Composer John Paesano on Scoring A Hero’s Journey in “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”

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Editor’s note: This article contains light spoilers for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.

“What’s interesting about this film, and it played into our favor, is you couldn’t score it like you could a normal film that’s been done the last ten years,” says composer John Paesano about director Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. “A lot of it wasn’t conceived by the time we started working on it because it was so visual effects heavy.”

What that meant for the composer was coming up with ideas that were emotionally connected to the characters rather than composing for pictures on a screen.

“I’ve wanted to write film score since I was nine years old, and I grew up on John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and John Barry. A lot of these old-school composers weren’t able to throw up a digital video and score to it. They’d have to read a script, talk to the director, and discuss the characters. Then they would go away and write themes based on those conversations and would later apply that music to the picture when it was edited,” explains Paesano. “Everything is so visual now. Composers get the film, and they are almost fully conceived. We can take the Quicktime files, put them on our timeline, and move things around digitally. Because of that, scores have become less character-based and more visual-based.”

The irony is that Kingdom is one of the most tech-forward films made this year, thanks to its stunning visual effects. But even still, Paesano took an off-screen approach, pulling inspiration from previous films in the vast franchise and discussing the score’s dynamics with Ball. “Wes really wanted the audience to feel like they were there. He kept saying, ‘I want it to feel like the audience is sitting there with them. I don’t want the audience to feel like they are sitting in a chair watching a movie,” Paesano notes.

(L-R): Noa (played by Owen Teague) and Raka (played by Peter Macon) in 20th Century Studios’ KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2024 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

The compelling story being told on screen takes place several hundred years after the War of the Planet of the Apes. It brings attention to a small group of apes known as the Eagle Clan and how a young ape named Noa (Owen Teague), who sees his entire village taken hostage by a ruthless ruler named Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), fights back for what’s been taken from him. 

The aural magnitude of Ball’s installment leans into a flavorful, world-building sound design rather than the score doing the heavy lifting. As Paesano puts it, the score is “supporting” the soundscape and “popping its head up every now and then.” The design choice was specific to Ball’s vision for Kingdom. Paesano discusses his inspirations, the difference in scoring for apes and humans, and why it was important to parallel Noa’s journey through music.

 

Finding Inspiration 

The Planet of the Apes franchise dates back to the 1960s, with several books, films, TV series, and comics telling the tale of apes ruling man. Paesano referenced what came before to furnish something new.

Paesano: Wes is a crazy score junky. It’s a huge part of his process, and we both have a huge appreciation for this franchise and what comes before us. When you go into these big properties, you have this choice to make: ignore what came before and do something completely new, or you try to adopt what made these films successful and bring some of that along. Because Wes and I are huge fans of what Jerry Goldsmith did in the original film and what Michael Giacchino did with Dawn and War, we knew there was a little bit of responsibility. From a pure passion standpoint, we wanted to bring what Goldsmith did and add a little bit of the DNA from Dawn and War. Then there’s this tricky responsibility of how to bring it to a new place. It was an intricate balance.

 

Unconventional Instrumentation

Paesano wrote an emotional, compelling score inspired by instruments from previous work. A less is more approach allowed the music to push through the soundscape with identifiable themes.

Paesano: We went into it with a sonic idea. Wes would use the word primal, and I would use the word gritty, but we wanted to have tone to it. Jerry Goldsmith’s score has it. When you listen to it, you can hear everything. You can hear the celli, hear the violin. You can hear all the instruments. It’s not just one big wash of sound. There’s so much character and space in it.

The one thing we took from Goldsmith was the palette. We didn’t want to use synths in the score. We wanted it to be completely natural and use instruments that reflect the environment. For instance, if I was going to use the piano, I wanted to use a piano that looked like it had been sitting in a schoolhouse for a couple of hundred years. It’s a little out of tune, and maybe we mic’d it a little closer, so it wasn’t a beautiful pristine grand piano. I made sure on the strings, we closed-mic’d everything, and we used smaller orchestral sections so you could hear more of the instruments and less of this big, lush sound. 

