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.”
A while ago it was announced that Westworld’s Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan would be producing a brand new science fiction series The Peripheral, based on the William Gibson novel for Warner Bros. Television and Amazon Studios that will air on Prime Video with Scott B. Smith and Greg Plageman set to showrun.
Variety reports that Chloe Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass, Let Me In) has nabbed the role of Flynne Fisher in the show.
The series centers on Flynne Fisher (Moretz), a woman trying to hold together the pieces of her broken family in a forgotten corner of tomorrow’s America. Flynne is smart, ambitious and doomed. She has no future – until the future comes calling for her.
It’s certain one of the upcoming adaptations at Amazon I’m very interested in seeing come together.
William Gibson is credited as creating the cyberpunk genre as we know it starting with his seminal novel Neuromancer and his work has gone to influence things like The Matrix franchise, Altered Carbon, and the upcoming video game Cyberpunk 2077.
Chloe recently joined Miramax’s upcoming sci-fi flick Mother/ Android that will be written and directed by Mattson Tomlin (The Batman, Project Power).
British actor Paddy Consideine (Hot Fuzz, Macbeth) has taken the lead in HBO’s new Game of Thrones series titled House of The Dragon has been announced by the network.
Paddy is a seasoned actor who most recently worked with HBO on the series The Outsider.
Filming is expected to take place in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Here is the official press release.
Based on George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, the series will tell the story of House Targaryen (a.k.a. the House that gave us the Mother of Dragons herself, Daenerys Targaryen) and take place 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones.
Paddy Considine (HBO’s The Third Day and The Outsider) will be playing King Viserys Targaryen. Viserys was chosen by the lords of Westeros to succeed the Old King, Jaehaerys Targaryen, at the Great Council at Harrenhal. A warm, kind, and decent man, Viserys only wishes to carry forward his grandfather’s legacy, but as we’ve learned from Game of Thrones, good men do not necessarily make for great kings.
Martin and Ryan Condal (Colony, Hercules) will serve as co-creators on the series. Miguel Sapochnik and Condal will be showrunners, and the pair will also serve as executive producers along with Martin and Vince Gerardis. Sapochnik, whose directing credits include six Game of Thrones episodes, won Emmy and DGA honors for “Battle of the Bastards.” He was nominated for another Emmy in 2019 for directing “The Long Night” and won the Emmy for Best Drama Series as an executive producer for the final season.
Back in February, up-and-coming British actor Oliver Jackson-Cohen (The Invisible Man) was asked by Entertainment Tonight about playing Marvel’s next big role Marc Spector aka Moon Knight. While not familiar with the character he was game for it.
JACKSON-COHEN: “I have heard this, yes. I don’t understand what a Moon Knight is. Sign me up!. No, I’d love to. Every single time I open Instagram, it’s like, ‘MOON KNIGHT!’ And I’m like, ‘This is so great and thank you, but I don’t know what it is!’. No one’s called me. I would love to be a Marvel superhero. That would be a dream. Tell all of your viewers to go and stand outside Marvel headquarters!”
Moon Knight is the next Marvel Studios series that will announce their main lead in the near future and is expected to shoot in the United Kingdom and the United States under the working title of Good Faith. The character would open the door to more of the occult, supernatural, and horror elements in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not unlike Mahershala Ali’s upcoming Blade reboot.
The hero is ostensibly Marc Spector, a mercenary who has numerous after egos – cabbie Jake Lockley and millionaire playboy Steven Grant – in order to better fight the criminal underworld. But later he was established as being a conduit for the Egyptian moon god Khonshu. Most recently, he was a consultant who dresses in all-white and goes by the name Mr. Knight.
He’s now reaffirmed that desire to play Spector while speaking with Comic Book to promote his upcoming Netflix series Haunting of Bly Manor.
JACKSON-COHEN: “Listen, Twitter is quite the encyclopedia and I have been very fortunate that people have educated me well on Moon Knight and Marvel and the world of it. The honest response is that I have no idea, no one has called me about this, but, again, I stand by what I said, that Moon Knight sounds like a fascinating, fascinating character, and I’d love to get my hands on that, but you just never know, do you?”
The problem with actors voicing their desire to play a character publicly is that tend to be the kinds of actors that Marvel avoids. Most recent castings of Jonathan Majors as Kang The Conqueror, Tatiana Maslany as Jennifer Walters aka She-Hulk, and Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel have been people that were never part of the rumor mill and various fan campaigns on social media.
