Director Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New Worldis currently putting in a 22-day shoot to capture additional photography and a new action sequence, a fairly routine course of business for an MCU film. What’s intriguing about Brave New World’s shoot is that it’s also bringing in a phenomenal performer, Giancarlo Esposito, to play a mysterious new villain.
Onah’s film actually wrapped principal photography in the spring of 2023, before the writers and actors struck. For the additional shoot, Moon Knight scribe Matthew Orton penned some new pages, with Esposito taking on this undisclosed bad guy role.
Brave New World is a major new MCU installment, with Anthony Mackie taking on the mantle of Captain America for the first time on the big screen. We’ve seen the burden Sam carries as the first Black man taking on the role Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) carried for so long in Marvel’s Disney+ series Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige presented some footage of Brave New World at Cinema Con and said the vibe of Brave New World is decidedly more of a grounded, gritty action flick, akin to the Russo Brothers’ beloved Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Winter Soldier was, in fact, Mackie’s first MCU film, where Sam Wilson became Captain America’s most trusted ally—Cap’s best friend, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), was the Winter Soldier, after all, often acting as Cap’s brain-washed antagonist. Sam Wilson was the man Cap could count on the most, which is why he was selected at the end of Avengers: Endgame by an aged, retired Steve Rogers to carry on the shield.
Falcon and the Winter Soldier showed us just how hard it was for Sam to replace a white icon and savior figure. By the end of the series, Sam has accepted the role and proven himself more than capable of carrying the shield. Brave New World finds Sam after he’s accepted and grown into the role, and also introduces Harrison Ford into the MCU as he takes over for the late William Hurt as Thunderbolt Ross. The cast also includes Danny Ramirez returns as Joaquin Torres, the young man who takes over from Sam as the Falcon, Liv Tyler, Tim Blake Nelson, Carl Lumbly (reprising his role of Isaiah Bradley from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), and Shira Haas.
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Chris Hemsworth knows a thing or two (or three) about blockbuster franchises. From Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Dementus in George Miller’s Mad Max wasteland, Hemsworth has no problem carrying the weight of a movie world on his shoulders.
Now, the talented Aussie is in talks to star in Paramount’s upcoming Transformers and G.I. Joe crossover film. The reality of this upcoming cinematic event was teased at the end of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, when Anthony Ramos’s Noah Diaz is offered a job by Michael Kelly’s Agent Burke at what he first mistakes to be an autobody shop. Agent Burke clues him in on the fact that the job, in fact, is with the U.S. Government, and it deals with machinery—and weaponry—a little more sophisticated. Given Noah’s recent exposure to the Transformers, he’s an ideal candidate to join the program. When he hands Noah a business card, it’s clear Burke works for the G.I. Joes, a special commando unit with unique skill sets. While the Transformers and G.I. Joes have crossed over in the pages of the comics before, they’ve never done so in film.
“Noah goes from somebody who cannot get a job to a guy who gets the greatest job ever. It really felt organic to put it in here because you could relate it to the story,” producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura told Variety. “It didn’t feel like we were being cynical and like, ‘Good news, we could just jam G.I. Joes in here.’ The fans want a lot of things; if we do it and we don’t figure it out well, they’re going to be disappointed. It took us a while to figure out the Maximals, and now we have the hint of how to begin the Joes story.”
Hemsworth already has his Transformers bonafides—he voices the young Optimus Prime in the upcoming animated film Transformers One, which bows on September 20. But stepping into a live-action role in the first-ever Transformers/G.I. Joes crossover film will be an even bigger deal.
L-r, Brian Tyree Henry (D-16), Keegan-Michael Key (B-127), Scarlett Johansson (Elita-1) and Chris Hemsworth (Orion Pax) star in PARAMOUNT ANIMATION and HASBRO Present In Association with NEW REPUBLIC PICTURES A di BONAVENTURA PICTURES Production A TOM DESANTO / DON MURPHY Production A BAY FILMS Production “TRANSFORMERS ONE”
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Featured image: Caption: Chris Hemsworth in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Village Roadshow Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland
Hugh Jackman hasn’t suited up and bulked out as Wolverine for seven years, since James Mangold’s stellar 2017 film Logan. In that movie, as fans are well aware, an aging, sick—but still very strong—Wolverine was trying to protect Professor X (he failed) and later, a young mutant named Laura (Dafne Keen—he succeeded) in what would turn out to be his final, heroic act.
But of course, we now know nothing’s final where Marvel is concerned.
Jackman is back as Wolverine in Deadpool & Wolverine, starring alongside Ryan Reynolds’ chatty Wade Wilson in the one and only film from Marvel to bow this year. In a conversation with People, Reynolds praised Jackman’s commitment to training.
“Just the sheer relentlessness that you dedicated yourself towards stunts, choreography,” Reynolds told People. “It was the first time I’d ever seen how invaluable a background in song and dance is when you are doing an action movie. You hit your marks in those fight scenes with speed and confidence, the likes of which I have never seen. I don’t care if you were 25, 35, 45 or 55. It was lightning. Watching you do what just looked like a clinic on stunt work was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Jackman is, in fact, 55. Reynolds is 47. These are not spring chickens playing two of our most beloved superheroes.
Jackman paid his dues to stunt coordinator Brian Smrz, who got Jackman into dance training as a way to prepare for his action scenes.
“When I came back to it, it was really fun and I was thrilled,” Jackman told People. “My body was a little sore at the beginning, but I was thrilled that my body was still responding. And I realized how good it is for your brain. The hardest bit…[was] the food. I have to eat a lot. For me, for my body type, I’m naturally skinny. To get the size on, that’s the hardest bit. That’s the bit that does my head in.”
Jackman’s going to be doing other people’s heads in very soon. Deadpool & Wolverine hits theaters on July 26.
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Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige promised that Deadpool & Wolverine would deliver a popcorn bucket that would take on Dune: Part Two’s infamous offering, and boy, he wasn’t kidding.
Stars Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, and the movie’s official Twitter page unveiled the new bucket, a somewhat naughty popcorn vessel that is Wolverine’s helmet with a large open mouth. Is it “crude and rude” as Feige promised? It depends on your sensitivity level. It is very much in the Deadpool franchise’s wheelhouse: irreverent, winking, and fun.
The first time we heard about the popcorn bucket was during the Super Bowl teaser when Reynolds promised one. Then Feige backed that up by mentioning the bucket at Cinema-Con in April.
“We’ve asked Deadpool to design a popcorn bucket for Deadpool & Wolverine,” Feige said at Cinema-Con. “And I don’t want to spoil it, but I will say, there are some movies that inadvertently make crude and rude popcorn buckets, and then there are popcorn buckets designed by Deadpool.”
Dune: Part Two‘s popcorn bucket was the subject of an SNL skit that pointed out how it looked as if it could be useful for other passions besides watching a movie. Deadpool & Wolverine was the perfect opportunity for Marvel to cook up their own bucket, considering it’s the first R-rated movie in MCU history.
Deadpool & Wolverine, and the Wolverine popcorn bucket, will hit theaters on July 26.
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“We’ve gone back to the beginning before the creatures invaded the Earth,” A Quiet Place: Day One star Lupita Nyong’o tells us at the top of a new featurette released by Paramount. We’ve already seen what the world was like on day 472 of the reign of the blind, sound-hunting aliens in John Krasinski’s 2018 original A QuietPlace—now, we finally get to see what the world was right as the alien invasion was underway. It’s not pretty.
As Nyong’o’s co-star, Joseph Quinn, explains in the new featurette, Day One will expand the scope of the franchise even further than Krasinski’s killer follow-up, Part II (2020), did. In Part II, Evelyn Abbott (Emily Blunt) and her children meet other survivors of the alien scourge. In Day One, we’ll see how all of New York City reacted to their arrival. The new film, directed by Pig helmer Michael Sarnoski, takes the horrors of the first two films and plants them in the Big Apple, with 8 plus people utterly unaware of the rules of this terrible game.
“It’s a completely different perspective, a different environment, a different setting,” Djimon Hounsou explains, reprising his role of Henri from Part II. “This one is so much more devastating to witness.”
In the new featurette, we learn that Nyong’o’s character Samira is on a day trip to New York when the attack occurs. As she has to learn how to survive the aliens in real time, she meets Eric (Quinn), a stranger with whom she’ll team up and try to figure out how to make it through the day.
“Trying to be quiet in New York City is no easy thing,” Quinn says. “An entire city of people figuring out the rules for themselves. It’s perilous, it’s fast-paced, and it’s extremely…quiet.”
Check out the new featurette below. A Quiet Place: Day One hits theaters on June 28.
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Nine years after Mad Max: Fury Road star Charlize Theron wreaked havoc as bad-ass adult Furiosa, director George Miller revisits his post-apocalyptic nightmare with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (in theaters now). The prequel, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, and the mighty first-generation War Rig truck, features one of the year’s most spellbinding action sequences, a relentless, 15-minute mind-melter that took 78 days to film.