 

Another thing we took from Jerry was his use of this effect called an Echoplex. It’s kind of like a delay pedal normally used on a guitar. We used it in the orchestra. I also borrowed serial composing to write the track “Human Hunt.” It’s something Goldsmith did in Planet of the Apes. It’s a tone row, a custom scale, but if you start going one way, you can’t skip any notes up or down. It’s a way to get thematic ideas through rhythm. Then, with Michael Giacchino’s sound, it wasn’t about using his themes but approaching scoring these characters with a simplicity that allows the themes to be obtainable.

 

Scoring for Apes                                  

Paesano began scoring the film early on, but when the final visual effects were delivered, everything changed.

Paesano: It’s funny, when I scored the characters as humans it was much more complex. We can absorb that because, as cinema people, we grew up on that lush, orchestral, intricate score. But when the visual effects came in and they turned into apes, it got so fantastical. It was so wrong.

(L-R): Noa (played by Owen Teague), Soona (played by Lydia Peckham), and Anaya (played by Travis Jeffery) in 20th Century Studios’ KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2024 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

We realized that we needed that simplicity. Michael Giacchino’s score has it. It’s got this wholesome, emotional, but very simplistic sound to it. I say that in a complimentary way because you can tell with Michael it was a choice. He knows how to write very intricate, complex music. I am just speculating, but I really think he probably ran into the same issue Wes and I noticed. With apes, it has to be simple.

 

A Simple Search

As Paesano started to write the music for Kingdom, he searched the internet looking to find any ties to apes and music. What he discovered added to the authenticity of the score. 

Paesano: I was researching and typing in Google ‘music and monkeys’ to figure out if there’s any throughline. I came across an Emory University study on primates and music. What was fascinating is they did this experiment trying to figure out if primates have any response to different types. And whenever they played traditional western music, music played in 2/4 or 4/4 time, the monkeys stayed away from that part of the enclosure. It drove the primates crazy. But when they played non-traditional Western music, whether it was African or Indian, anything that uses different compound rhythms, it was the opposite reaction. The monkeys came over to it and liked it. This was low-hanging fruit, and I thought what an easy thing to use as inspiration.

 

Antagonistic Themes

The composer used the Emory research and the original Planet of the Apes (1968) as inspiration to create the theme for Proximus Caesar, the power hungry king who wants to end human existence.

Paesano: Proximus Caesar’s theme has a motific idea to it, but the biggest part of his theme is that it’s done in an 11/8 time signature. [11/8 has eleven beats to a bar with the eighth note as the beat.] I took Jerry’s Goldsmith’s “The Hunt” and used motific ideas from that but did it in 11/8 to give it a little wrinkle to it.

You can hear it when the marauders attack Noa’s village; that part is in 11/8. Then, when you first see Proximus trying to explode the door open at his village, you can hear this 11/8 rhythmic thing. I used the non-compound time signature to sculpt it around Proximus and the marauders.

 

Creating a Hero

When we first meet Noa he’s an innocent ape trying to win his father’s approval. That bond became an inspiration for Noa’s musical theme. 

Paesano: Noa’s theme was born out of the idea that his father is the master of birds and Noa would eventually become the master of birds. One of the things I had to do was come up with a tune that his dad would sing to the birds. Wes and I went back and forth, wondering if we wanted his father to sing the theme that we would be hearing in the movie or did we want him to sing an entirely different song. We ended up going with a different song because if we didn’t, it could have turned into the musical Cats.

The tune his dad sings had to be really simple so that the audience would believe an ape could vocalize it. So when I came up with Noa’s theme, I borrowed the idea from the master of birds tune and adopted it to Noa. It’s this very simple melody and on the soundtrack it is called “Together Strong.”

 

The theme is written in Dorian mode, and it feels hopeful but not really happy. It can also feel intense and sad too. It was written to avoid leaning one way or another emotionally. We wanted it to be personal for Noa and believable, something that wasn’t too saccharine or over the top.

A Hero’s Journey

Part of the musical storytelling was being patient and earning moments for when a note would hit. After Noa’s village is attacked, the young primate starts to become a leader. Paesano wrote a parallel score to reflect the character’s journey.

