While rumors have swirled of a streaming debut, the seamy adult thriller wouldn’t be appropriate for Disney+, even though Disney owns Fox 2000. Disney also owns Hulu, which was thought to be the eventual home for the film. Adapted from author AJ Finn’s 2018 potboiler, it was originally slated for an October 2019 awards season release, then moved to May 15 of this year, before getting yanked from the calendar entirely....
The French actor has crossed over into studio films like “X-Men: Days of Future Past” and “Jurassic World.” He is a leading man, and his role as the title character in this contemporary, Paris-set series promised not only to spotlight that, but to serve as another successful instance of colorblind casting. Previous adaptations involving Sy’s character were typically written or cast with a white man in the main role. But casting aside, viewers familiar with Arsene Lupin, an early 20th century master of disguise created by Maurice Leblanc, found to their surprise that the updated character bears, at best, a tangential relationship to the gentleman thief of lore....
The company has 20 features and series in various stages of development. Among them are an animated feature inspired by the music of Juice WRLD — one of Spotify’s most popular artists of last year — written by “Daily Show” correspondent Jaboukie Young-White. There’s also “Nuevo Rico,” based on Kris Mercado’s SXSW short and set in a psychedelic future version of Puerto Rico, and an untitled “offbeat, subversive live action-comedy” feature that Quinta Brunson (“A Black Lady Sketch Show”) is currently writing for Sony Pictures....
Known for his documentary “Pier Kids,” about homeless queer and transgender youth in New York, and the “Viceland” series “My House,” about underground competitive ballroom dancing, filmmaker and photographer Elegance Bratton has made his narrative debut with “The Inspection,” a drama based on his own experiences as a gay man in Marine Corps basic training following a decade of living on the streets. Effie Brown’s (“Dear White People”) Gamechanger Films co-financed and produced “The Inspection....
“The Shape of Water” may have been a bold choice for Best Picture, but that Oscar-winning fable about a mute cleaning lady who falls in love with an imprisoned fishman stretched del Toro’s lifelong obsession with poignant genre stories to a fairy-tale ending. It was hard to imagine what “happily ever after” might look like for someone whose B-picture heart earned him prestige-picture hardware. Would he pivot away from his pet obsession, or would he use his newfound pedigree to double down like never before?...
“I’ve written a couple of scripts, the first two scripts, and we’re looking to make them next spring,” Hawley said. “When you get to something with this level of visual effects, there’s a lot of preparation that has to go into it. What’s been really illuminating is to see that the entire film industry had to take a year off and they are now trying to jam two years of production into one year....
After starring in indie films and auteur dramas — as well as big-budget franchise installments like “X-Men: Apocalypse” and the “Star Wars” trilogy — Isaac was “desperate” to return to character studies. “Often on these big movies it can feel like you’re building the plane on the runway,” Isaac told Empire. “The idea of getting back to ‘handmade’ films, character studies…I was desperate for that feeling.” And then along came Disney+’s new Marvel collaboration, “Moon Knight....
The history of cinema on the African continent is expectedly complex and brief — unlike other artforms including music and literature, of which there are decades, if not centuries of rich history. (Check out Malian scholar and professor at New York University’s Department of Cinema Studies, Manthia Diawara’s exhaustive 1992 account of African cinema during the first half of the 20th century, “African Cinema: Politics and Culture.”) Due to restrictive colonialist structures and a Francophone/Anglophone divide, Africans weren’t always in a position to tell their own stories on film....
“Audible” follows a deaf high school footballer and his classmates throughout their senior year, and is directed by Matt Ogens and Geoff McLean and counts deaf actor and model Nyle DiMarco as a producer. Netflix also has Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk’s “Lead Me Home,” a cinematic portrait of homelessness on the West Coast that humanizes the crisis while giving a sense of its immensity. The plaintive and intimate “Three Songs for Benazir” follows a charismatic young Afghani refugee living in a displaced persons camp in Kabul, and hails from Afghani filmmaker Gulistan Mirzaei and his wife Elizabeth Mirzaei....
With the calendar back to normal, more Oscar voters went out to screenings and theaters, although many made their selection from a wide range of movies available on the Academy portal. Back in the mix were such postponed movies as Denis Villeneuve’s day-and-date success “Dune” and Steven Spielberg’s success d’estime “West Side Story,” along with a smattering of arthouse and streaming fare. Clearly, many Academy voters are in the Netflix habit....
