With Deadpool & Wolverineslashing its way toward its July 26 premiere, its director, Shawn Levy, remains a very busy man. He’s got the final season of Stranger Things on his dance card—he’s directing two episodes and executive producing, which will carry him into 2025. This was the initial reason why Levy, when offered the opportunity to possibly direct the next Avengers movie, had to turn it down. Now, things have changed a bit.
Sources have told The Hollywood Reporter that with the shifts in development for the upcoming Avengers film, which has been changed dramatically as it will no longer focus on Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror, now makes it possible for Levy to direct. He’s not the only director in contention for the job, but Levy’s a hot commodity, and Marvel is clearly pleased with his work on their one and only 2024, the big ticket team-up of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in Deadpool & Wolverine.
The timetable for the fifth Avengers film shifted by several months as the script was being re-written, and with that shift, Marvel reengaged with Levy about the project. Loki creator Michael Waldron has written the recent drafts, while the previous director, Destin Daniel Cretton, departed this past November.
Levy has previously directed Night at the Museum, Real Steel, Free Guy, and The Adam Project (the latter two starring Reynolds). He’s also been a major force on Netflix’s Stranger Things. Now that he’s in the Marvel Studios family with Deadpool & Wolverine, it would make plenty of sense for the studio to want to keep him around for what will be one of the most crucial films in their Phase Six.
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You know the old adage, made famous by Ridley Scott’s original Alien, that in space, no one can you hear scream? You can be sure there will be screams aplenty in director Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus, an interquel that bridges the gap between Scott’s 1979 game changer and James Cameron’s fantastic 1986 sequel Aliens.
Alvarez’s film has the distinction of having been approved by both Scott and Cameron. Romulus is centered on a crew of young space colonists who come into contact with a fearsome Xenomorph, the acid-spewing, multiple-mouthed creature that literally burst onto the scene in Scott’s original. In Alien, we got an incredible performance from Sigourney Weaver as the indomitable Ellen Ripley, who battled and eventually vanquished a Xenomorph after a grueling duel aboard the USCSS Nostromo. Cameron picked up the story seven years later and followed a battle-hardened Ripley, now a part of a military mission to a space colony to investigate a fresh xenomorph attack. Romulus is set between these two films and boasts an ensemble of young performers led by Cailee Spaeny, Isabela Merced, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu.
The trailer reveals Spaeny’s Rain Carradine making a fateful decision; she wants out of her boring life and into something a little more eventful. So, she jumps aboard a ship that will end up being a house of horrors, including a chest-busting alien that brings us all the way back to the original Alien.
Check out the trailer below. Alien: Romulus hits theaters on August 16.
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A pioneer of animation in Thailand, producer Auchara Kijkanjanas is no stranger to copyright infringement. The founder and head of Big Brain Studio produced the nation’s first big animation hit, which was pirated shortly after it was released. Hence, Kijkanjanas takes both personal and professional satisfaction from witnessing the changes in attitude and behavior toward intellectual property that have occurred in subsequent years. She also holds out hope that something like Thailand’s generous and successful production incentives for live-action projects from overseas might one day be introduced for the animation sector.
The absence of a domestic animation industry meant that Kijkanjanas took a roundabout route to the sector she was instrumental in creating. After studying architecture and developing an interest in art, she opted for a degree in industrial design, which she felt contained elements of both.
Realizing she would have to go abroad to achieve what she was really aiming for, Kijkanjanas headed for Houston, Texas, to study English. That was followed by a master’s degree in computer graphics design at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York State, where she encountered real animated graphics for the first time.
After additional animation training in New York, Kijkanjanas returned to Thailand in 1990 and secured a role that allowed her to learn how to operate 3-D graphic specialist machines. After honing her craft on commercials and VFX for films, she began working as an artist and producer in the nascent domestic animation field.
“Advances in animation ran in parallel with the progress of the computer hardware and software,” she noted.
At Kantana Animation Studios, a division of Kantana, Thailand’s biggest film and television production company, Kijkanjanas began producing her first long-form, 24-part animation series, Zon 100%, in 2001. Series director Kompin Kemgumnird had also studied and worked in the US, including as an animator on Atlantis:The Lost Empire, Tarzan, and Ice Age.
Kijkanjanas and Kemgumnird teamed up again on Blue Elephant (Khan Kluay), which became Thailand’s first computer-animated feature in 2006. Based on a historical tale of war elephants during the 16th-century Burmese-Siamese War, the film took the domestic box office crown that year, landed awards at international film festivals, and put Thai animation on the map. It still holds the record for the highest-grossing Thai animated feature and spawned a 2009 sequel.
“Being the first feature of its kind, theaters didn’t give Blue Elephant many screens when it was first released,” said Kijkanjanas. “But a lot of people wanted to see it.”
This combination of high demand and a lack of awareness at the time around protecting IP set the stage for a major setback.
“I was in the office early when I got a call from a young guy who asked if I was the producer of the film. He told me he felt bad for me, and when I asked why, he said there were guys selling pirated DVDs in the market. I almost fainted.”
Kijkanjanas says revenue took a hit because of the pirated copies, though the film went on to show on more screens and had a long theatrical run. As that run was nearing its end, she received another unexpected call.
“A lady called to complain that there were no subtitles on her DVD. I had to tell her the film was still showing in cinemas and that the master was in my hand, as I was about to send it to the home theater company that had bought the license. She had no idea her copy was pirated, of course.”
According to Kijkanjanas, people in Thailand didn’t really understand the concept of IP or piracy at the time. Education campaigns on the subject have been a game changer, she said. “Now it is not seen as cool to buy fake things.”
In 2012, she collaborated with Kemgumnird again on Southeast Asia’s first 3D stereoscopic animated feature, Adventure Planet (Echo Planet), whose English-language release featured the voices of Jane Lynch, Brooke Shields, and J.K. Simmons.
The following year, Kijkanjanas founded Big Brain Studio to give herself more freedom to create content. In addition to their own productions, the studio has partnered with India’s Toonz Media Group on a project and does commissions for corporate and academic entities in Thailand. Last year, animation fan Conan O’Brien visited the studio while filming the Thailand episode for the recently premiered Conan O’Brien Must Go travel show on HBO Max.
Though Blue Elephant did receive some government subsidies, Kijkanjanas says that the animation sector doesn’t see the kind of incentives that have brought several high-profile international TV and movie shoots to Thailand. “We are jealous of the Malaysian animation industry as it gets a lot of support from the government there.”
Kijkanjanas believes this is partly due to the long timeframes involved in animation productions, meaning it can be years before the results are seen. “But I hope someday they [the Thai government] will realize the value of animation; I’m still waiting for that.”
Looking ahead, Kijkanjanas eagerly anticipates her daughter’s return home after nine years of working in Japanese anime. She hopes she will leverage her knowledge for the domestic industry. As for Big Brain, her mission is to keep “making animation for our kids to watch that has both Thai and international flavors to it.”
