If The Weeknd is being retired as a moniker, it’s going out with a bang. Just days after the release of his sixth studio album Hurry Up Tomorrow, and yesterday’s first-look images, Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye has released the trailer for the psychological thriller, which he co-wrote, produced, and played the lead role.
In Hurry Up Tomorrow, Tesfaye plays a version of himself, a “musician plagued by insomnia is pulled into an odyssey with a stranger who begins to unravel the very core of his existence.”
Also in the cast are Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan.
The film is directed and co-written by Trey Edward Shults, the filmmaker behind acclaimed films Krisha, It Comes at Night, and Waves. Reza Fahim, Tesfaye’s collaborator on short-lived series The Idol, was a co-writer, as well.
Lionsgate describes the film as “the culmination of The Weeknd’s trilogy of studio albums, following the blockbuster hits Dawn FM (2022) and After Hours (2020). This third album represents the creative apex of the project, serving as the final chapter crafted with existential and self-referential themes and accompanied by visionary teasers that have set fans ablaze with anticipation for this concluding installment.”
Later this month, Cobra Kai will conclude its sixth and final season with the third batch of episodes hitting Netflix on February 13th. Finally, now that it’s over I can start watching since everyone says it’s a show I’d love. We’ll see about that. By breaking up the season into three chapters they’ve made this the longest goodbye ever. Anyway, a new trailer teases the conclusion of the remaining storylines and the continuing feud between Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) that has been going on since The Karate Kid in 1984.
Cobra Kai features a large ensemble that includes Martin Kove, Xolo Maridueña, Jacob Bertrand, Mary Mouser, Tanner Buchanan, Peyton List, Gianni DeCenzo, Courtney Henggeler, Vanessa Rubio, Dallas Dupree Young, Yuji Okumoto, Alicia Hannah-Kim, Griffin Santopietro, and Oona O’Brien.
The series follows a group of kids and their martial arts mentors. Some of the students will learn how to be good, others are trained to be bullies where might is always right.
Here’s the synopsis: “After a shocking result in the Sekai Taikai, Miyagi-Do, and Cobra Kai must reckon with their pasts while facing an uncertain future both on and off the mat. Almost 40 years after the events of the 1984 All Valley Karate Tournament, it’s all been leading to this.”
When Cobra Kai ends, the franchise will live on with Karate Kid: Legends starring Jackie Chan, Ben Wang, and Macchio in a story set three years after the series.
We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free early screening of Padding in Peru, the sequel to the beloved films Paddington and Paddington 2, featuring everyone’s favorite marmalade-loving bear! The third film stars Hugh Bonneville, Emily Mortimer, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Imelda Staunton, Carla Tous, Madeleine Harris, Samuel Joslin, Olivia Colman, Antonio Banderas, and Ben Whishaw returning as the voice of Paddington.
SYNOPSIS: Full of Paddington’s signature blend of wit, charm, and laugh-out-loud humor, Paddington in Peru finds the beloved, marmalade-loving bear lost in the jungle on an exciting, high-stakes adventure. When Paddington discovers his beloved Aunt Lucy has gone missing from the Home for Retired Bears, he and the Brown family head to the wilds of Peru to look for her, the only clue to her whereabouts a spot marked on an enigmatic map. Determined to solve the mystery, Paddington embarks on a thrilling quest through the rainforests of the Amazon to find his aunt…and may also uncover one of the world’s most legendary treasures.
The screening takes place on Saturday, February 8th at 11:00AM at Regal Majestic. If you’d like to attend, RSVP at the Sony Pictures site here! Please remember all screenings are first come first served and you’ll need to arrive early to ensure seating. Enjoy the show.
Sony Pictures opens Paddington in Peru in theaters on February 14th.
The Pendragon Cycle is one of the most beloved works of historical fantasy that draws from Arthurian Legend. Soon, it’ll have itself a live-action television series for fans to explore. This comes a little over two years since the rights to the series were snapped up, but either way, it’s said that The Pendragon Cycle show will be available to watch at some point in 2025. Here’s what we know about the upcoming TV series so far.
