Bond 26 is coming a little sooner than we expected. Following the epic sendoff for Daniel Craig with 2021’s No Time To Die, Craig’s 5th and final assignment as James Bond, we figured it might be a long time until a new Bond would be coming our way. Happily, that appears not to be the case, as series producer Barbara Broccoli says we can expect a new Bond in the near-ish future.
Deadlinehas the scoop. Broccoli says that the next 007 is coming, but, it will be “at least two years.” What’s more, they haven’t yet begun the search for an actor to replace Daniel Craig, “because it’s a reinvention of Bond.”
At least two years might sound like a long time if you’re eager to get back into the Bond business immediately, but considering there was a six-year gap between the last two Bond films, Spectre (2015) and No Time To Die (2021), it’s actually surprisingly quick.
Broccoli was speaking to Deadline at a celebrity-packed private event in London to honor her and her brother, Michael G. Wilson, for their British Film Institute Fellowships. Broccoli wasn’t about to divulge who she was eyeing to take up the Bond mantle from Craig, but she offered some very intriguing insight into the process of finding the next Bond.
“Nobody’s in the running,” she said to Deadline. “We’re working out where to go with him, we’re talking that through. There isn’t a script and we can’t come up with one until we decide how we’re going to approach the next film because, really, it’s a reinvention of Bond. We’re reinventing who he is and that takes time. I’d say that filming is at least two years away.”
This is the most we’ve heard from Broccoli on the thinking behind replacing Craig. A “reinvention” suggests, well, a ton of possibilities. Let your speculative powers fly on what this reinvention might look like, but one thing for certain is that getting cast as the next Bond is a career-defining turn, and following Craig’s five-film embodiment of her Majesty’s most iconic spy will not be easy.
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Bursting through in the golden age of television, Elvis Presley had stunning good looks and taboo-shattering dance moves that instantly attracted legions of female fans, but his legacy rests in that sound. His voice was inimitable with the pain and power he had to share to survive.
Wayne Pashley, the re-recording mixer, sound designer, and supervising sound editor of Baz Luhrmann’s epic biopic Elvisbravely took up the mantle of resurrecting one of the most famous voices ever recorded. “Really, the sound brief that Baz gave us was simply, ‘Protect Elvis as we go forward, and make this a audio-visual wonder.’”
Presley’s career spanned 24 years and produced as many albums. He lived a life of immense public pressure and scrutiny, much of which was well documented. The creative team had to be judicious to compress the saga into two and a half hours. They invoked a method of montages and medleys that Luhrmann termed “poetic glue.”
“It was taking imagery that had been shot, the performances, and telling the narrative through this ‘poetic glue’ style,” Pashley explained. “Which, of course, then led to ‘sonic glue.’ So, over to us. We had to then take the sonic architecture of Elvis Presley’s life, which if you start breaking it down, what is Elvis Presley in a sonic sense? Well, it’s clearly the music number one. Number two it’s the crowds. Now, the crowds were everything. That’s where he found life.”
Caption: AUSTIN BUTLER as Elvis in Warner Bros. Pictures’ drama “ELVIS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
The audience was Presley’s driving force and motivation throughout his career. Fans gathered in unprecedented numbers with unmatched enthusiasm. “We didn’t want it to sound retro. We wanted it to sound real,” Pashley said. “The danger of the crowds was they could easily become overwhelming. What Baz called, ‘Be careful of crowd fatigue.’ Because if you’ve got two and a half hours of screaming and carrying on, it’s very easy to be worn down by it. Even though they’re there – they might be 10,000 strong in a stadium – they’re muted and away in order to create isolation and drama and emotion.”
Presley’s rise and fall has contemporary and timeless story elements. To fit the length of a feature film, the creative team focused on one pivotal relationship in his life. “In order to take the icon himself into a modern stage, you had to do something very different,” Pashley noted. “You had to allow the younger audience to fit in with a modern take without it just being a period piece. So, the approach was, Baz was going to make the great American tragic opera. It was going to be Shakespearean told through the eyes of the unreliable narrator, which was Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), who some say ultimately caused Elvis’ (Austin Butler) demise, even though he loved Elvis.”
They were an explosive pair with magnificent and destructive results. “What’s this really about? Well, it’s about Elvis the show and The Colonel the biz. He created, probably without precedent, the most famous man on the planet.”
“There are some who’d make me out to be the villain of this here story,” Colonel Parker narrates. Presley was the talent and the personality, but Parker was arguably the brains behind transforming Elvis from a singer into a superstar.
Caption: (L-r) TOM HANKS as Colonel Tom Parker and AUSTIN BUTLER as Elvis in Warner Bros. Pictures’ drama “ELVIS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Hugh Stewart
Parker was a man of mystery and manipulation. With experience in deceptive carnival practices and the veil of an unrecognizable Dutch and country accent, he was often underestimated. “What people don’t realize is that The Colonel himself used his wily ways and his accent to distract in dealmaking,” Pashley reflected. “People thought that he was a little bit stupid or something because he was making these deals with this chaotic weird accent. They basically would sign the deal going, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ Thinking that he would just go away. He started merchandizing. He was a genius in his own right.”
Caption: (L-r) TOM HANKS as Colonel Tom Parker and AUSTIN BUTLER as Elvis in Warner Bros. Pictures’ drama “ELVIS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Despite potential critiques of Parker’s motives, Pashley says they avoided demonizing him through the sound design. “I guess that would lend itself to character villainous design, but we did try to treat him fairly to give The Colonel due respect. At the end of the day as The Colonel said many times, there would be no Elvis Presley without him and there would be no him without Elvis Presley.”
Nearly half a century has passed since Presley’s tragic death. A lifetime in terms of audio equipment. The film is presented in Dolby Atmos, a technology that didn’t exist when Elvis performed. Pashley resisted taking Elvis out of time while bridging modern audience sensibilities through painstaking research and restoration. “We had a musical props team who bought, built, fixed amplifiers, guitars, double basses, all the musical instruments,” Pashley revealed. “As well as that, we got all the vintage microphones restored. Whatever the real microphones were on the day had all gone through a restoration process. Live performances that Austin did during the shoot or prerecorded and mimed were all happening using the real microphones of the era.”
Caption: AUSTIN BUTLER as Elvis in Warner Bros. Pictures’ drama “ELVIS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Hugh Stewart
Yes, Austin Butler is really singing, although he splits vocal duty with The King on later tracks. The quality of Presley’s recordings from the early 1950s were too poor to salvage leaving Butler on his own. Pashley’s team was able to make use of masters from Presley’s ‘68 Comeback Special and 1970s Las Vegas shows. “We were joining the dialogue on stage to the singing to match Austin to Elvis. We took the microphones into postproduction when we were doing ADR voice replacement as well,” Pashley said. “We had 32 channels of recording in our test work with the camera. We’re checking our sync for the music department feed and then recording live dialogue. On that test day, we took from playback of a track and then we let [Austin] go live.”
Pashley clearly remembers the magic that emerged. “That day, it was about five in the afternoon, and it was the first day I met Austin. I walked away and I actually thought I’d witnessed Elvis Presley live. It was unbelievable and I knew we were on a winner.”
Presley was a famously avid car enthusiast. Pashley’s team made on-set recordings of all the authentic vehicles of Presley’s era used in the film. They’re remnants of a tumultuous time and major cultural shifts in American history. Audio from real news broadcasts with Walter Cronkite was used. A speech from former President Jimmy Carter announcing Presley’s death that was written but never recorded was performed by a voice actor. “All of the voices are real quotes, real headlines from real people that were all re-recorded. Famous quotes,” Pashley revealed. “Now, you don’t necessarily hear every single line, but that merging of the time and the attitude of the press, of the people who knew Elvis commenting on the parts of his life as the story went forward, it’s all happening within the surrounding immersive sonic glue.”
Caption: AUSTIN BUTLER as Elvis in Warner Bros. Pictures’ drama “ELVIS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Having worked with Baz Luhrmann since Strictly Ballroom 30 years ago through Australia, The Great Gatsby, and more, Pashley anticipated the mammoth scale of Elvis. “I knew that Baz would bring the razzle-dazzle because that’s what he does. He’s the consummate showman. He’s a visionary. He’s a maximalist. His passion and innovation I find extraordinary.”
The controversial filmmaker memorializing the controversial pop culture figure got people talking once again. In his lifetime, Elvis Presley produced 18 no. 1 hits, and now, The King has secured the top spot again. Elvis ruled the box office this weekend, nosing past mega-blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick. Long live The King.
Director Dean Fleischer Camp has turned Marcel the Shell, the itty bitty seashell turned YouTube sensation that he created with actress/comic Jenny Slate, into a feature film. But he and Slate, who provides the distinctive voice for the philosophical, one-eyed, one-inch mollusk, knew it had to be on their terms.
“I basically make movies to try to trick my dad into crying in public,” says Fleischer Camp who developed the script with Slate and Nick Paley. “We were always saying, ‘how can we deepen it and make it personal and worthy of a feature?’ We wanted to keep the loose, authentic feel to it. I had a lot of emotional ambitions for the film. How do you do that with the organization that a feature requires?”
Ever since 2010 when Fleischer Camp and Slate, then a couple (they divorced in 2016 but continued to work together) made the first of three wildly successful short videos about Marcel, there was keen interest from Hollywood studios. But it was “all about grafting Marcel onto a tentpole movie,” says Fleischer Camp. “There were a lot of crazy suggestions [such as] partnering him with John Cena so they could fight crime. It felt clear we were going to have to take a different route to make the film that our Marcel deserved.”
An image from “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.” Courtesy A24.
“We knew it was important that I had creative control and final cut. We kept the character to ourselves for several years but we were always adding jokes, keeping notes of ideas. It reached a saturation point where it was like, it’s a shame to keep this hidden and not give it a bigger platform.”
Fleischer Camp and Slate reached out to Elisabeth Holm, who’d produced Slate’s movies Obvious Child and Landline, about “how do we fundraise in the indie world,” says Fleischer Camp.
