From Teenage Pirate Hunter to Global Anti-Piracy Leader: Rajkumar Akella’s Mission to Protect Creative Content

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Rajkumar Akella’s mission started almost the moment he joined the entertainment industry, when he brushed up against piracy for the first time.

These days, as the chairman of India’s Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce’s Anti Video Piracy Cell, Akella is leading the fight against piracy globally. Back then, as a teenager trying to turn a dollar, selling taped versions of Indian movie soundtracks and with “youthful energy,” he met with the pirates head-on.

“I gathered courage and actually confronted them, and it really paid off,” says Akella, smiling at the memory. “Over a period of time, I could actually claim that I could convert some of those hard-core pirates into legit businesses.”

It was an experience that helped set Akella’s life in motion. Throughout his career, he has witnessed the evolution of the fight against piracy from a physical approach, involving raids, arrests, and the confiscation of DVDs, to a primarily online effort that tracks the global movement of data.

In 2016, Akella was handed the MPA Asia-Pacific Copyright Educator (ACE) Award, which recognized his work in helping industry players in India protect their content. Today, speaking from his home in Hyderabad, Akella reflects on how the very nature of piracy has evolved, as have the methods he uses to fight it.

Receiving the Asia Pacific Copyright Educator (ACE) Award from the Chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, Senator Chris Dodd, in Hong Kong. 2016.

How has piracy in the Indian film market evolved over the years?

When Eega, directed by S. S. Rajamouli, was released [in 2012], we went to a particular cinema in a Tier 2 city in the erstwhile state of Andhra Pradesh, and we found through forensic watermarking that actually the cinema operator was facilitating cam-cording. We shut down the theater as a strong message to such offenders and all the pirates that nobody can encourage piracy in any manner.

By the time Baahubali: The Beginning was released in 2015, by the afternoon of the opening day, piracy had already broken out. It was devastating for the director, the producer, and everybody. By then, we already had a mechanism of tracking down the IP addresses, but [the pirates] had already wizened up. All these pirates were already using other methodologies to hide their identities.

What we’ve found, when we put all the information together, is that this was a global network. Some people were in Jabalpur, Pune, Delhi, Chennai, Gwalior, Mumbai, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Paris, Nepal, Pakistan, and so on. This shows how complicated the landscape of piracy has become. It’s not happening from one place anymore; it’s not very simple anymore.

 

Why do you think people use these sites?

The biggest motivator for movie piracy is that people want to watch the content immediately after it is released. That is the biggest motivator for pirates: we have a six- to eight-week window for the OTT release, and people won’t wait that long. This sense of urgency to consume content is actually a boon and a bane for the movie industry.

Secondly, and even more importantly, the perception, or rather the misconception, that pirated content is free. But that is the biggest fallacy. There is nothing free in the world. The so-called “free” pirated content comes with a huge cost, in the form of people’s personal data or identity, which they are largely unaware of or tend to ignore.

Could you share one of the most memorable or impactful operations you’ve been involved in?

We had started an international film distribution company with offices in the United States, Singapore, and Hyderabad in 2002. One of the first films we launched in the DVD format was Sampoorna Ramayanam [1972], based on the great Indian epic. We had acquired the home video rights at a steep price, as it was a very prestigious project. The DVD technology was evolving, and this was probably the first ever DVD from India with multiple language soundtracks and multiple language subtitles. We invested a great deal of time and effort in compiling the various soundtracks and struggled for several months to complete the translations into numerous Indian and foreign languages.

But then, before we could even fully market or monetize the DVDs, piracy came as a shock and ate into our rightful revenues. It was heartbreaking. It was more than money. Around that time in Chicago, we noticed a group of pirates engaged in pirating DVDs. We had invested our heart and soul, along with our hard-earned money, in creating world-class DVDs of Telugu content, only to see people pirate them unscrupulously in an instant.

Soon, we engaged a Copyright Attorney in New York and then conducted a raid in Chicago in 2003, with the help of Homeland Security. We actually confiscated a massive haul of pirated DVDs – about 97,000 DVDs – belonging to not just us but several copyright holders.

You helped set up the Anti-Video Piracy Cell for the Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce (TFCC) in 2005, and it has been a key player in the fight against piracy in India. Could you speak to some of the key initiatives and programs the TFCC has implemented?

When I shared insights of this experience with the thought leaders in the Telugu film industry, they could see the long-term implications of the piracy menace. I said no individual can actually address this issue; this has to be an industry issue. So we set up what was then the first-ever dedicated Anti-Piracy Cell by the movie industry in India in 2005.

Around 2010, I was selected as the chairman of the anti-piracy cell, and that was the time when online piracy emerged. We could see that this is going to be the future, so we need to engage professionals to tackle this issue. Up until then, we had about 15 retired cops to tackle piracy, targeting physical pirates and prosecuting them. We had conducted over six thousand anti-piracy raids. But today, if you really look at it, rather than dealing with physical pirates, we have the digital pirates everywhere.

Does that make the job harder?

Conceptually, it’s easier when you have the political will, stakeholder cooperation, and collaboration, because when it is online, everybody leaves a digital trail – they have a digital footprint. You have to convince the governments of the day that this is a serious crime, as the general perception is that piracy is a victimless crime, and all that. It’s not true. There are so many hundreds and thousands of people impacted by this. In just the Telugu film industry alone, there are over 15,000 daily wage workers, and across India, this number runs into hundreds of thousands.

With Mr Ramesh Sippy , Legendary Indian Film Maker, Uday Singh – Managing Director – MPA – India.

How has the focus of the work that you do changed?

If somebody is committing a crime, they must be punished, of course. But that is secondary, because the legal process and convictions take a very long time. As an industry, our primary concern is ensuring we can optimize our legitimate revenue. That really belongs to the Creator, the producer, the content maker.

Most content creators can’t afford the legal battles. For them, true justice is when they can deter people from distributing or consuming pirated content. So we thought, instead of waiting for convictions post facto, we should proactively initiate measures to stop piracy before it damages prospects. The challenge is to make the Government appreciate the urgency, time sensitivity, and gravity of the issue. Because for the creator fraternity, justice delayed is justice denied.

At India’s recent World Audio-Visual and Entertainment Summit (WAVES), you were part of a panel discussing international perspectives on content protection. What did you share about India and its market for international content?

One thing now is that every piece of content we create has the potential to reach a global audience. There is nothing like ‘This will only cater to this particular audience.’ There is no longer that concept; it’s passé. Any piece of content you create has the potential to reach a global audience. So basically, you need to protect your content wherever it goes.

You know, today in India, there are about 30 million Japanese anime fans – 30 million! And there are about 15 million fans of K-dramas and K-pop. And in fact, in some regions of India, the audiences aren’t even familiar with Bollywood or Indian stars; they only watch K-drama and K-pop; they’re more popular than that, it’s crazy! Likewise, Indian content is becoming increasingly popular even in non-traditional markets and among audiences beyond the diaspora.

At a panel discussion on Piracy at the World Audio Visual Entertainment Summit ( WAVES ) Mumbai 2025, with Dawn Barriteau – VP – Alliance For Creativity and Entertainment , Ho Fai – VP Content Protection Legal – ACE, Mr Tatsuya Otsuka – CODA – Japan, Itae Choi – Executive Director, Korea Copyright Overseas promotion Association , South Korea , Film Maker Jihè Lee Liribridge – South Korea

In your view, what are the most promising areas for cross-border collaboration?

We soon realized the necessity for global and cross-border collaboration with the advent of online media. So we [the Telugu Film Industry] were the first to sign an MOU [Memorandum of Understanding] with the Motion Picture Association and ever since have done several significant joint campaigns against piracy. And now with the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), we are working even more closely.

The idea is to bring all the industries across India and the globe together, to constantly stay connected, share actionable information and knowledge, and evolve strategies together, and be able to impress upon the governments, wherever we are, to go after these pirates. Unfortunately, the trend has always been that the bad guys use technology better than the legit guys, be it offshore hosting companies, cryptocurrencies, or using AI.

Secondly, the most exciting thing that has happened in the digital era is that everybody is a creator, making some form of creative content, be it reels, music, songs, micro movies, and so on. Right now, I think it’s one of the best times for any creative process. And if we can put in place these checks and balances, and a very robust mechanism to deal with piracy, then it is the golden age for every creator.

What are you seeing in terms of the pirates expanding into other forms of criminal activity?

Today, it is not just about piracy; they’re also stealing your identity. Recently, experts have observed that about 70 per cent of all cybercrime originates from digital piracy, as it often seems harmless to people. But the fact is, piracy is used as a bait, as a trap to steal people’s identities, to infringe on data privacy, and to spread malware, which will then lead to online fraud, financial scams, and other cybercrimes.

In India, identity theft is a huge threat. We have recently seen the notorious “digital arrest” scam in India. They are looting millions and millions of dollars from gullible people because they are stealing their identities and they are actually using it, or misusing that information, to threaten them and extort money. This is all happening because if it’s a very innocuous pirate site, you might want to watch a popular movie or series, but in the process, they’re stealing your data, your privacy, and your identity. This issue is morphing into many complex problems for society as a whole, which is why it’s crucial that we work together against it.

For more interviews with filmmakers, producers, and industry professionals taking big swings in Asia, check these out:

Oscar-Nominated “Elvis” Producer Schuyler Weiss on What’s Right About Korea’s Filmmaking Industry

From “Kill Bill” to Martin Scorsese to “Shōgun”: Producer Eriko Miyagawa on Her Hero’s Journey

From Mumbai to Batam: The Unexpected Journey of Dev Patel’s “Monkey Man”

Building Hollywood’s Village: HPA President Kari Grubin on Community, Innovation, and Change

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Since 2002, the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) has been committed to supporting and advancing the media and entertainment industry. Renowned for events like the HPA Tech Retreat, where professionals discuss the intersection of creativity and cutting-edge workflows, and the HPA Awards, which celebrate groundbreaking artistry and innovation across the entertainment industry, the association plays a vital role in facilitating knowledge and fostering collaborative environments to move the industry forward.

It’s through these engaging events that have sparked other HPA initiatives, including the Young Entertainment Professional (YEP) and Women In Post (WIP), both of which bring forward thoughtful insights and conversations, allowing working professionals to stay informed, build connections, and gain new skills that will shape the future of the industry. In January of this year, Kari Grubin stepped into the role of acting HPA President, with a goal to keep the organization at the industry’s forefront, stating: “HPA will continue to be a conduit for our community to grow, reach out for new opportunities and adapt.”

We connected with Grubin, a long-standing board member, who in her time launched the WIP program in 2011 and co-created the YEP, which, according to the HPA has mentored 200 up-and-coming industry professionals, to ask how the HPA is adapting to industry trends, how their programs are evolving, and the impact of California’s new film tax incentive.

Kari Grubin

How would you describe the HPA to anyone not familiar with the organization?

We are representatives of the media supply chain: the strategists, creatives, executives, and business owners who help content creators tell their stories. That can mean many things, including implementing the best process or workflow, identifying the right tools and people to execute it, or developing the necessary technologies. HPA is all about building community and connection through the events we produce. The HPA community is critical to the entire lifeline of making content, and it takes a village. Building that community and shining a light upon it, with a focus on knowledge exchange and recognition, has been our mission for the last 25 years.

As HPA president, have you set any goals to expand the organization that you felt were missing?

When the opportunity arose to become president, I thought about how I could continue that legacy of making the HPA accessible to more people, where they could have a space and a community to learn, grow, solve problems, and collaborate. It’s important to me that HPA supports an industry that’s experiencing a colossal transition. I want to continue helping our community and focus on our members in a way that creates a safe space for conversations to expand and grow.

HPA’s Young Entertainment Professional event at the Academy Museum. Courtesy HPA.

The HPA offers several roundtable discussions and industry expert panels that anyone in the industry can attend. Can you talk about some of those initiatives?

HPA’s NET (Networking Education Technology) roundtable events are extremely popular. They put subject matter experts, many of whom are directly involved in pressing industry issues, in conversation with attendees. Inquiry, information, and ideas flourish at NET events, all while people are connecting. The NET roundtable events are designed so that attendees move three times to different tables and talk with subject matter experts who are leading the tables on different topics. It’s a really diverse and highly engaged set of conversations.

Round table discussions. Courtesy of HPA

Women In Post (WIP) is a great initiative. How has the program evolved, and what can future attendees expect? 

Women In Post has evolved, and HPA has nurtured it to become a profoundly vibrant part of the organization. I would say that at any WIP event, you can expect to hear from and meet women who are defining (or redefining) their organizations or companies. WIP events, such as lunches during the year, the HPA Tech Retreat Women In Post lunch, and other mixers, put interesting and accomplished women in the spotlight and are phenomenal networking events.

HPA WIP lunch. Courtesy of HPA.

For those first stepping into the industry, the HPA created Young Entertainment Professionals (YEP). How has the program evolved?

Young Entertainment Professionals provides a place for people who are in the first 10 years of their career to participate in the organization, see its value, and build their own networks amongst each other. They are the future of the HPA, and over the last couple of years, it’s grown. Since its launch, over 200 YEPS have gone through the program. Each year’s class is about 35 YEPs matched with industry mentors. Initially, Young Entertainment Professionals was about people in a specific age range, but we updated the requirements to be about the first 10 years of their media supply chain career, opening a space for more people to participate.

The HPA Tech Retreat is one of the organization’s headliner events – the most recent taking place in February 2025. What trends came out of the discussions?

AI remained a big topic at this year’s Tech Retreat, and it will continue to be as it is leveraged and normalized throughout our pipelines. Progress happens regardless of whether we are in favor of something in particular or not. Our community is starting to embrace, learn, and understand the benefits and dangers. There are numerous questions on the legal front regarding provenance and other methods to protect intellectual properties.

HPA Tech Retreat, Renard Jenkins. Photo credit: Rand Larson, Morningstar

Anything else?

Another big conversation at the Tech Retreat was focused on the new definition of media creation. What does it look like from what was formerly the traditional broadcast side, and leveraging through multiple distribution networks? And what are the tool sets around the content creators? There’s a bit of a misnomer around non-traditional productions. Production encompasses all types of content creation, whether it’s a YouTube influencer or the more traditional episodic and feature content. It all takes planning and execution. When the team from MrBeast discussed The Beast Games pipeline at this year’s Tech Retreat, they explained the immense size of the production, including the amount of local storage needed, which was massive, truly insane. And so, while there are different ways of telling stories, you still need to set up a process to tell those stories by having the right tools in place, but in a slightly different way.