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George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Story has given us the best action sequence of the year, a relentless, 15-minute literal thrill ride that pits a young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy), her War Rig mentor Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), and some assorted War Boys against the onslaught of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and his Biker Horde. This includes the Mortiflyers, a team of motorcyclists who get airborne using a number of inventive techniques, including huge fans and paragliders.
Following the relentless action and success of 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, Miller’s Furiosa doesn’t skimp on the action while also covering a whole lot more ground and time (years, in fact) than its tightly wound successor, which introduced the world to Charlize Theron’s indomitable Furiosa. Miller reassembled a ton of his Fury Road creatives, and that includes Dutch composer Tom Holkenborg (aka Junkie XL), who provides Furiosa with a sound suitable to the Wastelands and the murderous men—and resilient women—who live and die there.
In an interview with The Credits, Holkenborg discusses deploying the duduk and didgeridoo, buying additional “instruments” at a hardware store, utilizing silence as a part of music, and which family member can be heard on the soundtrack.
How did you get started in music?
I just grew up in a family where everybody played instruments like it was the most normal thing to do. Since I started banging on the piano with my fists, my mom thought it was a good idea to give me a drum kit when I was seven. And so drums were my first instrument. Then, later, bass and guitar. I had violin lessons. I was playing the recorder. But by the time I was 14, I started working in a music store. I have to say, though, I’m not a master at any of them. I’m just a jack of all trades. I know a little bit about all these different instruments, and that’s what I love.
What do you compose on when you’re scoring a film?
It depends on the movie. For instance, when I was doing Fury Road, the first image that I saw was that guitar player [the Doof Warrior]. So, it makes sense to start with the guitar riff. And since the drummers were on the back of the truck, the drums came after that. But if you score a movie like Black Mass, which I did in 2015, that was like a cello, predominantly cello scores. So. you write it for a cello first. It totally depends on what the movie is and what is required for it.
I call myself a full-contact composer because I don’t want to be stuck behind two computer screens and an electronic keyboard to figure out what I’ll be writing. I have all this equipment in the studio here, I just like to turn knobs, move faders. up and down, play guitars, play bass—it’s right behind me, right there. I just love being physical with my instruments.
What was it like to come back to the Mad Max environment?
Oh, it’s fantastic. It’s like it never left me. Fury Road was a career-defining moment for me. It’s an action movie with rock and roll drums and rock and roll guitars and bass guitars, and the orchestra is like on speed, and everything sounds over the top and mangled with whatever tools. It took a while, but after about a year, I heard from people that the score was a fresh breeze of air in how you approach action. And so, it’s been a very special movie for me, and that’s why it was so special to return to that world.
Furiosa is just as action-packed as Fury Road, but the new film covers a lot more ground.
The first one was also pretty much shot in real time, except for a few breaks, all happening in 48 hours. This movie takes place over a period of 20 years. The first one used a third-person perspective approach. Furiosa is a first-person perspective score, so everything needs to be approached through her eyes. It’s quite different, but it’s the same world.
How does having everything seen through Furiosa’s eyes affect the way that you approach the score?
There’s a great music editor, Bob Battersby, that I’ve worked with on many, many movies before he retired. And he said to me, “Tom, never put more instruments in your arrangements that can fit in the room where the actors are.” So, if you have a discussion between two people in a kitchen, you wouldn’t use a 150-piece choir and orchestra. It made so much sense. So, if you score a movie with a very young girl, and when something really horrific is happening in front of her eyes, she’s not imagining a really emotional string piece. She doesn’t even know what strings are. But what she does feel is her heart pumping out of her chest and feeling sheer panic in her head, which has an impact on how you approach the score of things. It is apulse, which is more of a heartbeat approach. And since I was also one of the re-recording engineers on this movie, I was able to give it the sounds that George and I were looking for.
Secondly, the duduk and the didgeridoo keep reminding her of the Green Place, until she loses her arm. This time around, we needed way more of that duduk and didgeridoo because the Green Place actually still exists. Until Furiosa loses her arm with the astral body navigation on it, which means, okay, from that point forward, there is no Green Place for her. The reason I picked up the duduk and the didgeridoo is because they are both instruments that feel like Earth to me.
Third, it’s the incredibly aggressive sounds that we called The Darkest of Gods, From the Deepest of Hell, a characterization of which she’s witnessing the Dementors being that person until she becomes it herself at the end of the movie.
The fourth element is the typical repurposed instruments we used for Fury Road: the percussion, the mangled strings, and the metal sounds. So, it was quite a different approach on this one, and it took way longer in the movie itself to get to the point where that sound is warranted.
What kind of conversations did you have about the score with George Miller?
George told me, “You have to be very, very sparse with what we would call traditional music or traditional emotional music because she’s not there at any point anywhere in the movie yet.” With Fury Road, it was like 50-50. In this movie, it was more like 10 percent, 90 percent. So, 10 percent of the orchestral players were playing the proper notes I had notated. And 90 percent of them were just experimental sessions with each other in a room and very experimental notation. None of these performances would ever be the same because you’re leaving a lot of interpretation up to the players. It was really fun to do that. And when we were done with the recordings, we would take these mixes. Sometimes, I would use them in their natural sounds and sprinkle them throughout the movie. I would then take these recordings and, through this incredible Buchla synthesizer system developed in Berkeley, California, in the 1960s, create even weirder sounds out of it and again. There’s this everlasting rise. You don’t feel it stop, and it feels like it’s rising over and over and over again. That’s used in all the tense moments. I would also like to say, one powerful tool a composer has is not when to write music, but when not to write music. That was also a big part of the concept in this movie.
Much like Fury Road, it felt like the music was being played on the machinery I saw in the movie.
Repurposed instruments were obviously a massive quest for Fury Road, and so I did so much recording on my own. We rented a massive truck from U-Haul and went to Home Depot, where we bought absolutely everything that looked like metal: sledgehammers, pipes, the kitchen sink, metal toilets, you name it. All these recordings describe the world; they don’t describe one character.They just describe the world and the wasteland that we’re in. So, obviously, this is taking place in that same wasteland. Just a different story, but it’s still the same wasteland. It made sense to use all those recordings again but pick the things we hadn’t used so much on Fury Road.
Can you give me an example?
When Furiosa is sitting in the cave with Praetorian Jack, and he fixes her shoulder, it’s that first moment of warmth. And you can see clearly in the movie that she’s very, very hesitant to even open up the tiniest bit to him. Therefore, the music had to be very restrained in its emotional quality because it’s not like a love affair, and you start with all your violins. They don’t even know what violins are.
Your dog was on the soundtrack of Fury Road. Any other members of the household we can hear in Furiosa?
You can hear a recording of my oldest son’s heartbeat from before he was born.
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Featured image: Caption: War Boys in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland
Elle Fanning is ready to take on the universe’s most lethal hunter.