A few years later, their feature Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is now in theatersfrom A24. It seamlessly combines the stop-motion animated miniature world of Marcel with live-action, including Fleischer Camp playing himself as a filmmaker fresh from a breakup who finds Marcel in an AirBnB and engages with the tiny shell while making a documentary. Through flashbacks, we learn about an event in the house that scattered Marcel’s close community of shells, leaving him with only his grandmother, Nana Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini), a gardener whose increasing frailty inspires Marcel’s protectiveness.
An image from “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.” Courtesy A24.
Keeping the loose, improvisational quality that made the shorts so unique and beloved meant an arduous shooting process, says Fleischer Camp.
“We felt strongly that with a bigger budget, there was the danger you could sand off the things that made it great. We came up with the bonkers process that Nick Paley and I would write for several months, then record for a couple of days with Jenny and later with the rest of the cast. During those days, we’d see what was working or not. Jenny is one of the most masterful improvisers on the planet. She’s our Robin Williams. We’d record and get our scenes but we’d get other stuff, too. Nick and I have an editing background, so we’d pour over the audio, pick out the gems, fold them into the screenplay, and then we’d do it again. That allowed us to maintain the spontaneity and improvisational quality but also tell a larger story.”
It makes sense that a skilled improviser like Slate would thrive in this process, but Fleischer Camp also gets a delightfully comic and tender performance from co-star Rossellini whose wise Nana enjoys singing and watching 60 Minutes with Marcel but also shares with him advice about facing one’s fears.
“It was a learning curve for her. She said no one had asked her to improvise before,” Fleischer Camp says. “It took a while for her to feel comfortable; improvisation is so vulnerable — not having a script, to trust someone with that.”
Marcel (Jenny Slate) and Connie (Isabella Rossellini) in “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.” Courtesy A24.
“So much of what I love about the character is what I love about Isabella. This hybrid process afforded me and Nick the luxury of writing the character around her. We had a basic outline but it really came together once we got to know Isabella. She’s the most like this character than anything she’s been cast in. She does live on a farm; she knows a ton about gardening; she has a master’s in animal behavior. She’s also funny but is hardly ever cast in comedies. So much of what makes her great is what makes Nana great.”
Just as game was 60 Minutes anchor Lesley Stahl who appears as herself in a key sequence.
“You would think with a scrappy indie film we’d have a list of 100 news anchors but it was always just one name,” says Fleischer Camp. “We got incredibly lucky that Liz Holm had a friend who worked at 60 Minutes and was willing to get the film in front of Lesley and they worked with us to make it happen. The crew that comes in is really the 60 Minutes crew.”
Lesley Stahl in a scene from “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.” Courtesy A24.
The painstaking process of stop-motion animation and the spontaneity of documentary — “oil and water,” says Fleischer Camp — required two cinematographers and “an incredible amount of handholding among all the departments.”
“We were innovating a lot of things along the way and crossing our fingers,” he says. Ultimately, the two worlds of Marcel the Shell With Shoes On are seamless, he says. “I wanted it to seem real so that a kid could see this and think, ‘Maybe when I go home I could move a pillow and find Marcel.’”
Featured image: Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Courtesy A24.
Perhaps you missed this bit of news from yesterday—Christian Bale mentioned to Screenrantthat he’d be open to reprising the role of Batman again, but only if Christopher Nolan returned as director.
Nolan returning to Gotham is obviously a very big if, considering the director already put in years’ worth of work crafting his Dark Knight trilogy, and considering Warner Bros. already has a very viable new Batman franchise with writer/director Matt Reeves and star Robert Pattinson’s The Batman and its upcoming sequel. Oh, and there’s also the original Batman—Michael Keaton—set to reprise his role in both the upcoming The Flash and Batgirl. There’s more, Ben Affleck’s also reprising his version of Batman in The Flash, too. Yet the allure of a new Nolan/Bale pairing is hard to resist.
Bale is set to make his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut playing a decidedly different kind of character in Thor: Love and Thunder, Gorr the Butcher, a lunatic hellbent on taking out Thor and any other gods and goddesses he can find. Bale was speaking to Screenrant about his Love and Thunder role when he addressed the possibility of playing Batman again. He made it clear that as of yet, no one at Warners has brought up the possibility:
“No. No one’s ever mentioned it to me. No one’s brought it up. Occasionally people say to me, ‘Oh, I hear you were approached and offered all this. And I’m like, ‘That’s news to me. No one’s ever said that.’ I had a pact with Chris Nolan. We said, ‘Hey, look. Let’s make three films, if we’re lucky enough to get to do that. And then let’s walk away. Let’s not linger too long.'”
Yet Bale did have a caveat:
“In my mind, it would be something if Chris Nolan ever said to himself, ‘You know what, I’ve got another story to tell.’ And if he wished to tell that story with me, I’d be in.”
While it seems like a massive stretch, the reason there are currently three active Batmans in the DCEU is that they exist within a multiverse. A multiverse allows for an infinite number of Batman, sorry, Batmen. The thing that’s clear is you’re not getting Bale back for a cameo, but, if Nolan had that fourth Batman story to tell, well…
For more on all things Batman, check out these stories:
Featured image: HOLLYWOOD – JUNE 06: Actor Christian Bale and director Christopher Nolan arrive at the premiere of “Batman Begins” at the Grauman?s Chinese Theater on June 6, 2005 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Legend has it that a witch gets her powers on her 16th birthday. For three teenage girls living in modern-day Salem, what sounds like pure silliness turns out to be more like a warning. While celebrating a birthday, the three friends at the heart of Hocus Pocus 2 decide to spice up their lives with a birthday seancé, of sorts, and end up unwittingly conjuring the Sanderson Sisters. And abracadabra, new life is breathed into the Halloween classic of yore, with Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy returning to roles they last inhabited in the 1993 original.
“Lock up your children!” Winifred (Midler) shouts upon her resurrection. “Yes, Salem, we’re back!” For those too young to remember the original, Hocus Pocus became a cult classic thanks to the lovably go-for-broke performances of the original trio. The Sanderson Sisters (Midler’s Winifred, Najimy’s Mary, and Parker’s Sarah) were killed during the 1692 Salem Witch Trials but were summoned back in the original film by youngster Max (Omri Katz). In the sequel, directed by Anne Fletcher, Whitney Peak, Belissa Escobedo, and Lilia Buckingham play the three teens whose birthday ritual ends up dragging the Sanderson Sisters from beyond the grave. They’re joined by an excellent cast that includes Hannah Waddingham, Tony Hale, Sam Richardson, and Taylor Paige Henderson.
Check out the trailer below. Hocus Pocus 2 hits Disney+ on September 30.
Here’s the official synopsis for Hocus Pocus 2:
Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy reunite for the highly anticipated Disney+ Original Movie Hocus Pocus 2. The live-action, long-awaited sequel to the perennial Halloween classic, which brings back the delightfully wicked Sanderson sisters for more comedic mayhem, will debut on Disney+ on September 30.
It’s been 29 years since someone lit the Black Flame Candle and resurrected the 17th-century sisters, and they are looking for revenge. Now it is up to three high-school students to stop the ravenous witches from wreaking a new kind of havoc on Salem before dawn on All Hallow’s Eve.
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Mark Weingarten is no stranger to navigating the challenges of a production sound mixer. Over his accomplished career, Weingarten’s mixed on Christopher Nolan’s WWII epic Dunkirk, traveled to another dimension in Interstellar, captured the spirit of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, and tracked the drama behind The Social Network and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In director Joseph Kosinski’s world-beating Top Gun: Maverick, the hurdle was finding a way to usably record the actors’ dialogue inside fighter jet cockpits pulling up to 7Gs.
The journey for Weingarten began with a heavy dose of research and preparation. Since Kosinski sought to have all the inflight dialogue recorded, whether it was plane to plane communications, plane to ground, or an actor saying something to themselves, like when Tom Cruise whispers one of Maverick’s iconic lines, “Talk to me Goose,” the sound mixer needed a solution for every possibility. On top of that, production would be using the working flight masks worn by pilots which, at times, would be covering the actor’s faces while needed oxygen flowed through them.
“Initially in prep I thought about running a microphone into their masks but decided against it because the masks are fully functional, providing oxygen as well as enabling critical communications,” says Weingarten. “I didn’t want to do anything that could possibly interfere with any of that. I knew there already was a microphone built into the mask, I thought if there was a way I could tap into that existing microphone, I might be able to record the inflight dialogue, then listen to it during dailies and hear if the quality of the audio would be acceptable to use in the final film. I thought we should also put another lavalier microphone on their survival vests, which is their outermost garment, in case there were dialogue scenes among the actors with their masks hanging open.”
GREG TARZAN DAVIS PLAYS “COYOTE” IN TOP GUN: MAVERICK FROM PARAMOUNT PICTURES, SKYDANCE AND JERRY BRUCKHEIMER FILMS.
During an early tech scout, Weingarten pieced together some of the puzzle. “I was able to connect with the Navy’s internal plane communications department, which oversees all the internal communications in the planes, and they showed me all the places where I could possibly tap in to record the dialogue. The only problem was that every option was no good for one reason or another,” he says.
Diving into the matter further, the sound mixer learned that there is a connection on the inside of the survival vest that could allow him to record the dialogue. Weingarten touched base with the Navy’s Aircrew Survival Equipmentment (PR) department, which oversees the survival vests and oxygen masks. After the visit, he was able to confirm his idea of tapping into the vest to record the microphone audio from the mask.
The camera setup inside the F/A-18F cockpit was elaborate. Cinematographer Claudio Miranda (with the help of 1st AC Dan Ming and key grip Trevor Fulks, who sadly passed away from stage four metastatic esophageal cancer before the film’s theatrical release) configured six Sony Venice cameras, four looking back at the actor and two looking forward. Miranda opted to use the Sony Rialto Camera Extension System, which allows the sensor and lens to be separated from the camera body, for one of the cameras looking back at the actor and two looking forward over the pilot’s shoulder. Everything was wired so the actor could flip a single switch to start recording all six cameras along with the sound recorder. This was done for two different fighter jets in addition to the coverage captured jet to jet or helicopter to jet.
