Apple TV+ has released the first teaser for Disclaimer, the star-studded limited series written and directed by five-time Oscar-winner Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity,Roma). Cuarón’s series is based on Renée Knight’s bestselling novel and follows the journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (another Osar-winner in Cate Blanchett), a well-respected journo whose career was made uncovering the shadowy deeds of others. What happens when Ravenscroft is sent a novel by a mysterious author who seems to have turned the journalist into the main character? And what’s worse, what happens if all of Ravenscorft’s darkest secrets are exposed in the story?
So, the seasoned reporter suddenly finds herself on a very personal story, trying to suss out who this mysterious author is before her life unravels and her relationships, specifically with her husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) and their son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), are changed forever.
Befitting a filmmaker of Cuarón’s stature, Blanchett, Cohen, and Smit-McPhee are joined by more stellar performers, including the great Lesley Manville, Kevin Kline, Louis Partridge, Leila George, and Hoyeon. Indira Varma plays the narrator.
Disclaimer unfolds in seven chapters, beginning with the October 11 premiere of the first two episodes, followed by a new episode every Friday. The series is the first for the hugely talented Cuarón in his overall deal with Apple TV+. He once again works with his Oscar-winner cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and the six-time Oscar nominee Burno Delbonnel, a cinematographer who, among others, worked for the Coen brothers.
Check out theteaser here.
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Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen Deadpool & Wolverine yet, move along to another part of the multiverse timeline.
As Deadpool & Wolverine slashes past one box office milestone after another, we’ve talked a lot about the stars who made surprise cameos in the Ryan Reynolds/Hugh Jackman epic. Some were from Fox’s Marvel era, like Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, who first appeared in 2003’s Daredevil and then again in 2005’s stand-alone Elektra. In the film, Garner was one of the superheroes marooned in the Void, alongside three comrades who formed part of an underground resistance who had more or less stopped resisting—Wesley Snipe as Blade in a history-making return, Dafne Keen’s mutant Laura (from James Mangold’s 2017 banger Logan, the film that Jackman’s be-clawed mutant originally died in), and in a shocking twist, Channing Tatum as Gambit. (Tatum had tried to get a Gambit movie off the ground for four years, but the deal was ultimately scuttled when Disney acquired Fox in 2019.)
They were joined by another shocking cameo—Chris Evans—who returned not to play Captain America, the character he’s world-famous for, but his first-ever superhero role, Johnny Storm/The Human Torch, from Fox’s 2005 film Fantastic Four. These were the biggest names to make significant cameo contributions, but they weren’t the only ones—in a brief but pitch-perfect scene during Deadpool’s search across the multiverse for a Logan variant to help him save his timeline, he runs into the infamous Cavillerine, a Wolverine variant played by none other than Henry Cavill, who unleashed his two massive guns (his arms, folks) in a butt-kicking moment that nodded to Cavill’s most iconic action sequence to date.
Speaking with Collider, Ryan Reynolds revealed there was another massive star he tried to get to make a cameo in the film— Nicolas Cage—to see if Cage would reprise Ghost Rider, the Marvel antihero brought to life in Sony’s wing of the canon.
Reynolds wasn’t giving away much when Collider asked about the potential Cage casting, but he did confirm that it “came to a conversation for sure. Yeah, but no.” That’s all Reynolds would reveal about the potential of getting Cage back on the motorcycle to play Johnny Blaze.
We might never know how close Reynolds and Cage got to making this happen or even if it was close. There was clearly no shortage of surprising cameos in Deadpool & Wolverine, but given how much fun everyone seemed to be having, it’s hard not to feel like Cage would have been in his element. Perhaps this version of the film exists on another timeline.
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Featured image: BERLIN, GERMANY – JANUARY 23: Actor Nicolas Cage poses at a photocall at the Hotel De Rome on January 23, 2012 in Berlin, Germany. Cage was in Berlin to promote his 3-D fantasy/adventure film ‘Ghost Rider – Spirit of Vengeance,’ based on a comic book, in which he returns as the antihero Johnny Blaze, also known as Ghost Rider, a bounty hunter for the devil. The film will appear in German cinemas on February 23. (Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images)
“What was so great about what Sigourney did, it was incredible; it holds such an iconic space in cinematic history,” Cailee Spaeny says at the top of a new look at director Fede Alvarez’s upcoming Alien: Romulus. Spaeny stars as Rain Carradine, a young woman who makes a really, really bad decision when she tries to change up her life by joining a crew of space colonizers who go to scavenge a decommissioned space station to find the technology they need to finally leave their doomed planet. Unfortunately for Rain, the decommissioned space station is not abandoned; there is life aboard, but it’s obviously not human. The horrors to come connect Spaney’s Rain to the original alien slayer, Sigourney Weaver’s iconic Ripley, who first appeared in Ridley Scott’s game-changing 1979 original Alien.
Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus is an interquel that bridges the gap between Scott’s 1979 masterpiece and James Cameron’s fantastic 1986 sequel Aliens. In order to make sure he had his mythology right, Alvarez met early on in the writing process with Cameron himself, and based his idea off a deleted scene from Aliens in which children were running among the workers in the space colony. “I remember thinking about what it would be like for teenagers to grow up in a colony so small and what would happen to them when they reached their early 20s,” Alvarez said in the press notes.
Alvarez’s film has the distinction of having been approved by Cameron and Scott. This new look at Romulus is centered on Spaeny’s Rain, who is proudly in the mold of Weaver’s Ripley, albeit she’s a different kind of survivor. In Alien, Weaver’s indomitable Ellen Ripley battled and eventually vanquished a Xenomorph after a grueling duel aboard the USCSS Nostromo. Then Cameron picked up the story seven years later and followed a battle-hardened Ripley, who was now part of a military mission to a space colony to investigate a fresh xenomorph attack. Romulus is set roughly 20 years after Scott’s Alien and 37 years before Cameron’s Aliens, with Spaeny’s Rain and her fellow would-be colonizers finding themselves face-to-face-hugger with the most terrifying species in the universe.
In the new look, Alvarez makes clear that Spaeny was always his first choice. Spaeny’s Rain is desperate to get beyond Jackson’s Star, the mining colony where she lives. Her parents have died, and she’ll do anything for a fresh start. Instead, she finds herself in an unimaginable nightmare.
Check out the trailer below. Alien: Romulus hits theaters on August 16.
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The critically acclaimed and beloved Paddington trilogy is set to conclude with the beloved British bear’s biggest adventure yet.
Sony Pictures has just dropped an adorable teaser for the final film in the trilogy, the first new Paddington installment in 7 years since Paddington 2. The teaser finds Paddington attempting to get his passport photo taken, but it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. It’s brief, but the minute-plus sneak peek reminds viewers why this franchise has been so winning: Paddington is a lovely little bear, and his simple joys, including a delicious marmalade sandwich, always lead to big adventures.
In the new film, directed by Dougal Wilson, Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) heads back to his native Peru to visit Aunt Lucy (voiced by Imelda Staunton), who is now living at the Home for Retired Bears. Paddington’s visit to Aunt Lucy becomes a thrilling adventure in the Amazon rainforest alongside the Brown Family.