The star of Hulu’s series The Great is trading in her royal robes in 18th-century Russia for Dan Trachtenberg’s upcoming Predator film Badlands, the sequel to his 2022 hit Prey, which starred Amber Midthunder as Naru, a young Comanche woman in 1719 fighting back against one of the first Predators to reach earth. Prey was a huge hit for Hulu, breaking viewing records for the streamer at the time of release.
“Prey.” Courtesy 20th Century Studios/Hulu
For Badlands, Trachtenberg has reunited with his Prey screenwriter Patrick Aison to craft a story that is reportedly not set in the past like Prey and instead will be set sometime in the future. The Predator franchise began with director John McTiernan’s 1987 original, based on a script by Jim and John Thomas and starring an ascendant Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dutch, a member of a commando team on a doomed mission in a Central American jungle who has to tangle with a relentless enemy unlike any they’ve ever seen. The film spawned multiple sequels—the Danny Glover-led Predator 2 in 1990, the 2010 film Predators (starring Walton Goggins, Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, and Alice Braga), and 2010 and Shane Black’s 2018 film The Predator. There were also crossover movers pitting the two meanest aliens against each other, the Predator against the Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise.
There are no concrete plot details yet for Badlands. The film is being produced by 20th Century Studios. Whether it gets a theatrical run or goes straight to Hulu is also still an open question. We’ll let you know more when we do.
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The official trailer for first-time director Kelly Marcel’s Venom: The Last Dance is here, and as the title suggests, this will be the last time we see Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock, the journalist turned host of an alien symbiote with an insatiable appetite who has, over the years, learned to channel his aggression (sort of) for the right causes.
Hardy collaborated on the story with writer/director Marcel, a longtime Venom scribe, to help bring home the third and final installment in the franchise. Joining Hardy in the new film are newcomers Juno Temple and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Hardy’s run as Venom began with director Ruben Fleischer’s 2018 hit Venom, followed by Andy Serkis’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which co-starred Woody Harrelson as the alien symbiote that made Venom look mild-mannered by comparison.
Hardy wrote in an Instagram post last November that he loved making the final film with Marcel. “It’s been and continues to be a lot of fun this journey — there’s always hard turns to burn when we work, but [it] doesn’t feel as hard when you love what you do and when you know you have great material and the support at all sides, of a great team. I want to mention very briefly how proud of my director, writing partner and dear friend Kelly Marcel I am. Watching you taking the helm on this one fills me with pride, it is an honour. Trust your gut, your instincts are always spot on.”
Check out the trailer below. Venom: The Last Dance arrives in theaters on October 25.
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Ron Howard’s documentary Jim Henson: Idea Man, out May 31st on Disney+, is not only a tribute to the beloved, brilliant creator of the Muppets but feels like an artistic reflection of the creator’s own work. Cutting between Henson’s best-known creations, Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, along with his early short films, commercials, abstract videos, and Henson family footage, the documentary also uses visual effects, stop-motion animation, and regular animation alongside contemporary interviews to show Henson’s non-stop drive to create. And just as Sesame Street toggles between Oscar the Grouch’s garbage can and, say, a claymation short about the number seven, Idea Man toggles between these these different elements in a way that seems perfectly logical.
Jim Henson in Kermit the Frog. Courtesy Disney+.
The process started with finding representative gems in thousands of hours of Henson’s work. The volume of “what we had to work with was insane,” said Paul Crowder, who co-edited the documentary with Sierra Neal (previous projects together include McCartney 3,2,1, Pavarotti, and The Yin and Yang of Gerry Lopez). Crowder and Neal went through the output of Henson’s 36-year-long career, coming out the other side with a fresh understanding of the creator’s “affectionate anarchy,” as one documentary subject described the early days of Sesame Street. In addition to combing through endless episodes of Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and Fraggle Rock, at the Henson family’s behest, the editors visited the Jim Henson Company’s offices to screen footage of the creator’s earlier work, independent films and shorts made from the 1950s onward. This viewing was crucial to the final edit. “We tried to use Jim’s work to tell the story at different places in the film,” Neal said, using, for example, clips from the 1965 short experimental film, Time Piece, to help shape scenes from throughout Henson’s life.
Given the volume of behind-the-scenes footage (Henson’s camera team filmed extensively in places like the creature shop, where the Muppets are made), the editors had a huge amount of material to mine to portray Henson’s career. “It’s a blessing to be able to make an archive film where you haven’t got to cheat anything,” Crowder said. What was more challenging was getting across a private sense of who Jim Henson was. He gave infrequent interviews about himself and comes across as shy, humble, and private in the rare footage where he’s asked questions about his family or how much money he’s making. More typically, “an interviewer would ask him some easy questions and then ask for Kermit to appear, and Kermit would do the rest of the interview,” Neal said.
Jim Henson in his office. Couratesy Disney+
But conveying what made Henson tick and, thus, what drove him to such dedicated creative lengths is what makes Idea Man gel. “It wasn’t until we really started to get in a little bit deeper to Jim’s life, and his relationship with his wife, his work, his staff, that Ron really pushed us,” Neal said, “and that’s when it started to really come together, and feel like we had a message to put forward.” Interviews with Henson’s adult children (who have their own distinguished careers in art and filmmaking) and co-creators like Frank Oz in a so-called cube, a boundary-less device that allowed for images and animation to be layered with the interview footage was one way into Henson’s personal life. The other was to work as much as possible with past interviews from Jane Henson, Jim’s wife from 1959 to 1986 (Jane passed away in 2013).
Jim and Hane Henson. Courtesy Disney+
Jane and Jim Henson met in a college puppeteering class and had five children together. Despite never becoming its face, Jane was a part of the Jim Henson Company at its founding. A puppeteer herself, she quit working full-time in the 1960s to raise the children, coming back to Muppets projects in the 1980s and 90s. For Crowder and Neal, recordings of Jane’s past interviews, given for print, were among the most helpful finds in terms of detailing the inside story of Henson’s family life, and the production went to great lengths to clean up room sounds from the audio to make them usable.
An image from “Jim Henson: Idea Man.” Courtesy Disney+
The editors also used a creative avenue to represent Henson by editing the documentary as he might have done it himself. “The entire team, including Ron especially, was passionate about Jim’s work but was also on board with this idea of making it very Jim,” Neal said. “That meant it was going to be abstract at times. It was going to be a little kooky, and we were going to try to play an oddball joke sometimes.” After screening his lesser-known work, the editors sat down with Henson’s family to ask how he would have approached the project, from editing to additional animation. “We really just leaned into Jim-if this as much as we could,” Crowder said. We learn about this icon who revolutionized television, a shy artist who seemed to forever view himself as a tall skinny kid with difficult skin, not just from behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with his family and closest collaborators, but from a lively, effective edit of this footage creatively unified with choice gems from 36 years of his body of work.
An image from “Jim Henson: Idea Man.” Courtesy Disney+An image from “Jim Henson: Idea Man.” Courtesy Disney+
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Featured image: “Jim Henson Idea Man” takes us into the mind of this singular creative visionary, from his early years puppeteering on local television to the worldwide success of Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and beyond. Courtesy Disney+.