Since you mentioned AI, does the HPA have a viewpoint on the topic?

It’s important to distinguish generative AI from process-improvement AI and tools that enable entirely new possibilities. We’ve been using AI tools for a long time. And the one thing that’s really challenging in the conversation is that everybody, in some form or another, is interacting with AI tools online, whether it’s shopping or social media. I think we’ll start to see what AI tools are being used to tell stories and how people are leveraging them to do things that they can’t accomplish with other tools, rather than just focusing on tools based on generative AI functions.

That makes sense.

HPA is always going to look at tools and technologies and evaluate those tools based on the actual function, how to leverage the tool, and bring that visibility to our community. HPA is here to recognize innovation, but we are also about protecting people who create and own content. How can we make it transparent and visible to our members, so they understand what they are getting when using an AI-based tool? What does that mean?

When people think of AI right now, they’re usually thinking of Large Language Models like ChatGPT.

If you’re going to query an AI tool like a public-facing LLM, you’re taking a big chance. Intellectual property could potentially be used as a source for other purposes or even stolen. But if you’re building or using a private AI tool that only queries within your private network, then that’s different. It is up to each individual to decide what is the best decision for their particular needs. We do not judge anyone for the decisions they make, but we help them protect themselves. HPA is 100% supportive of intellectual property rights throughout the process.

You’re also part of the Trusted Partner Network (TPN) team. Can you share more details about TPN’s mission?

Trusted Partner Network (TPN) is a global, industry-wide content security initiative that the Motion Picture Association wholly owns. TPN provides programming intended to address security in various contexts and at different points in the content pipeline. These include: the MPA Content Security Best Practices, which are maintained by TPN and establish a single benchmark of minimum security preparedness for content industries; TPN security assessments, which measure a Service Provider’s current security status against the MPA Best Practices; and TPN+, a proprietary software application and global registry of industry Service Providers, which enables them to securely and seamlessly share their security information with Content Owners.

The California government passed its latest California Film Tax Incentive Program, which increased the cap to $750 million. What are your takeaways from what passed, and what are you hoping for future incentives? 

This new funding is a critical lifeline for not just the media industry, but all the ancillary businesses in California, which are intrinsically tied to the health of our business. I was proud to join so many other participants in California’s media creation supply chain to lobby for more financial support for our entire industry. Under the leadership of the MPA and California Production Coalition, I hope to see more direct support for postproduction, visual effects, and the other professional services that take place later in the production process. I would like to see how we can work together to create more incentives on a national level.

Before we let you go, how can someone join or get involved with the HPA?

Over the last few years, we have expanded what HPA membership looks like. Obviously, there’s always individual membership, and it’s easy to go to the website and join. But we also needed to provide additional support for companies to have a way to be involved. No matter what size or at what level a company joins, its employees get an inherent membership.

This article is part of an ongoing series that raises awareness about the businesses and individuals in the film and television community. HPA is a member of the California Production Collation. You can find more about the organization here.

Featured image: HPA’s 2025 Tech Treat. 

How “The Naked Gun” Writers Dan Gregor & Doug Mand Got Liam Neeson & Pamela Anderson to Embrace Absurdity

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Macho cop teams with gorgeous mystery woman to stop evil tech mogul from destroying the world: The plot’s perfectly functional for an action-thriller, but it’s the jokes, not the story, that have pushed The Naked Gun to the biggest action comedy opening of 2025. Writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), working with director/co-writer Akiva Schaffer, furnished stars Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson with a firehose of silliness encompassing sight gags, puns, bawdy banter, tone-deaf interrogation scenes, and ludicrous fight sequences spoofing three decades’ worth of action movie cliches.

Mand, who previously worked with Gregor and Schaffer on Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, says, “The whole name of this movie is, find a trope, make fun of the trope.”

Rebooting the original 1988 Naked Gun from David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker, Neeson plays the son of Leslie Nielsen’s famously accident-prone L.A. cop Frank Drebin, with Anderson, Danny Huston, and Paul Walter Hauser rounding out the cast.

Speaking from their offices in Los Angeles, Gregor and Mand unpack the joke-writing process that gave rise to a magical owl, a sexy snowman, Neeson’s 10-year-old schoolgirl disguise, and Anderson’s nickname Cherry Roosevelt Fat Bozo Chewing Spaghetti.

 

Not to get all fancy, but what you’ve done in The Naked Gun brings to mind the 1941 Preston Sturges movie Sullivan’s Travel about a director who wants to give up comedy and start making socially significant message films only to realize, when he sees regular folks laughing in theaters, that goofy slapstick also serves a valuable purpose, especially during hard times.

Gregor: What does that have to do with what we’re doing? We’re making a drama, Hugh, we’ve made a very serious cop drama.

Well, it just seems that people could use a good laugh right about now, and based on the reactions to The Naked Gun, mission accomplished.

Gregor: Thank you.

The sheer volume of jokes in The Naked Gun is something to behold. What was the process behind generating this volume of comedy?

Gregor: We met at Akiva’s office every day for months. First of all, we had to make sure the story was good enough so that the plot makes sense and you care about the characters. The more people think, “Oh, the story’s whatever,” that makes me feel great, because that means we did our job and left all this room for the comedy to shine. But if the story’s no good, then the comedy also suffers.

Mand: Once we made sure the story was right, we pitched jokes, scenes, and set pieces, and then wrote and rewrote them. We had a writer’s assistant named Melissa Aron, so she’d take down notes and pitch ideas herself. We wanted it to feel like a writer’s room.

 

So you have the script on paper. Then you show up on set and…

Mand: The benefit of having Liam Neeson is that he is such a good actor that every first take was pretty much perfect. We didn’t have to do the scene over and over, so now we could try different things. We would feed Liam different lines and he would look at us like we were psychotic: “What the hell is even coming out of your mouth?” He’d proceed to say the line, the crew would laugh, and he’d say, “I guess it was good.” Some of those really weird jokes that we’d written, they’d yell cut, and he’d say [gruff Liam Neeson imitation] “I’m Oscar Schindler, damn it, what’s happened to me!”

 

Neeson makes his entrance disguised as a schoolgirl in order to stop a bank robbery. As an actor best known for playing an ass-kicking vigilante in the Taken movies, seeing him about to fight in a little plaid dress feels like quite the departure. How did you come up with that bit?

Mand: It’s actually from Taken, when Liam’s character infiltrates this whole party of bad guys. We had this idea of “What’s the stupidest way that Frank could infiltrate our bank heist? And then when he pulls off the [little girl] mask [to reveal himself], that’s from Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.

Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr. in The Naked Gun from Paramount Pictures.

When Frank introduces Danny Huston’s villainous Richard Cane to Pam’s character Beth, he makes up a fake name on the spot. Looking around the club, he sees a cocktail and a painting on the wall, so she’s “Cherry Roosevelt…

Mand: Fat bozo chowing spaghetti.

Pamela Anderson plays Beth Davenport in The Naked Gun from Paramount Pictures.

And from then on, Beth is known to the bad guy as Cherry Roosevelt Fat Bozo Chowing Spaghetti. Besides the Femme Fatale tradition, how did you figure out what to make fun of?

Mand: The original Naked Gun was building off their Police Squad [TV comedy], which was building off tropes from fifties and sixties TV procedurals like Dragnet. That meant we had 30 years of new material to spoof with all the action and detective movies that have happened in the interim since the last Naked Gun.

Gregor: First and foremost, we sat down and watched the Bonds, the Mission Impossibles…

Mand: John Wick.

Gregor: John Wick, especially. When you watch those fight scenes, you go, “This is impossible. We have to use this!” Nonsensical physics in fight scenes is new because of CGI and advances in the stunt community which have created a whole new template for what stunts can look like.

Which would explain how Liam Newsom at one point literally rips the limbs off the bad guy…

Mand: Two arms.

Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr. in The Naked Gun from Paramount Pictures.

And then start beating the man with his own dismembered arms?

Mand: You are correct. You did not imagine that.

What’s the deal with Frank constantly being handed cups of coffee?

Gregor: You see it in probably half of the Law & Order cold opens when the detectives show up [at a crime scene] and they get handed coffee. We had the idea of giving Frank bigger and bigger cups of coffee, and then someone hands Frank coffee through the window of his car while he’s driving on the Pacific Coast Highway. We came up with that on set, kind of a nod to green screen driving, when it used to be obvious that they were just moving backgrounds and bumping the car up and down.

Mand: It’s a nod to the ridiculousness that he’s not really driving a car, and the physics of him getting coffee through the window while he’s driving only heightened the joke. That hand, I believe, belonged to our prop master. I remember when we filmed the driving coffee cup, people on set were going, “Oh my god, that is so stupid.”

Gregor: Which is exactly what you want to hear.

Pamela Anderson’s scat singing becomes truly deranged when she takes the stage at the villain’s nightclub. We expect Beth to perform some kind of sexy torch song, but instead, she unleashes bebop pandemonium. Where did that come from?

Man: When Akiva first met Pam, he learned that she’d been in a scat jazz band in like eighth grade, and he thought that was amazing. So from there, it was just about different iterations of how far we can go from Beth being sultry to completely unhinged.

Speaking of unhinged, please explain the hilariously weird montage when Frank and Beth build a sexy snowman during their romantic getaway to the tune of the power ballad “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.”

Gregor: The original Naked Gun has this iconic full-body condom montage, and we knew we could not beat that, so we had to do something very different. We started talking about doing a horror interlude. Akiva went home that night and had this dream, came back the next day, and, pretty much verbatim, that’s what you see in the movie. It came whole cloth out of Akiva’s brain in a bit of sleep.

How did you react when Akiva told you his idea?

Mand: Gregor and I just looked at him: “Yep.” Sometimes that’s the gift of having a partner.

SPOILER ALERT

Toward the end of the movie, an owl channeling the spirit of Frank’s dead father carries him through the air to help save the day. How did you dream up that flight of fancy?

Mand: We got a studio note about wanting us to dig into the “emotions” and make this relationship between Frank and his father more heartfelt and central to the story. We thought, eh, it’s belabored and exhausting to us. So honestly, the owl was our way of dressing up what felt like a relatively unhelpful studio note: Let’s make fun of it.

Gregor: We had a lot of fun playing with that bit until you realize you have to hire an actual owl, and then your life becomes terrible from dealing with real birds.

Featured image: Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr. and Pamela Anderson plays Beth Davenport in The Naked Gun from Paramount Pictures.

 

 

 

Day One on the “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” Set Feels Different for Tom Holland

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“Putting the suit on feels different this time,” Tom Holland says at the top of a new video from day one on the set of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. One new element for Holland’s fourth spin as Peter Parker is that the Brand New Day set marks the first time fans have been on the set, and as you’ll see in the video, it made for some very special moments.

We see Holland suited up as Spider-Man riding on top of an armored vehicle that he rips the hatch off of (could Jon Bernthal’s The Punisher be in there?). A little boy dressed as Spider-Man gets a very special photo with Holland. We also get a glimpse of director Destin Daniel Cretton as he and Holland embrace at the start of the shoot.

GLASGOW, UNITED KINGDOM – AUGUST 3: (UK OUT) Tom Holland is seen on the set of ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ on August 3, 2025 in Glasgow, Scotland. (Photo by MEGA/GC Images)

This follows the reveal of Spidey’s new suit, which boasts a larger spider symbol on his chest. This is Holland’s fourth adventure after suiting up in Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Far From Home (2019), and No Way Home (2021), which unleashed three Peter Parkers on a single universe, with Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield reprising their roles as they try to help Holland’s Peter Parker keep his universe from imploding.

Mark Ruffalo is returning to the MCU fold in Brand New Day as Bruce Banner/The Hulk, with Bernthal’s The Punisher and newcomer Sadie Sink (the speculation is that Sink is playing a young version of X-Men heroine Jean Grey, as we know the X-Men are majorly back in the MCU fold now.)

Cretton directs from a script by Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna, the long-tenured scribes on all of the Holland-led Spider-Man films. Their script for No Way Home had Peter having to wipe the memories of everyone he loves, including MJ (Zendaya), to keep his identity a secret, thus willingly ending his relationships and essentially isolating himself to protect them. The plot details for Brand New Day are, of course, being kept well webbed up.

Check out the video from the set. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is due in theaters on July 31, 2026.

Featured image: GLASGOW, UNITED KINGDOM – AUGUST 3: (UK OUT) Tom Holland is seen on the set of ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ on August 3, 2025 in Glasgow, Scotland. (Photo by MEGA/GC Images)

“Film is Forever”: How Maria Gabriela de Faría Embraced the Pain of Playing “Superman” Villain The Engineer

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Maria Gabriela de Faría doesn’t pull her punches—or her spinning blades, for that matter. In Superman, the actress makes Angela Spica (aka The Engineer) fight like an animal, throwing raw punches with unwavering belief in Lex Luthor’s (Nicolas Hoult) idea that no individual should be trusted with superpowers. Whether the Engineer is slicing robots in the Fortress of Solitude or going toe-to-toe with Superman (David Corenswet) in the Cleveland Guardians’ ballpark (outfitted to look like the DC Meteors’ home), she battles with ideals as well as fury.

To play half-machine, the nanotechnology empowering her is also eating away at her humanity, Gabriela de Faría transformed into a fighting machine. “Everything I did in the movie was so physical that it changed the way I acted,” she told The Credits. “It gave the character that frustration, that fear, because I was feeling it, too.” Though Superman isn’t her first comic book gig — she previously starred in SyFy’s Deadly Class — it’s by far her most transformative role to date.

Gabriela de Faría began as a child actor in Venezuela and went on to star in telenovelas, often performing 40 scenes a day. In other words, she was no stranger to the discipline Superman required.

 

As hard-hitting as The Engineer is, it always looks like there’s pain there behind the punches. How much did her physical discomfort, not just her strength, drive your acting choices? 

That was a conversation I had with James at the beginning. This isn’t a movie about the Engineer — it’s about Superman. The other characters are there to support his story. My character, specifically, supports Lex. But James has big plans for every character, so I needed to give the audience a glimpse into the Engineer’s mind and soul, even though the story isn’t hers. She sacrificed herself to become a metahuman for the greater good. Every time she connects with a machine, she loses a bit of her own humanity. I asked James, “What does it feel like when she connects to the Fortress of Solitude’s computer? It’s a foreign technology – alien.” We came up with this body language to have something to work with in those scenes. It’s painful because it’s not natural. 

C Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
Copyright: © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

Playing a soldier with nanotechnology in their body, what training and prep is required?

I worked out with the trainer DC gave me, Paolo Mascitti, for eight months before filming. I prepped from the outside in, reading the comics and doing all the research. My main focus was to gain those physical abilities, to look the part. I wasn’t a good fit when I started. The first couple of months, my body didn’t change. I wasn’t feeling any stronger, but I still had to show up every day, afraid of not achieving my goal, but still going. While I was at the gym, going through all of that in my mind and my body, I thought of the Engineer. I would send James pictures of me on the treadmill with different options for how she would walk.

 

How would she walk? How would she throw a punch?

The nanotechnology weighed her down. I would work out with my stunt team later on, holding dumbbells to make it require effort. And then — God loves me so much — he gave me a tight, stiff suit. The Engineer’s suit was 3D-printed leather. I had to fight my suit every time I wore it, which is 95% of the movie. It helped create the awkward movement. 

When you’re weight-training, do you approach acting similarly, treating scenes like goals to hit? In other words, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s approach to acting is like scenes being reps.

Every character requires a different approach. But I always start by finding a big-picture goal, an overall objective for the entire movie. Then I break each scene down into smaller objectives that build toward that larger goal. There’s no way for me to go for a scene objective without figuring out the big one first. It’s step by step. And so, in that sense, I guess Arnold and I have the same technique [Laughs]. 

[Laughs] What other questions did you have for James Gunn? How else did you want to help him tell Superman’s story? 

I know that when somebody writes a piece of dialogue, it’s there for a reason. Usually, actors — we are guilty of being so self-absorbed that we want to shine in a way we think is good for us, but maybe doesn’t serve the picture. I’m aware of not doing that, so that’s why I said earlier, “The Engineer — it’s not her story. She’s here to elevate Lex’s journey.” How can I do that in a way that – yes, helps me shine as an actress, because at the end of the day, I am an actor – but also help the filmmaker? If I help the filmmaker, the filmmaker is going to help me, and everything is going to be told in a way that’s great for the audience. We’ve all worked with actors that are not necessarily team players, and that’s painful. I’ve been guilty of that, for sure, in my career, but I never want to be that. 

Caption: (L to r) NICHOLAS HOULT as Lex Luthor, DAVID CORENSWET as Superman and Director JAMES GUNN in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jessica Miglio

Thousands of people are telling this story, given the scale of production. Any crew members you’d like to credit? 

The stunt team is so essential to our work. They make us look amazing when we can do the moves. More than that, they taught with patience and believed in me. They were so sure I was going to be able to do most of my stunts. The wire people — the riggers — the ones that make you fly, they became my safety net, alongside my stunt double, Angela. I’m afraid of heights and speed, and they knew it. When they were about to propel me forward fast and high, they were behind me, grabbing at my ankles, pumping me up: “You’ve got this, you’ve got this!”

 

For the baseball stadium set-piece, what did you and the stunt team want to accomplish with that fight? 

There are a couple of moves that took me months to accomplish, and I had real nightmares with those moves. There’s a slide where she is unconscious for a second, and then she sees Superman and Ultraman fighting above her, and she tracks them, and then she slides really fast and then does crazy shit. It was so difficult to accomplish that James’s wife, Jennifer, would ask, “Did you dream about this slide?” I did, because it’s so difficult. During that particular baseball fight, the riggers were there listening to Video Village and would be like, “They like it more every time. Don’t worry, you’re almost there.”

Maria Gabriela de Faría on the set of “Superman.” Courtesy Warner Bros.

How did you and David Corenswet tackle the challenge of those stunts together? 

There’s another slide where I’m on top of David, and we flip over, then keep sliding. We rehearsed separately at first, but when we did it together, it just wasn’t working because of our weight differences. David is huge – I was tiny. Whenever we flipped over, we would be flying to the sides. It didn’t work. I was frustrated and asked David, “What can I do to make this better for you?” He’s like, “Just let it wash over you. It’ll happen.” That’s the approach I took after. We overthink things, I’m type A and want to get it right away, but the body needs time. You’re not a machine. Let your body get used to the movement, and then it’ll happen. 

Was it satisfying when you saw that the editors didn’t cut the action to death? 

At the same time, the Fortress of Solitude fight, that’s two seconds [Laughs]. It took us months to rehearse and prep, and then I’m like, “It’s over? Sh*t.” You’re working on so many things. I’m splicing one of the robots, and to do that, I slice with my tail tucked in — because I’m Latina and my butt’s always sticking out — but my tail tucked in, that took me weeks, and it’s a fraction of a second [Laughs]. But it’s how it is. It has to look perfect, so it takes what it takes.

[Laughs] To conclude with Arnold — on the set of Conan the Barbarian — he mentioned pain, and [director] John Milius said, “Pain is momentary – film is eternal.” 

[Laughs] Oh my God, I watched that [Arnold] documentary a week before filming. It was inspiring. I’m like, “Yes, Arnold — that’s what I’m doing.” I was going through so much pain. I have tiny little scars from wearing the harness for so long, and those are f**king battle scars. I love them. I’m proud of them, because film is forever.

Featured image: Caption: (L to r) MARÍA GABRIELA DE FARÍA as The Engineer, SARA SAMPAIO as Eve and NICHOLAS HOULT as Lex Luthor in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

From Bismuth Crystal Rivers to Real Neon Signs: Supervising Art Director David Scott on Designing James Gunn’s “Superman”

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David Scott admits that growing up, he was more of a Batman and Spider-Man fan, but after listening to writer-director James Gunn’s pitch for Superman, which has now grossed over $550 million globally, he was excited to support the vision. “It’s infectious when you sit and listen to him talk. I loved everything about it,” says the supervising art director, who has built worlds for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Ad Astra, and Tron: Legacy.

Color and tone were flashpoint subjects for Gunn as he wanted to break away from Zack Snyder’s darker, moodier Man of Steel (2013) and paint his own vibrant vision.“Early on, they looked at a bit of a subtler, almost period look like JFK (1991). But as we tested and started playing around with the suit from our costume designer Judianna Makovsky, who is a master at what she does, it evolved,” says Scott. What helped inform the decision-making was bringing color swatches on scouts. “Judianna would lay out all the colors, faded blues, bright blues, reds, and everything in between. They took them up to Norway and looked at them in the snow, they took them to Cleveland and looked at them in the Hall of Justice…and it was just like, what’s the best color?”

Below, Scott discusses how palette influenced design, his creative tag-team with production designer Beth Mickle, the frosty magic behind Superman’s icy home planet, and what it took to cook up that crazy anti-proton river.

 

What did James Gunn express during those initial production meetings that helped to guide palette and tone? 

When we sat down with James, he likes to get everybody around the table and give his conceptual take on what he thinks about this whole thing. And nobody is a bigger Superman fan than him, so he had a great pitch. James wanted it to be like the comics, colorful and exciting. It’s about hope and the good in all of us. 

With those ideas in mind, what is the workflow between you and production designer Beth Mickle? 

Conceptually, Beth starts first, and I’m her second. We have a really good relationship and have done a number of shows together. It’s a bit of a back-and-forth thing between us. She starts and does a very high-level deep dive into the script for the big sets, the challenges, and the mood of the whole thing. We ask things like, is it going to be bright and colorful? Is it going to be primary colors? Is it going to be more subtle? And in this particular case, it really was about color because you want it to look like a comic book. 

DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

With a film of this size and budget, how did you and Beth divide and conquer? 

We kind of have different roles. She’s at the very top, and all designs run through her. And with the art department, the way it breaks down is you become an assistant art director, then an art director, and then a supervising art director, and oftentimes it can get less artistic as you go. So when you get to the top, it’s more budgets, timeline, scheduling, and build. The practical. But I do love that too! And we’re a sounding board for each other so we’re always sharing ideas. 

Caption: DAVID CORENSWET as Superman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.

What visual references went into making Fortress of Solitude? 

That was built at Trilith Studios in Atlanta on a 40,000 square foot stage that we filled to the brim. The original design is so iconic, but we asked ourselves, how do we make this better? So we wanted to do something different, but not too different, and Beth came up with the idea of it having more of an organic shape. It was driven by the idea that ice grows off itself. It’s not like everything grows at one time. Ice grows, and then melts, and then something new grows. She wanted to capture that frozen-in-time moment, so she explored the water crashing against rocks and how, when it hits, it creates these interesting sprays. We were picturing what that would look like if it actually froze in motion like that. 

Designing the Superman medallion. DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

So, how did that translate into the set build? 

We built the entire interior up to about 24 feet high, and then everything above that was all CG. But most everything down below that line was in camera. The crystals were made out of resin. And if you notice, looking back at the first film [Superman: The Movie, 1978], the ice crystals are solid white instead of looking like actual clear ice. That was the biggest challenge. It’s very easy to carve out Styrofoam and make these big crystals covered in snow. That’s the easy way out. But doing real translucency, where light can come through the crystals, was the biggest challenge. We experimented a lot to get to the point where we were happy. 

Caption: NICHOLAS HOULT as Lex Luthor in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

How did the team create the exterior world when Superman first crash-lands in the snow? 

They shot that whole sequence in Norway, and they actually dragged Superman in the snow by his cape up there. Beyond a few approach shots, we did a number of plates for Superman flying on location. We didn’t build anything practically in Norway. Stephane Ceretti was our visual effects supervisor, and he obviously pieced the whole sequence together between location and stage. We did build the giant Superman door on stage that they walk up to, which really moved. 

C Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
Copyright: © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

Playing in the background is a ton of graphic design and motion graphics. How did you want to stylize the new organizations of the Daily Planet, GBS News, and Sphere News?

The Daily Planet had been established, so we drew from what existed. But with GBS and Sphere, we had a more level playing field. Aesthetic wise, we wanted Sphere to kind of have an upscale look that was hip and more a cutting edge show that’s glossy and the lighting is great. The background has a big city view. And then GBS, we wanted it more straight-up news that was strictly reporting facts. 

Caption: RACHEL BROSNAHAN as Lois Lane and SKYLER GISONDO as Jimmy Olsen in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Photo by Jessica Miglio

What about the graphics in Lex Luthor’s control room as he fights Superman? 

Those happened with a company called Compuhire, which is a UK motion graphics company. They also worked on Guardians for us. We brought them on early to have an initial meeting with Beth and me to talk about all the needs. We knew we wouldn’t have everything 100% ready on day one, so we used generic graphics on screens for the background instead of a blue screen. This was because the fewer blue screens you have, the better it is for the budget. Then, for specific shots where the camera is looking at a screen, we have more detailed graphics that could also be replaced in post. 

Caption: (L to r) NICHOLAS HOULT as Lex Luthor and DAVID CORENSWET as Superman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jessica Miglio

Did the team want those Lex Luthor graphics to stand out differently from others in the film? 

The color palette in Lex’s world was all about green, with little hints of green marble and black. We were trying to work some purple in, which is what the comics are all about, but we ended up doing more of a limited palette. So we went with green and a brown and kind of a dirty orange look to those screens.  We also pulled back out of the futuristic look into a little more, subtler, timeless sense to it.

Another sequence sees Superman clash inside a baseball stadium that was filmed inside the Cleveland Guardians’ ballpark. How did you transform it into the Superman world? 

We didn’t want to see any real brands or real-world products. So the Meteors are the DC baseball team, and things like Coca-Cola became Soda Cola. Everything you see in the film is some Easter egg from the comic books. We had a digital archivist, P.J. Correa, who is as big a comic book fan as you can be, go through everything with our researcher, Samantha Avila, to build an inventory of things. Like, here’s an insurance company, a bank, here’s food companies, and drinks, all from the DC lore. We created a whole universe that doesn’t exist. James, early on, wanted everything to be from our own fictional metropolis world. 

(L to r) NICHOLAS HOULT as Lex Luthor, DAVID CORENSWET as Superman and Director JAMES GUNN in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jessica Miglio

So with the stadium, our team went there with our art coordinator, Molly Flick, who went through and figured out what we had to cover. Then with Beth, we figured out the budget of how much we could cover and ended up doing the first level of where the outfield stands were, and then everything above that was all in post.

In one climactic sequence, Superman is stuck in an anti-proton river and being sucked towards a giant black hole. This is all part of the Pocket Universe Lex Luthor created to imprison his enemies. What influenced the look? 

We spent countless illustrator hours working on developing different looks. We knew it needed to be otherworldly. We knew it needed to be a river. We knew it needed to have the prison. So we knew what the elements were, but what’s the aesthetic of the whole thing? So while Beth was doing the Fortress, both of us were driving the illustrators and coming up with wonderful solutions that any one of them would be great. In the end, the river was all based on a bismuth crystal. 

Caption: DAVID CORENSWET as Superman in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

While you were shooting in Ohio and Georgia, did you connect with local vendors to create artwork on the production? 

The fun part of the job is going out on location, and in Cleveland in particular, to work with the film community. So for one, we knew we wanted to make real neon signs, and because of how big they can be, it often makes more sense to do them on location. We ended up working with a historic sign-making company that is one of the few companies left in the city that does real neon. It was great to work with all these people who are excited about the project. And that was the best thing about Cleveland. They know that Superman was invented there, and they were excited to be included.  And all the credit goes to James and the producers. They made a genuine effort to engage the city and do everything right to honor the project. I think you can see the care everybody put into it. I certainly felt the heart of the whole thing when we finally saw it completed!

 

Superman is in theaters now.

Featured image: Caption: Nathan Fillion is Guy Gardener, Isabela Merced is Hawkgirl, and Rachel Brosnahan is Lois Lane. © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

How “The Pitt,” “Shrinking,” and “Paradise” Are Proving You Can Still Make Hit TV in Los Angeles

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Runaway production in California accelerated in recent years as films and TV shows took advantage of tax credits offered by other states and countries. Shut downs caused by Covid and strikes didn’t help matters, nor did the fires that raged through Los Angeles in January. To help reinvigorate Hollywood, the state of California in July passed a $750 million tax rebate program that rewards productions with cash incentives to stay in L.A. This is great news for the many, many filmmakers and TV creators who live in the state and want to work there.

Even without the expanded tax credits in place, prestige TV series this year have been leading by example: Emmy-nominated shows The Pitt, The Studio, Paradise, Abbott Elementary, and Shrinking are all filmed in Los Angeles County. The Credits spoke to key talents for three of these productions about how they create high-end television in Southern California while still earning a profit for their networks.