While the 15-minute sequence is the most thrilling action scene of the year (in any film), it’s but one of several hyper-violent set pieces set against a backdrop of desolate settlements. Helping Miller bring the world into focus is art director Jacinta Leong (The Great Gatsby, Alien: Covenant, Fury Road), who worked with production designer Colin Gibson on Furiosa for three years to modify the Australian desert into the near-future hellscape that forces young Furiosa to become a warrior.
Speaking from Melbourne, Leong talks to The Credits about how the real world informed Furiosa‘s scarcity-ravaged fantasyland.
How did your experience on Fury Road prepare you for Furiosa?
In some ways, it gave me a head start on the way George Miller works. Also, we wanted to create continuity, so with the War Rig for example, we literally used the same tanker from Fury Road
The tanker was still around?
We took it out of storage from Bathurst, where it had been sitting for ten years, and used that chassis and structure for the War Rig. It saved us some time and money – – what’s not to like? In Furiosa, they make things by reusing and recycling; we did that in the movie!
Caption: An action scene being filmed on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland
The War Rig truck stars in this huge chase sequence on a desert highway where the driver, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), and stowaway Furiosa, hiding under the truck, get attacked again by men on flying motorcycles. How did you contribute to that sequence?
In general, the production designer is the what, and the art director is the how. Colin is different in that he does both. [For the War Rig] myself and our set designer, Jemma Awad, did the drawings of this amazing machine for the stowaway sequence and drafted construction drawings so the mechanics could build this fully defensive vehicle, with harpoons at the top of the tank, a pair of excavator arms, a “Bommy knocker” at the back with the spinning cones and sharp spikes and mace balls.
Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) in in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland
And then where did the model go from there?
I sent the model of the vehicle to action designer Guy Norris and his stunt team so they could import it into their pre-vis and flesh out the sequence that way.
Did you have references in mind for this “stowaway” set piece?
We’d refer to the [1939 John Ford-directed] movie Stagecoach as a foundational set piece because everything happens in, close to, and around it. Those Old Hollywood images have a Western element and helped get us to the heart of the sequence.
The motorcyclists who attack the War Rig are relentless and ingenious.
It’s a next-level attack. In Fury Road, they had the pole attacks, [going back and forth] like metronomes, so attacks from the air are one of the dimensions of Mad Max warfare. Here we had what we called Mortiflyers that used paragliders. Someone demonstrated a paraglider in a studio lying on the ground with all the cords, and he only ran about ten meters before it lifted him up.
Jacinta Leong working on “Furiosa.” Courtesy Warner Bros.
So it’s actually feasible that your “Mortiflyers” could become airborne in the real world.
Yeah. Colin and I like to embed reality into these stories because if it doesn’t work, if it looks wrong, the audience may not buy it, and then you’ve lost.
Motorcycles play a big role for many of the survivalists of Furiosa.
Just like in our real world, we have punks and goths and country western people, well we have different groups, and motorcycles became a way for us to define and identify these groups. The Militia tribe had Harley-Davidsons and police bikes. For the Toe Jammers, which we also called roo-billies, the motorcycles were dressed appropriately. For the Mortiflyers, some of their motorcycles had bird head sculptures of reused metal objects and feathers of plastic.
Caption: Chris Hemsworth in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
And Dementus rides around like a Roman gladiator on this motorcycle chariot, which is very cinematic.
One of the things we looked at was this 1937 Sydney police race.
Furiosa’s journey begins in the Wasteland Dementus and continues to The Citadel, Gas City, and Bullet Farm. How did you conceptualize each of these settlements?
The Citadel, established by George and Colin in Fury Road, is this rock formation where Immortan Joe pours water from his balcony. What we saw new in Furiosa was Rictus’ den. It’s naturally formed spaces made from erosion and lava, but they also carved some parts out as well. Our plasterers were very excited because we’d take a mold off real rocks and have them do a “squeeze,” we call it. That’s why they look so real: the geometry comes from nature.
Then there’s the grimly industrial Gas Town.
Gas Town is a sprawling infrastructure surrounded by a moat and a pair of gates. Its distilling tanks create fuel and oil. We visited the Qenos gas plant in Sydney and gained some inspiration from that.
What about Bullet Farm, which looks like an awful place to live?
We were inspired by the very dark, dehumanizing Brazilian goldmine, disused now, called Serra Pelade. We looked at incredible black and white photos of minters there, really deep down [in the earth] on rickety ladders. We found some images of dwellings carved out of the rocks, and you’ll see parts of caravan or corrugated iron stuck in the wall.
In contrast to the smooth digital technology seen in so much sci-fi, Furiosa features a lot of analog steampunk technology — gears, pulleys, and old-time instruments.
That’s one of the things that separates Furiosa from the slick CGI worlds. This is a harsh, unforgiving exterior [environment]. We got spools from telecommunication companies, which use them to lay cable. We procured six of those, cut them, and put the treads on them, so again, that’s reused in The Wasteland. We also used telescopes from the sixties, which gives you a more textured look. It wouldn’t look as good if we had used a modern telescope.
It seems that resource scarcity played a big role in defining a future world in which water, fuel, and food are in short supply.
Our design mantra is, “Everything has to be re-purposed, re-used again and again. For example, [early in the movie] young Furiosa reaches a truck with an excavator arm on it. That same excavator shows up on the War Rig years later. Another example is when Dementus hijacks a Citadel truck coming back from Gas Town and takes the hood off that Mack truck. Then we see it appear later on his six-tire monster track. The excavator arm, the hood of the truck, the war rig, the harpoon shield—there’s an economy to it.
Caption: Chris Hemsworth in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Village Roadshow Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland
In his Mad Max movies, George Miller has told such an epic near-future saga that some might call him a visionary. What’s he like to work with?
He’s wonderful to work with. George can be very specific about things. It’s our job to bring ideas to him, and he always listens. When we present something, he’ll zoom in on some detail, like even the pipe on a motorcycle: He’ll go, ‘Can we just change it a little, the flow or the shape.’ Every week, we’d sit down in a group with George and Colin, our supervising art director, Sophie Nash, and art directors Laurie Faen and Nick Dare. I loved having those conversations. We all collaborated to bring things to the table.
Featured image: Caption: War Boys in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland
Moana and Maui are back for a fresh round of high-seas adventure in the first trailer for Moana 2. And if Moana and Maui are back, that means so, too, are stars Auli’i Cravalho and Dwayne Johnson, who return to reprise their voice roles from the world-beating first film.
The new film is from writer/director David G. Derrick Jr. (Raya and the Last Dragon), who worked as a story artist on the original Moana in 2016. The sequel finds Cravalho’s Moana heeding a call from her ancestors and setting out on a new journey across the long-lost waters to reconnect their people across the entire ocean.
Moana’s new adventure won’t be carried out solo, of course—enter her shape-shifting demi-God bestie Maui, who bursts into the new trailer as a shark, then a bird, then in his buff human form. The two friends will venture to the far seas of Oceania on their latest quest and will no doubt encounter creatures both wondrous and terrifying.
Not only will there be adventure in Moana 2, but there will also be music aplenty from Grammy winners Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, Grammy nominee Opetaia Foaʻi, and three-time Grammy winner Mark Mancina.
Check out the trailer below. Moana 2 swims into theaters on November 27.
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For the first time in 16 years, Brad Pitt and George Clooney are sharing the screen together, and in the first trailer for writer/director Jon Watts’ Wolfs, the two get off to a rollicking fun start.
The trailer opens with Clooney’s fixer being called to a woman’s apartment (Amy Ryan) in a huge heap of trouble. Clooney’s fixer has been there and done that, and scrubbing a crime scene or removing a body is all in a night’s work for him. Things get complicated when there’s a second knock at the door—enter Brad Pitt’s fixer—who has also been called in. Then, the body they’re there to remove turns out to have life left in it. A lot of life. Thus, their strange trip begins as these two lone wolves are forced to spend an increasingly bizarre, increasingly dangerous night together.
The reunion of these two mega-stars has been a long time coming. It was 24 years ago when they were still the two biggest names in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven franchise, playing Rusty Ryan and Danny Ocean, respectively. Yet we haven’t seen them on screen together since the Coen Brothers’ 2008 dark comedy Burn After Reading, so finding them co-starring and co-producing the new film gives you a good sense of how their careers have gone since. Pitt’s Plan B and Clooney’s Smokehouse Pictures are both producing Watts’s original film, and their on-screen chemistry might be a little more grizzled and gruff than their easy, fresh-faced rapport in that first Ocean’s, but they’ve lost none of the vim and vigor that make them such an ideal pairing.