For sound, Weingarten originally recorded directly from the microphone from the pilot’s mask using a special adapter that he had custom-made, which connected the cable from the survival vest into a Lectrosonics SM wireless transmitter. The audio would then be transmitted to a Lectrosonics 411 receiver which was connected to a Sound Devices 744T recorder and mounted inside the cockpit. Similar to the camera setup, the audio could be triggered to start or stop recording via the remote. The sound team also placed a secondary wireless lavalier and Lectrosonics SM transmitter on the actors for dialogue without their masks.
“The first time we got to try out the setup was with Tom’s [Cruise] initial flight while he was acting. Everything through the mask microphone and the secondary lavalier sounded great,” says Weingarten. “But when we were watching dailies, Tom noticed something in the frame, just over his shoulder. It turned out to be the Sound Devices 744T and the 411 receivers. We had to figure out another solution.”
Back at the drawing board, Weingarten found a way to simplify the setup even further. “I ended up buying several Lectrosonics PDR recorders, which can record audio directly from a microphone source and sync timecode. They are about the same size as the Lectrosonics SM transmitters and could fit inside the survival vests. It meant we no longer needed the Lectrosonics 411 receivers or the Sound Devices recorder.”
The streamlined setup did however have one hiccup. The actors would no longer be able to trigger the start/stop recording through the remote setup which Cruise (who also served as producer) asked for specifically. Instead, the PDR recorders would start recording just before the actors put on their survival vests and would remain recording from takeoff until landing. “My boom operator Tom Caton and I talked directly to Cruise about the change and he could not have been cooler. Tom was incredibly nice and said it was a great solution,” says Weingarten.
With the new setup, the Lectrosonics PDR was connected directly into the microphone inside the mask via the survival vest where both picture and sound were synced via timecode. A second PDR and lavalier were initially used to record the “mask off” audio but during production, Weingarten found the audio from the mask microphone “was great even for the scenes when the masks were open.”
“Over time we scrapped the second lavalier and went down to one microphone,” says Weingarten. “The main reason is this thing the Navy calls Foreign Object Damage (FOD). It concerns any objects that can come loose during flights and potentially cause a crash. It’s a big concern, so the more minimal we went the better. In the end, all the inflight dialogue was recorded from the connections in the vest, and there wasn’t one line looped.”
Weingarten replicated the solution for each flight, of which there were hundreds, to capture the epic aerial sequences in the film. The audio was recorded onto a 16GB microSD card that slid into each PDR. “Before each flight, we would place a PDR inside the actor’s survival vest, start recording, and then retrieve it at the end of the day. The nice thing about the PDRs is you can split a mono input and reduce one channel of audio down -20dB, so if the audio starts to over modulate on one channel, the second channel will be fine.”
Looking back, the sound mixer recalls it was “one of the nicest, most collaborative movies” he’s been on. “Joe is one of the nicest director’s I have ever met. He’s super kind, respectful, smart, and well prepared. He really made it a delightful experience. Plus, everyone on the cast and crew was very helpful. We all had to navigate working with the Navy and their rules and everyone was there to help each other out.”
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The bitterly feuding Roy family is coming back for another ten-round brawl. HBO has revealed that Succession season 4 has begun filming a 10-episode fourth season in New York City.
HBO has also done us the solid of giving us the new season’s logline, which gets us up to speed on what we can expect from the billionaire malcontents coming out of a hellacious, ongoing power struggle for the family’s company, Waystar Royco. When we last left the Roy family, the battle between Logan (Brian Cox) and Kendall (Jeremy Strong) seemed to have been settled, unsurprisingly, in Logan’s favor. The old man is like a Weeble, that toy from the 1970s, which might wobble but never falls down. Despite suffering from several health scares and humiliations over the years, including a public attack on his character by his second-eldest, Logan remains standing.
After absorbing Kendall’s best shot—telling the world his father was a criminal and imploring the U.S. Government to investigate Waystar Royco and possibly throw Logan behind bars, Logan managed to out-maneuver Kendall at nearly every turn. Utilizing contacts both within the government and his own family (an eleventh-hour agreement with his ex-wife, Lady Caroline Collingwood, played by Harriet Walter), the Roy Family Patriarch managed to end season 3 still firmly in control of the family empire, with decisions for Waystar’s future in his hands.
Season three also gave us a new, unexpected power within the Roy family—Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook)’s petulant but adoring husband made a move to help Logan get closer to selling Waystar to Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard) despite his own wife, Kendall, and the youngest Roy, Roman (Kieran Culkin) being vehemently opposed. It was the most Roy thing Tom could have done, and might even earn him the respect from Shiv he’s long desired but never attained. That, or she’ll kill him in season 4.
Here’s the logline for season 4:
In the ten-episode season four, the sale of media conglomerate Waystar Royco to tech visionary Lukas Matsson moves ever closer. The prospect of this seismic sale provokes existential angst and familial division among the Roys as they anticipate what their lives will look like once the deal is completed. A power struggle ensues as the family weighs up a future where their cultural and political weight is severely curtailed.
Other cast members include Alan Ruck, Nicholas Braun, J. Smith-Cameron, Peter Friedman, David Rasche, Fisher Stevens, Hiam Abbass, Justine Lupe, Scott Nicholson, Zoë Winters, and Jeannie Berlin.
A new Thor: Love and Thunder look gives you, among other pleasures, a glimpse at Chris Hemsworth’s screen test for the role that would change his career. Hemsworth, although a touch skinnier and a decade-plus younger, reads some of Thor’s lines and you marvel at how, even then, it seemed like nobody else could play the God of Thunder.
Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige discusses how one of the early decisions made at the studio was to bring the character of Thor to the big screen. Casting was a global effort, with Marvel looking at a slew of would-be Asgardian gods. Once they came across Hemsworth, Feige says they realized they had the right man for the job.
“It’s really just impressive to watch him,” Natalie Portman says in the video. “He’s so committed and works so hard, and he has such incredible comedic talent as well.” Portman, of course, played Jane Foster in the first two Thor films but stepped aside after that. That’s when writer/director Taika Waititi took on Thor: Ragnarok and changed the character from the noble, brooding intergalactic superhero into the hilarious, Hulk-loving goofball we’ve come to know and love. Waititi leaned into those comedic chops Portman was talking about, and Hemsworth has been having the time of his life ever since. Now, with Love and Thunder, we’re getting our second full dose of this version of Thor.
We’re also getting Portman back. Only she’s got a beefier role—she’s now Mighty Thor, capable of wielding the magical hammer Mjolnir, and is a huge part of Love and Thunder‘s go-for-broke style. It’s going to be epic.
Check out this homage to Hemsworth’s journey as Thor. Thor: Love and Thunder hits theaters on July 8.
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Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty sounded, on paper, like a no-brainer for HBO. Based on Jeff Pearlman’s book “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s,” the source material had every ingredient you’d want for a prestige series. It had larger-than-life figures in Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul Jabbar (as well as their foils and foes around the NBA), it’s set largely in Los Angeles in the late 70s and early 80s (gaudy, glitzy, debaucherous—catnip for TV), and, it had a genuinely compelling story to tell about not only these iconic individuals but about the remaking of the NBA.
It’s when you start to unpack what Winning Time‘s cast and crew were undertaking do you begin to appreciate the challenges. Obviously difficult things, like recreating seminal moments that are a part of NBA history (like Magic’s epic game 6 against the Philadelphia 76ers in the 1980 Finals), would require technical expertise. But then there were smaller but no less daunting challenges, from reconciling the height differences between the actors and the NBA legends they’re portraying (and their fellow co-stars), working in a variety of formats to mimic the look and feel of the era, and re-creating iconic locations like the LA Forum, Boston Garden, and Philadelphia Spectrum. And all of this is arguably secondary to the main task of capturing moving performances—including a phenomenal Quincy Isaiah as Magic and Solomon Hughes as Kareem— that could withstand the inherent scrutiny of watching people portray icons who are not only alive and well, but still very much a part of the public conversation and consciousness.
Stepping up to this challenge was cinematographer Todd Banhazl, who spoke to us about taking on a project that was as joyous as it was difficult, and what it took to bring it all together (hint: a camera operator on rollerblades).
Todd Banhazl on set of “Winning Time.” BTS. (Warrick Page/HBO)
Walk me through the process of capturing some of the iconic moments on the court, including Magic’s incredible game 6 performance in the NBA finals against the 76ers.
The idea behind Game 6 was to see Magic thrive in every position. We wanted the camera to match the balletic superhuman flow state that Magic entered in that game. We used many tools such as cranes, a camera rigged to a broom-type device, Steadicam, and the Ikegami vintage TV cameras of course; but, our most effective tool turned out to be our Rollerblade Operator John Lyke. We gave John a small 16mm camera and a backpack rig, and we rehearsed him into the plays. He became another player on the court, in essence. Finally, we were able to keep up with the pace of Showtime Era basketball while keeping the camera physically close to the players and inhabiting their emotional state.
Quincy Isaiah. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
There are more varied looks on this show, some of them mimicking the camera technology from back then—how did you achieve that?
From the beginning conversations between Adam Mckay and myself, we both knew the show needed to be shot on real film, and we were both excited by the idea of mixing formats. The scripts have a kaleidoscopic quality and we wanted that reflected in the images. After a lot of testing we landed on an aged Ektachrome 35mm look being our main format, and mixing into that documentary style 8mm and vintage video tube cameras from 1980. The idea was to create a collage of American cultural memory.
If we did our job right the audience should lose track of what we shot and was actual archival from the period. It felt like using the actual formats that were used in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, was the most joyful and effective way to achieve this. When we had to use more modern film stocks, we did various photochemical and digital techniques to age and destroy the film so that it would feel like an old film print found in a dusty box labeled “Lakers 1980 footage.” For example, we asked the film lab to leave all the dust and hairs on the negative. Things that are normally cleaned up we fought to make sure stayed in the image. Those beautiful imperfections are what excited us the most.
