In the first image from Deliver Me From Nowhere, director Scott Cooper’s (Crazy Hearts) biopic about Bruce Springsteen, Jeremy Allen White has traded in his kitchen whites for the boss’s leather and denim.
The Bear star is stepping into one of his meatiest cinematic roles to date, taking on Bruce Springsteen in Cooper’s adaptation of Warren Zanes’ 2030 book “Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.” Succession star Jeremy Strong is on board as Springsteen’s longtime music manager, Jon Landau. Stephan Graham plays Springsteen’s father, and Paul Walter Hauser is guitar tech Mike Batlan. Odessa Young is rumored to be playing a love interest.
The first image reveals White as the Boss in a leather jacket and flannel shirt.
Deliver Me From Nowhere was adapted by Cooper, who directs with cinematographer Masanobu Takayangi, production designer Stefania Cella, and editor Pamela Martin all on board. Cooper’s Crazy Heart, centered on Bridges’ faded country musician, earned Bridges an Oscar for Best Actor and musicians T Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham Oscars for Best Original Song. Eric Robinson and Ellen Goldsmith-Vein of the Gotham Group are producing Deliver Me From Nowhere, representing Scott Stuber’s first producing project since joining Netflix as the head of their film division.
The new film will follow the young Springsteen on his journey to make his sixth album, a departure from his previous work and one representing the Boss at his most stripped-down and personal. Springsteen recorded “Nebraska” in the sparest, least fussy way possible—on a four-track cassette in his bedroom in New Jersey. This was a few years before he and his E Street Band became a phenomenon with “Born in the U.S.A.”
“Beginning production on this film is an incredibly humbling and thrilling journey,” Cooper said in a statement. “Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’ has profoundly shaped my artistic vision. The album’s raw, unvarnished portrayal of life’s trials and resilience resonates deeply with me. Our film aims to capture that same spirit, bringing Warren Zanes’ compelling narrative of Bruce’s life to the screen with authenticity and hope, honoring Bruce’s legacy in a transformative cinematic experience. It has been a great pleasure to collaborate with Bruce and Jon [Landau] as I tell their story, and their creative energy fuels every part of this journey. As well, I’m excited to reunite with my friend, David Greenbaum [president, Disney Live Action and 20th Century Studios], as he embarks on his new role at Disney, adding another layer of inspiration to this project.”
Here’s the full image:
Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen. Mark Seliger/20th Century FoxJeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen. Mark Seliger/20th Century Fox
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Featured image: Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen. Mark Seliger/20th Century FoxJeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen. Mark Seliger/20th Century Fox
It was only a few days ago that Tom Holland appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and revealed that Spider-Man 4 was officially happening and would begin shooting next summer. Now, it’s been revealed that Spider-Man 4 has an official release date.
Holland will swing back into action as Peter Parker on July 24, 2026. The film will be directed by Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Creton, and will arrive just two months after Avengers: Doomsday, which premiers on May 1, 2026 and sees the return of Robert Downey Jr. to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but crucially not as Tony Stark but rather as the arch-villain Victor von Doom, aka Doctor Doom.
The still-untitled Spider-Man 4 will be the first Spidey outing since the trilogy capping, critical and commercial smash Spider-Man: No Way Home bowed in 2021. That film boasted not just Holland’s Peter Parker but a three-pack of Parkers, with Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire reprising their Spider-Man roles in a multiverse-spanning epic that also saw the return of Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin, Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock, and Jamie Foxx’s Electro. Holland had gone on Fallon then and famously said there weren’t any other Spider-Men in the movie except him.
“You totally, without a doubt, professionally lied to us all,” Fallon said. “But I will say, it was worth it.
It was only last week that Holland recently revealed on the Rich Roll podcast that he and Zendaya had read a draft of the Spider-Man 4 script, saying that while it needed some work, the writers had done a great job. “It really lit a fire in me,” Holland said on the podcast. “Zendaya and I sat down and read it together and we at times were bouncing around the living room, like this is a real movie worthy of the fans’ respect.”
There’s no word yet on whether Zendaya will reprise her role as MJ, who the villain might be, or how it will play into the events in Avengers: Doomsday. One thing’s for certain—2026 will be a big year for Marvel.
For more on all things Spider-Man, check out these stories:
We already knew that a new Predator film was headed our way—Predator: Badlands—the sequel to 2022’s Dan Trachtenberg’s hit Prey. But now, thanks to a conversation between 20th Century Studio Boss Steve Asbell and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit, we now know there’s a secret, additional Predator film lurking on the 2025 release schedule.
Asbell revealed that after the success of Trachtenberg’s Prey, the director wasn’t interested in doing a Prey 2. So, Trachtenberg pitched 20th Century Studio “a bunch of ideas that were really crazy but really cool,” Asbell said. “We’ve actually done two of them. Two are coming out next year. One I can’t talk about yet, but the other is the live-action Predator film with Elle Fanning that just wrapped in New Zealand. That’ll be out theatrically sometime next year.”
The Predator (Dane DiLiegro), shown. (Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios.)
Elle Fanning is starring in Badlands, a movie that Asbell says is “an absolute bonkers idea. It is a sci-fi thing, but it’s not what everybody thinks it is. And I mean, it’s awesome. It is so nuts. But in Dan, we trust.” But Asbell’s reveal to THR that Trachtenberg directed the second secret Predator film, too, is news to everyone. Badlands was already on the schedule with a November 7, 2025 release, and Asbell said the secret Predator Trachtenberg also directed would come out before, so that presumably means direct-to-streaming on Hulu. There’s no information out there about what this mysterious film will be about, but considering Prey was a self-contained period piece set 300 years before any previous Predator, we can guess that the new mystery film will have its own, separate time and place. Prey was delightful for just how different it felt from previous Predators, yet how it connected to the original 1987 film in the brutal simplicity of its setting. In the original, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch is a part of a commando team that gets slaughtered, one by one, by a Predator in a Central American jungle, until it’s just Dutch versus the Predator. In Prey, a young Comanche woman played by Amber Midthunder is pitted against Predator on Comanche Nation land in the Northern Great Plains in 1719.
Naru (Amber Midthunder) and the Predator (Dane DiLiegro), shown. (Photo by David Bukach.)
Badlands is reportedly not set in the past but will take place sometime in the future, and it just wrapped filming in New Zealand. Now, all we know about this mysterious third Trachtenberg film is that it exists, but given his track record, we can make an educated guess that it will be set entirely apart from the other two films.
When asked if there would be a new Alien vs. Predator film, a monster crossover that’s happened a number of times over the years, Asbell didn’t rule it out but admitted to no concrete plans.
“It wouldn’t be in the way you think. That’s the thing. Not in the way that it will just be called Alien vs. Predatoror anything like the original movies. If we do this, they’ll be organically created out of these two franchises that we’ve continued with characters that we fall in love with and those characters will combine…perhaps.”
We’ll keep you posted when we learn more about Badlands and this mysterious other Predator project. For now, you can stream Prey on Hulu.
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Director Danny Boyle’s nervy 2002 thriller 28 Days Later reinvigorated the zombie genre, introducing a version of the undead that was just as pitiless as previous iterations but quicker, more decisive, and more terrifying. Working off a script written by Alex Garland (who would go on to become an incredible director in his own right in films like Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Civil War) and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (who would later win an Oscar for his work on Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire), Boyle deployed Canon XL-1 digital cameras while filming on location in England, a novel approach at the time. Now, 22 years later, with Boyle, Garland, Mantle, and 28 Days Later star Cillian Murphy all reuniting for 28 Years Later, Boyle and his team have once again utilized a novel approach to give audiences something new.
Speaking with Collider, 28 Years Later co-star Ralph Fiennes revealed that Boyle shot the film, at least partially, using an iPhone 15 Pro Max. Fiennes is doing the rounds to talk about his critically acclaimed new thriller, Conclave, but he offered this juicy detail about how they filmed the movie after reports surfaced about Boyle choosing the iPhone. “Yeah, the iPhone attached on the back of huge lenses!“
This confirms previous reports that Boyle and his team eschewed the usual camera set-up and instead, again at least partially, utilized the iPhone, albeit in a highly advanced way—the phone was held in place by a protective cage and enhanced with attachments that increased its capabilities. In the original, camcorders were used to create grainier, rougher textures that befit the time and the context. The original featured a breakout performance by a then little-known Murphy as Jim, a young man who wakes up in a hospital in the U.K. to find out the country has been completely overrun by the undead. Now, decades later, Boyle returns and deploys arguably the piece of technology that defines our era to offer a vastly different visual palette that speaks to a new era of technology and, depending upon who you ask, the dread of living in a self-surveiling world.