A Bankable Part of History
Arthurian Legend is a very well-known part of history and mythology, having inspired a great many other entertainment products. You pick just about any corner of entertainment and spot its influences. This even goes for the newest form of online entertainment, iGaming. Among the top games of the casino lounge, you’ll find Merlin: Journey of Flame. In this slot, the magical textbook known as the Grimoire plays a central role.
With Merlin as the central character, players of the online slot the aim is to collect dragon eggs, connect magic runes, and unleash the power of the magic book in the main feature. From the smallest screen to the biggest, cinema has long put Arthurian Legend to screen. King Arthur, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Sword in the Stone, Shrek The Third, and the recent The Green Knight are all at least enjoyable takes on the mythos.
On TV, however, The Pendragon Cycle of DailyWire+ will have some fairly stiff competition. Camelot, featuring Joseph Fiennes and Eva Green, was very well received despite being on for just one season in 2011. Then, there’s the BBC’s Merlin. For five seasons, totaling 65 episodes, Merlin was nominated for and collected a whole host of awards.
Based on Novels with a YouTuber Being Cast
Originally, the famed Arthurian mythical tales of Great Britain were adapted into a trilogy known as The Pendragon Trilogy. The success of Stephen R. Lawhead’s works led him to make several additions. The first two to the original set of Taliesin, Merlin, and Arthur were Pendragon and Grail. These two delve deeper into the events that take place in the final book, Arthur. In 1999, the 1987-started series concluded with a sequel of sorts with Avalon.
It’s quite surprising that in a landscape featuring Vikings, The Last Kingdom, and Game of Thrones that it’s taken this long for Lawhead’s The Pendragon Cycle to get a TV adaptation. What’s more surprising is the platform that picked up the rights. Makers of Lady Ballers, Snow White and the Evil Queen, and Run Hide Fight, Daily Wire picked up the rights in November 2022 and will soon be putting the fantasy series out on their streaming platform.
The DailyWire+ show has cast several fresh faces, as they say, including YouTuber Brett Cooper as Merlin’s future wife, Ganieda, as well as debutant James Arden. Newcomer Tom Sharp will take on the role of Merlin, while Rose Reid, Myles Clohessy, Alex Laurence Phillips, Daniel Fathers, and Chick Allan are also in the mix. Their stories in the series will encompass the first two books, Taliesin and Merlin, over the course of seven episodes.
In the current entertainment landscape, The Pendragon Cycle offers incredibly rich source material to create a superb historical fantasy series. Whether or not DailyWire+ will be able to make the most of this opportunity will be found out later in 2025.
With Marvel releasing The Fantastic Four: First Stepstrailer this morning, as part of what should be a busy year following a quiet 2024, it’s time to tackle a couple of rumors. Both of these are pretty interesting otherwise I wouldn’t bother since neither is guaranteed actually to happen.
The big one is sure to cause some controversy. Jonathan Majors’ legal issues are well-known, but he’s served his sentence and his critically acclaimed film Magazine Dreams is due to arrive in March after a long delay. So now that Majors is making a comeback, perhaps a return to the MCU is in store?
According to Screen Geek (judge accordingly), Marvel’s Kevin Feige is considering bringing Majors back to the MCU as Kang the Conqueror. Majors played the role in Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania, and two seasons of Loki. He was meant to play a major part in Avengers: The Kang Dynasty before he was fired and the film renamed Avengers: Doomsday with Robert Downey Jr. taking over the villain role as Doctor Doom.
I have my doubts about this one. Majors may have done his mandated sentence, but audiences have long memories when it comes to domestic violence and there will be a certain, possibly large, segment that will refuse to see any film with him in it.
The next rumor from MTTSH says Euphoria and Cuckoo breakout Hunter Schafer is being eyed to play Raven Darkholme aka Mystique whenever the X-Men reboot arrives. This follows other rumors of Harris Dickinson (The Iron Claw) being eyed to play Cyclops, Ayo Edibiri (The Bear) as Storm (this one I think is absurd), and Sadie Sink (Stranger Things) as Jean Grey.