Paddington in Peru includes new faces (and voices), including Oscar-winner Olivia Colman as The Reverand Mother, a nun with serious guitar skills, and Antonio Banderas’ boat captain Hunter Cabot. Hugh Bonneville returns as Mr. Brown, with Emily Mortimer stepping in to voice Mrs. Brown.
While plot details are still being kept secret, director Dougal Wilson said the third film will explore Paddington’s origins and how he came to be rescued and live in London. “There’s a lot of missing information about what happens before that, and we thought for the third film it would be very appropriate for him to return to Peru, but this time taking his London friends and community with him and have an adventure there and, in doing so, fill in some of the missing pieces.”
Check out the trailer below. Paddington in Peru hits theaters on January 17, 2025.
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Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen Deadpool & Wolverine yet, move along to another part of the multiverse timeline.
As Deadpool & Wolverine continues to conquer the global box office, many of the folks who made surprise cameos in the Ryan Reynolds/Hugh Jackman two-hander have spoken up about their involvement in the film. Channing Tatum, who finally got a chance to play Gambit, a role he’d worked four years towards making happen to no avail, spoke about how happy he was that Ryan Reynolds got in touch and offered him the opportunity nearly a decade after the two first met at Comic-Con in 2016. Chris Evans spoke about his opportunity to reprise his very first superhero role as Johnny Storm/The Human Torch from 2005’s Fantastic Four and how he relished the opportunity to deliver a raunchy monologue without cue cards for a Deadpool & Wolverine post-credits scene.
Evans’ Johnny Storm is part of a crew of discarded superheroes marooned in the Void by the Time Variance Authority for refusing to let their own worlds get clipped into non-existence. Those discarded supes also include Dafne Keen’s mutant Laura (from 2017’s Logan) and Wesley Snipes’ Blade, a history-making turn for Snipes who became the person to hold the longest career as a live-action Marvel character—beating out Hugh Jackman, no less—after first appearing as the Daywalker in 1998’s Blade. Snipes also made history as the person with the longest gap between performances, beating out Alfred Molina, who had a 17-year gap between his Doc Ock appearances in Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Now Jennifer Garner is opening up about her own surprise cameo, returning to play Elektra, the super-skilled assassin she portrayed in 2003’s Daredevil (alongside Ben Affleck), and again in her stand-alone 2005 film Elektra. Garner appears in Deadpool & Wolverine alongside Tatum’s Gambit, Keen’s Laura, and Snipes’ Blade. In a recent Instagram post, Garner shared how the role came about after having recently worked with Reynolds and director Shawn Levy on The Adam Project, who she said share a “crazy artistic kismet.”
Garner recalled the moment that Levy and Reynolds thought Elektra could appear in Deadpool & Wolverine: “… we were on the set of The Adam Project, and they gave each other this look they have that can communicate an idea, 20 pages of dialogue, nuclear codes—there is a crazy artistic kismet between those two.”
Garner said that she was initially unsure, having not portrayed the character or wielded any of her weapons since 2004. But once she got to work with her stunt double, Shauna Duggins, and got “Marvel fit” as she puts it, Garner put in the work and was Elektra fit by the time filming began.
“I didn’t know that Elektra and I needed an ending, but Shawn and Ryan did,” Garner wrote. “They are gifted in many ways, but seeing and elevating people around them is at the top of the list.”
Featured image: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – JULY 25: Jennifer Garner speaks onstage during “Marvel Studios: The Ultimate Deadpool & Wolverine Celebration Of Life” panel during 2024 Comic-Con International at San Diego Convention Center on July 25, 2024 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)
Lionsgate is developing a new John Wick series with star Keanu Reeves and director Chad Stahelski producing and Stahelski directing the pilot episode. John Wick: Under the HighTable‘s script comes from The Old Man co-creator Robert Levine and will pick up where John Wick: Chapter 4 left off.
Deadlinescoops that Under the High Table will explore the assort assassins, fixers, and shady underworld characters in the aftermath of Chapter 4‘s heroic sendoff for Wick himself, with new up-and-comers looking to become the next Wick, while longtime franchise characters try to keep order and the old rules intact.
It’s a similar template to how Lionsgate handled the Peacock limited series The Continent: From the World of John Wick, which mixed existing characters within the Wickiverse with newcomers.
Reeves is attached as a producer without any acting component. Under the High Table will be shopped to potential buyers, and the interest will likely be very, very high.
The big unresolved question from John Wick: Chapter 4 is whether Wick died at the end. It wasn’t entirely clear, although he was gravely injured during his standoff with fellow assassin Caine (Donnie Yen). The post-credits scene left Wick’s fate uncertain and instead pivoted to a fight between Caine and Akira (Rina Sawayama), whose father Caine killed earlier in the film. Yen’s character is set to get his own spinoff film, which will join Ana de Armas’s upcoming Wick spinoff Ballerina, set between the third and fourth installment in the Wick franchise. A fifth Wick film is in development, too.
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Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen Deadpool and Wolverine yet, move on to another story in the multiverse.
Deadpool & Wolverine is a bonafide smash hit, slashing and F-bombing its way toward a billion-dollar haul while delighting audiences across the globe. The Shawn Levy-directed scorcher is being fueled, of course, by the long-awaited pairing of Ryan Reynolds’ Merc with the Mouth and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, resurrected (in a way) from his noble death in James Mangold’s 2017 film Logan with a little help from the multiverse. While Deadpool & Wolverine is the third film in Reynolds’ Deadpool franchise, it was conceived as a proper two-hander, with Jackman’s Wolverine every bit as important, with just about as much screen time, as Reynolds’ foul-mouthed man-child.
With that said, one of Deadpool & Wolverine‘s joys is the mic-drop cameos scattered throughout the film. Some are blink-brief, like Henry Cavill’s delicious turn as the Cavillerine, a Logan variant chomping on a cigar and eager to stomp Deadpool during his uninvited pop-in on the Cavillerine’s timeline. A few of the cameos, however, are a little meatier, and those include Chris Evans’s shocking arrival in the Void not as Captain America but rather as Johnny Storm, his first turn as a superhero back in 2005’s Fantastic Four. Evans’ Johnny Storm is one of the Fox Marvel-era superheroes marooned in the Void, the wasteland where the Time Variance Authority sends folks they feel threaten the sacred timeline. Johnny and a slew of other superheroes live in hiding, trying to avoid getting on the wrong side of the Void’s Queen Supreme, Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin).
Speaking with People Magazine, Evans revealed how Reynolds pitched him the cameo, as well as how he approached Johnny’s big monologue that appears during the credits,
“It was a couple years ago and I got a text from Ryan [Reynolds], we’re buddies,” Evans told People. “He just said, ‘Listen, if you don’t like this idea, no worries whatsoever. But I have something that could really bring the house down and would let you play a character from your past. I mean, honestly, I would do anything Ryan asked. He gave me a great cameo in Free Guy already, and I just trust him completely. So the chance to be Johnny again, I couldn’t pass up. I loved it. It was fun to shoot, fun to watch, all of it.”