28 Years Later reunites the original creative team and marks the start of a new era in the franchise. Its cast includes the aforementioned Murphy, returning as Jim and Fiennes, as well as Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. But 28 Years Later is just the start of a new trilogy, written by Garland and set to feature director Nia DaCosta helming the second installment.
28 Years Later will be unleashed in theaters on June 20, 2025.
Featured image: LONDON, ENGLAND – OCTOBER 10: (EDITORS NOTE: Image has been converted to black and white) Ralph Fiennes attends the “Conclave” Headline Gala during the 68th BFI London Film Festival at The Royal Festival Hall on October 10, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for BFI)
Agatha All Along wiselybrings songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez back to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is only fitting, considering the two helped musically introduce Agatha to great acclaim inWandaVision. With the latest Disney+ series from creator Jac Schaeffer, the acclaimed music duo explores music history as they deliver time-spanning variations of the powerful “Ballad of the Witches Road.”
The music is integral not only to the plot but also to the characters in Agatha All Along. Following the titular character (played by the effervescent Kathryn Hahn) after she lost her powers in WandaVision, Agatha is no longer flying solo—she conjures up a coven to help her regain herself via the Witche’s Road. Through the power of song, the bond between the band of witches grows as Agatha reclaims her powers.
Recently, Kristen and Robert Lopez spoke with The Credits about crafting a hypnotic ballad, as well as their enchanting 1970s rock and roll spin on it from episode four.
“Ballad of the Witches Road” is beautiful. What were your first inklings for it?
Kristen: Well, it really came from Jac. Jac had written these incredible scripts. She brought us in after all the episodes had been drafted in some way, and we were able to see what the ballad was doing.
Robert: It even had dummy lyrics in it.
Kristen: Yes, all of the genres she wanted, all of the information. The real trick was, which song were we going to hit first? After thinking, we were like, “We should do the ‘70s ballad first.” It had to sound like a hit, had to be a love song, but it also had to hold all of these pieces of information from different episodes. We knew if we could get that one, then we could start stripping back.
For the ‘70s ballad version, what techniques or little things did you both use to ensure that the song fit this time in American music?
Robert: Jac is a huge Fleetwood Mac fan, as well as the Eagles and Hotel California, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young – those kinds of harmonies. We love that stuff, too. We steeped ourselves in it, especially that 12-string guitar sound that Hotel California has, which has always made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.It’s a bit of playing with the major and minor scale kind of mixed together to mirror qualities. I thought that was a good place to start musically. Then Kristen took that voice memo I emailed her.
Kristen: When I’m like, “Ooh, that!” – we’ll get it in a voice memo, and then he’ll shoot it to me. I sit in this giant bed with sheets of paper, like three screens up, and no one can interrupt me for six hours. I need to be in flow to feel all these pieces and channel them into a love song. That’s what that day was like.
Have you both considered the soundtrack having B-sides of just the voice memos?
Kristen: That’s a funny idea.
Robert: We are the demo singers of our own songs, so it’s fun to have a playlist of just us and watch it get replaced by the real thing as we go. It’s one of the markers of how we know we’re making progress.
Kristen: We both were in a cappella groups growing up. Do you know how every cappella group has their signature song? My acapella group had “Helplessly Hoping,” which is a Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song. And then, for the sacred version, we both sang in churches. Bobby’s first job out of college was singing in an Episcopal choir. Sacred music lives in him.
Robert: Spiritual magic and music are all in the same world for me. That’s central to what we do, finding the magic in music. That’s definitely there in Frozen. We truly believe in this stuff. We make it, but we don’t know quite how or why it works. Sometimes, it’s just a weird alchemy. We were trying to capture the spell that a song can cast.
How’d you both want to get the hypnotic feeling in Agatha All Along similar to what you once sang in choir?
Robert: When I sang in a choir in college, we did a lot of plain chant, Gregorian chant. That’s a very specific singing, so we used that for the sacred chant. We also incorporated the idea of a drone – one character singing while the other sings the melody on top of it. There’s something magical about that, something ritualistic and solemn.
Kristen: It comes all the way from Europe over to America sometime in the 15th century, right around the time Agatha was hanging out in Massachusetts. It’s when the Salem witch hunts were happening, so this would’ve been the music of their time. That’s the origin of a lot of American music. These sacred songs become folk songs that you can sing in taverns and pubs. Then they become blues, and that blues gets turned into jazz in New Orleans, which eventually becomes rock. And that rock leads to all the music we have today.
You get to explore American music history in the show. Were there any new lessons while working on Agatha All Along, something that stuck with you?
Kristen: There’s always something to learn during mastering and mixing because that’s such an odd science. The moment it goes from your mix to the master…
Robert: It’s painstaking.
Kristen: Yeah, because we definitely wanted Patti’s voice to stick out in a way that a pop song would not; you wouldn’t hear Patti LuPone’s voice hitting so high. So, exploring how we keep the individual voices in a process that’s so much about smoothing everything out was fun.
Robert: Actually, the thing I didn’t know was Fleetwood Mac’s “Silver Spring.” I didn’t know that song. It’s one of Jac’s favorites, and she said, “You’ve got to watch the live recording.” It was 20 years later, and they finally sang it together on stage. You can see she turns to him, and he’s looking away because it’s all about his infidelity. There’s a moment where he meets her gaze, and the whole song takes on a level of drama. We were both crying watching it. Such an incredible song. It deepened my appreciation for that era and that group.
Which is basically one of the greatest soap opera stories in music, right?
Kristen: Well, it’s obviously in the zeitgeist. We had already written this song, and then we heard about this little show – it’s not little anymore – called Stereophonic, which also explores the drama behind iconic songs. But Jac had written the whole episode long before Stereophonic came to Broadway. We’re all fascinated by these songs that live rent-free in our brains.
Robert: Everybody loves the behind-the-scenes of music. In many ways, Agatha is about that. It’s about the formation of this coven, which is kind of like a band – the infighting and the search for connection. WandaVision was about being trapped in a bubble, and Agatha All Along was about breaking out and finding your people.
How else did you want the music to tell that story?
Kristen: Everyone in this coven has something to heal. These songs are part of that healing. There’s healing in the sacred version that brings these isolated witches together. When we sing in harmony, oxytocin is produced. It’s the bonding hormone that’s also produced when breastfeeding. Singing together creates bonding and love. You don’t even have to sing – you just have to be in the same space as people singing. It truly creates a physical connection.
Lumon Industries is back in business. What is that business? Well, that’s part of Severance‘s cryptic, compelling dread.
It’s been three years since Severance‘s first season, and the trailer for season two reintroduces us to Adam Scott’s Mark S., returning to the Lumon offices after he let his “innie” loose on the outside world and learned, to his shock and horror, that the wife he thought he’d lost in a car accident is actually alive and working at Lumon—she’s the wellness counselor, Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), who he had met with repeatedly during season one.
The big reveal in Severance season one was that the Lumon employees who toiled in the office actually never left—the people who worked there with Mark, including Helly (Britt Lower), Irving (John Turturro), and Dylan (Zach Cherry), had their home lives and work lives completely severed via a very bizarre, clearly NSFW procedure. The new trailer reveals that Mark’s return to the Lumon office finds new faces at the desks that used to be occupied by Helly, Irving, and Dylan—”Who are you people?” he asks. The one familiar face is his manager Milchick (Tramell Tillman) who is there to welcome him back with some supremely creepy balloons.
Joining the aforementioned cast from season one are Patricia Arquette, Christopher Walken, Jen Tullock, and Michael Chernus. Newcomers include Gwendoline Christie, Alia Shawkat, Bob Balaban, Merritt Wever, Robby Benson, Stefano Carannante, John Noble, Ólafur Darri and Sarah Bock.
The wait for season two has been long, especially considering it ended on such a delicious cliffhanger. The talent involved in Severance, including Ben Still as a producer and director, means that the wait will almost certainly be worth it. Check out the trailer for season 2, which arrives on Apple TV+ on January 17.
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Actor-turned-director Dev Patel, best known for his breakthrough role in Slumdog Millionaire, received a well-earned standing ovation for his directorial feature debut, Monkey Man, at the SXSW Film & TV Festival in Austin Texas this past March. His thrilling, kinetic debut went on to win the Headliners Audience Award.
The fight-filled action epic produced by Get Out and Us director Jordan Peele was inspired by the story of the half-monkey, half-human Hindu god Hanuman. Patel stars as the Kid, an anonymous young man nursing a wound so elemental it becomes a source of inexhaustible rage and, ultimately, power. Set in Mumbai, the plot revolves around the bone-shattering revenge journey as The Kid dons a gorilla mask and sets out to avenge his mother’s murder. Following its world premiere at SXSW, Monkey Man was released in the United States by Universal in April.
Monkey Man was meant to film in Mumbai, where it was set; however, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic derailed those production plans. Like the Kid, the cast and crew of Monkey Man needed to find a new way toward their goal.