Director Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New Worldis currently putting in a 22-day shoot to capture additional photography and a new action sequence, a fairly routine course of business for an MCU film. What’s intriguing about Brave New World’s shoot is that it’s also bringing in a phenomenal performer, Giancarlo Esposito, to play a mysterious new villain.
Onah’s film actually wrapped principal photography in the spring of 2023, before the writers and actors struck. For the additional shoot, Moon Knight scribe Matthew Orton penned some new pages, with Esposito taking on this undisclosed bad guy role.
Brave New World is a major new MCU installment, with Anthony Mackie taking on the mantle of Captain America for the first time on the big screen. We’ve seen the burden Sam carries as the first Black man taking on the role Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) carried for so long in Marvel’s Disney+ series Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige presented some footage of Brave New World at Cinema Con and said the vibe of Brave New World is decidedly more of a grounded, gritty action flick, akin to the Russo Brothers’ beloved Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Winter Soldier was, in fact, Mackie’s first MCU film, where Sam Wilson became Captain America’s most trusted ally—Cap’s best friend, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), was the Winter Soldier, after all, often acting as Cap’s brain-washed antagonist. Sam Wilson was the man Cap could count on the most, which is why he was selected at the end of Avengers: Endgame by an aged, retired Steve Rogers to carry on the shield.
Falcon and the Winter Soldier showed us just how hard it was for Sam to replace a white icon and savior figure. By the end of the series, Sam has accepted the role and proven himself more than capable of carrying the shield. Brave New World finds Sam after he’s accepted and grown into the role, and also introduces Harrison Ford into the MCU as he takes over for the late William Hurt as Thunderbolt Ross. The cast also includes Danny Ramirez returns as Joaquin Torres, the young man who takes over from Sam as the Falcon, Liv Tyler, Tim Blake Nelson, Carl Lumbly (reprising his role of Isaiah Bradley from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), and Shira Haas.
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Chris Hemsworth knows a thing or two (or three) about blockbuster franchises. From Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Dementus in George Miller’s Mad Max wasteland, Hemsworth has no problem carrying the weight of a movie world on his shoulders.
Now, the talented Aussie is in talks to star in Paramount’s upcoming Transformers and G.I. Joe crossover film. The reality of this upcoming cinematic event was teased at the end of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, when Anthony Ramos’s Noah Diaz is offered a job by Michael Kelly’s Agent Burke at what he first mistakes to be an autobody shop. Agent Burke clues him in on the fact that the job, in fact, is with the U.S. Government, and it deals with machinery—and weaponry—a little more sophisticated. Given Noah’s recent exposure to the Transformers, he’s an ideal candidate to join the program. When he hands Noah a business card, it’s clear Burke works for the G.I. Joes, a special commando unit with unique skill sets. While the Transformers and G.I. Joes have crossed over in the pages of the comics before, they’ve never done so in film.
“Noah goes from somebody who cannot get a job to a guy who gets the greatest job ever. It really felt organic to put it in here because you could relate it to the story,” producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura told Variety. “It didn’t feel like we were being cynical and like, ‘Good news, we could just jam G.I. Joes in here.’ The fans want a lot of things; if we do it and we don’t figure it out well, they’re going to be disappointed. It took us a while to figure out the Maximals, and now we have the hint of how to begin the Joes story.”
Hemsworth already has his Transformers bonafides—he voices the young Optimus Prime in the upcoming animated film Transformers One, which bows on September 20. But stepping into a live-action role in the first-ever Transformers/G.I. Joes crossover film will be an even bigger deal.
L-r, Brian Tyree Henry (D-16), Keegan-Michael Key (B-127), Scarlett Johansson (Elita-1) and Chris Hemsworth (Orion Pax) star in PARAMOUNT ANIMATION and HASBRO Present In Association with NEW REPUBLIC PICTURES A di BONAVENTURA PICTURES Production A TOM DESANTO / DON MURPHY Production A BAY FILMS Production “TRANSFORMERS ONE”
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Featured image: Caption: Chris Hemsworth in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Village Roadshow Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland
Hugh Jackman hasn’t suited up and bulked out as Wolverine for seven years, since James Mangold’s stellar 2017 film Logan. In that movie, as fans are well aware, an aging, sick—but still very strong—Wolverine was trying to protect Professor X (he failed) and later, a young mutant named Laura (Dafne Keen—he succeeded) in what would turn out to be his final, heroic act.
But of course, we now know nothing’s final where Marvel is concerned.
Jackman is back as Wolverine in Deadpool & Wolverine, starring alongside Ryan Reynolds’ chatty Wade Wilson in the one and only film from Marvel to bow this year. In a conversation with People, Reynolds praised Jackman’s commitment to training.
“Just the sheer relentlessness that you dedicated yourself towards stunts, choreography,” Reynolds told People. “It was the first time I’d ever seen how invaluable a background in song and dance is when you are doing an action movie. You hit your marks in those fight scenes with speed and confidence, the likes of which I have never seen. I don’t care if you were 25, 35, 45 or 55. It was lightning. Watching you do what just looked like a clinic on stunt work was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Jackman is, in fact, 55. Reynolds is 47. These are not spring chickens playing two of our most beloved superheroes.
Jackman paid his dues to stunt coordinator Brian Smrz, who got Jackman into dance training as a way to prepare for his action scenes.
“When I came back to it, it was really fun and I was thrilled,” Jackman told People. “My body was a little sore at the beginning, but I was thrilled that my body was still responding. And I realized how good it is for your brain. The hardest bit…[was] the food. I have to eat a lot. For me, for my body type, I’m naturally skinny. To get the size on, that’s the hardest bit. That’s the bit that does my head in.”
Jackman’s going to be doing other people’s heads in very soon. Deadpool & Wolverine hits theaters on July 26.
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Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige promised that Deadpool & Wolverine would deliver a popcorn bucket that would take on Dune: Part Two’s infamous offering, and boy, he wasn’t kidding.
Stars Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, and the movie’s official Twitter page unveiled the new bucket, a somewhat naughty popcorn vessel that is Wolverine’s helmet with a large open mouth. Is it “crude and rude” as Feige promised? It depends on your sensitivity level. It is very much in the Deadpool franchise’s wheelhouse: irreverent, winking, and fun.
The first time we heard about the popcorn bucket was during the Super Bowl teaser when Reynolds promised one. Then Feige backed that up by mentioning the bucket at Cinema-Con in April.
“We’ve asked Deadpool to design a popcorn bucket for Deadpool & Wolverine,” Feige said at Cinema-Con. “And I don’t want to spoil it, but I will say, there are some movies that inadvertently make crude and rude popcorn buckets, and then there are popcorn buckets designed by Deadpool.”
Dune: Part Two‘s popcorn bucket was the subject of an SNL skit that pointed out how it looked as if it could be useful for other passions besides watching a movie. Deadpool & Wolverine was the perfect opportunity for Marvel to cook up their own bucket, considering it’s the first R-rated movie in MCU history.
