Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver exceeded all expectations last summer, earning well over $200M and becoming the fan-favorite director’s first legit hit. He’s got plenty of great films that have achieved cult favorite status, but this one appealed to a wider audience and is going to be on a lot of “Best of the year” lists. And with that success has come calls for something Wright has never done before, a sequel, which he said was in the early stages of discussion. Well it appears those discussions have progressed quite nicely.
In a conversation with EW, Wright reveals that talks with Sony on a sequel have moved ahead, although it sounds like he may only write the script…
“Those talks are already in the works. The deal is being hammered out as we speak. So, hopefully, I’m going to at least write a second one. I’ve definitely got lots of ideas. Whether it’s the next movie, I don’t know. I’m just working that out at the moment, actually. I have a couple of things that I’ve been developing, and also a couple of new ideas that I had, and all the nice things things that I’ve been offered since [the release of Baby Driver]. I would like to get back on the saddle very shortly, because — slightly beyond my control — but there was four years between ‘The World’s End‘ and ‘Baby Driver.’ I don’t want it to be that long again. I would love to have a film out in the next two years.”
“At least write a second one”, eh? It does sound like he’s got a lot of open opportunities right now, which is great because it means Hollywood is ready to embrace him. Things didn’t work out with him and Marvel on Ant-Man (Remember that?), but it all turned out for the better because we wouldn’t even have Baby Driver right now. I’m not convinced it needs a sequel, especially one that may not have Wright behind the camera, but I like that it’s a possibility.
We’re happy to offer our readers the chance to win Reese Witherspoon’s Home Again on Bluray/DVD! The film is directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer and co-stars Michael Sheen, Nat Wolff, Candace Bergen, Lake Bell, and more.
SYNOPSIS: HOME AGAIN stars Reese Witherspoon (“Big Little Lies,” Wild, Walk The Line, Sweet Home Alabama) as Alice Kinney in a modern romantic comedy. Recently separated from her husband, (Michael Sheen), Alice decides to start over by moving back to her hometown of Los Angeles with her two young daughters. During a night out on her 40th birthday, Alice meets three aspiring filmmakers who happen to be in need of a place to live. Alice agrees to let the guys stay in her guest house temporarily, but the arrangement ends up unfolding in unexpected ways. Alice’s unlikely new family and new romance comes to a crashing halt when her ex-husband shows up, suitcase in hand. HOME AGAIN is a story of love, friendship, and the families we create. And one very big life lesson: Starting over is not for beginners.
To enter, simply complete the Rafflecopter contest form below. Winners will be selected on Friday, December 8th and contacted by email. Good luck!
Home Again will be available on Bluray and DVD on December 12th.
Every year we think filmmakers can’t improve upon what we’ve seen that year, and the following year we’re proven wrong – yet again. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 2017 has been no different – from bringing our favourite fairy tale to life, to teaching us some lessons about life, we’ve sat back and marvelled at the creative geniuses behind these box-office blockbusters.
Even though there’s still a few films to come, here are the most popular (and successful) films of 2017 so far:
1. Guardians of the Galaxy 2
This hits the top of the list thanks to it being one of the highest grossing films this year (likely to be beaten by Star Wars: The Last Jedi), netting a massive $1.1 billion in the box office (not bad from a budget of $200 million, huh?). Therefore, it probably goes without saying that the sequel to Guardians of the Galaxy (which was released in 2014) was a roaring success.
Critics hailed the film as being the ‘most fun’ of 2017, suggesting it didn’t disappoint fans (of either Chris Pratt or the first film). Repeating many of the tricks of its predecessor, the film gave fans more of what they loved, which, even though this meant the film lost some of its ‘freshness’, it did evoke the same happiness as the first – and that’s all that matters, right?
2. Wonder Woman
Comic fans have waited years for this, and thankfully, it didn’t disappoint. With a budget of $149 million, the producers went all out to bring a film that breathed new life into the ever-
declining genre of superhero blockbusters.
