Sylvester Stallone continues to indulge in playing his most iconic roles, and it’s not only audiences who can’t get enough. He’ll return as Rocky in Creed II, opening later this month. And after that he hits the battlefield for Rambo V: Last Blood, and according to Deadline buyers are swarming to see him back as the PTSD-afflicted war hero. Sales should be easier to come by now that Lionsgate has released the first official image from the film, which finds Rambo taking on a different kind of war.
Stallone’s Rambo sports a cowboy hat in the first image, a far cry from the crimson bandana we’re used to seeing him wear when in conflict. The story picks up after the events of 2008’s Rambo, with John Rambo now working on a ranch in Arizona, only to get into a beef with a Mexican cartel who has kidnapped a friend’s daughter. He teams up with a journalist whose half-sister has also been kidnapped, and will have to employ all of his combat skills to bring the crimelord down.
Rambo V: Last Blood is directed by Adrian Grunberg and co-stars Adriana Barrazza, Paz Vega, and Sergio Peris-Mencheta.
Ugh. I thought Ridley Scott had given up on the idea of a sequel to 2000’s Best Picture winner, Gladiator. But nope, it’s back on again and this time Scott appears to be very serious about it, tasking The Town writer Peter Craig to pen the script.
According to Deadline, Scott has begun development on Gladiator 2, which as you probably guessed would NOT start Russell Crowe. How could it considering Maximus’ fate in the first movie? How could it, considering Crowe now looks like your out-of-shape uncle and not the ripped specimen he was two decades ago? Instead, the story would follow Lucius (“I shall cheer for you!”), the young son of Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla, and the target of Joaquin Phoenix’s murderous Commodus. He was ultimately saved by Maximus, and the sequel will find him inspired by the hero’s sacrifice.
Well, I guess that’s better, albeit a million times less crazy, than the Nick Cave-scripted version he wrote in 2009. That one would have actually seen Maximus return from the dead to kill an upstart Jesus Christ. No bullshit. And he goes on to live forever, fighting in modern day wars. That shit is so wacko I’d give just about anything to see Scott try and make it work.
Scott has a lot on his plate right now so who knows if this ends up going anywhere. Fingers crossed it doesn’t. Gladiator is such a great film, one of the few I paid to see twice on the same day, that it just needs to be left alone.
It’s always nice when a long-standing rumor pans out. Birds of Prey will indeed include Ewan McGregor as the villain Black Mask, as was previously teased back in September.
McGregor had been in contention for the role along with Sharlto Copley, but it looks like the former Obi-Wan Kenobi has won out. He joins Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Huntress, Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Black Canary, and Rosie Perez as detective Renee Montoya in the DCEU film. The all-girl gang of vigilantes will also include Cassandra Cain, but that role has yet to be filled.
The villain Black Mask is general a Batman foe, but he does tend to get around. His real name is Roman Sionis, a ruthless and brutal crimelord in Gotham City, known to have an obsession with masks and a sadistic pleasure from torturing people. Born into a wealthy family who neglected him, Roman murdered his parents and made a mask out of his father’s casket. D’oh. McGregor is great at playing creeps so this should be a fun role for him. I’d much rather see him do this than don a Jedi cloak ever again.
Directed by Cathy Yan, Birds of Prey opens February 7th 2020. [Deadline]
We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free advance screening of Universal and Illumination’s The Grinch, based on Dr. Seuss’ holiday classic!
SYNOPSIS: For their eighth fully animated feature, Illumination and Universal Pictures present The Grinch, based on Dr. Seuss’ beloved holiday classic. The Grinch tells the story of a cynical grump who goes on a mission to steal Christmas, only to have his heart changed by a young girl’s generous holiday spirit. Funny, heartwarming and visually stunning, it’s a universal story about the spirit of Christmas and the indomitable power of optimism. Academy Award® nominee Benedict Cumberbatch lends his voice to the infamous Grinch, who lives a solitary life inside a cave on Mt. Crumpet with only his loyal dog, Max, for company. With a cave rigged with inventions and contraptions for his day-to-day needs, the Grinch only sees his neighbors in Who-ville when he runs out of food. Each year at Christmas they disrupt his tranquil solitude with their increasingly bigger, brighter and louder celebrations. When the Whos declare they are going to make Christmas three times bigger this year, the Grinch realizes there is only one way for him to gain some peace and quiet: he must steal Christmas. To do so, he decides he will pose as Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, even going so far as to trap a lackadaisical misfit reindeer to pull his sleigh. Meanwhile, down in Who-ville, Cindy-Lou Who—a young girl overflowing with holiday cheer—plots with her gang of friends to trap Santa Claus as he makes his Christmas Eve rounds so that she can thank him for help for her overworked single mother. As Christmas approaches, however, her good-natured scheme threatens to collide with the Grinch’s more nefarious one. Will Cindy-Lou achieve her goal of finally meeting Santa Claus? Will the Grinch succeed in silencing the Whos’ holiday cheer once and for all? Find out, Christmas season 2018. The screening takes place on Tuesday, November 6th at 7:00pm at Regal Majestic in Silver Spring. If you’d like to attend, simply complete the required steps in the Rafflecopter form below. Complete all of the steps to increase your chances. Winners will be selected on Sunday, November 4th and notified by email. Good luck!
