A treasure trove of new photos for writer/director Matt Reeves’s The Batman has been revealed. Warner Bros. has revealed the largest batch of images we’ve seen of Reeves’s hotly-anticipated inaugural trip to Gotham. The photos show, among other things, a huge image of Paul Dano’s The Riddler projected onto a digital billboard during a Gotham City News 1 segment. The caption? “Serial killer livestreams.” This is what Robert Pattinson’s Batman is up against, a lunatic who wants to terrorize everyone in Gotham.
The new images also reveal a few of Batman’s allies, chiefly Gotham City Police’s Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) and Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), better known as Catwoman. Yet Catwoman’s allyship will likely be a little less straightforward than the franchise-straddling brotherhood between Batman and Gordon. The relationship between Batman and Catwoman is one of this film’s most intriguing questions.
We also see two compelling images of district attorney Gil Colson (Peter Sarsgaard), who we know from “The Funeral” scene that Warner Bros. released will be kidnapped by the Riddler and used as a pawn. In one shot, he appears to still be booby-trapped with a bomb strapped to his mouth from that scene. There’s also a nice close-up of an unrecognizable Colin Farrell as Oswald Cobblepot/The Penguin. It proves that Farrell wasn’t kidding when he said it took four hours to turn him into one of Gotham’s most notorious villains.
The Batman is one of the year’s biggest films and will be one of the longest superhero movies ever, clocking in at two hours and fifty-five minutes. This new batch of photos gives ample evidence of how different Reeves’ vision for his reboot is. A proper detective story with a noir bent, it’s hard not to be eager to see what The Batman has in store.
Check out the photos below. The Batman arrives in theaters on March 4.
Robert Pattinson has been teasing just how different his version of Batman is for a while now, but last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Pattison may have given us the best clue yet as to how this new iteration of the character was conceived. Pattison told Kimmel that during early conversations with writer/director Matt Reeves, he learned of Reeves’s surprising source of inspiration.
“One of the first things that Matt said to me — he’s like, ‘He’s sort of inspired by Kurt Cobain,’” Pattison told Kimmel. “I’m like, ‘Really? That’s kind of the opposite of what I imagined Bruce Wayne to be.’”
That wasn’t the only fresh information Pattinson revealed about the hotly-anticipated The Batman—he also said his initial attempts at doing a different kind of voice for Gotham’s Dark Knight were utter failures.
Pattison had wanted to try something new, rather than the deeper, huskier voice we’ve heard in the past from Ben Affleck and Christian Bale.
“Everyone does this kind of gruff, gravelly thing, and I’m like, ‘I’m going to do the opposite — I’m gonna go really whispery,’” Pattinson said. “And I tried to do it for the first two weeks, and it just looked absolutely atrocious, and they told me to stop doing it.”
Yet Pattinson’s impulse to go a different way wasn’t so wild. In fact, a certain former Bruce Wayne felt the same way.
“I found out from Nick, who was putting me in the suit every day, that’s what Christian Bale did on Batman Begins as well,” Pattinson told Kimmel. “And if you listen to the first Batman Begins teaser trailer, you can hear the original voice. I only found this out a couple of weeks ago.”
What Pattinson learned was that while his Batman will be a very different beast from previous versions, there are a few things about the character that should remain the same. “You can feel when it feels right. You put the suit on, and you have to speak in a certain way.”
Pattinson is joined in The Batman by Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle/Catwoman, Paul Dano as Edward Nashton/The Riddler, Colin Farrell as Oswald Cobblepot/The Penguin, Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth, Jeffrey Wright as Jim Gordon, Peter Sarsgaard as Gil Colson, and John Turturro as Carmine Falcone.
Writer/director Matt Reeves knows a thing or three about picking villains. For The Batman, Reeves wrote a sizzling script that attracted so much heat a whole new franchise was rebooted based on the strength of his story, and that story includes a Rogue’s Gallery of villains. Robert Pattinson’s Batman will be facing two toplining villains in Paul Dano’s Riddler (the main event), and Colin Farrell’s Penguin (this role is smaller, but Farrell’s Penguin is getting his own HBO Max spinoff series to further explore the character). Then there’s Zoë Kravitz’s Catwoman who, while not a villain, is still another iconic figure plucked from DC’s rich bench of characters.
One character you probably would have never imagined entering Reeves’ mind as he thinks about populating a sequel is Dr. Victor Fries, better known as Mr. Freeze. This ice-cold character was frozen into our memory banks in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s very colorful performance in director Joel Schumacher’s extremely colorful 1997 film Batman and Robin. If you haven’t seen the film, here’s one of Mr. Freeze’s quotes just to give you a taste of what Schwarzenegger’s performance and the film itself were like: “Allow me to break the ice: My name is Freeze. Learn it well, for it’s the chilling sound of your doom.” Want another? Great, here you go: “If revenge is a dish best served cold, then put on your Sunday finest. It’s time to feast!”
So, yeah, Batman and Robin was more or less the antithesis of not only Reeves’ grittier take on Gotham, but nearly every superhero movie made since Christopher Nolan first wowed the world with his 2005 game changer Batman Begins. Yet at a recent press event, as relayed by Collider, Reeves said that a more grounded version of the character exists in the comics, and could make for a great villain for the sequel. Here’s what Reeves said:
“In my view, I just feel drawn to finding the grounded version of everything. So to me, it would be a challenge in an interesting way to try and figure out how that could happen, even the idea of something like Mr. Freeze, that is such a great story, right? I think there’s actually a grounded version of that story, which could be really powerful and could be really great. So, I love the fantastical side of Batman, but this iteration, obviously, while being, to me, I think it is very comics faithful, but I don’t think that this one is necessarily, it doesn’t lean as hard into the fantastical, I guess. But I think to me what would be interesting would be to try and unwind the fantastical and see, well, how could that make sense here? And so that’s kind of my view, how I see it.”
The Batman is one of the year’s most eagerly-anticipated films, and it’s expected to do massive business. Two more sequels are currently being planned for The Batman, so this notion of a grounded Mr. Freeze could go from speculation to reality.
Midway through Black History Month, Sacha Jenkins‘ documentary series everything’s gonna be all white debuted on Feb. 11 on Showtime. Introducing itself as “A tale of two Americas, one white, one not,” the three-part show offers a sprawling group portrait of Black, Native American, Korean-American, Puerto Rican, Afro-Peruvian, South Asian, and other citizens of color who go before the camera to offer their unvarnished views on racism in the United States, past and present.
Writer-director-producer Jenkins grew up in Queens where he published his own graffiti zine at age seventeen. Over the next 35 years, he’s continued making work about the Black experience, including the Emmy-nominated Wu-Tang Clan: of Mics and Men and the 2021 documentary Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James.
The idea for everything’s gonna be all white had been knocking around for a while, Jenkins says. “I pitched this series many times, years ago, and it got a lot of passes. It was finally greenlit by a gentleman who happens to be Indian and from New Jersey. He gets it. He’s in a position of power. I’m lucky to have a patron of color who understands the subject [of racism] because of what he and his family have gone through.”
In a Zoom interview from his New York City home base, Jenkins talks about giving voice to high-achieving minority Americans with stories to tell about January 6, “white noise,” Black Hills, and bad food.
everything’s gonna be all white begins with the January 6 insurrection as witnessed by Black photographer Mel D. Cole, who got pretty shook up by the experience.
