For months I’ve been wondering what was happening with Julie Taymor’s Gloria Steinem biopic, The Glorias. After a lukewarm reception at Sundance (including by me), it’s been pretty quiet since it was given a September 25th release date by Roadside Attractions. Well, the anticipated drama is still coming, albeit a few days later and on digital.
Deadline reports The Glorias will now arrive on September 30th, and will forego theaters completely. It will instead open on Amazon Prime, and be made available on VOD for those without an Amazon account.
The Glorias stars Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander, Lulu Wilson, and Ryan Kiera Armstrong as the famous feminist activist through different periods in her life. The cast includes Bette Midler, Janelle Monae, Lorraine Toussaint, and Timothy Hutton.
Warner Bros. has just revealed a full trailer for their upcoming DC FanDome event on August 22nd. Basically, it’s Comic-Con if the only studio that showed up was WB’s DC Universe wing. Along with the new look comes a pretty big change for the weekend’s festivities. What was going to be a 24-hour event has now been split over two days.
So how is this going to work out? For practical purposes, the big stuff has been separated from the smaller stuff. Panels and events for the DCEU movies Wonder Woman 1984, Aquaman, The Batman, and more will remain on Saturday, August 22nd. If you’re looking for discussions, trailers, and possibly some exclusive news, this is the place to go.
Smaller panels will get their time to shine on September 12th. A “create your own timeline” feature allows for you to curate the panels you want to see whenever you want, since all of the day’s events are On Demand. The Hall of Heroes stuff on day one is still set for specific times.
This is a good idea because I had been wondering how in the world they were going to fit so much content in a single day. Splitting the difference allows for those of us who want to focus on movies to do that easily, while giving the other stuff a better chance of getting noticed.
The full schedule can be found here. Check the split breakdown below.
DC FanDome: Hall of Heroes: On Saturday, August 22, at 10:00 am PDT, fans will be transported into the DC FanDome: Hall of Heroes, an epic world designed personally by Jim Lee featuring special programming, panels and exclusive reveals from a wide variety of films, TV series, games, comics and more.
The superpowered eight-hour show will be available for fans around the world to watch exclusively 3x in the 24-hour period.
DC FanDome: Explore the Multiverse: On Saturday, September 12, at 10:00am PDT, fans will be able to create their own timeline! The great thing about this event is that it will be on demand, giving you the ability to curate your own unique experience via our Official DC FanDome Online Scheduler Tool.
A lot of the content you were super excited to see from our multiple islands will now be housed here, and will be available for you to watch throughout the 24-hour period.
Fans can now choose their own adventure and will have more time to immerse themselves in all the hours of curated programming — at their own pace and on their own schedule.
This also allows us to provide the best user experience, and will now not only be available on your desktop computer but across all mobile devices.
DC Kids FanDome will also launch on Saturday, September 12, at its own kid-friendly companion site at DCKidsFanDome.com.
If I were launching a new streaming service and on the hunt for content, the first thing I’d do is talk to Sofia Coppola and beg her to make more movies with Bill Murray. That’s basically what Apple and A24 did as part of their new deal, making Coppola’s latest film On the Rocks their first huge announcement. A reunion between the filmmaker and her Lost in Translation star, the film returns her to a familiar motif; a relationship that grows stronger during a wild adventure in the big city.
On the Rocks pairs Murray with Rashida Jones as a larger-than-life playboy father and his daughter as they tail her soon-to-be husband around New York City. Like ‘Translation’, this looks to be both a stirring love letter to a big city and a look at how different generations have competing views on relationships.
Again, this feels very similar to Lost in Translation, maybe leaning a bit more on the comedic side, and I’m totally okay with that.
The cast also includes Marlon Wayans, Jessica Henwick, and Jenny Slate. Murray most recently worked with Coppola on the Netflix holiday special A Very Murray Christmas. Coppola’s 2013 film The Bling Ring was one of A24’s first big acquisitions.
On the Rocks hits theaters and Apple TV+ this October.
Who says they don’t make movies for adults anymore? Kenneth Branagh’s Murder On the Orient Express combined veteran actors with a classic Agatha Christie mystery for a whopping $350M worldwide, launching what has now turned out to be an unlikely Hercule Poirot franchise. Death On the Nile boasts a similarly star-powered cast of international favorites for another crime caper, moving the action from the rails to the Egyptian waters.
Branagh once again pulls double duty as director and the lead role of iconic detective Hercule Poirot. Because no holiday ever goes as planned for him, Poirot is once again tasked with solving a murder during his time off, this time involving a love triangle gone wrong. Michael Green wrote the screenplay, just as he did the prior film.
The killer cast (no pun intended) includes Gal Gadot, Letitia Wright, Armie Hammer, Annette Bening, Ali Fazal, Sophie Okonedo, Tom Bateman, Emma Mackey, Dawn French, Rose Leslie, Jennifer Saunders, and Russell Brand.
I’m curious to see how this does. If theatrical releases remain limited, and this gets a full rollout, it’s exactly the kind of star-driven movie that could be huge.
Death On the Nile opens on October 23rd.
SYNOPSIS: Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot’s Egyptian vacation aboard a glamorous river steamer turns into a terrifying search for a murderer when a picture-perfect couple’s idyllic honeymoon is tragically cut short. Set against an epic landscape of sweeping desert vistas and the majestic Giza pyramids, this tale of unbridled passion and incapacitating jealousy features a cosmopolitan group of impeccably dressed travelers, and enough wicked twists and turns to leave audiences guessing until the final, shocking denouement.