Solomon Hughes, Quincy Isaiah. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
The series breaks the fourth wall with characters, especially John C. Reilly’s Jerry Buss, talking directly to the camera. How did you approach filming those confessional moments?
I always thought of those fourth wall moments as something like Wayne’s World or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, or, like TheBrady Bunch, but with cursing. All of those moments are in the script. We found that monologues worked best when you designed a special shot for the character, but all the quick asides felt best when you did not create a special moment for them, instead, we asked the actors to steal each other’s shots. Someone could look over their own shoulder and steal someone else’s medium shot, to throw in a quick fourth wall break.
So much planning went into this series that most people wouldn’t even think of, including having to mimic the height of the players, like the seven-foot-tall Kareem and the 6’9” Magic—how did you create angles and environments that made the actors appear that tall?
This was one of our biggest challenges. I remember our showrunner Max [Borenstein] said to us, “They made Gandoff 10 feet tall, we have to do the same here for our characters.” It was never one technique, it was a combination of all the tools that sold the illusion. Smaller pieces of furniture or lower door frames were built into the sets. Apple box highways, forced perspective, and lower angles. Putting our cast near shorter extras. Body doubles. Height shoes. Every trick in the book. It becomes even more complicated when the actor’s heights need to look accurate in comparison to each other. I’ve never had more difficulty shooting a simple wide shot!
L-r: John C. Reilly, Quincy Isaiah, Jason Clarke. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
How did you approach lighting the very disparate environments in the show, from sunny Los Angeles to Lansing, Michigan, where Magic is from, from iconic places like the Garden in Boston and the Spectrum in Philly?
The general idea was that LA would feel sunny and like the future. That bling would at first be intoxicating and then over time feel more like a drug, something our characters are addicted to. Lansing would feel colder, snowier, but have a softer more family feeling, more like “back home.” It might not be as glamorous as LA, but there is comfort in family and in a world that isn’t obsessed with fame and money.
Each Arena had its own color and light design. The LA forum was the most spotlit, like a rock-and-roll show. The Philly Spectrum had a cooler, more east coast metal halide stadium look, and the Boston Garden was what we called ‘piss yellow’ and was left intentionally very warm, ugly, uncorrected, and gross. It was a lot of fun creating the different looks.
Solomon Hughes, Tim Soergel. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
What kind of conversations did you have with Adam McKay, Max Borenstein, and Jim Hecht about the overall look they were going for?
We knew the show wanted to have a visual bravado and maximalist approach. Loud. Everything and the kitchen sink. It seemed like the best way to match the bravado and pizazz of the showtime-era Lakers. We also wanted to be able to experience our characters as mythic, larger-than-life cultural icons, and at the same time be able to see them as vulnerable flawed human beings. The mixing of formats allowed the visual style to play a thematic role in this, along with the writing and the performances.
Was there a particular sequence or location you found most challenging?
Everything about this show was ambitious, larger-than-life, and difficult. But that was the joy of it. If I had to pick something, I would say chasing the famous heights of the basketball players was a massive undertaking.
With season 2 confirmed, what lessons did you learn that you’ll carry with you, and what, if anything, might you do differently going forward?
I’m excited to push the style even further, and dig into even deeper emotional territory with our cast and scripts. It’s really fun to have such wild paintbrushes to choose from when shooting a show. It’s also really exciting to quiet down and just photograph those brilliant actors doing their finest work when the time is right.
For more on Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, check out these stories:
A brand new Nope trailer and a behind-the-scenes video give us a clearer picture of the two stars of Jordan Peele’s third film. Both of these riveting peeks at the film came during last night’s BET Awards, held at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles (Nope stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer were on hand as presenters).
Kaluuya and Palmer play OJ and Emerald Haywood, a brother and sister who own a horse ranch in a dusty gulch in Southern California. In the new behind-the-scenes video, we learn that it was OJ who stayed behind to run the ranch. When Emerald comes back into his life, Kaluuya says that OJ remembers, “Oh wait, you’re not doing anything, you’re not helping.” While Emerald might not have been the best help around the ranch, what she does have, according to Palmer, is charisma.
The brother and sister pairing at the heart of Peele’s film will be put to the test when some uninvited guests show up—in the sky—and start causing trouble. Only that trouble could turn into a goldmine for the Haywoods, if only they could capture footage of their new guest—a freakin’ alien ship—and make history.
“Daniel Kaluuya is my all-time favorite actor,” Peele says of his collaborator from Get Out. “And Keke Palmer, she has this spark. She just crushes.”
Nope will track the Haywood’s relationship in the midst of this interstellar horror they find themselves suddenly starring in. Peele says that the two of them will be forced to recognize that despite their issues, the insanity unfolding all around them will clarify their relationship. “It’s about their ability to go from not connecting to acknowledging they have always seen each other,” Peele says.
“There’s an innate love for each other. A brother and sister being friends, being real—I’ve rarely seen that,” Kaluuya says.
This new behind-the-scene look ends with a thrilling sequence that exemplifies what Peele, Kaluuya, and Palmer are talking about, and you’ll get a better look at that sequence in the new trailer. Nope will give us the thrills and chills we’ve come to expect from Peele, but it will be centered on a relationship that is fundamentally decent and loving. Unlike the horrific violence hiding in the beautiful upstate Armitage house in Peele’s Oscar-winning Get Out, or the shocking truth buried beneath the family in his second film, Us, Nope looks like it might focus on a what’s possible when the truth about a relationship doesn’t spell doom, and even possibly means salvation.
Check out the two new videos below. Nope hits theaters on July 22.
Featured image: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 26: (L-R) Daniel Kaluuya and KeKe Palmer speak onstage during the 2022 BET Awards at Microsoft Theater on June 26, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images for BET)
For the first time in his long career, Tom Cruise is part of the billion-dollar club. Top Gun: Maverick has now officially crossed the billion-dollar threshold, becoming the 50th movie in history to do so, after another strong showing this past weekend.
Maverick soared into this rarefied air this weekend after the final numbers were tallied, adding another $75 million globally. The film’s box office haul now stands at $521.7 million domestically and another $484.7 million overseas, pushing it bast a billion total. This was Maverick‘s fifth weekend in theaters after its historic Memorial Day Weekend opener, and it was a special one—the film was opened in select IMAX and premium large-format screens.
Some of the folks going to see Maverick at this point are repeat customers. Paramount has said that more than 16 percent of viewers have seen the film more than once. There is even a robust super-fan community, with 4 percent seeing the film four times or more.
Joining the billion-dollar club would be a huge deal at any time, but it’s especially so during the pandemic era. Maverick joins Spider-Man: No Way Home as the only two films to do so.
The dazzling visuals of director Baz Luhrmann’s spine-tingling biopic of Elvis, which were beautifully shot by cinematographer Mandy Walker, undoubtedly hold your attention. But it’s the rhythmic melodies of the soundscape that flutters the soul. Elvis is made to be seen (and heard) in the theater.
The journey explores the relationship between the legendary artist and his manager, a former carny named Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), who sees the potential profit in Elvis’s musical gift. Luhrmann cast Austin Butler to fill the voice (and costumes) of Elvis and does so to a tee down to the iconic dance moves and sultry stare.
Overseeing the musical efforts was Elliott Wheeler, the composer and musical executive producer on the film. Wheeler’s relationship with Luhrmann dates back to TheGreat Gatsby, and more recently, the Netflix series The Get Down, which Wheeler notes served as a jumping-off point in terms of the storytelling process and department collaboration for Elvis.
Wheeler and the entire music team, including longtime Luhrmann collaborator Anton Monsted, put together a dynamic aural soundtrack with over thirty plus hits that include contemporary versions from Doja Cat (Vegas) and Eminem with CeeLo Green (The King and I). It’s hard to not want to move in your seat.
The composer spoke with The Credits to share all the harmonies, notes, and processes that went into creating the euphonious aural landscape.
How did being the composer and executive music producer allow you to explore things creatively?
It meant as early as 2017, Jamieson Shaw [supervising music editor / music producer], who was my right hand in this from the very beginning, was able to sit down with Baz and go through playlists trying to understand the catalog of music. There are over 800 songs Elvis recorded. Wading through them we were able to make shortlists about which songs will be in the film and find undiscovered gems. From that process, we met with the scriptwriters to help create the story through the telling of music.
So the music had an influence on the storytelling from the jump?
Yes, the way Baz tells a story is so much through music. We were able to make the performances part of the emotional story beats. We need to also be able to get to an emotional point. It meant we didn’t have to compartmentalize the story too much. It meant that we could sort of be a free-flowing Elvis opera and take the music where we needed to go.
There are several musical themes that connect to the storytelling. How did they come about?
Early on, once the story started to take shape, we were able to look at various themes for our characters and different relationships. As a composer, you normally have to work out your own themes, but with this, it was an absolute gift to be able to look at the themes already being performed by Elvis and then augment them with an orchestra or band or other artists to get to that extra storytelling point. We ended up with sort of six main themes throughout the film.
For Elvis’s relationship with his mother Gladys Presley [Helen Thompson], the song Heartbreak Hotel seemed like a great theme. Are You Lonesome Tonight? became a theme for Elvis and Colonel Parker. Another theme we had was the Battle Hymn of the Republic which comes up in [the album] “An American Trilogy.” That becomes Elvis’s relationship with the audience. Then with Priscilla [Olivia DeJonge] we had Can’t Help Falling In Love.
Caption: (L-r) AUSTIN BUTLER as Elvis and HELEN THOMSON as Gladys in Warner Bros. Pictures’ drama “ELVIS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Since you mentioned the Elvis-Priscilla relationship, how did you want the music to evolve with their tumbling relationship?
Once we started the scoring process, we settled on the notion that Can’t Help Falling in Love should be their theme. Kasey Musgraves [American country singer] recorded an absolutely stunning performance of just vocals and piano and that sort of plays the first time they kiss. Then by the end of the film, the theme becomes an extremely poignant and extremely moving minor version of it. We had a beautiful performance of the song by the orchestra out of AIR Studios in London, recorded and mixed by Geoff Foster. A good example of how within that one theme, you can take one well-known melody and do an incredible amount of storytelling with it.