PARADISE – “Agent Billy Pace” – The citizens of Paradise celebrate at the annual carnival. Xavier and Billy delve deeper into their investigation. (Disney/Brian Roedel)
PERCY DAGGS IV, STERLING K. BROWN, ALIYAH MASTIN

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER JOHN HOBERG, PARADISE (nominated for four Emmys)

Hoberg previously wrote or produced series including American Housewife, Black-ish, and My Name Is Earl.

You came to Hollywood in the late nineties. How have you seen things change?

I remember when my wife and I co-wrote a show called Gallivant and went to England to shoot it in 2014 – that was a rare treat. Now I wish for the days when everyone stayed in L.A., and the lots were filled, and you’d go to the cafeteria and run into friends from other shows. Now, the downturn in the number of shows means a lot of my friends are between jobs or they’re going off to New York or Atlanta.

Paradise creator Dan Fogelberg and star Sterling K. Brown came from the hit series This Is Us, which presumably earned them enough clout to shoot in California, even though the story takes place in Washington, D.C., and the Rocky Mountains.

Dan’s crew from This Is Us had been together for five years, so that was important, Steve Beers, his producer, is an L.A. guy, shooting on the Paramount soundstage was important so I think Dan Fogelberg and Sterling K. Smith were like “We’re shooting this in L.A,” almost like “This is the price of the show.”

PARADISE – “The Day” – Sinatra and Xavier confront the past, returning to the harrowing day that brought them to Paradise. (Disney/Brian Roedel)
JAMES MARSDEN, STERLING K. BROWN

And then it becomes about making the numbers work?

There was a lot of discussion about how to do it on budget, and the more we looked around, the more we realized everything we needed was here. We had flashbacks for [Jon Beaver’s character] Billy Pace that take place in the Colorado mountains, and we shot that at Frazier Pass [in neighboring Ventura County]. Our location guy, Duffy Taylor, is an encyclopedia of Los Angeles locations, and he can find anything. The White House South Lawn is actually the Arboretum in Pasadena.

PARADISE – “The Day” – Sinatra and Xavier confront the past, returning to the harrowing day that brought them to Paradise. (Disney)
STERLING K. BROWN

It clearly helps to have a wealth of locations to choose from.

There are also people eager to get film money for locations, so there are lots of places that say, “Yes, please film here, we would love it.”

 

What was it like when you first started shooting Paradise in early 2024 on the Paramount lot?

When we did our first season at Paramount, the lot was feeling kind of empty. You’re supposed to feel the smell of pine wood being freshly cut because they’re building sets, you’re supposed to see the hustle and bustle of people in costumes wandering around everywhere, you want be stepping back so you don’t get hit by a rolling set. That’s what you want to see. Things are picking up now and we’re starting to hear a lot of hammers again, which is good.

LOCATION MANAGER DAVID FLANNERY, SHRINKING (nominated for 7 Emmys)

Flannery grew up in L.A.-adjacent Pasadena and previously managed locations for Based on a True Story and the Saved by the Bell reboot.

 

At a time when so many other projects go out of state, why was it essential to make Shrinking in Pasadena and Altadena?

Whether you know it or not, Pasadena has shown up in thousands of movies. It shows over the decades, particularly for its architecture — Arts and Crafts, Spanish, mid-century, and colonial. Not only that, but these communities have older growth trees and more space around the houses. But Shrinking is interesting because we don’t shy away from being here. When we film the bench scenes in Pasadena’s Central Park, where Harrison Ford and Jason Segel meet, we don’t have to change street signs to say “We’re in Indiana.” Our characters go to the Rose Bowl, and we show the sign. People have filmed at the Bowl so many times, but then they put in CGI to make it seem like you’re in Pittsburgh or New York or whatever. As someone who grew up here, it’s just freeing as a filmmaker to show off this part of the world. Locations don’t drive the story in Shrinking, but by setting the series in a very real place, it helps tell us who the characters are and what kind of world they live in.

Harrison Ford and Jason Segel in “Shrinking.” Courtesy Apple TV+

In some ways, Pasadena has this pleasant Anywhere U.S.A. quality, but Jason Segel’s character Jimmy spells out the specifics right at the start of the series.

In the pilot episode, Jimmy parks his car on the curb, and his Black friend Sean is like, ‘What are you doing?’ Jimmy tells Sean, “Don’t worry, I’m a white doctor in Pasadena; the cops will probably take it back to my house for me.”

You’re fortunate to be working on a hit show, but how have you seen the general slowdown affecting your fellow creatives?

I’m a Teamster. We have drivers, dispatchers, animal wranglers, casting – these are blue-collar jobs done by everyday, salt-of-the-earth people who save money, put it back into the economy, buy a house, and coach their kids’ softball games. So, for the hundreds of people who don’t get staffed on a show, they either have to travel somewhere else or ride it out. That’s been difficult.

 

As if Covid and strikes weren’t enough, the January wildfires devastated Altadena and parts of Pasadena, which means Shrinking now needs to contend with a new environment. How have you guys addressed the fires in terms of production?

Because so much filmmaking [for Shrinking] happened in Altadena and Pasadena, it’s been important for us to go into those communities that have been affected and make sure people there understand that we are partners in all this. I live in Pasadena, but I was displaced from my house due to the fire, so now I’m living in a temporary home in [nearby] Mount Washington. L.A. County and the City of Pasadena recognize that the rebuild effort will be closely tied to the success of filmmakers returning to the area.

Jason Segel in “Shrinking.” Courtesy Apple TV

CREATOR/SHOWRUNNER R. SCOTT GEMMILL, THE PITT (nominated for 13 Emmys)

Gemmill previously produced ER, JAG, and NCIS: Los Angeles.

Scott Gemill on the set of “The Pitt.” Courtesy HBO.

Because it’s essentially a single-location drama, The Pitt could have been produced in any state or country equipped with quality soundstages, but you chose to shoot in L.A. County on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. Why?

I think it’s important! When I was younger, Hollywood was the place you came to make movies and TV. Sadly, it’s not the epicenter it once was. This is the first show that Noah [Wylie]’s done since he left ER in 2005 that’s been shot in Los Angeles. Think about how long that’s been! He’s worked in Toronto, Vancouver, and Louisiana, which are great places, but I think this is where we do our best work. L.A. is also where we have our best craftspeople.

How do your relationships with the local crew affect the quality of the show?

Filming out of state, you’re hiring new crews, working with people you don’t know—nothing wrong with that—but on this show, there are a lot of people we’ve worked with in the past, so we have a shorthand and we work really fast. In a way, that translates into the nature of the show itself, which has a lot of kinetic energy.

How did you persuade HBO to keep production in L.A.?

From day one, we figured we would shoot it here, and there was never a battle because our show is very affordable in that it’s only one set. Since we don’t have to go out to shoot on location, we can offset a lot of costs that maybe would have been saved by going elsewhere [out of state].

Ned Brower, Patrick Ball, Noah Wyle, Tracy Ifeachor.

Noah Wylie, who lives in Los Angeles, must have been bullish on shooting locally?

Absolutely. We all were. We want people to come to work, go home, and spend time with their families. That’s not always the case [in states] where there may be a cost benefit, but there’s also a deficit in quality of life.

 

California recently passed a new tax credit program. Do you believe it will make a difference?

I think it’s a start. For California not to have had a good tax credit all these years seems incomprehensible. There’s a reason these other places became more popular, and in some ways, it was our fault. I don’t know if people took it for granted that the industry would always be here, but we’ve taken a beating, exacerbated by Covid and the strikes. Business has not completely bounced back by any means. I still know a lot of people who are not working and want to work, but the shows aren’t there right now.

You previously produced NCIS: Los Angeles, which included numerous exterior locations throughout the city. Now with The Pitt, it looks like nearly everything you need is within walking distance from your office.

That’s the Mill [creative compound] behind me [pointing back toward the window of his office]. I can just walk through the Mill and I’m on set, so I can visit The Pitt multiple times a day, or walk down the hall here, pop my head in the door and see my production designer, my set tech, my prop master, and have conversations that solve problems before they become a problem. When you don’t have that kind of immediacy, things can slip through the cracks. Being able to interact with your team in person and being physically close to production – that’s the best scenario.

When you have proximity to talent…

And other shows too. The Studio shoots on Warner Brothers as well, they’re [on the floor] right above us. The energy you get just from being on a movie studio lot where you see writers and actors and crew people – it’s a great environment.

Featured image: Isa Briones, Tracy Ifeachor, Noah Wyle. Photograph by Warrick Page/Max

 

Dave Bautista Poised to Play Iconic “Highlander” Villain Opposite Henry Cavill in Amazon MGM’s Remake

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Dave Bautista can play the heavy.

The talented actor is well-regarded for not only playing villains, however, although he’s been aces in roles where his brawn has been used to aid his brutish beliefs, specifically in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and Dune: Part Two. Yet Bautista’s been just as good playing more complicated brawlers, like he did in Villeneuve’s Blade Runner: 2049 and M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin. Yet for Amazon MGM’s upcoming Highlander remake, Bautista will use his considerable physical presence to play the raging immortal barbarian The Kurgen, a warrior who has been slaying other immortals across time and absorbing their essence. In the original film, the great Clancy Brown played the role.

Bautista will be pitted against Henry Cavill’s Medieval Scottish Highlander Connor MacLeod, another immortal warrior who learns about his abilities and has his skills honed by the swordsman Ramirez. In the original film, Christopher Lambert played MacLeod and Sean Connery played Ramirez. In the remake, Cavill is joined by Russell Crowe as Ramirez.

This isn’t Bautista’s first shot at playing The Kurgen—back in 2015, he was circling the role in a version that was to be directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan for Summit Entertainment. Now, Bautista will be battling Cavill in a film from John Wick veteran Chad Stahelski, based on a script by Michael Finch.

Bautista has worked with Amazon before—he starred in the action comedy My Spy and its sequel, and will be seen in the action comedy The Wrecking Crew with Jason Momoa. He’s also in talks to join Jake Gyllenhaal in Amazon’s Road House sequel.

Highlander is slated to begin filming at the end of September.

Featured image: Caption: DAVE BAUTISTA as “Beast” Rabban Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise

Robert Pattinson Returning to Gotham: “The Batman Part II” Confirmed for 2027

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Happy days are here again for fans of Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson’s The Batman, and we are legion.

The Batman Part II will begin filming early next year, with Reeves’ script for the sequel completed this past June. The goal is to get The Batman Part II into theaters on October 1, 2027. The news was revealed in a letter to shareholders on Thursday, and it included information about the upcoming DC Studios slate, both in and outside of Gotham.

Reeves and Pattinson’s original The Batman bowed in 2022 and was a critical and commercial hit, grossing over $770 million worldwide. It also spawned HBO’s Emmy-winning The Penguin, which continued the story of Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb that first began in The Batman. The series gobbled up 24 Emmy nominations.

Pattinson’s got a lot of meaty roles on the books right now—he re-teamed with Christopher Nolan, after co-starring in Tenet, for Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, and he’ll be a major part of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Messiah. Yet for fans of Pattinson’s portrayal of Bruce Wayne, they’ve been waiting—not altogether patiently—for official confirmation that The Batman sequel was in the works, and now, three years after Pattinson’s last swing through Gotham, they’ve got it.

Caption: (L-r) ZOË KRAVITZ as Selina Kyle and ROBERT PATTINSON as Batman and in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley/™ & © DC Comics
Caption: (L-r) ZOË KRAVITZ as Selina Kyle and ROBERT PATTINSON as Batman and in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley/™ & © DC Comics

As for those DC Studios projects set outside of Gotham, the shareholder letter confirmed that Superman writer/director and co-chief of DC Studios, James Gunn, is working on Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (2026), Clayface (2026), and the next Wonder Woman. Gunn and DC are currently flying high after Superman wowed audiences and critics alike.

And Gunn has been a vocal supporter of Reeves when frustrated fans protested the gap between The Batman and the pending sequel. As Gunn reminded them on social media, sequels often take a long time to write when you want to get them right.

“To be fair, a 5-year gap or more is fairly common in sequels,” Gunn wrote online. “7 years between Alien and Aliens. 14 years between Incredibles. 7 years between the first two Terminators. 13 years between Avatars. 36 years between Top Guns. And, of course, 6 years between Guardians Vol 2 and Vol 3.”

Caption: (L-r) ROBERT PATTINSON and director MATT REEVES and on the set in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley/™ & © DC Comics
Caption: (L-r) ROBERT PATTINSON and director MATT REEVES and on the set in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley/™ & © DC Comics

Gunn went on:

“Let the guy write the screenplay in the amount of time he needs to write it. That’s just the way it is. He doesn’t owe you something because you like his movie. I mean, you like his movie because of Matt. So let Matt do things the way he does.”

Amen.

Featured image: Caption: ROBERT PATTINSON as Batman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “THE BATMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jonathan Olley/™ & © DC Comics

Composing Chaos: How Amie Doherty Scored Disney’s Four-Way Body Swap in “Freakier Friday”

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There are already two generations of hardcore fans who love Freaky Friday. Gen-Xers and their parents flocked to see Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster for the 1976 release, and in 2003, Disney struck gold again with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan playing the body-switching mother/daughter duo, bringing millennials into the fandom fold. More than 30 years later, those Gen-X grandparents and Millennial moms and dads are poised to make fans of the youngest among us with a long-awaited sequel to the 2003 film, Freakier Friday. 

The movie features returning stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, and features a number of other cast members from 2003 reprising their roles. Director Nisha Ganatra helms a story in which not only mother and daughter switch bodies, but the grandkids do, too, making it a four-way swap. Of course, mayhem, misidentification, and misadventures ensue. 

Ganatra is known for incorporating a lot of music into her films (see The High Note), and Freakier Friday is no exception. There are 29 songs spanning a variety of genres on the soundtrack, and the movie includes an appearance by the band Pink Slip playing their song “Take Me Away,” made famous in the 2003 film. It was composer Amie Doherty’s job to weave all those musical styles and genres together in a cohesive way, while amplifying the film’s heart and emotional center in the Freakier Friday score. Doherty spoke to The Credits about how the music she created took shape and how she brought Nisha Ganatra’s vision to musical life. 

 

How did you get connected with Nisha Ganatra? 

It was through the film music team at Universal. I had done the Universal Scoring Program and scored Spirit Untamed. I worked with them on that, and then a few months after Spirit finished, her film The High Note came up, and they needed a composer for a quick turnaround. They thought of me, and that’s the thing about the Universal Composers Initiative. It’s just so supportive. They aren’t doing something performative with it, or just trying to look good to the outside, they are genuinely wanting to support women and people of color and people with diverse backgrounds. They put their money where their mouths are. Every person who has been part of the program has been hired by Universal. 