Johnny’s arc in Deadpool & Wolverine is a real barn burner, but Evans has even more fun in the credits. For his big, raunchy monologue, he eschewed help from quip master Reynolds.
“Ryan was like, ‘Listen, if we need cue cards…’ and I was like, ‘Cue cards? I’m showing up off-book,’ ” Evans told People. “I don’t get to say dialogue like this. Trust me. I’m going to enjoy every second of this. Memorized.”
Meanwhile, Wesley Snipes, another of the major cameos, appears as a team alongside Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, Channing Tatum’s Gambit (!), and Dafne Keen’s Laura. In the process, Snipes made history by breaking two Guinness World Records when he appeared as the iconic Daywalker Blade—he’s now the person to hold the longest career as a live-action Marvel character. Who’d he beat out? None other than Hugh Jackman. Snipes first played the character in 1998’s Blade, and his appearance in Deadpool & Wolverine was 25 years and 240 days later. The massive gap between Snipes’ current and last Blade performances is another record—he last played the character in Blade: Trinity in 2004 (which, incidentally, co-starred Ryan Reynolds), and then 19 years and 231 days, re-appeared in the Void to the shock and delight of fans everywhere. This bested Alfred Molina’s 17-year gap between appearing as Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man: No Way Home.
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HBO has dropped a new trailer that gives us our first look at some of their most eagerly awaited upcoming series, both returning and brand new. These include season three of The White Lotus, season two of The Last of Us, and the series premiere of the latest Game of Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,an adaptation from George R. R. Martin’s novella “The Hedge Knight.”
The trailer ran before the season-season finale of House of the Dragon, and also included the upcoming It spinoff series It: Welcome to Derry, as well as new seasons of The Gilded Age, And Just Like That, Industry, and the fourth and final season of My Brilliant Friend.
New series joining A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms include the first series to come out of James Gunn and Peter Safran’s new DC Studios, Creature Commandos, as well as a DC Studios project that predated Gunn and Safran’s arrival: the Batman spinoff series The Penguin. There’s also the upcoming Dune prequel, Dune: Prophecy, centered on the founding of the secretive and powerful sect, the Bene Gesserit.
Sam Mendes and Armando Iannucci are teaming up with showrunner Jon Brown in the new comedy series The Franchise, while documentarian Alex Gibney’s Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos will explore the life and work of the legendary creator of The Sopranos.
Check out the trailer for HBO’s upcoming slate below.
Here’s the full list of HBO’s upcoming titles provided by Warner Bros. Discovery:
*Indicates a new title debuting in 2025
*A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS (HBO Original Drama Series)
*AND JUST LIKE THAT… (Max Original Comedy Series)
CHIMP CRAZY (HBO Original Four-Part Documentary Series)
CREATURE COMMANDOS (Max Original Adult Animated Series)
DUNE: PROPHECY (HBO Original Drama Series)
*DUSTER (Max Original Drama Series)
HARD KNOCKS: TRAINING CAMP WITH THE CHICAGO BEARS (HBO Original Sports Documentary Series)
HARLEY QUINN (Max Original Adult Animated Series)
INDUSTRY (HBO Original Drama Series)
*IT: WELCOME TO DERRY (HBO Original Drama Series)
MY BRILLIANT FRIEND (HBO Original Drama Series)
THE FRANCHISE (HBO Original Comedy Series)
*THE GILDED AGE (HBO Original Drama Series)
THE PENGUIN (HBO Original Limited Series)
*THE PITT (Max Original Drama Series)
*THE LAST OF US (HBO Original Drama Series)
THE SEX LIVES OF COLLEGE GIRLS (Max Original Comedy Series)
*THE WHITE LOTUS (HBO Original Drama Series)
WISE GUY DAVID CHASE AND THE SOPRANOS (HBO Original Two-Part Documentary)
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Spoiler alert – if you haven’t seen Deadpool & Wolverine yet and have somehow avoided all cameo-related spoilers, you might want to step away from this article.
There’s been a lot written about all the cameos in Deadpool & Wolverine—heck, we’ve written about them, too—but one of the most interesting cameos of all—with respects to Jennifer Garner, Wesley Snipes, Channing Tatum, and Chris Evans (who appears not as Captain America, but as Johnny Storm, from his first appearance in a superhero movie in 2005’s Fantastic Four, the Fox era of Marvel)—belongs to Henry Cavill. Cavill appears as the Cavillerine, a Wolverine variant who beats the stuffing out of Deadpool during the Merc with the Mouth’s recruiting session through the multiverse to find a Logan who can help him save his world.
The cameo works on several levels. First, Cavill has been a popular fan choice for playing Wolverine once Hugh Jackman is really and truly done with the character. Cavill surely looks the part in Deadpool & Wolverine, jacked as he is, sporting a thick beard, and unleashing all the berserker vitality that made Jackman such a perfect choice for the character when he was first cast in the role more than 24 years ago. It doesn’t hurt that he’s wearing a tank top to expose his massive arms and is chomping on a cigar while working on a motorcycle; all very on-brand for Wolverine, especially a younger Wolverine, before the entire weight of the universe is on his shoulders. (That Wolverine can be found in the variant of Logan Jackman plays in Deadpool & Wolverine and in the Logan he played in…Logan.)
Second, Cavill’s appearance as the Cavillerine is also a sly nod to his most famous cinematic sequence of all time (we’re sure fans of his portrayal of Superman might quibble with this, but hear us out), the iconic bathroom fight scene in Mission: Impossible – Fallout. In that scene, Cavill’s nefarious CIA agent August Walker, who’s briefly aligned with Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt during their epic, brutal brawl with Lian Yang’s butt-kicking assassin, does this thing with his arms that has become a beloved meme.
Left to right: Liang Yang and Henry Cavill in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT, from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
In Cavill’s brief Deadpool & Wolverine cameo, you notice that he does a very similar move before he clobbers Deadpool, where it looks like he’s loosening or reloading his arms. It’s more or less the same exact movement Cavill did as August Walker in the Mission: Impossible bathroom fight before Walker and Ethan Hunt finally get the upper hand on Yang’s brilliantly resourceful fighter.
Is this reading too much into what might be a bit of muscle memory on Cavill’s part? That argument might hold water, but then you have to factor in that Yang is not only an extremely talented stunt performer but also a stunt coordinator—in fact, he was the stunt coordinator on Deadpool & Wolverine.
It seems much more likely that Yang and Cavill planned this little performative Easter Egg as a nod to their previous, beloved work together, and it also happens to work perfectly in the moment. Although he gets his clock cleaned in the encounter, even Deadpool is gobsmacked over how cool the Cavillerine is.
Here’s the Mission: Impossible Fallout bathroom fight scene. The Cavill shoulder-reload moment comes at the 31-second mark:
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Downey’s fellow Avenger, Jeremy Renner, told US Weeklythat he was floored by the announcement that Downey was headed back to the MCU, but not to play Tony Stark, but rather, the most iconic Marvel villain of all time (with apologies to Thanos), Dr. Doom. Renner was one of Downey’s longtime Avenger teammates, dating back to the very first film, 2012’s The Avengers, yet Downey kept his return a secret from his old buddy. In fact, none of the original Avengers cast were aware—Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, and Chris Hemsworth—that Downey was donning a new mask (but the same task, as he put it) in the Russo Brothers (also returning!) upcoming Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars.