Schafer would be the third actress to play the shapeshifting mutant terrorist Mystique in a live-action film, following Rebecca Romijn and Jennifer Lawrence. Her biggest film to date has been The Hunter Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, so she has blockbuster experience already.
Further rumors have the X-Men showing up in the next Avengers movies, and if that’s true we should start getting casting news soon.
We’ve seen the X-Men make their MCU debut in last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine, and now it’s the Fantastic Four’s turn. After years under the Fox umbrella, Marvel’s First Family finally arrives in the MCU with The Fantastic Four: First Steps and this big-screen take will be very different from previous versions from the early 2000s and that atrocious reboot in 2015. This one, starring Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, is set in a retro-future version of the 1960s. So how is this going to fit with the continuity that we all know?
As promised, the first full trailer has arrived today, preceded by a one-hour countdown video by the Future Foundation from the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, with the cast on hand to introduce the footage.
There’s a lot to digest here. Directed by Matt Shakman, utilizing a nostalgic tone similar to what he brought to WandaVision, the film features an impressive look at The Thing who is very comic book accurate. We also see Human Torch and Sue Storm showing off their powers, we see Galactus towering above the city although his face remains hidden, and we even see John Malkovich looking like he’s playing villain the Red Ghost. We even see the FF’s house robot, H.E.R.B.I.E., who impresses Thing with its cooking skills. The one thing we don’t see? Reed Richards using his stretchy powers, but hopefully we’ll get that next time. This trailer is pretty short.
Hopefully next time we’ll also see Julia Garner as the Shalla-Bal version of Silver Surfer, plus the characters played by Natasha Lyonne (Alicia Masters?) and Paul Walter Hauser (Mole Man?). Ralph Ineson voices Galactus.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps hits theaters on July 25th!
SYNOPSIS: “Set against the vibrant backdrop of a 1960s-inspired, retro-futuristic world, ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ introduces Marvel’s First Family—Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, Johnny Storm/Human Torch, and Ben Grimm/The Thing as they face their most daunting challenge yet. Forced to balance their roles as heroes with the strength of their family bond, they must defend Earth from a ravenous space god called Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his enigmatic Herald, Silver Surfer (Julia Garner). And if Galactus’ plan to devour the entire planet and everyone on it weren’t bad enough, it suddenly gets very personal.”
What is this world that we’re living in right now? Are you serious that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is coming back? And not only is Sarah Michelle Gellar wielding the stake once more, but the series will have Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao aboard, as well!
Deadline reports that a Buffy the Vampire Slayer sequel series is nearing a pilot order from Hulu. Gellar will reprise her iconic role of Buffy Summers, the vampire slayer that she played for seven seasons, five of them on the WB with the final two on UPN (remember that?) before concluding in 2003.
Zhao, the director best known for Eternals and her poetic dramas The Rider and Best Picture winner Nomadland, is a lifelong Buffy fan and will direct the pilot episode from a script by Nora and Lilla Zuckerman (Poker Face). A writers room is being put together with expectation that it will lead to an ongoing series.
It’s unclear if anyone else from the original, such as Alyson Hannigan, James Marsters, or Nicholas Brendon, will return. If there’s no Michelle Trachtenberg or Emma Caulfield, I’ll protest. Just sayin’. It’s also unclear if the show will recognize events in the canonical sequel comic books, which lasted to season eleven.
Buffy creator Joss Whedon, who directed the 1992 movie that led to the series, won’t have any involvement at all which is wild to consider. He was once the most popular filmmaker around but misconduct allegations by the Justice League cast and others put an end to that.
The original series led to another long-running series, Angel, starring David Boreanaz, that ended in 2004. Something tells me if you bring back Buffy, then Angel won’t be far behind. You can’t keep those crazy kids apart.