You brought up the idea of “undiscovered gems” in Elvis’s music catalog. What did you find and how did you want to use them in the storytelling?
One example was a fairly obscure piece of Elvis music called Cotton Candy Land. Part of the lyrics are the “Sandman’s comin’, yes he’s comin’.” With Colonel Parker, he often talks about how “All showmen are snowmen.” [The idea being Col. Parker is pulling the wool over someone’s eyes.] So, “Sandman” became “Snowman” and we used it as this motif for when Parker is about to snow someone.
Caption: (L-r) TOM HANKS as Colonel Tom Parker and AUSTIN BUTLER as Elvis in Warner Bros. Pictures’ drama “ELVIS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Hugh Stewart
That’s clever. It also sounded like you mixed multiple Elvis songs together, no?
Yes. One of the things we were doing a lot was to pull in different Elvis songs. We called it making up DNAs. For example, we’d take the string line from Edge of Reality, then the baseline from I Got A Feelin’ in My Body and the melody of Summer Kisses, Winter Tears and combine all those elements into a new song entirely made up of Elvis tracks. Our music editor, Jamieson Shaw, has an incredible ear for picking out the smallest fragments of pieces and working them into a new creation.
Austin’s performance as Elvis is dazzling. How was it working with him to create this legend?
We were extremely blessed with Austin’s voice. I remember at the audition he was already fantastic without any training at all. His dedication and the practice he put in were just insane. There’s not an Elvis song, movie, performance, or interview that Austin hasn’t seen and studied. We had this great vocal coach in Irene Bartlet, but it was also Austin and I sitting and going over every line of Elvis to get the voice and the breathing down. The detail Austin went to was microscopic and he had to cover such a wide vocal range.
Vocal range meaning how Elvis’s singing changed over the years?
Yes. Elvis has at least four quite distinct vocal characteristics in different points in his career. At the beginning, he is very high up in his head, but then by the time of Unchained Melody, near the end, it’s operatic. Austin had to learn his voice and his body in all those different ways. We were lucky in that we could isolate the original Elvis vocal tracks and really focus on what was happening.
Makes sense why Austin nails the role. Curious though, there are songs in the film where it is Elvis’s actual vocals. How was the performance and singing treated on set?
With Austin, our approach was to use Elvis’s voice when we could but it wasn’t until the 1968 Comeback Special where we felt like we had the fidelity in the original recordings to be able to translate it to the cinema. And even with the ’68 Special, we ended up re-tracking the entire backing. So the entire first half of Elvis’ career is Austin performing all the vocals.
That said, even when we got to the point where we were using Elvis’s vocal stem and Austin was on stage performing back, Austin was still singing absolutely every note and we recorded everything live. What that allowed us to do, for example, was if Austin was breathing on set or if there was a slight difference between the original, we could put Austin’s voice in and manipulate it to when Elvis took off or vice versa.
That’s awesome.
We had an amazing team on the ground here with Wade Keighran [on set music playback operator] who was doing the playback and live recordings for us. Our on-set music supervisor Camera Bruce was there and the props department was looking after all the instruments for us. Every single microphone that we used was an exact working replica of what Elvis would be using on the day which allowed us to move between the original and set recordings.
Caption: AUSTIN BUTLER as Elvis in Warner Bros. Pictures’ drama “ELVIS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Hugh Stewart
Speaking of original recordings. You have to share how the incredibly moving gospel scene came together. The Pentecostal revival sequence.
We hooked up with Dave Cobb [music producer] over in Nashville who works out of the same RCA Studios where Elvis recorded a large amount of his material. Dave pulled together an all-star group of gospel singers and took us to this tiny church two hours outside of Nashville that was built in the 1700s. The musicians were just incredible – led by Shannon Sanders, we had the McCrary Sisters, Odessa Settles and Settles Connection, the Randolph family, Shonka Dukuereh, Jordan Holland, and many others. It was like being in a service and we were able to take all these themes we wanted to work within the film and get these amazing gospel performances. Baz would describe the scene and give some context and the music just came to life.
Astonishing.
That day was one of the most special days I ever had making music. Austin was there and everyone had tears flowing. Going there and unlocking that with Dave gave us the confidence that we were going to be able to pull off that sound and get to that level of excitement.
You brought up a good point. A “level of excitement.” With Elvis’s early music, a lot of it was mono-track recordings which don’t always translate to a cinema experience. How did you want to treat those early songs?
That was something we worked on with Dave early in the process. With Elvis being so ubiquitous, there’s a short circuit in the brain that says, ‘Oh that’s Elvis.’ So we had to find a way of recreating some of the early recordings, which were mono or adjusted three-track, and have control over them. A lot of the band tracks we recorded with Dave over in Nashville and we did some in Australia as well. We wanted to be faithful to the production style of the 50s and 60’s era and the Elvis sound, but make it sound new and fresh to an audience in a way that you’ll want to hear in the cinema.
Before we go, it would be remiss to not ask about the Doja Cat song Vegas and how it came about.
Baz asked if we were on Beale Street now who would you be listening to. And that’s Doja Cat. She did such a fantastic job with that song. We were able to record a version of Hound Dog with Shonka Dukureh [who plays Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton] over here in Australia and send it to Doja where she was able to make a track out of it. Everything worked out pretty seamlessly. Our music supervisor, Anton Monsted, and Baz have a long relationship going back over twenty years, and their ability to bring in external artists that connect to the story and bring currency is one of the very special parts of the experience.
Sounds like the entire process was inspiring.
When you’re working with Baz, you’re given this creative license to play and you get to work with this hugely collaborative team. It’s a hallmark of his production where he enables that kind of dialogue to happen. It’s fun.
Featured image: Caption: AUSTIN BUTLER as Elvis in Warner Bros. Pictures’ drama “ELVIS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
It will likely come as no surprise to hear that the first reactions to Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder are raves. Waititi re-invigorated both Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and the Thor franchise with Thor: Ragnarok, his candy-colored cosmic romp that instantly turned the God of Thunder from Marvel’s dour beefcake into the funniest Avenger. What’s more, Ragnarok introduced us to Waititi’s vision of what a Marvel movie could look like—whimsical, wild, and passionately weird. So expectations were high for the sequel, and Waititi himself added to those expectations by promising viewers that Love and Thunder was the craziest movie he’s ever made. It seems like he delivered.
Coming out of the premiere last night, critics have a lot of positive vibes to share. Waititi comes in for praise for delivering a “subversive, irreverent spectacle,” as Variety‘s Courtney Howard tweeted. Fandango‘s Erik Davis took to Twitter to share that Love and Thunder is “big, colorful, and weird,” and gives particular shoutouts to newcomers Christian Bale, as the villain Gorr the God Butcher, and Russell Crowe as Zeus.
We were also eager to hear the reactions to Natalie Portman’s transformation into Mighty Thor, the Mjolnir-wielding badass who, long ago in a very distant Thor past, played Jane Foster, Thor’s love interest. Portman comes in for heaps of praise, and it sounds like not only does she help make Love and Thunder surprisingly moving, her pairing her with a fellow ass-kicker in Tessa Thompson’s Valkryie sounds like a match made in heaven.
In case you haven’t been following our Thor: Love and Thunder news, the basic outline of the plot is fairly simple—Jane Foster is back, only now she’s Mighty Thor, and Thor’s retirement plans are put on hold when a sadistic god and goddess-killing lunatic named Gorr the God Butcher shows up. Gorr’s arrival means Thor’s going to need his friends to help him, including Mighty Thor, Valkryie, Korg (Waititi), Miek, and the Guardians of the Galaxy. This super-team will take on a super-creep, and the results sound divine.
Onto the reactions!
#ThorLoveAndThunder has an Appetite For Destruction & laughs. It’s totally rad! Taika Waititi delivers a subversive, irreverent spectacle. Great story, stakes & character-building. Chris Hemsworth & Natalie Portman, superb.Russell Crowe & Christian Bale slip easily into the world pic.twitter.com/W7PUUXIfM5
holy shit. #ThorLoveandThunder is the perfect blend of taika at his best with comedy and a punch to the gut all in one. i left this movie emotionally satisfied while also sobbing and just perfection. we stan a dad rock soundtrack. in the words of my new favorite characters: AHH pic.twitter.com/MytduVq89h
— it was rachatha all along (@RachelLeishman) June 24, 2022
Another classic Thor adventure! #ThorLoveAndThunder is everything I wanted it to be. Big, colorful, weird Guns N’ Roses-fueled battles to go w/ a hopelessly romantic story about discovering love in unexpected places. Christian Bale & Russell Crowe are especially great. And Korg! pic.twitter.com/fu0gTUuMRj
#ThorLoveAndThunder is absolutely AMAZING. It blows every other Marvel movie out of the water, and doubles down on the Ragnarok charm. A classic @TaikaWaititi joint, so many laughs and tears, with a moving narrative and beautiful visuals. And those post credits? OH MY GOD. pic.twitter.com/41iuRXPf0O
#ThorLoveAndThunder just cemented itself as one of my favorite MCU films. Bursting w/so much heart, emotion & sincerity, I teared up, I smiled from ear to ear. This film is a warm hug & plea to cherish the present, live in the moment do something that matters. I adore this film! pic.twitter.com/FYnwC2Gyqv
Portman comes in for high praise as the newly minted Mighty Thorr. And Bale does crucial work in making a thrilling, chilling, and at times campy villain in Gorr the God Butcher:
Wow!! #ThorLoveandThunder is great! The best entry in Phase 4 behind Shang-Chi and No Way Home. I laughed. I cried. Then I laughed and cried some more, in that order. Natalie Portman is FINALLY given her due. Dr. Jane Foster is more than worthy of being the Mighty Thor.⚡️ pic.twitter.com/oOop89P1uf
Christian Bale is phenomenally menacing as #ThorLoveandThunder’s villain, Gorr the God Butcher. One of the creepiest Marvel villains we’ve ever seen on screen. Gave me some Dark Knight Ledger Joker vibes at one point. pic.twitter.com/zsg9SNXfqY
THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER is a rockin’ great time with electrifying action, lots of laughs (the screaming goats!) & a profound story on absent gods & our desire for love. Natalie Portman makes a mighty return & Christian Bale slays it as the terrifying Gorr. The best Thor film yet! pic.twitter.com/s42SkqxlJj
— Matt Neglia @Tribeca (@NextBestPicture) June 24, 2022
#ThorLoveAndThunder is predictably hilarious yet unexpectedly personal and heartfelt. Christian Bale and Natalie Portman’s performances truly shine while Waititi delivers an emotional story. I think this may be my favorite Thor movie. pic.twitter.com/i7BpmQHvQ1
— Richard Nebens – The Direct (@RichardNebens) June 24, 2022
#ThorLoveAndThunder is everything great about comic book movies! Truly hilarious insanity, heart wrenching tragedy, and bombastic action! Visually stunning and one of the best MCU soundtracks. The entire cast is fantastic, but Christian Bale and Natalie Portman are phenomenal! pic.twitter.com/dVkpf54fmP
If you, like me, take delight in watching Christian Bale slurp up the scenery while gobbing out that black ink Danny DeVito had in Batman Returns, then #ThorLoveAndThunder is for you.