“They wanted to hire me like a beard; they wanted me to walk around on set as a woman, but it was their story and their vision,” Jenkins said. “And my ideas? They didn’t even want to read my script. There was such mistrust of a different way of doing things and a different point of view.” Jenkins continued, “Even when I first joined ‘Wonder Woman’ it was like, ‘Uhh, yeah, OK, but let’s do it this other way....
How odd stories remain and get distorted with time. I have just read in IndieWire some public remarks by Viggo Mortensen about the Palme d’Or that I didn’t win for “All About My Mother,” which went to “Rosetta.” I don’t think Viggo is the right person to talk about this. On top of that, he is a friend of mine and his words have shocked me, but I suppose he was defending his director, David Cronenberg, from a curse that has been following him since 1999 and for which I am not to blame....
While the “Wonder Woman” series was perhaps the buzziest pilot going into production for the 2011-2012 TV season, NBC passed on the series. It was a shock to comic book fans at the time, but word later got out the pilot was a near disaster and the network made the right call but not picking it up to series. Pascal would find much better luck with “Wonder Woman” nine years later in Patty Jenkins’ sequel, but he reflected on his first go-around with the comic book franchise in a recent interview with Variety....
In a new interview with USA Today, Witherspoon gave an update on “Legally Blonde 3” and expressed her hope that the long awaited sequel can find the same balance of nostalgia and fresh faces that made “Maverick” soar so high. “I’m still hoping that ‘Legally Blonde 3’ is gonna come together in the right way,” she said. “It’s just like ‘Top Gun’: They waited a long time to make another version of that movie, and I loved the nostalgia piece they incorporated in it....
It also suggests something crucial about how the streaming wars are waged in people’s living rooms. As Disney — and Netflix, and WarnerMedia, and NBCUniversal, the list goes on — invest billions in direct-to-consumer streaming, their vertical integrations all lack a key element: none of them actually make the devices that consumers use to access those services. According to Tedd Cittadine, Roku’s head of content distribution, Disney is an example of “companies that get it....
Here’s the synopsis from Neon: “Stranded in 1950s Ohio after a brutal attack, actor Paul Cole (Gosling), suffering from severe memory loss, struggles to find his way back to his life in New York and reclaim what he has lost. ‘The Actor’ follows a thrilling journey we must all make, to find home, to find love and ultimately to find ourselves.” This will mark Duke Johnson’s first solo feature film directing credit....
The 45-year-actor told Variety that his ability to do superhero and action star stunts had waned in the past decade. “After I turned 35, being thrown onto cement wasn’t hilarious anymore: It had been upgraded to hell,” Reynolds said. “You’re not allowed to eat Advil like cereal. Things start to hurt.” While Reynolds likes “physicality in movies,” he may be handing the reins over to professional stunt artists in the future....
“I don’t advocate drinking when one is on the air. I don’t know how that started as a tradition, but it’s probably a good idea [to scale back], CNN,” Seacrest said. During last year’s coverage, Cohen threw a few digs at the ABC show and Seacrest while inebriated on air, referring to the show as “Ryan Seacrest’s group of losers that are performing behind us” and saying, “I mean, with all due [respect], if you’ve been watching ABC tonight, you’ve seen nothing....
In a recent interview with Collider, Esmail gave some insight into how he plans to approach the series. He said he specifically reached out to Ronald D. Moore, the helmer of the 2004 reboot of “Battlestar” that became a groundbreaking show in its own right, in order to secure his blessing. “I spoke to him before I even took on the project to make sure that it’s all kosher with him, because the last thing I want to do is step on his toes, and the one thing we both agreed on is that it won’t be a reboot of what he did,” said Esmail....
“It’s funny because now I am getting older, [and] the women that I like to play aren’t really — so slowly the ‘older’ is going to be taken away so I’m just playing women,” Escola, 34, said over Zoom. Escola, raised in a mobile home in Oregon but now residing in Brooklyn, is known for their Old Hollywood-invoking, garishly wigged female characters on Instagram, and they bring that matronly charm to playing Chip....
