We’ve got a while to wait until Pixar’s 27th feature film, Elemental, hits theaters, but it’s never too early to get a sneak peek at what the vaunted animation studio is up to next. As you might have guessed, Elemental will focus on the four elements, only in Pixar’s hands, they’ll be living together in a city. The first image, a piece of very gorgeous concept art, depicts fire (named Ember) and water (named Wade) walking down the street of a city itself inspired by the elements. Director Peter Sohn (The Good Dinosaur) will helm the film, based on an idea he had.
Elemental will focus on Wade (described as, wait for it, a go-with-the-flow type of guy), and Ember, a more fiery character, as they explore the big city. They’ll also be living with two more elements representing earth and the wind, and in classic Pixar fashion, these four very different beings will come to understand that they’re not as different as they think they are.
Sohn was inspired by his upbringing in New York. “My parents emigrated from Korea in the early 1970s and built a bustling grocery store in the Bronx,” he said in a statement. “We were among many families who ventured to a new land with hopes and dreams—all of us mixing into one big salad bowl of cultures, languages, and beautiful little neighborhoods. That’s what led me to Elemental.”
The image reveals Wade and Ember enjoying the sights (at least Wade seems to be enjoying himself) in a city that’s rendered with an elemental design itself, including beautiful foliage on the buildings, water elements, and even fire, seemingly contained, in bands around a building on the right.
“Our story is based on the classic elements—fire, water, land, and air. Some elements mix with each other, and some don’t,” Sohn added in his director’s statement. “What if these elements were alive?”
We’re going to find out. Elemental is due in theaters on June 16, 2023.
Check out the full image here:
For more on Pixar and Walt Disney Studios, check out these stories:
Marvel’s Moon Knight recently concluded its first six-episode run (a second season is possible). Marvel’s latest Disney+ series centers on a mild-mannered British gift shop employee named Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac). Steven learns in the very first episode that he shares a body with an American mercenary named Marc Spector, who works as the human avatar for the ancient Egyptian god Khonshu (voiced by F. Murray Abraham). With the help of Steven and Marc’s mutual love interest Layla El-Faouly (May Calamawy), they have to stop religious zealot Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) from unleashing the Egyptian Goddess Ammit so she can purge the world of all who have ever or will ever perform an evil deed. Season one was a wild, weird, and wonderful triumph, and now fans are clamoring for confirmation that they’ll see more of Isaac as the complicated superhero, and Calamawy as El-Faouly, who is now following her own hero’s journey. There are so many unanswered questions, not least about the fate of the villain Harrow and the introduction of a new mysterious presence during the end credits.
Egyptian filmmaker Mohamed Diab, who led the directing team, believed capturing the essence of both ancient and contemporary Egypt was central to the success of the show. To that end, he hired award-winning Egyptian composer Hesham Nazih to create the score for Moon Knight. It was his first major English language project and his first foray into the Marvel universe. The Credits spoke to Nazih, who is known for incorporating traditional and ancient Egyptian elements in his scores while maintaining a very contemporary sound, about capturing a world of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses, Marvel superheroes, and the sounds of contemporary Cairo.
Hesham Nazih
Cairo feels so alive and present in Moon Knight, it’s like another character in the show. The city is both ancient and very contemporary. How did you go about bringing life to it, and capturing the vibrancy of the city?
If you listen to the album, there’s a cue called “She Is Here”, and halfway through it, you’ll find a kind of electronic dance music in it. It was a fight scene on the rooftops of Cairo. That’s the closest type of music for describing the life of the city. Cairo is a very vibrant, very dynamic city, a vast city. It contains so many different styles and eras. When you drive for 10 minutes outside the city, you step into a place that is thousands of years old, and then you hop on a bridge and go across the city and find yourself in a new, just developed neighborhood. It is truly the city that never sleeps. It’s always on, 24 hours a day, and it’s full of sounds like car horns, coffee shops, loud music, people talking, drinking, eating, and chatting. It’s a very upbeat scene, so describing Cairo musically, it has to be vibrant and both ancient and very modern, and that’s what I tried to do in “She Is Here”.
The music for Arthur Harrow’s theme had to be a challenge because he is not just bad, he really believes what he is doing is for the greater good.
He’s not a typical villain. It’s not just about evil, he’s pursuing his beliefs. He thinks he is serving the world, stopping the bad things from happening before they even happen. Hypothetically, this sounds like a good idea, but it’s going to create so many worse things before achieving this principle. He’s one-minded. He is one of those villains that makes some sense at the time, which is even worse because that makes him eviler without him even knowing. Musically, Ethan and I discussed many times that the theme for Harrow has to have an otherworldly motif that describes him as an accomplished man, not just an evil figure.
I opted for a very minimal motif that may resonate with listeners as building in very unsettling movements. It is very repetitive and goes in a spiral way as if someone is coming closer to you slowly but steadily, that you cannot resist or stop. This was my approach to Harrow.
Singing is such an important aspect of Egyptian music. You incorporated choirs and singing in quite a bit of the score, including chants sung in ancient Egyptian. Why is that such a valuable element to the finished score?
You’re right about the value of singing in Egyptian culture. It is so much a part of our daily activities. We are a singing people, and we sing in almost everything we do, in all ceremonies and festivities. We even have a very touching kind of singing called laments in which you mourn the deceased by singing. So when I first thought of how I would bring the Egyptian essence to the music, I thought of the vocalists. I looked for little phrases from the ancient Egyptian language to be sung within the music, and I came across the few words that are, in essence, praising words for Egyptian ancient kings on their enthronement. It’s usually carved on the cartouche and the back of the throne of the Egyptian king. I added some choir to the music, and then those elements got bigger and bigger, and halfway through I realized that the vocal element had become, not just an integral part of the music, it had become the music itself, where the orchestra plays around them and supports them. It’s an important tool that helped me deliver the sense of massiveness needed to complement the story.
There are also Egyptian instruments woven into the traditional orchestra, some of them ancient, like the Rababa, which is an ancestor to the violin, and also the Arghul and the Mizmar horn, both of which belong to the woodwind family. Why did you choose those in particular?
I’ve used them all in various recordings before, and the reason why I chose those is that there are so many Middle Eastern instruments used in a wide spectrum of the Pan-Arab and Mediterranean regions. You can find them in Moroccan and Turkish music. Those instruments you just mentioned, the ones I used, are historically Egyptian. You find them in other countries, but they are essentially Egyptian. They are very ancient, and the amazing thing about them is they haven’t changed at all since they were used back 5,000 years ago. They were engraved on the walls of the temples, and they are still used in modern music today. It’s amazing to me that they’ve existed and been used for thousands of years. They each have a very unique timbre and unique characteristic that is so Egyptian, just the sound of it and the way the players play it, no matter the theme or line you give them, will unwillingly inject the soul and spirit of Egypt towards this musical line, so they’re fantastic in all senses. What’s more, they sit perfectly well within the orchestra and blend incredibly well. So many ancient instruments across the world have a fantastic sound, but when used in the orchestra, you need to minimize or eliminate some sections of the orchestra to make room for them. These ones, no. They sit so well, in so many different orchestral domains. These are the reasons why I chose them.
You’ve said the workflow and the system at Marvel are very different than your experience as a scoring artist for Egyptian film and TV. How so?
I set my own schedule. It’s my own workflow. With Marvel, there’s a big team of music editors, and it’s more organized about deadlines. When I write music for the Egyptian audience or the Pan-Arab audience, it’s not like writing music for the Marvel audience, which is huge. There are lots of differences between Marvel and my previous experience, but we all aim for the same goal. This experience has been a joy, because we all, everywhere in the world, are aiming for those unforgettable moments that we try to create on the screen for audiences.
All 6 episodes of Moon Knight are streaming now on Disney+.
The official trailer for The Boys season three opens with Homelander (Antony Starr) on an apology tour. “I feel in love with the wrong woman,” Homelander tells one interviewer after another, referring to his partner-in-fascism and love interest from season 2, Stormfront (Aya Cash). That relationship got…messy, especially after it was revealed that Stormfront was a full-blown Nazi. So, Homelander is out there trying to tell anyone who will listen that it was all just a mistake and that he, chastened by falling for the wrong girl, has learned invaluable lessons.
As The Boys watchers know, Homelander is a very, very bad man, and while he’s hellbent on cleaning up his public image, in private, he’ll continue his murderous ways. The new trailer also reveals that he’ll now be up against a very different Billy Butcher (Karl Urban)—thanks to a serum delivered by Maeve (Dominque McElligott), Billy can become a supe (a superhuman for you not versed in Boys-speak) for 24 hours.