We were working on the documentary when the insurrection came along, so to have a bird’s eye view — a black bird’s eye — from an African American who can tell you what it felt like to be in that situation? That was really important. And that’s what this series is really about. It’s about feelings. It’s about how we feel. It’s about giving African Americans and other people of color the chance to express themselves.
A still from EVERYTHING’S GONNA BE ALL WHITE. Photo credit: Courtesy of SHOWTIME.
Your documentary addresses everything from Black Jesus to nightmarish housing projects to racism in the pornography industry and “colorism” criticisms of In the Heights. Yet the way you weave in and out of all these different topics feels very organic.
Well, it’s very organic because everything’s related. For example, food deserts and gentrification: You go from a [Black] neighborhood that has very poor food choices until the complexion of the local clientele changes, and then you get a Whole Foods. When you live in a housing project with lead paint and you’re told it’s okay but then you learn they were lying and that lead paint can lead to mental health issues and how that may affect a community where the people are crammed in like sardines and have very poor food choices. Or you live across the street from a power plant and a cloud of smoke blows over every day and you don’t know what it is so you have to run and tell your family “Here comes the cloud!” What’s that telling you? It’s all related.
There’s a cumulative effect?
Economics and education create a level of freedom in a capitalist system and many of us don’t have the freedom that allows you to be on an equal footing. If you went to horrible schools, if the supermarket in your neighborhood was terrible — all these things go into a piggy bank of oppression and every penny adds something that can get in the way of your success.
How did you go about selecting your interview subjects, which include activists, scholars, artists, comedians, and rappers?
It’s easy to think, “Ooh it’s more exciting when they’re famous,” but I just wanted people with a real point of view who could add something unexpected and heartfelt. We interviewed a lot of grassroots people in progressive movements. These are serious subjects, but I wanted to break it up with some humor from people like comedian Amanda Seales or the rapper Style P, who’s very eloquent. The way we curated the interviews, I think the balance is pretty good.
Style P in EVERYTHING’S GONNA BE ALL WHITE. Photo credit: Courtesy of SHOWTIME.
Tell me about “Mad Chad,” the goofy white racist character created by you and your writing team.
Chad’s is the only white perspective represented in the series. I didn’t want white scholars or guilty white folks. They’re great but we’ve seen those people before. For this series, I wanted people of color exclusively talking about how they feel, but we brought on Mad Chad so white folks can’t say their perspective isn’t represented.
Who plays Mad Chad?
Michael Kaves, who’s one of my dearest friends. He grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn I knew the character he brought to the table would be very authentic because Chad’s based on people Michael grew up with who have similar thoughts.
Your doc explores the “white noise” that happens when people of color internalize messages put out there by the white power structure.What does “white noise” feel like?
It’s a subliminal fuzz, constant, like a ringing in your ears. It’s always there, right, but you become used to it. If you focus on that frequency, it’s going to confuse you, encourage you to make the wrong decisions, like not being conscious of casting folks of color in a film about folks of color. White noise has to do with the things that white supremacy demands of you as a creative.
Your documentarygoes deep on the subject of White America’s exploitation of Native Americans. What did you learn from talking to Dr. Nick Estes, a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and co-founder of Red Nation?
It’s despicable the way Native folks have been lied to, swindled, and yet they remain. When the government offers native Americans a whole lot of money for the Black Hills, they’re like “No! This is our holy land. You can buy our spirituality.” I felt that was one of the most powerful moments in the series.
Dr. Nick Estes in EVERYTHING’S GONNA BE ALL WHITE, “103”. Photo credit: Courtesy of SHOWTIME.
It’s kind of heartbreaking to hear Nick talk about what he had to deal with growing up on a reservation.
It’s a personal thing that he’s sharing. That experience informed who he became but it didn’t stop him. Hopefully, people who don’t know people of color will listen and to his stories and maybe that will help change things.
Although the title everything’s gonna be all white seems to suggest that the system will not be changing any time soon.
Yes, but we also have a bonus episode in a talk show format called everything is not gonna be all white. We produced, for instance, a package about a Black professional skateboarder from Philadelphia who was called Dirty Ghetto Kid, and he turned that catchphrase into a multi-million dollar business. We included that fourth episode because I want to encourage people to stay creative and show all the things that are not expected from us, yet we are still able to thrive.
A still from EVERYTHING’S GONNA BE ALL WHITE, “104”. Photo credit: Courtesy of SHOWTIME.
At one point in the series, the Black photographer Mel Cole remembers walking down the street minding his own business when a cop mistakes his camera for a gun and starts screaming at him. Have you personally experienced that kind of street-level racism?
When I was fourteen, I was writing [graffiti] on trains [and got caught by transit police]. There was no reason to shove your face in a toilet bowl or beat the crap out of you. But the way I thought about it then was, “The cop kicked my ass but my mom didn’t find out.” I wasn’t thinking about racism or the white kids who weren’t getting beat up. No. The fact that I thought it was a win to not get arrested? That’s white noise.
Featured image: Behind-the-scenes on set of EVERYTHING’S GONNA BE ALL WHITE. Photo credit: John Chimples/Courtesy of SHOWTIME.
J.J. Abrams made a big announcement during Paramount’s Investors Day Presentation on February 15—Star Trek 4 is set to launch. Abrams revealed that Paramount is in negotiations to get Star Trek‘s stars back onto the bridge. The main cast includes Chris Pine as Kirk, Zoe Saldana as Uhura, Zachary Quinto as Spock, John Cho as Sulu, Simon Pegg as Scotty, and Karl Urban as Bones. It seems they’re all prepared to head back to the Starfleet for their fourth mission.
“We are thrilled to say that we are hard at work on a new Star Trek film that will be shooting by the end of the year that will be featuring our original cast and some new characters that I think are going to be really fun and exciting and help take Star Trek into areas that you’ve just never seen before,” Abrams said. “We’re thrilled about this film, we have a bunch of other stories that we’re talking about that we think will be really exciting, so can’t wait for you to see what we’re cooking up. But until then, live long and prosper.”
These six featured actors first took on their iconic Star Trek roles back in Abrams’s 2009 franchise reboot. That Trek rejiggered the timeline so that the new film franchise could chart out fresh stories without worrying about meddling with the massive trove of previous Trek plots and timelines explored in previous films and TV series. Abrams followed up 2009’s Star Trek with 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness. Then director Justin Lin took over in 2016 for Star Trek Beyond.
Star Trek 4 will be directed by WandaVision‘s ace helmer Matt Shakman, based on a script from WandaVision scribe Cameron Squires and Avatar 2 writer Josh Friedman. Their screenplay itself is based on an earlier draft from Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain America) and Lindsey Beer (Sierra Burgess is a Loser).
There has been a slew of Trek films in the works over the years, so this news that the original cast from 2009 is coming back is, at last, a definitive move towards getting the beloved sci-fi franchise back on the big screen. Those projects have included potential Star Trek movies from Quentin Tarantino, Jessica Jones director S.J. Clarkson, and Fargo creator Noah Hawley.
One somber note about the returning cast is they’re missing a beloved member. Anton Yelchin, who played Chekov in all three of the new Star Trek films, died in a tragic accident in 2016. There is little doubt Yelchin will be honored in some way in the new film.
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New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. Animation will release The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim anime feature on April 12, 2024. Varietybroke the story about the upcoming film, a fresh addition to the growing list of cinematic adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s vast Middle-earth, which he explored at length and in astonishing detail in his now-iconic books “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit.”
Variety confirms that The War of the Rohirrim is set roughly two centuries before the events in “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings,” and will center on the Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan, and the creation of Helm’s Deep, the fortified gorge in the White Mountains that was a major setting in Tolkien’s work and the middle film in Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy The Two Towers.