Amie Doherty at Abbey Road. Courtesy Walt Disney Studios.

And they introduced you to Nisha? 

Yes, they said they’d love for Nisha to meet with me, and then the following day, she asked me to score the movie. We just had a great time working together, and really connected as creators. After that, I scored a short film for her called Rise that premiered at Sundance in 2023. It was another amazing project supporting women, a short documentary. When it came time to do Freakier Friday, she just called me out of the blue last March. I didn’t even know what the project was. She just said, “Hey, I have this new film at Disney, and I told them we’d definitely need you on the project.” I told her I was ten toes in, not even knowing the project. I hung up the phone and realized I didn’t even ask what it was. I texted her and asked, she told me it was Freakier Friday, and I was floored. It was a film I watched a lot when I was a kid, so that just made it incredibly exciting from day one. 

Jamie Lee Curtis, Sophia Hammons, Nisha Ganatra and Lindsay Lohan on the set of Disney’s FREAKIER FRIDAY. Photo by Andrew Eccles. © 2025 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

What was your approach? 

It was so much fun, but the thing about this movie, much like The High Note, is it’s very song-heavy. With Freakier Friday in particular, I think 29 tracks on the soundtrack aren’t score. There’s everything on there from The Spice Girls to Chappell Roan, some really nostalgic pieces mixed with very modern pieces. Trying to figure out the score and how to blend that all together to create a cohesive world was part of my job, as well as to convey the emotion. The songs are used to bring a lot of energy, and to give the movie that nostalgic vibe in some places, and modern in others, to establish and reference the older two characters and the younger two in this movie, so the score was there to help with the emotional beats, first and foremost. 

 

How did you collaborate with Nisha and her team in creating this score?

I initially went and worked on my own because I came in so early. I got the script and the dailies, and they started sending me early edits. We had decided to focus on the bonding theme, this family theme, as the main one for the film. I went away and worked on that, and sent it back to Nisha. We tried it against a few scenes and worked on it back and forth. It was amazing to have that time, which was not something I had on The High Note, on which I had a total of six weeks. On Freakier Friday, I had months. It was so nice to have that time to play with ideas and get feedback, and give Nisha and her team time to get used to it and see how they felt about it. Once we had the themes, it was just a matter of me going through and scoring every single scene, but always based on the emotion of the moment. 

(L-R) Lindsay Lohan as Anna Coleman and Jamie Lee Curtis as Tess Coleman in Disney’s FREAKIER FRIDAY. Photo by Glen Wilson. © 2025 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

What was a particularly fun cue to work on? 

There are scenes with Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer), the psychic in the film, and she’s absolutely hilarious. Nisha wanted to make sure she had a unique musical vibe. We played around with a lot of kooky, off-the-wall ideas until we landed on something that fit the character perfectly. I think there was a suggestion from Nisha and the editor Eleanor Infante that we’d use some bagpipes for a finish. Originally, I had done some world instruments, then they thought it would be fun to lean into her Scottish heritage. I also added some whale and dolphin noises, if you listen carefully, because it’s subtle.  

Lindsay Lohan as Anna Coleman in Disney’s FREAKIER FRIDAY. Photo by Glen Wilson. © 2025 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

And there’s quite a wide range of sounds and genres within your score as well. 

In terms of palette, we definitely pulled some ideas from the songs, like there are some punk rock elements that touch on Lindsay Lohan’s band in the first film, so I wanted to play with that a bit. We also have orchestral themes and recorded with a beautiful string orchestra here in LA. I have some modern beat electronic stuff in there, as well. It’s a mishmash, but the idea was to tie it all together and make one cohesive, unified whole.

 

It’s always wonderful to have live instruments in the score, which is not as common as it used to be.

Yeah, we used just strings on this one, which we recorded at Warner Brothers with a 40-piece string section. We did it with just one day of recording, and to Disney’s credit, they made sure it happened, because it’s a Disney movie, so they wanted that beautiful, polished Disney warmth. You really need strings to do that. They were committed to it, so we had some of the best players in the world. 

How did this project stretch you as an artist? 

On Freakier Friday, I had to step out of my comfort zone to incorporate modern synth elements into the score, mixing them with traditional string sounds. That definitely stretched me, but I’m really loving working that way, trying new things. I love the energy of it.  

Freakier Friday is in theaters on August 8 nationwide.

Featured image: (L-R) Julia Butters as Harper Coleman, Lindsay Lohan as Anna Coleman, Jamie Lee Curtis as Tess Coleman and Sophia Hammons as Lily Davies in Disney’s FREAKIER FRIDAY. Photo by Glen Wilson. © 2025 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

“Superman” Composer John Murphy on Electrifying John Williams’ Iconic Score

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John Murphy is a composer known for scoring films with dark undertones, whether they’re kinetic and terrifying or haunting and ethereal. To this day, his theme for Danny Boyle’s electric 2002 gamechanger, 28 Days Later, remains a deservedly beloved earworm, while his music for Boyle’s bittersweet 2007 sci-fi stunner, Sunshine, is at turns heartbreaking and inspiring. Now, he’s scored one of pop culture’s sunniest, noblest characters (Zack Snyder’s darker take notwithstanding), Superman, whom he brings to the screen with strings of bravura and romance.

Superman is not Murphy’s first collaboration with writer/director James Gunn; the two teamed up for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and The Suicide Squad. Gunn isn’t shy about letting music tell his stories, allowing Murphy’s score to soar and riff, which included playing John Williams’ iconic Superman theme on an electric guitar. The composer brings elegance and playfulness to Superman’s (played by David Corenswet) journey, whether he’s saving Boravia or Metropolis from Lex Luthor’s (Nicolas Hoult) machinations, while fighting to maintain his identity and protect his love for reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan).

Murphy scored pieces of music before seeing a single frame of the film. When Gunn shot scenes, he played the composer’s music. For Murphy, who co-composed with David Fleming, it was a process that sometimes made him forget he was scoring a movie as gigantic as Superman. “The story is everything,” Murphy told The Credits. “We’re not scoring to picture. We’re scoring a story. That’s what we do.” 

 

What was that first experience like of playing the John Williams theme? What was your ambition in tackling a classic? 

It’s funny, there was no grand idea of, oh, wouldn’t it be awesome to put this iconic theme on guitar? I was just playing around with it. I kind of played it in that bombastic, Hendrix Star-Spangled Banner style for fun. After playing that, I thought, God, could I get away with this? Am I going to go to Composer Hell here for daring to put such a beautiful, iconic theme on guitar? So I did a version of it with [musician] Tyler Barton, and we sent it to James, and it ends up being the first sound you hear on the first trailer, which I wasn’t expecting. The thing with this movie is that it goes back to that pure sense of wonder, so there was always a feeling that we would have some fun and keep that sense of wonder. Ideas like playing the John Williams theme on electric guitar — we wouldn’t have gotten away with that on a certain type of movie. With this movie, we thought, let’s try it and see.

The score in general is often quite gentle for a superhero movie. The track “The Real Punk Rock” is a good example of that, when Superman explains what’s truly punk rock to him. How’d his monologue inspire your score? 

One of the first of the original themes I wrote was the love theme. I don’t panic, but I always go, God, I’ve got to write a love theme. I tend to err toward the darker side of the story in a movie, or toward darker movies overall. I don’t get up in the morning and listen to love themes, let’s be honest. So, I wrote two themes for James. One was this big epic, golden-era, Max Steiner–type love theme. I was quite proud of myself for digging that one out, but I thought I should do something a bit more modern and minimal. So, I did the one that ended up in the movie, which was a gentle, filtered guitar. The idea was that it was going to be kind of like a Sigur Rós, Mogwai–type thing.

What’d you think when James chose to go with the more gentle track than the grand, Max Steiner–type epic track for that scene? 

I was sure he was going to go for the big orchestral romance, but when I saw the movie for the first time, it all made sense. At the beginning of their relationship, it’s not grand. The movie starts right as they start dating, so they’re awkward with each other, not sure how they feel about each other. And so, it made sense why James went for the more minimal one. It was a motif that could grow. By the time you hit the conclusion of that theme, and the scene toward the end where they’re floating, then it becomes grand and makes sense then.

How’d Lex Luthor on the page influence your theme for him? The scratchy guitar for him contrasts so well with Superman’s elegance. 

The minute you establish something — the way the guitar became the Hendrix Star-Spangled Banner–type, John Williams motif — then your next thought is, well, how can I contrast that? What would be the way to battle with that in certain moments? It’s having that dirty, kind of Pablo Honey–type guitar, which is kind of nasty, relentless, and grimy. For Luthor, that was a perfect foil. My daughter, Molly Murphy, actually co-wrote the “LuthorCorp” theme.

On the flipside, the track “Metropolis” — that’s Superman and the city together, as one. How did you want that track to tell the character and location’s story?

That started off as one of the first conversations with James, who had it in his head to explore the possibility of using the original John Williams theme. I’m not sure he knew how I would react to that, because normally, as a composer, you’re like, “Why do you need somebody else’s theme? I’ll write it.” But because of what it is, I was like, “Whoa, that would be amazing, if we can find our own sound for that.” But that guitar thing at the end in “Metropolis” was actually part of a longer version that was me messing with the original John Williams theme. That section never got used at that moment. In the end, it was just my vision, and Dave [Fleming] added all the beautiful strings and changed some chords. So, that was a proper collaboration between me and Dave.

How else did the track evolve?

It was originally my way of trying to see if I could do a Radiohead–type acoustic version of the John Williams theme. It never went into that section, but it’s cool. One of the reasons I love using the acoustic guitar in films is that it’s one of the most grounded instruments. You have all this cinematic noise — bangs, crashes, and pyrotechnics of the orchestras and choirs — but the minute you come down to someone strumming an acoustic guitar, it brings you emotionally close. It gave us the feeling that everything had returned to some semblance of normalcy. What Dave added with the strings gave it that sense of finality as well, that this chapter of the story is closing now.

What about John Williams, the craftsman and technician, influenced you while scoring Superman? 

Nobody comes close when it comes to articulating his themes and how they develop. It’s almost pure math. It’s so perfectly executed. If there’s a film that’s got one of John’s scores, I always — no matter what movie it is — if it’s on TV, I’ll stop and listen. A master craftsman. How he can take a motif and effortlessly drag it out into another emotion — it’s almost the way when you listen to Bach, and you just almost get that sense of divine-like effortlessness. You don’t get that with Mozart or Beethoven so much, or I don’t. But with Bach, you get that sense of this is just effortless, and it’s how it’s meant to be.

You pay good respect to the original Superman theme. You won’t be going to composer hell, as you feared. 

What was funny was that I did everything I could to kind of destroy that motif. I thought, well, where does it break apart? I put it in minor key, and it was awesome. And then I slowed it down. I did a doom version. I did a punk version. No matter what I did to it, no matter what I played it on, how much I slowed it down, what chords I put underneath it — it was still the Superman theme. My God, it’s the most bulletproof motif ever written. Genius in simplicity. Whatever you do to that motif, the fact that it still feels like the Superman theme is mind-blowing.

Featured image: DAVID CORENSWET as Superman and RACHEL BROSNAHAN as Lois Lane in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

“House of the Dragon” Star Matt Smith Lands Villain Role Opposite Ryan Gosling in “Star Wars: Starfighter”

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Matt Smith is going from Westeros to a galaxy far, far away.

The House of the Dragon star is joining Shawn Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter in a villain role. He’ll be sparring with Ryan Gosling, the film’s star, and Mia Goth, whose casting was announced this past June. Smith isn’t exactly new to the Star Wars franchise, however—he was considered to appear in J.J. Abrams’ 2019 trilogy capper Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. While Smith didn’t get to make his Star Wars debut there, one imagines he’ll have an even meatier role here in Levy’s stand-alone film.

Smith’s villain will be one of several, The Hollywood Reporter scoops, with casting now moving into high gear. The details on the film’s plot are still being kept in carbonite, but the initial news about the project first broke at the Star Wars Celebration in Tokyo this past April, and along with it, some key details. Starfighter is set five years after the events in Abrams’ The Rise of Skywalker, which had been billed, at the time, as the end of the Skywalker Saga that first began with George Lucas’s 1977 Star Wars IV: A New Hope, although a new Star Wars film starring Daisy Ridley is in the works. Star Wars: Starfighter has set a May 28, 2027, release date.

“There are many rumors, some true, some not. This is not a prequel. This is not a sequel. It’s a new adventure,” Gosling said at the Tokyo event. “It was a great process. This is no longer a Star Wars movie in development. This is a Star Wars movie we’re making this fall! This script is so good. It’s filled with so much heart and adventure, and there just really is not a more perfect filmmaker for this particular story than Shawn.”

Smith has been one of the marquee stars in Ryan Condal’s Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon. He’ll next appear in Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, starring opposite Austin Butler, as well as the limited series The Death of Bunny Munro.

“Being here and seeing all of you [makes it] more inspiring to do it,” Gosling said during the Star Wars Celebration. “There’s so much creativity and imagination in this room, and there’s so much love. It’s such a great reminder of how much movies can mean to us, specifically how much these movies mean to us. The force is a mysterious thing, but, as I’m here, the force is the fans. All we can hope for is, ‘May the fans be with us.’”

Gosling and Smith have a potent third cast member among them in Mia Goth, who has two massive movies on the horizon–she’ll next be seen in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, playing Victor Frankenstein’s (Oscar Isaac) fiancé, Elisabeth, and after that, she’ll appear in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in an undisclosed role.

Featured image: Matt Smith in “House of the Dragon.” Courtesy HBO.

How Director Nisha Ganatra Captured the Real Magic of LA for Lindsay Lohan & Jamie Lee Curtis in “Freakier Friday”

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Freakier Friday director Nisha Ganatra is no stranger to showcasing Los Angeles in her work for both the big and small screen. Having helmed episodes of such iconic shows as Transparent, Welcome to Chippendales, and the 2020 feature The High Note, she has a knack for capturing the many faces of the city that is home to Hollywood.

This legacy sequel to the 2003 Disney classic Freaky Friday sees Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan reunite as mother-daughter duo Tess and Anna. Once again set in LA, 22 years after their initial body swap, Lohan’s Anna now has a daughter and is about to add a stepdaughter. As two families merge, something supernaturally familiar happens to the young women, and chaos and hilarity ensue.