Penny Dreadful is back!! Sorta! The Showtime series only lasted for three seasons but in that time it quickly gained a loyal but too-small base of supporters. In the couple of years since it was cancelled the series has developed into a cult favorite, especially for those with a fondness for characters from literature’s most Gothic corners. Well, now the series has returned, but it won’t be as you remembered it.
Showtime has announced the series’ comeback, albeit a brand new version titled Penny Dreadful: City of Angels. As you probably guessed, the location is being moved from London to Los Angeles, and it will be set in a totally different time period, 1938 to be exact, and feature an entire different cast of characters.
Series creator John Logan says there are other changes, as well, that come with the more contemporary setting…
“’Penny Dreadful: City of Angels’ will have a social consciousness and historical awareness that we chose not to explore in the ‘Penny Dreadful’ London storylines. We will now be grappling with specific historical and real world political, religious, social and racial issues. In 1938, Los Angeles was facing some hard questions about its future and its soul. Our characters must do the same. There are no easy answers. There are only powerful questions and arresting moral challenges. As always in the world of ‘Penny Dreadful,’ there are no heroes or villains in this world, only protagonists and antagonists; complicated and conflicted characters living on the fulcrum of moral choice.”
Mexican -American folklore will play a big part this time around, as a conflict erupts between characters related to Santa Muerte and others aligned with the Devil. Sounds pretty cool. Production begins next year and we may see Penny Dreadful: City of Angels arrive in 2020.
Maybe I should catch up on the previous series? [Deadline]
We don’t normally think of Jessica Chastain as an action movie star but she’s been spending quite a lot of time in the genre lately. She fired a bunch of arrows or something in The Huntsman: Winter’s War, and will face Marvel’s mutants in X-Men: Dark Phoenix. She’s put her producing muscle to work casting Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Lupita Nyong’o and maybe Fan Bingbing in spy flick 355, but next for her is the starring role in action film, Eve, which has just debuted its first image.
Chastain is a bloody mess, but still rockin’ that hoodie in the first pic from Eve. The character-driven film follows a female assassin who is hunted by her former employer after a job goes wrong. The film co-stars Common, Colin Farrell, Geena Davis, John Malkovich, and Joan Chen.
Chastain’s friend and The Help director Tate Taylor is behind the camera for this one, having replaced Matthew Newton who left when past charges of domestic abuse surfaced.
Eve has yet to set a release date or find a distributor, but don’t look for that to be an issue much longer.
Blue Sky Studios is probably never going to reach the heights of other animation studios like Pixar or Dreamworks, but they do some pretty good work. Their biggest franchise by far is the mega-successful Ice Age, but I would say the Rio movies are good, as well. They’ve had modest hits with films like Ferdinand, Robots, and my personal favorite The Peanuts Movie, and now they hope to have another on their hands with Spies in Disguise.
The spy movie features the voice of Will Smith as super spy Lance Sterling, and Tom Holland as genius scientist Walter Beckett, who builds all of Lance’s cool gadgets. They’re polar opposites but the partnership works until Walter turns Lance into a pigeon, then they must learn to partner up in a new way to save the world. Ben Mendelsohn, Karen Gillan, Rashida Jones, DJ Khaled, and Masi Oka also lend their voices to the film.
Directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane, Spies in Disguise opens September 13th 2019, after originally being set for April. That’s a pretty big bump, so why put out the teaser now?
With casting actually happening on the Game of Thrones spinoff show, it was only a matter of time before we got an actual look at the regular series’ final season. And now it’s here, the first look at Game of Thrones season 8, and it features arguably the series’ two most popular, and now we know quite related, characters: Kit Harington’s Jon Snow and Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen.
EW put the duo right on the cover, in a chilly embrace of sorts. Last year’s final episode told us what a lot of viewers already suspected, that Jon Snow is actually Dany’s nephew, which makes this particular embrace a little bit creepy. To us, anyway, but we know incestuous relationships are nothing new in Westeros. They aren’t championed or anything, but they do exist.
Imagine a J.J. Abrams movie taken to the tenth degree and you’ve got an idea the level of secrecy on set. It’s worked, too, because I don’t know if there’s been even a single spoiler up to this point.
“It’s relentless; scenes that would have been a one-day shoot five years ago are now a five-day shoot,” Harington says. “They want to get it right, they want to shoot everything every single way so they have options.”
Clark adds, “[Camera] checks take longer, costumes are a bit better, hair and makeup a bit sharper — every choice, every conversation, every attitude, has this air of ‘this is it.’ Everything feels more intense.”
Game of Thrones returns in the first half of 2019 but has yet to set a premiere date.
Disney’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is a sweet holiday confection, easy to consume but lacking anything of substance. A loose amalgamation of E.T.A. Hoffman’s 19th-century story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, Alexandre Dumas’ adapted vision and the classic Tchaikovsky ballet that has become a perennial Christmas favorite, the film comes across often like a poor man’s Chronicles of Narnia. Its gorgeous production design, colorful characters, and dazzling costumes are a visual treat, but little about the story proves to be nearly as much of a gift.
