We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free early screening of Dark Waters, directed by Todd Haynes (Carol) and starring Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway.
SYNOPSIS: Inspired by a shocking true story, a tenacious attorney (Ruffalo) uncovers a dark secret that connects a growing number of unexplained deaths due to one of the world’s largest corporations. In the process, he risks everything – his future, his family, and his own life – to expose the truth.
The screening takes place tonight, November 25th, at Landmark E Street at 7:00pm. If you’d like to attend, simply go to the Focus Features ticketing site here. Please remember all screenings are first come first served and you will need to arrive early to ensure seating. Enjoy the show!
It’s getting down to the wire now. We are less than a month away from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and depending on your feelings on such things it may be time to tune out all trailers and promos. Even if that’s the case for you, Lucasfilm’s behind-the-scenes featurettes are pretty tough to stay away from. There’s so much history that goes into the making of each Star Wars movie, and this one in particular has decades of passion behind it.
Four decades of Star Wars greatness is crammed into this brief featurette which…well, most of it great. It does include the prequels so it ain’t all good. That said, it’s even sorta fun to walk through that period, as well, getting a look at a much-younger Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman. The footage also provides us shots of some of the franchise’s most beloved figures who are no longer with us, such as Carrie Fisher and Peter Mayhew.
Lately, I think we’ve all become trained to look out for celebrity cameos and a pair of them are teased by appearances from Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ed Sheeran. While they’re seen in costumes it doesn’t mean they’re in The Rise of Skywalker‘s final cut, although I doubt Disney wouldn’t release this video if they weren’t. A Disney rep told Yahoo! that both stars’ appearances were from fan events. We’ll see, I suppose? Or not. They could be hidden under a Stormtrooper outfit like Daniel Craig was.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker opens December 20th. Check out the featurette plus the latest TV spot below.
By many accounts this season of The Walking Dead has found its creative stride, making the series enjoyable again for the first time in years. It’s on that firm ground that AMC has revealed the official title and teaser for the franchise’s third series, The Walking Dead: World Beyond.
This footage features Julia Ormond as Elizabeth, “the charismatic leader of a large, sophisticated and formidable force.”
“We are the last light of the world. We are the last hope”, Ormond’s character whispers as her trained soldiers gun down a group of walkers.
But the show is about more than just military might. The focus is on the first generation to come of age during the zombie apocalypse. These young men, women, and children have mostly been shielded from the outbreak but are now being forced to venture out and confront it for the first time. The cast includes other newcomers to the franchise Aliyah Royale, Alexa Mansour, Annet Mahendru, Nicolas Cantu, Hal Cumpston. and Nico Tortorella.
The Walking Dead: World Beyond has Matt Negrete acting as showrunner joined by longtime franchise overseer Scott M. Gimple. The series kicks off next spring.
1. Frozen 2 (review)- $127M
Disney’s anticipated Frozen 2 journeyed into the unknown, breaking records at every turn. The Disney sequel earned $127M domestically, the biggest ever for a Walt Disney Animation film and the third-largest animated debut stateside ever behind The Incredibles 2 and Finding Dory. Internationally it actually surpassed its predecessor with $223M, making for a record-breaking $350M worldwide total. It just goes to show Disney saw no blowback from the long six-year wait between films, growing more popular during that time.
2. Ford v Ferrari– $16M/$57.9M
3. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (review)- $13.5M
The absolutely wonderful Mister Rogers biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood opened with $13.5M, a good but not great start clearly affected by Frozen 2‘s powerhouse debut. The good news is reviews are so strong for Marielle Heller’s film and Tom Hanks’ performance as the late-great Fred Rogers that it’s likely to have a lengthy theatrical run. Hanks is already being positioned as a likely Oscar frontrunner and I see other nominations in the movie’s future, as well. In other words, look for a big Oscar boost at some point.
4. 21 Bridges (review)- $9.3M
Chadwick Boseman’s cop thriller 21 Bridges, a perfectly entertaining action vehicle for the Black Panther star, opened with just $9.3M. The timing has been way off on this one, having been previously scheduled for last July and then September, both probably would’ve served it better than going up against Frozen 2 at awards season time.
5. Midway– $4.7M/$43.1M
6. Playing with Fire– $4.6M/$31.6M
7. The Good Liar– $3.3M/$11.7M
8. Charlie’s Angels– $3.1M/$13.9M
9. Last Christmas– $3M/$27.7M
10. Joker– $2.8M/$326.9M
In just a pair of early previews at 936 sites, Rian Johnson’s well-reviewed, star-studded mystery Knives Out took in $2M. That’s a really promising start as it heads into general release next week when it’s projected to open at around $20M. Meanwhile, Todd Phillips’s environmental legal thriller Dark Waters got off to a decent start with $110K in just 4 locations. Despite good buzz for Mark Ruffalo’s performance as a crusading corporate attorney, this one’s going to be a tough sell without major awards prospects.
On the latest episode of the smash cut podcast, we talk about the first few episodes of THE MANDALORIAN, get the need for speed with FORD v FERRARI, and lament the demise of CHARLIE’S ANGELS. All this and a lot more, of course!
You can catch the Smash Cut podcast live every Sunday on Twitch at 2pm. Please join us, follow, subscribe, and make your opinions known in the chat room! We encourage all of your takes and will respond to them on air! You can also find us here on Libsyn and all of your favorite podcast platforms!!
In an interview on KCRW The Business, Miller blames Reynolds’ need for complete creative as the reason he left…
“It became clear that Ryan wanted to be in control of the franchise,” Miller said. You can work that way as a director, quite successfully, but I can’t. I don’t mind having a debate, but if I can’t win, I don’t want to play. And I don’t think you can negotiate every creative decision, there’s too many to make. So Ryan’s the face of the franchise, and he was the most important component of that, by far. So if he decides he wants to control it, then he’s going to control it.”