And then, the trailer also gives us our first glimpse at Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), who seems to have some anger issues. He’s not the only new face around. The trailer also reveals newcomers Blue Hawk (Nick Wechsler) and the Crimson Countess (Laurie Holden). Meanwhile, returning champions include Hughie (Jack Quaid), Starlight (Erin Moriarty), A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso), The Deep (Chace Crawford), Frenchie (Tomer Capone), and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara).
Check out the trailer below. The Boys season 3 hits Amazon Prime Video on June 3.
Here’s the official synopsis of The Boys season 3:
It’s been a year of calm. Homelander’s subdued. Butcher works for the government, supervised by Hughie of all people. But both men itch to turn this peace and quiet into blood and bone. So when The Boys learn of a mysterious anti-Supe weapon, it sends them crashing into The Seven, starting a war, and chasing the legend of the first Superhero: Soldier Boy. Season 3 arrives June 3rd, only on Prime Video.
For more on Amazon Prime Video, check out these stories:
One of the most common jokes of the last, oh, five or so years has been that real life has become an episode of Black Mirror. The peerless series, created by Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones, depicts a future world in which technology has run amok, the worst people on the planet seem to amass the most power, and the very things we rely on to escape our relentless and terrifying reality end up swallowing us whole. There were whispers that because the world kept getting more Black Mirror-like since the show’s premiere way back in 2011 (originally on Channel 4 in the U.K.), Charlie Brooker, Jones, and the Black Mirror creative team felt no need to return to their landmark series. In fact, during the darkest days of the pandemic, Brooker told the U.K.’s Radio Times Magazinethat he wasn’t sure he could make another Black Mirror. “At the moment, I don’t know what stomach there would be for stories about societies falling apart, so I’m not working away on one of those. I’m sort of keen to revisit my comic skill set, so I’ve been writing scripts aimed at making myself laugh.”
Luckily, Varietyhas confirmed that’s not the case, as they’ve confirmed that Black Mirror is returning after a 3-year hiatus. Of course, we won’t know a thing about what the new episodes will explore, but Variety does report that season 6 will have more episodes than the shorter-than-usual season 5, which had only three. Those three episodes in season five were fantastic, however, and included great performances from stars Anthony Mackie and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in the episode “Striking Vipers,” Topher Grace and Andrew Scott in “Smithereens,” and Miley Cyrus and Angourie Rice in “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too.”
Variety has a bit more to their scoop that adds to the intrigue—they’ve learned that season 6 will be “even more cinematic in scope, with each installment being treated as an individual film.” What’s made Black Mirror such unbelievable TV has been not only how eerily prescient it’s felt, but how exquisitely shot the show is. Sure, we’re living in this extended “Golden era” of TV, but Black Mirror has always been one of the best shows around, period.
Brooker and Jones had left their previous company, House of Tomorrow, which maintained rights over Black Mirror. Luckily for all involved, a deal has been worked out. Now it seems as if Black Mirror is returning, and perhaps—one can dream—the world it returns to will feel a little less like one of its episodes.
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
The Predator franchise is getting a very compelling prequel.
The first trailer for director Dan Trachtenberg’s (10 Cloverfield Lane, The Boys) Predator sequel Prey is here, revealing a glimpse at how the cosmos’ most relentless Alpha Predator has been hunting on our planet for a long, long time. Prey is set in the Comanche Nation some 300 years ago and is centered on Naru (Amber Midthunder), a very skilled Comanche warrior who was taught by some of the Nation’s most revered hunters. As you’ve likely guessed by now, Naru’s skills will be put to the test when her camp is threatened by a hunter who exceeds even her abilities. Naru’s intent on protecting her people, but she’ll be pitted against a force unlike any she could possibly imagine.
Trachtenberg’s film comes from a script by Patrick Aison (Jack Ryan), and the production was committed to making sure their portrayal of the Comanche was accurate. A key to this effort was producer Jhane Myers, an acclaimed filmmaker and member of the Comanche nation, and the cast, along with Midthunder, is comprised entirely of Native and First Nation talent. This includes Dakota Beavers, Stormee Kipp, Julian Black Antelope, and Michelle Thrush.
Check out the trailer below. Prey begins its hunt on Hulu on August 5.
Here’s the official synopsis:
“Prey,” an all-new action-thriller from 20th Century Studios directed by Dan Trachtenberg (“The Boys,” “10 Cloverfield Lane”) and the newest entry in the “Predator” franchise, will stream August 5, 2022, exclusively on Hulu.
Set in the Comanche Nation 300 years ago, “Prey” is the story of a young woman, Naru, a fierce and highly skilled warrior. She has been raised in the shadow of some of the most legendary hunters who roam the Great Plains, so when danger threatens her camp, she sets out to protect her people. The prey she stalks, and ultimately confronts, turns out to be a highly evolved alien predator with a technically advanced arsenal, resulting in a vicious and terrifying showdown between the two adversaries.
“Prey” is directed by Dan Trachtenberg, written by Patrick Aison (“Jack Ryan,” “Treadstone”), and produced by John Davis (“Jungle Cruise,” “The Predator”) and Jhane Myers (“Monsters of God”), with Lawrence Gordon (“Watchmen”), Marty Ewing (“It: Chapter Two”), James E. Thomas, John C. Thomas and Marc Toberoff (“Fantasy Island”) serving as executive producers.
The filmmakers were committed to creating a film that provides an accurate portrayal of the Comanche and brings a level of authenticity that rings true to its Indigenous peoples. Myers, an acclaimed filmmaker, Sundance Fellow and member of the Comanche nation herself, is known for her attention and dedication to films surrounding the Comanche and Blackfeet nations and her passion for honoring the legacies of the Native communities. As a result, the film features a cast comprised almost entirely of Native and First Nation’s talent, including Amber Midthunder (“The Ice Road,” “Roswell, New Mexico”), newcomer Dakota Beavers, Stormee Kipp (“Sooyii”), Michelle Thrush (“The Journey Home”), Julian Black Antelope (“Tribal”).
For more on films and shows on Hulu, check out these stories:
We’ve got a fresh look at Jane Foster as the Mighty Thor.
Natalie Portman’s return to the Thor fold in Taika Waititi’s upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder as Jane Foster would have been exciting enough, but we’ve known since Comic-Con 2019 that Portman’s Foster would also be Mighty Thor. Here’s how Waititi revealed that bit of news way back when:
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – JULY 20: (L-R) President of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige, Director Taika Waititi, Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth of Marvel Studios’ ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ at the San Diego Comic-Con International 2019 Marvel Studios Panel in Hall H on July 20, 2019 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney)
Now, Marvel has revealed a new image of Portman as Mighty Thor, holding Mjolnir, the magical hammer we all know and love. Seeing Jane Foster as Mighty Thor certainly shocked regular old Thor (Chris Hemsworth, of course) in the first trailer for Love and Thunder, and we’re guessing it’ll take him most of the movie to get over it. In fact, Thor: Love and Thunder finds the God of Thunder in a reflective mood and on a new kind of quest—one to find inner peace. Yet we know that Thor will have to get into the action eventually, and thus he’s lured into yet another battle by a cosmic psychopath called Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale) who plans on killing all the gods. In order to defeat Gorr, Thor will need his old pal Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), Korg (Waititi himself), and, yes, Jane Foster.
In another new image, we see Thor definitely in battle mode as he dons his black armored chest plate, that lush fur cape, and Stormbreaker, his post-Mjolnir weapon. Thor: Love and Thunder is easily one of the most hotly-anticipated films in MCU’s Phase 4, and it’s the next one up, too. The cosmic action gets underway when Thor: Love and Thunder premieres on July 8.
Here’s the official synopsis for Thor: Love and Thunder:
Marvel Studios’ “Thor: Love and Thunder” finds the God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth) on a journey unlike anything he’s ever faced – a quest for inner peace. But Thor’s retirement is interrupted by a galactic killer known as Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale), who seeks the extinction of the gods. To combat the threat, Thor enlists the help of King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), Korg (Taika Waititi) and ex-girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who – to Thor’s surprise – inexplicably wields his magical hammer, Mjolnir, as the Mighty Thor. Together, they embark upon a harrowing cosmic adventure to uncover the mystery of the God Butcher’s vengeance and stop him before it’s too late. Directed by Taika Waititi (“Thor: Ragnarok,” “Jojo Rabbit”) and produced by Kevin Feige and Brad Winderbaum, “Thor: Love and Thunder” opens in U.S. theaters July 8, 2022.