TV veteran Kenji Kamiyama (Blade Runner: Black Lotus) will direct, with producer Joseph Chou (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) on board. There is also a very strong connection between thte new film and Jackson’s Oscar-winning films. One of those connections is Philippa Boyens, a major LOTR contributor who won an Oscar for co-writing Jackson’s final film in his trilogy The Return of the King, as well as co-writing The Hobbit films. Her daughter Phoebe Gittins and her writing partner Arty Papageorgiou are writing The War of the Rohirrim script, based on a draft from Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews.
“I’m in awe of the creative talent who have come together to bring this epic, heart-pounding story to life, from the mastery of Kenji Kamiyama to a truly stellar cast,” Boyens told Variety.
The connection between the new anime film and Jackson’s creative team doesn’t end there. Oscar-winning makeup and visual effects artist Richard Taylor and Oscar-winning art director Alan Lee, both Lord of the Rings veterans, are also onboard. As is Tolkien illustrator John Howe.
“The Lord of the Rings films took Tolkien’s masterwork to new cinematic heights and inspired a generation,” said Warner Bros. Pictures Group chairman Toby Emmerich to Variety. “It’s a gift to be able to revisit Middle-earth with many of the same creative visionaries and the talented Kenji Kamiyama at the helm. This will be an epic portrayal unlike anything audiences have ever seen.”
For more on all things The Lord of the Rings, check out these stories about the upcoming Amazon Prime series:
For production designer Jim Clay, details matter. In director Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile, a pseudo-sequel to Murder on the Orient Expresswhich returns sharp-witted investigator Hercule Poirot in another case of whodunit, the murder mystery transports viewers to the 1930s Egypt that entangles love and death in the most devilish ways – and may we say stylish?
“Ken is meticulous in his planning ‘cause when he gets on set he wants to give time to the actors and the performance,” Clay shares with The Credits, who has worked with Branagh on a number of projects including Belfast which received seven Academy Award nominations
Based on the novel by Agatha Christie, the screenplay from Micahel Green intertwines an ensemble that includes Gal Gadot, Emma Mackey, Russell Brand, Letitia Wright, and Annette Bening, hopscotching to a number of exotic locations from a London blues club to the banks of the Nile River – all of which the product designer crafted from scratch.
For its design, Clay says Branagh sought a look that was “absolutely realistic and locked into the period” while still having the freedom to give it a “contemporary feel” to reach a newer audience. “It was really about creating an epic scale as much as possible.”
One of the largest tasks was building the Karnak, a majestic paddleboat steamer that becomes the backdrop for the investigation. With supervising location manager Tom Woods laying the path, production originally scouted Egypt looking to shoot on a real paddleboat steamer. The idea quickly fizzled when it became apparent they couldn’t find a boat that was remotely period or to the scale and style that was visually required. “We decided to build the paddle steamer and that was the first big decision,” says Clay. “Originally we were going to build it and float it on a lake in Morocco, but that presented all sort of logistical and shooting problems.” After researching how far computer-generated water has come, they decided to build the steamer on the backlot of Longcross Studios in the UK and digitally place the water afterward.
A key decision early on in its construction was building the massive steamer subframe on railroad tracks rather than placing it directly into water. This allowed production to move it outdoors for bluescreen work or slide it into a stage for night shoots or when filming inside the cabins or interiors. The caveat in doing it this way created a weight limit.
“I have to pay tribute to John Boahn, who was our construction manager. He was really taking care of the structural side of it, where I was concerned more with the decoration, layout, detail, and quality of finishing,” mentions Clay. “John was constantly obsessing about the weight. We had to keep it to 240 tons, which is what the wheels would bear. As we got closer and closer to completion, John would weigh every element we were putting on board to make sure we weren’t going to exceed the weight limit.”
No detail was left untouched designing the luxuriousness of the Karnak, a style Clay evolved based on photographic material and drawings from a fleet Thomas Cook built, a British travel entrepreneur who sold tours of the Nile to members of high society dating back to the early 1900s. The boat stretched 236 feet long, 48 feet wide, and 42 feet high while weighing 225 tons complete with three levels. Interiors were elegantly finished with an expressive color palette of warm hues, oceanic blues, and a splatter of whites and grays that created a visceral juxtaposition to the muted earthy tones found along the River Nile. Furniture with a Gustavian-era feel filled the space, providing a modern 1930s impression. “The design is one of elegance, portraying a life of opulence floating down the waters of the Nile,” says Clay.
Besides its stunning aesthetics, functionality was part of the ship’s design. “Ken is very keen on creating composite worlds so his camera can roam around wherever it wishes to go. That’s the basis on which we design the work we do for him,” notes Clay. This meant the design needed to allow Branagh to shoot 360-degrees. Clay also addressed the technical needs for cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos – who shot on 65mm film – and his team of elections by creating storage areas for generators and plug-in points for practical lights.
The production designer also added small details to the steamer that subliminally spoke to the storytelling and duality of characters. In one scene where Hercule expresses who he believes the killer is, the camera glides through etched glass showing multiple images of the sleuth. “It’s something we experimented with a little bit on Murder of the Orient Express,” says Clay. “I used special glass panels in that film that was quite a success, so we decided to exploit that further on this one because it gave us broken images of the characters when we are not sure who they are, whether they were involved in the murder or who was guilty. That broken imagery helped to enhance and support that narrative.”
It wasn’t all elegant boat steamers and painterly palettes for the production designer. The team recreated the temple of Abu Simbel which the characters visit on their way down the Nile. The temple depicts four enormous sculptures of Ramses the Great, the third pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty of Egypt that can still be found in the ancient city of Aswan today. From location scouts, a number of measurements and photos were taken to create a digital scan where a replica was then constructed out of polystyrene and plaster which stood 70 feet high and 100 feet wide on the lot of Longcross Studios. “I think the only difference was that we made it from plaster rather than rock,” notes Clay.
Unique to the build were the sculptors who created it over 16 weeks. “Ken is very keen to nurture new talent and create opportunities where we can. We had an amazing team of young sculptors who came out of art school and were immensely talented. I think for young art students, who would probably struggle to make a living as sculptors in this modern-day, and suddenly there they were doing this incredibly huge work was a great opportunity to mentor.”
Other stops along the journey included an Egyptian spice market and temple ruins which were constructed on the banks of Costwold Water Park outside of Swindon, England, with the Cleveland Lake doubling as the Nile River. Interiors of the glamorous Aswan Cataract Hotel were built on stage for an elaborate party scene. The historic Nubian Desert hotel is where Agatha Christie stayed while writing the Death on the Nile. Clay designed an extravagant reception area and a long corridor that leads up to a private dining room area that has a balcony overlooking the Nile. Connecting the stage sets to Egypt was overseen by visual effects supervisor George Murphy where his team filmed clean plates along the Nile to be composited into the blue screen portions of the set.
Clary says the success of the production design on this film, and the number of projects he’s worked on in the past, is because of the attention to detail. “I’m totally dependent on my construction team, the plaster team, the painters. I can design anything on the page but they turn it into reality. Sometimes, I say to John, my construction manager, ‘I feel as if I spent 30 years making walls look like walls.’ Sometimes it comes down to that. If you’re lucky to work with the same construction people for many years they know how you work and you know how they work and you can create some amazing stuff. You can take bigger risks and convince a director it’s worth building a set as opposed to going on location. But in doing so, you have to deliver that reality.”