“No! I had no idea. The son of a b***h didn’t say anything to me,” Renner told US Weekly. “We’re good friends. There’s the Avengers family chat. The original six. He said not a peep. I got online and started blowing up his phone like, ‘What’s going on? You’ve been hiding this from us the whole time?’ It’s exciting news. I’m really, really excited about it.”
Renner then revealed that he might be joining Downey in the upcoming Avengers films—the major difference is that Renner would continue portraying Clint Barton/Hawkeye, while Downey’s Dr. Doom would be his adversary. (Not for nothing, Hawkeye and Iron Man fought, too, in the original The Avengers when Loki turned Hawkeye into a mindless minion.) Renner last played the sharpshooter on the Disney+ series Hawkeye.
“You got Downey back in the mix, you got the Russo Brothers back in the mix. This is a direction where Marvel is going to do well,” Renner said. “The Avengers movies have always been fan favorites and there’s so many wonderful characters in them. It’s going to be challenging to get everyone together. But I am excited about it. We’ll see. I think we’ll probably be doing it. It’s all brand new. They just made the announcement. They got to start figuring it out.”
Renner was hospitalized after his snow plow accident in 2023, a horrific scare in which he suffered orthopedic injuries, including eight ribs broken in 14 places, blunt chest trauma, a broken right shoulder, left tibia, left ankle, and more. He’s been in physical therapy and feels that he’s getting back to a place where he can return as Hawkeye, a remarkable achievement.
“I’m always game. I’m gonna be strong enough, that’s for sure. I’ll be ready,” Renner told ET. “All those [Marvel] guys come to my bedside and they’ve been with me all along through this recovery, so … if they want me, they could have me. It would be something.”
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Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color is now streaming on Netflix.
A trailer for one of the highest-ratest Godzilla movies in history (hailed as one of the best ever by many critics) reveals a meticulously decolorized version of writer/director Takashi Yamazaki’s masterpiece. The colorized version of Godzilla Minus One is the first domestic Japanese Godzilla film in seven years and takes us back to post-war Japan as the iconic kaiju surfaces from the ocean depths to unleash holy hell on a populace still reckoning with the ravages of World War II, a nation that was “baptized in the horrific power of the atom bomb” as the film’s press materials state.
When Godzilla Minus Onearrived on U.S. shores, the reviews glowed as brightly as the titan’s atomic breath. “The result is nothing short of magical: a feast for the eyes, an entertaining epic in every sense of the word,” writes the Washington Post‘s Lucas Trevor. “Godzilla Minus One isn’t just a good Godzilla movie. It’s an excellent Godzilla movie – arguably among the best ever to grace the screen,” says ReelViews James Berardinelli.
The black-and-white version gives us a gorgeous duotone version of Yamazaki’s film, which is a vastly different beast from the American incarnations we’ve seen in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,Godzilla vs. Kong(2021) and Godzilla (2014). Minus One takes us back to Godzilla’s roots as a metaphor for Japan’s postwar agony and grief while balancing the beast’s lust for carnage and destruction with a human-level story focusing on the people’s lives beneath Godzilla’s feet.
Godzilla Minus One stars Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando, and Kuranosuke Sasaki.
Check out the trailer below for Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color.
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We know when Squid Game will return to Netflix…and when it will end.
Netflix’s biggest series of all time is finally returning for season two on December 26. This is a boon time for streaming, with people still home for the holidays. Squid Game executive producer, writer, and director Hwang Dong-hyuk also revealed that the series’ third season will premiere in 2025 and will be its last.
“Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae), who vowed revenge at the end of season one, returns and joins the game again,” Hwang wrote in a press release detailing the series’ upcoming conclusion. “Will he succeed in getting his revenge? Front Man doesn’t seem to be an easy opponent this time, either. The fierce clash between their two worlds will continue into the series finale in season three, which will be brought to you next year.”
Lee Jung-Jae has seen his career explode since the release of the Korean juggernaut series in 2021, when it burst onto the global scene and went on to become the all-time highest-ranking series in Netflix history, earning an astonishing 265.2 million views and a total watch-time of 2.2 billion hours—in its first 13 weeks of release. He has since starred in Disney+’s most recent Star Wars series, The Acolyte, playing Master Jedi Sol. He’ll be joined in season two by returning cast members Lee Byung-hun, Wi Ha-jun, and Gong Yoo. Newcomers include Yim Si-wan, Kang Ha-neul, Park Gyu-young, Lee Jin-uk, Park Sung-hoon, Yang Dong-geun, Kang Ae-sim, Lee David, Choi Seung-hyun, Roh Jae-won, Jo Yu-ri and Won Ji-an.
“I am thrilled to see the seed that was planted in creating a new Squid Game grow and bear fruit through the end of this story,” Hwang continued in his statement. “We’ll do our best to make sure we bring you yet another thrill ride. I hope you’re excited for what’s to come.
Here’s a look at the teaser Netflix just released to announce the premiere date:
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The news coming out of Comic-Con this past weekend was of the cinematic universe-shaking variety. Robert Downey Jr. returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but not as Tony Stark and, instead, as the supervillain Dr. Doom? Check. The Russo Brothers returning to direct Downey in not one but two Avenger films, Avengers: Doomsday (newly retitled and now centering on Downey’s iconic villain), and Avengers: Secret Wars? Check and check. It was a good Con for Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige, who had so many beloved stars to reintroduce and news to report that one could be forgiven for overlooking specific details about another hotly anticipated MCU installment on its way—the long-awaited reboot of The Fantastic Four, which had a heck of a lot more to reveal than just that new title, The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Feige returned to the stage of Hall H for The Fantastic Four panel, with production on the filming kicking off this past Tuesday, July 30. Director Matt Sharman joined Feige in Hall H, and then, in a surprise, revealed Marvel’s first family on stage together for the first time— Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic), Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman), Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm/The Human Torch) and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm/Thing).
Shakman and the cast shared some tasty details about the film, which will pit the Core Four against the supervillains Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), who have their sights set on Earth. A real-life Fantasticar then flew over the crowd, emphasizing the retro-future 1960s vibe. Shakman also shared a teaser reel of the film, which showed the Core Four’s astronaut outfits, a massive spaceship, and a glimpse of Galactus hovering over Earth. The film’s score will come from Oscar-winner Michael Giacchino.
There was another particular detail that Shakman shared that stood out—the design of Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s The Thing, the rock-skinned giant that has been played in the past by Jamie Bell in 2015’s Fantastic Four and Michael Chiklis in 2005’s Fantastic Four and 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. The technology has improved so vastly since the last two iterations of the Thing that Shakman and his creative team knew they were coming in with an ability to render him more realistically than ever before.
“We want to be true to comics but we also want to be true to life,” Shakman said during the panel. “We talked to scientists, we talked to animal experts, we talked to everybody. We went out into the desert to find the best rock to make the Thing right.”