For more on Thor: Love and Thunder, check out these stories:
*Big fat spoiler alert for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.*
Have you seen Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness? Good, that means you can follow us through this portal into a universe where we can discuss the film’s epic mid-credits reveal. But first, a word about director Sam Raimi, who has returned to superhero moviemaking after his game-changing, early aughts Spider-Man trilogy with a bang here, delivering a Marvel movie unlike any we’ve seen before. Yes, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness connects directly to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, and yes, the movie delivers the witty one-liners, the spectacle, and the CGI wizardry we’ve come to expect, but it feels decidedly like a Sam Raimi movie. There’s a ringing horror element that runs through the whole movie, highlighted when Doctor Strange has to embody his own corpse from another universe to save the day. Yet if there was one moment that was true to the Marvel formula, it was the big reveal during the mid-credits scene. And that reveal, you know, was massive—Charlize Theron has joined the MCU.
In a video Theron posted to Twitter, Theron takes us behind the scenes to have a quick look at the creation of her character, Clea. The mid-credits scene only offers us a few clues as to who Theron is, but a dip into the comics reveals more. Clea is one of Doctor Strange’s students. She’s also a romantic partner (she eventually marries him in the comics), and, in one of the multiverses, she’s the Sorceress Supreme. In the mid-credits scene, Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch, obviously) is walking through New York when he’s stopped by Clea. She tells him he’s caused an incursion for all his multiverse-meddling, and she needs him to come with her to fix it. Then she slices a fat hole in the universe, exposing the Dark Dimension that was revealed back in 2016’s Doctor Strange. Naturally, Doctor Strange joins her immediately and they hop through the portal and off for a fresh adventure.
Theron had first revealed that she’d joined the MCU as Clea back on May 10, four days after Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness premiered:
Clea is a powerful sorceress, but her outfit also appears much more sturdy and armored than what we see Doctor Strange typically wearing. How many battles has Clea faced? But then, the purple cape, along with the purple eyeshadow, definitely gives off a Sorceress Supreme vibe. The big question now is, when will see Theron’s Clea in real action in an MCU movie? The answer, of course, remains a secret, but you don’t introduce a star as big as Theron without having grand plans for her.
For more on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, check out these stories:
Featured image: LONDON, ENGLAND – FEBRUARY 02: Charlize Theron attend the EE British Academy Film Awards 2020 After Party at The Grosvenor House Hotel on February 02, 2020 in London, England. (Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images)
Moon Knight was a particularly intriguing challenge for costume designer Meghan Kasperlik. Coming off an incredible piece of work with her designs for the gritty crime series Mare of Easttown on HBO, where Kasperlik was key to helping Kate Winslet fully embody a detective in Delaware County, Pennsylvania (as a DelCo native, I remain amazed by this series on every level), Kasperlik plunged into the realm of superheroes, Egyptian mythology, and the massive Marvel Cinematic Universe with Moon Knight.
Yet the series, which just finished its six-episode run on Disney+, offered unique challenges for a Marvel project. For the first time in a Disney+ Marvel series, Moon Knight would feature a character not seen before in an MCU film. Oscar Isaac does double duty in the series, starring as a fidgety museum gift shop employee named Steven Grant who happens to also be Marc Spector, an American mercenary who works at the behest of the Egyptian God Khonoshu. Marc Spector then takes on the superheroic persona—and super-suit—of the titular Moon Knight.
The challenges for Steven and Marc—reconciling their clashing personalities, dealing with a very demanding Egyptian God, trying to wrest control of their body from the other—increase tenfold when Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) shows up determined to dispatch them while he completes a quest to release the Goddess Ammit. Harrow’s reasoning? Through Ammit, he will be able to cleanse the planet of all evil-doers (or so he claims), based on a questionable calculus that goes by another name—mass murder.
We spoke to Kasperlik about jumping into the Marvel fray, designing Moon Knight’s costume, and how she handled creating the looks for a talking hippotamus who also happens to be the Goddess Tawaret.
So talk to me about plunging into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and doing so with a brand new character.
I’ve been wanting to work with Marvel for a while now. Creatively, you get to do some really amazing things. But I always like to do my own take on it, I like to be very involved from the beginning. So it was really great that my first venture into Marvel happens to be one where we’ve never met this person in the MCU on screen before. When I heard it was Oscar, that was just a no-brainer. Also, I’ve worked with cinematographer Greg Middleton before—we did Watchmen together.
We used the comics, but I didn’t go as heavy into the comic as I did with Watchmen, because the graphic novel was really Watchmen creator Damon Lindelof’s Bible. For Moon Knight, we referenced the comics, but we were also asking ourselves, ‘How do we take it to the next level? How do we bring these two-dimensional characters to life?’ What helps is that Oscar’s performance is just phenomenal throughout. So it was like, I need costumes to work with that. How can my work be up to that level?
Oscar Isaac is Marc Spector/Moon Knight in Marvel’s “Moon Knight.” Courtesy Marvel Studios/Disney+.
I imagine designing for Oscar’s character must’ve been a lot of fun because he plays essentially three people. He’s a nervous Brit as Steven Grant, a no-nonsense American mercenary as Marc Spector, and a superhero as Moon Knight.
So we started off with Steven, who was in Brixton, in London. That’s kind of a cooler area, but obviously, Steven is not super cool. So in the London scenes, we have Oscar in baggier pants and clunkier shoes. You really saw the transformation into Steven happening with Oscar. I could see it happening in the fitting. But there are hints of Marc and Moon Knight in Steven’s clothes. For example, his socks might look white, but they’re actually cool gray socks, which is a nod to the Moon Knight character. And then with Marc, he needed to blend in. I didn’t want the clothes to be as stylish, because Oscar has a friend that does Special Ops and he was telling me that when a person is a mercenary, they need to blend in.
So one interesting aspect is, that you actually don’t put a mercenary in black because you will notice black, so you put them in tans, browns, and charcoal grays because that blends into a crowd. So we have Marc in this brown jacket when we first see him. Then I also put him in a light gray hoodie as an ode to Moon Knight, too.
How did you go about designing the Moon Knight super-suit? It has a mummified wrapping element, a cloak, and so many more little details.
Marvel has a great development team that starts the process. Oscar wanted to have a very strong presence in the suit. So there were some alterations to the mummy wrappings. I love a lot of texture in my designs. So there are multiple layers of 3D printed textures on the Moon Knight suit, there were 803 individual pieces on it, with a lot of patterning and a lot of cutting. Not to mention the crest, which is partly inspired by the God Khonshu. And then underneath the lining of the cape, there are hieroglyphics—those are Khonshu’s oath of vengeance. Moon Knight is kind of like this substantiation of this God. They’re mirrored in ways. So there are lots of different elements in that suit that equate to a new kind of superhero.
And what about the color of Moon Knight’s super-suit?
In the comic, Moon Knight says something like, ‘I wear white, so you can see me coming.’ So we did that, while still keeping a little bit of the little gray and making it a little dingier, but you can still see him.
What about when Steven is inhabiting the Moon Knight suit and becomes Mr. Knight, and instead of the caped super-suit, it’s a literal suit?
It’s a white three-piece suit in the comics, and coming in I was slightly terrified because a white three-piece suit can go very wrong, like you’re suddenly in a wedding singer scenario. So that was another suit that I wanted to make sure had a lot of texture because I knew we would be filming outside, and I didn’t want when the light that hits it to go flat. So the fabric is actually white, it’s an upholstery fabric that has some texture. And then it has a little silver thread throughout so that when the light hits it, it’ll help bounce it off in a way that like gives it a little shimmer. Then the lapels are similar to what Khonshu wears on his chest. Khonshu has these like leather straps that criss-cross his chest, like bandoliers, and the print on the lapels of the Mr. Knight suit are like those bandoliers. Also, the buttons on the waistcoat are Khonshu’s symbol. I had an in-house metalsmith working on multiple things, and one of them was the buttons. He made more than 200. I mean, the level of detail is, is astonishing.
How much input do you have when the character is largely computer-generated, like Khonshu or Tawaret (Antonia Salib), a Goddess who takes the form of a talking hippo?
All of the CG characters in the show are fully made costumes that were worn on set. With Tawaret, the hippo, I had a metalsmith who made her headpiece, this crown which means mother and birth. Then there are hieroglyphics on her costume, there’s a handmade beetle on her chest, and there’s her jewelry, like the rings she wears and her bracelets. So everything was completely constructed and made, and Tawaret’s episode was a bit more playful and fun, and definitely the most colorful episode.
Then there’s the villain, Arthur Harrow, played by Ethan Hawke. I’ve read that he was modeled a bit on the Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh?