Joining Pitt, Clooney, and Ryan are Austin Abrams, Poorna Jagannathan, Rob Riddell, Irina Dubova, and Hassani Rizzo.
Check out the trailer below. Wolfs hits theaters on September 20.
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Featured image: L-r: HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – MAY 07: George Clooney attends the U.S. premiere of Hulu’s “Catch-22” at TCL Chinese Theatre on May 07, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images). NORTHAMPTON, ENGLAND – JULY 08: Brad Pitt, star of the upcoming Formula One based movie, Apex, walks in the Paddock after qualifying ahead of the F1 Grand Prix of Great Britain at Silverstone Circuit on July 08, 2023 in Northampton, England. (Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
Chris Pratt voices the iconic, lasagna-loving star of director Mark Dindal’s The Garfield Movie, which uses Garfield’s love of Italian cuisine and the indoors as a jumping-off point for an origin and adventure story in one. A sweet-faced kitten gloms onto lonely Jon (Nicholas Hoult) at a restaurant and doesn’t let go until an unexpected reunion with his father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson).
John (voiced by Nicholas Hoult) with baby Garfield. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
This father-son reunion comes on the heels of a catnapping, bringing reluctant Garfield into the fold of a heist led by a vengeful Persian cat named Jinx (Hannah Waddingham). The booty at stake is a truck full of milk Jinx feels she’s owed, and to get it, Garfield, his dad, and Odie (Harvey Guillén) wind up freight-hopping and breaking into a maximum-security dairy farm. Obviously, this is a far cry from Garfield’s preferred station, at Jon’s dining table or in front of the television, and calls for a new approach to animating the classic character. Animation director Jason Boose (The Little Prince, Up), along with a team of 70 to 80 animators spread across the globe, translated Garfield’s signature deadpan existence into the more madcap one we see here. Dindal wanted the team to be bold as they figured out what worked and what didn’t, so we spoke with Boose about working to avoid cliche while both expanding Garfield’s range while keeping aspects of his withering reluctance intact.
Were you a fan of Garfield going into the film?
It wasn’t until I was working on the movie that I remembered I loved the character so much. I was researching it, watching the specials from the 80s, and reading the comics; a lot of it was so familiar. I was halfway through the film, my parents were moving out of their house, and they wanted me to go through my stuff from when I was a kid. I was looking through some old sketchbooks, and there were all kinds of drawings of Garfield from the comic strips. It was serendipitous, in a way. I loved the character then, and I love it now. Looking at the drawings again, you realize the comic strip was drawn with such skill. It’s funny, it’s charming, it’s still relevant today.
Odie and Garfield (voiced by Chris Pratt) in THE GARFIELD MOVIE.
Given that, what did you want to ensure you retained from the original strip?
The jumping-off point was tricky because all of us in the film wanted to honor Jim Davis and his creativity. I think it’s the most syndicated comic strip ever, so it’s loved worldwide. You have to honor how it’s done, but at the same time, you have to give the audience something new and reinvent it for a new generation. Garfield is sometimes quite sweet in the comic, in unexpected ways, but he’s also quite cynical and sarcastic. We have to be able to honor the original character but also show a broad range of emotions. That’s the trick of it all.
Was there ever a question of how much to push his facial expressions?
At first, we would try to match what Jim Davis was doing, to make sure we could hit those poses — the completely sarcastic, deadpan eyes and the sardonic grin. Then, we had to go through many more expressions and ranges of emotion. That’s tricky because CG doesn’t want to go as far as some of the drawings Jim Davis did. Sometimes you’re going from regular, deadpan Garfield, who we recognize, [to him] eating a piece of cake. His whole mouth becomes absolutely massive, his eyes disappear, his ears disappear, and he’s all mouth and muzzle, and in CG, that’s a completely different model. We were almost switching from one model to a new model over one frame to try to get these exaggerated poses and do it quickly enough so the audience didn’t notice. And because you’re doing dialogue and a huge range of emotion, there are a lot of expressions that were obviously never drawn in the original comic strip. That unique muzzle of Garfield’s was a real challenge to get into all different shapes.
How did you develop baby Garfield? He’s very cute, but he also has to carry a lot of emotional weight.
We went for pure innocence. He evolved. He started off as a very small part of the film, and he was loved so much that he expanded more and more. We just wanted to play him so sweet. We wanted everyone to absolutely love him, recognize that that is Garfield as a baby, and have their hearts break for him.
How did you develop the look of new characters, like Vic and Jinx?
The voice acting was so incredible. With Jinx, for example, and Hannah Waddingham, you have the character design, you have that vocal performance, and then you have what Mark wanted to create with that character. And Norma Desmond, from Sunset Boulevard, was an inspiration. So it was taking [all that] and trying to inject that into a big fluffy white cat. We didn’t want to animate a typical diva because she’s a very unique character. Everything she does, we wanted to make somewhat unexpected and unusual. Every shot we looked at, we looked at through that lens. Vic is very Samuel L. Jackson. He just gets so much from the cadence of his vocal performance. The way he delivers a line, both visually and auditorially. We tried to honor him as much as we could and get as much of him into Vic as we could.
Odie, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) and Garfield (Chris Pratt) in GARFIELD. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
How did you develop the backgrounds? Some are tangible; some are more painterly.
Pete Oswald and Jeanie Chang did the production design and art direction. Through Mark Dindal’s direction, they wanted to create a very painterly world, very warmly lit, with a lot of backlit characters. The biggest thing they wanted to get across was a feeling of miniature. Mark almost wanted it to feel like the Viewmasters from the 70s and 80s. You hold them up, look through them, and everything looks a bit miniature. That was his initial inspiration for the movie, was to try and give it that sort of charm and feel.
How did you settle on which animation styles to use in the film?
We wanted to let the story and performance dictate the style of animation, which is unique in a way. Some parts of the film are quite touching and heartfelt, so it calls for a much more naturalistic style of animation, much more believable. But some parts of the film are completely wacky and crazy, and it goes much more Chuck Jones/Tex Avery style, where anything can happen. Sometimes it’s somewhere in between. We were always weaving between those different animation styles and trying to weave them together seamlessly.
Garfield is in theaters now.
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Rian Johnson’s third Knives Out film has snagged one of the hottest actors working together.
Andrew Scott has joined the cast for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, joining Challengersbreakout star Joh O’Connor, Priscilla, Civil War, and Alien: Romulus star Cailee Spaeny, and Benoit Blanc himself, Daniel Craig, who returns to the franchise as the dandified detective sleuthing on another case. Since the first Knives Out in 2019, Johnson has assembled delicious ensembles. In the first film, Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Christopher Plummer, and Ana de Armas are caught up in the mystery that Blanc is sent to solve. In the sequel Glass Onion, Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe, Kate Hudson, Kathryn Hahn, and Dave Bautista had to undergo Benoit Blanc’s scrutiny.
Johnson is again writing the script and will produce alongside his T-Street colleague Ram Bergman. They’re looking to get Wake Up Dead Man into production soon, with a release date of 2025. Naturally, no one knows a thing about what kind of whodunit Johnson is cooking up for the third film, but Johnson has teased that this case will present Blanc with the most dangerous challenge he’s faced yet.
“I love everything about whodunnits, but one of the things I love most is how malleable the genre is,” Johnson wrote on social media. “There’s a whole tonal spectrum from Carr to Christie, and getting to explore that range is one of the most exciting things about making Benoit Blanc movies.” He added, “We’re about to go into production on the 3rd one, and I’m very excited to share the title, which gives a little hint of where it’s going.”
— Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (@KnivesOut) May 24, 2024
Lionsgate released the first Knives Out film in 2019, and it became a serious hit, grossing $312 million against a $40 million budget. Netflix then bought the rights to the series (for more than $450 million) and released Johnson’s sequel, Glass Onion, in 2022. It also became the first Netflix movie to play in Regal Cinemas, Cinemark, and AMC Theaters.
Scott will be paired again with Craig for the first time since 2015’s Bond sequel Spectre. Scott made a name for himself as the Hot Priest on Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s series Fleabag, starred in Andrew Haigh’s aching 2023 film All Us Strangers, and in Netflix’s recent adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels in Ripley.
You don’t need much more than Brad Pitt and George Clooney to hype your movie, and in the first teaser for their upcoming film Wolfs, they’re pretty much all you get, plus one squeaky windshield wiper and a carful of tension. With two seasoned pros boasting charisma and chemistry to spare, this wordless teaser still manages to excite.
Pitt and Clooney have teamed up before, of course, most memorably as the two biggest names in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven franchise, playing Rusty Ryan and Danny Ocean, respectively. The two have finally reunited for director Jon Watts’ (the recent Spider-Man trilogy) thriller for Apple, which won the rights to Wolfs after an intense bidding war. Pitt’s Plan B and Clooney’s Smokehouse Pictures are both producing. Wolfs is the first film Pitt and Clooney have starred in together since the Coen Brothers’ 2008 dark comedy Burn After Reading, which immediately marks the upcoming release as a must-see.