For more on Death on the Nile, check out these stories:
Warner Bros.’ 2022 film slate is massive. How massive? Just on the DC Extended Universe side of things, you’ve got a return trip to Gotham in Matt Reeves The Batman, the first stand-alone Flash film, and you’ve got Dwayne Johnson making his long-awaited entrance to the DCEU in Black Adam. To that end, Warner Bros. has revealed three new behind-the-scene images of Johnson in the role he was born to play.
Black Adam comes from director Jaume Collet-Serra, and the logline lets you know that when Dwayne Johnson enters the DCEU, it’s not to simply add to its growing roster of superheroes. “The hierarchy of power in the DC universe is about to change,” and, well, of course it is—this is the Rock. We got our first glimpse of Johnson as Black Adam via this clip revealed at the most recent DC FanDome Event. The clip showed just has nasty Black Adam can be when he feels threatened. We were also introduced to members of the Justice Society—Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo).
The images give us a great look at Black Adam’s suit, with its Shazam-like lightning bolt running down the chest:
Then we got two more behind-the-scenes shots, one of Jaume Collet-Serra and Johnson looking at a monitor after a scene, and another of Johnson preparing to perform.
We’ve been waiting a long, long time to see Johnson in this role. In fact, he was cast way back in 2014. Producer Hiram Garcia shared his enthusiasm for what he’s seen thus far late last year. Speaking to Collider, Garcia had this to say after seeing the first cut of Black Adam:
“Granted, the movie’s in a stage where there are no effects done. It’s so fresh after filming. But anytime the movie is that entertaining and good in that raw of a form, it makes us very confident. So [we’re] really excited with where the movie is. Jaume has done such a good job. The movie is big. It’s fun. DJ was born to play Black Adam — [I’ve] got to tell you, if there was ever anyone who is just perfect for this role, it’s him. Then seeing him with the rest of the JSA and all those characters and Pierce [Brosnan] and Aldis [Hodge] and Quintessa [Swindell] and Noah [Centineo], it’s a ‘Pinch me’ moment. It was one of the most fun movies we’ve ever made and also just the coolest to be making something on this scale and with a character who’s going to have this much of an effect on the DC Universe. It’s really been awesome, and I think you’re really going to dig it.”
Marvel Studios has started really giving us the Moon Knight goods in recent weeks. The first official trailer, the Super Bowl spot, and now a slew of new images have filled out the picture on what the upcoming Disney+ series will be like. Moon Knight stars Oscar Isaac as Steven Grant, a gift-shop employee who seems like he’d be spooked by his own shadow. When Moon Knight begins, Steven is still unaware there’s a lot more to him than he realizes. He is, in fact, two people, the milquetoast Steven and a mercenary named Marc Spector. It’s Spector’s life and deeds that will come to dominate Steven’s world, as the two personalities and one man are plunged into a mystery involving dangerous enemies, a mysterious man named Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke), and, wait for it, Egyptian gods.
The new images give us a few of Steven, including one compelling image of Marc confronting Steven in an elevator reflection.
Then there’s Hawke’s Arthur Harrow, who the actor has compared to the Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh, and who may be modeled on one but two Marvel villains.
And we keep coming back to something Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige said to Empire Magazine — that Moon Knight will be louder and more brutal than anything they’ve done before. “He’s brutal,” Feige told Empire about Oscar Isaac’s Steven Grant/Marc Spector. “It’s been fun to work with Disney+ and see the boundaries shifting on what we’re able to do. There are moments [in the series] when Moon Knight is wailing on another character, and it is loud and brutal, and the knee-jerk reaction is, ‘We’re gonna pull back on this, right?’ No. We’re not pulling back. There’s a tonal shift. This is a different thing. This is Moon Knight.”
Moon Knight arrives on Disney+ on March 30. Here are the rest of the images:
When Steven Grant, a mild-mannered gift-shop employee, becomes plagued with blackouts and memories of another life, he discovers he has dissociative identity disorder and shares a body with mercenary Marc Spector. As Steven/Marc’s enemies converge upon them, they must navigate their complex identities while thrust into a deadly mystery among the powerful gods of Egypt.
Now, this is a tasty little morsel of a teaser trailer. The first trailer for director Adrian Lyne’s Deep Water is a spare, expertly paced minimalist teaser that manages to evoke all sorts of menace and madness without so much as a raised voice or a single image save the two faces of our leads. Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas star as a husband-and-wife who have an interesting relationship dynamic. Affleck plays the wealthy Vic Van Allen, a man who allows his wife, Armas’s Melinda Van Allen, to have affairs. He does this, ostensibly, to avoid getting a divorce. Yet Vic is hardly the sexually progressive sort, nor is he desperate, cowering cuckold, either. What he is, as this teaser hints at, is a psychopath. That will be made clear when Melinda’s lovers start disappearing.
The teaser doesn’t give you any of this, mind you. Deep Water is based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, so that’s how we know what screenwriter Zach Helm is working with. What the teaser gives you is Vic and Melinda having what looks like an idyllic picnic that’s becoming a little bit saucy. They seem very much in love as they banter playfully. “Why are you the only man who wants to stay with me?” she asks. “I don’t know,” he says. “But you do?” she counters. “I do.” Then they get closer, “But you love me?” she asks. “Of course,” he says. “You’re not bored,” she asks. “No.” Then as they seem about to kiss, the needle drops on where this film is headed. “There’s something wrong with me,” Melinda tells Vic.
“There’s something wrong with me, too,” he replies. And we believe them both.
Deep Water streams on Hulu on March 18. Check out the teaser trailer below:
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“Every night, I dream the same dream,” says Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) at the start of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness official trailer. “And then…the nightmare begins.”
Here, at last, is our longest look at director Sam Raimi’s film, which sees the director of the beloved Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 stepping into the modern MCU for the first time. Raimi’s working with a heckuva set-up here, seeing as how Doctor Strange’s world is literally falling apart at the seams and becoming, as he said himself, a total nightmare. The last time we saw Strange, he was trying to help Peter Parker erase a few million memory banks in Spider-Man: No Way Home, to disastrous effect. Strange ended up accidentally unleashing the multiverse, sending a slew of villains from other dimensions into his present-day New York. Now, Strange finds himself facing a mysterious new enemy in the wilds of the multiverse, which looks even more unruly and ungovernable than it did during Spidey’s adventure.
“You opened the doorway between universes,” Wong (Benedict Wong) tells Strange, “and we don’t know who or what will walk through it.” We see images of a New York in mid-destruction, a scared-looking Dr. Christine Palmer (newcomer Rachel McAdams), and citizens fleeing for their lives. Strange has meddled with space-time in the past, but in The Multiverse of Madness, it looks like he’s really and truly gone too far.
This is why he recruits Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), who recently had her own issues with reality in WandaVision. The hope is Wanda knows a thing or two about the multiverse and, being one of the most potent superheroes on the planet, she might be able to help him. She’s not the only familiar face we see here—Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Karl Mordo is back, we see him handcuffing the good doctor (they’re magical cuffs, obviously) for his “desecration of reality.” We also see an evil Doctor Strange, no doubt from the multiverse, and a colossal squid monster hurling buses at our poor, beleaguered Sorcerer Supreme.
“You break the rules and become a hero,” a suddenly sinister Wanda says to Strange, “I do it and I become the enemy. That doesn’t seem fair.” No, it doesn’t, but then again, nothing in The Multiverse of Madness seems to adhere to any sense of fair play we know about. The premise, the game cast, and Sam Raimi directing all make this one of the most intriguing films of 2022.