Deadpool & Wolverine, and the Wolverine popcorn bucket, will hit theaters on July 26.
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“We’ve gone back to the beginning before the creatures invaded the Earth,” A Quiet Place: Day One star Lupita Nyong’o tells us at the top of a new featurette released by Paramount. We’ve already seen what the world was like on day 472 of the reign of the blind, sound-hunting aliens in John Krasinski’s 2018 original A QuietPlace—now, we finally get to see what the world was right as the alien invasion was underway. It’s not pretty.
As Nyong’o’s co-star, Joseph Quinn, explains in the new featurette, Day One will expand the scope of the franchise even further than Krasinski’s killer follow-up, Part II (2020), did. In Part II, Evelyn Abbott (Emily Blunt) and her children meet other survivors of the alien scourge. In Day One, we’ll see how all of New York City reacted to their arrival. The new film, directed by Pig helmer Michael Sarnoski, takes the horrors of the first two films and plants them in the Big Apple, with 8 plus people utterly unaware of the rules of this terrible game.
“It’s a completely different perspective, a different environment, a different setting,” Djimon Hounsou explains, reprising his role of Henri from Part II. “This one is so much more devastating to witness.”
In the new featurette, we learn that Nyong’o’s character Samira is on a day trip to New York when the attack occurs. As she has to learn how to survive the aliens in real time, she meets Eric (Quinn), a stranger with whom she’ll team up and try to figure out how to make it through the day.
“Trying to be quiet in New York City is no easy thing,” Quinn says. “An entire city of people figuring out the rules for themselves. It’s perilous, it’s fast-paced, and it’s extremely…quiet.”
Check out the new featurette below. A Quiet Place: Day One hits theaters on June 28.
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Nine years after Mad Max: Fury Road star Charlize Theron wreaked havoc as bad-ass adult Furiosa, director George Miller revisits his post-apocalyptic nightmare with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (in theaters now). The prequel, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, and the mighty first-generation War Rig truck, features one of the year’s most spellbinding action sequences, a relentless, 15-minute mind-melter that took 78 days to film.
While the 15-minute sequence is the most thrilling action scene of the year (in any film), it’s but one of several hyper-violent set pieces set against a backdrop of desolate settlements. Helping Miller bring the world into focus is art director Jacinta Leong (The Great Gatsby, Alien: Covenant, Fury Road), who worked with production designer Colin Gibson on Furiosa for three years to modify the Australian desert into the near-future hellscape that forces young Furiosa to become a warrior.
Speaking from Melbourne, Leong talks to The Credits about how the real world informed Furiosa‘s scarcity-ravaged fantasyland.
How did your experience on Fury Road prepare you for Furiosa?
In some ways, it gave me a head start on the way George Miller works. Also, we wanted to create continuity, so with the War Rig for example, we literally used the same tanker from Fury Road
The tanker was still around?
We took it out of storage from Bathurst, where it had been sitting for ten years, and used that chassis and structure for the War Rig. It saved us some time and money – – what’s not to like? In Furiosa, they make things by reusing and recycling; we did that in the movie!
Caption: An action scene being filmed on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland
The War Rig truck stars in this huge chase sequence on a desert highway where the driver, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), and stowaway Furiosa, hiding under the truck, get attacked again by men on flying motorcycles. How did you contribute to that sequence?
In general, the production designer is the what, and the art director is the how. Colin is different in that he does both. [For the War Rig] myself and our set designer, Jemma Awad, did the drawings of this amazing machine for the stowaway sequence and drafted construction drawings so the mechanics could build this fully defensive vehicle, with harpoons at the top of the tank, a pair of excavator arms, a “Bommy knocker” at the back with the spinning cones and sharp spikes and mace balls.
Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) in in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland
And then where did the model go from there?
I sent the model of the vehicle to action designer Guy Norris and his stunt team so they could import it into their pre-vis and flesh out the sequence that way.
Did you have references in mind for this “stowaway” set piece?
We’d refer to the [1939 John Ford-directed] movie Stagecoach as a foundational set piece because everything happens in, close to, and around it. Those Old Hollywood images have a Western element and helped get us to the heart of the sequence.
The motorcyclists who attack the War Rig are relentless and ingenious.
It’s a next-level attack. In Fury Road, they had the pole attacks, [going back and forth] like metronomes, so attacks from the air are one of the dimensions of Mad Max warfare. Here we had what we called Mortiflyers that used paragliders. Someone demonstrated a paraglider in a studio lying on the ground with all the cords, and he only ran about ten meters before it lifted him up.
Jacinta Leong working on “Furiosa.” Courtesy Warner Bros.
So it’s actually feasible that your “Mortiflyers” could become airborne in the real world.
Yeah. Colin and I like to embed reality into these stories because if it doesn’t work, if it looks wrong, the audience may not buy it, and then you’ve lost.
Motorcycles play a big role for many of the survivalists of Furiosa.
Just like in our real world, we have punks and goths and country western people, well we have different groups, and motorcycles became a way for us to define and identify these groups. The Militia tribe had Harley-Davidsons and police bikes. For the Toe Jammers, which we also called roo-billies, the motorcycles were dressed appropriately. For the Mortiflyers, some of their motorcycles had bird head sculptures of reused metal objects and feathers of plastic.
Caption: Chris Hemsworth in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
And Dementus rides around like a Roman gladiator on this motorcycle chariot, which is very cinematic.
One of the things we looked at was this 1937 Sydney police race.
Furiosa’s journey begins in the Wasteland Dementus and continues to The Citadel, Gas City, and Bullet Farm. How did you conceptualize each of these settlements?
The Citadel, established by George and Colin in Fury Road, is this rock formation where Immortan Joe pours water from his balcony. What we saw new in Furiosa was Rictus’ den. It’s naturally formed spaces made from erosion and lava, but they also carved some parts out as well. Our plasterers were very excited because we’d take a mold off real rocks and have them do a “squeeze,” we call it. That’s why they look so real: the geometry comes from nature.
Then there’s the grimly industrial Gas Town.
Gas Town is a sprawling infrastructure surrounded by a moat and a pair of gates. Its distilling tanks create fuel and oil. We visited the Qenos gas plant in Sydney and gained some inspiration from that.
What about Bullet Farm, which looks like an awful place to live?
We were inspired by the very dark, dehumanizing Brazilian goldmine, disused now, called Serra Pelade. We looked at incredible black and white photos of minters there, really deep down [in the earth] on rickety ladders. We found some images of dwellings carved out of the rocks, and you’ll see parts of caravan or corrugated iron stuck in the wall.
In contrast to the smooth digital technology seen in so much sci-fi, Furiosa features a lot of analog steampunk technology — gears, pulleys, and old-time instruments.
