Tag: Inception

Posted on in Film News

EXCLUSIVE: ‘Black Panther 2’ Enlists ‘Inception’ Supervising Art Director Brad Ricker

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has been filming over the summer in Atlanta with Ryan Coogler back as director and co-writer. The sequel will be released on July 8, 2022, with a returning cast that consists of Danai Gurira as Okoye, Letitia Wright as Shuri, Daniel Kaluuya as W’Kabi, Winston Duke as M’Baku, Lupita Nyong’o as Nakia, Florence Kasumba as Ayo, Angela Bassett as Romonda, and Martin Freeman as Everett K. Ross.

Oscar-winning production designer Hannah Beachler is officially back for the sequel and The Ronin can confirm she’ll get help from veteran supervising art director Brad Ricker.

The art director’s extensive credits include a solid amount of action projects such as The Tomorrow War, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Michael Bay’s Bad Boys II, J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III, Suicide Squad, and a portion of Ghost In The Shell.

Fellow Oscar winners Ruth E. Carter (Coming 2 America) and Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson (Turning Red, The Mandalorian) are set to return too.

Loki’s director of photography, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, will take over duties from Rachel Morrison.

Dominique Thorne (Judas & The Black Messiah) will make her MCU debut as Riri Williams (getting her own Disney+ series Ironheart) alongside new additions to the cast like Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You, Black Mirror) and Tenoch Huerta (Narcos: Mexico) their roles have yet to be officially named by the studio.

Online rumors have suggested that Namor McKenzie and The Kingdom of Atlantis will feature heavily in the movie. Wakanda and Atlantis have fought each other in the comic books, so it makes sense from that standpoint.

There have been teases that Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ character Valentina Allegra de Fontaine will make an appearance in the new film after showing up in The Falcon & The Winter Soldier and in a button scene from Black Widow.

One glaring issue is how Marvel Studios and the writers will deal with the death of star Chadwick Boseman, as the studio has stated they won’t be bringing him back with CGI or recasting the T’Challa role. A common assumption is that the film will feature the choosing of a new king/queen and Black Panther.

A Wakanda focused Disney+ series is also on the way from Ryan Coogler.

BLACK PANTHER – After the death of his father, T’Challa returns home to the African nation of Wakanda to take his rightful place as king. When a powerful enemy suddenly reappears, T’Challa’s mettle as king — and as Black Panther — gets tested when he’s drawn into a conflict that puts the fate of Wakanda and the entire world at risk. Faced with treachery and danger, the young king must rally his allies and release the full power of Black Panther to defeat his foes and secure the safety of his people.

Posted on in Television News

‘Jack Ryan’ Season 3 Adds ‘Dunkirk & ‘The Dark Knight’ Stunt Coordinator Tom Struthers

John Krasinski is having a pretty good week as his second feature film as a director made a mint at the domestic box office this past Memorial Day long weekend, with A Quiet Place Part II taking in around $57 million surpassing both the original film and Godzilla Vs. Kong’s pandemic record breaking domestic opening. Krasinski is also the main lead of the Amazon spy series Jack Ryan, of course, based on the Tom Clancy series of novels that spawned five studio movies previously led by actors such as Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, and Chris Pine.

The Ronin can confirm that veteran stunt coordinator Tom Struthers has joined the production team of the Amazon Prime Video series. Something that should get action fans like myself hyped about the third season taking steps to elevate the show’s action sequences.

The stunt coordinator isn’t a stranger to the Jack Ryan franchise as he worked on Chris Pine’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Struthers’ other credits include The Dark Knight, Dunkirk, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, John Carter, Terminator Salvation, and X-Men: First Class. He most recently worked on Denis Villeneuve’s first Dune installment and the Paramount+ streaming series Halo starring Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief, both sci-fi projects had been primarily shot in Budapest, Hungary.

Filming is reportedly still underway as Deadline says they added Betty Gabriel (Get Out) to the cast last month and mentioned the plot synopsis of the next season. She joins Krasinski alongside others such as Wendell Pierce, Mark Kelly, James Cosmo, Peter Guinness, Nina Hoss, and Alexej Manvelov.

Season 3 of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan finds Jack Ryan (Krasinski) on the run and in a race against time. Jack is wrongly implicated in a larger conspiracy and suddenly finds himself a fugitive out in the cold. Now, wanted by both the CIA and an international rogue faction that he has uncovered, Jack is forced underground, crisscrossing Europe, trying to stay alive and prevent a massive global conflict.

Season 3 is said to debut sometime this year.

Posted on in Film News

Tom Hardy To Lead Netflix Action-Thriller ‘Havoc’ Directed By ‘The Raid’s Gareth Evans

It looks like Tom Hardy has found his next project as he’s taken the lead role in the Netflix film, Havoc, from writer/director Gareth Evans, the filmmaker has a new deal with the streaming giant and the action-thriller will be part of it.