Check out the official trailer below. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness hits theaters on May 6.
Here’s the official synopsis:
In Marvel Studios’ Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the MCU unlocks the Multiverse and pushes its boundaries further than ever before. Journey into the unknown with Doctor Strange, who, with the help of mystical allies both old and new, traverses the mind-bending and dangerous alternate realities of the Multiverse to confront a mysterious new adversary.
“Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Elizabeth Olsen, Benedict Wong, Xochitl Gomez, with Michael Stühlbarg, and Rachel McAdams.
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Marvel’s upcoming Moon Knight series on Disney+ promises to be unlike any previous MCU installment. This much has been made clear by Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige, who told Empire Magazine that Moon Knight will be louder and more brutal than anything they’ve done before. “He’s brutal,” Feige told Empire about Oscar Isaac’s Steven Grant, aka Marc Spector, the tortured soul at the center of the series. This new TV spot that dropped during the Super Bowl speaks to just how wild Moon Knight aims to be, centered on a man who isn’t even sure exactly who he is, or what kind of power he has. “It’s been fun to work with Disney+ and see the boundaries shifting on what we’re able to do,” Feige told Empire. “There are moments [in the series] when Moon Knight is wailing on another character, and it is loud and brutal, and the knee-jerk reaction is, ‘We’re gonna pull back on this, right?’ No. We’re not pulling back. There’s a tonal shift. This is a different thing. This is Moon Knight.”
The first trailer focused on the struggles of Isaac’s decidedly unheroic gift shop employee Steven Grant, a man who seems spooked by just about everything. Soon enough, Grant learns he has another name—Marc Spector—and what’s more, he suffers from dissociative personality disorder. It seems when he’s Marc, he’s a totally different kind of person, one with some seriously dangerous enemies. Soon enough Steven/Marc’s enemies arrive, and this hybrid, divided individual is plunged into a dangerous mystery.
The new spot delves right into the madness at the core of the series, and gives us Marc in full Moon Knight form taking the fight to some would-be challengers. We also get another look at Ethan Hawke’s villain, who seems intent on teasing out the very worst impulses inside our troubled hero.
Check out the new spot here. Moon Knight arrives on Disney+ on March 30.
“There are wonders in this world beyond our wandering” we hear early on the first trailer for Amazon’s long-simmering, surprisingly mysterious The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. These words are spoken by a young Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), and she’s not lying. Wonders do appear as you tuck into this first, extended look at one of TV’s most highly-anticipated new series. One of the most astonishing things about the trailer is the sheer scope and scale of Amazon’s new series, which looks very much like the lush, vast world Peter Jackson created for his two big J.R.R. Tolkien adaptations, his Lord of the Rings trilogy, and his Hobbit trilogy. Yet The Rings of Power will take us back to a time before the events in those six films took place, back to when there was more than just “the one ring to rule them all.”
The new series, which has been called the most expensive ever made, will follow the creation of the original rings of power. Those rings were made for the three Elven-kings, seven for the dwarves, and nine for mortal men, and then the One Ring that all the considerable fuss kicked up in both TheLord of the Rings and The Hobbit was about. In fact, the main mover in Tolkien’s LOTR and The Hobbit stories was the evil sorcerer Sauron, and he’ll be the Big Bad in the new series, too.
Morfydd Clark is joined by a vast ensemble cast including Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Robert Aramayo, Owain Arthur, Maxim Baldry, Nazanin Boniadi, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Charles Edwards, Trystan Gravelle, Sir Lenny Henry, Ema Horvath, Markella Kavenagh, Joseph Mawle, Tyroe Muhafidin, Sophia Nomvete, Lloyd Owen, Megan Richards, Dylan Smith, Charlie Vickers, Leon Wadham, Benjamin Walker, Daniel Weyman, and Sara Zwangobani.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power arrives on Prime Video on September 2, 2022. Check out the trailer below:
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It’s safe to say the first trailer for Jordan Peele’s Nope is as deliciously potent a peek at a new movie as we’ve seen in a long, long time. This first look at Peele’s eagerly-anticipated third feature film was revealed during Sunday’s Super Bowl matchup between the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams, and it contained nearly as much excitement in two minutes as the game did in three hours. And it was a good game! Here’s what we learned.
The trailer opens at Haywood Ranch, home to the only Black-owned horse trainers in Hollywood. In fact, the trailer opens with a great bit of movie trivia—did you know that the very first assembly of photographs to create a moving picture was of a Black man on a horse? This is the question posed to a room full of studio executives by the great, great, great, great-granddaughter of that man on the horse. She’s the one now selling them on using the Haywood Ranch for their next film. “Ever since the moment pictures could move,” the sales pitch to studio executives goes, “we’ve had skin in the game.”
It’s a cleverly written set-up and gives way to where Peele wants our attention to be, outside the ranch and in the sky, where a very strange cloud is moving towards Daniel Kaluuya’s character, who is a part of the Haywood Ranch family, it appears. So what, exactly, is Peele up to? The menace hovering in the sky certainly screams alien, and the fear on Kaluuya’s face tells us he doesn’t think he’s dealing with anything remotely normal, or even earthly. The trailer doesn’t make it official exactly what will be haunting our characters, but the few reaction shots we get tell us this situation is going to be just as crazy as what Peele pulled off in Get Out and Us. Peele is not only re-teaming with his Get Out star and Oscar-winner Daniel Kaluuya, but he also recruited Kaluuya’s fellow Oscar-nominee from last year, Steven Yeun, and rising star Keke Palmer. It’s Palmer’s character we see later on in the trailer getting sucked up into the sky.
So can we confirm that Nope is definitely an alien abduction movie? Well, no, not yet. We predicted that the film had to do with aliens way back when Peele first revealed the poster, which shows an oddly shaped cloud that looks a little too perfectly symmetrical to be natural. The official trailer seems to confirm that Peele is, in fact, turning his attention to the sci-fi/alien genre, but we’ll still need confirmation. There is no official synopsis we’ve seen that says as much.
Peele has brought along a heavyweight team of actors and crew to create something special for this third film. One of those folks is his DP Hoyte van Hoytema, Christopher Nolan’s longtime collaborator. Needless to say, Nope is one of the most exciting films on this year’s slate.
Nope creeps into theaters on July 22. Check out the trailer below.
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Costume designer Paco Delgado grew up on a tiny island off the coast of West Africa, where he cultivated a vivid eye for color, shape, and texture. That aesthetic, developed at Institut del Teatre of Barcelona, has served him well. In 2011 he collaborated with the famously meticulous director Pedro Almodóvar on BAFTA Award-winning The Skin I Live In. Delgado then earned Oscar nominations for Les Miserable and The Danish Girl. More recently, he dressed up mainstream Hollywood entertainments like Jungle Cruise, for which he fashioned Dwayne Johnson’s instantly memorable riverboat captain outfit.
None of those projects exceed the breadth and depth of sartorial splendor showcased in Death on the Nile (in theaters Friday, Feb. 11). Based on Agatha Christie’s 1937 mystery, director-star Kenneth Branagh’s second time around as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot takes place on luxury cruiser S.S. Karnak, where impeccably dressed passengers come under suspicion for having murdered one of their own. The cast, headed by Gal Gadot as newly married heiress Linnet Ridgeway Doyle, includes Sex Education star Emma Mackey, Letitia Wright of Black Panther fame, four-time Academy Award nominee Annette Bening as “the Mother” and comedian Russell Brand, in a rare dramatic turn.