That’s one of the things that separates Furiosa from the slick CGI worlds. This is a harsh, unforgiving exterior [environment]. We got spools from telecommunication companies, which use them to lay cable. We procured six of those, cut them, and put the treads on them, so again, that’s reused in The Wasteland. We also used telescopes from the sixties, which gives you a more textured look. It wouldn’t look as good if we had used a modern telescope.
It seems that resource scarcity played a big role in defining a future world in which water, fuel, and food are in short supply.
Our design mantra is, “Everything has to be re-purposed, re-used again and again. For example, [early in the movie] young Furiosa reaches a truck with an excavator arm on it. That same excavator shows up on the War Rig years later. Another example is when Dementus hijacks a Citadel truck coming back from Gas Town and takes the hood off that Mack truck. Then we see it appear later on his six-tire monster track. The excavator arm, the hood of the truck, the war rig, the harpoon shield—there’s an economy to it.
Caption: Chris Hemsworth in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Village Roadshow Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland
In his Mad Max movies, George Miller has told such an epic near-future saga that some might call him a visionary. What’s he like to work with?
He’s wonderful to work with. George can be very specific about things. It’s our job to bring ideas to him, and he always listens. When we present something, he’ll zoom in on some detail, like even the pipe on a motorcycle: He’ll go, ‘Can we just change it a little, the flow or the shape.’ Every week, we’d sit down in a group with George and Colin, our supervising art director, Sophie Nash, and art directors Laurie Faen and Nick Dare. I loved having those conversations. We all collaborated to bring things to the table.
Featured image: Caption: War Boys in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland
Moana and Maui are back for a fresh round of high-seas adventure in the first trailer for Moana 2. And if Moana and Maui are back, that means so, too, are stars Auli’i Cravalho and Dwayne Johnson, who return to reprise their voice roles from the world-beating first film.
The new film is from writer/director David G. Derrick Jr. (Raya and the Last Dragon), who worked as a story artist on the original Moana in 2016. The sequel finds Cravalho’s Moana heeding a call from her ancestors and setting out on a new journey across the long-lost waters to reconnect their people across the entire ocean.
Moana’s new adventure won’t be carried out solo, of course—enter her shape-shifting demi-God bestie Maui, who bursts into the new trailer as a shark, then a bird, then in his buff human form. The two friends will venture to the far seas of Oceania on their latest quest and will no doubt encounter creatures both wondrous and terrifying.
Not only will there be adventure in Moana 2, but there will also be music aplenty from Grammy winners Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, Grammy nominee Opetaia Foaʻi, and three-time Grammy winner Mark Mancina.
Check out the trailer below. Moana 2 swims into theaters on November 27.
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For the first time in 16 years, Brad Pitt and George Clooney are sharing the screen together, and in the first trailer for writer/director Jon Watts’ Wolfs, the two get off to a rollicking fun start.
The trailer opens with Clooney’s fixer being called to a woman’s apartment (Amy Ryan) in a huge heap of trouble. Clooney’s fixer has been there and done that, and scrubbing a crime scene or removing a body is all in a night’s work for him. Things get complicated when there’s a second knock at the door—enter Brad Pitt’s fixer—who has also been called in. Then, the body they’re there to remove turns out to have life left in it. A lot of life. Thus, their strange trip begins as these two lone wolves are forced to spend an increasingly bizarre, increasingly dangerous night together.
The reunion of these two mega-stars has been a long time coming. It was 24 years ago when they were still the two biggest names in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven franchise, playing Rusty Ryan and Danny Ocean, respectively. Yet we haven’t seen them on screen together since the Coen Brothers’ 2008 dark comedy Burn After Reading, so finding them co-starring and co-producing the new film gives you a good sense of how their careers have gone since. Pitt’s Plan B and Clooney’s Smokehouse Pictures are both producing Watts’s original film, and their on-screen chemistry might be a little more grizzled and gruff than their easy, fresh-faced rapport in that first Ocean’s, but they’ve lost none of the vim and vigor that make them such an ideal pairing.
Joining Pitt, Clooney, and Ryan are Austin Abrams, Poorna Jagannathan, Rob Riddell, Irina Dubova, and Hassani Rizzo.
Check out the trailer below. Wolfs hits theaters on September 20.
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Featured image: L-r: HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – MAY 07: George Clooney attends the U.S. premiere of Hulu’s “Catch-22” at TCL Chinese Theatre on May 07, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images). NORTHAMPTON, ENGLAND – JULY 08: Brad Pitt, star of the upcoming Formula One based movie, Apex, walks in the Paddock after qualifying ahead of the F1 Grand Prix of Great Britain at Silverstone Circuit on July 08, 2023 in Northampton, England. (Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
Chris Pratt voices the iconic, lasagna-loving star of director Mark Dindal’s The Garfield Movie, which uses Garfield’s love of Italian cuisine and the indoors as a jumping-off point for an origin and adventure story in one. A sweet-faced kitten gloms onto lonely Jon (Nicholas Hoult) at a restaurant and doesn’t let go until an unexpected reunion with his father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson).
John (voiced by Nicholas Hoult) with baby Garfield. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
This father-son reunion comes on the heels of a catnapping, bringing reluctant Garfield into the fold of a heist led by a vengeful Persian cat named Jinx (Hannah Waddingham). The booty at stake is a truck full of milk Jinx feels she’s owed, and to get it, Garfield, his dad, and Odie (Harvey Guillén) wind up freight-hopping and breaking into a maximum-security dairy farm. Obviously, this is a far cry from Garfield’s preferred station, at Jon’s dining table or in front of the television, and calls for a new approach to animating the classic character. Animation director Jason Boose (The Little Prince, Up), along with a team of 70 to 80 animators spread across the globe, translated Garfield’s signature deadpan existence into the more madcap one we see here. Dindal wanted the team to be bold as they figured out what worked and what didn’t, so we spoke with Boose about working to avoid cliche while both expanding Garfield’s range while keeping aspects of his withering reluctance intact.
Were you a fan of Garfield going into the film?
It wasn’t until I was working on the movie that I remembered I loved the character so much. I was researching it, watching the specials from the 80s, and reading the comics; a lot of it was so familiar. I was halfway through the film, my parents were moving out of their house, and they wanted me to go through my stuff from when I was a kid. I was looking through some old sketchbooks, and there were all kinds of drawings of Garfield from the comic strips. It was serendipitous, in a way. I loved the character then, and I love it now. Looking at the drawings again, you realize the comic strip was drawn with such skill. It’s funny, it’s charming, it’s still relevant today.
Odie and Garfield (voiced by Chris Pratt) in THE GARFIELD MOVIE.
Given that, what did you want to ensure you retained from the original strip?
The jumping-off point was tricky because all of us in the film wanted to honor Jim Davis and his creativity. I think it’s the most syndicated comic strip ever, so it’s loved worldwide. You have to honor how it’s done, but at the same time, you have to give the audience something new and reinvent it for a new generation. Garfield is sometimes quite sweet in the comic, in unexpected ways, but he’s also quite cynical and sarcastic. We have to be able to honor the original character but also show a broad range of emotions. That’s the trick of it all.