Also, there has been no shortage of random casting rumors/fan campaigns on the internet (take with a pinch of salt) for Marc Spector from Zac Efron, Daniel Radcliffe, Shia Labeouf, and even the increasingly busy Keanu Reeves. Some of the names would conflict with various casting and character information that had been making the rounds because there was talk that Marvel Studios wanted to hire a practicing Jewish actor but Efron (non-practicing and too busy) and Reeves (Christian and too busy) wouldn’t meet that criteria. There was also talk of Marvel looking at younger actors in their 30s, a little young given how much Spector has done before becoming Moon Knight and now that has jumped to actors 40-50. This could simply mean that this information is iffy, to begin with, which is why we shouldn’t take this stuff too seriously until there is an official announcement from trades/Marvel.
Earlier in the year, Daniel Radcliffe specifically debunked those rumblings that he was being pursued by Marvel for Moon Knight while speaking to Coming Soon.
RADCLIFFE: “I’m not averse to doing any kind of franchise thing in the future again, that could be fun. But the Moon Knight rumors are untrue, I can officially debunk that one, I haven’t heard anything about it.”
It does seem like that we’ll learn who is directing Moon Knight before we’ll get the announcement of the actor playing Marc Spector.
Guy Ritchie is busy these days as he released The Gentlemen in January, expected to release his armored car thriller Wrath of Man starring Jason Statham in the near future, and is about to return to the spy genre with his Statham action flick Five Years filming this fall in Europe.
Deadline has learned that Ritchie is looking to turn his film The Gentlemen into a series for Miramax TV, pointing out that the project originally was a television pitch before it pivoted to a feature film adaption. Adding that Guy will both write and direct the show.
Miramax TV is developing The Gentlemen, a TV series based on the studio’s successful action-comedy feature that was written and directed by Guy Ritchie and starred Matthew McConaughey. Ritchie will write and direct the series, which he will executive produce alongside Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, his fellow producers on the movie.
The British gangster film starred Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, Colin Farrell, Michelle Dockery, and Hugh Grant, however, it’s unknown if that cast will reprise their roles for the series.
THE GENTLEMEN – Miramax TV is developing The Gentlemen, a TV series based on the studio’s successful action-comedy feature that was written and directed by Guy Ritchie and starred Matthew McConaughey. Ritchie will write and direct the series, which he will executive produce alongside Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, his fellow producers on the movie.
Deadline reports that Canadian newcomer Iman Vellani has been hired by Marvel Studios to play the role of Kamala Khan in their Disney+ series Ms. Marvel.
Kamala Khan is a Pakistani-American Muslim teenager living in New Jersey, a Carol Danvers super-fan that discovers she has superpowers. In the comics she is part of The Inhumans and eventually joins the Young Avengers.
The show directors are said to include Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, and Meera Menon. Bisha K. Ali is also writing the series.
There had been rumblings that filming could begin as early as November in Atlanta. However, filming will be heavily reliant on where the United States and Georgia will be concerning the second wave of COVID-19.
The Ms. Marvel role will lead to Iman making the jump the movies and most likely will appear in stuff like Captain Marvel 2.
Deadline reports that a new series version of Conan The Barbarian based on the classic Robert E. Howard sword and sorcery hero is in development at Netflix. They also point out that Netflix can make new movies as well.
Netflix has put in development an epic live-action series based on Conan, the iconic sword-and-sorcery character created by writer Robert E. Howard, I have learned. I hear the project, from Fredrik Malmberg and Mark Wheeler’s Pathfinder Media, is the first in a deal between Netflix and Conan Properties International, owned by Malmberg’s Cabinet Entertainment. The pact gives Netflix the exclusive option to acquire rights to the Conan literary library and develop works across TV and film, both live-action and animated.
A feature film titled The Legend of Conan was in the works with Arnold Schwarzenegger reprising the role and later on a reboot series at Amazon had been in development before it was killed.
Schwarzenegger made the role famous in Conan The Barbarian and the sub-par sequel Conan The Destroyer. A series titled Conan The Adventurer starring Gladiator actor Ralf Möller had been made before Jason Momoa took a crack at the character in the 2011 remake of Conan The Barbarian.
CONAN THE BARBARIAN – Orphaned boy Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is enslaved after his village is destroyed by the forces of vicious necromancer Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones), and is compelled to push “The Wheel of Pain” for many years. Once he reaches adulthood, Conan sets off across the prehistoric landscape of the Hyborian Age in search of the man who killed his family and stole his father’s sword. With beautiful warrior Valeria (Sandahl Bergman) and archer Subotai (Gerry Lopez), he faces a supernatural evil.
A Conan The Barbarian series would fit nicely among The Witcher series, a string of Polish fantasy novels that owe a lot to Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. Netflix being the home of the series should allow all the sex and violence that the franchise is known for.
Yesterday, Karl Urban the star of the comic book series The Boys took to Instagram to announce that his Lord of The Rings co-star John Noble has taken a meaty role in Season 3 of The Boys. The pair were previously seen in the Best Picture Oscar-winner The Lord of The Rings: The Return of The King.