Delgado and his team spent a year researching, designing, dyeing, cutting, and fabricating some 150 outfits for delivery in the fall of 2019 when filmmakers shot Death on the Nile in England’s Longcross Studios and in Morocco. Speaking from his home in Madrid, Delgado compares Gadot to 1930’s movie star Carole Lombard and reveals himself to be something of a Method designer: great-looking clothes mean nothing unless they reflect the character’s motivation.
All your Death on the Nile characters are literally in the same boat — everybody’s wealthy and on vacation — but you find subtle ways to distinguish one personality from the next. Can you break down some of the key looks?
In the case of Gal Gadot, if you met her character Linnet in real life, you’d think she’d be self-assured because the world has treated her in an amazing way, it’s like she has everything. But in fact, I felt the opposite was true. I always like to work with opposite thinking, so here I felt like Linett is actually very fragile. Yes, she has money, she’s always had money, but Linnet’s surrounded by people who envy her and don’t necessarily like her. She’s criticized constantly by everyone, so I felt that maybe that [fragility] could be reflected in the costumes. I used transparent fabrics where you can see the skin, which makes her more vulnerable. These silks and chiffons are really nice to the body but Linnet doesn’t have the armor to fight against this dangerous world. And Jacqueline for example…
Wait, I’m sorry to interrupt, but for Gal, did you have a specific inspiration for her luxurious evening gowns? I wonder if you looked at movie stars from that period or . . .
Yeah. I felt the direction with Gal’s character has to be Hollywood. Not Katherine Hepburn because she’s so strong, but Marlene Dietrich movies where it’s all about glamour. And I thought about [blonde 1930’s screwball comedy star] Carole Lombard a lot. Gal’s very warm, like a next-door gal, and she has an amazing sense of humor. I told her when we met, “Obviously you are not blonde but I have this feeling that you have to be a little bit like Carole Lombard as a style for your character” and she said “That’s really funny because I was talking once to [Francis Ford] Coppola. and he told me I reminded him of Carole Lombard.” Bingo! I thought If Coppola said that, who am I to doubt it?
You created a very different look for Linnet’s rival Jacqueline, played by Emmy Mackey.
For Jacqueline, it was the opposite. She has nothing, but Jacqueline has an engine moving her, love and revenge, that gives her something that Linnet hasn’t got. She’s almost aggressive, following Linnet and her husband to Egypt. We wanted to show this passion in a very direct way by dressing Emma in red.
And then, of course, Poirot. This was your first time working with Kenneth Branagh?
Yes but it feels like we’ve been working together for a long time because he’s very direct and very clear about what he wants. Kenneth told me one of the important things about Poirot is that he’s almost OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder. Poirot wants everything to be in place, in perfect condition. If he has a knot here in his tie, the knot has to be perfect. The jacket has to fall perfectly.
Branagh introduced his version of Poirot five years ago in Murder on the Orient Express, but this film sets the murders in an entirely different setting: a luxury cruise ship on the Nile. How did this premise impact your ideas for Poirot’s clothes?
In the first movie, Kenneth portrayed Poirot in dark colors. The thing I thought about for Death on the Nile is that Poirot’s not working, at first. He’s on holiday and we have to make the audience believe that so I put him in the fancy dress. Poirot’s a bourgeoise traveler of the period, dressed in white linen, pretending that he’s enjoying the pyramids. That was the whole thing at the beginning of the movie, where we put him into linens and summer suits and this sort of thing. By the end of the movie, when becomes the Poirot we all know and has to tangle with what happened, then he comes back to his dark persona.
In fact, just about everybody winds up wearing darker clothes by the end of the movie.
Yes because I just thought, these people live in a fantasy world of partying and happy holidays and summer dresses, all thinking, “How lovely are the pyramids, I’m so comfortable, I’m so cool.” But the progression in this movie has to be from light and from colors to dark, because by the end when there’s this dark confrontation with the real world, they’re not living in a bubble anymore.
Gal Gadot wears the famous 128-carat Fancy Yellow Tiffany Diamond in this movie. If I understand correctly, it’s the real thing, on loan from Tiffany?
Yes. It was scripted that Linnet wore this Tiffany diamond, so it wasn’t my idea. I asked the producers, “Can we really get this?” Because it’s a mythical diamond of legendary status, worn before by Audrey Hepburn [when she was promoting Breakfast at Tiffany’s] and Lady Gaga. But the producers have an arrangement with Tiffany and we were able to get this diamond, with its amazing color. That opened the door to work with Tiffany on many many other pieces of jewelry, both vintage and contemporary. Cufflinks for the men, earrings, and rings for the ladies.
Death on the Nile, like everything else you’ve worked on, showcases your mastery of materials and shapes but more than anything, I think it’s your eye for color that really shines. How did you learn to create such rich palettes in your clothing?
I am from a little island [in the Canary Islands] where the only color is the black of the volcanic ashes and the blue of the sky. And maybe a little bit of green from the plants, the geraniums. That very minimalistic palette made me appreciate color in a different way. I don’t like to put in a lot of things, like embroidery and then flowers and then… I don’t like to have the eye looking at a lot of different things. I try to make my costumes “clean” in a way that gives shape and color and interest to the protagonists.Because I’ve always felt that color is a really powerful dramatic tool that can express so many things. You see blue, you feel calm. If you see red, you feel agitated maybe or you feel the passion. It allows you to express so many emotions. I prefer to make an impact on the eye [right] from the beginning. Then they can forget about that and concentrate on the acting.
February is the month of Galantine’s and Valentine’s Day, and both are the perfect time for the new musical rom-com Marry Me, which stars Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, and Maluma and hits theaters and Peacock on February 11. The story begins as pop superstar Kat Valdez (Lopez) and fiancé, Latin singing sensation Bastian (Maluma), are preparing to marry onstage. The fans and everybody else on the globe are invited, as it will be live-streamed during a concert. On the big day, things go very badly. The blessing and curse of social media is its immediacy, a truth that hits home when Bastian’s infidelity is revealed online seconds before Kat invites him onstage to tie the knot. Trapped, as if in a nightmare, in front of her audience and the entire online world in full wedding regalia, Kat sees a man—math teacher Charlie Gilbert (Owen Wilson)—in the audience. He’s holding a sign that says, “Marry Me.” She says yes, they marry, and the rest of the film is about the complications of two very different people from two very different lives falling in love.
Is that too spoiler-y for you? There’s no such thing in a rom-com. With the pandemic still hovering, audiences need some love, joy, and nobody can sneeze at the need for a happy ending right now. The musical element adds another layer of delight to the proceedings. Nine really great songs are woven into the storyline, all variously performed by Lopez and Maluma. One track is even filmed as it was performed live by the two together onstage at Madison Square Garden. In sum, you’ll have no problem saying yes to Marry Me.
The Credits spoke to Marry Me’s director Kat Coiro, the filmmaker helming Marvel’s hotly-anticipated She-Hulk, about how she came to the project, her collaboration with Jennifer Lopez, and what she believes makes Marry Me so special.
Marry Me was developed by Jennifer Lopez and Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas through Lopez’s company Nuyorican Productions. How did you get involved in the project?