Evolving from her cameo in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Wonder Woman took on her inner Amazonian princess wonderfully, being full of nobility, resolve and innocence throughout. Combining fantasy with history, the film boasted plenty of CGI and a good dose of feminism. This modern-day Wonder Woman (played by Diana Prince) is all brawn, beauty and brains, and that’s why this was one of the most successful films of the year.
Wonder Woman has been incredibly popular for some time now, there is a huge amount of merchandise available; fans can get their hands on t-shirts, bags and figurines, just to name a few. In fact, the Wonder Woman franchise was so popular, there was even a slot game released to celebrate the film.
3. Beauty and the Beast
Whether you’re a fan of Disney or not, you couldn’t help but be spellbound by this magical film, featuring the English Rose herself – Emma Watson. It followed the wonderfully successful The Jungle Book, which was released in 2016 and proved that the magic of Disney films wasn’t lost through high-tech animations. In fact, Beauty and the Beast went one step further, as it was the first ever animated film to receive an Oscar nomination for best picture.
The original Beauty and the Beast (released in 1991) is often regarded as the best Disney film ever made, so the producers had a lot to live up to – hence the $160 million budget. However, fans were not left disappointed as the star-studded cast (including Sir Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson, Ewan McGregor and Dan Stevens – to name but a few) brought this enchanting tale to life, earning the film a whopping $1 billion at the box office (only the 29th film to ever do so).
4. Dunkirk
Last, but by no means least, is this dramatic account of Dunkirk – the WWII evacuation in 1941 on France’s beaches. This film had a budget of $100 million, fuelling plenty of drama, intrigue and chaos.
From the start, viewers were thrown straight into the disorder a number of civilian boatmen (namely, Mark Rylance), fighter pilots (headed up by Tom Hardy), commanders (chiefly, Kenneth Branagh) and infantrymen (including Harry Styles and Fionn Whitehead), faced. Throughout the film, the heroism, cowardice, selfishness and sacrifice of these characters were played out in sharp definition.
Unfortunately, we haven’t got room to mention some of the other epic films that have graced movie screens this year (e.g. Baby Driver, Justice League and Logan). Hopefully, however, this list hasn’t just demonstrated the outstanding quality of films this year, but has also added to your anticipation of how filmmakers are going to top this list next year.
A day late and a dollar short (thanks spotty Sling.TV service!)!
The Good
Eugene is finally confirmed as loyal to Negan but not without a slight exception here and there. He calls Dwight out on his betrayal of the Saviors but then decides to keep his secret. If Abraham could see what Eugene has become he’d probably kill him himself. But there is a slight bit of nobility to Eugene’s betrayal. He’s seems to truly think he’s with the group that can help the most people.
Gabriel. It was a long time coming but Gabriel, who was initially the worst, has come around to being a somewhat interesting character. He gives Eugene a perfect priestly speech that almost redeems his devotion to the cloth which has been in question since we first met him and found out what he did to his congregation in their time of need. Nah, you know what, nothing redeems you from that but it feels like he’s not just faking priest anymore.
Rosita becomes the surprising voice of reason in the suicide squad of Daryl, Tara, and Michonne. Oh, and Morgan who just happened to be in a sniper position outside of the sanctuary. Their plan to drive a truck through the front door of the sanctuary is too much for Rosita who leaves. For someone who’s had a death wish for almost 3 seasons it was refreshing to see…I just wish it wasn’t done with such a non-explanation
Eugene going to kiss Negan’s hand. If you’re going to keep this idiot around at least have some fun with it and that’s what they do here.
Austin Amiellio’s Dwight is better episode by episode, he’s really settled into the role and has become one of, if not the most, interesting characters in the show.
Whether by fear or something else, Eugene is getting ready to out Dwight but decides against it after he walks into the room.