Wolfs finds the two stars playing a pair of lone-wolf fixers who get assigned to the same job. The stars are joined by Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams, Poorna Jagannathan, Rob Riddell, Irina Dubova, and Hassani Rizzo.
Check out the teaser trailer below. Wolfs will premiere in theaters on September 20. The full trailer will arrive on May 29.
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Featured image: L-r: HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – MAY 07: George Clooney attends the U.S. premiere of Hulu’s “Catch-22” at TCL Chinese Theatre on May 07, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images). NORTHAMPTON, ENGLAND – JULY 08: Brad Pitt, star of the upcoming Formula One based movie, Apex, walks in the Paddock after qualifying ahead of the F1 Grand Prix of Great Britain at Silverstone Circuit on July 08, 2023 in Northampton, England. (Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
Damon Lindelof is no stranger to superheroes, a fact that DC Studios co-chief James Gunn was well aware of when he tapped him to help bring a brand new series based on the Green Lanterns to life.
Lindelof, the co-creator of ABC’s seminal series Lost and the man who helped steer HBO’s sensational Watchmen adaptation, which riffed on writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins’ iconic graphic novel and went on to win 11 Emmys, will now join the creative team behind Gunn and DC Studios co-chief Peter Safran’s Lanterns. Lindelof joins Ozark showrunner Chris Mundy and longtime DC comics author Tom King.
James Gunn announced the team behind Lanterns on Instagram on Saturday.
The image Gunn chose to accompany the reveal of the Lanterns creative team is of Lanterns Hal Jordan and John Stewart, suggesting that the upcoming series will be a two-hander. This jibes with something Safran said when their initial slate of offerings from their newly revived and unified DC Studios was revealed, “Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters,” when he described the series as similar in tone to HBO’s twisty thriller/detective series True Detective. It’s also worth noting that Ozark showrunner Mundy also served as executive producer and writer on the latest excellent season of the series True Detective: Night Country.
Lindelof has also won many accolades for co-creating HBO’s supernatural drama The Leftovers, adapted from Tom Perrotta’s novel. He seems ideally suited to help Gunn and Safran ensure that Lanterns is a bright shining light on the newly unified DC Universe.
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Featured image: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 14: Damon Lindelof attends the Premiere Of HBO’s “Watchmen” at The Cinerama Dome on October 14, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
Garfield, the lasagna-eating original grumpy cat, has been painted with a fresh coat of animated fur and given a new voice in actor Chris Pratt for director Mark Dindal’s The Garfield Movie, a hilarious roller-coaster romp that’s going to bring out the kid in you, nostalgia aside. Garfield purred into theaters on May 24.
Published as a comic strip in 1978, the beloved feline has made its way onto television series, specials, movies, books, video games, and countless toys and memorabilia. After 45+ years of storytelling, you’d think there’s nothing new to share, but you would be wrong. The Garfield Movie uncovers a side of the pudgy orange cat that we have never seen before—his father. I asked Dindal over a video call how something so obvious had never been touched on before.
Odie, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) and Garfield (Chris Pratt) in GARFIELD. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
“When you have so many years of material, it’s like what hasn’t been done. His mother was referenced in one of the specials, but not his dad. This is the first time we see his father in anything, and it gave us an opportunity to come up with something unique,” Dindal tells The Credits. “Producer John Cohen has been shepherding the project for quite some time, and the idea of Garfield’s father came from his conversations with Jim Davis. It was part of the script when I got it in 2018.”
The fully animated feature has been in the works since 2016, when Alcon Entertainment bought the motion picture rights from Garfield creator Jim Davis, who hails from Muncie, Indiana. Dindal was tapped to direct two years later after a nearly twenty-year hiatus from the business—his last feature was Disney’s first fully computer-animated film, Chicken Little (2005). Before that was the low-key Disney cult classic Emperor’s New Groove (2000), which spawned from the shipwrecked development of Kingdom of the Sun.
Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) and Garfield (Chris Pratt) in GARFIELD. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
During that time, Dindal worked with producer Randy Fullmer, who retired from Hollywood in 2006 to start a guitar company. He recently passed away in 2023 at the age of 73. When asked if Dindal was able to share any of the Garfield projects with Fullmer, the director graciously replied, “A little bit, but when you’re working on a movie, you can’t share too many of the details.” Adding, “What Fullmer did for me, and I think it’s important for any artist, as a producer, he shielded us from a lot that comes from making a movie. There are a lot of moving parts and concerns and money being spent. He knew me so well that there were certain things he could share with me so that I was aware of them and could make creative choices appropriately. Then, there were certain things he would take care of so I could focus on the story. He was a real crusader for protecting the creative process. Craig Sost was our producer on the daily production of The Garfield Movie and he has the same quality. I have been blessed twice now with producers like that.”
The story Dindal focused on for this project reunites Garfield with his long-lost father, Vic (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson), in an outrageous milk heist that brings along lovable pup Odie (voiced by Harvey Guillén) and several more surprises. There’s plenty that will make you laugh, too, as Pratt delivers some quotable one-liners, and the physical comedy doesn’t disappoint. But what resonates are the character arcs and emotional stakes. For instance, the origin story of Garfield meeting Jon Arbuckle (voiced by Nicholas Hoult).
In creating those moments through animation, the years of comic strips became the defacto reference for character expression and poses. The world-building was brought together by production designer Pete Oswald under Dindal’s direction. “The challenge was translating ideas into CG and developing it in a way that would work with the type of animation that I like… the broad, cartoony stylized animation,” says the director. “One of the influences I brought up was when I was a kid, we had these View-Master viewers. It’s a 3D stereo that allows you to see these color photographs and I remember as a kid I always felt like I wanted to step into the world of those. I showed them to Pete and magical is the only way I can describe it. It makes you want to shrink down and be part of it. I feel the same thing when I see stop motion. I just want to step into that world.”
The View-Master reference was a stepping stone in developing a stylized look with a certain amount of force perspective to the visuals. Another item on Dindal’s checklist was the use of painted backdrops, similar to the work found in The Wizard of Oz (1939). “They create a hyper-reality,” says the director. “One of the things I like to think about is to create a universe in a movie that doesn’t exist. So, if you’re drawn to that reality, you have to come to the movie to experience it. You can’t step outside and say, ‘Well, this is like that movie.’”
John (voiced by Nicholas Hoult) with baby Garfield. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
Getting there is a gut feeling for Dindal—he takes it one step at a time, asking: do these character poses feel like there’s a level of imagination being applied? “I probably do it more subconsciously than consciously, but that’s kind of the way my mind works.”
The animation is also pushed to an entertaining level of absurdity, especially when Garfield, a famously lazy indoor cat, is pulled outdoors with his “what can go wrong” attitude—apparently plenty. Dindal credits his board artists, giving them “the freedom to go as far as they possibly can” for the bigger hijinks sequences.
“Animation takes so long you can kinda take it out for a test drive and get a sense of how people laugh or if it will confuse them with the absurdity. There’s a lot of it in this movie,” Dindal says with a smile. “A simple thing of Vic driving a truck. When you really think about it, can he reach the pedals and all that stuff? That’s all legitimate. But the kid in me, it’s like kids playing in the backyard, and they’re imagining that sticks are swords or laser guns. I like to be in touch with that side of imagination that everybody had as a kit that I think, unfortunately, sometimes goes away. I am still blessed to have that so of course Vic is driving a truck, he’s an adult.”
As for Pratt filling the paws of Garfield, Dindal says the actor was his first choice. “One of the things we do is get sound clips from actors that we feel can play the roles and we put their clips to drawings of the characters. The clips we found of Chris just fit the character so well. We knew we would have a certain level of action and a definite amount of emotion. I felt like he had the range we wanted to have in the movie, and his ability to adlib and improvise I knew I wanted as well. He checked all the boxes and then some.”
Garfield is in theaters now.
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Editor’s note: This article contains light spoilers for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
“What’s interesting about this film, and it played into our favor, is you couldn’t score it like you could a normal film that’s been done the last ten years,” says composer John Paesano about director Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. “A lot of it wasn’t conceived by the time we started working on it because it was so visual effects heavy.”
What that meant for the composer was coming up with ideas that were emotionally connected to the characters rather than composing for pictures on a screen.
“I’ve wanted to write film score since I was nine years old, and I grew up on John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and John Barry. A lot of these old-school composers weren’t able to throw up a digital video and score to it. They’d have to read a script, talk to the director, and discuss the characters. Then they would go away and write themes based on those conversations and would later apply that music to the picture when it was edited,” explains Paesano. “Everything is so visual now. Composers get the film, and they are almost fully conceived. We can take the Quicktime files, put them on our timeline, and move things around digitally. Because of that, scores have become less character-based and more visual-based.”