The production ended up in Batam, an island in Indonesia that is a short ferry ride from Singapore and home to one of the largest production and animation facilities in Southeast Asia, operated by Infinite Studios.
Infinite Studios has been a busy fount of creative action. In the past decade, its Batam facilities’ productions have included the HBO Asia series Grisse, Folklore, Dead Mine, Halfworlds, and Serangoon Road. Since Monkey Man was shot there, Batam has recently hosted more original series productions: Operandi Gerhana for Singapore’s MediaCorp and Losmen Melati, produced by Infinite Studios and Taiwan’s Catchplay. Later this year, the studio will release the feature film Orang Ikan, which is set to premiere at the gala section of the upcoming Tokyo International Film Festival (October 28-November 6).
We spoke to Mike Wiluan, CEO of Infinite Studios, about how the production overcame the many challenges of shooting during COVID-19 on the island of Batam and got Patel’s scorching debut into theaters.
From India to Indonesia, how did Monkey Man end up on Batam Island?
I’ve known Dev Patel for some years. He was a frequent guest at the Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF) when I was the festival chairman. Unfortunately, Monkey Man was in preparation in Mumbai when COVID-19 hit, and the production had to be shut down. Dev and his team called me and enquired whether they could move the production to Batam. We had just completed a show and had space for them.
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – APRIL 03: Dev Patel attends the Los Angeles premiere of Universal Pictures’ “Monkey Man” at TCL Chinese Theatre on April 03, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
That was at the peak of the pandemic. What made Patel think Batam was the right place?
As Covid was spreading and countries shutting down with strict controls, we had to immediately present the opportunity to relevant government agencies in Indonesia to prepare a safe and plausible way to continue production. Batam and the studio in Nongsa were very isolated, including the resorts that would be entirely dedicated to the show; the authorities were confident that the project could be managed. The entirety of the production was produced in our studios in Nongsa and some remote locations in Batam. There were some plates and drone shots done in Batam.
How did the pre-production and production come together once Batam was confirmed as the alternative filming location?
Once we had government approvals, we contacted the Indonesian Embassies around the world to facilitate visas for the heads of departments and actors. Dev and his team were the first into Batam and began their 14-day quarantine immediately. As designs were finalized, the sets, both interiors and exteriors, soon started to be built on the backlot. It took around three months of preparation before shooting commenced. The time was extended as strict COVID protocols were adhered to. From pre-production to production, the shoot took around six months.
What kind of filming support did Infinite Studios provide?
Infinite Studios provided studio facilities, government permissions, production administration, casting, logistics, catering, camera and technical equipment, building, and the provision of local film crews.
Batam served to double up as Mumbai, which is a very distinct, bustling city. What kind of sets need to be built?
The two soundstages (30 sq ft and 14 sq ft) acted as interior spaces, and many interiors were built. The backlot (one hectare) was used as Mumbai’s modern city, so the facades were decorated in Mumbai fashion, including props. There were some mock-up sets on our empty land and forest areas that doubled as village sets. Other locations we filmed included an abandoned hotel, which had a ballroom, full-size service kitchen, and lifts. Some more derelict areas of Batam were used.
How did you manage crowd scenes with many extras while adhering to strict COVID protocols??
We carefully ensured that different types of extras went through quarantine and testing procedures. Day background extras were separated into different areas, and the assistant directors carefully ensured they were shot in efficient groups.
You mentioned the HODs were from overseas. What was the ratio of overseas and local crew?
We had HODs from overseas, such as cinematographers, action choreographers, production designers, and wardrobe. Several key HODs from India brought cultural relevance, especially in wardrobe. Most of the crew (90%) were from Indonesia and supported all departments.
Productions worldwide are now available online to viewers everywhere. You are also a filmmaker, having directed both films (Buffalo Boys, upcoming Orang Ikan) and series (Operandi Gerhana, Losmen Melati). What are your thoughts on copyright?
We are finding that more often when we release content on streaming platforms, it is quickly uploaded onto social media. TikTok has been a frequent platform for snack-sized content, which is then uploaded multiple times to form an episode. For a country like Indonesia, which thrives on social media, we have found a huge viewership from watching bite-sized content on social media platforms. The shows have become very viral, and viewership numbers are significant.
Filming “Buffalo Boys” at Infinite Studios in Batam.
Is there anything you can do?
Some platforms take action to bring the content down, but it is an endless task as they quickly appear elsewhere. Some platforms may see this viral spread as a positive view on promotion and a potential boost to their subscriber base. However, as producers, much effort has been spent crafting the show to be seen as intended, and it quickly appears elsewhere, so seeing this effort being cut into bite-sized chunks can be frustrating.
Indonesia seems to be slow to make any production incentives available. Has it made any progress lately?
Government incentives greatly increase our competitive edge as a production house and studio with significant infrastructure investment in Indonesia. The discussion on incentives has been a long road that has been championed not only by us but by the entire industry, which is looking to produce better-quality films for a growing domestic market with the potential for overseas distribution.
How’s the progress been so far?
Despite much effort in lobbying government ministries and agencies, many of these discussions are heard but, sadly, not acted upon. More recently, there have been efforts to announce some programs based on a matching fund scheme, but even then, the process has been rather vague. The long and toothless argument of Indonesia being a ‘cheap’, ‘value added’ or ‘location diverse’ destination is not something we want to boast about. We have deep talent and a committed, skilled workforce who have evolved tremendously in leaps and bounds over the years, with thanks to the box office growth and original productions from streamers.
What are the real roadblocks here?
Much of the footdragging comes from the fact that administrators do not understand the nature of the industry and how the industry provides an economic domino effect across other business ecosystems. Not to mention the benefits of fostering growth and potential of the country’s fledgling creative sector, but also the positive public relations image for Indonesia globally – in particular to its tourism industry, which still remains a key strategic growth sector today. However, as box office numbers continue to grow and more Indonesian filmmakers are making headlines in festivals and working overseas – the government is taking notice and giving support. However, the support is more of a blessing than actual defined incentives.
What kind of action should be taken that will benefit the industry?
Choosing the right path for transparently and fairly administering incentives still needs further robust study. The other complicated issue is that these incentives (if acted on now) would need to involve several ministries, including the Ministry of Finance. But with the elections completed and a new cabinet being formed, we are waiting to see if there will be dedicated and clear administrators who will handle this matter moving forward. We are hopeful, given that several international productions have brought wide praise for our talented filmmakers. However, the loudest voices have come from the public, who are incredibly proud of the achievements made so far. The government has taken notice, and with the new cabinet soon to be in place, we hope the road ahead will lead to a final destination that will benefit the industry as a whole.
For more interviews with filmmakers and producers taking big swings in Asia, check these out:
Tom Holland came on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon ready to unleash a major web of movie news.
“Next summer, we start shooting,” Holland told Fallon. “Everything’s good to go. We’re nearly there. Super exciting. I can’t wait!”
Holland was talking about Spider-Man 4, of course, which will be the first Spidey film since the trilogy capping instant classic Spider-Man: No Way Home bowed in 2021 and revealed Holland’s Peter Parker teaming up with Parkers past—Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Men—to vanquish a trio of classic villains. It was on Fallon before No Way Home that Holland appeared, and Holland said there weren’t any other Spider-Men in the movie except him.
“You totally, without a doubt, professionally lied to us all,” Fallon said. “But I will say, it was worth it.
Tom Holland is Spider-Man and Zendaya is MJ in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
It wasn’t easy for Holland, Garfield, and Maguire to keep their secret safe from the press and eager public sniffing around the possibility that there would be a super-team of Spider-Men in No Way Home, but Holland said they went to great lengths. “We were in a bubble. Tobey and Andrew would come to set in a cloak. It was like something out of Star Wars. It was hilarious.”
Holland had recently revealed on the Rich Roll podcast that he and Zendaya had read a draft of the Spider-Man 4 script, saying that while it needed some work, the writers had done a great job. “It really lit a fire in me,” Holland said on the podcast. “Zendaya and I sat down and read it together and we at times were bouncing around the living room, like this is a real movie worthy of the fans’ respect.”
Jon Watts directed the three previous Spider-Man films, but as of September, Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton was in talks to helm Spider-Man 4.
You can watch Holland’s appearance on Fallon here:
For more on all things Spidey-related, check out these stories:
Production designer Jess Gonchor felt right at home on director Jason Reitman’s film Saturday Night, a pulsing recreation of the moments leading up to the first-ever broadcast of Saturday Night Live, which aired on October 11, 1975. Similar to Reitman, who fulfilled a dream of being a guest writer on SNL for a week on Season 35, Gonchor also worked in sketch comedy, so he knew “the inner workings of what this is and what it needed to be.” What that meant for the two-time Oscar-nominated production designer was that everything had to be interconnected.