Here, Ganatra explains why Freakier Friday needed to film in LA, the impact of the wildfires, and how they used particular lenses to capture the aesthetic of iconic teen movies.

Freakier Friday is set in and around LA and was filmed there. Why was that vital for you?

It was so important because it is an LA story. We got permission to shoot in LA, which is amazing, but it is a love letter to the city. LA is such a beautiful place, and I have never seen certain parts of it captured on film. We all see the car commercial with the ocean, or certain aspects of LA like the Beverly Hills palm trees, but it’s one of the only cities that I’ve lived in that has a mountain range running right through the middle of it. It’s beautiful. It has so much diversity, both in the people and places. It is urban versus nature. It was incredible to explore the city, but it then became a sad reality, as much of what we captured has disappeared due to the fires. I’m glad we got to film in Altadena, Pacific Palisades, and Malibu, but it’s heartbreaking that so much of that is gone.

(L-R) Mark Harmon as Ryan and Jamie Lee Curtis as Tess Coleman in Disney’s FREAKIER FRIDAY. Photo by Glen Wilson. © 2025 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

How much of what we see in the movie is no longer there?

Unfortunately, a lot of things. The pickleball court was at the Altadena Town and Country Club. The house itself, the Coleman house, is gone. All around the beaches, those shots of driving through Pacific Palisades, all of those neighborhoods are gone. They were devastated. Jamie did a really beautiful 60 Minutes segment about it, showed where the devastation was, and how we had it captured in the film. It has been heartbreaking.

You have shot a lot of TV shows and films in LA. As a city on film, LA is a character in its own right. How do you find the right version of her for each project?

That is so beautifully put. LA is her own character, and there are so many versions of LA, but I think for this movie, the right version was all of her. It was about showcasing the beauty, nature, from Downtown to the beaches. Whenever anybody in the movie has an emotional moment where they are reckoning with something, I wanted them to go to nature, so it was a lot of sitting on the beach, getting in the water, and also tumbling around, figuring out where you are in life and what’s going on with it. If you’ve grown up in LA, you’ve had moments where the waves have taken you, and you think, ‘This is it.’ Right when you think it’s over, it throws you to the top, and you get a breath of air, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’ve got another chance to do this.’ This movie is like that tumbling. The camera tumbles when it’s coming away from Jamie, Lindsay, and the girls as they switch places, and it tumbles in the waves with them. The idea of switching and moving through life in a circle is one of the visual themes.

Jamie Lee Curtis, Sophia Hammons, Nisha Ganatra and Lindsay Lohan on the set of Disney’s FREAKIER FRIDAY. Photo by Andrew Eccles. © 2025 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The visual tropes of LA, such as the Hollywood sign and places like the Hollywood Bowl, are given lip service, but you lean into locations that are iconic to LA locals. How and why did you pick those?

The Record Parlour on Selma Avenue is a great example. We did put a coffee shop in it because that’s my fantasy record store. I love that record store so much; all they’re missing is some coffee, so we can hang out and listen to stuff. It was a case of asking, ‘How do we find a cool place where Jake would work?’ I adore Amoeba Music in Hollywood too, but it is gigantic, whereas The Record Parlour is cool and intimate. We pretended it was Downtown, so apologies for that. It was inspired by the first film, when they did the 18th Street Coffee Shop. They shot that whole movie on the Westside, and I think in proximity to Jamie Lee Curtis’s house, but for this one, she was game to travel a little bit. Because of that, we went and found all the LA spots where everybody loves hanging out, and that you usually don’t get to see a movie. It was pretty inspiring.

(L-R) Lindsay Lohan as Anna Coleman and Chad Michael Murray as Jake in Disney’s FREAKIER FRIDAY. Photo by Glen Wilson. © 2025 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

There was also a lot of filming in Koreatown, notably at The Line LA hotel, where the engagement party is held, and Eric’s restaurant. You renamed their rooftop restaurant, Openaire. Were most locations good to go or do you need to do much set building?

When it comes to the sets themselves, you spend a lot of time picking them carefully. The Line LA is a very music-centric hotel. Whenever you have to meet with someone in the music industry who wants to have a career in acting, that meeting, for me, has always been at The Line LA. Break Room 86 is also there, but it was the hardest location to find and took the longest. We were asking, ‘Where would Anna have her bachelorette party? What has enough magical elements to it that a switch would happen there?’ We found that near the end.

(L-R) Lindsay Lohan as Anna Coleman and Jamie Lee Curtis as Tess Coleman in Disney’s FREAKIER FRIDAY. Photo by Glen Wilson. © 2025 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Many crew members and creatives in LA have been out of work. Did you have the pick of the crop?

It sounds awful to think, ‘How did it benefit me?’ but it did. The thing you get in LA and New York that you don’t get elsewhere is that the talent lives here. It’s a lot easier to say, ‘Will you come play with us for a day?’ when it is somebody who is driving from home, and they get to go home at the end of the day. There are so many people here, so many artists in the city. We got the best crew. It benefited us in terms of light and the beauty of LA, and how we could capture that. It also helped in terms of the music. We have a full concert in the movie, and we have the best band, technicians, and lighting crews at The Wiltern. It’s an incredible venue. The locations and the look added to the authenticity of this being an LA story. We also got to film in real recording studios that bands have been in. Everything about it feels more real.

You touched on the light in LA. The palette and the color of Freakier Friday feel very contemporary but also very similar to the original movie.

A lot of that is the natural California light, but Ferris Bueller’s Day Off informed the lensing we picked, and a lot of the films from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. We even went with the 1.85:1 aspect ratio because I wanted it to feel like the classic studio films that we grew up with. There’s a little more grain in the lenses, so you feel like it’s new and nostalgic all at the same time. I hope it’s not super obvious to audiences, but just a feeling you get.

(L-R) Lindsay Lohan as Anna Coleman and Jamie Lee Curtis as Tess Coleman in Disney’s live-action FREAKIER FRIDAY. Photo courtesy of Disney. © 2025 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.


Freakier Friday is in theaters now 2025.

Featured image: (L-R) Jamie Lee Curtis, Nisha Ganatra and Lindsay Lohan behind the scenes of Disney’s FREAKIER FRIDAY. Photo by Glen Wilson. © 2025 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Director Gareth Edwards on Why “Jurassic World: Rebirth” Needed Real Locations & Film Stock to Capture Its Magic

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Having already directed Godzilla, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and The Creator, Gareth Edwards is used to fantastical storytelling on an epic scale, as well as handling some of the biggest and best-loved IPs in the history of cinema.

Jurassic World: Rebirth, the seventh installment in the multibillion-dollar Jurassic film franchise, is one of the year’s biggest box office hits both globally and domestically. Taking place five years after Jurassic World: Dominion, Rebirth follows an expedition into a no-go zone to extract DNA from three prehistoric creatures in an attempt to create a groundbreaking medical breakthrough. Rebirth‘s lead cast boasts two-time Oscar nominee Scarlett Johansson, Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali, and Wicked‘s Jonathan Bailey.

Here, Edwards explains to The Credits why he chose to shoot on film, why he loved filming on location in New York, and Jurassic World: Rebirth‘s box office success.

 

There are no guarantees at the box office these days, even for massive IPs, but this has done really well. How do you feel about that?

I personally feel like I can take zero credit for it because it’s down to the world’s love of dinosaurs and the Jurassic films. I’m relieved we made a film that we’re proud of. It’s out into the world now and belongs to everyone else. It was surreal. You spend a year trying to ignore the fact that it’s going to go out into the world because it’s too much pressure on yourself. We pretended to be working on a passion project, a little movie we all wanted to see. I convinced myself it was this mini film that we were all making from an office in London’s Soho. One day, I went home, and it was 11 pm. I was typing an email or responding to the visual effects guys about something, and I heard the movie playing from next door to where I lived. I was like, ‘How come my neighbors are playing our movie?’ I got worried that it was somehow streaming it to their TV. When I went out into the corridor, I found a trailer on loop on the TV, as it was being shown at a basketball match in America. That was the moment when I went, ‘Oh my God. Everyone is going to see this.’ Relief is probably the easiest word to describe how it feels. Honestly, the Jurassic IP is always going to have this sort of response. It’s very primal to be pulled into an adventure. As mammals, for millions of years, we have been trying to avoid being eaten and killed by bigger creatures. In our modern society, we’ve pushed that nature away and forgotten about it, yet it’s still right there within us. The moment it starts happening in a film like this, it feels so correct, even if it seems absurd as a science fiction premise.

Mosasaurus in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

We start the movie in New York. You shot those scenes in the city. How was that?

I wasn’t sure if we were going to be able to, but we kept pushing to film in New York. Suddenly, we were allowed to find this great spot right under the Brooklyn Bridge, and they were willing to close off the roads and everything. What was super interesting was that you inherit a New York crew and cast in a way, so when you go shoot somewhere like that, you have to land running. We shot there for two days, and there was no time to get up to speed. It was amazing how the background artists, all the people on that street walking around, were all actors, but they were so perfect. I couldn’t tell who was a tourist who walked into the shot, and who was a background artist. It is then that you realize, ‘It’s because there have been so many movies and TV shows shot in New York, they’ve done it a billion times.’ They are just so good at looking naturalistic and repeating themselves. It’s a small thing to pick up on, but as a director, I appreciate that. Often, when you’re working with background people, you spend a lot of time trying to make it feel natural, and they’ve got it down without even a conversation. I feel like people aren’t going to real locations enough. I wanted this movie to be shot in real environments, not against a green or blue screen. Thankfully, the studio and producers all supported that.

Director Gareth Edwards (center) on the set of JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH

You also shot in the UK, Thailand, and other places that you have shot in before. All of them have great local crews. Did you find yourself reusing people you’d worked with before?

I made a film called The Creator, which was shot in Thailand, and some of the crew members came back. A lot of them weren’t able to. There’s this TV show called The White Lotus? You might have heard of it. Some of them were busy with that, but we still had an amazing crew. We also shot in Malta, which is where they had shot Gladiator II just before we got there. I knew all the locations we were shooting in Thailand because we had previously shot in similar places or scouted them for The Creator. It’s paradise, with a crew that’s not only friendly but also incredibly hardworking. They’re also fun to be around. They share a similar sarcastic sense of humor to Brits, so you can joke around during takes. I hope that now that I have made two movies in Thailand, I can maybe get an honorary visa or passport, and I can make more films here because it’s a really lovely place to be.

You shot Jurassic World: Rebirth on film. Did the environment create issues?

What my DOP, John Mathieson, kept saying was that you can drop a Panavision camera into the water, grab it, and pull it out, and everything will be fine. You can’t do that with a digital camera, because we’re shooting about a third of the movie on the ocean or in water, which ended up being one of the reasons why film was probably an advantage. I wanted it to have the aesthetic of movies I grew up loving. Even when shooting digitally, I’m trying to capture that Kodak film stock feel. Shooting on Kodak was a dream come true, and it gives us a straight-out-of-the-can look. There was a lot of pressure not to do it. It makes life harder. We were shooting in places where we wouldn’t see what we filmed for four days, so we had to wait to find out if we got it right. Luckily, there were no problems. We didn’t have a single technical issue, and we didn’t have to reshoot anything. I would definitely do it again. If you make a small indie movie with a digital camera and then switch to a film camera, the crew size is going to explode. When you’re making one of these big Hollywood blockbusters and you have a crew this big, you replace the digital camera with a film camera. This was my chance to use film, and I fell in love with it. If I ever do a movie like this again, I’ll definitely shoot it on film.

Many references to the original Jurassic movies, as well as other films like The Goonies and E.T., revolve around colors such as reds, yellows, blues, and greens. Does shooting on film help authenticate that aesthetic?

Absolutely. When people do period films set in the 60s, they often dress all the background artists and use sets with pastel colors that feel very coordinated. You think, ‘Oh, that’s strange that everyone phoned each other before they left for the office that day and checked that they were going to wear the same thing in the middle of the street?’ Then you realize none of that happened. They had just as loud, crazy clothes as we have today, but Kodak changed those colors and made them into a beautiful palette. That’s what those film stocks always did. They remove colors that fight with those other colors or dampen them. It’s really interesting once you get into it. It’s an arms race with digital cameras to get more pixels, more resolution, more reality, but film isn’t trying to be like reality. It’s trying to be better than reality, more dreamy and beautiful, and that’s what storytelling is as well. What happens in real life is very boring, and so you’re trying to do realism meets beauty, and look like you got really lucky that both arrived in your movie. Film does that without anyone doing a thing; it just comes straight out looking like that.

L to R: , Xavier Dobbs (David Iacono), Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

Jurassic World: Rebirth arrives on digital on August 5 2025 and is also currently in theaters.

Featured image: Scarlett Johansson as skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

Crystal Vision: How “Superman” Production Designer Beth Mickle Built the Fortress of Solitude

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Director James Gunn started small with his 2010 micro-budgeted indie film Super, followed by his acclaimed Guardians of the Galaxy films for Marvel. Now, he’s made a crowd-pleasing new version of Superman that’s raked in more than half a billion in global box office since its release earlier this summer. DC Comics’ original superhero returns in a big way, as Gunn’s universe-corraling reboot pits the title character (David Corenswet), the brilliant and always game Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and the Justice Gang of metahumans against Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) and his war-mongering schemes, which includes a few super-powered thugs, one of whom, Ultraman, proves especially, brutally efficient at taking on Superman.

The action unfolds against an array of spectacle-scaled backdrops configured by Gunn’s go-to production designer, Beth Mickle. Like Gunn, Mickle segued from indie films into epic-scale movies when her Half Nelson directors, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, enlisted her to design Captain Marvel. She then worked with Gunn on Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 before taking on his big-budget reboot in the first feature to fly out of DC Studios since Gunn and his co-chief Peter Safran took over the studio.

Speaking from her home in upstate New York, Mickle talked about building superhero environments from fake crystals, turning downtown Cleveland into Metropolis, retrofitting Art Deco train stations, and the dark design behind Lex Luthor’s creeptastic Pocket Universe.

Beth Mickle on the set of “Superman.” © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

Superman opens on this vast snowscape in the middle of nowhere. It’s very cinematic. How did you find that location?

