Jessica Chastain is currently shooting her role in It: Chapter Two, but she’s still found time to line up another project. Collider reports Chastain will produce and star in the action flick, Eve, from writer/director Matthew Newton.
Plot details are being kept under wraps, but it’s being described as a character-driven actioner. Collider’s sources say it follows “a ruthless female assassin named Eve (Chastain) who is hunted by her former employers while trying to tell her family the truth about what she does for a living.”
Newton’s previous film was Who We Are Now, which stars Zachary Quinto and Julianne Nicholson. It premiered last year in Toronto and was picked up soon after. Chastain recently wrapped filming on X-Men: Dark Phoenix and was seen in the Native American drama, Woman Walks Ahead.
We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free advance screening of Dog Days, the new canine comedy starring Nina Dobrev, Vanesssa Hudgens, Eva Longoria, Finn Wolfhard, and Adam Pally.
SYNOPSIS: From acclaimed production company LD Entertainment (The Zookeeper’s Wife, Jackie, and Megan Leavey) and Director Ken Marino comes Dog Days. Dog Days is a hilarious and heartfelt ensemble comedy that follows the lives of multiple dog owners and their beloved fluffy pals around sunny Los Angeles. When these human and canine’s paths start to intertwine, their lives begin changing in ways they never expected.
The screening takes place on Monday, August 6th at AMC Mazza Gallerie at 7:00pm. If you’d like to attend, simply register with the Gofobo ticketing site here. Please remember having passes does not guarantee entry, and you’ll need to arrive early to ensure receiving a seat. Enjoy the show!
Warner Bros. and The Batman director Matt Reeves have been so unbelievably quiet about the film, we don’t even know who the heck its star will be. Is it Ben Affleck? Or will they go with a younger actor and tell and origin story of the Dark Knight? We just don’t know that much, which is why it’s surprising that Reeves has revealed more information today, in a totally random interview, than we’ve learned in months.
Speaking at the TCAs about his upcoming series, The Passage, Reeves shot down rumors The Batman would be based on the Batman: Year One comic. Basically, this ain’t no origin tale…
“We’re not doing any particular [comic],” Reeves said. “’Year One’ is one of the many comic books that I love. We are definitely not doing ‘Year One.’ It’s just exciting to be focused very specifically on a tale that is defining for him and very personal to him. Obviously we’re not doing an origin tale or anything like that. We’re doing a story that is definitively Batman though and trying to tell a story that’s emotional and yet is really about him being the world’s greatest detective and all the things that for me, since I was a kid, made me love Batman.”
What it sounds like is the film won’t necessarily ignore Batman’s early days, but won’t give us all that crap with Bruce Wayne’s parents getting killed, his growing angry, yadda yadda yadda. We don’t need to see that shit again.
Reeves also said they are working to fast-track the film now, with an eye towards filming next “spring or early summer”.
“We are working on getting our draft [in] the next couple weeks,” Reeves said. “Right now, my head is totally into the script. Right now, I’m going to be leaving here to go back to work on the script.”
And what about Ben Affleck? Is he coming back or what? That was the one thing Reeves decided to keep being mysterious about…
“We’re one piece of many pieces so I don’t want to comment on that except to say that I’m focused very specifically on this aspect of the DC world.”
With so many Batman appearances on the big screen, Reeves went back in order to find a way to bring something new and unique that fans haven’t seen…
“I’ve talked about making it a very point of view noir-driven definitive Batman story in which he is investigating a particular case and that takes us out into the world of Gotham,” Reeves said. “I went on a deep dive again revisiting all my favorite comics. Those all inform by osmosis. There’s no continuation of the Nolan films. It’s very much trying to find a way to do this as something that for me is going to be definitively Batman and new and cool.”
I doubt this is Reeves beginning to turn on the spigot of information, and chances are we won’t hear a thing for another few months. So let’s be happy with what we got. If what Reeves said sticks, we should see The Batman in 2020. Fingers crossed. [via Slashfilm]
It doesn’t take Hollywood long to snap up a good idea when it finds one. Only a few days ago The Daily Beast published “How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions,” a title that is pretty self-explanatory. A hot bidding war erupted to win the film rights to the real-life crime story, and the project has landed at Fox where Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are going to bring it to the screen.