The photo was seemingly taken in Toronto where the last two seasons of The Boys were shot and is expected to take place for Season 3 as well.
John is an Australian character actor known for the series Fringe, Elementary, and playing Denethor (Steward of Gondor) in Peter Jackson’s Lord of The Rings trilogy.
Supernatural’s Jensen Ackles also recently joined the show’s cast as Soldier Boy.
Back In May, Murphy’s Multiverse had speculated that young actress Erin Kellyman (Solo: A Star Wars Story, The Green Knight) had taken an undisclosed role in the Marvel Studios series The Falcon & The Winter Soldier. That has now been officially confirmed thanks to a recent set photo from Atlanta, Georgia as the Star Wars actress (her name obviously misspelled in the IG post) can be seen working with Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s George St-Pierre, as he reprises the Batroc The Leaper role in the series.
Could Erin be playing Batroc’s young assassin/mercenary daughter Marie?
Erin is likely most notable for her role as Star Wars character Enfys Nest in Solo: A Star Wars Story and has a role in A24’s Arthurian fantasy film The Green Knight which still hasn’t been given a new release date.
The Ronin reported back in mid-August that The Falcon & The Winter Soldier would see it’s release delayed until sometime in 2021 after many were adamant that it could still make a 2020 release despite having a fair amount of filming to do. The delay tidbit has seemingly been confirmed by Disney+ as they’ve excluded the series from their 2020 lineup promo material and the official website lists a TBA 2021 release.
Hopefully, they won’t delay the series too long as many folks are really looking forward to getting their hands on it after the recent news that Black Widow’s release date has been pushed to May.
Deadline has word that the New Zealand production of Amazon’s Lord of The Rings series has resumed and Netflix’s live-action Cowboy Bebop heading towards a start on September 30th, both series had been shooting in Auckland.
Filming has just resumed in New Zealand on Amazon’s sprawling The Lord Of The Rings TV series, an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novels, I have learned. Production on Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop is slated to restart on Wednesday, Sept. 30, in the island country where Netflix’s Sweet Tooth has been shooting since Sept. 14, sources said. The three shows were among handful of Hollywood TV series and movies that were granted border exemptions by the New Zealand government in July to film in the country.
The Lord of The Rings series will take place during The Second Age of Middle-Earth, which means this will be thousands of years before the events of two feature film trilogies that took place in The Third Age. It’s cast includes Robert Aramayo, Markella Kavenagh, Morfydd Clark, Ema Horvath, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Maxim Baldry, Nazanin Boniadi, and Joseph Mawle.
The Second Age sees the rise of Sauron, who has replaced Melkor aka Morgoth as the new Dark Lord after Morgoth is banished to the void. During this time Sauron creates the rings of power and uses them to destroy multiple ancient kingdoms leading to the battle scene in the prologue sequence from Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring.
It’ll be interesting to see if we’ll end up seeing fair-faced version of Sauron and the origin of The Witch King, who might have been a Numenorean king of the ancient island kingdom. A key location that is going to be explored in the series.
Sadly, Amazon is tackling The Second Age because they don’t have access to The First Age, which is mostly covered in The Silmarillion and the History of Middle-Earth. This could lead to Amazon having to come up with a lot of that mythology on their own and filling blanks with the help of the Tolkien Estate. This series will likely be familiar to fans but will also likely be it’s own thing.
We are hearing they’ll be adding many familiar Middle-Earth creatures but remains to be seen if they’ll attempt to make the production design match the Peter Jackson films.
Deadline adding that writers have used the production pause to start writing Season 2 (previously confirmed) scripts which isn’t shocking it’s being planned as getting five seasons.
The writing team of the series, led by showrunners and executive producers J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, used the time to map out and write Season 2 scripts.
Netflix had begun shooting the live-action Cowboy Bebop last fall and after a knee injury suffered by lead actor John Cho led to a hiatus in Auckland before the COVID-19 impacted global production. Resuming this week sounds is the first step for them to finally get this completed after a year of hiccups.
COWBOY BEOP – Based on the worldwide phenomenon from Sunrise Inc., Cowboy Bebop is the jazz-inspired, genre-bending story of Spike Spiegel, Jet Black, Faye Valentine and Radical Ed: a rag-tag crew of bounty hunters on the run from their pasts as they hunt down the solar system’s most dangerous criminals. They’ll even save the world…for the right price.
This news comes after James Cameron recently confirmed to Arnold Schwarzenegger that they’ve completed live-action filming on Avatar 2 and is 95% completed on Avatar 3. Those two massive sequels had been shooting at Stone Street Studios in Wellington, New Zealand.
THE RONIN 