“I do a lot of things that are nostalgic to me,” says Gonchor, whose list of credits includes No Country for Old Men, True Grit, Hail, Caesar!, and Little Women. “But this was really special to be able to go back and make it about scenery.”
Jess Gonchor on the set of “Saturday Night.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
In turning back the clock to recreate the now iconic Studio 8H, Gonchor found the original blueprints for Rockefeller Center to fully conceptualize the engineering of the original floorplan. The research informed the designs that would be built on soundstages in Atlanta, where Reitman and cinematographer Eric Steelberg would shoot 360 degrees with a pace that didn’t allow for any holes in the set builds.
Below, Gonchor shares with The Credits how he designed the 1970s period sets, how pace influenced his work, and the one thing they had to shoot in New York.
This is your first project with director Jason Reitman. What made you want to be part of this project?
A lot of times, I’ll get scripts, read them, and do them for many different reasons, but this one, as soon as I started reading it, I was like, I actually think I can make a difference in this movie.
How so?
It’s beyond up my alley. I have spent a lot of time in the exact situation of trying to get a show up and running that had to launch, either open a curtain or turn on a camera at a certain time. I really felt connected with the material more so than I have on any other project. So as I am reading it I’m seeing all these things unfold and getting more and more excited about it.
In designing Saturday Night, did Reitman suggest any specific themes or ideas to guide your approach in prep?
Jason was a big part of the process. This got started before the writer’s strike, so we started a little, and then we were down for several months with the strike. But all that time, I was noodling away at what I thought it could be, so I had a really long runway to figure things out on my own time. We both agreed that we wanted to honor what was there historically but put our own little twist on it, which allowed for the functionality of the script that he had written.
Designing the set for “Saturday Night.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
When you say functionality, are you referring to how there’s this kind of real-time feeling to how the story unfolds?
Yes.I think the best note that Jason gave me was, he said, listen, we’re going to be moving through these environments very quickly, so I want to personalize each one so nobody’s confused about if they’re in hair and makeup or if they’re in wardrobe, or if they’re editing, the control room, which on paper seems academic and easy. Somebody’s going to go into a control room and see monitors, but in some of these environments, you really fly through pretty quickly. So he wanted to make sure that the production design told the story of just how lost you could get in the environment. He leaned on me a little bit to create chaos through the scenery and how that can build tension.
Designing the set for “Saturday Night.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
How did that real-time feeling of the story affect your approach?
First of all, you don’t get to do a movie these days where there are zero visual effects in the production design. So the whole thing was built on a stage where the camera could look anywhere, and it all had to be ready on day one of filming because they were flying through all the hallways, the rooms, up the balcony, up to the ninth floor… all those things. So it all had to be ready at one time. We really studied it through a couple of physical models that we made in prep, and then Jason and Eric Steelberg, our cinematographer, taped it out on the stage. It was a very theatrical approach, which is the world I come from anyway, so I really thought of it less as a movie set and more of an environment for theatrics to unfold.
Behind the scenes of “Saturday Night.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.Creating the set of “Saturday Night” in miniature before production design began. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
You taped out the entire set design?
Yes. It was a big stage, like 40,000 square feet. We taped out the stage from the elevator to the back wall. Then Jason and a couple of people grabbed a script, and we all walked out of the scenes to make sure the timing was right. All of the movement was calculated and timed to see how long it would take to get from stage left to stage right. It let him figure out how the cameras would flow, the pace, and how all these things came into play while figuring out the sets.
Behind the scenes of “Saturday Night.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
You can tell there is a real harmony between the production design and the story, not just a string of locations the characters visit.
They really lived in it because there was nothing fake about it. We couldn’t take anything for granted as far as what the camera was going to see, and that was a good thing. I think that’s really the difference, and it really inspired the performers and the crew to be in that environment.
“Saturday Night.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
It couldn’t have been easy to recreate SNL‘s Studio 8H, one of the most iconic stages in the world, yet it feels like we’re seeing it here for the first time. How did you pull that off?
Most of my movies I try to make something stand out in the environment whatever it may be but in some ways it was actually different on this film. I think it was William Eggleston, the photographer, who started framing things in photos so people would look around the photograph and not just stare at the center of it. I didn’t want to take anything away from the performances, but I wanted to create an environment that people could look around the screen to absorb.
Besides shooting in Atlanta, production also shot in New York, right?
Yes, we only shot for two nights in New York outside for the marquee and on the skating rink. We didn’t get all the work done on the skating rink, so we had to recreate some of that on stage in Atlanta as well. But even if you had all the money, you owe it to the audience and everyone involved to shoot outside the marquee in New York.
The costumes, hair, makeup, and shooting on 16mm take us back to the 1970s. What was your approach to the 1970s palette?
The costumes, the hair and makeup, and everything transports you to that time and place right away. For me, I was trying to get into the history of that studio. 30 Rock was built for Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. It was a recording studio before it became a TV studio, so the big picture of Toscanini outside the control room is no accident. It was meant to be as if Toscanini was looking at Lorne Michaels every time he went into the control room. It was this idea that it was bad enough that TV had taken over radio, and now, this show where he performed as the maestro is taking over the stage. There are a lot of those types of things in the design—I always tried to make it feel timeless.
Director Kelly Marcel and star Tom Hardy finally unleashed Venom: The Last Dance on Monday night, with Sony Pictures premiering the film in New York. This means that now that Hardy’s Eddie Brock and best alien symbiote buddy Venom have finally waltzed in front of a crowd, the first reactions have flooded social media.
The Last Dance is, as its title suggests, Hardy’s final turn as the investigative reporter turned body-snatched antihero, appearing in a story he cooked up with first-time director Marcel, a longtime Venom scribe herself. Marcel has been working with Hardy since the very beginning in director Ruben Fleischer’s 2018 hit Venom and then the sequel, Andy Serkis’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which co-starred Woody Harrelson as the alien symbiote that made Venom look mild-mannered by comparison. The Last Dance picks up after the events in Let There Be Carnage, with Eddie and Venom now pursued by Earthly authorities and some seriously upset baddies from Venom’s home planet.
“Hunted by both of their worlds and with the net closing in, the duo is forced into a devastating decision that will bring the curtains down on Venom and Eddie’s last dance,” the logline states. Hardy is joined by newcomers Juno Temple and Chiwetel Ejiofor, alongside Rhys Ifans, Peggy Lu, Alanna Ubach, and Stephen Graham.
The reactions have been almost uniformly positive, with folks writing that it’s a whacky, wild, funny, and fitting end to Hardy’s three-film run as the world’s most adaptive human, becoming best buds with the insatiable alien symbiote who took over his body. It’s a road trip movie with a lot of good old-fashioned alien head-chomping.
Plus, Hardy and Marcel made a great team. Hardy wrote in an Instagram post last November that he loved making the final film with Marcel. “It’s been and continues to be a lot of fun this journey — there’s always hard turns to burn when we work, but [it] doesn’t feel as hard when you love what you do and when you know you have great material and the support at all sides, of a great team. I want to mention very briefly how proud of my director, writing partner and dear friend Kelly Marcel I am. Watching you taking the helm on this one fills me with pride, it is an honour. Trust your gut, your instincts are always spot on.”
Venom: The Last Dance hits theaters on October 25. Let’s have a peek at some of those first reactions.