Rick’s final scene in the trash kingdom is a great fight I’ll talk about later. In a so bad it’s good bit Rick and Queen Trash negotiate for their help with one of the stipulations that Queen Trash gets to sculpt Rick…In the nude. I can’t even lie, it made me chuckle.
The Bad
The trash kingdom and it’s queen. I mean, we have a zombie apocalypse and Eugene, I think we have our fill of weird
Too much Eugene. Even though his appearance merited some initially points that should have been it for him. Instead they keep him around saying weird shit and being ungrateful to those who kept his mulleted ass safe for months.
Gabriel mysteriously falling ill. They explain that he has several infections, but they could have gone another inch in plot miles and told us he cut himself on something or had some other injury. The dude was fine then as soon as he’s captured he comes down with Denghi fever or some shit.
Daryl’s Lone Ranger act was successful but at what cost. Granted he thought all the women and children were elsewhere but as it ends up they weren’t…if he’s been that down since Abraham and Glenn were killed how’s he going to take this? I don’t see him ever being the same again…not that Daryl was ever a happy go lucky type a fella’ but even those once a season throw away happy moments are probably gone after this. Great, just what we need, more sadness in this, most morose, of TV shows.
The Dead
Given that we spent an entire episode in a building surrounded by the dead. A building they eventually infiltrated, the gore and zombie action was relegated to dark corners and groups of carnage at once…they had some real chances to give a few close ups of memorable Z-kills but decided against it for some reason. It’s almost made up for in the final scene back at the trash kingdom where Rick is thrust back into the Zombie gladiator pit. He’s put up against another of their Mad Max style zombies. In a move that is the kind of gory brilliance they need more of Rick rips the zombie’s head of and uses the decapitated head to hold Queen Trashy hostage and make his bad ass exit from their camp. They do have to remember, every now and then, that this is a zombie show and even though it doesn’t have to be the forefront of every episode we could certainly do with one or two good zombie scenes in each.
Next Week on The Walking Dead!!!
Already we’ve come to this place! The mid-season finale awaits! I really thought this war was only going to last the first half of the season, at this point it could go either way. They could easily wrap up the war in the next episode but I’m starting to feel that they are going to go the other way and stretch this thing out. Sadly, that will be a big mistake.
I knew there would be Bubble Boy repercussions, but never expected it to be this. There seems to be a new twist on the young adult romance, the “teens stuck in the house” wing of the genre led by last year’s Everything, Everything. Now we have another one, Midnight Sun, which stars Bella Thorne and the Governator’s spawn (Patrick Schwarzenegger) in a movie that hopes to melt even the coldest heart.
Directed by Step Up Revolution‘s Scott Speer, the story follows a young woman who has a sensitivity to light that prevents her from ever leaving the house during the day. She finds love anyway, though, because this would be a boring movie if she didn’t. Believe it or not this is actually a remake of the 2006 Japanese film that I only remember because it starred homeboy from Battle Royale.
Here is the official synopsis: MIDNIGHT SUN is a romantic tearjerker about 17-year-old Katie Price (Bella Thorne), sheltered at home since childhood with a rare genetic condition, a life-threatening sensitivity to sunlight. Having only her father Jack (Rob Riggle) for company, Katie’s world opens up after dark when she ventures outside to play her guitar. One night, her dreams come true when she’s noticed and asked out by her longtime crush Charlie (Patrick Schwarzenegger), whom she’s secretly watched from her bedroom window for years. As they embark on nightly summer excursions, Katie’s risk to sunlight grows and she’s presented with the gut-wrenching dilemma of whether she can live a normal life with her newfound soul mate.
People everywhere are going out and failing to find their perfect match, but Bella Thorne lives the life of a vampire and it just happens for her. Typical. Also starring Rob Riggle and Quinn Shepherd, Midnight Sun opens March 23rd 2018.