I spoke to Ethan at length about the character. We had really great conversations. Sometimes actors come in and you just start the fitting and talk while you’re doing it. Ethan and I had like a really good sit-down for probably an hour and a half, two hours, to really discuss who this character is and where we wanted to go. I sent him over renderings of like my thoughts, and we talked about Arthur Harrow, who’s a cult leader, but he’s a part of the people, he brought in like the monk-like thing. We did talk about David Koresh, and about cult leaders in general, and often they dress very simply. They’re very plain, but they might have an interesting haircut or they wear glasses or, in Arthur Harrow’s case, have a cane. So we went with these Monk-like linen clothes. We knew he’d be going to the desert, so we kept it simple. But if you go back and re-watch, you’ll see we have a few different shapes and a few different colors.
Those were my idea. I wanted to bring in a weird element, those sandals are a little clunky and unexpected. He also wears bracelets that you don’t see very much, but they’ve got engravings that are like the Death Prayer Book.
Finally, May Calamawy’s Layla El-Fouly is a badass, a romantic interest, and by the end, a superhero in her own right. How did you approach her look?
Yeah. So Mohammed Diab, our director, had a very strong request of wanting to show Egyptian women in a powerful way. In our story, Layla has lived in London for a while, but even though she’s left Egypt, she still has that culture, while she made her life in London. So it’s a mix of both cultures while being a badass. I wanted to make her a little bit sporty, but not in a stereotypical way with the leather jacket and tight jeans. We’ve seen that a lot. So I brought in a little color and played with texture and pattern. I just wanted her look to have a different feel than maybe some other action women that we’ve seen. And May is lovely and amazing, so it was really exciting to build a character with her.
The shadowy figure who sent House Atreides to their doom in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune? Yeah, it was Christopher Walken.
The legendary Walken is joining Denis Villeneuve’s eagerly-anticipated sequel, making him the third big name to round out the cast alongside Florence Pugh and Austin Butler. Walken’s not just joining the cast, he’s playing the major role of Emperor Shaddum IV, the prime mover in the Galactic power struggle at the heart of Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 classic.
The role of the Emperor was the last, big missing piece for Villeneuve, having already found his Princess Irulan Corrino in Pugh and his Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Butler. The cast already includes Timothée Chalamet as young hero Paul Atreides, Rebecca Ferguson as his mother, Lady Jessica, Zendaya as the Fremen Chani, Stellan Skarsgård as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck, and Javier Bardem as the Fremen Stilgar.
Emperor Shaddum IV was the unseen ruler in the first part of Dune who sent House Atreides, led by Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) to Arrakis to take over the spice trade from House Harkonnen. We learned in Part One (as readers of the book already knew, of course) that this was a set-up. House Harkonnen attacked and obliterated much of House Atreides, including Duke Leto, casting off Paul and Lady Jessica into the desert in a desperate attempt to survive and, if possible, plot their revenge. In Part Two, both the Emperor and his number two, the Baron, brutally lord over the remaining population of Arrakis—but a rebellion is brewing. Readers of the book and viewers of David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation also know that a big showdown is set for Chalamet’s Paul Atreides and Butler’s Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. But the figure pulling all the strings is the Emperor, and you couldn’t do much better than Walken for the role.
Filming on Part Two is set to begin this summer in Budapest.
Featured image: NEW YORK, NY – APRIL 16: Christopher Walken attends the “The Family Fang” Premiere – 2016 Tribeca Film Festival at BMCC John Zuccotti Theater on April 16, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival)
Netflix is taking you to Raccoon City, possibly the worst city in the world, via a trailer for their new live-action series based on the mega-popular video game series.
Resident Evil will follow the travails of Jade Wesker (Tamara Smart), and you Resident Evil fans will recognize that last name, as Jade is the daughter of the villain Albert Wesker (Lance Reddick). The series is set between the years 2022 and 2036, tracking Jade and her sister Billie (Siena Agudong) in 2022 as they move with their family to Raccoon City (why? why?) and eventually start to uncover the truth about their father. To be fair, in 2022, Raccoon City seems like a nice place to live, if your thing is a spick-and-span blandness that screams future dystopia. You know what definitely screams future dystopia? A shot of two viles in a laboratory that have Jade and Billie’s names on them—uh oh.
The 2036 portions of the series will find Jade in dire straits, trying to make it in a zombie-ravaged world thanks to the Umbrella Corp’s T-Virus. Making matters even worse for Jade is her sister Billie’s gone, and she wants answers.
We’ve obviously been to Raccoon City before via the six-film series directed by Paul W.S. Anderson that starred Milla Jovovich, as well as director Johannes Roberts’ stand-alone film Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City in 2021. Then there’s the animated series Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness that’s also on Netflix. Yet this particular Resident Evil has the distinction of being the first live-action series in the zombie franchise.
Joining Agudong, Reddick, and Smart are Ella Balinska, Paola Nuñez, and Adeline Rudolph.
Check out the trailer below. Resident Evil hits Netflix on July 14.
Here’s the official synopsis:
14 years after Joy caused so much pain, Jade Wesker fights for survival in a world overrun by the blood-thirsty infected and mind-shattering creatures. In this absolute carnage, Jade is haunted by her past in New Raccoon City, by her father’s chilling connections to the sinister Umbrella Corporation but mostly by what happened to her sister, Billie.
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
Here we are, 36-years after the original Top Gun, and Tom Cruise is back in the cockpit and going Mach 4 with his hair on fire again. Cruise, director Joseph Kosinski (they teamed up on the sci-fi film Oblivion), and their cast and crew have delivered one of the best action movies in years. Top Gun: Maverick manages the tricky feat of retaining what made the original so iconic while achieving newfound emotions, depth, and even more death-defying aerial feats. As the reviews are flying in, there is a consistent theme—this film is not just a ripping good time, it’s also a surprisingly emotional, old-fashioned action blockbuster made with impeccable craft. Also, and this is never easy, critics are pointing out an absolutely fantastic third act.
Let’s quickly situate ourselves with the story before moving onto the rave reviews. Top Gun: Maverick finds Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise, obviously) being summoned back to the Navy to help school a new class of Top Gun pilots before a top-secret, seriously dangerous mission. Yet Maverick’s return is complicated by his past—one of his students is Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, the son of Top Gun‘s Goose (Anthony Edwards), Mav’s best friend and former radar intercept officer who died during a tragic accident during a training mission that has haunted Mav ever since.
And who summoned Mav back into the Navy fold? One Admiral Kazansky, who you remember from the original film from his call sign—Iceman. Yup, Val Kilmer returns for a moving scene in Maverick, and it’s but one of the resonances from the original that helps give Maverick its emotional heft. New cast members include Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Monica Barbaro, and Greg Tarzan Davis.
Top Gun: Maverick his theaters on May 27.
Onto the reviews!
#TopGunMaverick is a stunning sequel. Hardly anything in it will surprise you, except how well it does nearly all the things audiences want and expect it to do. Our review: https://t.co/CkZn9jigdE
#TopGunMaverick has stronger internal & external conflicts than the original, but honors, blending past & present into a poignant, powerful thrill ride. Kosinski doesn’t emulate Scott, but he innovates & evolves. INCREDIBLE flight & dogfight sequences. Tom Cruise, terrific. pic.twitter.com/WOtvvAupyO
Yes I’m gonna say it and I don’t care who disagrees. #Topgun#TopGunMaverick is a perfect movie. They don’t make movies like that anymore. You wait and see. Your expectations of this movie should be higher than you think. pic.twitter.com/kQ4ecLsLQG
— Kristian Harloff (@KristianHarloff) May 10, 2022
#TopGunMaverick is pure movie magic. It brings us back to another era of blockbusters. Absolutely stunning flight sequences and an emotional core that resonates. See it in IMAX. pic.twitter.com/aDpjyrFlfm
The single greatest thing about the stratospherically spectacular #TopGunMaverick? The sheer love & utter reverence it has for its predecessor, credit Joseph Kosinski for delivering the single best film of ‘22, what an absolute GRAND SLAM Paramount has on its hands, straight FIRE pic.twitter.com/KKhCx1FKhR
#TopGunMaverick took my breathe away! An adrenaline rush tailor made for the summer blockbuster season. Not only does it give cinephiles jaw dropping aerial combat sequences, but packs an unexpected amount of emotion that will surely surprise many. 80s nostalgia done right! pic.twitter.com/CqpzuxR5Oq
Yes, #TopGunMaverick is a really entertaining movie. But it’s also maybe the most personal thing Tom Cruise has ever made? It’s all one big metaphor for Tom Cruise’s career and his vision of what movies should be. https://t.co/S7KQR2oN6R
Directed by Sam Raimi, Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is back in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and he and Supreme Sorcerer Wong (Benedict Wong) speedily land an unexpected assignment — protect America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), a teenage multiverse-traveler who can’t control her world-hopping powers. To keep his charge safe, Stephen turns to Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), who turns out to be living not in an apple orchard, busily mothering her twin boys, but in a barren land, population: 1, the Scarlet Witch. For Wanda, the only way back to Billy and Tommy, the boys she created in Westview, is to another universe where they still exist — but traveling between worlds is a talent she needs to take from America, first.