Capturing the Thing in a way that both honors the comics and reveals deeper nuances and more biological realism than we’ve seen in the character before will certainly be a challenge, but it’s one the MCU has been doing for a long time. The method for conjuring a realistic Thing will include motion capture technology, the same process that Mark Ruffalo underwent during all his years of playing the Hulk. To this end, Moss-Bachrach received a very helpful message: “I got a really nice text message from Mark Ruffalo just to demystify the process of motion capture because I’ve never done it before,” Moss-Bachrach said. “He sent a long, generous text message taking a way a bit of how I was scared of the technology.”
The Fantastic Four: First Steps touches down in theaters on July 25, 2025.
For more on The Fantastic Four: First Steps, check out these stories:
“And that’s a wrap,” Superman writer/director James Gunn wrote in a post shared early Monday evening. “God bless our cast and crew whose commitment, creativity, and hard work have brought this project to life.”
The image Gunn shared reveals the cast’s first week of shooting in Svalbard, Norway when they began the journey of rebooting the most iconic DC character for Gunn and Peter Safran’s new DC Studios. Superman will be the first major feature from the revamped studio, kicking off what they’re calling “Chapter 1: Gods & Monsters,” a slate of films and TV series that will unveil their vision for a freshly unified DC Universe.
Gunn’s Superman has been an international production, filming in Svalbard, Norway, Cleveland and Cincinnati, Ohio, Atlanta, Georgia, and elsewhere. The film stars David Corenswet as Clark Kent/Superman, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, Wendell Pierce as Perry White, Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher, Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific, Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, Anthony Carrigan as Metamorpho, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, María Gabriela de Faría as The Engineer, and Gunn’s longtime collaborator Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner.
Corenswet becomes only the fourth person to play Superman on screen, joining Christopher Reeve, who played him from 1978 to 1987, beginning with Richard Donner’s iconic Superman—which inspired Gunn to lop Legacy off his own title—Brandon Routh in a 2006 reboot, and most recently, Henry Cavill for Zack Snyder’s film, beginning with Man of Steel in 2013 and through Batman v. Superman and Justice League.
Superman is set to premiere on July 11, 2025.
Here’s Gunn’s post:
And that’s a wrap.
God bless our cast and crew whose commitment, creativity, and hard work have brought this project to life. I set out to make a movie about a good man in a world that isn’t always so much. And the goodness and kindness and love I’ve encountered on a daily basis… pic.twitter.com/9Y52HEVXpF
Spoiler alert for those of you who haven’t seen Deadpool & Wolverine, which is now playing in theaters.
Channing Tatum spent years trying to get a film made in which he’d star as Gambit, the explosive card-dealing member of the X-Men first created by writer Chris Claremont and artist Jim Lee and introduced in “The Uncanny X-Men” in 1990. Gambit was a key member of the X-Men the beloved 1990s animated series X-Men: The Animated Series that ran from 1992 to 1997 (a sequel series, X-Men: 97, is streaming on Disney+), andTatum worked for four years trying to give the character a proper standalone film with producer Reid Carolin, but the project was scuttled when Disney acquired Fox in 2019. Then, years later, Ryan Reynolds gave him a shot at suiting up as the Louisianan mutant with a knack for conjuring kinetic energy.
Tatum took to Twitter to share side-by-side images of him and Reynolds at Comic-Con—the first was nearly ten years ago, when Reynolds first debuted Deadpool, and the second was this past weekend when Deadpool & Wolverine opened to staggering, record-breaking numbers and Tatum debuted as Gambit in a delightful, fairly meaty cameo.
These pictures are almost 10 years apart to the day. I sat in the audience when Ryan Reynolds showed his first peek of Deadpool 1 to the world and I think I ran back stage right after and found him and I think I just hugged him and was like holy shit you did it man. It’s perfect.… pic.twitter.com/B5viY2f7nl
“I will owe him probably forever,” Tatum said in his post. “Cause I’m not sure how I could ever do something that would be equal to what this has meant to me. I love ya buddy.”
Tatum was one of several high-profile actors to make a cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine, joining Chris Evans (not as Captain America, but as Fantastic Four member Johnny Storm), Jennifer Garner (reprising her role of Elektra), and Wesley Snipes (reprising his role as Blade). Gambit, Elektra, Blade, and Laura (Dafne Keen) are all hiding out in the Void, the cosmic wasteland where the Time Variance Authority sends people they think are a threat to the Sacred Timeline, where villain Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) rules supreme.
“All things happen for a reason,” Tatum wrote. “I’m so grateful to be in this movie. It’s a masterpiece in my opinion. And just pure bad ass joy. I was literally screaming in the theater. LFG!!”
For more on Deadpool & Wolverine, check out these stories:
Featured image: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – JULY 25: Channing Tatum speaks onstage during “Marvel Studios: The Ultimate Deadpool & Wolverine Celebration Of Life” panel during 2024 Comic-Con International at San Diego Convention Center on July 25, 2024 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)
Sing Sing screenwriters Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley are unusual, even in the world of indies. They immerse themselves in the world of the story they want to tell for years, in this case a drama program in a maximum-security prison. They surround professional performers like Colman Domingo in the case of Sing Sing, with real-life inhabitants of that world, with a seamless naturalism that straddles documentary and narrative filmmaking. And everyone is a full partner in the production. Actors, producers, and crew all get paid the same, and all get the same share of the movie’s revenues. They do this because they think it is fair. More important to them is how literal ownership of the project brings everyone together.
Speaking withThe Credits, Kwedar, who also directed, Bentley, producer Monique Walton, and formerly incarcerated-turned-actors John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield, Sean ‘Dino’ Johnson, and Jon Adrian ‘JJ’ Velazquez talked about what arts programs can do, including how the recidivism rate for participants in the program is just 3 percent, compared to over 60 percent for the rest of the imprisoned people, and more.
Greg, I understand that you worked on this script for many years, and then it suddenly came together for you. What was the turning point?
Kwedar: That didn’t happen until about six years into our development process. The work that Clint and I have done over our careers together inherently takes time because of the process of building stories from the dirt up. We like to spend time in the community, listen, and let the story be born from that. It can take a few years to finally have that happen, to get that breakthrough. You could make a movie about every one of the men in this film, and so in earlier drafts, we tried to do that, telling all the stories. It was a process of finding its focus. Finally, we had this revelation that the best way to speak to the community of this program while having something to really attach to is to tell the story of a friendship. Once that was apparent to us, a lot synthesized from all the years, it literally fell out onto the page in a treatment in about 15 minutes. At the very bottom of that, I wrote, “Coleman Domingo as Divine G.”
Greg Kweder and Colman Domingo on the set of “Sing Sing.” Courtesy A24
You combine experienced, trained, professional actors with cast members who have the real-life experience of the people they are playing but are new to acting, or at least acting on film. How does that work?
Bentley: There’s always an amazing alchemy that happens when we put those two folks together. It’s not just that the trained actor comes in and carries these other folks along. It’s that they both learn from each other and grow from each other in different ways. We saw it on Jockey, and we saw it here a lot of times. There’s something about stepping into drama and dramaturgy, with actors channeling the interiority and depth of these feelings and things happening within the program that help transcend to a higher plane of truth. What’s beautiful about this process is the space for the world to breathe into it and have moments that, we always say, never could have been written but only lived. It’s how those dance together that leads us to an understanding that we couldn’t have arrived at with its independent parts.