The irony is that Kingdom is one of the most tech-forward films made this year, thanks to its stunning visual effects. But even still, Paesano took an off-screen approach, pulling inspiration from previous films in the vast franchise and discussing the score’s dynamics with Ball. “Wes really wanted the audience to feel like they were there. He kept saying, ‘I want it to feel like the audience is sitting there with them. I don’t want the audience to feel like they are sitting in a chair watching a movie,” Paesano notes.
The compelling story being told on screen takes place several hundred years after the War of the Planet of the Apes. It brings attention to a small group of apes known as the Eagle Clan and how a young ape named Noa (Owen Teague), who sees his entire village taken hostage by a ruthless ruler named Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), fights back for what’s been taken from him.
The aural magnitude of Ball’s installment leans into a flavorful, world-building sound design rather than the score doing the heavy lifting. As Paesano puts it, the score is “supporting” the soundscape and “popping its head up every now and then.” The design choice was specific to Ball’s vision for Kingdom. Paesano discusses his inspirations, the difference in scoring for apes and humans, and why it was important to parallel Noa’s journey through music.
Finding Inspiration
The Planet of the Apes franchise dates back to the 1960s, with several books, films, TV series, and comics telling the tale of apes ruling man. Paesano referenced what came before to furnish something new.
Paesano: Wes is a crazy score junky. It’s a huge part of his process, and we both have a huge appreciation for this franchise and what comes before us. When you go into these big properties, you have this choice to make: ignore what came before and do something completely new, or you try to adopt what made these films successful and bring some of that along. Because Wes and I are huge fans of what Jerry Goldsmith did in the original film and what Michael Giacchino did with Dawn and War, we knew there was a little bit of responsibility. From a pure passion standpoint, we wanted to bring what Goldsmith did and add a little bit of the DNA from Dawn and War. Then there’s this tricky responsibility of how to bring it to a new place. It was an intricate balance.
Unconventional Instrumentation
Paesano wrote an emotional, compelling score inspired by instruments from previous work. A less is more approach allowed the music to push through the soundscape with identifiable themes.
Paesano: We went into it with a sonic idea. Wes would use the word primal, and I would use the word gritty, but we wanted to have tone to it. Jerry Goldsmith’s score has it. When you listen to it, you can hear everything. You can hear the celli, hear the violin. You can hear all the instruments. It’s not just one big wash of sound. There’s so much character and space in it.
The one thing we took from Goldsmith was the palette. We didn’t want to use synths in the score. We wanted it to be completely natural and use instruments that reflect the environment. For instance, if I was going to use the piano, I wanted to use a piano that looked like it had been sitting in a schoolhouse for a couple of hundred years. It’s a little out of tune, and maybe we mic’d it a little closer, so it wasn’t a beautiful pristine grand piano. I made sure on the strings, we closed-mic’d everything, and we used smaller orchestral sections so you could hear more of the instruments and less of this big, lush sound.
Another thing we took from Jerry was his use of this effect called an Echoplex. It’s kind of like a delay pedal normally used on a guitar. We used it in the orchestra. I also borrowed serial composing to write the track “Human Hunt.” It’s something Goldsmith did in Planet of the Apes. It’s a tone row, a custom scale, but if you start going one way, you can’t skip any notes up or down. It’s a way to get thematic ideas through rhythm. Then, with Michael Giacchino’s sound, it wasn’t about using his themes but approaching scoring these characters with a simplicity that allows the themes to be obtainable.
Scoring for Apes
Paesano began scoring the film early on, but when the final visual effects were delivered, everything changed.
Paesano: It’s funny, when I scored the characters as humans it was much more complex. We can absorb that because, as cinema people, we grew up on that lush, orchestral, intricate score. But when the visual effects came in and they turned into apes, it got so fantastical. It was so wrong.
We realized that we needed that simplicity. Michael Giacchino’s score has it. It’s got this wholesome, emotional, but very simplistic sound to it. I say that in a complimentary way because you can tell with Michael it was a choice. He knows how to write very intricate, complex music. I am just speculating, but I really think he probably ran into the same issue Wes and I noticed. With apes, it has to be simple.
A Simple Search
As Paesano started to write the music for Kingdom, he searched the internet looking to find any ties to apes and music. What he discovered added to the authenticity of the score.
Paesano: I was researching and typing in Google ‘music and monkeys’ to figure out if there’s any throughline. I came across an Emory University study on primates and music. What was fascinating is they did this experiment trying to figure out if primates have any response to different types. And whenever they played traditional western music, music played in 2/4 or 4/4 time, the monkeys stayed away from that part of the enclosure. It drove the primates crazy. But when they played non-traditional Western music, whether it was African or Indian, anything that uses different compound rhythms, it was the opposite reaction. The monkeys came over to it and liked it. This was low-hanging fruit, and I thought what an easy thing to use as inspiration.
Antagonistic Themes
The composer used the Emory research and the original Planet of the Apes (1968) as inspiration to create the theme for Proximus Caesar, the power hungry king who wants to end human existence.
Paesano: Proximus Caesar’s theme has a motific idea to it, but the biggest part of his theme is that it’s done in an 11/8 time signature. [11/8 has eleven beats to a bar with the eighth note as the beat.] I took Jerry’s Goldsmith’s “The Hunt” and used motific ideas from that but did it in 11/8 to give it a little wrinkle to it.
You can hear it when the marauders attack Noa’s village; that part is in 11/8. Then, when you first see Proximus trying to explode the door open at his village, you can hear this 11/8 rhythmic thing. I used the non-compound time signature to sculpt it around Proximus and the marauders.
Creating a Hero
When we first meet Noa he’s an innocent ape trying to win his father’s approval. That bond became an inspiration for Noa’s musical theme.
Paesano: Noa’s theme was born out of the idea that his father is the master of birds and Noa would eventually become the master of birds. One of the things I had to do was come up with a tune that his dad would sing to the birds. Wes and I went back and forth, wondering if we wanted his father to sing the theme that we would be hearing in the movie or did we want him to sing an entirely different song. We ended up going with a different song because if we didn’t, it could have turned into the musical Cats.
The tune his dad sings had to be really simple so that the audience would believe an ape could vocalize it. So when I came up with Noa’s theme, I borrowed the idea from the master of birds tune and adopted it to Noa. It’s this very simple melody and on the soundtrack it is called “Together Strong.”
The theme is written in Dorian mode, and it feels hopeful but not really happy. It can also feel intense and sad too. It was written to avoid leaning one way or another emotionally. We wanted it to be personal for Noa and believable, something that wasn’t too saccharine or over the top.
A Hero’s Journey
Part of the musical storytelling was being patient and earning moments for when a note would hit. After Noa’s village is attacked, the young primate starts to become a leader. Paesano wrote a parallel score to reflect the character’s journey.
Paesano: Wes had to hold me back at times. He was very focused on doing something different than what Matt Reeves and Micahel Giacchino had done on Dawn but still adopt the heart and character they had at the same time.
For Noa, it was more about growth. When we first start the film, Noa’s theme is introduced when he arrives in the village after getting his egg. The Eagle Clan theme can be heard in that big wide shot when Noa gets off his horse. There’s a little hint of French horn, and you can hear just the melody before he goes up to talk to his dad. Then, we don’t come back to Noa’s until after the attack on the village.
Wes was saying, ‘He’s not Noa yet.” It’s a growth thing. The whole idea for Noa went from being very simple and unsure to having the confidence to go to the valley beyond, and then this emotional statement of becoming the clan leader. We don’t get to its full glory until the film ends when Noa says, “climb Eagle Clan climb” during the flood. There’s this heroic moment when he eventually faces Proximus, and the largest part is when he bonds with the father’s eagle. It goes through these stages.
Delicate Placement
Kingdom builds compelling environments through lush sound design. Finding the right moments to include the score required balance.
Paesano: Technology has changed a lot since War, and it is interesting because the more real the characters look, the harder it is for the audience to accept crazy ideas. We took the character of what Jerry Goldsmith did but brought it to a modern place. A lot of it was writing the music but it was also about how Wes applied it to the film.
With a big-budget film like this, you’re expecting this giant score. But our score is pretty subdued. There are moments when the soundtrack is big, but when you hear it applied in the film, it’s very intentional. Wes wanted to apply it in a way that is very different from what’s out there, and I think it gives it character. We were conscious that this film moved a little slower, and I have to give Wes credit. He wanted it to take its time, for audiences to sit in the world and appreciate it so people didn’t feel rushed through scenes.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is in theaters now.
The Juice is loose in the official Beetlejuice Beetlejuice trailer.