#ThorLoveAndThunder is a vivid and vibrant blast that delivers. Hemsworth’s Thor remains a jewel in Marvel’s crown. Bale’s Gorr is a killer boogeyman blending the campy and the creepy. Portman’s Foster and Thompson’s Valkyrie are a top notch pairing. Crowe’s Zeus is *chef’s kiss* pic.twitter.com/PDb5SZRWOo
I saw #ThorLoveAndThunder. It can’t quite match the visual or comedy bombast of Ragnarok, but Taika Waititi makes up for it with an emotionally mature Marvel movie. It’s also very funny (Natalie’s got jokes) and features one of the most stunning visual sequences in MCU history.
The always versatile Ethan Hawke first teamed with writer-director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill on their 2012 horror film Sinister, in which he played a good guy protecting his family. In Derrickson and Cargill’s new horror movie The Black Phone (opening Friday), Hawke plays a very bad man. Wearing a mask and preying on children, Hawke portrays “The Grabber,” who’s partially based on serial killer John Wayne Gacy, according to Joe Hill, author of the original “Black Phone” short story. Derrickson recalls, “When I first offered The Black Phone to Ethan, he said ‘I don’t play villains. It’s going to have to be some real Jack Nicholson in The Shining kind of thing. But I’ll read it. The next morning Ethan left me a voice mail in the voice of The Grabber saying one of the lines from the script. That’s how he let me know he was in.”
Hawke delivers a shocking performance, but the movie’s real surprise comes from its vivid young stars Mason Thames and Madeline McGraw as the heroic thirteen-year-old Finney and his fiery little sister Gwen. Middle school bullying and an abusive father (Jeremy Davies) also figure into the story, which takes place in Derrickson’s hometown of North Denver, Colorado. After executive-producing Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Derrickson enlisted Cargill to write a feature-length thriller informed by his own unhappy seventies-era childhood.
Cargill and Derrickson got on Zoom last week to unpack the methods behind the film’s scary madness.
You guys adapted “The Black Phone” short story into a full-length feature film. How did that happen?
Scott Derrickson: I wandered into a book store, went to the horror section, and picked up 20th Century Ghosts by this guy Joe Hill — I had no idea he was Stephen King’s son. The first story in the collection was called “Best New Horror Story” and I thought “Boy, this writer’s got balls.” I read it right there in the book store, it blew me away so I bought the book, brought it home, read the rest of the book, and “Black Phone” stood out in my mind as something that would make a great film.
Why?
Derrickson: It was a serial killer story blended with a ghost story. I had never seen that done before. But I didn’t really know how to expand it into a feature.
That was back in 2005. What happened next?
Derrickson: After I stepped off of [producing] Dr. Strange [in the Multiverse of Madness], I had this eureka moment about blending the Black Phone idea with memories of my own childhood in North Denver. I grew up there in a working-class neighborhood with a lot of violence, so I told Cargill, what if we put these two things together? He said “F*** yeah, let’s do it.”
In The Black Phone, our hero, Finney, gets bullied by his middle school classmates. That’s autobiographically inspired?
Derrickson: In 1978 when the movie takes place, I was Finney’s age, the youngest kid on a block with thirteen other boys, and I got bullied all the time. Robin in our movie was based on the toughest kid in school. He befriended me and even to this day, I’m not sure why but some of the stuff Robin says in the movie are direct quotes. It was a violent neighborhood. People fought and bled. The fear of serial killers was in the air. After the Manson murders, Ted Bundy came through Colorado. There was violence in my home. All of that became part of the tapestry for The Black Phone.
(from left) Finney Shaw (Mason Thames) and Gwen Shaw (Madeleine McGraw) in The Black Phone, directed by Scott Derrickson.
With The Black Phone and your previous collaboration Sinister, you two excel in a genre where moviegoers have watched hundreds of horror films and know all the standard tropes. What’s your process for surprising audiences with fresh scares?
C. Robert Cargill: Scott and I watch a lot of movies and we read a lot of books so at this point, this [horror] stuff is in our DNA You think of all the things that have been done before and then you think of what hasn’t been seen and you start there. In the case of Black Phone, it’s the fusion of Scott’s personal memories with this great short story. The big hook gets back to that old two-sentence horror story — “The last man on earth sits alone in a room. There’s a knock at the door.” Here, a kid’s stuck in a basement with a disconnected phone. Then the phone rings. That lends itself to many interesting things that haven’t been done, so for us, it was really fertile ground.
Mason Thames as Finney Shaw in The Black Phone, directed by Scott Derrickson.
Cell phones figure into the plot of so many contemporary horror films. Here, it’s an old-fashioned analog telephone in the title role. That’s a refreshing change of pace.
Derrickson: We’ve all rolled our eyes at the 100th time we’ve watched a horror movie where somebody looks down at their cellphone to call for help and they have no service. I would be happy if I never saw that happen in another genre film again.
American cinema in the seventies is highly regarded by a lot of movie lovers. Does that period resonate for you?
Cargill: It does, very much. We both grew up in that era but the thing is you don’t often see the grit and grime of the seventies reflected in film. Joe Hill mentioned to us that what he loved about Black Phone, the movie, is that it isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about time travel. It’s about putting you in the seventies and making you feel like you’re there rather than celebrating and going “Hey wasn’t this time cool!” Because me and Scott are like: “Not really.”
Derrickson: Wasn’t for me. I think my primary emotional memory of childhood is fear and in a lot of ways, Black Phone is about childhood trauma and the resilience of children. With this movie, we reject the temptation to filter that middle school experience through the Spielbergian kid and suburban life, which it seems like everybody wants to do. The goal was to capture the era with authenticity and get the audience to feel the way the seventies felt like to me.
(from left) Terrence Shaw (Jeremy Davies), Detective Wright (E. Roger Mitchell), Gwen Shaw (Madeleine McGraw) and Detective Miller (Troy Rudeseal) in The Black Phone, directed by Scott Derrickson.
The kids in this movie are terrific. How’d you find Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw, who play Finney and his little sister Gwen?
Derrickson: Madeleine was one of four young actresses selected by the casting director. I saw her reading the scene where Gwen talks to the police officers and she had the spitfire attitude, the gestures, her manner of speaking, and I just laughed so hard. Then I did a Zoom call back with Madeleine and realized this kid is brilliant and it has to be her. In fact, we moved the whole production because Madeleine was on a Disney show that shut down for Covid and then ramped back up for the fall, when we were originally going to shoot The Black Phone. When I got the message saying I had to re-cast Gwen’s character because Madeleine was no longer available, I called [Blumhouse Productions president] Jason Blum and said “I’m not making this movie without that girl.” We moved the whole production to January.
How about Mason, who stars as Finney?
Derrickson: He was harder to find. We’d been looking for many months when our casting director showed me a self-tape Mason made. He was very inexperienced but his ability to take direction and emote with just his eyes is incredible. He’s a natural talent.
Ethan Hawke has played flawed characters before but nothing as dark as The Grabber. Scott, having worked with Ethan before on Sinister, how did you direct him in The Black Phone?
Derrickson: To be honest I really didn’t have to. On Sinister Ethan demanded a lot of direction because his character’s scared so I was always saying you have to slow down here, take a beat there. On this one, it was much more about giving him the lines, sure, but then creating an arena where he could be innovative, and then giving him these scary masks. There wasn’t a lot of conversation about baseline character. I think Ethan effortlessly understood the Grabber.
(from left) Finney Shaw (Mason Thames) and The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) in The Black Phone, directed by Scott Derrickson.
Wearing that mask, Ethan looks creepy even when he’s just sitting alone in the kitchen doing nothing.
Derrickson: Before we started shooting, Ethan told me “I have to let the mask do the mask’s work.” Because once he saw the mask, Ethan realized its power to create a very specific effect on his victims. That freed him up to be much more complex behind the mask, which just makes everything even more disturbing.
The masks, created by Tom Savini of Friday the 13th fame, really sell the horror. Was that your intention?
The starting goal of putting The Grabber in a mask—because he doesn’t wear a mask in the short story—is to evolve the idea of the masked killer. We’ve got Jason, we’ve got Michael Meyers, we’ve got Ghostface, which we’ve been seeing over and over for decades. How can we make it new?
Wait a minute: you’re saying the original short story had no mask?
Derrickson: That’s right.
Cargill: It’s nowhere found.
Well, that was a huge add.
Derrickson: It was.
For more on Universal Pictures films, check out these stories:
There is every indication that Jordan Peele’s Nope is going to be one of the year’s most thrilling films. Peele has, in just two previous films as writer/director, carved out a singular place for himself in the filmmaking firmament. His movies are instantly recognizable as films only he could make, and having proven himself with his Oscar-winning Get Out and his outrageously Oscar-snubbed, excellent Us, he had an even bigger palette to work with on his third feature.