#VenomTheLastDance isn’t just fun, IT’S THE BEST VENOM MOVIE BY FAR! It’s the funniest, most emotional, best story & it takes the silliness we love & fully embraces it full force. They do A LOT of cool symbiote stuff & we couldn’t have gotten a better ending to this trilogy that… pic.twitter.com/7TPAF78My8
I’ve seen #VenomTheLastDance and it’s the most cinematic, monumental #Venom movie to date. Eddie Brock and Venom’s dynamic is at its strongest in this one and the stakes are so much higher. I had a LOT of fun with this one…the final act is BONKERS! pic.twitter.com/7sEBGMZpEY
Venom The Last Dance is a whacky buddy roadtrip that stretches its PG-13 rating as far as it will possibly go. Simply put – Venom 3 is classic guilty pleasure cinema. Turn your brains off and let #Venom snack on ‘em. pic.twitter.com/7geSd29O3O
#VenomTheLastDance REVIEW: A huge EPIC & EMOTIONAL finale!! Tom Hardy gives EVERYTHING & Sony has never been better. Stunning action satisfies with all nineteen inches. Not just another Venom movie, it’s one of the BEST comic book films ever! A fitting end setting up what’s next. pic.twitter.com/IXO4WEHZ4L
#VenomTheLastDance is the best of the “Venom” movies — the insanity has been ramped up significantly but so has the heart. It’s not perfect but it’s super entertaining and there’s a giant monster that chews people up and sprays blood out of the back of its head. Pretty nuts. 🕷️ pic.twitter.com/Ebp5ONseEG
#VenomTheLastDance sees Tom Hardy go all in for a fun finale befitting the franchise. With stacks of set pieces ranging from kooky to crazy, this doesn’t hold back with the Venomenal action. Take it for what it is. Grab some popcorn and go with the flow of this raging road movie. pic.twitter.com/neW56JxTLg
#VenomTheLastDance takes you on a wild and exhilarating journey from start to finish! It’s a fun popcorn movie that reminds me of the early 2000’s comic book movies. The action is great & is a tribute to action films from the 80’s. There’s a ton of funny moments. Are there plot… pic.twitter.com/b0wY5qkck4
Venom: The Last Dance is the most entertaining of the trilogy. It’s largely a funny and sweet road trip with Eddie and Venom living their Thelma & Louise fugitive dreams, including car karaoke and dog rescuing. You might even find yourself getting emotional. #VenomTheLastDancepic.twitter.com/9vFtq3eJfT
Just saw @VenomMovie and it’s a blast. Probably one of the better movies in the trilogy. It’s full of action and emotion. The pairing of Eddie and Brock are what holds the film together thanks to Tom Hardy. Plus a lot of love for comic book fans who follow the lore. #venompic.twitter.com/aFh42RoWoz
Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk themselves—Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio, respectively—arrived at this past weekend’s New York Comic for Marvel’s Daredevil: Born Again panel. Marvel Studios officially announced that the long-awaited return of Murdock, Fisk, and co are arriving on Disney+ on March 4th, 2025.
Think this guy could win a Daredevil cosplay contest?
Daredevil: Born Again will reunite Cox’s sight-impaired superhero and D’Onofrio’s brutal criminal super-boss Kingpin for the first time since they clashed back when Daredevil was a Netflix series from 2015 to 2018. Matt Murdock had a brief, quite funny cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home and a meatier role in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, while D’Onofrio’s Kingpin has appeared in both Hawkeye and the spinoff series Echo.
In fact, Marvel’s upcoming Disney+ series will follow the grittier tone established in Echo, which was led by Alaqua Cox’s Maya Lopez and centered on her tortured past and her relationship with Kingpin. We already know that Born Again will see the return of one of the most brutal of all of Marvel’s antiheroes, Jon Bernthal’s The Punisher, as well as former Daredevil cast members Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page, Wilson Bethel as Bullseye, and Elden Henson as Foggy Nelson.
Born Again is the first Marvel series on Disney+ to feature a showrunner (previous series were led by head writers and directors), with Dario Scardapane, a writer on the original The Punisher. The original Daredevil was gritty and often brutal, and in keeping with this change in tone, Marvel brought on fight and stunt coordinator Philip Silvera, a veteran of the original Netflix series, who will act as both stunt coordinator and second unit director for the new series. Loki directors Aaron Moorehead and Justin Benson were brought in to guide the show.
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Featured image: NEW YORK, NEW YORK – OCTOBER 19: Charlie Cox attends the Marvel Fanfare with C.B. Cebulski at New York Comic Con at Javits Center on October 19, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for Disney)
At this past weekend’s New York Comic Con, DC Studios co-chief James Gunn had a lot to say. He, his fellow Creature Commandsexecutive producer Dean Lorey, and cast members from DC’s upcoming animated series revealed the wild first trailer, and while he was there, Gunn dished on some of the studios’ most marquee upcoming projects.
Those projects include his big-time reboot, Superman, which will fly first out of the gate and become DC Studios’ marquee first feature. Gunn wrote and directed Superman, which stars David Corenswet as Clark Kent/Superman and Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane. Gunn also teased Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, based on Tom King’s comic “Woman of Tomorrow,” starring Milly Alcock as Kara Zor-El/Supergirl and directed by Craig Gillespie, and finally, the upcoming new series Lantners, starring Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart, two members of the Green Lanterns Corps who travel to Earth to work on a murder mystery set in the American heartland.
On the Superman front, a lot is riding on Gunn’s reboot of DC’s most iconic superhero—unless you prefer that Dark Knight fella from Gotham—which kicks off the feature slate for Gunn and co-DC Studios chief Peter Safran, which they’ve titled “Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters.” Gunn reassured fans that, yes, Superman’s superheroic dog, Krypto, will be in the new film. Considering Gunn’s third and final Guardians of the Galaxywas a loving homage to Rocket the Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper)’s tragic past, Gunn has proven that he has no issues fronting an animal’s point of view.
“Krypto, that’s been something that’s just been amazing,” Gunn said at New York Comic Con. “We’ve been working with him in the edit. He’s an incredible part of the story to me personally. When I was writing the screenplay, he came in and kind of changed everything up.”
As for Corenswet’s performance as Superman, Gunn was very excited.
“We’re deep in the process of editing. David Corenswet is going to f**ing blow people away. He is the movie star that everyone just dreams he could possibly be. I don’t think anyone really understands the depth of this guy’s talent dramatically, comedically. He’s the best physical action star I’ve probably ever worked with. I feel good about it, and I’m really hard on stuff, so it’s been fantastic… It won’t be too long before we see a trailer, but it also won’t be too soon.”
As for Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Gunn seemed just as enthused about reintroducing Superman’s cousin, Milly Alcock’s Kara Zor-El, and how Tom King’s comic “Woman of Tomorrow,” offers extremely rich source material for the character.
“[Writer] Anna [Nogueira] came in, and she pitched the story to me of Supergirl, and it was just one of the best pitches I’ve ever heard, and she immediately wrote it,” Gunn said. “She came in with the first draft that was great, and it’s just gotten better and better. Then [director] Craig [Gillespie] has been incredibly easy to work with, and I can’t wait for that to come out.”
For DC Studios’ upcoming Lanterns, Gunn talked about the latest and most major casting addition along with Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan, and that’s Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart.
“Aaron Pierre is somebody who I’ve wanted to work together with for a long time,” Gunn said. “People don’t know, but he was almost cast as Adam Warlock. He’s an amazing actor, and I just really admired him from the beginning of his career. Seeing him read with Kyle was one of those miraculous moments. I don’t care what they’re saying, I just love what they’re saying together. When we first started the DCU, the first couple of weeks of heading this out, we got together with a group of writers, and Tom King was one of those writers, and we were in this room, and we came up with sort of this concept for Lanterns. It’s a very grounded series, a very real series, which is a strange thing to say about a Green Lanterns show. But it’s going to be something like nobody’s ever seen before.”
For more on all things DC Studios, check out these stories:
James Gunn had a lot to share New York Comic Con, and arguably the biggest news also included a fun first trailer. That would be for Gunn’s new-look DC Studios’ animated series Creature Commandos, a seven-episode Max original written and executive produced by Gunn, which tracks a secret team of incarcerated monsters recruited for the world’s most dangerous missions. These Creature Commandos are “your last, worst option,” according to the series logline.
Taking the stage at the Con on Saturday, Gunn said that Creature Commandos would be “something beyond what any of us expected.”
The Commandos panel included Gunn, fellow executive producer Dean Lorey, and voice cast members David Harbour (Frankenstein), Frank Grill (Rick Flag, Sr.), Steve Agee (Economos), Zoë Chao (Nina Mazursky, and Sean Gunn (GI Robot and Weasel).
David Harbour is Frankenstein and Frank Grillo is Rick Flag Sr. Photograph by Courtesy of Max
Gunn promised that his and Peter Safran’s DC Studios, which they’ve been reimagining and retooling to bring all DC Studios titles into a unified narrative universe, would be unveiling Commandos as a show that was totally “its own thing.” Gunn said the same for the rest of DC’s new slate. “Every single project out of DC Studios is going to be its own thing. We want this to be very different from what Supermanis going to be when that comes out,” he said, pointing to Lanterns and Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. “It’s a connected universe, but we’re not imposing any overall aesthetic.”
Executive producer Dean Lorey said that the ton of Commandos is more grounded despite the killer cast of oddballs.
We were looking to do something that was sort of grounded, but with some style to it. It’s got a lot of really dark, dark tones. The palettes are really cool. But as you can see, it’s very action-oriented. It sets itself apart from, say, Harley Quinn and those kind of shows. It feels more adult.”
Check out the first trailer for Creature Commandos.
Creature Commandos was already something Gunn was working on before he and Safran took over DC Studios. “It was written when I started as the CEO of DC Studios. I had talked to Max about creating something afterPeacemaker did so well. I talked to Peter Girardi about creating an animated series. I like the Creature Commandos. I love monsters. I love Frankenstein, the story of Bride of Frankenstein. It seemed like the perfect thing to do,” he said. “I wrote the scripts without a deal. Then I happened to get hired instead of DC studios, and I am very gracious. Thank you, self.”
