) pans-out and if he’ll attempt to focus on more action-driven films moving forward.
Deadline recently confirmed a Daily Mail story that a crew member working on The Batman has tested positive placing the production on hiatus again.
Even more shocking is that Vanity Fair reports the person who tested positive is actually their lead star Robert Pattinson, who is playing Bruce Wayne aka Batman in the reboot.
Robert Pattinson has tested positive for the coronavirus, causing filming of The Batman to be halted just days after the superhero drama resumed work at studios outside of London.
This certainly puts into question the prevention tools the film industry has put so much faith in during the return to productions in the United Kingdom. I’m starting to think that if Pattinson can’t be protected others are just as open to infection, if not more.
Hopefully, Robert and others on the film remain in good health and spirits.
This news comes a day after action star Dwayne Johnson revealed himself and his family, including his two young daughters had tested positive for COVID-19 as well. Johnson revealed this on Instagram while reiterating how important wearing a mask is.
The Batman had previously stopped production back in March alongside a bulk of projects filming in England and had only recently started filming again.
Warner Bros. is coming off massive buzz for film after the release of the teaser trailer that spread like wildfire online.
While this Eternals tidbit has been making the rounds online for months it’s nice to have it finally confirmed. During a profile of Eternals director Chloe Zhao at The Hollywood Reporter, Marvel Studios and actor Kumail Nanjiani confirmed that his superhero character Kingo will be a Bollywood star in the film and talked about filming a dance sequence.
NANJIANI: “When I walked onto the set and saw a huge group of brown people who were going to be in a Marvel movie, I felt such gratitude towards Chloé for creating the situation. The scene was full of joy.”
Kumail stunned a lot of people revealing his massive transformation from regular comedic actor to beefcake.
The rest of 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, Lauren Ridloff as Makkari, Brian Tyree Henry as Phastos, Salma Hayek as Ajak, Lia McHugh as Sprite, and Don Lee as Gilgamesh.
Eternals is set to be released on February 12th, 2021.
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.
THE RONIN 