It seems that everybody is trying to duck and cover from the expensive Super Bowl day ads. This time it’s Universal, who today have revealed the first footage from Jurassic World Rebirth, with the full trailer arriving on Wednesday!
The footage is only ten seconds long, and it shows new characters played by Scarlett Johansson and Wicked actor Jonathan Bailey as a reptilian tale sprouts up from the tall grass. Well, that’s their own fault because everyone knows to avoid the tall grass in the Jurassicmovies.
Steven Spielberg is back as exec-producer of the seventh movie in the franchise. Jurassic Park writer David Koepp penned the screenplay with The Creator and Rogue One filmmaker Gareth Edwards directing.
Johansson and Bailey are part of an all-new cast that includes Mahershala Ali, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, Béchir Sylvain, Philippine Velge, and Ed Skrein.
Here’s the reported plot: Jurassic World Rebirth sees an intrepid team racing to secure DNA samples from the three most colossal creatures across land, sea and air. Five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, the planet’s ecology has proven largely inhospitable to dinosaurs. Those remaining exist in isolated equatorial environments with climates resembling the one in which they once thrived. The three most colossal creatures within that tropical biosphere hold the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind.
There’s a reason the Final Destination franchise holds a place in the hearts of many horror fans. First, the premise is very cool, centering on a group of people (usually teens but not always) who survive a mass tragedy only for Death to strike them down one-by-one. Second, this premise led to some very cool, freak death sequences, like the unforgettable logging truck highway scene. There hasn’t been a new movie since 2011, but that changes in May with Final Destination Bloodlines.
The sixth movie in the Final Destination franchise follows the same path as the others, teasing all sorts of fluky murders, in this case a nasty one in a tattoo parlor, because Death has one Hell of a sense of humor. However, there’s something different also as this one is a partial prequel, taking place in the 1960s and in the present. The past will reveal the origin story of William Bludworth, the mortician played by the late Tony Todd in four of the six movies.
Here’s the synopsis: “Plagued by a violent recurring nightmare, college student Stefanie heads home to track down the one person who might be able to break the cycle and save her family from the grisly demise that inevitably awaits them all.”
Final Destination has a cast that includes Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Richard Harmon, Owen Patrick Joyner, Rya Kihlstedt, Anna Lore, Brec Bassinger, and Todd in his final role.
The film is directed by Adam B. Stein and Zach Lipovsky, the duo behind Freaks and The Kim Possible Movie. Seriously. Lipovsky has a bit more horror cred as the solo director of Leprechaun: Origins and Dead Rising: Watchtower.
Perhaps more interesting is the screenplay co-written by Lori Evans Taylor and Guy Busick, with a story co-created by Spider-Man and Wolfs director Jon Watts. Busick has been a frequent collaborator with Radio Silence on such films as Scream, Scream VI, Abigail, and Ready or Not, a damn fine track record.
Final Destination Bloodlines opens in theaters on May 16th.
With You’re Cordially Invited the #1 streaming film on Prime Video, Amazon MGM has quickly snagged Will Ferrell and director Nicholas Stoller for a new comedy. And this time Ferrell will be co-starring with Zac Efron. Deadline reports the trio will team up on an untitled comedy that Stoller will direct from his own screenplay.
The new comedy centers on “a young convict (Efron) fresh out of prison who takes a reality TV courtroom hostage blaming the megalomaniac TV judge (Ferrell) for a past ruling that the convict feels ruined his life.”
This brings Efron back under the Amazon MGM umbrella following last year’s comedy Ricky Stanicky.
Coming up for Efron is the Jody Hill celebrity thriller Famous alongside Phoebe Dynevor. He was last seen opposite Nicole Kidman in the Netflix rom-com A Family Affair. He previously worked with Stoller on Neighbors and the sequel Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising.
Ferrell can be seen right now with Reese Witherspoon in You’re Cordially Invited. He kept busy in 2024 with the award-winning documentary Will & Harper, and his voice role in Despicable Me 4.