Paesano: Wes had to hold me back at times. He was very focused on doing something different than what Matt Reeves and Micahel Giacchino had done on Dawn but still adopt the heart and character they had at the same time.

For Noa, it was more about growth. When we first start the film, Noa’s theme is introduced when he arrives in the village after getting his egg. The Eagle Clan theme can be heard in that big wide shot when Noa gets off his horse. There’s a little hint of French horn, and you can hear just the melody before he goes up to talk to his dad. Then, we don’t come back to Noa’s until after the attack on the village.

Wes was saying, ‘He’s not Noa yet.” It’s a growth thing. The whole idea for Noa went from being very simple and unsure to having the confidence to go to the valley beyond, and then this emotional statement of becoming the clan leader. We don’t get to its full glory until the film ends when Noa says, “climb Eagle Clan climb” during the flood. There’s this heroic moment when he eventually faces Proximus, and the largest part is when he bonds with the father’s eagle. It goes through these stages.

Delicate Placement

Kingdom builds compelling environments through lush sound design. Finding the right moments to include the score required balance.

Paesano: Technology has changed a lot since War, and it is interesting because the more real the characters look, the harder it is for the audience to accept crazy ideas. We took the character of what Jerry Goldsmith did but brought it to a modern place. A lot of it was writing the music but it was also about how Wes applied it to the film.

With a big-budget film like this, you’re expecting this giant score. But our score is pretty subdued. There are moments when the soundtrack is big, but when you hear it applied in the film, it’s very intentional. Wes wanted to apply it in a way that is very different from what’s out there, and I think it gives it character. We were conscious that this film moved a little slower, and I have to give Wes credit. He wanted it to take its time, for audiences to sit in the world and appreciate it so people didn’t feel rushed through scenes.  

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is in theaters now.

 

 

 

Featured image: (L-R): Soona (played by Lydia Peckham) and Noa (played by Owen Teague) in 20th Century Studios’ KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved. 

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” Trailer Unleashes Michael Keaton’s Trickster Demon

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The Juice is loose in the official Beetlejuice Beetlejuice trailer.

Twenty-six years after Tim Burton and Michael Keaton delivered their beguilingly charming horror comedy, one of the films that defined 1980s cinema, the dream team is back to create some fresh nightmares. The official trailer for Burton and Keaton’s long-awaited sequel to their iconic Beetlejuice has arrived, and the reunion is so sweet they had to name it twice.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice finds Keaton returning to the trickster spirit he inhabited, and he’s joined by his Beetlejuice co-stars Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz and Catherine O’Hara as Delia Deetz. These 1988 originals are joined by new cast members, including Jenna Ortega, as Lydia’s daughter, Astrid, alongside Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Arthur Conti, and the great Willem Dafoe.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice finds the Deetz family returning home to Winter River after a tragedy, the location of their last run-in with Keaton’s diabolical demon. Lydia is still haunted by her experience with Beetlejuice two decades ago, but now her fortunes take a turn for the even more troublesome when Astrid, as rebellious as Lydia herself was at that age, discovers the mysterious model of the town in the attic, the very thing that lured a young Lydia into the underworld all those years ago. The title Beetlejuice Beetlejuice begs the question—when will spit out a third Beetlejuice and summon the spectral trickster?

Burton directs from a screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar (Wednesday) and a story by Gough & Millar and Seth Grahame-Smith, based on characters created by Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson. Burton’s creative team behind the camera includes cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos and members of his Wednesday team, like production designer Mark Scruton and editor Jay Prychidny, alongside his longtime collaborator, costume designer Colleen Atwood, creature effects and special makeup FX creative supervisor Neal Scanlan, and composer Danny Elfman. Hair and makeup designer Christine Blundell is on board to give Beetlejuice his signature dead-but-lively looks.

Check out the trailer below. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice haunts theaters on September 6.