Coleman Domingo stars in “Sing Sing.” Courtesy A24.
How complicated was implementing your unusual revenue share and selling it to your financial partners?
Walton: Looking for a fresh idea, it was a compelling invitation. Can we think about this differently? Greg always talked about, let’s fully erase the hierarchy. That affected everything. Even in the structure of a budget, a film budget is typically above or below the line. He said, “I don’t want my budget to have a line. Take it out.” And I was like, “I don’t know how to do that. It’s a program. It’s built that way. You want me to go into the code?” Ultimately, when it’s shared, it’s one of those ideas people start to think about. Because your instinct is like, “Oh, that could never work. But then we did it, and it worked.”
Kwedar: And what that starts to do is migrating a team of artists from an employee to a partner mindset. And once you’re like an actual stakeholder in the work, the transformative act of that has everyone saying, “If I’m ever going to empty the tank on a project, if I’m ever going to put it all on the line, I’ll do it for one that I feel like really belongs to me.” Particularly within this film, the majority of our cast being formerly incarcerated and bringing their own life story to the project, to have literal ownership over their own story, speaks very loudly to all of us in the process of making it, particularly for the men who really lived it.
Bentley: It is not that hard of a pitch to our partners because it’s not like charity. We joke that it’s a table where both capitalists and communists can sit down together and eat from the same plate. It just makes it an easier pitch to investors because you’re not asking them to do something that doesn’t work in their favor. It’s a way of making budgets more approachable in a place where every other budget is inflating so radically it is almost unsustainable; it allows investors to trust the filmmakers, and when the risk is lower, we can be bolder in the work. It actually brings artists and investors together to finally be able to see each other eye-to-eye.
Coleman Domingo stars in “Sing Sing.” Courtesy A24.
How did you first get involved with Rehabilitation Through the Arts?
Johnson: I’m one of the founding members. Someone approached me in the yard and said, “Hey man, we want to get a couple of people together and start a theater program.” I thought it was a joke. Because we’re in a maximum security facility. I’m not running around with tights telling you what to be or not to be, you know? And show you how shallow my understanding of theater was; it was amazing because we came together as a community, and the more we read scripts and got into it, the more we started connecting with one another. We all realized how much we had in common. And it was an escape from the lifestyle of prison. It was an escape mentally, physically, and emotionally, you know.
Coleman Domingo stars in “Sing Sing.” Courtesy A24.
In the film, we see the men’s unconditional support for each other. How is that created through the program?
Whitfield: It was built into the program. As founding members, Dean and I are the architects of our steering committee. So, when we interviewed individuals when they came into the program, we set the stage to let them know that you have to be a risk-taker for new behaviors because we are thinking outside the box. We prepared them and worked on them to make them understand that this was healthy for us and that this was work we had to do. You had to be an adventurous person when you came into RTA. So, it was kind of woven into the whole program. It was a struggle for some. Because it was new behaviors that were totally out of their range or out of their familiarity at the point of the experience. But as time progressed, guys started taking off the layers of the armor, layer by layer. Like peeling an onion, taking it off. It feels a little uncomfortable, but the more you get to the root of it, the guys start to understand.
Coleman Domingo and Clarence Maclin on the set of “Sing Sing.” Courtesy A24
Why do the men in the program call each other “Beloved?”
Whitfield: It was to get away from the n-word that people used even as a term of affection. When you have a historical comprehension of how dangerous and devastating it is and how much harm, destruction, murder, maim, and chaos that’s equated with that word, you have to come up with a way to combat it. And that was our way of trying to combat the use of that word, creating a substitute that would also tell guys that, listen, this word is not socially appropriate. It’s a harmful word. We also did a little more than just use the word Beloved. It is not in the movie, but if someone gets caught using the n-word out of habit, they have to acknowledge that they made a mistake and do 20 push-ups.
What do you want people to learn from this film?
Velasquez: I would love for them to walk away with a deeper understanding of the full and complex humanity of people incarcerated and understand that these are human beings. Human beings, when given the right equipment, the right ingredients, and the right circumstances, change. There is the power within humans to change, no matter where they’re at, no matter what’s going on. We are human beings, and we all can change.
Featured image: Coleman Domingo stars in “Sing Sing.” Courtesy A24.
When she helmed the first episode of Star Trek: Picard in 2020, director Hanelle M. Culpepper made history as the first woman to launch a Star Trek series. She went on to win the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series for that project. This, along with her work on shows like Westworld, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, Kung Fu, and Star Trek: Discovery, led her to land on the 2023 IndieWire “TV Directors to Know” list. With the release of The Acolyte, for which she directed the 6th episode and the season finale, Culpepper is officially the first director to direct in both the Star Wars and Star Trek episodic universes.
The Acolyte, created by executive producer and showrunner Leslye Headland for Disney+, stars Amandla Stenberg in the dual roles of sisters Osha and Mae. Twins separated in their youth, conflict arises when their home is destroyed after an encounter with Jedis, and Osha is saved by Jedi Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) and learns the ways of the Force, while Mae is initially believed to have died during the tragedy. Mae’s reappearance and her use of the dark side of the Force to track down those Jedis she finds culpable for her childhood tragedy set the two sisters on a collision course. Culpepper was charged with helming the finale, in which the truth of their childhood tragedy is revealed, and the sisters are forced to make terrible decisions about their own fates and the fates of the characters we have come to know.
Culpepper’s next high-profile project is Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, for which she directs and acts as executive producer. She also recently shot for Hulu’s upcoming episodic political thriller Paradise City,which reteams This is Us alum Sterling K Brown with its creator Dan Fogelman as the series lead and showrunner.
One of few women of color working consistently in the film and TV industry, Culpepper is steadfast in her commitment to raising up other female filmmakers and diverse voices. This year, she was named the guest artistic director of the AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women. Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, the program is a tuition-free year-long intensive that educates traditionally underrepresented filmmakers.
The Credits spoke to Culpepper about her work on The Acolyte and her incredibly busy 2024.
You made history by directing on the small screen for the Star Trek and Star Wars universes. As a longtime fan, what were you most excited to tackle?
With Star Wars, it was definitely my chance to do a space chase and a lightsaber battle. I was also really excited to work with Amandla. She’s been someone I’ve been a fan of since The Hunger Games, so there was that, too. Just being invited to play in that world was so exciting. With Star Trek, it was probably working with Sir Patrick Stewart and developing the costumes.
Can you talk about the experience of filming Amandla Stenberg as twins in the series?
I’ve had to work with one actor playing two roles quite often. It keeps popping up. In this case, the character had already been established, so Amandla had worked out the physical differences in how they move and that sort of thing. I decided what shots would be with the acting double, which shots would be a techno dolly so that we could have her on both sides, and which ones would end up being a face replacement. For the fight in Episode 8, we knew there would probably be a lot of face replacement, so Amandla had to learn both sides of the fight. She has to shoot both sides, as does her acting body double, who was Shanice Archer. The next big choice is to determine which character Amandla is going to play first because that has a lot of effect in that, even though I come up with a blocking plan, things change organically as they’re in the scene, so if she’s playing one character, you want to make sure the acting double is doing what feels right as well. So I would figure out which one I thought she should play first and run that by her. That became the plan for the day because the hair, costume, and makeup are different, so everyone needs to know. We’d rehearse, and Amandla would watch Shanice, who was amazing. They had a lot of instincts that were completely aligned. which is rare.