Unlike his directing partner David Leitch who went on to direct Hobbs & Shaw, Deadpool 2, and Atomic Blonde, Chad Stahelski has yet to leave the John Wick universe behind, other than a brief stint helping out on Birds of Prey and The Matrix 4. It won’t be that way for long as he’s piling up quite a workload of upcoming projects, including an urban fantasy film titled Arcana.
Deadline reports Stahelski will direct Arcana, a new film set up at Lionsgate, the studio behind the John Wick films. The script is by Predators duo Michael Finch & Alex Litvak, and takes place in a gritty urban fantasy world of hidden clans. Isn’t that just John Wick minus the gunplay?
Don’t expect to see Arcana anytime soon. Stahelski is currently working on two back-to-back John Wick films, plus the franchise series spinoff The Continental, an untitled car film from A Quiet Place writers, a Highlander reboot, comic book adaptation Analog, and more.
Hard to believe the first we saw of The New Mutants was back in 2017 (!!!) and what we saw was pretty much crap. I’m not going to go over the many twists and turns, ups and downs Josh Boone’s X-Men spinoff has gone through. You know all of that shit already. What matters now is that buzz is actually pretty high following recent trailers, and the movie is DEFINITELY coming out on August 28th. In a theater. So get ready.
Disney and The New Mutants cast are pulling out all of the stops to learn you up on who these junior league X-Men are. In a 60-second tease, Maisie Williams, Blu Hunt, Charlie Heaton, Henry Zaga, and Anya Taylor-Joy introduce their characters and their powers. Finally, we get a really good look at Heaton powering up Cannonball’s rocket-fueled abilities. True to form, he spins wildly out of control…just like in the comics.
The New Mutants hits theaters on August 28th, and tickets are on sale now.
Hard to believe it’s been a decade since Craig Roberts burst onto the scene with 2010’s coming-of-age film Submarine. The English actor has kept busy in films covering a wide variety of genres, from 22 Jump Street to The Double and The Current War. In 2015 he made his directorial debut with dark comedy Just Jim, and during that time he also started cooking up his sophomore effort, Eternal Beauty, a film he’s always had Oscar-nominee Sally Hawkins in mind for.
Fortunately for Roberts, the Shape of Water actress and his Submarine co-star agreed. Eternal Beauty stars Hawkins as Jane, a woman who sees her life spiral into chaos after she’s left at the altar. The cast includes David Thewlis, Alice Lowe, Billie Piper, and Penelope Wilton.
Eternal Beauty opens October 2nd.
SYNOPSIS: When Jane (Sally Hawkins) is dumped at the altar she has a breakdown and spirals into a chaotic world, where love (both real and imagined) and family relationships collide with both touching and humorous consequences.
What happens when the events depicted in an underground comic book become a reality? I’m not talking about a superhero leaping from its pages to fight crime in the real world, but if that comic’s predictions of the future turn out to be true? That’s the premise of Utopia, a new Amazon series from Gone Girl and Sharp Objects author Gillian Flynn.
Based on the original UK series, Utopia centers on a group of misfit comic book readers (Are there any other kind?) who discover that predictions made in their favorite graphic novel’s pages are coming true. And that means the world is due for an apocalyptic end.
The series stars Sasha Lane, John Cusack, Rainn Wilson, Ashleigh LaThrop, Dan Byrd, Jessica Rothe, Desmin Borges, and Javon Walton. David Fincher had been involved with the series when it was initially set up at HBO, with plans for him to direct. But when the network basically ended all dealings with Fincher, he left and Amazon swooped in. They ordered all nine episodes to series and set Utopia for release on September 25th.
SYNOPSIS: When the conspiracy in the elusive comic Utopia is real, a group of young fans come together to embark on a high-stakes twisted adventure to use what they uncover to save themselves, each other, and ultimately humanity.
The pre-teen drama Cuties won over a lot of hearts at Sundance earlier this year, and earning the Directing Award for debut filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré. Coming-of-age stories set in the world of dance are a dime a dozen, but when the dance troupe are a bunch of 11-year-old girls it presents a number of new challenges and potential controversies, which Doucouré met head-on.
The film stars Fathia Youssouf as Amy, a young girl torn between her conservative Muslim Senegalese family and the exciting life she wants for herself. When she meets another group of girls who are part of a twerking dance crew, Amy bucks family tradition to build a new connection with her friends.
And that’s what these movies are typically all about, right? The parents are more concerned with what they want than listening to their children, who go and seek acceptance and validation elsewhere. It’s a familiar story done with a different flavor by Doucouré, which is why Netflix was quick to snap it up for themselves.
That said, I expect the film will be met with some resistance by those who will only see little girls dancing around in tight outfits.
We’re happy to offer our readers the chance to attend a free virtual screening of Chemical Hearts, the new Amazon drama starring Lili Reinhart (Hustlers) and Austin Abrams (Euphoria).
SYNOPSIS: Seventeen-year-old Henry Page (Austin Abrams) has never been in love. He fancies himself a romantic, but the kind of once-in-a-lifetime love he’s been hoping for just hasn’t happened yet. Then, on the first day of senior year, he meets transfer student Grace Town (Lili Reinhart) and it seems all that is about to change. When Grace and Henry are chosen to co-edit the school paper, he is immediately drawn to the mysterious newcomer. As he learns the heartbreaking secret that has changed her life, he finds himself falling in love with her — or at least the person he thinks she is.
The screening takes place tonight, August 18th at 7pm EST. Waiting room opens at 6pm. If you’d like to attend, simply register at the Amazon screening site here. Feel free to spread the word!
CHEMICAL HEARTS will be available Worldwide on Amazon Prime Video on August 21st. It is rated R with a running time of 93 minutes.