There will be lots more characters in Creature Commandos, voiced by some very well-known and beloved figures, both as performers and within the DC Studios world. One of those is Viola Davis, who returns to voice Amanda Waller. “She just grounded it so well, and she’s so incredible in the show,” Gunn said. “She gets a chance to do a little bit of humorous stuff too. Some emotional stuff. She just really brought everything together. I’m so fortunate to have her as a person in my life and in my career.”
That cast also includes Indira Varma, who is on board as Bride of Frankenstein, Alan Tudyk as Doctor Phosphorous, Maria Bakalova as Illana Rostovic, and Anya Chalotra as Circe.
GI Robot in “Creature Commandos.” Courtesy Photograph by Courtesy of Max.
Gunn also joked that Creature Commandos borrows a bit from that ABC classic Lost. “The first episode is you see the team come together, but then every episode after that explores the backstory of one of these characters — not necessarily the origin, in some places, the origin — but just something from their past that we see about how they got to the place where they are today,” he said. “And we get to know these characters in a much more intimate way because of that. I think it’s a really fun way to get to know. You see that some of them are a lot better than maybe we think they are at the beginning of the series, and some of them are even worse.”
The new series arrives on Max on December 5.
For more on all things DC Studios, check out these stories:
The official Dune: Prophecy trailer has revealed the expansion of the Dune universe that Denis Villeneuve has reinvigorated in his two masterful films. Prophecy, however, is set 10,000 years before the events depicted in Villeneuve’s films, long before Paul Atreides was leading a rebellion of Fremen against House Harkonnen and eventually the rest of the craven galactic Houses looking to enrich themselves from the resources on Arrakis. Yet that dangerous desert planet, filled with the highly-coveted spice and ruled by the colossal, subterranean gods known as sandworms, will play a big part in Prophecy, a series that sets out to reveal how the immensely powerful and secretive sisterhood known as the Bene Gesserit gained their influence and learned the tricks of their dark trade.
Dune: Prophecy is centered on two Harkonnen sisters, Valya (Emily Watson), a Mother Superior of a school of young priestesses in training, and Tula (Olivia Williams), who go on to found the Bene Gesserit, two later members of which were played so vividly by Rebecca Ferguson and Charlotte Rampling in Villeneuve’s films.
“What was really delicious to me as an actor about coming into this world was that these women are from a truly, truly, recognizably messed-up family,” Watson said at the Dune: Prophecy New York Cinema-Con panel. “They’ve had an awful childhood, and it’s sort of propelled them away. And nothing, nothing in this world is good and bad; everything is compromised and strange, and yet what Valya Harkonnen sets her sights on is really determining the right path for humankind. That’s her ambition.”
The new trailer reveals the dangers ahead for both women as they chart their course through the squabbling powers of the Imperium, including Mark Strong’s Emperor Javicco Corrino and Travis Fimmel’s Desmond Hart, a man committed to wiping the sisters off the face of the planet. Prophecy will give viewers an early look at the Harkonnen family we met as the pale, savage clan in Villeneuve’s films, as well as their longstanding interstellar feud with the Atreides clan. Prophecy is based on the work of Frank Herbert’s son, Brian Herbert, and his co-author, Kevin J. Anderson, in their book “Sisterhood of Dune.”
Watson, Williams, Fimmel and Strong are joined by Travis Fimmel, Jodhi May, Sarah-Sofie Boussnina, Josh Heuston, Chloe Lea, Jade Anouka, Faoileann Cunningham, Edward Davis, Aoife Hinds, Chris Mason, Shalom Brune-Franklin, Jihae, Tabu, Charithra Chandran, Jessica Barden, Emma Canning, and Yerin Ha.
The series hails from showrunner and executive producer Alison Schapker. Anna Foerster directed multiple episodes, including the all-important pilot, and serves as executive producer. Jordan Goldberg, Mark Tobey, John Cameron, Matthew King, Scott Z. Burns, and Dune and Dune: Part Two screenwriter Jon Spaihts executive produce alongside Brian Herbert. Byron Merritt and Kim Herbert are executive producers for the Frank Herbert estate.
Check out the trailer below. Dune: Prophecy arrives on HBO on November 17.
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Tom Holland revealed some major Spidey news when he said that he and his Spider-Man co-star Zendaya (also his real-life girlfriend) have read the Spider-Man 4 script a few weeks ago.
Speaking on the Rich Roll Podcast, Holland admitted that the script “needs work, but the writers are doing a great job.”
Spider-Man 4 will have big webs to fill—the last installment, Spider-Man: No Way Home, boasted not only Holland’s Peter Parker but also the return of previous Spideys played by Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire. It was a critical and commercial smash, with a bittersweet ending that required Peter to allow himself to be erased from the memories of the people he loves, including Zendaya’s MJ, as penance for all his multiverse meddling. A month ago, The Hollywood Reporter scooped that Destin Daniel Cretton, the director of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, was in talks to step in to direct Spider-Man 4. Jon Watts has directed the first three films.
Spider-Man (Tom Holland) in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Courtesy of Sony Pictures.
Holland feels good about the direction the Spider-Man 4 script is headed. “I read it three weeks ago, and it really lit a fire in me. Zendaya and I sat down and read it together, and we at times were bouncing around the living room like, ‘This is a real movie worthy of the fans’ respect.’ But there’s a few things we need to figure out before we can get that really going, but it’s exciting,” Holland said.
Yet as always with a Marvel movie, there were larger considerations.
“One of the things to bear in mind with Marvel is that your film is a small cog in a large machine,” Holland told the Rich Roll podcast about making Spider-Man 4. “And that machine has got to keep running. And you need to make sure you can fit into that timeline at the right time to benefit the bigger picture. That’s one of the challenges we’re facing. The time in which we need to get that done is a tall order but definitely achievable with the fantastic people we have working on it now.”
Holland has made it clear that Spider-Man is near and dear to his heart, and to do a Spider-Man 4 after three critically and commercially successful films already, it would have to be for a story that really popped.
“I feel very protective over Spider-Man,” he told Collider. “I feel very, very lucky that we were able to work on a franchise that got better with each movie, that got more successful with each movie, which I think is really rare, and I want to protect his legacy. So, I won’t make another one for the sake of making another one. It will have to be worth the while of the character.”
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Most of the time, all you can do with a Christopher Nolan project is speculate. For every Dark Knight film, based on one of the most popular characters of all time, or Oppenheimer, based on Kai Bird’s book “American Prometheus,” there’s been an Inception or Interstellar or Tenet, films whose intricate plotting and heady ambition were kept more or less secret from the general public until their first trailers arrived. This is how Nolan likes it, and it also happens to be a great way to entice fans. Nolan is that rare director whose name alone guarantees interest, and it’s in his interest, and the film’s interest, to keep even its genre a secret for as long as possible.
This brings us to Nolan’s next film, which is set at Universal, the studio that released his Oscar-winning blockbuster, Oppenheimer. We know that the film will star Matt Damon, who reteams with Nolan after having a meaty role in Oppenheimer as Leslie Groves, the military man who put together the Manhattan Project and took a chance on the brilliant, difficult Oppenheimer to lead it. Damon also had a brief but juicy role in Interstellar as a double-crossing astronaut desperate to get off an uninhabitable planet. One guess as to the subject of Nolan’s upcoming film is a remake of the cult British TV series The Prisoner, which aired back in the UK in 1967 and in the US in 1968, created by Irish writer/actor Patrick McGoohan. The Prisoner has been knocking around Universal for a while, and its surreal mixture of spy thriller and sci-fi screams Nolan-—Tenet was an outright surreal sci-fi epic that was also the closest Nolan’s gotten to a proper spy thriller, and one could argue Inception, clearly sci-fi ,was at least adjacent to the spy thriller in its own way, too.
L to R: Matt Damon is Leslie Groves and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.Caption: (L-r) Director/writer/producer CHRISTOPHER NOLAN and JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ action epic “TENET,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon
Yet sources told Varietythat Nolan’s upcoming project is not a sci-fi epic, which would seem to rule out remaking The Prisoner. That does, however, leave the spy genre, and one piece of Nolan lore is that he considered jumping into the world of James Bond. Yet as Variety and other outlets have mentioned, Nolan is a director who gets final cut, and the Bond franchise, led by Barbara Broccoli, involves a more hands-on approach. This doesn’t rule out Nolaan deploying Damon in a spy thriller; Damon was Jason Bourne, after all. It’s also a very rich genre that allows Nolan to do a lot of the things he loves: weave together complex plots that often play with time, unleash mind-boggling practical effects, and give an ensemble cast juicy roles involving characters not being who they appear to be at first blush.