Twenty-six years after Tim Burton and Michael Keaton delivered their beguilingly charming horror comedy, one of the films that defined 1980s cinema, the dream team is back to create some fresh nightmares. The official trailer for Burton and Keaton’s long-awaited sequel to their iconic Beetlejuice has arrived, and the reunion is so sweet they had to name it twice.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice finds Keaton returning to the trickster spirit he inhabited, and he’s joined by his Beetlejuice co-stars Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz and Catherine O’Hara as Delia Deetz. These 1988 originals are joined by new cast members, including Jenna Ortega, as Lydia’s daughter, Astrid, alongside Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Arthur Conti, and the great Willem Dafoe.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice finds the Deetz family returning home to Winter River after a tragedy, the location of their last run-in with Keaton’s diabolical demon. Lydia is still haunted by her experience with Beetlejuice two decades ago, but now her fortunes take a turn for the even more troublesome when Astrid, as rebellious as Lydia herself was at that age, discovers the mysterious model of the town in the attic, the very thing that lured a young Lydia into the underworld all those years ago. The title Beetlejuice Beetlejuice begs the question—when will spit out a third Beetlejuice and summon the spectral trickster?
Burton directs from a screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar (Wednesday) and a story by Gough & Millar and Seth Grahame-Smith, based on characters created by Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson. Burton’s creative team behind the camera includes cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos and members of his Wednesday team, like production designer Mark Scruton and editor Jay Prychidny, alongside his longtime collaborator, costume designer Colleen Atwood, creature effects and special makeup FX creative supervisor Neal Scanlan, and composer Danny Elfman. Hair and makeup designer Christine Blundell is on board to give Beetlejuice his signature dead-but-lively looks.
Check out the trailer below. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice haunts theaters on September 6.
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Written and directed by John Krasinski, IF is a fantastical inverse of Krasinski’s A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II. A contemporary fairy-tale journey inspired by Krasinski’s own daughters, IF pairs live action and animation to bring us Bea (Cailey Fleming), a tween who learns she can see everyone else’s imaginary friends, and teams up with Cal (Ryan Reynolds), the only adult around who shares her superpower, to help them.
Being able to see this wild array of imaginary beings sounds delightful, but those who’ve been outgrown by their children are in troubled waters. Bea and Cal work to find new kids for a gaggle of adrift IFs, accompanied by an enormous purple furry friend named Blue (Steve Carell). Born as they are of children’s imaginations, no two IFs are alike — where Blue is tangibly huggable, Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) is a petite, Betty Boop-inspired butterfly. Opposite both is the IFs’ wise soul, a scruffy teddy bear named Lewis, voiced by the late Louis Gossett Jr. Given the level of interaction and emotional tension between the actors and the IFs, for the visual effects supervisor, Academy Award winner Chris Lawrence (Gravity, The Martian), animation supervisor Arslan Elver (Guardians of The Galaxy, Star Wars: The Force Awakens), and their team, the challenge was to support Krasinski as a live-action filmmaker while bringing an incredible stylistic range of animated characters to life.
The blend between the two worlds needed to be seamless. “Ultimately, our goal was for the audience to forget we’d done any work at all,” Lawrence said. On set, they used a proprietary iPad app to point around the action, showing versions of the IFs that the actors could use to get a visual sense of where these characters would eventually wind up in the final edit. Main character IFs like Blue and Blossom had stand-ins (Blue’s wore a hula hoop around his middle to mimic his proportions). While the film was still being shot, Lawrence and Elver took an unusual approach to the animation, grabbing key moments from set each day to animate a couple of key poses, show them to Krasinski, and get feedback. “What it meant was that the basic blocking of the digital characters was defined at the point where John was cutting the scenes. He was able to make editorial choices based on what the characters were doing and what Arslan had imbued them with,” Lawrence explained. This way of working, combined with Krasinski’s passion for the project, made for a highly collaborative, performance-focused approach. “John’s enthusiasm is literally contagious,” Elver said. “It was quite cool because you don’t often see someone get so excited about an animation test and call other people to show them.”
The team also went out of the box to achieve trickier characters, like Blossom. “How do you get from this antique idea that’s almost 100 years old,” Lawrence said of Blossom’s inspiration, Betty Boop, “to something that’s contemporary and appealing for a four-year-old today?” The team watched Fleabag to glean some of Waller-Bridge’s particular idiosyncrasies and charm, then wound up using a three-dimensional version of a two-dimensional animation technique as part of their approach to get the character right, drawing up a model sheet of all of Blossom’s expressions, seen from different angles. “We couldn’t rotate her head up too much, but other than that, we made it happen,” Elver said.
Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Blossom), left, and Cailey Fleming (Bea) star in Paramount Pictures’ “IF.”
Though they looked to references as varied as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, ET, and Dark Crystal, Lawrence and Elver worked to strike a new balance between realism and anything too cartoon-like. “How do you imbue these characters with just enough detail, photographic realism, and nuance of articulation and expression so that you can have them live with live-action actors and have them all sit together sympathetically in a scene?” Lawrence said of the philosophical tack they took throughout. The answer was a handmade, frame-by-frame approach so that even the visuals of a talking ice cube in a glass of water (voiced by Bradley Cooper) hit the right emotional beats. The animation team added imperfections like barely perceptible scratches to their characters’ eyes and watched videos of the film’s all-star cast in the recording booth for inspiration. “We look at their facial expressions — what do they do with their eyes and eyebrows? It’s like picking up the right ingredients for cooking,” Elver said. Krasinski also guided some scenes by acting them out himself.
Ice (Bradley Cooper) in “IF.” Courtesy Paramount Pictures.Bradley Cooper (Ice) and Steve Carell (Blue) star in Paramount Pictures’ “IF.”
The final look of the film’s digital characters is a composite of the director’s vision, the actors’ performances, and the painstaking way each of these elements was interpreted by the animation team. “Great care and attention was our overall goal, to protect the human actors’ performances and the animated performances, to allow them to live and evolve together in a scene, and to support John and his vision in directing that,” Lawrence said. “We used that to guide every decision we made on the film. I’m too close to it, but my four-year-old loved it, so I’m really happy.”
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Featured image: L-R, Christopher Meloni (Cosmo), Ryan Reynolds (Cal), Cailey Fleming (Bea) and Louis Gossett Jr. (Lewis) star in Paramount Pictures’ “IF.”
You can’t keep a good superhero down, especially not Paul Bettany’s Vision, who will be returning once again to lead a brand new Marvel series on Disney+.
Bettany’s red-skinned, Infinity Stone-charged superhero (it’s the Mind Stone, to get technical), one of the more tragic figures in recent Marvel lore considering his death at the hands of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity and his bittersweet resurrection in Disney+’s WandaVision, will return to center a new series from the studio. While we don’t have a title yet, word is the new series will premiere in 2026, led by Star Trek: Picard showrunner Terry Matalas. Marvel has already opened the writer’s room.
Bettany’s Vision has appeared in one form or another in multiple MCU films—first, as simply the voice of J.A.R.V.I.S. (Just a Rather Very Intelligent System), Tony Stark’s all-seeing AI in the Iron Man franchise, then as the near-holy superhero in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, and Avengers: Infinity War. It was in Infinity War that Vision became one of Thanos’s first Avenger casualties, murdered for the Mind Stone that he has lodged in his forehead. But then, Vision was resurrected by Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) in WandaVision, although without any memories from his past, only to once again perish by the end of the series when Wanda removed her spell.
The new Vision series will be the third in this particular witchy corner of the MCU’s Disney+ universe, following the events in both WandaVision and the upcoming spinoff, Agatha All Along, which stars Kathryn Hahn reprising her WandaVision role as the witch Agatha Harkness. That series will premiere on Disney+ in September.
The new Vision series and Agatha All Along join plenty of Marvel action on Disney+, including Daredevil: Born Again and Ironheart, both set to premiere in 2025. Marvel will also follow up their recent animated series X-Men 97 with two more animated offerings, Eyes of Wakanda and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. Over on Prime Video, Marvel has Noir, which will star Nicolas Cage as Spider-Man Noir, reprising his role from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Ever since news broke that Hugh Jackman was returning as Wolverine, fans and Marvel canon keepers have had to reckon with the fact that Jackman had already had his bittersweet superhero sendoff in James Mangold’s 2017 banger Logan, and returning as the be-clawed mutant might mess with that beloved movie’s entire premise and Wolverine’s timeline. The premise in Logan was that the gruff, grizzled lone wolf makes the ultimate sacrifice for his mutant kind and becomes a mythic hero in the process by giving up his life to save a young mutant molded by his own genetics in Dafne Keen’s Laura. The timeline was Wolverine canon, the same one we’d been following for years in previous X-Men movies. Wolverine definitively died at the end of Logan, and in such epically noble fashion that even superfans of Jackman’s take on the character who wanted him around a lot longer had to concede it was the best possible exit.