“I’ve always been pretty good at the ‘moving on’ thing. I care deeply, and then you get to this point where you’ve gotta make a decision, and I’m pretty good about putting it in my rearview mirror. We had a meeting at Fox, and the writing was on the wall, so I said, ‘I get it. I’ll quit, and you guys can do what you need to do.”
I think a lot of people would say Deadpool 2, despite the massive box office that made it the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever for a while, wasn’t as good as Miller’s film. The story may have been bigger, but it lacked a director who knew when to tone down Reynolds’ worst impulses. It’s still a great film, but often excessive when subtlety was required. David Leitch isn’t a director known for nuance.
So I don’t blame Miller here. Deadpool was his first feature film and he didn’t want to establish that he’s a director willing to roll over. It’s unfortunate that we didn’t get to see what he would’ve done with the Fantastic Four, but maybe Marvel will give him a call whenever they arrive in the MCU.
For a stretch in the ’90s MTV was still trying to figure out what it wanted to be as it transitioned away from less music videos, and more original content. That led to a lot of experiments, some successful, some not. One that definitely stands out as one of the best things MTV has ever done was The Maxx, a groundbreaking animated series based on the Sam Kieth graphic novels. It’s been a while since anything’s been done with the comic, but Channing Tatum is among those looking to bring The Maxx back.
THR reports that Tatum will produce an adaptation of The Maxx, although it’s too early to know whether it’ll be a TV series or a movie. He’ll be joined by his creative partner Reid Carolin, and The Lego Movie producer Roy Lee.
The Maxx was known for its edgy, dark material and nightmarish visuals that was so different from the Marvel/DC style at the time. The series followed the Maxx, who exists in two separate realities. In the real world he’s a homeless vagrant, while in a dangerous alternate reality known as the Outback he’s a powerful hero. The Maxx’s closest confidante is Julie Walters, a social worker who often helps him out in reality, but in the Outback she is the Jungle Queen and protected by the Maxx from the evil Mr. Gone.
MTV’s series only lasted 13 episodes, but still managed to come away with an Annie Award. Tatum’s got some big shoes to fill but I’m curious to see how he plans to bring The Maxx to a new audience who may not know it ever existed.
After teasing Leonardo DiCaprio’s song and dance number in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, there was actually very little of the scene in the full movie. Fortunately for us all, Quentin Tarantino knows what we want, and an extended version of DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton singing (badly) and dancing (goofily) to the song “Green Door” is coming to the digital and Bluray release.
You can check out the extended version of the “Green Door” scene below, with Rick Dalton performing on the show Hullabaloo. It’s a ridiculously silly bit, with DiCaprio clearly not much of a singer or a dancer, and that cigarette hanging on for dear life in his mouth.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is available now on digital, and arrives on Bluray on December 10th. You can see the list of special features below, as well.
4K ULTRA HD, BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL BONUS MATERIALS
Over Twenty Minutes of Additional Scenes
Five exclusive behind the scenes pieces including:
Quentin Tarantino’s Love Letter to Hollywood
Bob Richardson – For the Love of Film
Shop Talk – The Cars of 1969
Restoring Hollywood – The Production Design of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
Shia LeBeouf is about to prove he’s more then just a crazy Hollywood type with a movie that’s not only going to give a deeper look into the life of a child actor but also shed a spotlight on the inner torment and emotional trauma the actor himself had to contend with in his journey to today. While Honey Boy isn’t technically an autobiographical tale of the (still) young actors life it’s not hard to look between the lines and see how much of this comes from a very real place…right down to the opening shot of the trailer which is an obvious take on LeBeouf’s time on a Transformers set. This new trailer really hammers home the “parental” angle of the film, and I use those quotation marks for a very real reason. I’m dying to see how that relationship plays out as it looks like they’re going to show a situation where a father is trying to do right by his son but just doesn’t have the tools to do so, like most villains a bad parent doesn’t always know they’re a bad parent and genuinly thinks, at least some of the time, that they’re doing the right thing.
I don’t think I’ve ever been really looking forward to a Shia LeBeouf movie, that is of course, until now.
Not that calls to see the infamous “Snyder Cut” of Justice League have ever really ceased, they picked up steam with the movie’s two-year anniversary last week. The cast took to social media, not to talk up their great experience making the movie, but to draw support for the release of Zack Snyder’s version of the box office dud, and not the one we got in theaters that saw significant contributions from Joss Whedon.
It’s the extent of Whedon’s contributions to Justice League that are being revealed in a NY Times piece. There have been conflicting reports about what he did to the film following Snyder’s early departure for personal reasons. Turns out, he did quite a lot, adding 80 pages of new script following a screening of Snyder’s cut of the film alongside Straight Outta Compton writer Andrea Berloff and Wonder Woman writer Allan Heinberg.
It was then decided Whedon would come on to do very extensive reshoots to reflect his new story pages. The changes he made we already have a pretty good idea about; Kiersey Clemons’ role as Iris West was cut, along with storylines for woefully underwritten characters Cyborg and the Flash…
“This version gave Gadot and ‘Man of Steel’ holdovers Amy Adams and Diane Lane far more to do, significantly trimmed subplots involving the Flash and Cyborg (one character, a love interest for Miller played by Kiersey Clemons, was cut entirely) and added more jokes.”
I’m amazed that all of this Justice League stuff is being dredged up again. To what end? Warner Bros. has no plans to ever release the Snyder Cut, regardless of the interest in seeing it. If anything, this story just goes to show how much time and money was invested just to see the whole thing flop, and throwing more money at it to appease a small but vocal crowd would be foolish.