This brings us to this new Nope video, “It Takes a Village,” which takes us behind the scenes of Nope and delivers a brief, thrilling inside look at just how big a palette Peele was working with, and the way Peele works with his collaborators.
“Everything is bigger. Jordan’s really grown as a filmmaker. It’s a different style of filmmaking he’s doing,” says star Daniel Kaluuya. “Not trying to rush it, trying to get the moments. There’s a value in what we’re shooting. I mean, the whole crew engaged with it differently.”
Nope is centered on the Haywood family, with OJ Haywood (Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer) running a horse ranch that caters to Hollywood films. But then some mysterious, sinister objects appear in the sky, and soon the Haywood ranch is ground zero for some menacing, extra-terrestrial insanity. Yet this gives them an idea—if they could capture one of these things on camera, they could change their lives. They’ll just need to survive the attempt.
“Every single department is firing off these huge swings,” Peele says in the video. “It takes a village to make a film like Nope,” says first assistant director and producer Liz Tan. “We’re all important individually and in combination. That sense of respect and integrity for all of us is hugely important.”
“The scale is so huge, we’re working with 65 millimeter and IMAX, which is pretty rare,” says camera operator Kristen Correll.
“The growth going from Us to this film, Jordan pushing not in vain but like, why not?” says costume designer Ruth De Jong, “Then when you add someone like Hoyte [Van Hoytema, cinematographer] there’s nothing like it.”
“Jordan challenged himself a lot,” says Hoytema. “He should from the outset that he was not afraid, so it always meant I had to challenge myself to come up with more interesting ways to tell the story.”
Nope sounds like the kind of film Peele has been building toward his whole career. On July 8th, we’ll see just how far one of the most intriguing filmmakers of his generation has come. And he’s only just begun.
Moon Knight cinematographer Gregory Middleton came to the Marvel Cinematic Universe with considerable world-building experience. He helmed six episodes of HBO’s colossal fantasy series Game of Thrones, as well as three episodes of Damon Lindelof’s fantastic adaptation of Watchmen (also for HBO), so it would be unfair to say he was daunted to take on Marvel’s vaunted, ever-expanding cinematic universe.
Yet Middleton had his work cut out for him with Moon Knight, the first Marvel series on Disney+ not to feature a character already well established in the films. That character, Oscar Isaac’s Steven Grant, contains multitudes. As Steven, he’s a quirky, decidedly unheroic British museum giftshop employee and budding Egyptologist, but as Marc Spector, he’s an American mercenary who moonlights as Moon Knight, the superhero avatar of the Egyptian god Khonshu.
We spoke to Middleton about going darker in Moon Knight than any previous MCU installment, the joy of capturing great performances, and how the entire series was hidden in a fish tank.
Unlike the previous Marvel series on Disney+, Moon Knight is introducing characters we’ve never seen in an MCU film, led by Oscar Isaac’s Steven Grant/Marc Spector/Moon Knight. How’d you approach that?
First, it’s exciting to have a new character where you’re not beholden to previous incarnations. The second thing is this character has a lot of elements that Marvel hasn’t really applied before. There’s more of a psychological horror element to the show, of not knowing what’s real and what’s not. Moon Knight is looking more deeply into the interior mind of this character, and the childhood trauma that created him. There was an opportunity I sensed to be able to adapt our filmmaking to that point of view, and you see that in how the episodes represent different genres.
Episode one in particular really feels like a horror movie.
Episode one is kind of a horror movie and Steven Grant is essentially being haunted by this unknown thing, so we can shoot it that way. My director, Mohamed Diab, was intent on trying to keep a point of view in each episode and each scene. So we tried to anchor the camera to Steven, experiencing everything from his disoriented point of view, so the audience is just as disoriented as he is. This creates a very immersive filmmaking journey, hopefully.
What are some of the methods you use to create disorientation for the viewer?
One thing is we use a lot more darkness. There are a lot of unknowns in Steven’s story, and there are a lot of questions about what is reality. I wanted to play with the idea of using parts of things you can’t see and using real black elements in the frame. There’s an interesting moment in the pilot when Steven runs out of his apartment after hearing a voice speaking as Marc from the mirror. He’s totally terrified. He gets into the elevator and he ends on the second floor and it’s all black, there’s just nothing out there at all. It’s just a void, which is a great way to express that he really knows nothing, and who knows what’s out there. So these kinds of visual things that we were able to do and which we haven’t seen that much of in the MCU so far.
How did you balance the narrative demands of a show that looks at Steven’s mental health issues, Egyptian mythology, Marvel mythology, and just the basic demands of visual storytelling?
We all discussed this as a team with Mohamed, but we wanted the audience to know where they were, to have visual cues for color to help them decode something. Because Moon Knight could be potentially very confusing, and it gets pretty trippy later on in the series, especially in episodes four and five in the hospital. We’re trying to create a visual palette that’s identifiable and interesting, that all go together with the flow of the story. You want to be aware of the transitions on the journey.
The hospital became such an important location, with Steven/Marc coming face-to-face, literally, with the various realities of their situation.
It’s a place of terror in episode four, but by the end of episode five, the hospital is kind of a safe space. On the other hand, I was very tempted to make young Marc’s bedroom, where we reveal his mom has been abusing him, very cool, but I had to be sure it contrasted well with the asylum and Doctor Harrow (Ethan Hawke)’s office.
So we have very dark spaces, very white spaces, but then other colors pop in the show.
Gold was an important color for us. There’s a lot of gold in the costumes of our avatars, and gold is a big part of Egyptian mythology. We put gold into a lot of those spaces, and I lit certain scenes with gold light. There’s gold in the restaurant in the pilot, as well as red, and then we use red again at Anton Mogart (Gaspard Ulliel)’s place.
Do the colors tie back to Steven/Marc’s central struggle with which one of them is real?
Yes, sometimes colors repeating in various sets was useful because. For example, when you dream something, you pull from your experience in real life. The images of scenes you experienced pop up in dreams, you may think they’re original, but they’re things you experienced. So for example, with the fish tank in the pilot, if you look at it very carefully, you’ll see the entire Duat [the place where the dead and their souls go for judgment in Egyptian mythology], the pyramids, the gates of Osiris, and the Khonshu temple—it’s all in there. So let’s just say if he’s imagining all of that, which came first? Did he put that stuff in the fish tank because it happened for real, or, did he imagine it all because that stuff was in the fish tank?
Speaking of things that aren’t real—how do you approach filming scenes that include characters that will be entirely rendered by CGI, like the goddess Taweret, whose depicted as a bipedal hippopotamus?
More and more things are done with pre-visualization. These are computer-generated visual animatics created by a pre-viz team. So as a cinematographer I just make sure I’m involved with developing those ideas as early as possible. If we’re going to play with where the camera is and point of view, then that’s a conversation I feel I really need to be involved in. I’ll approach these storyboarding meetings the same way I would on set with Mohamed or an actor or a stunt person, suggesting things, but in this instance, I’m just doing it virtually with the pre-viz team. Then during filming, Antonia [Salib, the actress who plays Taweret] is hilarious, right? She’s a great actor with an amazing voice, and Taweret’s mannerisms are all her mannerisms. So you do your best to capture the best performance because performance drives everything. Even if you lit an amazing shot, it doesn’t really mean anything if the performance is not there. So capturing Antonia’s performance, even though she was going to be essentially replaced by the CG character, was very important.
Speaking of capturing performances, Moon Knight is fueled by Oscar Isaac’s remarkable portrayal of Steven/Marc. Were there any sequences you shot that were most challenging, or memorable?
Well, we begin with Steven and Marc at odds, and Steven hates him, and by the end, Steven has this incredible sympathy for Marc and is the one person who can actually forgive Marc. When Steven watches Marc become Steven on the street after his mom’s funeral? You’re seeing Marc at rock bottom. He’s completely broken down in grief. And watching Oscar playing Steven watching Marc becoming Steven? It’s amazing. When I read this scene I was absolutely terrified, because to do twinning scenes in an exterior setting is difficult, because you have to capture the weather exactly the same, and you’re praying it doesn’t change too much between takes. Yet it went seamlessly, and when we were shooting the scene, I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is going to be so moving.’
There is a reason that Darth Vader is widely considered one of the greatest villains in the history of cinema. Imposing, imperial, and impeccably performed by the voice work of James Earl Jones and embodied by the 6’6″ David Prowse, just on aesthetics alone, Vader is hard to match. The black mask, black body armor, and black cloak all scream fascist terrorizer to our reptilian brain. When artist Ralph McQuarrie was getting to work on the earliest concept art of Vader, George Lucas told him he wanted Vader to look like “a dark lord riding on the wind with an evil essence about him,” senior manager of archives and exhibits at Lucas Museum of Narrative Art told Fast Company back in 2015. Early inspirations included samurai armor, and McQuarrie delivered a sketch that gave Vader a creepy breathing apparatus and a billowing cape. McQuarrie realized that because Vader would be operating in space, he needed some kind of spacesuit and a proper helmet, so he attached the breathing apparatus to a samurai helmet. Costume designer John Mollo then took inspiration from real-life evil, designing Vader’s now iconic black helmet to look like the headgear that Nazis wore during WWII. Mollo added a gas mask, motorcycle suit, leather boots, and a monk’s cloak from the Middle Ages. Sound designer Ben Burtt added the respiratory function to Darth’s helmet, using modified recordings of scuba diving breathing apparatuses. An iconic villain was born.