Then came the news that Jackman had signed up to reprise Wolverine for Deadpool 3, later titled, for emphasis, Deadpool & Wolverine. Ryan Reynolds had long been agitating for Jackman to join his mouthy, irreverent superhero in his R-rated, F-bomb-happy franchise, and Jackman had finally signed on. In fact, Jackman was so eager to join Reynolds that he said yes to the movie before he told his agent. In a conversation with Fandangoalongside Reynolds and director Shawn Levy, Jackman admitted he’d agreed almost out of a Wolverine berserker burst of spontaneity.
“I was on my way, I was just driving, and literally, just like a bolt of lightning, came this knowing deep in my gut that I wanted to do this film with Ryan [Reynolds],” Jackman told Fandango. “For Deapdool and Wolverine to come back together. I swear to you, When I said I was done, I really thought I was done. But in the back of my head, ever since I saw ‘Deadpool’ 1, I was like, ‘Those two characters together.’ I knew it, I knew the fans wanted it ever since I put on the claws, people talked about these two. So, that had always been there, but I just knew. And I literally couldn’t wait to arrive,” he continued. “Soon as I arrived, I rang Ryan. And I just said, ‘Let’s do it.’ Like, I hadn’t rung my agent, no one. I had to ring my agent and said, ‘Oh, by the way, I have just committed to a movie.’”
Yet the power of Jackman’s last turn as Wolverine in Logan was such that even a person who would personally gain from Jackman’s return was leery; Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige thought he should stay retired. Feige told Empirethat he gave Jackman a piece of advice—don’t come back. ‘You had the greatest ending in history with Logan,” Feige told Empire of his conversation with Jackman. That’s not something we should undo.’”
So what got Feige in Jackman’s corner—besides all the delicious comedic possibilities of putting him back in the claws and pairing him with Reynolds’ gleefully ludicrous Deadpool? The fact that Deadpool & Wolverine wouldn’t undo Jackman’s journey in Logan because the Wolverine we’ll be seeing in the new film is a different version. As Jackman has said previously, Marvel’s been playing around with various timelines via the multiverse for a while now, and it allows for multiple versions of a single character (hence the multiple Thanos’s—Thani?—and Gamoras in Avengers: Endgame for example). This meant Jackman’s Logan timeline could remain intact, his noble sacrifice forever etched in Marvel canon history.
The fact that Deadpool & Wolverine is serving up an entirely different Wolverine to audiences—yet still with his trademark claws and hard-earned, embittered stoicism—offers yet one more reason to rush to the movie theater when the film comes out.
Deadpool & Wolverine slashes its way into theaters on July 26.
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When director Lynn Wang and her co-director Jared Hess set out to adapt Aaron Blabey’s popular 2015 book about a plain-Jane barn pony who dreams of being a unicorn, Wang brought to bear years of animation experience to this sure-hoofed, very funny adaptation. Thelma the Unicorn hits its high notes but also manages to work in sly humor that adults will particularly savor.
What Wang and Hess both have in spades is a deep appreciation for music (the film is chock full of tunes, and Hess made his name with the music-loving indie juggernaut Napoleon Dynamite) and the ability to get the best out of the talented people they assembled around them. Their adaptation boasts a bonafide powerhouse performer in the role of the titular pony-turned-unicorn in former Alabama Shakes’ frontwoman Brittany Howard, making her voice acting debut.
Howard’s spirited Thelma dreams of one day headlining Sparklepalooza, the biggest musical event of the year. Her band, the Rusty Buckets, features her barnyard pals Otis (Will Forte) and Reggie (Napoleon Dynamite star Jon Heder), a pair of donkeys. They’ve never once qualified for a major music festival. The problem, as Thelma sees it, is that being a regular barn pony means she’ll never deserve a stage and microphone; to fulfill her dreams, she needs to be somebody different.
A scene from “Thelma the Unicorn.” Courtesy Netflix.
Everything changes, however, after a mishap turns this dreamy pony into a glittery pink unicorn (her horn is chock full of vitamin A—it’s a carrot), and a viral video of Thelma the (fake) unicorn reaches music manager Vic Diamond (Jemaine Clement), who believes she’s the next big thing. Thelma’s journey to potential stardom and her exposure as an imposter unicorn are set into motion.
All of this is handled with a bevy of showstopping tunes, wry humor, and charm. We speak to Wang about how she helped Thelma the Unicorn find its sparkle and shine.
Walk me through what it was like to direct an animated film during Covid.
Usually, we’re doing all of this face-to-face, and it’s really fast and free-flowing; you get a lot of creative minds in a room together and throw ideas back and forth, scribbling ideas. We didn’t get to have that luxury during Covid; we were doing it through Zoom, like this. But that format forced us to trust each other a lot more and make sure we could communicate our ideas clearly and create the space for our other team members to do that. There was a lot of trust that we had to create really, really fast.
Lynn Wang. Photo by Mekael Dawson.
What was the adaptation process from the books—did the books create parameters for how the film could look, or did you have the license to go in a different direction?
It was definitely an open conversation. Typically, when adapting a book for animation, you expect it to evolve. Things have to get more intricate to translate a 32-page picture book into a 90-minute movie, especially in CG. We always wanted to take the essence of what Aaron Blabey did in his illustrations, which were wacky, weird, and funny on sight, because we thought that fit the movie’s theme so well.Celebrating everyone’s quirks and ensuring you were celebrating yourself and what makes you special. So the core of those ideas were there, and there were some other things we wanted to keep: Thelma being short and the textures we loved in Aaron Blabey’s illustrations. Mikros, our animation company, was amazing. They had people who specialized in the physics of hair and cloth simulation and stuff like that, all that added together make this giant whole, and it takes a really long time. [Laughs].
Brittany Howard is Thelma and Jemaine Clement is Vic Diamond in “Thelma the Unicorn.” Courtesy Netflix.
What’s it like to direct and shape voice performances in real-time, especially with someone like Brittany Howard, who has such an iconic voice…
Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s funny because once we found Thelma’s character and finally signed on Brittany—and we were so excited about that—we were thinking about how we could marry her personality to Thelma. The moment we got Brittany into the recording booth, she was so comfortable in front of the microphone, so it was amazing to watch her slip into that so easily. To watch her embody Thelma, she was able to bring so much of her own personality, and as she was recording, we were shifting Thelma because of some of the things she would do or say. A lot of the times, we’d have her read the lines, and as she was saying it, Jared and I would be like, that doesn’t sound quite right, so we’d ask her how she’d say it in her own way, and more often than not, that’s what would end up in the movie. We thought the actors taking hold of the characters and helping direct where the characters would land was right. Especially with comedy.
You have some seriously gifted comedians in this cast…
Especially Will Forte, who voiced Otis, he’s so sweet and funny and dorky at the same time, Will really took a hold of that. And the same with Jemaine Clement, who plays Vic Diamond, he was just hilarious. He was riffing a ton of stuff that we ended up not being able to use in the movie, but they were all great and added so much to the character. He was also amazing to watch work through the music.
A scene from “Thelma the Unicorn.” Courtesy Netflix.
How much re-recording did you have to do?
We brought them back quite a bit. It wasn’t weekly, more like once in a few months, because we were working toward screenings. Once we got into animation dailies, we were pretty much locked at that point, because changing animation is a lot more expensive and a lot harder to do. So when we were doing screenings and doing storyboards, we have these moments during the process of making animation where we show the entire movie in whatever shape it’s in—it’s really rough, and it’s all temp scratch, temp audio, and we’re just watching to see how the movie is playing. From there, there’s usually a lot of re-writing and dialogue changing, so after each screening, we bring back the actors to re-record the new audio or get a new take on something.
Did you have any other animated or live-action touchstones while you were working on this? One movie that comes to mind is Sing.
It’s funny that you bring up Sing, we did bring up that film a couple of times just in terms of how we wanted to present this musical movie. Sing is a performance musical versus a Disney musical where you’re singing through the story process and everyone’s emotions. Our film is a performance movie, so that’s where that reference came in. For the most part, we didn’t really use other animated movies as references, the references we used were a lot more from live-action, a lot of musical bios like A Star is Born or Yesterday or Sing Street. We tried to capture the fun of a performance musical. It sounds cheesy, but the project you’re working on does tell you what it needs. You have to follow that down the path without being diverted by something else.
It’s interesting because A Star is Born is a fairly dark reference…
Yes. [Laughs.] That’s true; it’s a very dark reference for a very sparkly unicorn.
