Millennium Films has finally found their new Red Sonja as The Hollywood Reporter reveals that British actress Hannah John-Kamen will be playing the fantasy heroine birthed from the pages of Marvel Comics and inspired by characters from Conan creator Robert E. Howard.
Hannah has been long involved with genre projects with credits that include Ant-Man & The Wasp, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Black Mirror, Misfits, Tomb Raider, Ready Player One, Game of Thrones, and Brave New World. She recently nabbed the Jill Valentine role in the Resident Evil reboot.
Sonya was created by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith for Marvel Comics’ Conan the Barbarian comic in the early 1970s and was an amalgam of several characters from Conan creator Robert E. Howard. The character, fiery and strong enough to go toe-to-toe with Conan while refusing his advances, proved popular enough to get her own book, continuing to this day even as the Howard and Conan licenses have moved through several companies. Millennium is saying their movie is based on the comic published by Dynamite Entertainment
The film will be directed by Transparent’s Joey Soloway, after the studio removed X-Men’s Bryan Singer in the wake of multiple sexual assault allegations. Soloway also co-wrote the remake’s script with Tasha Huo.
Danish actress Brigitte Nielsen played the role originally alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1985 film. A reboot had been previously in the works from producer Robert Rodriguez with Planet Terror’s Rose McGowan set to play the role before things fell apart.
Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania seemingly has a seasonal start date according to Evangeline Lilly. The Canadian actress has revealed in the comments section of a recent Instagram post they’re aiming to start shooting the sequel sometime in the summer.
Below is a screenshot of that interaction.
Lilly will be returning alongside director Peyton Reed and fellow cast members Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Newcomers include Kathryn Newton as the new Cassie Lang and Lovecraft Country’s Jonathan Majors playing Kang The Conqueror, the latter is assumed to be the main villain of the picture.
There are multiple signals that filming will take place at Pinewood Studios UK, the British stages were previously used for Black Widow and Eternals.
Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness, directed by Sam Raimi, is currently in production over at Longcross Studios in Surrey, England with cameras still rolling on Spider-Man 3 in Atlanta and Takia Waititi’s Thor: Love & Thunder just starting production last month at Fox Studios Australia in Sydney, Australia.
Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther 2 is reportedly aiming to start filming in the summer as well but will be shooting in Atlanta, Georgia. There is also evidence that Nia DaCosta’s Captain Marvel 2 will be shooting in the UK as well but given it’s November 2022 release date likely won’t begin shooting until September-October. James Gunn is busy with his HBO Max series Peacemaker but will eventually return to the Marvel family to shoot Guardians of The Galaxy 3, most likely in 2022.
Sadly, the Ant-Man & The Wasp sequel is without an official release date from Disney/Marvel.
Tomorrow will see the final episode of The Mandalorian Season 2 air on Disney+ and we know who will be directing that episode. During an interview with Extra, Pedro Pascal has now revealed that Peyton Reed will be back to direct the Season 2 finale.
Peyton Reed directed the fantastic second episode of this current season which featured the Frog Lady and the live-action version of the Krykna. The director is best known for Marvel’s Ant-Man, Ant-Man & The Wasp, and will shoot Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania next year.
We know that Grogu is in the hands of Moff Gideon and Mando will attempt to rescue him with a handful of his cohorts, how this all turns out remains to be seen and there have been speculation a Jedi may show up.
It’ll be a little while before we get more Star Wars as Andor just started shooting and Obi-Wan Kenobi won’t begin production until March. However, it’s very likely that Season 3 of The Mandalorian will begin filming soon if it hasn’t already. We’re getting a whole bunch of new shows on the horizon with Ahsoka, Rangers of The New Republic, and The High Republic era show The Acolyte.
We’re hearing there are more shows to be announced as well.
The Ronin has learned that Marvel Studios has added Will Htay as the production designer of Peyton Reed’s upcoming Ant-Man 3 and could speak to the scale of the film.
Will’s impressive credits on massive blockbusters as a concept designer includes films such as Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, No Time To Die, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Solo: A Star Wars Story. His work on Star Wars isn’t relegated to just feature films as has been part of the production design team on Disney+ series Kenobi and the untitled Cassian Andor show.
Reed is no stranger to Star Wars either as he directed Chapter 10 of The Mandalorian.
Returning cast members include Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Emma Fuhrmann
Lovecraft Country’s Jonathan Majors is reportedly playing the villain Kang The Conqueror in the sequel which suggests the scale of the Marvel Comics sequel.
We’ve been hearing for months that filming on Ant-Man 3 will be taking place mainly on the stages of Pinewood Studios UK in Buckinghamshire, England and they’ll have access to The Volume/StageCraft for their shoot. The facility was used for upcoming Marvel films Black Widow and Eternals, the latter finishing up their reshoots.
Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness is currently shooting at Longcross Studios in Surrey, England with Elizabeth Olsen suggesting she’ll join them next month.
Ant-Man 3 is without an official release date but is coming out sometime in 2022.
In Chapter 10, directed by Ant-Man’s Peyton Reed, we see Season 1 actress Misty Rosas return after playing Kuiil (voiced by Nick Nolte) to take a new role of the Frog Lady fare and Richard Ayoade’s droid bounty hunter makes a brief return too.
Mando encounters some tie-fighter pilots leading to him wrecking the ship and stranding the group on an icy planet.
We also see a huge call-back to the white spiders created by artist Ralph McQuarrie for The Empire Strikes Back (seen above) and excellently used on this snowy planet, the new episode also homages both James Cameron’s Aliens and John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing. They were also used in Star Wars: Rebels and given the name of Krykna.
Between tackling the Krykna in this new episode and the Krayt dragon on Tatooine in Chapter 9, it is starting to feel like the visual effects budget has been greatly increased from Season 1.
Here is a new batch of concept artwork from Chapter 10.
In a post-COVID-19 world, it looks like Disney is looking to adopt safer methods of production which includes expanding the use of the StageCraft technology used to shoot the first two seasons of The Mandalorian. Using this technology means less production crew would be potentially put in harm’s way for set construction and also limit the number of secondary exterior locations as productions traveling to multiple countries might not be the wisest idea at the moment.
The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that ILM’s StageCraft technology will be used for Marvel Studios’ Thor: Love & Thunder (MCU Cosmic mentioned this previously) at Fox Studios Australia in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
This comes after writer and director Taika Waititi had used the technology when filming the final episode of the first season of Lucasfilm’s Star Wars series The Mandalorian.
There has been an expectation that Thor: Love & Thunder will begin shooting sometime between January-February of next year as director Destin Daniel Cretton is trying to finish up production on Shang-Chi & The Legend of The Ten Rings allowing Taika to move in for the Thor sequel.
THR adds that they’ll also be adding StageCraft to the Pinewood Studios UK facility.
In addition, ILM is building a StageCraft volume at Pinewood Studios in London (expected to open in February), and a larger custom volume at Fox Studios Australia that will be used for Thor: Love and Thunder. Waititi previously used virtual production when he helmed the final episode of The Mandalorian season one.
Actor Ewan McGregor previously confirmed that his Star Wars series Kenobi directed by Deborah Chow (The Mandalorian) would be implementing the technology during an interview with Ace Universe back in June.
The next Marvel Studios feature film to shoot at Pinewood Studios UK is expected to be Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man 3, who happened to direct an episode of The Mandalorian for Season 2 just like Taika and may also be familiar with StageCraft after his own experience with that show.
Yesterday, I posted an update of sorts on Ant-Man 3 via Twitter that they are deep in pre-production and that we should expect some massive action sequences given they’ll be moving filming from Pinewood Atlanta Studios to Pinewood Studios UK, the latter facility has been used for the Star Wars films and traditional all of the James Bond movies as well.
We should expect this installment to feel more like an event.
#AntMan3 is well into pre-production and "big" is going to be an understatement… there is a reason this movie is moving to the stages home to BOND and STAR WARS.
I was also able to confirm Marvel/Disney is aiming to release the film sometime in 2020, however, release dates for the next little while will be in flux and most will unlikely be set-in-stone for the foreseeable future given multiple projects will begin production in 2021 meaning that some projects may have be delayed to 2023.
Peyton Reed recently mentioned that the film would be “bigger” and “sprawling” while speaking on The Jess Cagle Show and reaffirmed via Yahoo! Entertainment that Evangeline Lily’s Wasp would be getting equal billing on the sequel.
REED: “They’re a partnership, and she’s a very, very important part of that. And that was a very gratifying thing, I guess technically we were the first Marvel movie with a female hero in the title of the movie. Finding that balance in that movie, that’s very important to me because that’s very much a men’s playing field, historically. But that’s really, really changing now in a great way.”
I’m personally holding out the hope that we’ll see the film morph into some sort of MCU version of Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim as Peyton Reed hasn’t been shy about how the films have been influenced by Japanese kaiju projects like Ultraman. Moving the setting of the film outside of San Francisco might also help shake things up given that Scott Lang might be allowed to move a little more freely around the world after the events of Avengers: Endgame.
Most recently the Pinewood facility has been used for Black Widow and Eternals both films are expected to be larger in scale than Ant-Man or Ant-Man & The Wasp. There is also an expectation that the Moon Knight series will spend some time there as well and we should be getting some updates on that show in the near future.
Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness is confirmed for Longcross Studios in Surrey, England and it’s unknown at this point if they’ll have access to the StageCraft tech, but it’s possible.
This new technology certainly would cut-down costs and post-production time, the safety element is simply a massive benefit.
THE RONIN 