Yet what makes Darth Vader a truly great villain is the hints of weakness, of humanity, buried beneath all black armor and flowing black cloak. From the moment Lucasfilm announced that Obi-Wan Kenobi would be coming to Disney+ starring Ewan McGregor, it was all but assured that we’d once again be revisiting Vader, and potentially getting a lot more of him than we’ve gotten in any film since Return of the Jedi. Yes, Vader has been a presence in various Star Wars spinoffs, including the thrilling conclusion to Rogue One, and a slew of animated films and series, including The Clone Wars film and subsequent TV series, the Rebels animated series, and Forces of Destiny animated series. And of course, the man who became Vader, Anakin Skywalker, appears in all three of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels. His journey from promising Padawan to a Sith Lord of the Dark Side is what drives Lucas’s prequel trilogy. Played by Hayden Christensen, Anakin’s descent is young Obi-Wan’s greatest failure, and if there’s any one emotion that drives Obi-Wan Kenobi above all others, it’s guilt. Set ten years after the events in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Obi-Wan is essentially in hiding, watching over a young Luke Skywalker but otherwise a man who has renounced his Jedi life, and the Jedi order, out of disgust over his failure to keep Anakin from becoming Darth Vader.
And now, with the finale of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the books, we have a much fuller picture of the tragedy that is Darth Vader, with Christensen reprising the role and delivering a potent, heartbreaking performance in the series’ final minutes. While James Earl Jones returned to deliver his basso profondo vocal performance, Christensen delivered scenes depicting his Anakin engaging Obi-Wan in lightsaber duels that both hinted at the drama unfolding in the present and what was to come, in the series’ final moments during an epic, surprisingly sad lightsaber duel with his former master.
There was a chance that this much Vader backstory would damage the iconic image of one of cinema’s perfect villains, giving us too much information and saddling Vader with too much psychodrama. Yet director Deborah Chow and showrunner Joby Harold wisely kept the exposition to a minimum, showing us a Vader now a decade into his transformation yet still seething at his old Jedi master, who maimed him beyond recognition at the end of Revenge of the Sith and left him for dead. While the narrative thrust of Obi-Wan Kenobi is set into motion when Obi-Wan goes on a mission to save a young Leia Organa, the larger structure of the story is essentially a cat and mouse game between Vader and Obi-Wan, with the former obsessively hunting the latter.
Time and again in Obi-Wan Kenobi, Vader makes poor choices based on his overwhelming desire to punish his old master, choices Obi-Wan sees coming and uses to his advantage. And it’s in these moments, when Vader ignores potentially bigger gains for the Empire in favor of his personal quest to face Obi-Wan, that you feel the presence of Anakin buried beneath all that black armor. It’s just like when Obi-Wan and Anakin used to spar—Anakin is probably the more skilled warrior, but his recklessness allows Obi-Wan to anticipate his moves and retain the upper hand. “You are a great warrior, Anakin, but your need to prove yourself is your undoing. Until you overcome it, a padawan you will still be,” Obi-Wan says to Anakin in this flashback scene in episode V. This dynamic played throughout Obi-Wan Kenobi right to its bittersweet ending.
The image that Chow, Harold and Christenen paint of Darth Vader in Obi-Wan Kenobi is still fearsome, but because we know Vader’s overall arc, and because we know the tragic events that led him to become Vader in the first place, he’s a far more lamentable figure now. The final lightsaber battle between Vader and Obi-Wan in the series is one of the better duels we’ve seen in Star Wars, and even though Obi-Wan triumphs, the victory is bittersweet because we know that Vader will eventually kill him in a future duel. The battles between Obi-Wan and Vader are also battles between Vader and Anakin Skywalker. Obi-Wan will ultimately pay the price for how long that internal struggle between the two split personalities rages on.
Obi-Wan Kenobi delivers its most haunting image at the end of the final lightsaber duel, with Vader on his knees, his helmet ripped in half, and the human Anakin, horribly scared yet still so clearly in there, raging at his master with what feels like twisted love.
“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan says to Anakin, shocked to see his face beneath the helmet, to see what he helped create. Guilt, horror, and sadness wash over Obi-Wan’s face. He seems like he’s fated to feel this way forever. But that’s when Obi-Wan Kenobi delivers its most haunting moment. When Vader speaks, it’s a ragged amalgam of both Christensen’s voice and James Earl Jones’s, and what he says to Obi-Wan could be viewed as an act of kindness.
“I’m not your failure, Obi-Wan,” Vader says. “You didn’t kill Anakin Skywalker. I did.”
This allows Obi-Wan to finally let go of all his guilt over Anakin’s transformation into Darth Vader. It allows Obi-Wan to resume some kind of life, but it’s a tragic reminder of how Anakin’s fate is captured behind the black mask. It will take many years for Anakin to reclaim his full humanity in a final act of grace to save his son, Luke.
By then, however, Obi-Wan will be a Force Ghost, killed at the hand of his former Padawan, a young man he once called his best friend.
For more on Obi-Wan Kenobi, check out these stories:
The King has arrived. Well, almost—director Baz Luhrmann’s exuberant biopic Elvis premieres in just a few days—and Warner Bros. has released the final trailer. Unlike the first trailer, which was as much about Tom Hanks’s Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s notoriously unscrupulous manager, as it was about Elvis (Austin Butler), the final trailer is more focused on the meteoric rise of the King himself and the cultural landscape in America that he inherited and then helped changed.
The King’s rise was, as Elvis will explore, managed by Colonel Tom Parker, who steered the young Memphis musician’s career with ferocious energy. Parker saw his own future bathed in bright lights (and money) thanks to Elvis’s musical chops, his billboard-worthy looks, and his malleability as a young man in search of guidance. The final trailer shows the absolute frenzy Elvis was able to cause nearly everywhere he went, and how transgressive his performances seemed back then. “Colonel, you put an end to your boy’s animal behavior, or we will,” Parker is instructed in the trailer. Elvis will explore the relationship between Elvis and Parker, as well as Elvis’s family life. This being a Luhrmann film, you can also count on a colorful, maximalist approach to tracking the life of one of the 20th century’s most iconic stars.
The supporting cast includes Helen Thomson as Elvis’s mother, Gladys, Richard Roxburgh as Elvis’s father, Vernon, and Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla Presley. For the non-family members, the cast includes Kelvin Harrison Jr. as B.B. King and recent Oscar-nominee Kodi Smit-McPhee as Jimmie Rodgers Snow.
Check out the final trailer below. Elvis hits theaters on June 24.
Here’s the official synopsis for Elvis:
ELVIS is an epic, big-screen spectacle from Warner Bros. Pictures and visionary, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Baz Luhrmann that explores the life and music of Elvis Presley, starring Austin Butler and Oscar winner Tom Hanks.
A thoroughly cinematic drama, Elvis’s (Butler) story is seen through the prism of his complicated relationship with his enigmatic manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Hanks). As told by Parker, the film delves into the complex dynamic between the two spanning over 20 years, from Presley’s rise to fame to his unprecedented stardom, against the backdrop of the evolving cultural landscape and loss of innocence in America. Central to that journey is one of the significant and influential people in Elvis’s life, Priscilla Presley (Olivia DeJonge).
As we get ever closer to the premiere of co-writer/director Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder, you can practically hear the magical hammer Mjolnir whistling through the air. And whose hand is Mjolnir flying towards? Mighty Thor’s (Natalie Portman) of course!
Ever since we learned during 2019’s Comic-Con that Portman would be reprising her role as Jane Foster but with a twist— she’d also be Mighty Thor—we’ve been eager to see her suited up, hammer in hand. Then we got those first peeks via teaser and trailer, and Portman’s transformation into Mighty Thor was even better than we imagined. Now, Marvel has let some new images fly, and they include Portman’s Mighty Thor, Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie, a few of Thor himself, a new look at Christian Bale’s lunatic villain Gorr the God Butcher, and Pom Klementieff’s Mantis and Star-lord (Chris Pratt), ever the foil for Thor, trying to talk some sense into him.
The reason Thor’s Guardians friends are concerned is that Thor: Love and Thunder will find the God of Thunder on a vision quest of sorts, trying to find a more peaceful way to live. That will prove impossible when Gorr shows up, determined to take out all the gods and goddesses in the universe. Luckily for Thor, he’ll not only have Valkyrie and the Guardians on his side, as well as his beloved sidekicks Korg (Takia Waititi) and Miek, but Mighty Thor herself. There’s even a behind-the-scenes image of Waititi in his mo-cap suit and Hemsworth. They look happy.
Check out the images below. Thor: Love and Thunder hammers into theaters on July 8.
Paul Atreides might be breathing a little easier today. Léa Seydoux has joined the cast of Dune: Part Two as Lady Margot, one of Paul’s (Timothée Chalamet) most crucial allies as he regroups and prepares for war against House Harkonnen.
Deadline reports that Seydoux has joined the gangbusters cast in co-writer/director Denis Villeneuve’s sequel, which will begin filming later this year. Along with Chalamet, returning cast members include Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgard, Javier Bardem, and Dave Bautista. Seydoux will be one of the major new characters introduced in Part Two, along with Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, Christopher Walken as Emperor Shaddam IV, and Florence Pugh as the Emperor’s daughter, Princess Irulan.
Part One left us at the edge of annihilation for Paul and his mother, Lady Jessica (Ferguson). While they’d managed to survive House Harkonnen’s attack on Arrakis, they required the help of the Fremen, led by Bardem’s Stilgar, and with the important assistance of Zendaya’s Chani. In fact, Part Two, which will once again be co-written by Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, will give us a lot more Chani as she introduces Paul and Lady Jessica into the world of the Fremen. The sequel will also feature one of the most memorable scenes in both Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel and David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation, the ferocious battle between Paul and Feyd-Rautha.
As for Seydoux’s Lady Margot, in Herbert’s novel, she warns Lady Jessica early on about House Harkonnen’s diabolical plans for House Atreides once the family moves to the dangerous, Spice-rich desert planet to administer it. While that plot point was left out of Villeneuve’s Part One, Lady Margot figures to factor into the sequel in a big way. Lady Margot and Lady Jessica are both members of the powerful, female-led Bene Gesserit, which will have an even bigger role to play in Part Two.
Seydoux is currently starring in David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, and before that had a major role in the 25th Bond installment, No Time To Die.
Featured image: NEW YORK, NEW YORK – OCTOBER 02: Lea Seydoux attends a screening of “The French Dispatch” during the 59th New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center on October 02, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by Jason Mendez/Getty Images)