*UPDATE* The full trailer for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom arrives on Thursday, but we’re getting sneaks of it in 15-second increments. After Sunday’s explosive teaser, a new one has been released that isn’t a partial scene like that one, but like more of a traditional TV spot. It ends with Chris Pratt promising something “awesome”, so we’ll just have to take his word for it. Check out the new teaser and the previous one below. * After a cutesy teaser a couple weeks ago, the new teaser for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is more like what we’re expecting. Lots of stampeding dinosaurs, humans cowering for protection…and there’s one new element introduced, an erupting volcano.
The new preview arrives with confirmation of the full trailer’s debut on Thursday, but this is a pretty cool glimpse to tide us over. It begins with Chris Pratt as Owen Grady, fleeing from a herd of scared/angry dinos. But he’s not running from them, he’s running away WITH them from the erupting volcano spewing fire, ash, and debris in the distance. Also looking for safe shelter are Bryce Dallas Howard as Claire and The Get Down‘s Justice Smith looking super-dorky as a brand new character.
Details on the plot remain tantalizingly vague at this point, and I hope the trailer doesn’t reveal too much. The film will be directed by J.A. Bayona, with Jurassic World‘s Colin Trevorrow co-writing the script. While there are a number of new cast additions, such as Daniella Pineda, Toby Jones, and Rafe Spall, the one that has the most upside for awesome is the return of Jeff Goldblum as Jurassic Park‘s Ian Malcolm.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom opens June 22nd 2018.
Ridley Scott is never without a shortage of projects to work on. Right now he’s feverishly doing reshoots on Oscar bait All the Money in the World, and after that he’ll jump into an adaptation of Don Winslow’s The Cartel. But earlier this year he kept busy producing Blade Runner 2049, and directing Alien: Covenant. Both films underwhelmed at the box office, and in the case of the latter it’s led to speculation that Scott’s ambitious franchise plans have ground to a halt.
That’s apparently not the case, according to Scott’s latest comments to EW. He confirms to them that a new Alien film will happen, but we may see a shift away from the alien Xenomorphs. Say wha!?
“We are [going to make another], we are. I think what we have to do is gradually drift away from the alien stuff.”
Okay, so what’s he want to turn his attention to? Artificial Intelligence, a subject that has been coursing pretty close to the surface in his Alien movies, anyway. You can’t have a malevolent android running around and not have it be an issue, right?
“People say, ‘You need more alien, you need more face pulling, need more chest bursting,’ so I put a lot of that in Covenant and it fitted nicely. But I think if you go again you need to start finding another solution that’s more interesting. I think AI is becoming much more dangerous and therefore more interesting.”
As an example Scott noted Facebook’s experiment with two AIs last summer in which they started talking in their own unique language, forcing the whole thing to be shut down. He’s right, that shit was mad scary…
“They put two AIs together and they were communing. It already invented a f—ing language! And they couldn’t decipher what the language was so they had to switch them off. What was said and where’s it gone? They could have already implemented something we don’t know.”
Does anybody want to see Alien go down that path, though? I doubt it, and definitely 20th Century Fox wouldn’t want it. If the Alien: Covenant box office tells us anything it’s that only the hardcore fans are sticking around, so why do something that could potentially turn them off next?
“Bryan Singer is no longer the director of Bohemian Rhapsody.”
That was the tersely worded statement from 20th Century Fox tonight as they announced the departure of Singer from his Queen biopic, which had seen its production halted over the director’s sudden absence. The news of Singer’s mysterious disappearance broke over the weekend and it hasn’t looked good from the start. Singer never returned to the set following Thanksgiving break, citing an illness that had afflicted him and his family.
It might have been fine, except for Singer’s history of absences which in some cases has forced the film’s cinematographer to stand-in as director. This unreliability, predictably, pissed off star Rami Malek who confronted Singer, leading to an argument that reportedly saw the director hurl an object at him. They are said to have mended fences on that one, but surely an incident like that was run up the flagpole to Fox execs, who had warned Singer they wouldn’t tolerate any “unprofessional behavior” on his part. Also, co-star Tom Hollander temporarily quit the project due to Singer’s unprofessional conduct.