What was your experience balancing visual effects with character development in The Acolyte, and how did that differ from your experience working in the Star Trek universe on Picard and Discovery?
There were way more in Star Trek. Alex Kurtzman loves visual effects. On The Acolyte, Leslye really wanted the show to feel like the original first three Star Wars movies, so we used practical effects as much as we could.
Hanelle M. Culpepper on the set of “The Acolyte.” Courtesy Disney+
You have a very big deal project coming up that’s currently in postproduction, Anansi Boys. What can you tell us about the mini-series, which is based on the Neil Gaiman novel and, again, has an actor playing two roles?
It’s supposed to be coming out later this year. It’s been a long time in post. Visual effects were challenging, but we’re all very excited about it. Malachi Kirby was the one that I worked with to figure out both characters, and they feel so distinct, so I really think the audience is going to enjoy meeting both Charlie and Spider. We’ve done some really cool things with bringing stuff like the shadow world to life. What has always been tricky with Anansi Boys is balancing the various tones, which the book has as well. It has romance, comedy, and drama; it’s a family story, a love story, and so many things at once. I feel like we managed to nail it, so I really hope the audiences love the show as much as we all do.
You were named the Guest Artistic Director of this year’s AFI Directing Workshop for Women. What have been your directives there?
First, I was so honored when they asked me. I always want to give back because I credit so much of my career back to being a part of the AFI DWW. I’ve tapped my resources to put together various panels, workshops, and classes, together with the women who are running the program right now and some AFI teachers, to give the eight participating people all the support they need. We’ve been focusing on what they needed leading up to production. I also paired each one with an alum so they have their own mentor and “call a friend.” I’m also their “call a friend” if anything comes up, but I wanted to have someone specific to them. What we’ll do next is really focus on some workshops and panels on the post process, getting your film out there, and growing your career.
What did you learn from your own experience with workshops that you put into practice for the DWW?
One example that really worked well is I remember taking Lesli Linka Glatter’s class on blocking, where she gave us a scene, and we all did our own blocking, and then we saw how she did it. We all had from five to seven shots, but then she showed us her clip and did it in one shot. So with the group this year, they came and said, “we’ve gotten all this great information, but we still feel weak on blocking”, and the timing turned out to be perfect. I was shooting Paradise City, and I had a complicated scene coming up. And so Hulu and Dan Fogelman, the producers of Paradise City, allowed me to give my team one of the scripts, one of the scenes that I was going to shoot, and a floor plan for the set. I gave that to them and told them to come up with their blocking and shot list. We met ahead of time and talked through what everybody did, then we got to go on the set, and they were able to try out their blocking there, and they were able to watch me do my own blocking. They were able to see me go through the process of how I was figuring it out and then stay and watch as I did my rehearsal with the actors. They saw how that changed the dynamic and then saw me working out the shots with my DP. They could see that whole process, and then once the show goes out, they’ll see how that scene ended up getting edited. They loved it, and they learned so much. It was also cool for them to be on the Paramount lot. I was learning the whole time, too. You learn from watching other people think things through. Hearing other perspectives always grows you as a director.
All episodes of The Acolyte are streaming now on Disney+.
While the superhero world got a major surprise this past weekend at San Diego’s Comic-Con with the news that Robert Downey Jr. was returning to the MCU as iconic villain Dr. Doom, there was plenty of news about Dr. Doom’s biggest adversaries, the Fantastic Four, who are getting a reboot from director Matt Shakman. The first bit of news? The Fantastic Four has an official title: The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
The core four headlining First Steps are Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic (Dr. Doom’s obsessed with proving he’s better than Reed in the comics, by the way), Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing, and Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/The Human Torch.
Shakman revealed the new title at Comic-Con, along with a teaser reel, which included a look at the core four in astronaut outfits, a massive spaceship, and a glimpse of the supervillain Galactus, played by Ralph Ineson, hovering over Earth. Then, to the added delight of the audience, Shakman introduced Pascal, Kirby, Quinn, and Moss-Bachrach, who weren’t supposed to be able to be there in person as filming is set to begin in the UK on Monday.
It was also revealed that the Fantastic Four cast will appear in the upcoming Avengers movies, Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. We now know that Downey will be the big bad in both those films, but little is known about how he might factor into The Fantastic Four: First Steps, if it all, given that Ineson is playing the film’s villain.
Joining the core four are Paul Walter Hauser and Natasha Lyonne in undisclosed roles, with Julia Garner set to play Shalla-Bal, a version of Silver Surfer. Thanks to Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige, we know the movie will be a period piece set in the 1960s. Shakman is directing from a script by Eric Pearson, Josh Friedman, Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps will open Marvel’s Phase Six on July 25, 2025. Also set to premiere are Blade (November 7, 2025), Avengers: Doomsday (May 1, 2026), and Avengers: Secret Wars (May 7, 2027).
For more on The Fantastic Four, check out these stories:
Spoiler Alert! If you haven’t seen Deadpool & Wolverine yet, you probably want to skip this article.
Deadpool & Wolverine is a bonafide blockbuster. The Ryan Reynolds/Hugh Jackman two-hander pulled past the $200 million mark in its domestic opening, a shocking haul for an R-rated film. In fact, Deadpool & Wolverine bested the previous champion of the R-rated opening weekend, the first Deadpool, which pulled in $133.7 million in 2016. Nobody breaks the fourth wall harder or with more F-bombs than Ryan Reynolds’ potty-mouthed antihero.
Reynolds now has three successful outings to show for rejiggering and rebooting the character (he played a version of Deadpool in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but that was an entirely different, far less funny iteration), but it was a stroke of genius to bring Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine on board. Despite dying at the end of 2017’s Logan—which Reynolds and his Deadpool & Wolverine co-writers Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Zeb Wells make great hay about—Jackman’s Logan, well, an iteration of Logan, is hauled from his sad sack universe where he’s a pariah and far from a hero into Deadpool’s storyline to help him save his own world. Their journey, which includes fighting each other in comically brutal fashion before finally taking their aggression out on bad guys, zig-zags across Marvel history and pulls in some well-known faces from previous franchises, some from more than two decades ago, for what was a consistently surprising parade of cameos.
Let’s have a look at the biggest cameos of them all:
Jon Favreau: Favreau’s Happy Hogan is one of the first cameos we get in a flashback scene when Deadpool applies to join the Avengers and is gently but thoroughly rebuffed.
Henry Cavill: In an early, delightful surprise, Cavill turns up as a Wolverine variant, the Cavillrine. He looks very, very right in the role. Cavill was, of course, Superman during Zack Snyder’s run with DC. There’s also all the scuttlebutt over the fact that Cavill does a little nod—via his shoulders and arms—to his most iconic fight scene ever in Mission: Impossible – Fallout in his brief but potent cameo, the moment before he beats the stuffing out of Deadpool.