Affleck will direct Matt Damon in the film, which will have a script by Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. Damn. The incredible story follows an ex-cop who allegedly stole $24M by riggin the McDonald’s Monopoly game, the one where you get game pieces for purchases. He would then share the winnings with an unsavory group of criminal co-conspirators. The FBI caught wind of the operation through “a tip about an “Uncle Jerry,” who’d sell stolen game pieces. Solid detective work unearthed Jerry Jacobson, a head of security for a Los Angeles company responsible for generating the game pieces. It led to a wide conspiracy that involved mobsters, psychic, strip-club owners, drug traffickers and a family of Mormons who falsely claimed to have won more than $24 million in cash and prizes.”
Affleck and Damon will partner up through their Pearl Street banner. McDonald’s must hate that every movie about them is either criminal or paints them in a disereputable light, like Michael Keaton’s The Founder. [Deadline]
Rebecca Ferguson has been on a meteoric trajectory ever since her breakout TV role on The White Queen. Her film career took off with Mission: Impossible-Rogue Nation, in which she absolutely stole the whole damn thing; then continued with big time parts in The Girl On the Train, smash hit The Greatest Showman, and her return for Mission: Impossible-Fallout. And if that isn’t enough, she’s just landed two key roles in a pair of potential blockbusters.
Ferguson has joined Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson in the Men in Black spinoff/sequel. There isn’t a lot known about it except it has F. Gary Gray as director and co-stars Emma Thompson, Kumail Nanjiani, Liam Neeson, and Rafe Spall. The story is said to be set in London, but this is Men in Black we’re talking about here and it will likely span the globe. The film arrives in theaters on June 14th 2019.
After she finishes shooting MIB, Ferguson will move over to Doctor Sleep, the sequel to Stephen King’s The Shining. She’ll play antagonist Rose the Hat, with Ewan McGregor playing the grown-up Danny Torrance. Mike Flanagan (Oculus) is behind the camera for that one, which opens January 24th 2020. [Deadline]
Sorry to Bother You and Atlanta‘s Lakeith Stanfield as feline royalty? Yes, please! Huh? Oh…sorry, Prince of Cats won’t feature any of that, as amazing as that might have been. Fortunately, the film is an adaptation of Ron Wimberly’s terrific graphic novel, one of the most successful attempts at making Shakespeare cool.
An ’80s hip-hop take on Romeo & Juliet set in Brooklyn, the story is actually centered on Juliet’s cousin, Tybault, who was actually described in the original text as a “Prince of Cats”. Stanfield will get to let out any violent urges as the title character,with Selwyn Sefyu Hinds adapting the script. Hinds, a former editor-in-chief at The Source, most recently edited HBO’s post-apocalyptic drama Who Fears Death.
Legendary won a fierce bidding war for the Prince of Cats rights, and now let’s hope they find the perfect director to fit with the material.
The YA genre may have reached its zenith a few years ago, but a few stragglers still trickle out in hopes of capturing old glories. The Darkest Minds, which is based on the novels of Alexandra Bracken, is one of those, and its combination of teenage angst and rebellion will feel very familiar throughout. While those qualities certainly won’t set the film apart, it’s similarities to Marvel’s mutant band of heroes the X-Men that are strong enough to possibly launch a brand new superhero franchise for the folks at 20th Century Fox, and clearly that’s what they are counting on.
Directed by Kung Fu Panda‘s Jennifer Yuh Nelson in her live-action debut, the film boasts a stellar cast of rising stars. The always-fierce Amandla Stenberg, who broke out with her role as Rue in The Hunger Games, emerges unscathed despite a script that can’t help but be riddled with genre clichés. The world designed by Nelson and screenwriter Chad Hodge could’ve been ripped out of a Chris Claremont comic: After an unexplained disease wipes out 90% of the world’s kids, those who remain possess strange and powerful abilities (mutants!!!!). The fearful government brutally rounds them up into camps and divides them into colors based on threat level. Blues and greens are largely enhanced intellectually and are harmless, but those colored orange or red are deadly and must be killed on sight. You can’t have a dystopian YA thriller without a heavily militarized authoritarian government on standby.
Stenberg plays Ruby, a young girl gifted, or cursed, with the powerful telepathic abilities that code her an Orange. When the emergence of her powers destroy any hope of staying with her parents, Ruby is forced into a camp where she hide her true abilities for years until a friendly therapist (Mandy Moore) working for a rebel faction known as The League helps her escape. From there it isn’t long before Ruby stumbles upon a trio of like-minded youths with their own powers and a healthy mistrust of adults. Zu (Miya Cech) is the youngest and can harness electricity from her hands; Chubs (Skylan Brooks) is super-smart and super-nerdy, he’s also super suspicious of Ruby; and Liam (Beach Rats breakout Harris Dickinson) is the Cyclops-esque leader who has powerful telekinetic gifts and no game for wooing the ladies. Naturally, his awkward attempts to impress Ruby will win her over, anyway. Together they hope to find a hidden utopia where others like them are said to be living in harmony, but if you guessed there were dangers there, too, then maybe your mutant power is recognizing genre tropes.