The action takes off across the multiverse, with America and her helpers and pursuer alike landing in alternate worlds where they contend with challenges ranging from the mundane (red means go, pizza comes in ball form) to the existential, up to and including death. And poor Strange can’t seem to land his love, Christine (Rachel McAdams) in any world, with the additional bad luck of encountering different versions of his personal enemies who remain embittered with the doctor across universes.
In terms of costumes, Strange is fairly consistent, even across several different worlds’ worth of Stephens. His enchanted cloak is back, of course. America, we are reminded by both her consistent teenager appearance and love of pizza, is but an adolescent, even if she holds one of the rarest powers in the multiverse. We see the most variety from the multitude of Wandas, who swing wildly from an athleisure-clad suburban mom to the slick and sinister-gowned Scarlett Witch. For costume designer Graham Churchyard, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was both a continuation of a world in which he’s spent many years — this is his sixth Marvel film — and a totally new assignment. “I’ve been quite happy for years being the guy in the workshop making all these supersuits, and then just kind of put my neck forward,” he said of his extensive resume prior to signing on with Multiverse of Madness as the film’s costume designer (he credits producer Eric Carroll for putting his name forward and his wife for pushing him to do it). We got to speak with him about landing the job, bringing the film’s repeat characters into new versions of their various worlds, and marrying physical costumes with their VFX counterparts.
So this was a very new experience.
Kevin Feige and Lou D’Esposito [both producers] had tried to promote me before, about six years ago, and that didn’t work out. I was a bit crestfallen, but I thought okay, I’ll go back to my job on Justice League, or whatever I was doing next. But it’s been absolutely amazing. Victoria [Alonso], Lou [D’Esposito], and Kevin [Feige] are just such amazing people to work for. And the visual department, they’re set up in such a way that I’m not saying it makes it easy, but they have a system. And because they’ve known me for so long, they trusted me to get on with stuff.
Elizabeth Olsen in in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” Courtesy Marvel Studios.
How did you approach a character like Wanda, aka theScarlet Witch, whose looks vary so much and whom we’ve seen elsewhere recently?
After WandaVision, part of the story is that she’s now gotten the Darkhold, is creating these hexes, and her character is moving on, as it were. So they wanted to get away from the last frames you saw of WandaVision, of something that looked more superhero and more like the comics, into another version that was a little more sinister. So I made some changes there in the crown. The tiara has this undefinable material. You’re not quite sure if it’s a jewel-like precious stone or something unknown, but it has this kind of deterioration on it. And the whole of her costume has this deteriorated effect. I was really happy with the way that worked out because we took the WandaVision costume but we cast it in clear tinted material. So when she’s flying around, backlit, and in the seance, you actually really see that the material of her costume has a jewel-like and translucent quality, which changes depending on the angle. And then I gave her sleeves, wanting to move away from the cold shoulder look. It gave her more of a unified look in a silhouette.
How did you develop what America should be wearing? Her costume winds up having to do a lot of work.
Now I can’t remember whether the jean jacket with the star on the back was actually scripted. I probably did about 40 illustrations for that, all with different back designs which were part of Mexican folklore, just to keep her heritage within Mexican culture. But in fact, there’s a bit of a mix-up, there are some Portuguese witchcraft symbols in there, too. The denim jacket is an idea that’s been around in fashion for a long time and then some emo kids, if you like, will write some poetry on it, or a slogan, or just personalize their own jacket. In one of the scripts, she was an orphan in an orphanage, and it felt like she’d be in her bedroom decorating this coat just to get out some of the angst at the way she’d had to survive for the last 14 years, being hustled around different universes. So that expressive poetry on there came out of her background. It’s all in Spanish and it all means something. If you saw it in close detail, people would recognize a lot of expressions there. I tried many things. I tried a camouflage that was red, white, and blue but mashed up, keeping America from the comics and the American flag, and blending that with Mexican folk art was where we got to.
I think, in the end, the denim jacket was more youthful, with the black jeans and high-top sneakers. It was just a better launch for her into the multiverse, at age 14, rather than some of the comic images. We didn’t particularly want to introduce anything that was too adult. We wanted to keep her in that early teens look. But it was also a very functional garment. There were many designs on the back and there were many discussions about how she would create these star portals when she had no control over them. So the star on the back became more significant. When she’s running down the street, at the opening when she first meets Strange, you just see this white star running down the street, so you don’t lose her in the crowd.
Xochitl Gomez in in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” Courtesy Marvel Studios.
What kind of research do you do going in, particularly related to the dojo-type setting and Wong’s character?
I certainly looked at what other people had done. Everything from samurai movies to any kind of Eastern culture. The vibe was set up in the first film. It was sportswear mixed with kimono styles. So just taking that one stage further — they wanted to upgrade Wong. I know he’s in almost every Marvel production made now, but they wanted to move him on. Because this film was a bit more fight- and battle-oriented, when Wong first arrives in the street, he has elements of kendo armor on his legs, and he’s wearing a very elaborate and embroidered garment, but the essence of it was to keep it a practical battle look. So his costume goes back to Imperial China, but still keeping the signature Wong colors that were set up in the first film, the purples and indigos. It was Sam’s idea to introduce the gold color. It worked. The deeper you look into that costume, the leather belt he wears is remarkably detailed, hand-tooled leather designed with serpents and dragons. We designed the rope dart which he uses several times. I wanted it to almost be like a Marvel comic relic, like Wong’s staff. In the first film, in the sanctum, they had these relics, which include the Cloak of Levitation. I just like to think that the rope dart that I designed was sort of a magical relic. It’s like a sort of physical taser, like an arrowhead on a ribbon, and it’s used in martial arts. It can be thrown and retrieved and hit enemies, and then rather than just staying out there like an arrowhead, you can retrieve it. It goes back to Chinese martial arts weaponry.
Starting with Strange’s cloak, is there a close collaboration between your department and the VFX team?
Doctor Strange’s cloak is quite often more physical than you realize. Because VFX is sort of on a budget, they like to leave it in as long as possible before it needs to take on some sort of personality. We have a shortie version which he wears when there are fights going on and then the rest of it is CG after that. Quite a lot of the time it’s really there as a physical thing. It was made on the first Doctor Strange, and then on this, we made ten more. He’s had six physical appearances in this costume, so we needed to not only upgrade his costume from a disciple to a master’s costume but we remade the cloaks. They were one of the most complicated things I’ve ever made. The design was worked out by Alexandra Byrne on the first movie with the director, and they arrived at that asymmetric, amazing piece of costume. But I’m used to working in my own capacity very closely with visual effects because you have to do all kinds of trick costumes to make them work for the stunts, special effects, and visual effects. So when the audience thinks, for example, on Avengers: Age of Ultron, there might be one or two Black Widow costumes, one or two Captain Americas, we made 20 repeats of each of those, and they are phenomenally complicated and usually take about a week [each]. The hours are just enormous. So Janek Sirrs, the remarkable visual effects producer, we had a lot of shortcuts. The visual effects results in this film are quite remarkable. And to John Mathieson [cinematographer] and Janek, I’d just like to say thank you for making me look so good. John’s lighting is remarkable and the intermeshing of all the visual effects just makes it look like everything is real, all the time. It’s very important to get that balance, in that relationship with the cinematographer and visual effects.
Benedict Cumberbatch in “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.”
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is in theaters now.
For more on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, check out these stories:
Writer Ben Macintyre’s book “Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory” lives up to its subtitle. The bizarre plan in question would barely be credible as the plot of a movie, let alone an actual piece of espionage history that really and truly did fool the Nazis and make an Allied victory possible. A sketch of that plan—doctor up a corpse to make it look like a high ranking British officer, fill in his backstory (photo of his sweetheart, proper credentials, etc.), and include detailed plans about a British attack on Nazi positions in Europe via Greece, and hope, against all odds, the Nazis fall for it and divert their resources from Sicily, the actual location of the Allied invasion. The number of things that had to go right for this ploy to work was astonishing, and as even a D-student of history knows, the Allied forces won the war, so the ploy, incredibly, worked.
You couldn’t read Macintyre’s book without telling yourself this should be a movie, especially when you learn that one of the scheme’s architects was a young Lieutenant Commander named Ian Fleming. (Yes, that Ian Fleming). And twelve years after its publication, director John Madden has delivered a riveting adaptation of a story with more moving parts than an amphibious assault.