Chris Evans: But not as Captain America, mind you; instead, Deadpool and Wolverine come across Evans’ version of Johnny Storm, aka the Human Torch, from his very first outing as a superhero in Fox’s Fantastic Four. Deadpool and Wolverine find Johnny in the Void, where a slew of pre-Disney acquisition characters are marooned. (The Void is where the Time Variance Authority drops anyone it deems a threat to the Sacred Timeline, which is why the villain Cassandra Nova, played by Emma Corrin, is there). In the upcoming The Fantastic Four, the Human Torch will be played by Stranger Things star Joseph Quinn.
Tyler Mane: Mane reprises his role from 2000’s X-Men as Sabretooth, Wolverine’s arch nemesis and usually an equal match in a fight. However, when they face off early on in Deadpool & Wolverine, Wolverine decapitates him with a single stroke.
Ray Park: Park returns as Toad, another character from 2000’s X-Men, and alongside Sabretooth is one of Cassandra Nova’s henchmen.
Jennifer Garner: Garner reprises her role of Elektra, the expert warrior and assassin who she played in 2003’s Daredevil, opposite Ben Affleck’s blind superhero, and again in 2005’s Elektra. When Deadpool “pays his respects” to the Marvel characters who apparently haven’t survived in the Void, including Elektra’s former partner in fighting crime, Daredevil, Garner’s Elektra quips, “Oh, it’s fine.”
Wesley Snipes: Snipes reprising his role of Blade was, for us, the biggest surprise of them all. Snipes first played the character in 1998’s Blade and its two subsequent sequels, including 2004’s Blade: Trinity, where he shared the screen with Ryan Reynolds (who played Hannibal King), and the two weren’t, shall we say, best buds back then. Marvel is in the process of rebooting the character with Mahershala Ali, but that’s been slow going, and Snipes even got in a joke about it: “There’s only one Blade. There’s only ever gonna be one Blade.”
Channing Tatum: Okay, perhaps Channing Tatum as Gambit was an even bigger surprise than seeing Snipes, but that’s only because, despite Tatum’s efforts to make that happen, we’ve never actually gotten to see Tatum in the role of the mutant. Deadpool gets in a lot of jokes about having no idea what the Cajun cardsharp is saying.
Dafne Keen: Keen reprises her role as Laura, or X-23, the young mutant that Wolverine sacrifices himself for in Logan. She plays a huge role in this film, as she eventually convinces Logan to stop being a mope and help Deadpool and the rest of the team take on Cassandra Nova.
Blake Lively: As she hinted, Blake Lively is, in fact, Ladypool, voicing the character.
Matthew McConaughey: He briefly voices Cowboy Deadpool, or the Deadpool Kid, the western gun-slinger variant from Earth-1108.
Ryan Reynolds: Yup, Reynolds also played one of the Deadpool variants, Nicepool, whose puppy Dogpool is the apple to the regular, raunchy, rude Deadpool’s eye. Nicepool has long, flowing locks, drives a Honda Odyssey, and is very helpful, calm, and sure enough, Kind. But, alas, he doesn’t have Deadpool’s regenerative abilities, and this proves to be a problem.
Wunmi Mosaku: Mosaku’s Hunter B-15 from Loki appears at the film’s end, helping Deadpool and Wolverine tidy up loose ends after they foil Mr. Paradox’s plot. A romance brews between her and Rob Delaney’s Peterpool.
For more on Deadpool & Wolverine, check out these stories:
It was one of Comic-Con’s biggest, if not the biggest, surprises—Robert Downey Jr. was revealed to be taking on the role of Marvel’s most iconic villain, Dr. Doom, in the two upcoming Avengers movies. Downey was, of course, the face of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for a decade as Iron Man, inarguably the biggest star in a galaxy of them whose performance as Tony Stark in the very first Iron Man catapulted Marvel Studios into the cinematic juggernaut it is today. Downey Jr.’s time as Tony Stark came to a noble end in Avengers: Endgame, as he sacrificed himself to take out Thanos (Josh Brolin) and save the universe. While there have been whispers about whether he’d return to the fold, and he’d even mentioned how he’d be open to it considering how deeply he came to know and love the role of Tony Stark, very few people could have imagined this kind of return. It was a proper shockwave that spread throughout Hall H in San Diego as the crowd and the reporters absorbed the news.
The Downey Jr. shocker followed another major announcement from Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige when he revealed that the Russo Brothers would return to the MCU to direct Avengers 5 and 6 during the end of a Marvel Studios panel at Comic-Con on Saturday. The fifth film, formerly titled Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, has been rewritten and retitled—now it’s Avengers: Doomsday, which makes it clear that Dr. Doom, widely considered the most potent villain in the entire Marvel canon, would finally be making his MCU entrance. The Russo brothers said “there is one very important character required to do Secret Wars justice,” and said they’d need “the greatest actor in the world” to play Doctor Doom. That’s when the Russo Brothers revealed that Dr. Doom would be played by none other than Downey Jr., once again wearing armor but now for a very different purpose, with Downey Jr. taking the stage alongside a bevy of Dr. Dooms. Perhaps this was a meta nod, as there’s speculation that this Dr. Doom will be a Tony Stark variant.
“New mask, same task,” Downey said as he emerged onto the panel’s stage. “What did I tell ya? I like playing complicated characters.”
It will be a while before we know how the Russo Brothers and Marvel plan to use one of the most famous actors on the planet, the face of the MCU for a decade, in a completely new role. What’s more, Victor von Doom is horribly scarred in the comics (although he was healed in the comic iterations of “Secret Wars” in 1984 and 2015), so if Marvel were going with that version of Dr. Doom, they’d be messing with one of the most recognizable faces in the world and the man whose character arc as Iron Man was more or less perfect.
The comics have a lot of rich material to seed any number of potential Dooms for Downey to play with. There was even a 12-issue run of comics in which Dr. Doom became the Infamous Iron Man, in a story by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev, where he tried to redeem himself in the wake of Tony Stark’s death. Thus far, Downey Jr.’s been confirmed to play Doom in just two films, Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, but one imagines that Dr. Doom will have some part to play in director Matt Shakman’s upcoming The Fantastic Four, which is the reboot of Marvel’s first family and Dr. Doom’s biggest adversaries.
There’s also speculation that Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars will use the original “Marvel Super Hero Secret Wars” manga as source material. It was on these pages that Dr. Doom became the biggest, worst villain of them all. Dropping Downey Jr. into the first new Avengers film since Endgame as the villain does pose some significant challenges, especially that it won’t give him, or fans, a few films to get to know just who Victor von Doom is and how and why he became Dr. Doom. It’s a challenge Marvel is no doubt willing and ready to accept, and they’re banking on their secret weapon from the original launch of the MCU, the face that launched the movie’s biggest franchise machine.
Avengers: Doomsday is set to hit theaters sometime in 2026.
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Featured image: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – JULY 27: Robert Downey Jr. speaks onstage during the Marvel Studios Panel in Hall H at SDCC in San Diego, California on July 27, 2024. (Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney)