I had just signed with a new agent, who signed me off of a short film I did that was a very heartfelt romantic comedy with a very crazy premise, and the first script he sent me when I signed with him was Marry Me. I read it and I thought, ‘This is fabulous, but who the hell is going to play this role?’ Then I went to meet Elaine Goldsmith Thomas, and found out that Jennifer was involved, and was really excited by that, but I still felt that the male character of Charlie was lacking. I told Elaine in our first meeting, ‘Right now this guy feels like he’s so impressed by her fame, and I would never want to see a woman this powerful end up with a guy who’s bowled over that she flies in a private jet. We need to revamp this character. We need to make him someone who has a completely different life, a much smaller life, but a life that he is fully confident in. Kat is obviously beautiful, talented, intelligent, wealthy, and all those things, but he needs to be equally appealing in a completely different way.’ She looked at me and said, ‘That’s what we’re missing. Let’s go meet Jennifer.’
(from left, center) Charlie Gilbert (Owen Wilson) and Kat Valdez (Jennifer Lopez) in Marry Me, directed by Kat Coiro.
And how’d that meeting go?
When we went and met Jennifer, she was singing a song along to a Bluetooth and kind of explaining something she wanted to do musically. The Bluetooth dropped out and she kept singing, and I was like, ‘Oh my god!’ I just saw Jennifer Lopez with completely fresh eyes. I saw her as this raw, vulnerable artist stripped of the trappings of glamour, sitting there with no makeup and no production value, and thought, ‘If we can capture a little bit of that, this film is going to be amazing.’ So it was a very quick process. And Elaine and Jennifer and I are all very, very collaborative. For us, it’s never about ego, it’s about the production, and where it’s going, and we immediately just felt this lockstep, and went into battle to get this movie made.
Director Kat Coiro and Jennifer Lopez on the set of Marry Me. Courtesy Universal Pictures.
There are all these wonderful songs, but also the costumes, especially the performance costumes, are spectacular. What were some of the discussions when collaborating with Caroline Duncan, the costume designer?
Caroline Duncan is a quiet genius. What Caroline always does is look at the clothing through the lens of the story, and you can see that she has crafted a journey for that character, who starts very angular and very put together, and with very hard lines. As this relationship progresses, and as she has these private moments, there’s a softness that comes into the textures and patterns and just everything about the way she dresses. When you look at her wedding dress, which is highly constructed and weighs 95 pounds, and then you go to that dress she wears at the prom, which looks like it’s made of cotton candy and air, it reflects the emotional journey of the character. It’s such a beautiful metaphor that the wedding dress literally weighs 95 pounds. It’s an anchor, and this public love between Kat and Bastian that is played out for the fans is literally pulling her down, but by the end, she’s very light. You know, another thing that Caroline balanced so well, that I think a lot of people would have struggled with, was Jennifer’s stylist Rob Zangardi also had a hand in creating especially the concert looks. It was so important, because Jennifer and Rob have this track record, to let them work their magic into it, and understand that that was all part of the process. They ended up becoming just an amazing team, and once I’d shared how the clothing should impact the emotional arc, it was fun to just step back and watch the masters at work.
(from left) Kat Valdez (Jennifer Lopez) and Charlie Gilbert (Owen Wilson) in Marry Me, directed by Kat Coiro. Courtesy Universal Pictures.Jennifer Lopez (center) as Kat Valdez in Marry Me, directed by Kat Coiro. Courtesy Universal Pictures.
Another refreshing element is the star is a 52-year-old Latina shown in a glamorous, vital way, and she and Owen Wilson are two romantic leads who are the same age. These are not things you normally see in films.
There were definitely conversations when we were casting about if she should play her as younger, and I was like, ‘Absolutely not!’ Part of what we love about her is she has been around. She has lived her life in the public eye. We all know exactly how old she is, and we should embrace that. It was the same with Owen. There were definitely people who said to me that rom-coms are for younger people, and I said no. People in their 50s still fall in love, and their love is far more interesting and nuanced and layered and different. We don’t see it very often, and it’s not about falling into a fugue state and sacrificing your life for this hot, sexy love, it’s about having two lives that have been lived, and bringing them together. You’ll notice in the film that nobody sacrifices their career, or sacrifices huge chunks of themselves for love. If anything, their careers get stronger, and their subsidiary relationships with other people get stronger because it’s a mature relationship.
(from left) Charlie Gilbert’s dog Tank (Romeo), Charlie Gilbert (Owen Wilson), Kat Valdez (Jennifer Lopez) and Lou (Chloe Coleman) in Marry Me, directed by Kat Coiro. Courtesy Universal Pictures.
Something else you never see is Bastian is a lot younger than Kat. That totally flips the script and it absolutely works.
It does! In terms of Maluma and Jen, it’s like, who cares how old they are? They are both so magnetic, and their chemistry is so on fire that I don’t care how old Maluma and Jennifer are. The only thing I like about it is having an older woman with a younger man when we’ve seen the opposite so many times, but it doesn’t even play into the story for me, because they’re two artists, and art is timeless and ageless. One of the things Jennifer and I talked a lot about was this is a character who has had certain patterns in her romantic life, and she has not been able to break them. She falls for the bad boy, the glamorous artist, she’s all confused by the heat that she feels in an artistic collaboration. So finding someone totally out of the box shakes up her whole life. A lot of people said, ‘Oh, they’re a weird pairing.’ And I’m like, ‘Absolutely!’ They need to be a weird pairing. She’s doing something different, something out of her comfort zone, and that’s what makes it special. That’s what’s gonna make it enduring. I see those guys lasting forever.
Marry Me is in theaters and streaming only on Peacock starting February 11th.
Director Kat Coiro and Jennifer Lopez on the set of Marry Me. Courtesy Universal Pictures.
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We’ve got our long-awaited look at Jurassic World: Dominion, the third and final film in the new trilogy that began in 2015 with Jurassic World. The official trailer introduces new dinosaurs, some beloved old favorites, and a slew of Jurassic veterans, including the new trilogy’s leads, Chris Pratt’s Owen Grady and Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire Dearing. Dominion also brings back Jurassic Park’s original tremendous trio of Sam Neill’s Alan Grant, Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler, and Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm. Newcomers to the franchise include DeWanda Wise and Mamaoudou Athie.
As much as we love this cast, the stars of any Jurassic film are obviously the dinos. The franchise’s stalwarts return, the T-rex and the velociraptors, yet there will be some new dinosaurs ready to sink their teeth into the proceedings. One of those is a different breed of velociraptor called the atrociraptor – a species that is somehow stronger, smarter, and faster than the o.g. type. Here’s hoping Blue makes it out okay!
The last film in the franchise, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, ended with the dinosaurs being released into the wild, and this is the reason why Dominion, set four years later, is such a globe-trotting adventure story. By the time Dominion picks up, humanity has come to an uneasy truce with living with dinosaurs in the wild. It’s a balance that seems unsustainable, and our heroes will be flying around the world trying to solve the problem.
Dominion is directed by Colin Trevorrow, the man who brought Jurassic World to the, well, world, back in 2015. Trevorrow has promised that Dominion will feature more animatronic dinosaurs than the previous two films had, which is a throwback to how Steven Spielberg approached the original Jurassic Park, with a mixture of practical and special effects. The first trailer certainly looks great, and we’re eager to see more.
Jurassic World: Dominion stomps theaters on June 10, 2022. Check out the new trailer below:
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While Robert Pattinson has been talking about Bruce Wayne’s transformation into Batman (including how for one terrified Gothamite, Batman probably looked like a werewolf) in The Batman, Colin Farrell’s metamorphosis into the pockmarked, obese Penguin was an even harder transition. Physically, that is. Speaking with Varietyat Sundance, Farrell revealed that at the beginning of The Batman filming, it took four hours to turn him into the iconic villain, complete with a combover, layers of fat, and an unrecognizable face.
