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.
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.
Yesterday, it was announced by Amazon via Deadline that they’ve officially cast Alan Ritchson (Titans, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) as the new Jack Reacher for their Prime Video series, which will be a reboot of the Lee Childs hard-boiled character. Reacher is known to be a hulking figure at 6’5 (Ritchson is 6’4), so the casting seems to be great on paper, we’ll have to see if Amazon will have another Jack Ryan level hit on their hands.
Its first season is said to be based on the novel The Killing Floor and will take place in Georgia.
Jack Reacher comes to the little town of Margrave looking for information about the mysterious death of a guitar player named Blind Blake. Instead, he finds one of the largest counterfeiting operations in history.
The character had been previously played by action star Tom Cruise in Christopher McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher and the box office blunder Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. A casting choice that seemed to irk author Lee Childs in retrospect.
I’m sure folks are going to be curious if a Jack Ryan and Jack Reacher crossover event could be in the cards given they’re both Paramount/Skydance characters with their own Amazon shows.
Amazon has a bevy of shows based on novels on the way including Lord of The Rings and The Wheel of Time about to resume production after production pauses. They also announced plans in 2018 to make a series reboot of Robert E. Howard’s Conan The Barbarian, the film incarnation starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and is credited to launching his successful Hollywood career.
Today, it was announced via Twitter that Supernatural actor Jensen Ackles has landed the role of Soldier Boy in the third season of Amazon’s mature superhero series The Boys.
The Boys is an irreverent take on what happens when superheroes, who are as popular as celebrities, as influential as politicians and as revered as Gods, abuse their superpowers rather than use them for good. It’s the powerless against the super powerful as The Boys embark on a heroic quest to expose the truth about “The Seven”, and their formidable Vought backing.
Ackles made the announcement on the official account for the series in a cheeky video.
The news comes ahead of the Season 2 drop on Prime Video which will debut September 4th.
I’d totally recommend catching up with Season 1 before the new season drops if you haven’t already.
In a more intense, more desperate Season 2 of THE BOYS, Butcher, Hughie and the team reel from their losses in Season 1. On the run from the law, they struggle to fight back against the Superheroes. As Vought, the company that manages the heroes, cashes in on the panic over the threat of Supervillains, and a new hero, Stormfront, shakes up the company and challenges an already unstable Homelander.
Yesterday, it was reported by Variety that Paramount Pictures is now in final negotiations with Amazon Studios to sell them the global rights to the Skydance Media action movie Without Remorse.
Based on the novel from Tom Clancy, it has a script penned by Taylor Sheridan (Sicario, Wind River). Stefano Sollima, who directed the feature adaptation previously worked with Amazon for the Prime Video series ZeroZeroZero.
Paramount had originally planned on releasing the Michael B. Jordan film on September 18th before moving it’s release to February 26th, 2021, after COVID-19 concerns but has instead decided to sell to Amazon instead and will drop on Amazon Prime.
Jordan plays Clark, a former U.S. Navy SEAL that is recruited into the C.I.A. as an operator. The character was previously played by Willem Dafoe in Clear & Present Danger and Liev Schreiber in The Sum of All Fears.
There is a good chance that Michael B. Jordan’s John Clark could eventually crossover with Amazon’s Jack Ryan series which is set in the same universe created by Tom Clancy. Jack and John have interacted on multiple times in the Jack Ryan novels, having Without Remorse at Amazon allows them some extra wiggle-room to have them cross paths in the future.
When Without Remorse will be released is currently unknown but since it was going to be ready for September there is a shot that it could be released on Amazon Prime before the end of the year.
Another high-concept and potentially expense series is coming to Amazon Prime Video.
Today, game developer Bethesda announced that they’re partnering with Amazon Studios and Kilter Films to bring to life a live-action series based on the beloved post-apocalypse video game franchise Fallout.
They’ve hired Westworld series co-creators and showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan to develop the show for the streaming service via Kilter Films and will act as producers. Nolan is also known as a screenwriter working on his brother Christopher Nolan’s films such as Interstellar, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises.
Here is the press release.
Amazon Studios has licensed the rights to the worldwide best-selling game franchise Fallout, with acclaimed producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s Kilter Films attached to produce the project, currently in development with a series commitment.
The world of Fallout is one where the future envisioned by Americans in the late 1940s explodes upon itself through a nuclear war in 2077. The magic of the Fallout world is the harshness of the wasteland set against the previous generation’s utopian idea of a better world through nuclear energy. It is serious and harsh in tone, yet sprinkled with moments of ironic humor and B-movie-nuclear-fantasies.Fallout games have achieved record-setting sales and received hundreds of awards, including dozens of Game of the Year awards, while its mobile game, Fallout Shelter, has been downloaded more than 170 million times.
Fallout is from Amazon Studios and Kilter Films in association with Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks, with executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, and Athena Wickham for Kilter Films, Todd Howard for Bethesda Game Studios, and James Altman for Bethesda Softworks.
The pair’s Kilter Films is also in pre-production on their series adaptation of the William Gibson cyberpunk novel The Peripheral.
Lisa Joy recently made her feature film directorial debut with her sci-fi thriller Reminiscence for Warner Bros. starring Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson, and Thandie Newton.
This is yet another high-profile series in development at Amazon Prime Video as they’re about to resume production on their fantasy shows such as The Lord of The Rings and The Wheel of Time.
If successful, I’m curious if Amazon Studios will also attempt to license the rights for Doom and Skyrim in the future to give those properties series adaptations as well.
Amazon is tackling another interesting series adaptation with news today of them adapting a Japanese property for western audiences. It’s been announced via outlets like Variety that Amazon Studios, Fox 21 Television Studios, and Vertigo are moving forward with an English-langue live-action series adaptation of the manga The Promised Neverland.
The manga is written by Kaiu Shirai and illustrated by Posuka Demizu. It is in it’s second season of an anime series in Japan as well.
THE PROMISED NEVERLAND – A group of the smartest kids at a seemingly idyllic orphanage uncover its dark truth when they break a rule to never leave the orphanage grounds. Once the truth is discovered, they begin to plan an escape to save all of the children.
Rodney Rothman, who co-directed the Oscar-winning animated film Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse will be helming the series with a script from Spider-Verse screenwriter Meghan Malloy.
I’m not familiar with the property but this certainly sounds interesting enough to be serialized. I’m curious how fans will react from a western adaption.
Earlier in the week it was reported by Variety that Amazon will be developing a standalone series focusing on Swedish literary heroine Lisbeth Salander best known from the Sony Pictures thrillers The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Girl In The Spider’s Web.
Originally, the novels from author Stieg Larsson were adapted as a trilogy of Swedish films.
The new streaming series from Amazon is said to take Salander in a new direction giving her new stories and characters to interact with, hence the “standalone” aspect. Unlike her other live-action counterparts this won’t be an adaption of existing novels.
Amazon and Left Bank Pictures will produce the series in association with Sony Pictures Television.
It sounds like the show is in very early stages as a showrunner or writers weren’t named in the report.
Lisbeth is one of the more complex female protagonists as she is an investigator, hacker, and vigilante that happens to get herself caught-up in the grim underworld of serial killers, international human trafficking, and corporate espionage.
The role has been previously played by Noomi Rapace, Rooney Mara, and Claire Foy. Mara ended up landing a Best Actress Oscar nomination for the David Fincher incarnation of Lisbeth.
Who exactly is playing her in this new version in currently unknown.
THE RONIN 