Nolan has made a string of astonishing sci-fi films, but he’s proven adept at a variety of genres, including the war epic (Dunkirk), the bio-pic (Oppenheimer), and the thriller (Memento, Insomnia). In fact, Memento, the film that put Nolan on the map, is not a bad film to re-watch for a taste of what Nolan could do with a straight-up spy thriller—it was an ingeniously plotted, generally thrilling race against time centered on a character with anterograde amnesia (Guy Pearce) working with only bits of information he’s left for himself to try and track down his wife’s killer. It wasn’t a spy thriller, but it was complex, thrilling, and genuinely surprising, all elements that the best spy thrillers need to succeed. And who’s going to doubt Nolan at this point? Not us, probably not you, and definitely not Universal.
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Will Spider-Man appear in Venom: The Last Dance? This is the question on the mind of Spidey fans as we approach the October 25 premiere date of Tom Hardy’s last turn as Eddie Brock, the investigative reporter turned alien symbiote antihero. For two bloody, funny films, Eddie and Venom have been biting the heads off bad guys (mostly) and battling some of the universe’s most vicious beings, including Carnage (Woody Harrelson), an alien symbiote even bigger and better than Venom. But throughout it all, despite Venom being one of Spider-Man’s chief antagonists in both the comics and previous films, there’s been no peep from Peter Parker. It’s been 15 years, in fact, since we’ve seen Spidey and Venom take swings at each other, despite the fact that Venom, Morbius, and now Kraven the Hunter all exist in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. That universe has been missing its central star.
Sala 7 posted the Spidey question on Instagram to Tom Hardy, and his response left the door open just a crack for a potential surprise.
“Will we ever meet Spider-Man? You know, see, there are always possibilities. But, I cannot possibly say anything because this is the last movie. I would love that.”
So, Hardy hasn’t ruled out the possibility with this cryptic answer, and that’s exciting. Marvel has confirmed that Tom Holland is returning as Peter Parker, so, one could reason there’s a non-zero chance that Holland swings through The Last Dance before going on to Spider-Man 4. It’s also been confirmed that Knull, one of the most formidable villains in Spidey’s orbit, will appear in the film, so speculation is that Holland’s Spider-Man (or even Andrew Garfield’s, as he’s expressed interest in returning to the character after appearing in Spider-Man: No Way Home) will take on the intergalactic beast.
Director Kelly Marcel told IGNthat while, yes, Knull will be in The Last Dance, he’s not the main villain, and therefore, we can expect to see him again. “One movie could never do justice to Knull,” she told IGN. So, it stands to reason we could see Spider-Man for the sole purpose of having a scene or two with Hardy’s Venom (at last!), and then swinging off to take on Knull while Venom deals with the film’s main villain.
What we do know about The Last Dance is Hardy will appear in a story he cooked up with first-time director Marcel, a longtime Venom scribe herself. Marcel has been working with Hardy since the beginning, director Ruben Fleischer’s 2018 hit Venom and then onto Andy Serkis’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which co-starred Woody Harrelson as the alien symbiote that made Venom look mild-mannered by comparison.
“Hunted by both of their worlds and with the net closing in, the duo is forced into a devastating decision that will bring the curtains down on Venom and Eddie’s last dance,” the logline states. The Last Dance finds Venom’s home planet and its ferocious inhabitants having zeroed in on Earth, forcing Eddie and Venom to go on the run.
Newcomers Juno Temple and Chiwetel Ejiofor join Hardy in the new film alongside Rhys Ifans, Peggy Lu, Alanna Ubach, and Stephen Graham.
Hardy wrote in an Instagram post last November that he loved making the final film with Marcel. “It’s been and continues to be a lot of fun this journey — there’s always hard turns to burn when we work, but [it] doesn’t feel as hard when you love what you do and when you know you have great material and the support at all sides, of a great team. I want to mention very briefly how proud of my director, writing partner and dear friend Kelly Marcel I am. Watching you taking the helm on this one fills me with pride, it is an honour. Trust your gut, your instincts are always spot on.”
Venom: The Last Dance hits theaters on October 25.
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The tense first teaser for Netflix’s Carry-On has arrived, revealing the new thriller from director Jaume Collet-Serra starring Taron Egerton as Ethan, a TSA agent who’s dropped into a dangerous game by a mysterious passenger who turns out to be a terrorist. That passenger is played by Jason Bateman, a man who knows a thing or two about tense thrillers after delivering four seasons of his nervy Netflix series Ozark. While Bateman wasn’t exactly a good guy in Ozark (by the end of the series, there were few “good guys” to be found), it’s fun to see him play an out-and-out villain here.
The gist of Carry-On is that Bateman’s nefarious traveler blackmails Ethan into letting a deadly package onto a flight that could turn the airport into a massive crime scene. The script comes from Michael Green and T.J. Fixman. Green has a lengthy list of successful writing credits, including James Mangold’s beloved 2017 film Logan and Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 Blade Runner: 2049. Fixman was a successful video game writer who worked on the critically acclaimed animated film Rachet & Clank.
Carry-On‘s cast includes Danielle Deadwyler, Dean Norris, Sofia Carson, and Theo Rossi. Collet-Serra has a long resume of thrillers and chillers, from 2005’s House of Wax and 2009’s Orphan to his underrated Blake Lively-versus-a-shark 2016 thriller The Shallows. More recently, he’s worked on much larger films like 2021’s Jungle Cruise with Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt and 2022’s Black Adam, again with Johnson.
Check out the trailer below. Carry-On arrives on Netflix on December 13.
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No one is more delighted that The Wild Robot has surpassed all expectations at the box office and with critics than director Chris Sanders. Receiving almost perfect reviews upon its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the film is headed towards record-breaking box office numbers for DreamWorks. Buzz has begun for The Wild Robot as a strong contender at this year’s Oscars. Only days ago, DreamWorks gave the green light for a sequel, with director Chris Sanders helming once again.
The story is about the sentient helper robot Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), who crash lands on an island and must adapt to her surroundings, building a relationship with local wildlife and becoming the adoptive mother of Brightbill (Kit Connor), the goose she has accidentally orphaned. She learns friendship and empathy by befriending island creatures, including self-serving fox Fink (Pedro Pascal), overwhelmed possum mom Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara), wise flock leader Longneck (Bill Nighy), and fearless falcon Thunderbolt (Ving Rhames).
There are a number of reasons for the success of The Wild Robot, including the combined star power of the voice actors and the incredibly collaborative partnership of the cast and crew. Of course, it all starts with a story and the cinematic interpretation of Peter Brown’s book series.
The Credits talked about the power and importance of story with DreamWorks’ head of story Heidi Jo Gilbert. Named by Variety as one of 2024’s 10 Animators to Watch, Gilbert headed the story team for the film and played an integral part in building the wonderful story lovers of The Wild Robot film see.
There are storyboards that you specifically did for the sequence when Brightbill and Roz first connect and imprints on her. What was your process on that sequence, and what were some challenges in hitting the right emotional note there?
When I first came on, I felt like Roz and Brightbill’s relationship was the thing that needed to come to the forefront of the story, and the moment where he hatches was very important. I remember having conversations with Chris and our editor, Mary Blee, about light. With Roz, could there be these lights that are emotional versus the ones that are robotic? That just kind of evolved, and then production took it and ran with it, and they created these hexagonal lights that come out of her that represent her emotional expansion.
Heidi Jo Gilbert’s storyboard for Roz and Brightbill. Courtesy Heidi Jo Gilbert.(from back center) Roz (Lupita N’yongo), and Brightbill (Kit Connor) in DreamWorks Animation’s Wild Robot, directed by Chris Sanders.
Can you discuss one of the biggest challenges in character development and how you solved it in the film?
Well, we always love when there’s not a lot of dialogue, and especially the scene where she walks through the forest for the first time, we had versions of that with no dialogue. We ran into problems with that because it needed to serve as her character introduction, and when it was silent, we weren’t getting the personality or character from her that we needed for the rest of the movie. Figuring that out was a journey. There was also a lot of trial and error in unlocking or translating the language. It used to be spread out over the movie instead of taking place, as it does now, in one scene. It’s through a time-lapse that she does it quickly. Originally, it happened in chunks. On her screen, the language would start to translate, and there would be an actual bar with percentages. We placed that throughout different scenes in the movie but found the audience wasn’t absorbing it. If you go back and look at the movie now, you can still see scenes with very little dialogue before we solved that, We had to actually add some, like when she chases after Fink after he catches the egg, because before she couldn’t understand the language. It used to be that for the first 15 or 20 minutes, there was no dialogue, but we needed to make changes just based on the greater story needs or the bigger picture.
You have some great actors voicing characters for this film. Who among them had the most impact on the development of their character?
I feel like Lupita Nyong’o as Roz and Catherine O’Hara as Pinktail both had a big impact on those characters in the booth. We had a hard time finding Pinktail as a character in the movie. We had earlier versions where she wasn’t even a mom. She was just a wannabe actress. When we got Catherine, she really started to help us find the personality and who that character would be, and I think Chris came up with the idea of having her be a mom who was exhausted and overworked, but she really helped us find that as well.
And Lupita?
She was great because she would bring up all these points in her recording sessions that I feel like only she could do because she had to embody that character in her performance and be in Roz’s head. She would find things that were inconsistencies emotionally, in terms of how robotic she needed to be in the beginning and through the end. It was really fun just to see her refine that character, and it made it so much easier for us to track Roz’s robotic versus emotional arcs throughout the movie because she was so aware of it, too. So that just made our jobs a lot easier.
They are very much foils as well, in terms of how they express motherhood, with Roz being more gentle and Pinktail being more blunt and practical.
All true, but I don’t think we molded that intentionally; we just saw problems we needed to solve. First, Pinktail was an actress, then she was a mother, but she was a mom who had all this wisdom for Roz about caring for her children, but it wasn’t working. We actually did a brainstorming session with Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, the directors of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and they helped us find her as edgier and careless about her kids, and when they pitched it, we knew it would work. It creates two sides of motherhood: the very exhausted and overwhelmed with Pinktail and the gentle and sensitive with Roz.
(from left) Fink (Pedro Pascal), Roz (Lupita N’yongo), and Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara) in DreamWorks Animation’s Wild Robot, directed by Chris Sanders.
With multiple perspectives on motherhood, the whole story is just better.
Exactly. It can only happen when you have multiple mother characters. I heard Geena Davis, who is a great advocate for women in film, say that it’s hard to represent all of womanhood when you only have one female character. She brought up A League of Their Own, saying because they had a bunch of different female characters, they could show more facets of being a woman. Because we had multiple mother characters, we could show different sides and not put all the pressure on one character.
DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot, directed by Chris Sanders.
There’s a very positive aspect in this film that is threaded through the story, and the characters are in part in the service of that. Can you talk about that?
We have this dramatic argument going on in the characters about kindness as a survival skill. It’s one of the themes of the book we really wanted to represent, and to get that point across, we had to present the counter-argument to that, and we feel that’s most embodied through Fink, with his “dog eat dog” every creature for themselves attitude, doing whatever they have to do to survive. Pinktail represented the motherhood side of things. We wanted to make sure that in all the situations we put them in, we’d stay true to the characters we’d established with Fink, Thorn, and Paddler. Thorn also embodied the worldview of survival. He’s the one who attacks Roz at the beginning. He’s the Alpha predator on the island. In the scene with all the characters together, we land the emotional part first, with Roz saying how sometimes, to survive, we have to be more than we’re programmed to be. That is threaded through any and all story threads or business between characters, especially when they’re all together.
As much success as The Wild Robot is having, I love to believe it’s in part due to the collaborations of the cast and crew.
Absolutely. Chris Sanders is just so collaborative. It’s his vision, but if he hears a good idea, he’ll run with it, no matter where it comes from. He grew up through the story department, working on films like The Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, and he sees the power of collaboration. If you get the right team together, with the right sensibilities, having someone who can challenge the story from a different point of view that supports the greater vision, it always makes the story better. He’s a great collaborator, not just with the story but in all aspects. Working that way has inspired me to prioritize and find that type of collaborative team. It’s very powerful to have that diversity of talent in the storyroom.
The Wild Robot is in theaters nationwide and available to own or rent as of October 15th.
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In the first three episodes of HBO’s devilishly entertaining The Penguin, Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb has made daring, painful inroads with Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), the daughter of the late Gotham underworld poobah Carmine Falcone (Mark Strong). As the series kicked off in the wake of the Riddler’s attack on Gotham in Matt Reeves’ feature The Batman, Sofia was freshly sprung from Arkham Asylum, where she spent a decade after being accused of the murder of seven women working at her father’s Iceberg Lounge, earning her the nickname “The Hangman” in the press and within her family. The fragile, budding partnership between Oz and Sofia has been slowly fleshed out over the first three episodes, revealing their tortured shared history—including episode one’s explosive opening sequence in which Oz kills her beloved brother, Alberto—and their common goal of filling the power vacuum left after Carmine’s assassination. Episode 4, “Cent’Anni,” filled in the full extent of Sofia’s banishment to Arkham, Oz’s complicity in her miserable decade of confinement, and the people Sofia met while there. One of those people happened to be a classic Batman villain, although her future as a Gotham ghoul was cut brutally short in the episode.
Cristin Milioti, Colin Farrell. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO
“Cent’Anni” (an Italian phrase meaning “may you live 100 years”) took us back to life in Falcone family before the Riddler killed Carmine, when he was running the most powerful crime family in Gotham, and Sofia was his chosen successor. Unlike the unreliable, unfocused Alberto, Sofia was smart, composed, motivated, and somewhat in awe of her father. In short, she wanted to do right by him and wanted him to be proud of her. There was one impediment to her transition into the top spot in the Falcone family—the suicide of her mother, who Sofia found in her parents’ bedroom; she’d hanged herself. When a reporter from the Gotham Gazette, Summer Gleeson (Nadine Malouf), approaches Sofia at a benefit for mental health that the Falcone’s sponsor in honor of her mother’s troubles and asks her pointed questions about the string of apparent suicides of young women working at her father’s club, Sofia’s grim fate is set into motion.
Cristin Milioti, Mark Strong. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO
Sofia agrees to meet with the reporter to hear her out and learns that the young women who keep turning up dead are not, in fact, suicides—they were strangled, and they had fought their killer, as evidenced by marks on their hands and under their fingernails. Confronting this reality forces Sofia to recall a detail from her childhood—the bloody scratches on her father’s hand after her mother’s suicide. The brutal reality of what has actually been happening to these women and what happened to her mother is too much to bear for her. She decides to look away. It doesn’t matter.
Back then, Oz wasn’t the Capo he was when we met him in The Batman or here; he was with Sofia’s driver, and he drove her to meet with Summer Gleeson. Oz goes behind Sofia’s back and tells Carmine about this, and Carmine summons Sofia to meet with her father at his birthday party. In short order, he has her arrested for the murder of Gleeson (which is news to both Sofia and Oz, or so he says), as well as the seven women who had worked at the Iceberg Lounge and its secretive inner sanctum, 44 Degrees. She’s shipped off to Arkham, where she’s tortured, mentally and physically, for the six months before her trial.
Arkham is a legendary breeding ground in the comics and the films for Batman villains, and while Sofia goes into Arkham a sane, innocent woman, she will leave a killer. While there, she meets the woman sharing the next cell over, a patient who calls herself Magpie (Marié Botha), an eccentric, talkative sort who seems desperate to be Sofia’s friend. The problem for Sofia is everyone at Arkham is working for her father, and there will be no end to the brutality she endures—shock “therapy,” unshackled lunatics allowed to attack her, and eventually, the erasure of the one thing holding her together, her court date. The doctors at Arkham have said she’s not stable enough to stand trial, and her family members have all signed affidavits attesting to her insanity. Carmine Falcone has destroyed Sofia’s life and left her no exits whatsoever. And there’s Magpie, chattering away in her ear.
Cristin Milioti, Marié Botha. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO
Magpie is a classic Batman villain from the comics. She was first introduced in 1986 in the third issue of “The Man of Steel,” in which she is a curator for the Gotham City Museum by day, a serial robber by not. She’s a kleptomaniac and a tech whiz who creates explosive replicas of the objects she wants to steal, eventually drawing both Superman and Batman into orbit. It takes the two of them to track her down and send her to Arkham.
In the comics, Magpie was eventually killed by the Penguin’s associates. However, a new version was resurrected as a Black Lantern in the “Blackest Night” saga, and other versions of Magpie ended up in the Suicide Squad and appeared in the shows Gotham, Beware the Batman, and Batwoman.
Unfortunately for us, despite a riveting performance from Botha, Magpie’s tenure in this particular vision of Gotham is short-lived. Sofia finally snaps at Arkham, and Magpie pays the price—Sofia beats her to death. It ain’t pretty.
It was, in short, a riveting but pitch-black episode devoted to Cristin. Milioti’s sensational performance as Sofia and the injustice she’s endured. It also teased us with a glimpse of some of the colorful villains that have moved across the pages and screens of Gotham-set stories. “Cent’Anni” also made clear that as incredible as Colin Farrell is as the Penguin, as much as we find ourselves rooting for him in a way that’s not so dissimilar from how we rooted for the deeply troubled and decidedly bad Tony Soprano, his complicity in Sofia Falcone’s torture is impossible to look away from. The irony is after screwing over countless dangerous people in Gotham for years, and years, Sofia Falcone might be the one person capable of making Oz finally pay for his crimes.