Was there ever a question of how much to push his facial expressions?
At first, we would try to match what Jim Davis was doing, to make sure we could hit those poses — the completely sarcastic, deadpan eyes and the sardonic grin. Then, we had to go through many more expressions and ranges of emotion. That’s tricky because CG doesn’t want to go as far as some of the drawings Jim Davis did. Sometimes you’re going from regular, deadpan Garfield, who we recognize, [to him] eating a piece of cake. His whole mouth becomes absolutely massive, his eyes disappear, his ears disappear, and he’s all mouth and muzzle, and in CG, that’s a completely different model. We were almost switching from one model to a new model over one frame to try to get these exaggerated poses and do it quickly enough so the audience didn’t notice. And because you’re doing dialogue and a huge range of emotion, there are a lot of expressions that were obviously never drawn in the original comic strip. That unique muzzle of Garfield’s was a real challenge to get into all different shapes.
How did you develop baby Garfield? He’s very cute, but he also has to carry a lot of emotional weight.
We went for pure innocence. He evolved. He started off as a very small part of the film, and he was loved so much that he expanded more and more. We just wanted to play him so sweet. We wanted everyone to absolutely love him, recognize that that is Garfield as a baby, and have their hearts break for him.
How did you develop the look of new characters, like Vic and Jinx?
The voice acting was so incredible. With Jinx, for example, and Hannah Waddingham, you have the character design, you have that vocal performance, and then you have what Mark wanted to create with that character. And Norma Desmond, from Sunset Boulevard, was an inspiration. So it was taking [all that] and trying to inject that into a big fluffy white cat. We didn’t want to animate a typical diva because she’s a very unique character. Everything she does, we wanted to make somewhat unexpected and unusual. Every shot we looked at, we looked at through that lens. Vic is very Samuel L. Jackson. He just gets so much from the cadence of his vocal performance. The way he delivers a line, both visually and auditorially. We tried to honor him as much as we could and get as much of him into Vic as we could.
Odie, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) and Garfield (Chris Pratt) in GARFIELD. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
How did you develop the backgrounds? Some are tangible; some are more painterly.
Pete Oswald and Jeanie Chang did the production design and art direction. Through Mark Dindal’s direction, they wanted to create a very painterly world, very warmly lit, with a lot of backlit characters. The biggest thing they wanted to get across was a feeling of miniature. Mark almost wanted it to feel like the Viewmasters from the 70s and 80s. You hold them up, look through them, and everything looks a bit miniature. That was his initial inspiration for the movie, was to try and give it that sort of charm and feel.
How did you settle on which animation styles to use in the film?
We wanted to let the story and performance dictate the style of animation, which is unique in a way. Some parts of the film are quite touching and heartfelt, so it calls for a much more naturalistic style of animation, much more believable. But some parts of the film are completely wacky and crazy, and it goes much more Chuck Jones/Tex Avery style, where anything can happen. Sometimes it’s somewhere in between. We were always weaving between those different animation styles and trying to weave them together seamlessly.
Garfield is in theaters now.
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Rian Johnson’s third Knives Out film has snagged one of the hottest actors working together.
Andrew Scott has joined the cast for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, joining Challengersbreakout star Joh O’Connor, Priscilla, Civil War, and Alien: Romulus star Cailee Spaeny, and Benoit Blanc himself, Daniel Craig, who returns to the franchise as the dandified detective sleuthing on another case. Since the first Knives Out in 2019, Johnson has assembled delicious ensembles. In the first film, Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Christopher Plummer, and Ana de Armas are caught up in the mystery that Blanc is sent to solve. In the sequel Glass Onion, Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe, Kate Hudson, Kathryn Hahn, and Dave Bautista had to undergo Benoit Blanc’s scrutiny.
Johnson is again writing the script and will produce alongside his T-Street colleague Ram Bergman. They’re looking to get Wake Up Dead Man into production soon, with a release date of 2025. Naturally, no one knows a thing about what kind of whodunit Johnson is cooking up for the third film, but Johnson has teased that this case will present Blanc with the most dangerous challenge he’s faced yet.
“I love everything about whodunnits, but one of the things I love most is how malleable the genre is,” Johnson wrote on social media. “There’s a whole tonal spectrum from Carr to Christie, and getting to explore that range is one of the most exciting things about making Benoit Blanc movies.” He added, “We’re about to go into production on the 3rd one, and I’m very excited to share the title, which gives a little hint of where it’s going.”
— Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (@KnivesOut) May 24, 2024
Lionsgate released the first Knives Out film in 2019, and it became a serious hit, grossing $312 million against a $40 million budget. Netflix then bought the rights to the series (for more than $450 million) and released Johnson’s sequel, Glass Onion, in 2022. It also became the first Netflix movie to play in Regal Cinemas, Cinemark, and AMC Theaters.
Scott will be paired again with Craig for the first time since 2015’s Bond sequel Spectre. Scott made a name for himself as the Hot Priest on Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s series Fleabag, starred in Andrew Haigh’s aching 2023 film All Us Strangers, and in Netflix’s recent adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels in Ripley.
You don’t need much more than Brad Pitt and George Clooney to hype your movie, and in the first teaser for their upcoming film Wolfs, they’re pretty much all you get, plus one squeaky windshield wiper and a carful of tension. With two seasoned pros boasting charisma and chemistry to spare, this wordless teaser still manages to excite.
Pitt and Clooney have teamed up before, of course, most memorably as the two biggest names in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven franchise, playing Rusty Ryan and Danny Ocean, respectively. The two have finally reunited for director Jon Watts’ (the recent Spider-Man trilogy) thriller for Apple, which won the rights to Wolfs after an intense bidding war. Pitt’s Plan B and Clooney’s Smokehouse Pictures are both producing. Wolfs is the first film Pitt and Clooney have starred in together since the Coen Brothers’ 2008 dark comedy Burn After Reading, which immediately marks the upcoming release as a must-see.
Wolfs finds the two stars playing a pair of lone-wolf fixers who get assigned to the same job. The stars are joined by Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams, Poorna Jagannathan, Rob Riddell, Irina Dubova, and Hassani Rizzo.
Check out the teaser trailer below. Wolfs will premiere in theaters on September 20. The full trailer will arrive on May 29.
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Featured image: L-r: HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – MAY 07: George Clooney attends the U.S. premiere of Hulu’s “Catch-22” at TCL Chinese Theatre on May 07, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images). NORTHAMPTON, ENGLAND – JULY 08: Brad Pitt, star of the upcoming Formula One based movie, Apex, walks in the Paddock after qualifying ahead of the F1 Grand Prix of Great Britain at Silverstone Circuit on July 08, 2023 in Northampton, England. (Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
Damon Lindelof is no stranger to superheroes, a fact that DC Studios co-chief James Gunn was well aware of when he tapped him to help bring a brand new series based on the Green Lanterns to life.