“Eventually they got it down to two,” Farrell told Variety.
Even two hours is an awfully long time in a makeup chair, but Farrell was eager to do it for a film he was happy to take a smaller role in. Not for nothing, Farrell will get a chance to expand his Penguin character in a spinoff series on HBO Max.
He was on hand at Sundance to discuss After Yang, writer/director Kogonada’s slow-boil sci-fi film about a family in the near future reckoning with loss, impermanence, and connection after their A.I. helper breaks down. Farrell stars alongside Justin H. MIn, Malea Emma, Tjandrawidjaja, Haley Lu Richardson and Jodie Turner-Smith in a film he said was “one of my most favorite experiences by a mile.”
In The Batman, Farrell took on that supporting role with equal enthusiasm. The film obviously belongs to Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne, with meaty roles for Zoë Kravitz’s Selina Kyle/Catwoman and Paul Dano’s the Riddler, who features as the film’s primary villain. Farrell said he was interested in the role because of writer/director Matt Reeves.
“Matt Reeves is a wonderful filmmaker, so I was just grateful to be allowed anywhere near it,” Farrell told Variety. “Hopefully people are entertained by it and moved by it. It’s a very unique take on a story that’s often been told.”
At long last, we have an official release date and supporting cast for Disney+’s long-awaited Obi-Wan Kenobi series. Ewan McGregor is reprising his role of the venerable Jedi Master on May 25, bringing along a host of great co-stars. McGregor first played Obi-Wan Kenobi way back in 1999 in the first of George Lucas’sprequel trilogy Star Wars:The Phantom Menace.
Obi-Wan Kenobi is set 10 years after the events of 2005’s Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, where we saw McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi have to brutally dispatch his protégé, Annakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) after the latter slipped over to the Dark Slide and slaughtered a slew of young Padawans in the process. The series will see the return of Christensen in the role of Darth Vader, joining a bunch of excellent performers like Joel Edgerton, Moses Ingram, Kumail Nanjiani, Bonnie Piesse, Indira Varma, O’Shea Jackson, Rupert Friend, Sung Kang, Simone Kessell, and actor/director Benny Safdie.
The series comes from director/producer Deborah Chow and will be the nextaddition to Disney+’s growing slate of Star Wars content. Their current Star Wars series, The Book of Boba Fett (itself a spinoff from The Mandalorian) just wrapped its final episode. Then there’s Andor, starring Diego Luna as the heoric pilot from Rogue One, due out later this year. Further down the road is the Rosario Dawson-led Ahsoka, which is currently casting.
It’ll be great to see McGregor back in the role that catapulted him to stardom, one he handled with aplomb despite having the rather massive shoes of Alec Guinness to fill. It’s worth noting that Obi-Wan Kenobi‘s release date of May 25, 2022, is exactly 45-years to the day after the original Star Wars hit theaters on May 25, 1977.
Here’s the official synopsis from Disney+:
The story begins 10 years after the dramatic events of “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” where Obi-Wan Kenobi faced his greatest defeat—the downfall and corruption of his best friend and Jedi apprentice, Anakin Skywalker, who turned to the dark side as evil Sith Lord Darth Vader.
The series also marks the return of Hayden Christensen in the role of Darth Vader. Joining the cast are Moses Ingram, Joel Edgerton, Bonnie Piesse, Kumail Nanjiani, Indira Varma, Rupert Friend, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Sung Kang, Simone Kessell, and Benny Safdie.
“Obi-Wan Kenobi” is executive-produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Michelle Rejwan, Deborah Chow, Ewan McGregor and Joby Harold.
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Robert Pattinson was always going to bring something unique to his portrayal of Bruce Wayne. We knew this from the moment his casting was announced, as he’s chosen a post-Twilight career path that has been focused on characters in extremis. Whether it was playing a wildcard bank robber hellbent on freeing his brother from prison in the Safdie brothers insane Good Time to a lighthouse keeper barreling towards, then far, far past the edge of sanity in The Lighthouse, Pattinson has gravitated towards men in turmoil.
This brings us to his iteration of Bruce Wayne in writer/director Matt Reeve’s The Batman. We’ve known for a while now that Reeves’ vision for the character was steeped in the specifics of the noir detective story, a far cry from the usual template for a superhero movie, even one based on the most brooding character in the comics canon. What’s more, Reeves promised that his film would eschew the origin story in favor of dropping in on an already formed Batman in year two of his work. What we weren’t sure about was what kind of Batman Pattinson would be, even if we were confident he’d bring his usual intensity and edginess to the role. Yet Pattinson has been giving us hints along the way, and now he reveals just how different of a Bruce Wayne he’s portraying in a new profile in GQ.
“I’ve definitely found a little interesting thread. He doesn’t have a playboy persona at all, so he’s kind of a weirdo as Bruce and a weirdo as Batman, and I kept thinking there’s a more nihilistic slant to it,” Pattinson told GQ. “’Cause, normally, in all the other movies, Bruce goes away, trains, and returns to Gotham believing in himself, thinking, I’m gonna change things here. But in this, it’s sort of implied that he’s had a bit of a breakdown. But this thing he’s doing, it’s not even working. Like, it’s two years into it, and the crime has gotten worse since Bruce started being Batman. The people of Gotham think that he’s just another symptom of how shit everything is. There’s this scene where he’s beating everyone up on this train platform, and I just love that there’s a bit in the script where the guy he’s saving is also just like: Ahh! It’s worse! You’re either being mugged by some gang members, or a monster comes and, like, fucking beats everybody up! The guy has no idea that Batman’s come to save him. It just looks like this werewolf.”
We’ve never heard the Batman/werewolf comparison, but it’s apt considering both require a transformation into a savage beast. The glimpses we’ve seen thus far have definitely depicted a non-glamorous Bruce Wayne, one who looks sullen, bitter, and ready to snap. Even Ben Affleck’s vengeful, furious Bruce Wayne in Batman v Superman still partook in a cocktail party (at Lex Luthor’s place, no less) and enjoyed an expensive car or three. Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne, however, looks like he hasn’t socialized with anyone save Alfred since he was a child. Just look at how dour he is in The Batman‘s funeral scene.
Pattinson goes on to describe an interaction with the ever-loyal Alfred (Andy Serkis) that further exemplifies his tortured version of Bruce Wayne. Alfred bemoans the fact that, according to him, Bruce is besmirching the Wayne family name by dressing up like a bat and beating up criminals at night. “This is my family legacy,” Bruce replies. “If I don’t do this, then there’s nothing else for me.” The key part is that “there’s nothing left for me” bit, depicting a young man who has all but lost his connection to humanity. Here’s how Pattinson read this exchange:
“I think that makes it a lot sadder,” he told GQ. “Like, it’s a sad movie. It’s kind of about him trying to find some element of hope, in himself, and not just the city. Normally, Bruce never questions his own ability; he questions the city’s ability to change. But I mean, it’s kind of such an insane thing to do: The only way I can live is to dress up as a bat.”
Considering The Batman runs at nearly three hours long, these tidbits, while intriguing, are giving us only a hint of what he, Reeves, and The Batman team have in store for us.
Pattinson and Serkis are joined by a stellar cast, including Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle/Catwoman, Colin Farrell as Oswald Cobblepot/The Penguin, Paul Dano as Edward Nashton/The Riddler, and Jeffrey Wright as Jim Gordon.