Considered the greatest single deception in the history of espionage, the events surrounding Operation Mincemeat have been parlayed into a film before, director Ronald Neame’s The Man Who Never Was (1956), yet it’s fair to say Madden’s Operation Mincemeat, premiering today on Netflix, will likely be the definitive cinematic version. Working off a nimble script from Michelle Ashford, Madden has marshaled a stellar cast of performers, including Colin Firth as the operation’s chief Ewen Montagu (who went on a to write a history of the operation in 1953 that was the basis for the 1956 film), Matthew Macfadyen as his brilliant number two Charles Cholmondeley, Johnny Flynn as Ian Fleming, Kelly Macdonald as a crucial member of their team, Jean Leslie, and Jason Isaacs as the operation’s official Doubting Thomas, Admiral John Godfrey.
We spoke to Madden about the risks and rewards of adapting Macintyre’s book, and why Operation Mincemeat had to be more than just a spy thriller.
How did you first come to Ben Macintyre’s book?
I was aware of the story, you know, in a kind of urban myth way. When I was growing up we had the original account of it from Ewen Montague’s book, “The Man Who Never Was,” which became a film in 1956. I was too young to see that, but I remembered a dim sense of the story and what it was about simply because once you hear about the dead body, it sticks in your head. Then I was working with Michelle Ashford on a pilot for a series about the sex researchers, Masters and Johnson, and she had just stumbled on Ben Macintyre’s book. She was just sort of gobsmacked by it. She gave it to me and said she thought she had a hunch about a way into this book as a film.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT (2022) Lorne Macfadyen as Glyndwr Michael, Paul Ritter as Bentley Purchase, Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Cholmondeley and Colin Firth as Ewen Montagu. Cr: Giles Keyte/Courtesy See-Saw Films and Netflix
The story Macintyre tells is just so unbelievable, and it does feel like begs to be a movie, but then again, it’s incredibly complex. How did you turn this massive, intricately plotted deception into a cohesive, compelling film?
When I read it, I thought, ‘How on earth do you corral this extraordinary story into a shape that has the specific gravity of a film?’ There were several things that Michelle and I both jumped at. One was the sort of thematic idea that it’s a story about telling stories. It’s about fiction and reality and how you mediate reality by telling stories about it. Then, it happened to be peopled with novelistically inclined characters left, right, and center, with the most extraordinary one in the middle of it, Ian Fleming, who was 10 years away from writing “Casino Royale” at the time. But much more than that, I was amazed at how you were grabbed emotionally by this story.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT (2022) Director John Madden behind the scenes of Operation Mincemeat. Cr: Giles Keyte/Courtesy See-Saw Films and Netflix
It seems rare for a spy thriller to be so concerned with the emotional landscape of its central characters.
The circumstances here were interesting—the people who actually created the deception were not professional spies. They were highly intelligent people who gravitated towards the intelligence effort during the war. Many of them were very eccentric, like Charles Cholmondeley (Macfayden), and they were plunged into this improbable undertaking, which I think initially they sort of jumped at because it seemed like an idea that worked in fiction.
Yes, that’s another incredible true fact—they lifted their idea of planting a corpse with fake papers from a novel!
It was all borrowed from the book “The Milliner’s Hat Mystery” by Basil Thompson. And then they started to take very seriously the idea that could this be made to work. They invested more of themselves in it until eventually, they became lost.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT (2022) Colin Firth, Johnny Flynn and Matthew Macfadyen behind the scenes of Operation Mincemeat. Cr: Giles Keyte/Courtesy See-Saw Films and Netflix
We watch as Firth’s Ewen Montagu and Macfayden’s Charles Cholmondeley, the chief drivers of the deception, start to unravel. How did you go about framing that?
They disappeared into their own fiction to a degree emotionally, and that was the point of entry for Michelle and me. I didn’t think you could tell the story unless you could involve the audience emotionally, because if it just became like a sort of parade of Monte Python sketches, that might not result in something that gave you a film that evolved into something much more powerful in the end, because it’s a big story with huge stakes.
The stakes are hundreds of thousands of human lives and the fate of the free world, more or less.
Yes, and I think at the point that those stakes really finally settle on the shoulders of the creators of this fiction, it becomes almost unbearable because of the risk that their deception could have the exact opposite effect that they wanted.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT (2022) James Fleet as Charles Fraser-Smith, Colin Firth as Ewen Montagu and Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Cholmondeley. Cr: Giles Keyte/Courtesy See-Saw Films and Netflix
It’s a spy thriller, but also a war film, and then it’s also got hints of a romantic triangle—how did you meld those genres?
Emotionally it’s tonally varied. I love those kinds of films that you have to kind of navigate shifts in tone that are sometimes very funny and absurd. Then it becomes something else and the characters don’t realize what’s happening to them. I feel this is true of any film, particularly a film like this, that if it’s just a dry procedural, even one this crazy and bizarre, it will only keep you engaged at a certain level. On one level it’s a war film, the world of bombs and bullets on the battlefield and the brutalities and the heroism, and on the other hand, it’s about the corridors of power. But our film occupies a very unique space in the middle because the plan itself becomes shaped by the people who are creating it, who then become unable to control what it is that they’ve created. The whole thing depends on a body that you float across a piece of water.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT (2022) Colin Firth and Kelly Macdonald behind the scenes of Operation Mincemeat. Cr: Giles Keyte/Courtesy See-Saw Films and Netflix
This is where Operation Mincemeat turns again—it’s hard enough to launch this mission, and then when it is launched, it’s a terrifying waiting game of, ‘will it work?’
Yes, how do you deal with the third act? Because you know, two acts are certainly going to be the time you need to develop the deception and making that real. And then the body is launched and now the story has to go somewhere else because the characters that we’ve been following are completely separated from the story that unfolds.
So how’d you solve that third act problem?
Michelle and I were talking and we thought, at that point, it should flip on its head. The story then becomes about how our characters are assaulted by doubt, how dread takes over, and with very good reason because they can’t actually tell whether the body has hit the target that they want. And when the body does land in Spain as intended, it becomes about who’s bluffing and who’s double bluffing? Have the Germans swallowed the deception, or, have they figured it out and are now playing a disinformation strategy back at the Allies? And then the film becomes existential almost and moves into the terrain of a thriller, with the terror of this situation where countless hundreds of thousands of people might be literally marching into their deaths.
It’s amazing that once the body lands in Spain, we meet the British officers stationed there who have to continue to sell the fiction to the authorities there, both Spanish and Nazis because this feels like it could be its own movie. These characters are also so compelling.
Yes, by the time the body is actually in Cadiz, it’s so fascinating. And every new character could be the protagonist of a movie. It’s very unusual story in that respect, the fact that every character who walks into the movie sort of holds the story in their hands at a certain point.
Operation Mincemeat is available to stream on Netflix.
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
Featured image: OPERATION MINCEMEAT (2022), Colin Firth as Ewen Montagu and Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Cholmondeley. Cr: Giles Keyte/See-Saw Films, Courtesy of Netflix
When Tom Cruise landed a helicopter on the USS Midway aircraft carrier in San Diego for the world premiere of Top Gun: Maverick, he was putting perhaps the perfect final touch on an epic story of movie-making magic. It’s been 35-years since we last saw Cruise play Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in director Tony Scott’s Top Gun, but Cruise’s return, after an inspired pitch by Maverick director Joseph Kosinski, blew away audiences in both San Diego and Las Vegas, where Paramount debuted the film at CinemaCon. The story of how Top Gun: Maverick came to be, what it required, and what it brought to California’s economy are all nearly as stunning as the aerial maneuvers on display in the film.
The first step was that pitch from Kosinski, who got into a room with Cruise and producer Jerry Bruckheimer to tell them his vision for a Top Gun sequel. As The Hollywood Reporterreveals, Kosinski came prepared with a fleshed-out story, a poster, and a lookbook. “After he finished pitching it, Tom pulled out his phone and called Paramount and said, ‘I’m making another Top Gun movie,’” Bruckheimer told The Hollywood Reporter.
Of course, this is just the very beginning—the pre-production process included fine-tuning a script that saw Maverick returning to the Navy after a request by a certain Admiral Kazansky (better known as Iceman, played by Val Kilmer, in the original Top Gun), to help train a crop of new Top Guns for a top-secret and highly dangerous new mission. One of those Top Guns is Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of Goose (Anthony Edwards), Maverick’s best friend and radar intercept officer who died during one of Maverick’s training flights in the original Top Gun. In this way, Maverick has to face his past while helping these young hotshot pilots, a breed he knows a few things about, for a mission unlike any other before.
Production in California was, in a word, epic. The aerial action was real and required Kosinski to film more than 800 hours of footage. As we wrote back in 2018, Top Gun: Maverick deployed real Navy jets and aviators. “Much like the first film, these are going to be real jets and real U.S. Naval aviators flying in these scenes,” Naval Air Forces spokesman Commander Ronald Flanders told us. “We’re excited about it.”