You had an embarrassment of riches in terms of musical talent to work with here…
Yeah, we did have an embarrassment of riches, so many songwriters who made demos for us. On top of that, we had Brittany and a great music team at Netflix, who helped us keep our focus on the emotional character arc. And our great songwriters who kept Thelma’s emotional journey in mind, people like Brett McKenzie, who has been writing for TV and movies as well as Flight of the Conchords, and Taura Stinson, who really resonated with Thelma’s journey and who could bring her own truth and history into the songs. That’s why I think a lot of Thelma’s songs are so emotional. And we had Theo Katzman and Louis Cato, and they were phenomenal in helping us make things so ear-wormy.
How did you feel when it was time to put your pencils down, no more tinkering allowed, and you saw the finished film?
I’m really happy with where we landed and that we achieved what we set out to achieve: subverting the unicorn movie. The humor and joy of this movie really come through in the end. And working with my entire team is really excited about where the movie landed. As with any project you work on for so long, you’ll always think, “What if we had more time to explore this a little more,” but I don’t think that’s ever going to stop. [Laughs]. We really strived for whole family viewing; there’s humor for kids, for adults, there’s references for music lovers, needle drops and songs that people will recognize from growing up, and then introducing that type of music to little kids. I hope this is a movie for everybody.
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In 1997, fourteen-year-old Reena Virk went to a party and never came home, then became front page news around the world when a tight-knit circle of girls and one troubled teenage boy were implicated in her murder. Journalist Rebecca Godfrey wrote about the crime in her acclaimed book “Under the Bridge”, and now Hulu’s narrative series of the same name delves into the life of the victim, as well as those involved in her death. In it, Riley Keough plays Rebecca Godfrey, who finds herself getting too close to the teens in her desire to find the truth. Lily Gladstone plays the fictional character Cam, a childhood friend and police officer with whom Rebecca shares a complicated past.
Executive producer and writer Quinn Shephard adapted Under the Bridge for Hulu and directed episodes 5 and 6, both of which feature a deeper focus on the teens’ lives. Shephard worked closely on the adaptation with Godfrey, who passed away in 2022. The Credits spoke to Shephard about the pull she felt toward this shocking true story, working with Godfrey, and her experience directing the series.
Rebecca Godfrey is so integral to the show, both as a creator and a character. How important was your collaboration to the finished series?
I don’t think I could possibly overstate her level of influence. It was Rebecca’s book, but so much of her essence and life were part of the show. She was quite generous with sharing that with me, and also giving freedom to explore where we could dip a toe into fictionalization with her character. It was really fun getting to work with somebody who didn’t seem at all precious about her character being sanitized or heroic and who was really game for her being flawed and human. It spoke to her overall ethos as a writer. She had a real appetite to tell very complicated stories about young women. I met her in early 2020, and we worked together for almost three years until she passed away. She let me in fully to her world, including looking at family photos, delving into her backstory and psyche, the music she listened to, and how she met the kids. It was all a really incredible resource.
Under The Bridge — “In Water They Sink The Same” – Episode 106 — Past and present wounds entwine as Rebecca and Cam’s alliance is tested. The Virks discuss taking matters into their own hands, and the teens use a school dance as cover for their escape plan — all as another life is threatened. Rebecca (Riley Keough), shown. (Photo by: Darko Sikman/Hulu)
You directed Episode 5, “When The Heat Comes Down,” and Episode 6, “In Water, They Sink The Same.” Can you discuss a choice as a director that speaks to your aesthetic or particular style?
I really wanted to direct those episodes because they are the most heavily focused on the teen storyline. The goal with them was to really throw the audience into how the teens might have felt in that scenario. Our joke in the room was that we should be writing them with the gravity of The Sopranos and that it should feel as intense and real as being in the mafia. Episodes 5 and 6 are one big arc of throwing ourselves into this extremely tense state that the teens are in after the crime and show how that happens. Simultaneously, in the past, we’re exploring the more tender and human moments about those people and seeing how the two timelines meet. There were some sequences in it that I was really excited about from the beginning, especially shooting Riley and Javon as Rebecca and one of the teenagers, Warren, in the warehouse, which is important because it’s their first real bonding experience when they’re tripping on acid together.
How did you approach that scene?
It gave me the ability to be really visually creative, because we knew going into the acid trip we wanted to do everything practically, without VFX. I was working with DP Checco Varese for that episode, and we created something that would hold a fixed close-up of an actor while going in and out. It was fully manual, so the dolly grip would move the camera back and forth during all of the close-up coverage of Javon and Riley. The frame wouldn’t change, but the depth perception of the world behind them and the angles of their faces would be shifting slightly the whole time. As a director, stuff like that is really exciting to me to think about how to fully, practically execute a feeling while being grounded and in the world of the show. The directors on the show before me, who I’d been on set with, created such a very grounded language for the show, and I was excited to pick that up and add a little bit of my own spin on it.
How did you develop Cam, Lily Gladstone’s character? Is she a composite of real people working to solve the crime?
Cam was based heavily on details of the entire investigative team and things that the police force went through. One woman worked on the case in real life, but she was not a direct adaptation into Cam, and she was also a white woman. The people tasked with solving this crime, in reality, were largely white men. It was a creative choice to be able to look at this crime through a modern lens and make it something more personal. She also came out of a need in the narrative. Once Rebecca was introduced as a perspective, I wanted to have a meaningful foil to her. I wanted somebody who wasn’t seduced by the world of teenagers or as fascinated by them, but more someone who believed there was no possible way of excusing this sort of violence. In terms of Cam’s relationship with Rebecca, a lot of that is fictionalized. It was such a huge cast of characters in real life, so we took off a lot of men that really existed and created Cam and just made her a badass. It also gave us an opportunity to dig in a lot harder, both as a critique of the justice system and Canada’s Pacific history. There’s a lot of romanticization of Canada, imagining they have less of a dark history than we do in the US, and that’s not the case. Cam’s fictional backstory and her being a cop were a way to comment on all that.
Under The Bridge — “When The Heat Comes Down” – Episode 105 — Tensions rise as suspicions surround the teens. Rebecca and Cam hatch a plan — but an unexpected detour leads Rebecca down a strange rabbit hole, resulting in a new bond. Cam (Lily Gladstone) and Roy (Matt Craven), shown. (Photo by: Darko Sikman/Hulu)Under The Bridge — “When The Heat Comes Down” – Episode 105 — Tensions rise as suspicions surround the teens. Rebecca and Cam hatch a plan — but an unexpected detour leads Rebecca down a strange rabbit hole, resulting in a new bond. Rebecca (Riley Keough) and Cam (Lily Gladstone), shown. (Photo by: Jeff Weddell/Hulu)
The series certainly reflects aspects of coming of age rarely expressed onscreen.
It was an opportunity, at least from my perspective, to deal with so many universal themes about girlhood, but completely devoid of the male gaze. It dealt with every universal aspect of childhood and of being a girl that was rooted in identity, wanting a sense of belonging, a sense of family, about bullying, about violence, about the internalized violence that these girls were dealing with, and socio-economic struggles and racism. Honestly, it’s a story that stretches across so many themes. It’s something I hadn’t really seen explored on television, and it was true. I also saw the opportunity, with the adult storyline, to comment on how stories about young women are often told.
Under The Bridge — “When The Heat Comes Down” – Episode 105 — Tensions rise as suspicions surround the teens. Rebecca and Cam hatch a plan — but an unexpected detour leads Rebecca down a strange rabbit hole, resulting in a new bond. Dusty (Aiyana Goodfellow), Kelly (Izzy G.) and Josephine (Chloe Guidry), shown. (Photo by: Darko Sikman/Hulu)
The story just gets more complicated as it goes on.
There’s a theme in the show that stories never end, and there was something endless about this one, where every crevice you looked into would open up a conversation that was very human. It was never a dead end. I think that was really fascinating to all of us who worked on the show.
What are you hoping for audiences who watch the series?
The most rewarding reactions for me have been people’s feelings of being conflicted and the moral dilemma of having to sit with it. That’s why I’m very happy it’s a weekly show, because as you get deeper into it, it becomes more challenging emotionally. There are definitely episodes intended to have you walk away feeling as if you’re holding multiple opposing opinions, all of which have valid points and flaws. As an artist, that is the thing I want most from an audience. When I walk away from something, and I genuinely want to have a debate even within myself about how I feel about it, that’s the stuff that makes me look at what part I play in the bigger picture. It helps me step up to the plate as a human being. How do I feel about this, and how might I be a part of the aspect of society that contributes to things like this happening? Reflections like that, for me, come from being challenged.
New episodes of Under the Bridge are airing Wednesdays on Hulu.
Featured image: Under The Bridge — “In Water They Sink The Same” – Episode 106 — Past and present wounds entwine as Rebecca and Cam’s alliance is tested. The Virks discuss taking matters into their own hands, and the teens use a school dance as cover for their escape plan — all as another life is threatened. Rebecca (Riley Keough) and Cam (Lily Gladstone), shown. (Photo by: Darko Sikman/Hulu)