Initially, we thought Iceland would be a good fit, but when our start dates shifted and the seasons changed, those glaciers wouldn’t have been accessible. Then we did Google Earth scouting and considered British Columbia and New Zealand, but ultimately, Norway came onto our radar as a place that Mission: Impossible had explored. Svalbard is the northernmost point in the world where civilization still exists, because there’s a tiny little mining town there. We did a helicopter scout, and it was just magical, seeing this frozen landscape, no vegetation, the sun setting perpetually. And this big open plain was just a five-minute drive from our hotel. Incredible.

Cut to Krypto the dog dragging Superman across the snow to the secret bunker known by superhero nerds through the ages as the Fortress of Solitude. Where did you build Superman’s hideaway?

We built it at Trilith Studios in Georgia, a half hour south of Atlanta, on a sprawling 40,000 square foot soundstage that we filled wall to wall with every piece of ice and stone we could get in.

Designing the Fortress of Solitude at Trilith Studio in Georgia. © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

How did you come up with the crystal design?

We loved Richard Donner’s 1978 iteration and the old comics where the fortress was originally inside a mountain, so we did a deep dive into how crystals grow from rocks. Once we found examples of formations that had the right translucency, the right color tint, and the right overall shape, we wanted the crystals to seemingly explode upward from the rocks to give them a propulsive feel. We sculpted them out of resin, made molds from that, and suspended fiberglass strands in the resin to give each one texture and occlusions so they look more natural. After we got that first crystal done, we made 242 more of them.

Beth Mickle inspecting the crystal designs. © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC
Crystal fabrication. © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC
The finished set. © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

How did you approach designing the world of Superman’s day job as Clark Kent, alongside Lois Lane, at The Daily Planet office?

We wanted The Daily Planet newsroom to feel a bit timeless and not overly modern, which is true for everything you see in Metropolis. We filmed inside this gorgeous train station south of Atlanta. It’s now an event space, so we rented that out, retrofitted everything inside, and dressed the space with stacks of paper, corkboard, landline phones – elements you’d see in fabulous newsrooms from the seventies.

The Daily Planet set. © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

Lex Luthor’s chilling “Pocket Universe” prison fills the screen with stacks of cube-shaped cages. What’s the concept behind this horrendous facility?

This was by far the darkest environment. In the script, James described it as a “world built of arithmetic,” so we asked ourselves, what if cubes compounded and grew onto themselves? Our wonderful art director, Sam Avila, brought in this mineral called Bismuth, which grows at right angles as compound cubes on top of each other. That was a big inspiration point for us.

Bismuth. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
Caption: RACHEL BROSNAHAN as Lois Lane and EDI GATHEGI as Mr. Terrific in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Was the prison also built at Trilith Studios?

Yeah, a couple of stages down from the Fortress of Solitude. We built nine of those cubes, three across and three high. We lovingly refer to it as the Hollywood Squares set.

The Hollywood Squares set in hell.

[Laughing] Yes, Hollywood Squares in Hell.

And then the VFX team digitally extended your physical set?

Exactly. They scanned our cubes and extended [the cages] on both sides and up and down, far as the eye can see, all these people are pacing within their own cubes and bringing that despair into focus. It’s interesting that the prison has come around to being more timely than any of us would have imagined [when we first started working on the movie] back in 2023.

Unlike the deathly Pocket Universe, the Justice Gang headquarters practically screams optimism, with its bright colored interior housed within a beautiful art deco building. How did the Justice Gang environment come together?

Doing research for the overall tone and look of the movie early on, I came across photos of the Cincinnati Union Terminal train station, which had really colorful art deco geometric interiors, so I put that into a look book for us to think about. A couple of weeks later, my art director, Dave Scott, came across an article about the station saying it was the inspiration for the Hall of Justice in the D.C. Comics [cartoon] “Super Friends.” Too good to be true! I called James and Peter [Safran], and we all hopped on a plane to scout this staggering piece of architecture. The colors are the original bright, vivid yellows and oranges, so inside, that’s where we put the Gang’s workstations. Sam found these vintage circular love seats and re-upholstered them in our bright colors with a few new pieces fabricated to look like Milo Baughman, the great mid-century architect and furniture designer. I actually have a couple of his sofas right behind me!

The Hall of Justice. © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC
Inside the Justice Gang’s headquarters. © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC
Nathan Fillion is Guy Gardener, Isabela Merced is Hawkgirl, and Rachel Brosnahan is Lois Lane. © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

LuthorCorp headquarters looks every bit the villain’s high-rise lair. What were your inspirations for his office?

We looked at 1970s brutalism architecture because it’s severe and dominating, like Lex Luthor’s character. The copper ceiling in his command center is taken right out of this Brutalist theater in Eastern Europe that has concrete finishes and green marble throughout. Once I saw that, I realized it would make a really strong combo, since Lex Luthor’s color in the comic books is green. We built the office fourteen feet up in the air as if it were looking out onto the city. We surrounded the whole thing with a printed backdrop of Metropolis. That’s not CGI background – it’s actually images of real buildings printed onto fabric and wrapped around the set. Some people actually got vertigo because the backdrop really made you feel like you were eighty floors up in the air.

LuthorCorp. © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC
NICHOLAS HOULT as Lex Luthor in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo by Jessica Miglio © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

The city of Metropolis itself combines digital imagery with real physical exteriors, right?

We shot exteriors in Cleveland’s public square, where the big monster fight happens. We turned the smoothie shop in the main plaza into a Belly Burger, which is the big burger joint in the D.C. Comics world. For the TV store where the big tank explosion happens, we re-named that Quitely Electronics Shop after comic book artist Frank Quitely, who did the “All-Star Superman” series. We used Cleveland’s beautiful Arcade Building at the end and called it Lacey’s Department Store, another piece of D.C. Lore.

DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

Fan service in action!

There are literally hundreds of Easter eggs for fans, which they can hopefully go through and pinpoint all the things we put in there.

In the course of pulling together all these sets and exterior spaces, how would you describe Superman‘s economic impact on local filmmaking communities?

It’s beautiful to go into a city like Atlanta and have such a nice footprint. A lot of our craftsmen who worked on the Fortress of Solitude set are painters, stone carvers, and carpenters from the area. We go to all the local retailers to rent our furniture, our office supplies, to buy our food, our lunches — all these industries benefit in countless ways from this huge influx of work.

Designing the Superman medallion. DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

This is your third movie with James Gunn. What’s he like to work with?

James sees the movie in his head when he’s writing, so his direction is crystal clear. And he does these great little doodles. He’s also incredibly loyal to folks who have worked for him over the years. I’ve been with him for eight years, and the team now includes some of my closest friends. We’ve become quite a community.

What about your own department as head of production design?

When I started doing [production design], very few women worked at this level. Once you got in, you were one of maybe thirty women. Now I’m really proud of our department because it’s incredibly diverse. With my art director, Dave Scott, we’ve made it a priority to look out and see this beautiful array of artists that feels like a snapshot of the world population.

Superman is in theaters now.

Featured image: DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. © 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC

Suited Up and Ready to Swing: Tom Holland Reveals New Spider-Man Suit

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Sony really got into the swing of things on Saturday.

In a surprise new video the studio posted on Saturday morning, we’ve got our first glimpse of Tom Holland in his new Spider-Man suit. Holland is certainly ready to roll; he’s hopping from foot to foot in a shadowy hangar, then approaches the camera, mask off but otherwise suited up, and asks, “We ready?”

The new suit boasts a larger spider emblem on his chest than in previous iterations we’ve seen him wear in Spider-Man: No Way Home, his last outing from back in 2021, and before that, Spider-Man: Far From Home and his first film as Peter Parker, Spider-Man: Homecoming. In fact, the suit is a closer match to the ones worn by his pals from No Way Home, Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire’s suits from their respective years playing the web slinger. (You can compare the spider emblem size between the featured image and the video below.) This is especially noteworthy given the multiverse shenanigans that No Way Home unleashed, bringing the three Spider-Men together for the first time.

In No Way Home, Holland’s Parker teamed up with his fellow Spider-Men from across the multiverse, Garfield and Maguire’s versions, to take down a trio of unleashed, old-school villains, but in the process they had to wipe out the memories of everyone in Parker’s universe, removing him from the minds of the people he loved, including MJ (Zendaya). In Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Holland’s Parker will be mixing it up with an iconic bruiser, Jon Bernthal’s The Punisher, who will be making his big-screen debut as the character after appearing in his own Netflix series and in Marvel’s Daredevil: Born Again on Disney+. The Hollywood Reporter also revealed that another major character will be appearing in Brand New Day, Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk. They’re joined by Michael Mando, returning as the Scorpion, reprising his role from 2017’s Homecoming.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has begun filming, and is being directed by Destin Daniel Cretton from a script by Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna.

Check out Spidey’s new suit below. Spider-Man: Brand New Day arrives in theaters on July 31, 2026.

For more on all things Spider-Man, check out these stories:

Web-Slinger Meets Skull-Crusher: Jon Bernthal’s Punisher Joins Tom Holland’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”

“Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse” Swinging Into Theaters in 2027

From the Upside Down to the MCU: “Stranger Things” Star Sadie Sink Joining Tom Holland in “Spider-Man 4”

Featured image:

“The Naked Gun” Writer/Director Akiva Schaffer’s Dead Serious Mission to Resurrect the Spoof Comedy

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The Naked Gun director Akiva Schaffer is on a quest to bring people back to the movie theaters to laugh—hysterically, if he’s done his job right—and, while he’s at it, to bring the filmmaking process back to Los Angeles as much as possible.

His franchise revival stars Liam Neeson as Detective Frank Drebin Jr., the son of Leslie Nielsen’s iconic Police Squad cop, tasked with solving a murder and saving his department from shutting down. The cast also includes Pamela Anderson (who is coming in for rave reviews), Paul Walter Hauser, and Danny Huston.

Here, Schaffer explains why screening on the Paramount Studios lot is a big deal, shooting Atlanta for LA, and why he insisted on practical effects over VFX whenever possible.

The first official screening of The Naked Gun took place at the iconic Paramount Theatre on the Paramount Studios lot. How was that?

I had never set foot in that theater before, even though I made Hot Rod for Paramount back in 2007, and this. We screened The Naked Gun for friends and family to work out jokes and figure out what plays well, but we would be in the smaller Sherry Lansing Theatre. I only saw the main one from the outside. I was blown away, just on a technical level, by how great it looked and sounded, and how big and comfortable the seats are. It’s a beautiful theater, and it was also nice that the experience got saved. Other than in a little theater at Deluxe when I was approving it, that was the first screening where it was color corrected, sound mixed, had the score, was locked, and on DCP. I’m also a sucker for old Hollywood. I used to work at SNL, and we wrote Hot Rod in Lorne Michaels’ office on the Paramount lot. It was one of the bungalows right off the courtyard. I believe it was Paul Hogan’s before it was Lorne’s. We’d be at SNL in NY, and Lorne would be wanting us to take it seriously, so he’d say, “Fly to LA on the off week and write Hot Rod at the bungalow.”

Seeing The Naked Gun with an audience and laughing alongside of strangers reminds us of the value of comedies securing theatrical releases. However, people have to turn out.

The big question is, ‘Will they?’ There haven’t been that many comedies attempted at a big studio level recently, so with each one it’s like, ‘Does this still work?’ Earlier this year, One of Them Days with Keke Palmer and SZA was a hit, so I don’t want to erase that film’s success. There are certainly no spoof comedies, though. This is a dead genre. I agree that it’s amazing to be in a room full of people laughing, but I’m hearing the laughs differently than you are. I’m analyzing them. What I found interesting about the Paramount lot was the real sound mix, which I’m very proud of because it sounds incredible. Lorne Balfe’s score sounds legit, and it feels like you’re watching Mission: Impossible.

The Naked Gun is set in Los Angeles, but you filmed it in Atlanta. Was the decision influenced by tax credits?

I was holding onto LA with my fingernails, being dragged, no offense, to Atlanta. My kids are in school here, and I love LA. I managed to get Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers to have the LA tax credit, so I shot it here. As producers, we managed to do it in Palm Springs. With no tax credit, we managed to talk Universal into letting us shoot Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping here, because we wanted to get all the cameos. We were like, “If we’re anywhere else, we’ll never get them. We’re not paying anybody, and there are like 50 cameos in the movie from very famous, busy people.” You’re not getting Ringo Starr to come by your set in Atlanta. I’ve been lucky to shoot in LA a ton, much more than almost every one of my friends in this business, but here we go with a movie that is LA to its core, and it was a little sad to be like, “Oh, we’re going to have to figure out how to fake it.” We were lucky enough to come back to LA and shoot a lot of our exterior stuff here, like the final fight. That’s all shot where it’s supposed to be. We also did a lot of the driving stuff.

If The Naked Gun is a hit, would you push to make the sequel here?

Of course. There were various things where we were going to shoot exterior, but couldn’t. Atlanta can double for a lot of places, such as New York, but LA is not one of them. It’d be nice to have the freedom to go wherever you want. On Popstar, which is very loosey-goosey because it was shot documentary style, it was so rad to, at any moment, go, ‘Well, we’ll just step outside.’ Every location looked like the right location.  

Pamela Anderson and Director Akiva Schaffer on the set of The Naked Gun from Paramount Pictures.

Let’s talk about casting Liam Neeson, who is absolutely perfect as Frank Drebin Jr.

His casting predates me, but it’s the reason I said yes to doing it. Seth MacFarlane and Liam were on Ted 2 because Liam has a really funny cameo, and they were talking about their mutual love of ZAZ – Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker. Seth was like, “You’d be a great Frank Drebin if we ever rebooted. Can I run with that?” and Liam agreed. Seth went to Paramount, years passed, there were two other attempts, but it wasn’t working, and then I got the call from Erica Huggins, who works for Seth at Fuzzy Door, and Paramount. If they had come to me asking for my thoughts on Naked Gun, I’d have said, “It’s a perfect movie. No one should touch it.” I would have the same pessimism that an audience of a certain age who remember and love Naked Gun have, which is, “What’s the next one they’re going to ruin? Oh, it’s Naked Gun.” I don’t blame anybody for those feelings. The second thing is the morbid curiosity. I did a Google search, saw Liam might be attached, and when they confirmed it, I could visualize a whole new thing, down to how I would want to shoot it, what I wanted the music to be, and how I’d want him to play it. It was also my way of seeing how it would not be a rip-off, rehash, or a nostalgia thing, but we could pay respects and lean into what this is and the last 30 years of spy movies, action movies, police procedurals, and all the stuff. The movie is a pretty fair representation of the goal from that first conversation.

Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr. in The Naked Gun from Paramount Pictures.