As always, Cruise was adamant that the case train hard and do as many of their own stunts as possible. That included two hours of swimming and two hours of flying a day. Cruise also helped train the crew on the camera equipment, as the actors were often required to work the cameras while in the cockpit. “We had to teach the actors about lighting, about cinematography, about editing,” Cruise told Empire Magazine. “I had to teach them how to turn the cameras on and off, and about camera angles and lenses. We didn’t have unlimited time in these jets. If they were going up for 20-30 minutes, I had to make sure that we got what we needed.”
As for the economic impact that Top Gun: Maverick made on California, the proof is in the numbers. The production added $150 million to the local economy and created 2,820 jobs for Californians. When a production as massive as this comes to town, that means millions of dollars are not only poured into the economy via wages ($80 million worth here), but also in rentals, purchases, and supplies to build and dress sets ($6.7 million), in lodging ($3.9 million), transportation ($2 million), catering ($1.4 million), and hardware and lumber supplies ($1.2 million). Big movie, big impact.
Joining Cruise, Kilmer, and Powell in the cast are Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Monica Barbaro, and Greg Tarzan Davis. And don’t worry, if you’re a Top Gun fan and wondering whether Top Gun: Maverick will reproduce one of those most iconic scenes from the original, you won’t be disappointed. There is a beach volleyball scene, and according to castmember Jay Ellis, it required so much baby oil that lighting a match near the cast could have been dangerous.
Top Gun: Maverick zooms into theaters on May 27.
For more on Top Gun: Maverick, check out these stories:
It seems safe to say that despite a 13-year gap between James Cameron’s 2009 Avatar and his long-awaited sequel Avatar: The Way of Water, interest remains as huge as a tidal wave. The first teaser trailer The Way of Water, which played first exclusively in theaters before Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness before heading online, was viewed 148.6 million times in its first 24 hours. That’s a ton of eyeballs, folks.
To give you a bit of perspective on how that compares to other recent massive films, consider the only recent teaser to best The Way of Water was Universal’s F9: The Fast Saga, which raced off to 202.7 million online views in its first 24 hours. The Way Of Water garnered more looks than Black Widow (116.8 million); Incredibles 2 (113.1 million); and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (112.4 million).
The Way of Water will take us back to the lush planet of Pandora, where Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is raising a family with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), but danger looms once again for the Na’vi tribe and the planet itself. Original Avatar stars return alongside Worthington and Saldaña, including Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Grace Augustine and Stephen Lang as the villain Colonel Miles Quaritch. Newcomers include Cameron’s Titanic star, Kate Winslet, and Vin Diesel.
Have another look at the teaser. Avatar: The Way of Water hits theaters on December 16:
Here’s the official synopsis for Avatar: The Way of Water:
Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, “Avatar: The Way of Water” begins to tell the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure. Directed by James Cameron and produced by Cameron and Jon Landau, the film stars Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement, and Kate Winslet.
For more on Avatar: The Way of Water, check out these stories:
Last night, the Boston Celtics managed to withstand yet another monster performance from Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Milwaukee Bucks’ prodigiously gifted power forward, to even the series at 2 games apiece. Yet there is no doubt Antetokounmpo will continue to dominate, he is quite literally a once-in-a-generation talent who took the Bucks to the promised land last year to win them their first title since 1971. As sensational as Antetokounmpo is on the court, his life leading up to his ascendance to the top tier of the NBA’s star-studded league is even more astonishing. Now, Disney+ has revealed the first trailer for Rise, an original film based on his life that tracks the Antetokounmpos journey from Nigeria to Greece to the NBA.
Rise will reveal how Gianni’s parents, Charles and Vera (Dayo Okeniyi and Yetide Badaki, respectively) took their family to Greece, where they lived under the perpetual threat of deportation while trying to provide for their kids. Life was hard—the Antetokounmpos did everything they could to make it work—and that meant brothers Giannis (Uche Agada) and Thanasis (Ral Agada) were part of that equation, selling things to tourists to make ends meet. But the brothers did get to play some basketball on the side, coming to the sport late but finding themselves picking it up quickly. They played on a local youth team, and it became clear they were gifted. Yet a future in the NBA? An impossibility.
We know now that not only was it possible, but that Giannis would prove to be one of the most transformational NBA players in years. He entered the draft in 2013, a long shot despite his size, strength, and speed. His brother, Kostas (Jaden Osimuwa) also made it to the league, and the two of them did the unthinkable—they won back-to-back championships with their respective teams (Kostas won with the Los Angeles Lakers, Giannis with the Bucks the following year).
The NBA playoffs are in full swing, and Giannis’s insane abilities are on display for the entire world to see. Rise promises to show us how he, his brother, and his family managed to turn their grit and determination, and the brother’s gifts, into an unbelievable career. And he’s only 27.
Check out the trailer below. Rise premieres on Disney+ on June 24.
Here’s the official synopsis for Rise:
Audiences have never seen a story like that of the Antetokounmpos. After emigrating from Nigeria to Greece, Charles and Vera Antetokounmpo (Dayo Okeniyi and Yetide Badaki, respectively) struggled to survive and provide for their five children, while living under the daily threat of deportation. With their oldest son still in Nigeria with relatives, the couple were desperate to obtain Greek citizenship but found themselves undermined by a system that blocked them at every turn. When they weren’t selling items to tourists on the streets of Athens with the rest of the family, the brothers– Giannis (Uche Agada) and Thanasis (Ral Agada)–would play basketball with a local youth team. Latecomers to the sport, they discovered their great abilities on the basketball court and worked hard to become world class athletes, along with brother, Kostas (Jaden Osimuwa). With the help of an agent, Giannis entered the NBA Draft in 2013 in a long shot prospect that would change not only his life but the life of his entire family. And last season, Giannis and Thanasis helped bring the Milwaukee Bucks their first championship ring in 50 years, while Kostas played for the previous season champs, the Los Angeles Lakers.
For more stories on Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, Marvel Studios and what’s streaming or coming to Disney+, check these out:
Cindy Mollo‘s big break came following a move to New York where she landed on the NBC show Homicide: Life on the Street editing a number of episodes throughout the ‘90s. “I’ve always worked with great writers,” Mollo says. “With Homicide, I learned from one of the best in the business, Tom Fontana, about how to put a story together, connect different beats and move scenes around. I was learning all these tricks of storytelling that I could put into my kit and use show after show.”
Since then, Mollo has cut Panic (2000), Ready to Rumble (2001), several episodes of Mad Men, House of Cards, and the Deadwood movie, earning herself a number of Emmy nominations. But it wasn’t until Ozark that she did something for the first time in her career: cutting the pilot and last episode of a series. “It was really gratifying editing Ozark, Mollo says. “It even came down to me turning down projects during the fourth season because I really wanted that feeling of being a completist. That I worked on every season. It never mattered to me before, but on this one, I really wanted to see it through.”
Ozark tells the story of the Bryde family – Marty (Jason Bateman), Wendy (Laura Linney), Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz), and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner) – who uproot their lives in Chicago for the Missouri lakes after Marty, who is laundering money for a Mexican cartel, promises he will return a large sum of stolen funds that his former (and very dead) business partner was found to be skimming. The uneasiness of the show, and undoubtedly what hooks you in, is the scheming, lying, and killing that takes place in order for the Byrdes to dig themselves out. The finale, “A Hard Way to Go,” directed by Bateman, was one of its most shocking yet.
“We didn’t know the ending for a long time,” says Mollo. The final season was split into two parts each with seven episodes. “We all had our theories before the script was published. I thought the writers clearly love Ruth so she would survive and take baby Zeke and go off into the sunset. Well, that didn’t happen.”
No, it did not. Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner) is one of Ozark‘s greatest characters, a Missouri sprite whose small stature belies a ferocious will. From the very beginning, it’s Ruth who helps Marty launder money through various businesses, but it’s Ruth who ends up being killed by Camila Elizondro (Veronica Falcón), sister to Omar Navarro (Felix Solis), the now dispatched head of the Navarro cartel, who rubs Ruth out for killing her son, Javi (Alfonso Herrera).
“When I read the last episode I called Chris Mundy [executive producer] and told him I cannot believe this episode. It’s perfect,” Mollo continues. “If you remember in the first season there was an episode called “Nest Box” [S1/E7] that was all about invasive species. And literally about invasive bird species. So by the time the Brydes come to the Ozarks they are toxic to the Langmore family. So it made sense that Ruth couldn’t get out of clean. I felt this was absolutely the only way the show could end. Yes, Marty gets away with it, whatever it is, but they are forever ruined because of what happens to their son.”