A tame family-friendly adventure set in 1879 London, the story centers on Clara (Mackenzie Foy), the grieving middle child who along with her father (Matthew Macfadyen) are mourning the mother Marie’s recent death. It’s Christmas time and still unaccustomed to her absence, the season has lost all of its joy. The father robotically gives the children presents left behind by Marie, with Clara’s being a golden Faberge egg with a special keyhole, but no key. A clever, inventive girl just like her mother, Clara sets out to find the key and open her gift, with the promise of answers to all of her life’s problems. Turning to her mysterious godfather Drosselmeyer (Morgan Freeman, looking like Nick Fury’s distant ancestor), she finds herself whisked away to the magical Four Realms.
The Four Realms turns out to be as creepy as Hoffman’s original story, and if you got a thing about rodents it’ll be the stuff of nightmares. Mice are everywhere; they’re thieving little buggers and can merge into a giant creature made of thousands of little mice formed together like Voltron. It’s disgusting. Clara soon make friends with a nutcracker soldier, Captain Philip Hoffman (Jayden Fowora-Knight), who along with saving her hide introduces her to the rulers of three realms, including the Sugar Plum Fairy (Keira Knightley). But the fourth ruler, Mother Ginger (Helen Mirren), has turned evil and seeks to destroy the other realms. Only Clara can stop her, and in the process hopefully find a way back home.
Disney should be commended for the diversity in casting. While Foy and Knightley aren’t exactly prime examples, casting the charming Fowora-Knight as the nutcracker was a bold move and he turns out to be one of the film’s most welcome characters. Sure, his complete lack of autonomy is annoying but he’s both a nutcracker and a soldier, given to taking orders…of which Clara issues many. In a clever We also get a command ballet performance by Misty Copeland, the country’s first African-American prima ballerina, in a clever walkthrough of the Four Realms’ backstory. As ruler of the Flower Realm, Disney cast Mexican superstar Eugenio Derbez, with his gift for funny faces and odd voices coming in handy.
From a character standpoint this might be Disney’s boldest break from tradition, outside of Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book. That only makes the predictable plot all the more disappointing. There simply isn’t much meat on this story’s bones. Clara will be very familiar to fans of other Disney heroines; headstrong, fed up with her domestic life, and that’s about it. Foy is solid in the role, her Clara is sweet and confident, but also a little naïve. Knightley has the most fun as the Sugar Plum Fairy, although I suspect her ditzy performance, and this interpretation of the character, will be an acquired taste. When screenwriter Ashleigh Powell tries to tackle larger themes, such as grief and loss, the story simply buckles underneath the weight. It works far better as a straight arrow adventure yarn, and that’s also when we get to see the most of Mirren, wielding a whip and leaping into battle against an army of tin soldiers.
The rare film approved by the DGA to have two unrelated directors given credit, Lasse Hallstrom (who left early due to scheduling) and Joe Johnston couldn’t be more different stylistically. Johnston is a special effects dynamo while Hallstrom is known for quieter, all-ages fare; but to look at The Nutcracker and the Four Realms you can hardly see where one ends and the other begins.
Disney’s latest live-action fairy tale may lack the spark of originality, but let’s be honest that the goal here was to create a Christmas mainstay that can be popped into the Bluray player while the family opens gifts. On that level, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is entertaining enough to do the trick, and it will for a very long time to come.
Who would’ve thought Jason Statham going toe-to-fin against a giant prehistoric shark would lead to the most successful China-U.S. co-production ever? The Meg was a massive international hit with $527M worldwide, and those kinds of numbers usually mean one thing: sequels. Well, get ready to head back into the deep because it’s happening.
Deadline reports The Meg exec-producer Catherine Xujun Ying said when asked about a sequel, “It’s still in the very early stages, but we’re working on it. We’re trying to keep it secret at this time.”
Kinda tough to keep secret when you’re telling us it’s being worked on, though. And why keep it secret, anyway? Everybody expects The Meg to launch a franchise, so why play games?
The next step is getting Warner Bros.’ stamp of approval, which should be pretty easy. And from there, probably luring in Statham to go another round. Not that he’s been especially choosey about sequels, and he’s expressed interest previously in doing another one if the first was a hit. Well, it was.
The Meg was based on a book by Steve Alten, and he penned a sequel titled The Trench which hit shelves in 1999. So if there is a sequel the groundwork for a story is already in place. Here’s the book synopsis:
Four years after the incident at the Mariana Trench that unleashed a pregnant Megaladon, Jonas Taylor now houses her one surviving offspring at the Tanaka Institute. Deep in debt, Taylor has turned to an eccentric billionaire to help keep the institute afloat, but it doesn’t come without a price. Drawn into a web of deceit and lies, plagued by nightmares of his own death, Taylor must once again face frightening monsters of unimaginable power. Only this time, it’s not just the sharks he has to watch out for.
Hmmm…that sounds like a lot more than a monster movie. I’m not sure they’ll want to go in a direction that finds Statham facing human threats as much as aquatic beasts. Why fix what ain’t broke?