Is it true that Paul Walter Hauser called you at the offices of SNL to chat with you and Andy Samberg?

Yeah. He told me that, and I have vague memories of it happening, but not knowing it was him. As someone who grew up in the Bay Area with zero connections to showbiz, it all felt so far away and impenetrable, and then you get here. At one point, I think I found it at a thrift store, or maybe somebody’s boss had it, but we managed to get hold of a UTA sweatshirt. We would wear it around, being like, “I’m signed to an agency.” Even living in LA, it felt so far away. The fact that you can pick up a phone and call CAA, UTA, or whatever and get them on the phone is wild. Some kids realized they could call the switchboard at 30 Rock and go, Saturday Night Live please,” then some 20-year-old who works the phones would answer “SNL,” and the caller would be like, “Put me through to Akiva Schaffer, please.” All of a sudden, a phone’s ringing in our office, and they’re patched through. He wasn’t the only one who did it. We would think that if they’re motivated and clever enough to get to me, we would always try to tolerate it. We weren’t like, “You can’t call here,” but more like, “Yeah, what’s up?”

Paul Walter Hauser plays Ed Hocken Jr. in The Naked Gun from Paramount Pictures.

There are so many sight gags in The Naked Gun. Were any of them particularly challenging?

I had a big meeting right at the beginning where I said, “Let’s do everything practical. If there’s ever an option between VFX and practical, it’s always practical, because it’s so much funnier if you know it really happened.” One example that’s in the trailer is when Frank drives the electric car away. It’s still plugged in, so all the chargers get ripped out. Then, it goes up the wall to the transformer, ripping out the bricks. All of a sudden, you realize it’s the side of their prison, and all the criminals are escaping. There isn’t a VFX shot in that, not even a wire cleanup, and we did two takes. After we did the first one, we reset, came back, and did one take the next day, then moved on.


The Naked Gun is in theaters now.

Featured image: Director Akiva Schaffer, Liam Neeson and Paul Walter Hauser on the set of The Naked Gun from Paramount Pictures.

Denis Villeneuve’s James Bond Movie Enlists “Peaky Blinders” Creator Steven Knight to Write Script

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Knight, Steven Knight.

Pardon the terrible pun, but the Peaky Blinders creator, Steven Knight, a well-respected world-builder and ace writer, has been tapped to write the script for Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming James Bond film. The prolific Knight’s TV credits also include A Thousand Blows, Rogue Heroes, and All the Light We Cannot See. On the film side, he earned an Oscar nomination for his 2002 script for Dirty Pretty Things, and, among other notable screenplays, wrote the script for David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises and Pablo Larraín’s Spencer. Knight will be a key part of the mission for Villeneuve and producers Amy Pascal and David Heyman to deliver Amazon MGM Studios’ first Bond film.

BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND – JANUARY 17: Steven Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders, during the press launch of a Rambert Dance production entitled “Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby”, inspired by the “Peaky Blinders” television series, at Dance Hub Birmingham on January 17, 2022 in Birmingham, England. (Photo by Anthony Devlin/Getty Images)

Knight’s ascension into the world of Bond marks a definitive shift in the franchise, a shift that began once Daniel Craig said goodbye to the role after 2021’s No Time to Die. That film was written by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, two veterans of 007, having begun working on the franchise more than a quarter of a century ago on 1999’s The World is Not Enough. The franchise is now in the hands of Amazon MGM Studios, after longtime stewards Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson reached a deal with Amazon, allowing the studio creative control over the franchise.

Daniel Craig in "No Time to Die."
Daniel Craig in “No Time to Die.” Courtesy MGM.

Knight’s dance card is as full as it can be, as he’ll add this major new assignment to a list that also includes his eagerly anticipated Peaky Blinders feature film for Netflix, as well as the historical drama series House of Guinness. 

For more on all things Bond, check out these stories:

From “Dune” to 007: Denis Villeneuve Will Direct Next James Bond Film

007 at CinemaCon: Amazon MGM Promises Exotic New Chapter to James Bond Franchise

Amazon MGM’s Next James Bond Movie to be Produced by Veteran Hit-Makers Amy Pascal & David Heyman

Featured image: Daniel Craig stars as James Bond in NO TIME TO DIE, an EON Productions and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios film Credit: Nicola Dove. © 2021 DANJAQ, LLC AND MGM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Aaron Sorkin Eyeing Jeremy Allen White & Mikey Madison for “The Social Network Part II”

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Aaron Sorkin’s Social Network sequel might be close to a major development—Deadline reports that Sorkin is circling Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison to lead his sequel. Madison recently nabbed an Oscar for her mesmerizing turn in Sean Baker’s Anora, while White’s star has been rising for years as the Emmy-winning lead in The Bear, while also set to star as Bruce Springsteen in Scott Cooper’s Deliver Me From Nowhere, which premieres on October 24. No formal offers have been submitted yet, but Deadline reports that White and Madison are Sorkin’s top choices. 

Deadline first broke the story that Sorkin was planning on directing his own script for the sequel to his Oscar-winning 2010 film, which he wrote and David Fincher directed. That film, based on Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental Millionaires,” starred Jesse Eisenberg as a young Mark Zuckerberg during his early years at Harvard, when he created the social networking site that would end up becoming the global colossus Facebook. The Social Network tracked the contentious birth of the site, with Zuckerberg facing legal challenges from the Winklevoss twins, who claimed he stole their idea, and from his co-founder, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), whom he boxed out of the business. Sorkin’s whip-smart script, Fincher’s masterful directing, and outstanding performances from the leads led to eight Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture. The film won three, including Sorkin’s win for Best Adapted Screenplay. Incredibly, the version of Facebook that Sorkin, Fincher, and their cast and crew depicted was arguably a depiction of a messy but promising company whoes platform was, by design, becoming a exponentially growing social experiment—now, Sorkin would be working with material that covered the tumultuous years Facebook, and the world it helped create, has been enduring in the decade and a half since.

The new script will be based on the reporting by The Wall Street Journal‘s Jeff Horowitz in his explosive series, “The Facebook Files,” published in October 2021. This series was based on a trove of internal Facebook documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former product manager at the company. Some of the explosive details included in Horowitz’s reporting were that Facebook (now Meta) was aware of the numerous harmful societal effects of its platforms, often downplaying those findings or failing to address them. The exposé revealed a company far more invested in growth than user safety. The exposé included reporting on how Facebook’s platforms had a harmful impact on teenage girls, exempted high-profile users from content moderation, and fueled misinformation and division with its algorithms.

No reporting has revealed who White and Madison would play, but speculation has it that White would be cast as reporter Jeff Horowitz, and Madison would play whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Sorkin has helmed a slew of films since The Social Network premiered, including Being the Ricardos, The Trial of the Chicago 7, and the underrated Molly’s Game.  It’s unclear whether Eisenberg will reprise his role as Zuckerberg, although it seems likely he’ll appear in some capacity.

Featured image: L-r: HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 9: Jeremy Allen White attends a dinner for the cast and producers of “The Bear” at Musso & Frank Grill on June 9, 2025, in Hollywood, California. (Photo by David Jon/Getty Images for FX Networks); LONDON, ENGLAND – FEBRUARY 16: Mikey Madison attends the 2025 EE BAFTA Film Awards at The Royal Festival Hall on February 16, 2025 in London, England. (Photo by Lia Toby/Getty Images)

Flying at 125 MPH to Keep Up With “F1” Cars: Aerial Cinematographer Phil Arntz on the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix Sequence

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It was especially fun for aerial cinematographer Phil Arntz to return to Abu Dhabi with his camera pilot, Will Banks, for the climactic racing sequence in Joseph Kosinski’s pedal-to-the-metal epic F1. “I used to live in Dubai around 2012 or 2013, when I did a lot of filming for extreme sports. So, it was nice coming back because many of the crew, like the Shotover technician and the team with the helicopter, are all people I’ve known for years,” he recalls.

The racing actioner starring Brad Pitt as racing veteran Sonny Hayes and Damson Idris as the hot-shot rookie Joshua Pearce has just crossed the $500 million mark globally. In our previous conversation with Arntz, he talked about shooting at the Silverstone track in the United Kingdom. Today, we focus on the climactic race set and filmed at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. This presented its own set of challenges (temperature and maximum altitude) but also gave audiences a singular look with the famed Yas Marina Circuit. 

You and Will also worked on another massive action film that came out this summer, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, two very kinetic but different films.

Both utilized aerial filming to create that sense of speed. But F1 is more considered in the story beats with more precise setups, whereas Mission: Impossible -The Final Reckoning was an exploration of shooting an aerial sequence, because no one’s really done it before. We were trying to figure out what to do with the aircraft and how to capture it. Both were challenging in their own regard.

 

Since F1 was filmed throughout the 2023 and 2024 World Championships, between testing, prep, and shooting, how long were you on this project?

Most of the time, we come in as needed to shoot the aerial work and disappear until the call comes again to pick up bits and pieces. Silverstone was really early on in the filming. We did some other stuff in Oxfordshire with Brad driving cars around the countryside, which was quite lovely. Abu Dhabi was much later in the year – that’s the final race in the calendar.

How did you prepare for the Abu Dhabi race?

The first challenge with Abu Dhabi is the temperature. The hotter it gets, the less an aircraft wants to fly with a lot of power. The heli we normally used is quite heavy, so for Will, a lot of thought went into managing the energy because we still wanted to get down to track level, right through the grandstands towards the control tower at a really low level.

Compared to the other sequences in the film, how was this different?

It was at night and right under the approach to Abu Dhabi International Airport. So, you can’t go any higher than 200 feet. Most permits restrict anything lower than 200 feet. So, it was just track-level to 200 feet. It was about finding really dynamic angles of the cars going around the circuit. I did about a week’s worth of prep from London, drawing up diagrams of what I figured might be nice shots. What was really handy is that the Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi is on Google Street View, an amazing scouting tool where you could look at angles ahead of time and see what works really well.

 

What was it like to shoot at the Yas Marina track?

We would go low as the car crests over the hill, and you’re countering them. A lot of it was about creating a sense of speed from a moving camera at a low angle. We had to find the angles that you can’t normally get in a live broadcast because their helicopter covers it in a Top Shot. Whereas we were flying really low, countering the cars, flying low over them, and chasing them from behind. Those cars are so bloody quick, even if you’re going full chat on a helicopter, keeping up with them isn’t possible. It was about working out the timing of how to get to them in the right moments, like cutting corners to come low behind the cars.

Caption: A scene from Apple Original Films’ “F1® The Movie,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Photo by Scott Garfield Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures / Apple Original Films

For the Silverstone sequence in the U.K., you talked about adhering to the Civil Aviation Authority’s requirements. What was the equivalent process in Abu Dhabi?

Abu Dhabi was great because we had permission to fly the entire track at a very low level, so we had more time to figure things out. We flew it without cars for about an hour to look at some angles, but also for Will to make sure that he knew where the obstacles were, like wires, light poles, and gantries. And you’ve got the W Hotel in the middle of the track.

Caption: A scene from Apple Original Films’ “F1® The Movie,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures / Apple Original Films

It’s pretty insane that it was challenging for the helicopter going at top speed to keep up with the cars blazing at 200 mph!

The helicopter we had in Abu Dhabi probably maxed out at about 125-130 mph. The cars were probably going 200 mph. So, there’s a deficit of 70-80 mph. A car takes time to accelerate from a corner, but our acceleration is nowhere near that of a race car. So, we had to judge the distances so that we were right behind these cars at a low level as they went under this gantry, and it took one or two runs to work out the timing. But it was a fun challenge to keep up with vehicles that were honestly pedal to the metal.

Did you also use the Airbus AS355?

Yes, but the difference was we owned the one in the U.K., so we could strip everything out of it to make it as light as possible. It doesn’t have air conditioning, floats, a headliner, or all the interior that makes it look nice. But we don’t own the one in Abu Dhabi, which had everything intact and probably weighs 300kgs more than ours. You really feel that, especially when you’re flying in 35 degrees Celsius [95 Fahrenheit].

The Yas Marina Circuit has a very distinct look, but compared to other locations, it has not been featured on film as often. I think it was in Furious 7.

The Yas Marina track is an amazing location! It’s by a river and has a lot of cool architecture. One day, there was a massive super yacht right next to the track. So, we tried to showcase the elements that you can only get in Abu Dhabi. We went exploring for cool shots all around the circuit.

Was any drone photography involved?

We didn’t use drones on the work we did, but I think there were some days when drones were used. Drones are limited to distance and speed, and you really need a full-size manned aircraft to keep up with these cars.

What was the choreography design like with Joe and Claudio [Miranda, cinematographer]?

Some of the stuff was heavily Previs’d. For Abu Dhabi, I created a 30-page PDF with some ideas. After we shot them, we’d get feedback from the ground from Joe and Claudio. There were certain story beats where one car overtakes the other in this part of the track that we had to capture in counter moves. Once the drivers decide where the overtake will occur, they have a marker on the track, say at a gantry. We had to counter it at 100 miles an hour from the opposite direction. There’s a lot of timing involved to start your flight a mile in the opposite direction, go full chat, and then meet them right in the middle where the move happens. The only timing cue was the marker on the track. It was really challenging to get that dialed in perfectly.

Director Joseph Kosinski and crew on the set of “F1.” Courtesy Apple/Warner Bros.

Were you communicating with Joe and Claudio in real-time during all these flights?

Joe had control of the cameras [mounted on the cars] with live video feed in the garage [referring to the video village]. There was an RF [radio frequency wireless] team that handled all the wireless video system, regardless of where you were and what altitude, there was always a picture in the garage. We could be at track level a mile and a half away, and they would get a perfect image. The wireless video team had the entire track set up to receive live video, which was really impressive. Wireless video downlinks can sometimes be difficult, and you don’t get a picture all the time. It was absolutely mind-blowing how they created this perfect HD video signal all around the track.

Was this only at Silverstone?

This was at every race, live around the entire track. When we came in, all they had to do was dial us into the frequency, and we could make use of their on-the-ground video system so they could receive our picture wherever we were. That was really impressive. The main reason wasn’t for us. They had these little cameras on the race cars, and Joe was directing from the garage. So, he was cueing the camera moves. To do that, you need perfect video and camera control the entire way. It was nice that we could piggyback on that.

Caption: A scene from Apple Original Films’ “F1® The Movie,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures / Apple Original Films

 

F1 is playing in theaters nationwide.

Featured image: Brad Pitt in “F1.” Courtesy Warner Bros.