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Featured image: MICHAEL KEATON as Beetlejuice in Warner Bros. Pictures’ comedy, “BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.COPYRIGHT:© 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

How the Animation in John Krasinski’s “IF” Came to Live Seamlessly Among Live-Action

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Written and directed by John Krasinski, IF is a fantastical inverse of Krasinski’s A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II. A contemporary fairy-tale journey inspired by Krasinski’s own daughters, IF pairs live action and animation to bring us Bea (Cailey Fleming), a tween who learns she can see everyone else’s imaginary friends, and teams up with Cal (Ryan Reynolds), the only adult around who shares her superpower, to help them.

Being able to see this wild array of imaginary beings sounds delightful, but those who’ve been outgrown by their children are in troubled waters. Bea and Cal work to find new kids for a gaggle of adrift IFs, accompanied by an enormous purple furry friend named Blue (Steve Carell). Born as they are of children’s imaginations, no two IFs are alike — where Blue is tangibly huggable, Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) is a petite, Betty Boop-inspired butterfly. Opposite both is the IFs’ wise soul, a scruffy teddy bear named Lewis, voiced by the late Louis Gossett Jr. Given the level of interaction and emotional tension between the actors and the IFs, for the visual effects supervisor, Academy Award winner Chris Lawrence (Gravity, The Martian), animation supervisor Arslan Elver (Guardians of The Galaxy, Star Wars: The Force Awakens), and their team, the challenge was to support Krasinski as a live-action filmmaker while bringing an incredible stylistic range of animated characters to life.

 

The blend between the two worlds needed to be seamless. “Ultimately, our goal was for the audience to forget we’d done any work at all,” Lawrence said. On set, they used a proprietary iPad app to point around the action, showing versions of the IFs that the actors could use to get a visual sense of where these characters would eventually wind up in the final edit. Main character IFs like Blue and Blossom had stand-ins (Blue’s wore a hula hoop around his middle to mimic his proportions). While the film was still being shot, Lawrence and Elver took an unusual approach to the animation, grabbing key moments from set each day to animate a couple of key poses, show them to Krasinski, and get feedback. “What it meant was that the basic blocking of the digital characters was defined at the point where John was cutting the scenes. He was able to make editorial choices based on what the characters were doing and what Arslan had imbued them with,” Lawrence explained. This way of working, combined with Krasinski’s passion for the project, made for a highly collaborative, performance-focused approach. “John’s enthusiasm is literally contagious,” Elver said. “It was quite cool because you don’t often see someone get so excited about an animation test and call other people to show them.”

 

The team also went out of the box to achieve trickier characters, like Blossom. “How do you get from this antique idea that’s almost 100 years old,” Lawrence said of Blossom’s inspiration, Betty Boop, “to something that’s contemporary and appealing for a four-year-old today?” The team watched Fleabag to glean some of Waller-Bridge’s particular idiosyncrasies and charm, then wound up using a three-dimensional version of a two-dimensional animation technique as part of their approach to get the character right, drawing up a model sheet of all of Blossom’s expressions, seen from different angles. “We couldn’t rotate her head up too much, but other than that, we made it happen,” Elver said.

Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Blossom), left, and Cailey Fleming (Bea) star in Paramount Pictures’ “IF.”

Though they looked to references as varied as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, ET, and Dark Crystal, Lawrence and Elver worked to strike a new balance between realism and anything too cartoon-like. “How do you imbue these characters with just enough detail, photographic realism, and nuance of articulation and expression so that you can have them live with live-action actors and have them all sit together sympathetically in a scene?” Lawrence said of the philosophical tack they took throughout. The answer was a handmade, frame-by-frame approach so that even the visuals of a talking ice cube in a glass of water (voiced by Bradley Cooper) hit the right emotional beats. The animation team added imperfections like barely perceptible scratches to their characters’ eyes and watched videos of the film’s all-star cast in the recording booth for inspiration. “We look at their facial expressions — what do they do with their eyes and eyebrows? It’s like picking up the right ingredients for cooking,” Elver said. Krasinski also guided some scenes by acting them out himself.

Ice (Bradley Cooper) in “IF.” Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
Bradley Cooper (Ice) and Steve Carell (Blue) star in Paramount Pictures’ “IF.”