The story is set after a drug deal gone wrong, when a bruised detective must fight his way through a criminal underworld to rescue a politician’s estranged son, while unraveling a deep web of corruption and conspiracy that ensnares his entire city.

Evans is best known for The Raid and The Raid 2 along with his British crime series Gangs of London. He was also developing a Deathstroke film for DC Films and Warner Bros. at one time.

Tom has been known for taking various kinds of projects including The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, Dunkirk, Mad Max: Fury Road, Venom, and this summer’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage. He was recently attached to star in the Vietnam War film The Things We Carried.

SOURCE: DEADLINE

Posted on in Film News

Christopher Nolan Unlikely To Work With Warner Bros. In The Future

A new report from The Wall Street Journal (spotted by The Playlist) is claiming that Warner Bros. golden-child director Christopher Nolan is now “unlikely” to make future films at the studio due to their decision to embrace a new day-and-date release model that is meant to boost subscriptions to HBO Max on the backs of the film division and filmmakers. This wouldn’t be terribly surprising as Christopher Nolan has been vocal against this release model since it’s announcement caught most directors it affected off guard and almost led to a potential lawsuit from production partner Legendary Entertainment.

The filmmaker made his opinions widely known in various interviews including the following quote from The Hollywood Reporter.

NOLAN: “Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service. Warner Bros. had an incredible machine for getting a filmmaker’s work out everywhere, both in theaters and in the home, and they are dismantling it as we speak. They don’t even understand what they’re losing. Their decision makes no economic sense, and even the most casual Wall Street investor can see the difference between disruption and dysfunction.”

Dune director Denis Villeneuve also made a similar plea to the studio in an op-ed at The Hollywood Reporter, suggesting the studio could be killing the Dune franchise.

This would be the first time in twenty years that Nolan had a movie that wasn’t made for Warner Bros. or distributed by them since 2001’s Memento. The filmmaker is one of the few people that can convince a studio to give him a blockbuster-level budget to make original films as seen with Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and last summer’s Tenet.

Here is a rundown of the global box office earnings of the Warner Bros. films made by Christopher Nolan over the years.

  • INSOMNIA (2002) – $113.7 Million
  • BATMAN BEGINS (2004) – $373.6 Million
  • THE PRESTIGE (2006) – $109.6 Million
  • THE DARK KNIGHT (2008) – $1 Billion
  • INCEPTION (2010) – $836.8 Million
  • THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012) – $1.08 Billion
  • INTERSTELLAR (2014) – $701.7 Million
  • DUNKIRK (2017) – $526.9 Million
  • TENET (2020) – $363.1 Million

If Nolan ultimately exits the studio this could be a huge loss for Warner Bros. and a sign of more creative fallout from WarnerMedia/AT&T’s new day-and-date model. The model sees WarnerMedia adding a bulk of their 2021 theatrical releases to their struggling streaming service HBO Max exclusively for a month at the same time the film is being released domestically in theaters, having HBO Max and theaters going head-to-head for audiences.

AT&T CEO John Stankey had previously alluded to The Washington Post in an interview, that this is likely going to be a release model they’ll be using beyond 2021 and the pandemic giving the impression they wouldn’t be turning back to regular release windows that gave theaters a proper amount of time to earn money.

STANKEY: “In March, we unleashed a new normal in society. That horse left the barn. I don’t think any of us are going to change that dynamic.”

Nolan could stick around at Warner Bros. if they change their minds on the release model or more likely he could easily find a home at another studio. I don’t think he’d have much trouble getting the same deal elsewhere given his track record.

SOURCE: THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Posted on in Film News

Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tenet’ Officially Delayed To August 12th – Will Warner Bros. Move It Again?

Warner Bros. has flinched for a second time as they’ve officially delayed Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending action blockbuster from July 31st to August 12th.

Tenet had originally been set for release on July 17th.

This comes after the state of New York removed movie theaters from Phase 4 of reopening and multiple states across the United States seeing record breaking numbers of new cases including Texas and Florida surpassing 5,500+ per day.

However, it hasn’t scared the studio enough to push the film out of the summer entirely as they’re essentially bumping the release date a less than two weeks from it’s previous date. There had been reports that Christopher Nolan had been head-strong with the studio making demands to keep the release date in July, despite the coronavirus being extremely deadly and theaters potentially being places where it can spread like wildfire.

Theaters almost attempted to reopen without mandatory masks for patrons until a handful of them noticed the backlash from that weak safety policy.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the studio delayed the film to the fall or winter.

TENET – John David Washington is the new Protagonist in Christopher Nolan’s original sci-fi action spectacle “Tenet.” Armed with only one word—Tenet—and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time. Not time travel. Inversion.

SOURCE: WARNER BROS.