There’s no attempt to break the genre mold here; The Darkest Minds all but embraces its obvious influences, even referencing Harry Potter in one key encounter between Ruby and Liam. Will their tragic love story survive being chased by bounty hunters (Gwendoline Christie is sadly wasted as one) and tortured by a tyrannical government? Can they overcome fear over their own powers and learn to love? It’s well-worn territory, but Nelson and her cast show a determined commitment to the material that is worth investing in. Tantalizing questions about the world-at-large are teased, with only a few answered and the rest dangled for future chapters. What does the rest of the world look like? Are all of the parents of these kids down with what’s going on? Why have the country’s banking and social institutions collapsed on itself when all of the adults are still alive to run things? The most demanding questions aren’t really fit for the target demo, but the film still has its share of disturbing moments, most of which involve kids being gunned down in cold blood. For all of the violence that does break out, the most twisted act is by Ruby herself, committed out of anger against a bounty hunter who had been on their trail.
Nelson is still finding her footing behind the camera, especially when it comes to the generic action sequences, but she knows enough to lean heavy on her stars to deliver emotionally. Stenberg continues to impress, whether she’s leading her fellow charges into battle or falling head over heels. The romantic chemistry between her and the impressive Dickinson is debatable, though. Maybe they should just be friends? As a couple they share a couple of sweet but fleeting moments, which is about what you’d expect for the first part of a potential trilogy. While the open-ended conclusion promises Ruby’s eventual evolution into the Mockingjay or something, it remains to be seen whether The Darkest Minds will ever reach that point.
With her debut feature, 2012’s Wadjda, Haifaa al-Mansour made history as the first female Saudi Arabian filmmaker, having shot her film entire within her country’s borders. Since then she has worked steadily in telling special stories about women. Last year she debuted at TIFF her film about Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, which opened quietly a couple of months ago. And now she’s back with her first Netflix effort, Nappily Ever After, which stars Sanaa Lathan in a story that centers on an issue most women can relate to.
Featuring a script co-written by Gina Prince-Bythewood (Beyond the Lights), Lisa Loomer, and Tina Gordon Chisholm (Tyler Perry’s Peeples), the film centers on a successful black woman who comes to associate a large part of her happiness and success to her hair. When her life goes south, she decides it’s time to take drastic measures with the one thing that has always defined her. The film co-stars Ernie Hudson, Lyriq Bent, Ricky Whittle, and Lynn Whitfield.
After his debut feature Medicine for Melancholy marked him a director to watch in 2008, Barry Jenkins then pulled a vanishing act for eight years. He re-emerged in stellar fashion with 2016’s Best Picture Oscar winner Moonlight, and having recaptured our attention Jenkins decided not to wait around quite as long for a followup. Debuting in Toronto is Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, and an impressive trailer for it has just debuted.
Starring Kiki Layne, Stephan James, Teyonah Parris, Regina King, Colman Domingo, Diego Luna, Pedro Pascal, Dave Franco, Brian Tyree Henry, Ed Skrein, and Finn Wittrock, the film features another incredible ensemble that Jenkins looks to have gotten the best from. The story follows Tish, a newly-engaged Harlem woman whose fiance Fonny is falsely accused of rape, and she must race to prove his innocence before the birth of their child. The release of the trailer comes on Baldwin’s birthday, and this vibrant, lush drama looks like a fitting tribute to the renowned writer.
If Beale Street Could Talk hits theaters on November 30th.
Glen Powell may not be failing upwards, but this is at least failing sideways. After Miles Teller beat him out for the role of Goose’s son in Top Gun: Maverick, Powell has now joined the film in a totally different part. The only way this could be better is if the role were as Goose’s OTHER son that nobody knew about, not even him!
Maybe…that’s the case? THR says Powell so impressed Tom Cruise and the film’s producers that they made it a point to cast him in a different part, one that they are beefing up just for him. Damn! So how exactly did Teller beat him out in the first place?
Powell joins Cruise, Teller, Jennifer Connelly, and Val Kilmer in the John Kosinski-directed sequel which opens July 12th, 2019. You can check out Powell now, but probably shouldn’t, in the Netflix rom-com Set it Up.