The final look of the film’s digital characters is a composite of the director’s vision, the actors’ performances, and the painstaking way each of these elements was interpreted by the animation team. “Great care and attention was our overall goal, to protect the human actors’ performances and the animated performances, to allow them to live and evolve together in a scene, and to support John and his vision in directing that,” Lawrence said. “We used that to guide every decision we made on the film. I’m too close to it, but my four-year-old loved it, so I’m really happy.”

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Featured image: L-R, Christopher Meloni (Cosmo), Ryan Reynolds (Cal), Cailey Fleming (Bea) and Louis Gossett Jr. (Lewis) star in Paramount Pictures’ “IF.”

 

Vision Resurrected: Marvel is Brining Back Paul Bettany’s Superhero for New Disney+ Series

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You can’t keep a good superhero down, especially not Paul Bettany’s Vision, who will be returning once again to lead a brand new Marvel series on Disney+.

Bettany’s red-skinned, Infinity Stone-charged superhero (it’s the Mind Stone, to get technical), one of the more tragic figures in recent Marvel lore considering his death at the hands of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity and his bittersweet resurrection in Disney+’s WandaVision, will return to center a new series from the studio. While we don’t have a title yet, word is the new series will premiere in 2026, led by Star Trek: Picard showrunner Terry Matalas. Marvel has already opened the writer’s room.

Bettany’s Vision has appeared in one form or another in multiple MCU films—first, as simply the voice of J.A.R.V.I.S. (Just a Rather Very Intelligent System), Tony Stark’s all-seeing AI in the Iron Man franchise, then as the near-holy superhero in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, and Avengers: Infinity War. It was in Infinity War that Vision became one of Thanos’s first Avenger casualties, murdered for the Mind Stone that he has lodged in his forehead. But then, Vision was resurrected by Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) in WandaVision, although without any memories from his past, only to once again perish by the end of the series when Wanda removed her spell.

The new Vision series will be the third in this particular witchy corner of the MCU’s Disney+ universe, following the events in both WandaVision and the upcoming spinoff, Agatha All Along, which stars Kathryn Hahn reprising her WandaVision role as the witch Agatha Harkness. That series will premiere on Disney+ in September.

The new Vision series and Agatha All Along join plenty of Marvel action on Disney+, including Daredevil: Born Again and Ironheart, both set to premiere in 2025. Marvel will also follow up their recent animated series X-Men 97 with two more animated offerings, Eyes of Wakanda and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. Over on Prime Video, Marvel has Noir, which will star Nicolas Cage as Spider-Man Noir, reprising his role from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Variety first reported on Vision’s resurrection.

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Featured image: Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda and Paul Bettany as Vision in Marvel Studios’ WandaVision. Courtesy Marvel Studios.

Hugh Jackman’s Return as Wolverine Surprised his Agent and Worried Kevin Feige

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Ever since news broke that Hugh Jackman was returning as Wolverine, fans and Marvel canon keepers have had to reckon with the fact that Jackman had already had his bittersweet superhero sendoff in James Mangold’s 2017 banger Logan, and returning as the be-clawed mutant might mess with that beloved movie’s entire premise and Wolverine’s timeline. The premise in Logan was that the gruff, grizzled lone wolf makes the ultimate sacrifice for his mutant kind and becomes a mythic hero in the process by giving up his life to save a young mutant molded by his own genetics in Dafne Keen’s Laura. The timeline was Wolverine canon, the same one we’d been following for years in previous X-Men movies. Wolverine definitively died at the end of Logan, and in such epically noble fashion that even superfans of Jackman’s take on the character who wanted him around a lot longer had to concede it was the best possible exit.

Then came the news that Jackman had signed up to reprise Wolverine for Deadpool 3, later titled, for emphasis, Deadpool & Wolverine. Ryan Reynolds had long been agitating for Jackman to join his mouthy, irreverent superhero in his R-rated, F-bomb-happy franchise, and Jackman had finally signed on. In fact, Jackman was so eager to join Reynolds that he said yes to the movie before he told his agent. In a conversation with Fandango alongside Reynolds and director Shawn Levy, Jackman admitted he’d agreed almost out of a Wolverine berserker burst of spontaneity.