Singer denies all of this, saying in a statement “I wanted nothing more than to be able to finish this project and help honor the legacy of Freddie Mercury and Queen, but Fox would not permit me to do so because I needed to temporarily put my health, and the health of my loved ones, first.”
That just doesn’t seem to track, though, does it? Singer and Fox have a long and lucrative history together, stretching back to X-Men in 2000. They wouldn’t give him a couple of weeks off if they truly felt it was due to a health issue? But Singer also has a history of flaking out during production, as he did recently with X-Men: Apocalypse and before that on Superman Returns. As I said in the earlier post, it doesn’t make sense that he keeps getting such high-profile gigs if he has such a reputation.
Singer’s denials just don’t sound credible, and claiming he’s “suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder because of the tensions on the set” just sounds, well, pretty damned weak.
So a new director will be found to get Bohemian Rhapsody rolling again. Ron Howard, your phone is ringing. [THR]
This is pretty incredible right here. For some time now Quentin Tarantino has expressed interest in directing a Star Trek movie. Seems kinda out of nowhere, right? But nah, he’s always loved genre and Star Trek is at the top of his list of favorites. He said a couple of years ago…
“Some of those episodes are fantastic, and the only thing that limited them was their ‘60s budget and 8-day shooting schedule. And even having said that, they did a magnificent job. You could take some of the great, classic ‘Star Trek’ episodes and just easily expand them to 90 minutes or more. And really do some amazing stuff…The obvious one would be ‘City On The Edge Of Forever,’ that’s what everyone would go to, but there’s a reason why everyone would go to that. It’s one of the classic stories of all time, and one of the great time travel stories. However, in thinking about that concept even further though, I think one of the best ‘Star Trek’ episodes ever written was for ‘Next Generation’… ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise.’ I actually think that is one of the great, not only space story, but the way it dealt with the mythology. That actually could bear a two-hour treatment.”
Well, he may be about to get his chance. Deadline reports Tarantino is in talks to direct a Star Trek movie, having pitched an idea to J.J. Abrams. Abrams has run with it from there, assembling a writers room to make this thing happen. If all goes as planned Tarantino will take the helm himself.
Wow. Imagine if this whole thing comes together! The Star Trek franchise could use a shot in the arm after the underwhelming Star Trek Beyond, and…well, this is one Hell of a shot in the arm. Whatever happens it’ll have to wait until Tarantino wraps up his Manson-era movie first, so we may be waiting a while. But this is one of those projects that, on paper, sounds almost too good to be true.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi is only days away, isn’t that crazy? And fortunately it seems that much of the news has shifted over to Rian Johnson’s new trilogy, which we aren’t going to know anything about for a while, rather than spoiling what is right around the corner. Johnson kept the lid on tight in his conversation with Collider, but did manage to tell us how long his initial cut of the movie was and why he felt some stuff that he loved needed to be cut…
“We had a long movie from the start. It was well over three hours, the first cut… It’s much better at two and a half [hours] than it was at over three, but it was a cut I had put together, is where we started. And it was over three hours.”
“A lot of really good stuff came out in the edit. I actually just reviewed the deleted scenes we’re gonna have on the Blu-ray. There’s a bunch of — some of my favorite scenes ended up having to come out just structurally… There’s a lot of really substantial, really good scenes. There’s a couple whole sequences actually that we lifted out. It’s weirdly — and this always happens — it’s like your babies you have to kill. It’s some of my favorite stuff from the movie.”
While there may be demand to see a full director’s cut, Johnson promises the version you’re seeing in theaters is exactly what he wants up there. So you’ll get these deleted moments on the home release, and that’s it. Take it or leave it. Let’s face it, you’ll take it.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens December 15th. If you can’t help it and you really need to see more right now, check out the new Chinese trailer below which features some footage we haven’t seen before.