Ozark totaled 44 episodes, and Mollo cut 19 of them, and along the way, she edited the deaths of a boatload of people. Storylines had her dissolving business partners in barrels of lye, hitting Sam Dermody’s mother Eugenia (Sharon Blackwood) with a garbage truck, accidentally shooting Pastor Mason Young (Michael Mosley), suffocating drug dealers, drowning FBI Agent Roy Petty (Jason Butler Harner) and the roadside assignation of Ruth’s father Cade (Trevor Long). But it didn’t stop there. Mollo also cut the memorable aforementioned death scenes of cartel leaders Omar Navarro and his nephew Javi. Her favorite among the list though was Marty and Wendy’s sweet and innocent therapist Sue Shelby (Marylouise Burke) in season three.
The couple seeks out counseling as a place to vent their frustrations, and during an outburst, their relationship with the drug cartel comes out. Marty goes into damage control by blackmailing Sue with a “sh*tload” of cash in order to keep her quiet. Unfortunately, Sue lavishly buys an obnoxious luxury sports car, a McLaren. Refusing to return it after a warning from Marty and the cartel’s lawyer Helen (Janet McTeer), she receives a visit from the series’ ominous hitman Nelson (Nelson Bonilla).
“I loved everything about that storyline. Sue gets so into thinking she’s part of the Byrde’s criminality she bought that ridiculous car which was essentially the nail in her coffin,” says Mollo. “What I loved most about the end of her story was how much fun we were able to have with Nelson. He is so stiff and rigid, but when he shows up on Sue’s doorstep, we were able to have great fun with the character. He sits down on the couch and starts talking to her and then slowly pulls out the gun. I loved how methodical he gets. He wraps up the body, wipes down her computer, and steals her files and any records of the Brydes being patients. Then Helen and he submerge the McLaren and Helen says, ‘do you ever get tired of this?’ which Nelson replies with, ‘not really.’ He’s a machine. This is what he does.”
For Ruth’s tragic death, the editor leaned into the emotions of the character. “When Camilla comes and shoots Ruth, we are practically straight on, at a slight angle. Ruth is defiant at that moment. She doesn’t regret anything. She is her truest self then,” Mollo continues. “After she’s struck with the bullet, it’s a high angle shot over Ruth’s body that makes you feel the loss even more. It’s angelic. She’s alone, lying next to where her dream was to come true – a big house with a pool and a circular drive so you never had to back out to turn around.”
Mollo says she thought one or more of the Byrdes would meet their demise. “I thought maybe there would be a message like crime doesn’t pay. But the message is more that you’re never really free when you get into this world. It’s what Wendy kept saying throughout the fourth season that they needed to get out alive and clean.”
How unclean are the Byrdes? They are responsible, in one way or another, for countless deaths, including Ruth’s, who each member of the family loved in their own way. The Byrdes manage to survive Ozark, but there’s one more terrible twist at the very end. Dogged private investigator Mel Sattem (Adam Rothenberg) has found proof that Marty and Wendy are responsible for the death of Wendy’s brother, Ben (Tom Pelphrey). Mel is the surprising yet inevitable deliverer of justice to the Byrdes, who will finally have to—nope. Jonah aiming a shotgun on Mel is the second to last thing we see in Ozark. The last is a hint of a smile on Marty Byrde’s face. Fade to black. Then, the sound of the gun going off.
“By the end, you realize two things happened: Jonah had to kill someone and he’s still in high school. Then they have to take Mel (Adam Rothenberg) to the crematorium,” Mollo says. “Maybe someone would come looking for Mel or they would be seen. It’s a never-ending loop. They’re alive together, but are they really free?”
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
After a wait that would have made even the non-sentient Westworld hosts impatient, HBO’s ambitious sci-fi series is back. A brand new trailer for season 4 reveals the return of Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and the gang, who have all been offline, as it were, since the season three finale in May 2020.
Who better to welcome us back to Westworld‘s special blend of haunted sci-fi dystopia better than Lou Reed, whose song “Perfect Day” greets us as we’re reunited with Maeve (Thandie Newton), Caleb Nichols (Aaron Paul), Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth), Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), Bernard Shaw (Jeffrey Wright), and even the Man in Black (Ed Harris).
The trailer is wordless, save for Reed’s deathless voice, but it gives us a glimpse of the terrors to come. HBO describes season four as a “dark odyssey about the fate of sentient life on earth,” so the stakes are certainly high. The money shot is a host, her face still unconnected, spewing insects. In fact, the trailer is bug-crazy, with insects swarming and flying out of (and into) eyes and mouths. It’s classic a Westworld teaser, heavy on portent, light on specifics, but gorgeously done.
Westworld comes from creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, who also executive produce alongside Alison Schapker, Denis Thé, J.J. Abrams, Athena Wickham, Richard J. Lewis, and Ben Stephenson.
Check out the trailer below. Westworld returns on June 26.
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:
Featured image: L-r: Evan Rachel Wood is Dolores and Tessa Thompson is Charlotte Hale in ‘Westworld,’ episode 4, “Mother of Exiles.” Photograph by John P. Johnson/HBO
Netflix’s Love Death + Robots has sneakily become one of the most transgressive, devilishly daring shows on TV. The animated anthology series from Tim Miller (Deadpool) and David Fincher (MINDHUNTER, Mank) is back with volume 3, and the first official trailer delivers the thrills, chills, and sci-fi skills we’ve come to expect from the show.
Love Death + Robots has won 11 Emmys for its daring approach to anthology animation, creating a truly singular viewing experience that can leap from seriously scary to funny to surreal in a single episode. The 9 new episodes in Volume 3 will explore danger on the high seas in Bad Traveling and out in the cosmos in The Very Pulse of the Machine, where astronauts will move through “strange eons of thought” on a distant planet and face mind-melting scenarios. In Vaulted Halls Entombed, soldiers will find the dark side of archeology. Jibaro takes us to a lush, lunatic world where a battle with swords and horses turns insane. Swarm imagines a perfect organic system that promises to bring order to the chaos of human expansion—we’re guessing it won’t go quite the way they’re planning. In Mason’s Rat, the animal kingdom has wised up and declared war on humanity. Then, in Three Robots: Exit Strategies, a trio of bots look to escape, one wisecrack at a time. And finally, in Kill Team Kill and Night of the Mini Dead we get two wars—against monsters and against miniature monsters—all with that uncanny Love Death + Robots panache.
There is no other show quite like it, which is why Love Death + Robots is always on our must-watch list.
Check out the trailer below. Love Death + Robots returns to Netflix on May 20.
Here’s the official synopsis from Netflix:
Emmy-winning animated anthology Love, Death + Robots returns with a third-volume executive produced by Tim Miller (Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate) and David Fincher (MINDHUNTER, Mank). Terror, imagination, and beauty combine in new episodes which stretch from uncovering an ancient evil to a comedic apocalypse, telling startling short stories of fantasy, horror, and science-fiction with trademark wit and visual invention.
For more on what’s coming to Netflix, check out these stories:
We open on the lush planet of Pandora, with members of the Na’vi tribe running across a moss-covered tree. Then we see Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and Jake (Sam Worthington), who have started a family. We are plunged into the hyper-realistic alien planet of James Cameron’s world, a place we haven’t been for 13-years, since Avatar (2009) bowed and ushered in a new era of filmmaking.
The new trailer is short on dialogue and plot specifics but big on beauty. And it hints at the troubles to come, as Jake promises Neytiri that wherever they go, they go as a family, which will serve as their fortress. We see glimpses of the trouble brewing, with war appearing imminent and the splendor of Pandora once again being threatened.
Joining Worthington and Saldana in the cast are Giovanni Ribisi, Sigourney Weaver, CCH Pounder, and the original film’s villain, Stephen Lang. Newcomers include Kate Winslet, Vin Diesel, Michelle Yeoh, Edie Falco, Cliff Curtis, and Jemaine Clement. Disney plans to re-release Cameron’s original Avatar in theaters on September 23. During its original run in theaters back in 2009, Avatar played on the big screen for an astonishing 10 months.
Avatar: The Way of Water will, like the original Avatar, feature brand new technology that Cameron and his team deployed to capture the many underwater scenes. This means that theaters showing the film will likely require equipment upgrades, but it will be a small price to pay for being to show this movie in all its glory.
Avatar: The Way of Water swims into theaters on December 16. Its sequels are due on December 20, 2024, December 18, 2026, and December 22, 2028.
Check out the trailer below:
Here’s the official synopsis for Avatar: The Way of Water:
Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, “Avatar: The Way of Water” begins to tell the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure. Directed by James Cameron and produced by Cameron and Jon Landau, the film stars Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement and Kate Winslet.
For more on Avatar: The Way of Water, check out these stories:
