One of the most beloved episodes of Black Mirroris, without question, “San Junipero,” and now its helmer, Owen Harris, has been tapped to board one of HBO’s biggest productions.
Harris is joining HBO’s next Game of Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, only the second spinoff series that will have made it to air—House of the Dragon was the first—and now it has a stellar director in Harris, who also will serve as executive producer and will direct the first three episodes, setting the tone and pace for the series. Harris also directed the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back,” another stunner.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mackenzie Davis in “Black Mirror” season 3, “San Junipero.” Courtesy Laurie Sparham/Netflix
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is set a century before the events in Game of Thrones and is centered on two unlikely heroes wandering about Westeros and getting into adventures. One is Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey), a young, naïve knight who makes up for his lack of knowledge with a tremendous amount of courage. Ser Duncan has a friend and helpmate, his squire Egg (Sol Ansell), and the two go bumbling about Westeros while the Targaryens sit on the Iron Throne.
We also now know that A Knight in the Seven Kingdoms’ first season will have six episodes, a touch tighter than the usual 10-episode arc of the first seasons of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. This smaller narrative window owes a lot to the fact that the series is adapted from George R. R. Martin’s novella “The Hedge Knight,” which ran a slim 160 pages, a much tighter storyline than Martin’s usual sprawling epics.
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Leave it to Lord Corlys to clue us in on House of the Dragon‘s season 2 timeline.
Actor Steve Toussaint, who plays Lord Corlys, aka “The Sea Snake,” gave us a major clue regarding the timeline for season 2 of House of the Dragon during a panel at CCXP. Toussaint revealed that season 2 will begin a mere 10 days after the end of season 1. This is intriguing news for a series that ambitiously took a massive time jump in season 1, springing ahead 10 years between episodes 5 and 6.
Joining Toussaint on the panel were Eve Best (Rhaenys Targaryen) and Ewan Mitchell (Aemond Targaryen), and each of them spoke about their characters’ journeys in the turbulent times ahead as House Targaryen’s internal battles increase in intensity.
After revealing that season 2 picks up 10 days after season 1, Toussaint had this to say about Lord Corlys: “So for Corlys, he’s still coming to terms with the grief of losing his son, his brother, his daughter, and his heir, his grandson. So he is trying to deal with that, plus hold on to the one thing he holds most of his relationship with his wife, so that’s kind of where he is. He’s in a very weakened and emotional state.”
Steve Toussaint as Lord Corlys Velaryon, Eve Best as Princess Rhaenys Targaryen. Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO
Eve Best, who plays Lord Corlys’ wife Rhaenys, said that season 2 will find her strong, patient should-have-been-queen getting a little dragon therapy: “Okay, so Rhaenys is trying to keep everything together, in the light of the horrible loss of Lucerys and everything that’s been going on for the last 10 days. She’s pulling out strength and trying not to lose her shit. And, I think she’s really tired and out on her dragon (Meleys) a lot.”
Ewan Mitchell (Aemond Targaryen) in “House of the Dragon.” By Ollie Upton.
As for Ewan Mitchell, his Aemond Targaryen was the catalyst for a lot of the bloodshed and will no doubt play a huge role in the carnage to come.
“Aemond kick-started the Dance of the Dragons and drew first blood by killing Lucerys,” he said during the panel.”He’s facing a choice: he can either own what he did, return to King’s Landing, and say that he meant to kill Luc and become the most hated man in the realm. Or, he can admit what he did was a mistake and be at the mercy of Rhaenyra.”
We’ll finally find out who takes the upper hand in House Targaryen’s blood civil war when House of the Dragon season 2 premieres on HBO on June 16.
For more on all things Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, check out these stories:
Prime Video’s Blade Runner 2099 just got a major talent upgrade.
Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh has joined the cast in a lead role, adding a major star to one of TV’s most mysterious, exciting new projects. Yeoh joins a limited series that comes from showrunner Silka Luisa (Shining Girls) and is executive-produced by original Blade Runner director Ridley Scott. The Blade Runner 2099 team also includes director Jonathan van Tulleken (Shogun), Blade Runner 2049 screenwriter Michael Green as a non-writing executive producer, and The Leftovers and Watchmen alum Tom Spezialy, who serves as an executive producer and writer.Blade Runner 2099 is the first-ever television series adaptation of one of the most iconic sci-fi film franchises of them all.
Who precisely Yeoh will play is not yet known, as much of Blade Runner 2099 has been kept under wraps. We know it’s a direct sequel to Scott’s groundbreaking 1982 original film and Villeneuve’s beautifully executed follow-up 2049.
Yeoh is coming off her historic Oscar win last year as the first Best Actress winner of Asian descent. She is set to reprise her Star Trek: Discovery role as Emperor Philippa Georgiou in the upcoming TV movie Star Trek: Section 31.
There’s no release date yet for the limited series.
For more on Amazon Prime Video, check out these stories:
Director Luca Guadagnino’s sexy new tennis romance, Challengers, layers a years-long love triangle of three millennial-era players over the highs and lows of their careers. At the center is talented, driven, and stunning Tashi (Zendaya). She first dates Patrick (Josh O’Connor), who plays as well as she does, but doesn’t take his career or their relationship seriously enough for either to work out. After getting knocked out of the circuit with a knee injury, Tashi gets together with Art (Mike Faist), a more earnest character with a more mediocre tennis game who Tashi, as his coach, manages to transform into a star.
Cutting across different chronologies, Tashi and Art live on the road in five-star hotels (one of Challengers’ shooting locations was the Newbury Boston) and, for years, have little to do with Patrick, who plays a journeyman’s game and lives out of his car. When Art hits an unusual career low, Tashi enters him as a wildcard in a low-level local challengers match with the aim of getting him an easy, ego-boosting win before a more important match. But Patrick is there too (sleeping in his car, in the club parking lot), desperate to win any part of the purse attached to the match. Once Tashi and Art arrive, he reconfigures his goals for something loftier.
On the court, Challengers gets everything right, from period-correct Adidas branding to the kinesio tape running up Art’s back. Off-court, the film keeps to Guadagnino’s predilection for elegant, unfussy interiors, whether it’s an airy Stanford dining hall or a high-end hotel bar Patrick can’t afford. For production designer Merissa Lombardo (I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), it was important to offer both an accurate and a stylized view of the settings associated with competitive tennis, which meant building out almost the entire set of the pivotal challengers match and redoing well-known courts along the way.
We spoke with Lombardo about getting into the tennis circuit, scouting for Guadagnino-esque interiors around Boston, and building the three main characters’ visual backstories despite none of them having a home.
Was competitive tennis something you were familiar with going into the project?
No, not at all. In fact, when I got the script, I knew it would be a challenge, with no pun intended, to start researching this film and how to make it look interesting and not like a regular sports film. That was very important to me, and I think to Luca. We worked with Brad Gilbert and other consultants and experts to understand tennis, but from a design perspective, it was also important to see how tennis has been photographed, how it’s looked historically, and how we could bring a lot of that into our world.
That world alternates between realistic and stylized. How did you decide which direction to take each setting?
In the original script, there were so many different matches. I started from the point of, What do these things look like in real life? That’s a base, and from there, we play with colors, lines, simple graphics, even the clothing, and how that’s going to look on top of these big color walls. Everything was very intentional. We started from the point of reality and research and then, from there, tried to figure out how we could add our own look to things and make them look really graphic and beautiful. I’m glad you noticed that because in every different match, we tried to get color in that way because when you watch the games, you really do just see these individual people on this big color field, which is how I started looking at the world.
How did the production design support the arc of the characters growing up and changing?
We looked a lot at how actual tennis players live. There are a lot of grand hotel rooms, branding, and products, and we wanted to really show that. A lot of the films and projects I do have very character-heavy environments, but with these particular characters, you don’t know where they live. They kind of exist as they are, so for me, the question was, how do we represent these three different people? For example, we painted Patrick’s car interior, and we really thought about what was in there. And there are each of the hotel rooms as they progress in their careers. They obviously start in a dingy hotel room, which we built on a stage, and progress into more glamorous, beautiful rooms full of branding and products, all these things that are part of this lifestyle. I’m happy that people seem to be picking up on the fact that we were able to show progression and give the characters a visual backstory. I think the biggest progression was the party they went to after the Billie Jean King match. That was the first time we were using Adidas posters — this was the first entrance into that world.
There are also interior elements that seem reminiscent of the interiors in I Am Love. Was Luca Guadagnino looking for that sort of aesthetic?
We never discussed that, but obviously, he has a very particular style. I think for things like the different hotel lobbies, we scouted hard and long to look for places that gave us beautiful flooring and beautiful details. We wanted everything to feel very clean. I tried to give him and Sayombhu [Mukdeeprom, the cinematographer] spaces we could move throughout, so it wasn’t just two walls. In the scouting process, it was about finding places that were beautiful as they were, adding our own flavor to that, and which enabled the camera to shoot from various angles and move around the space. Obviously, Luca has his own style, especially when it comes to the intimacy of people together.
Besides that first dingy hotel room where the trio have their first intentional meeting, are there other builds that might surprise audiences?
We basically built the whole challengers match site. It was very hard to find it. We were also scouting around Boston in winter with four feet of snow. As it was written in the script as New Rochelle Tennis Club, I started research there. Everywhere you go, these clubs have a different feel. We looked very hard to find a site that we could build on and lay out every piece we needed for the script so we wouldn’t have to go to different places. We also needed a site where we could be for a long time. We took that site and redid the court, built the locker rooms, put the pro shop in a barn, and built that big beautiful awning on the tennis court so we could have spectators from both sides. I think another thing that might surprise people is the Billie Jean King match. We shot at that location, but we researched heavily all the graphics from that time period, and replaced everything with all these period-correct graphics, chose which court worked the best, then built upon that space.
The graphics are one of the film’s most realistic elements, tying you to the world of tennis.
I always — and I know Luca, too — like to use real brands. Branding in sports, and tennis specifically, is a huge thing, so we fought really hard to be able to use those brands and make it feel real in that way rather than making things up. For every match, we researched what all those courts look like and what was there at that time to help everything feel real.
Were the brands themselves open to the requests?
It’s a big process. We have a whole department that helps us do that. Luckily everyone we reached out to was pretty generous about letting us put those in. Obviously, it was a fictional story, but we were trying to be true to the sport and make it look and feel real.
Nine years after George Miller’s more or less flawless Mad Max:Fury Road introduced an unbelievable Charlize Theron as Furiosa, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the origin story of how Theron’s one-armed warrior supreme came to be, is racing toward theaters. And with its swiftly approaching premiere date comes the first reactions to Miller’s follow-up, the fifth film in his decades-spanning Mad Max dystopian mega-narrative.
While we’ll have to wait a bit longer for the full reviews, the embargo for social media reactions has been lifted, and the unifying theme between them all is that Miller has cooked up another super-charged action epic. Anya Taylor-Joy has stepped into the role of the younger Furiosa, with Miller’s new film focused on how she became the fearsome and fearless liberator we came to know in Fury Road. Here, she has to battle against the man who obliterated her childhood and took away her beloved mother, Chris Hemsworth’s Warlord Dementus.
“Powerhouse action filmmaking at its absolute best,” writes Fandango‘s Erik Davis.
George Miller’s #Furiosa is powerhouse action filmmaking at its absolute best! A ferocious & relentlessly paced epic that expands the story of Furiosa and the Wasteland while delivering the craziest chases, the most bombastic characters & just plain stunning cinematography.… pic.twitter.com/tLEADO3Zc2
IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich points out that Furiosa has the courage to be a different kind of movie than Fury Road while still delivering an absolute smashing time.
brings me great joy to report that Furiosa is really, *really* fucking good.
operates in an extremely different gear than Fury Road (in ways that i suspect will frustrate some people), but also manages to make that movie even richer while carving its own legend in the wasteland.
Furiosa takes us back to that original sin committed against her as a child when she was snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and ended up in the snares of Dementus, the leader of the great Biker Horde. This crime sets into motion her years-long struggle against the lunatics roaming the vast wasteland and vying for supremacy in a broken world.
Critic Simon Thompson (The Wrap, Variety, etc.) enthuses that Furiosa somehow seems even too big for the IMAX format:
Jesus George Miller! #Furiosa engulfs you. At times it almost seems to exceed the canvas of the #IMAX format it is THAT big – and yet at times has a deeply affecting intimacy. Echoing cinematic elements from the 50s through the 80s, it’s a rich, smart vision the cast revels in 👍 pic.twitter.com/1C7NWHqUJ7
Miller’s latest is set 45 years after the collapse of society and details how the young Furiosa managed to become a master of all things mechanical and survive a war between Warlord Dementus and Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme).
Furiosa’s exploits in Fury Road were significant—risking life and what was left of her limbs to free a gaggle of female prisoners from Immortan Joe, the sadistic ruler of the citadel. In Furiosa, it seems Immortan Joe, being the enemy of her enemy, might prove himself to be a friend of sorts to our heroine.
FURIOSA is a visceral triumph. An epic trip through Miller’s scorched wasteland that spans decades. The emotional journey is intimately personal and deeply moving. Action is ferocious, wild and unrelenting. Hold tight and brace for fury. pic.twitter.com/r8OOSCsrNt
Now that I can say so, #Furiosa is a BLAST! Made in the spirit of FURY ROAD, it’s still its own beast that thrives on exaggerated action and characters. Anya Taylor-Joy makes the character her own, but this is Chris Hemsworth’s chance to prove his worth as a character actor. pic.twitter.com/M2Nl7x6Fqu
LADY AND GENTLEMENS: #Furiosa is myth making at its finest. The most sprawling Mad Max Saga entry returns to the series’ roots: it’s a powerful, moving, gritty tale of revenge in the middle of a world gone wild. Also: windsurfing bombers. Anya Taylor-Joy owns, Hemsworth kills! pic.twitter.com/9R0adQf8Of
Once again, Miller directs from a script he wrote alongside his Fury Road co-writer Nick Lathouris, and he’s built the world of Furiosa with plenty more Fury Road alums, including production designer Colin Gibson, costume designer Jenny Beavan, and makeup designer Lesley Vanderwalt, each of whom won an Oscar for their work on Fury Road.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga revs into theaters on May 24, 2024:
Featured image: Caption: Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland
Our first glimpse of David Corenswet as Superman is here.
Writer/director James Gunn, naturally, was the one who shared the image of Corenswet suited up as the Man of Steel, sliding on his red boot. This is the first time we’ve seen Corenswet in Superman’s iconic red and blue suit, and he becomes only the third man to play the superhero, joining Christopher Reeve, who played him from 1978 to 1987, Brandon Routh in 2006, and most recently, Henry Cavill from 2013 to 2022.
Corenswet’s Clark Kent/Superman is joined by newly cast Neva Howell and Pruitt Taylor Vince, playing Martha and Jonathan Kent respectively, alongside Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher, Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific, Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, Anthony Carrigan as Metamorpho, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, María Gabriela de Faría as The Engineer, and Gunn’s longtime collaborator Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner.
There’s a lot going on at DC Studios, with Gunn’s Superman as the marquee title and the first feature to roll out of the studio under his and co-chief Peter Safran’s leadership. Superman will fly first out of the gate for Gunn and Safran’s “Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters,” which will include a TV series set on Wonder Woman’s home island of Themyscira called Paradise Lost, the introduction of a new Batman in The Brave and the Bold, the film Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow starring Milly Alcock, and Swamp Thing, in development with director James Mangold, which will return the infamous monster to the big screen.
Superman will fly into theaters, including IMAX, on July 11, 2025.
Featured image: HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – AUGUST 16: David Corenswet attends the Los Angeles Premiere of Netflix’s “Look Both Ways” at TUDUM Theater on August 16, 2022 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)
Hollywood couldn’t have found a more perfect director for Ryan Gosling’s stuntman rom-com The Fall Guy (in theaters now) than David Leitch. A body double-turned-stunt supervisor on dozens of movies, including John Wick, he understood the stunt world firsthand before moving into the director’s chair for Deadpool 2 and Bullet Train. To oversee stunts on The Fall Guy, co-starring Emily Blunt and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Leitch enlisted longtime compadre Chris O’Hara, who boasts some 90 action credits, including a stint as Hugo Weaving’s stunt double in Matrix 2, along with three Jason Bourne films and the hair-raising Baby Driver.
Intent on saluting the craft of physical stunts in the age of digital effects, The Fall Guy features boat jumps, fights, car chases and a record-breaking “cannon roll,” in which stunt driver Logan Holladay somersaulted a jeep eight and a half times before tumbling to an upside down stop.
O’Hara, speaking from a closed-off stretch of Hollywood Boulevard ahead of The Fall Guy‘s red carpet premiere, breaks down the movie’s most riveting action sequences and describes the one kind of stunt he won’t do.
You are officially designated as “Stunt Designer” for The Fall Guy, the first time that title has been used. What does that mean to you?
David Leitch and [producer] Kelly McCormick realized the real scope of what a stunt coordinator does, so to give me the honor of being the first one to have that title — it’s pretty cool. Hopefully, I’ll be the first of many stunt designers out there because I think we can all stand to get a little more recognition
The Academy Awards will now recognize casting directors and of course, production designers and costume designers have their own categories. Maybe the time will come when “Stunt Designer” becomes an Oscar-recognized award category.
This stunt designer credit hopefully brings light to the fact that I am designing the action for the film. Right now it’s about educating [people in the Academy] about what stunts really mean to the film business. Stunts have been part of movies since the silent film era ever since Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, who were both actors and stunt men.
Left to right: Stunt designer Chris O’Hara, second from left, on set of “The Fall Guy” set with (left to right) Bob Brown, Troy Brown and David Leitch. Photo credits on all: Eric Laciste/Universal Pictures
Since Fall Guy director David Leitch shares your background in stunts, did you have a shorthand talking through the film’s big action scenes?
Dave and I grew up in the business together. There were six of us kind of spending every day together training, and we also lived together for a year or two. So, coming from the world of stunt performers made The Fall Guy a personal thing for both of us. We wanted to do the stunt community justice by being as factual as we could be. I think people are excited to see practical stunts where there’s no question that they were really done [physically rather than digitally].
L to R: Director David Leitch and Ryan Gosling (as Colt Seavers) on the set of THE FALL GUY, directed by David Leitch
I wonder if stunt performers, by nature, have a bit of a wild streak?
I wouldn’t call it wild, and I wouldn’t say it’s [being a] thrill seeker. I look at what we do as, we’re professional athletes. We all come from different disciplines, be it moto-cross racing, car driving, gymnastics, or martial arts, and we’re very calculated in what we do. Everybody sees these grandiose action scenes, like, “Oh my God, it’s got to be so crazy!’ But they don’t see the six or eight weeks of prep, where we’re taking baby steps. Engineers are involved, numbers and math, we have trajectory patterns showing what a car’s going to do at this angle at this speed with this weight. Stunts have turned into a very educated profession. We’re creating the illusion of danger by eliminating the risk.
THE FALL GUY, directed by David Leitch
The Fall Guy set a Guinness World Record when a Jeep Grand Cherokee fitted with a hidden propulsive cannon raced down a beach in Australia and turned over eight and a half times. How did you bump it up to eight rolls?
Working out the cannon pressure is a big thing. We had a couple of rehearsals and learned that too much pressure creates more “up” than it does forward momentum, which means that a lot of your energy is going down into the ground when you land. But [what you want is] kind of similar to trying to skip the perfect rock: you want to keep it low and keep that speed up so you can get twenty skips.
L to R: Ryan Gosling is Colt Seavers and Emily Blunt is Judy Moreno in THE FALL GUY, directed by David Leitch
Filming the cannon roll on a beach must have only added to the challenge.
A lot of our tests were done on softer sand, which is more grippy and more absorbing. The day we accomplished the eight and a half rolls, we had our ground crew rolling over and watering the beach starting at 4 in the morning to around noon when we did the stunt. All those hours, they were going up and down the beach to compact the sand because we wanted to create the hardest surface that we could to keep all the energy. The first cannon roll ever was done on a beach by stunt performer Jerry McCartney for this [1974] John Wayne movie called McQ. It was great to do this on a beach as an homage.
And to capture this on film, you must have had a very fast camera car out of frame?
In our procession for that take, the vehicle that was leading everything was this Australian camera car guy who got us up to 80 miles an hour in front of shooting the camera car shooting [movie within the movie] Metal Storm.
It must have been exhilarating to pull off that stunt.
We caught lightning in a bottle when all the factors lined up. Honestly, it was a perfect stunt with the cannon roll going dead-center down the beach. [Stunt driver] Logan [Holloway] is an absolute professional and it’s his lifetime of training that set him up for this special stunt on this special movie at this special time.
The boat jump also must have been tricky to execute.
We worked hand in hand with the special effects guys. They have engineers on their staff who can calculate a bunch of stuff. For the boat jump, we knew how fast we were going to go, we knew the angle of the ramp, and we put those calculations into a computer. We also do testing with the boat and the ramp, we video it, we watch it in slo-mo, we go ‘This landed at 40 feet, we want to be at 50 feet, so let’s go 26 miles an hour instead of 24.’ Like I said before, you take all these baby steps to achieve great things you see in the final product.
SPOILER ALERT – Ryan Gosling played a stunt guy before in Drive, and here he’s doing a 15-story jump for real in the opening sequence. How did you set that up?
It’s basically a one-er. We take Ryan from a trailer outside all the way into the building, where he has a discussion behind the video village, then jumps on an elevator and takes it 190 feet up. He gets out of the elevator, goes right out onto the platform, gets hooked up by our stunt team, and Ryan basically leans back over the abyss, 190 feet up in the air, and we drop him. Ryan’s big thing is, he is afraid of heights, but this really benefited the story. Stunts aren’t gratuitous in The Fall Guy — we let the story drive the action.
Sometimes, even the best-laid plans go awry. Over the course of your 30-year career, have you ever been injured on set?
I can honestly say that I’ve never been hurt at work. I’ve been hurt living the lifestyle. Riding moto-cross, I’ve broken my collar bone and blown out my knee, but that’s just stuff I enjoy doing in my personal time. But I’ve never been hurt at work. For all of us [stunt people], getting hurt is kind of frowned upon. Don’t forget that key phrase: create the illusion of danger by eliminating the risk. That’s what we do.
Growing up in upstate New York you excelled in gymnastics, then got into aerial skiing. When you first arrived in L.A. to become a stunt performer, did you have a specialty?
My niche was that I was a six-foot-tall college gymnast, and there were only three of four guys who had that size and skill set, so that set me apart from everybody else. Now, I’m not the best at everything — maybe the acrobatic aspect I’m pretty good at.
Any stunts you won’t do?
The only thing I didn’t want to do was horses. Early in my career, I saw a friend of mine do a horse fall. The horse reared up and fell on him, so I was, “Oh my God, I never want to do that.” I know there’s a bunch of cowboys out there who know how to handle horses, so I’ll leave that to them.
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This past Saturday was May the 4th, the annual Star Wars celebration that began with this apocryphal story: the first reference came on May 4, 1979, the day Margaret Thatcher became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The story goes that her political party, the Conservatives, took out an ad in the London Evening News that read, “May the Fourth Be with You, Maggie. Congratulations.” Yet this advertisement, as far as we can tell, has never resurfaced online, but May the 4th has forever become a day that Star Wars fans and Lucasfilm (and now Disney) celebrate the iconic franchise.
This makes the re-release of George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace such a meaningful addition to the ongoing celebration. The film was back in theaters over the weekend, pulling in an extremely impressive $14.5 million at the global box office, a pretty stunning achievement for the re-release of a film that’s a quarter of a century old. The film pulled in $8.1 million domestically, which lightsabered its way to No. 2 spot at the box office. It was shown in 2,700 domestic theaters, including 150 Premium Large Format screens and 130 specialty motion D-Box/4D auditoriums.
The Phantom Menace is canonically the first film in the broader chronology begun by Lucas. It is the first film in a trilogy centered on the life of a young Anakin Skywalker, a gifted child whose life will come to have a massive effect on the galaxy. The Phantom Menace is followed by The Clone Wars. and The Revenge of the Sith, which detailed the final, excruciating descent of Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker into the Sith lord Darth Vader after a brutal lightsaber battle with his former mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor.) Christensen has since reprised the role in two Star Wars series for Disney+: Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka, where his tortured Sith Lord is seen battling his old Jedi master Obi-Wan and battling and teaching his former Padawan warrior Ahsoka.
The Phantom Menace‘s re-release was also an effort to celebrate its 25th anniversary—it was released on May 19, 1999, and was the first new Star Wars film in 16 years since 1983’s Return of the Jedi. The Phantom Menace introduces Ewan McGregor’s younger version of Obi-Wan, Liam Neeson’s Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, Natalie Portman’s Queen Amidala/Padmé, Jake Lloyd’s young Anakin Skywalker, Ian McDiarmid’s Senator Palpatine, Ahmed Best’s divisive Jar Jar Binks, returns Anthony Daniels and Kenny Baker as C-3P0 and R2-D2 respectively, as well as returns Frank Oz as Yoda, and introduces Ray Park as the formidable Darth Maul. For those that head to the theater to see The Phantom Menace, you’ll also get a special glimpse at the upcoming series Star Wars: The Acolyte.
Check your local listings to see where The Phantom Menace is playing near you.
For more on all things Star Wars, check out these stories:
The great Paul Walter Hauser is headed to the MCU to join one of Marvel’s most anticipated films-in-progress.
The Hollywood Reporterhas confirmed that Hauser is joining the cast of The Fantastic Four, joining Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/The Human Torch, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing, and Julia Garner as the Silver Surfer.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 15: Paul Walter Hauser accepts the Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie award for “Black Bird” onstage during the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards at Peacock Theater on January 15, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
It’s not yet clear who Hauser will be playing, but he’s certainly joining one of Marvel’s hottest properties and a film MCU fans have been waiting for now for years. Director Matt Shakman is helping the studio reboot the franchise, thanks to Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox back in 2019, the previous studio that owned the rights to Marvel’s first superhero family. Marvel’s new-look Four will differ in tone, substance, and style from the three films Fox produced—Fantastic Four (2005), Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), and a reboot, Fantastic Four (2015). Shakman, coming off his impressive run helming Marvel Studios’ WandaVision on Disney+, directs from a script by Black Widow and Thor: Ragnarok scribe Eric Pearson, based on the iconic characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for Marvel Comics back in 1961.
When Marvel teased the film with this illustration, it helped kickstart speculation on exactly what kind of film this new Four would be.
By the clues embedded in the illustration, the new Fantastic Four looks like it will be set, at least partially, in the 1960s. Check out the Life Magazine that Ben Grimm is reading—it’s from December 1963. It’s not for nothing that Shakman proved so capable of capturing the 60s with his stellar period work in WandaVision.
If The Fantastic Four is indeed set in the 1960s, that means it’ll exist apart from what’s going on right now in the major MCU timelines, possibly in a parallel world, considering we haven’t heard about them in any of the MCU films (you think someone like Nick Fury would have mentioned them by now), save for a brief moment in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness when John Krasinski appeared as his world’s Rex Reed (it didn’t end well for him, thanks to a very pissed off Wanda Maximoff.) This will offer Marvel and Shakman something of a blank canvas, manna from heaven for filmmakers and performers looking to make the film their own. Sure, Marvel will connect The Fantastic Four to the broader MCU, with 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars as the most likely convergence point for the Fantastic Four to merge with the rest of the franchise if they follow the storyline from the “Secret Wars” comics run from 2015. Yet, for now, setting the film in the 1960s and giving the characters the literal time and space to do their own thing sounds like a great plan for Marvel.
The Fantastic Four is slated to hit theaters on July 25, 2025.
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A three-time Oscar nominee, Mark Stoeckinger has worked on five of the six features by stuntman-turned-director David Leitch, starting with 2017’s action thriller Atomic Blonde. No stranger to actioners, the veteran sound editor also led the sound team on all four John Wick films (which Leitch also produced). The Fall Guy is a cinematic love letter to the unsung heroes of the filmmaking business, an uproarious action comedy with a winsome love story that’s a throwback to old-fashioned movies and has one simple goal – to deliver a nonstop thrill ride.
Inspired by Lee Majors’ 1980s TV series, Ryan Gosling’s stuntman Colt Seavers comes out of retirement in The Fall Guy after a gnarly fall on the job to save his ex-girlfriend and first-time director Jody’s (Emily Blunt) movie by tracking down the missing diva star, Tom (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Colt soon stumbles into a web of lies and menace, unleashing a deluge of propulsive stunts, including a record-breaking cannon roll, a 225-foot car jump, and a wild chase on a spinning dumpster truck careening down a bridge.
Ahead of the premiere, Stoeckinger spoke with The Credits about how his sound team balanced the need to convey the visceral thrills while keeping the comedy and dialogue in focus.
With your long history with David, what can you tell us about his sonic palette?
David likes the action beats to be really visceral—big and dynamic—so you want the sound of the punch or impact to overwhelm the body’s reaction. As Colt says, “Honestly, it all hurts.” Since we’ve developed tracks for him over the years, we understand his aesthetic palette and lean into that. His films are a brand, so we want the sound to be true to that brand.
This is a very personal film for David because it’s a love letter to the stunt community. How did that play into the sound?
That’s why I wanted our work to ring true to what’s important to David and that community. I go back to the fact that it hurts, but make it energetic. The stunt performers work very hard but are so stoic about it—the action speaks for itself; they don’t need to talk about it.
L to R: Ryan Gosling, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ben Jenkin, Logan Holladay, Justin Eaton, and David Leitch on the set of THE FALL GUY, directed by David Leitch.
This film also includes a co-supervising sound editor, Paul Soucek. Is it common to have two supervising sound editors on a film?
It doesn’t happen that often but on this one, I really wanted somebody to help me with the logistics of running a film this complicated so I could focus on the creative aesthetics.
Did your team start during production?
Not until we finished shooting. We worked on sequences as they were cutting the film. Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir [picture editor] went over the sonic challenges, which could be as simple as fixing dialogue. Not only is the cannon roll a pivotal event in the story, it made movie history with eight-and-a-half rolls. So, we had to keep it crazy, destructive, interesting, visceral, and dangerous. There’s a lot destruction, but you don’t want it to be just a wall of noise. You want to hear all the specific parts breaking, impacting, coming off. Sequences like that get really cut up sonically, using only a piece of a sound, not the whole thing; otherwise, it would obscure whatever comes next. It also couldn’t be too over-the-top because it has to sound believable.
Was any of the sound captured during production used?
Nothing captured in production on that was usable. There’s a joke in the beginning where a sound guy says, “We’re not rolling sound.” There’s no production sound on sequences like that because it would just be a wall of noise with the helicopter overhead and ocean waves. For example, a real car crash sounds nothing like they do in movies. A real one, with everything being plastic now, you’d just hear a plastic crunch. Where in movies, you lean into the metal aspect, so it’s more impactful.
What were the bits of sound that you put together for these action set pieces?
We’re out recording and making sounds all the time, so we have a pretty good database to find sounds of a metal pole snap, car crash, fender rip, a body falling onto a hood, pulled brakes, tires running over things, and you take that whole palette and blend it into something that works with the visual. Then you add sounds of velocity, like whoosh-y type sounds that hopefully don’t stand out because the whole idea is to give it a sense of energy and movement. For sequences that have a lot of music and action, you don’t want a wall of noise. The most important thing is the comedy and the dialog—you don’t want to get in the way of that.
What about the garbage truck chase when Colt was fighting Dressler (Ben Knight) as they tear through the Sydney Harbor Bridge?
You go shot by shot instead of using any sounds consistently. If a shot has a lot of destruction and spinning, you don’t want any constant sounds. Once we put the shots together, re-recording mixer Frank Montaño sculpts it even further into something that blends with the music, giving it more perspective to make it interesting and dramatic. It’s highly manipulated. The sound of metal grinding is not a pleasant sound. So, you’ve got to pitch it down or filter it so the audience gets it, but it doesn’t piss them off. We make sure there are no frequencies that really hurt but still give it that exciting feel.
Ryan Gosling is Colt Seavers in THE FALL GUY, directed by David Leitch
Since this movie is almost wall-to-wall stunts, a lot of the dialogue happens in the chaos. How do you work that out?
There’s a lot of work that goes into dialogue editing/ADR. When Colt is on the phone with Jody while he’s in the middle of the boat chase telling her how much he loves her, they recorded that in a metal boat, and the swashes [of the water] were banging around on that boat, but you can’t have that in such a tender scene. Over the course of a week, our dialogue editor used a lot of special tools to take out most of those boat bangs—it saved the scene. Ryan Gosling was so happy that he didn’t have to loop that scene. There’s a lot of work to take the noise out of what we recorded on location to make things feel smooth and cohesive or add things from other takes that work in a different shot to flesh out the track. It’s very much a tapestry of various sources of sound.
Are there any techniques that would surprise the viewer?
When Colt is working as a valet and takes the Challenger Hellcat for a wild spin in the garage—there are a couple of animal sounds in that to give it energy, which might not be obvious. Every fight scene has a bit of a whoosh element right before the hits, which helps your ear register that something’s about to hit before it happens. It’s very subconscious, but it works.
What do you use to make the various whooshing sounds?
You can take anything and turn it into a whoosh by speeding it up and filtering it, or take things and walk through the air. You take a cloth and get this ripple right before a punch. There are all sorts of little esoteric sounds that go into these that are more than meet the ear.
Let’s talk about the wild helicopter chase in the end— Colt hangs on mid-flight while flinging himself from one skid to another, fighting Tom and the producer, Gail (Hannah Waddingham).
They weren’t in a real helicopter, but it was still loud with the fans and other things. So, you suggest the helicopter [is there] so the audience doesn’t feel it’s missing. It’s really about the dialogue, music, fights, and falls. When Colt jumps from skid to skid, he does it in slow motion because we’ve got this movie convention that’s been around for years, so we add in some of that whoosh and non-literal sounds. Since The Fall Guy is an homage to the TV series and stunts, you lean into that and have fun with it. If those sounds weren’t there, you’d miss them because we’re used to them.
Ryan Gosling is Colt Seavers in THE FALL GUY, directed by David Leitch
Towards the end, Colt flees on the boat and steers it with his hands zip-tied behind his back. What went into that sequence?
There’s no production sound except for the dialogue, which wasn’t looped, so he was actually going at speed. Boats are hard because they don’t accelerate fast like a car. So, you speed sounds up or put little dragster sounds in with the boats because it has a distorted quality, which I think we associate with power.
When Colt’s drink is spiked at the club, he gets into a funny but savage fight while hallucinating.
His distorted vision gives us a lot of choices, like big, weird, developing low frequencies with other sounds mixed in to make it sound trippy. There’s no music in that sequence as soon as the fight begins. It was cut so well, which allowed the sound to carry that sequence without feeling a lack of energy, even without any music. When he uses the champagne bottle as a weapon and pops the cork, we added sparkler sounds or little jet sounds to make it really blossom.
What about some of the non-action and comedic scenes, which were also crucial to the story?
What’s important in the sound of this movie is life—they’re on a movie set. So, the sound of all the crew milling around were taken from real recordings. We found some tracks and used the bits and pieces to put them together. Production sound is about capturing the dialogue with the actors in the best possible way; most everything else is layered in by sound design to bring the story to life.
The Fall Guy opens in theaters nationwide on May 3rd.
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