Lindelof, the co-creator of ABC’s seminal series Lost and the man who helped steer HBO’s sensational Watchmen adaptation, which riffed on writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins’ iconic graphic novel and went on to win 11 Emmys, will now join the creative team behind Gunn and DC Studios co-chief Peter Safran’s Lanterns. Lindelof joins Ozark showrunner Chris Mundy and longtime DC comics author Tom King.
James Gunn announced the team behind Lanterns on Instagram on Saturday.
The image Gunn chose to accompany the reveal of the Lanterns creative team is of Lanterns Hal Jordan and John Stewart, suggesting that the upcoming series will be a two-hander. This jibes with something Safran said when their initial slate of offerings from their newly revived and unified DC Studios was revealed, “Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters,” when he described the series as similar in tone to HBO’s twisty thriller/detective series True Detective. It’s also worth noting that Ozark showrunner Mundy also served as executive producer and writer on the latest excellent season of the series True Detective: Night Country.
Lindelof has also won many accolades for co-creating HBO’s supernatural drama The Leftovers, adapted from Tom Perrotta’s novel. He seems ideally suited to help Gunn and Safran ensure that Lanterns is a bright shining light on the newly unified DC Universe.
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Featured image: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 14: Damon Lindelof attends the Premiere Of HBO’s “Watchmen” at The Cinerama Dome on October 14, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
Garfield, the lasagna-eating original grumpy cat, has been painted with a fresh coat of animated fur and given a new voice in actor Chris Pratt for director Mark Dindal’s The Garfield Movie, a hilarious roller-coaster romp that’s going to bring out the kid in you, nostalgia aside. Garfield purred into theaters on May 24.
Published as a comic strip in 1978, the beloved feline has made its way onto television series, specials, movies, books, video games, and countless toys and memorabilia. After 45+ years of storytelling, you’d think there’s nothing new to share, but you would be wrong. The Garfield Movie uncovers a side of the pudgy orange cat that we have never seen before—his father. I asked Dindal over a video call how something so obvious had never been touched on before.
Odie, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) and Garfield (Chris Pratt) in GARFIELD. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
“When you have so many years of material, it’s like what hasn’t been done. His mother was referenced in one of the specials, but not his dad. This is the first time we see his father in anything, and it gave us an opportunity to come up with something unique,” Dindal tells The Credits. “Producer John Cohen has been shepherding the project for quite some time, and the idea of Garfield’s father came from his conversations with Jim Davis. It was part of the script when I got it in 2018.”
The fully animated feature has been in the works since 2016, when Alcon Entertainment bought the motion picture rights from Garfield creator Jim Davis, who hails from Muncie, Indiana. Dindal was tapped to direct two years later after a nearly twenty-year hiatus from the business—his last feature was Disney’s first fully computer-animated film, Chicken Little (2005). Before that was the low-key Disney cult classic Emperor’s New Groove (2000), which spawned from the shipwrecked development of Kingdom of the Sun.
Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) and Garfield (Chris Pratt) in GARFIELD. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
During that time, Dindal worked with producer Randy Fullmer, who retired from Hollywood in 2006 to start a guitar company. He recently passed away in 2023 at the age of 73. When asked if Dindal was able to share any of the Garfield projects with Fullmer, the director graciously replied, “A little bit, but when you’re working on a movie, you can’t share too many of the details.” Adding, “What Fullmer did for me, and I think it’s important for any artist, as a producer, he shielded us from a lot that comes from making a movie. There are a lot of moving parts and concerns and money being spent. He knew me so well that there were certain things he could share with me so that I was aware of them and could make creative choices appropriately. Then, there were certain things he would take care of so I could focus on the story. He was a real crusader for protecting the creative process. Craig Sost was our producer on the daily production of The Garfield Movie and he has the same quality. I have been blessed twice now with producers like that.”
The story Dindal focused on for this project reunites Garfield with his long-lost father, Vic (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson), in an outrageous milk heist that brings along lovable pup Odie (voiced by Harvey Guillén) and several more surprises. There’s plenty that will make you laugh, too, as Pratt delivers some quotable one-liners, and the physical comedy doesn’t disappoint. But what resonates are the character arcs and emotional stakes. For instance, the origin story of Garfield meeting Jon Arbuckle (voiced by Nicholas Hoult).
In creating those moments through animation, the years of comic strips became the defacto reference for character expression and poses. The world-building was brought together by production designer Pete Oswald under Dindal’s direction. “The challenge was translating ideas into CG and developing it in a way that would work with the type of animation that I like… the broad, cartoony stylized animation,” says the director. “One of the influences I brought up was when I was a kid, we had these View-Master viewers. It’s a 3D stereo that allows you to see these color photographs and I remember as a kid I always felt like I wanted to step into the world of those. I showed them to Pete and magical is the only way I can describe it. It makes you want to shrink down and be part of it. I feel the same thing when I see stop motion. I just want to step into that world.”
The View-Master reference was a stepping stone in developing a stylized look with a certain amount of force perspective to the visuals. Another item on Dindal’s checklist was the use of painted backdrops, similar to the work found in The Wizard of Oz (1939). “They create a hyper-reality,” says the director. “One of the things I like to think about is to create a universe in a movie that doesn’t exist. So, if you’re drawn to that reality, you have to come to the movie to experience it. You can’t step outside and say, ‘Well, this is like that movie.’”
John (voiced by Nicholas Hoult) with baby Garfield. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
Getting there is a gut feeling for Dindal—he takes it one step at a time, asking: do these character poses feel like there’s a level of imagination being applied? “I probably do it more subconsciously than consciously, but that’s kind of the way my mind works.”
The animation is also pushed to an entertaining level of absurdity, especially when Garfield, a famously lazy indoor cat, is pulled outdoors with his “what can go wrong” attitude—apparently plenty. Dindal credits his board artists, giving them “the freedom to go as far as they possibly can” for the bigger hijinks sequences.
“Animation takes so long you can kinda take it out for a test drive and get a sense of how people laugh or if it will confuse them with the absurdity. There’s a lot of it in this movie,” Dindal says with a smile. “A simple thing of Vic driving a truck. When you really think about it, can he reach the pedals and all that stuff? That’s all legitimate. But the kid in me, it’s like kids playing in the backyard, and they’re imagining that sticks are swords or laser guns. I like to be in touch with that side of imagination that everybody had as a kit that I think, unfortunately, sometimes goes away. I am still blessed to have that so of course Vic is driving a truck, he’s an adult.”
As for Pratt filling the paws of Garfield, Dindal says the actor was his first choice. “One of the things we do is get sound clips from actors that we feel can play the roles and we put their clips to drawings of the characters. The clips we found of Chris just fit the character so well. We knew we would have a certain level of action and a definite amount of emotion. I felt like he had the range we wanted to have in the movie, and his ability to adlib and improvise I knew I wanted as well. He checked all the boxes and then some.”
Garfield is in theaters now.
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