“I was on my way, I was just driving, and literally, just like a bolt of lightning, came this knowing deep in my gut that I wanted to do this film with Ryan [Reynolds],” Jackman told Fandango. “For Deapdool and Wolverine to come back together. I swear to you, When I said I was done, I really thought I was done. But in the back of my head, ever since I saw ‘Deadpool’ 1, I was like, ‘Those two characters together.’ I knew it, I knew the fans wanted it ever since I put on the claws, people talked about these two. So, that had always been there, but I just knew. And I literally couldn’t wait to arrive,” he continued. “Soon as I arrived, I rang Ryan. And I just said, ‘Let’s do it.’ Like, I hadn’t rung my agent, no one. I had to ring my agent and said, ‘Oh, by the way, I have just committed to a movie.’”

Yet the power of Jackman’s last turn as Wolverine in Logan was such that even a person who would personally gain from Jackman’s return was leery; Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige thought he should stay retired. Feige told Empire that he gave Jackman a piece of advice—don’t come back. ‘You had the greatest ending in history with Logan,” Feige told Empire of his conversation with Jackman. That’s not something we should undo.’”

So what got Feige in Jackman’s corner—besides all the delicious comedic possibilities of putting him back in the claws and pairing him with Reynolds’ gleefully ludicrous Deadpool? The fact that Deadpool & Wolverine wouldn’t undo Jackman’s journey in Logan because the Wolverine we’ll be seeing in the new film is a different version. As Jackman has said previously, Marvel’s been playing around with various timelines via the multiverse for a while now, and it allows for multiple versions of a single character (hence the multiple Thanos’s—Thani?—and Gamoras in Avengers: Endgame for example). This meant Jackman’s Logan timeline could remain intact, his noble sacrifice forever etched in Marvel canon history.

The fact that Deadpool & Wolverine is serving up an entirely different Wolverine to audiences—yet still with his trademark claws and hard-earned, embittered stoicism—offers yet one more reason to rush to the movie theater when the film comes out.

Deadpool & Wolverine slashes its way into theaters on July 26.

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Featured image: Hugh Jackman as Wolverine/Logan in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo by Jay Maidment. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.

“Thelma the Unicorn” Director Lynn Wang on Marshaling the Magic of Brittany Howard’s Voice

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When director Lynn Wang and her co-director Jared Hess set out to adapt Aaron Blabey’s popular 2015 book about a plain-Jane barn pony who dreams of being a unicorn, Wang brought to bear years of animation experience to this sure-hoofed, very funny adaptation. Thelma the Unicorn hits its high notes but also manages to work in sly humor that adults will particularly savor.

What Wang and Hess both have in spades is a deep appreciation for music (the film is chock full of tunes, and Hess made his name with the music-loving indie juggernaut Napoleon Dynamite) and the ability to get the best out of the talented people they assembled around them. Their adaptation boasts a bonafide powerhouse performer in the role of the titular pony-turned-unicorn in former Alabama Shakes’ frontwoman Brittany Howard, making her voice acting debut.

Howard’s spirited Thelma dreams of one day headlining Sparklepalooza, the biggest musical event of the year. Her band, the Rusty Buckets, features her barnyard pals Otis (Will Forte) and Reggie (Napoleon Dynamite star Jon Heder), a pair of donkeys. They’ve never once qualified for a major music festival. The problem, as Thelma sees it, is that being a regular barn pony means she’ll never deserve a stage and microphone; to fulfill her dreams, she needs to be somebody different. 

A scene from “Thelma the Unicorn.” Courtesy Netflix.

Everything changes, however, after a mishap turns this dreamy pony into a glittery pink unicorn (her horn is chock full of vitamin A—it’s a carrot), and a viral video of Thelma the (fake) unicorn reaches music manager Vic Diamond (Jemaine Clement), who believes she’s the next big thing. Thelma’s journey to potential stardom and her exposure as an imposter unicorn are set into motion.

All of this is handled with a bevy of showstopping tunes, wry humor, and charm. We speak to Wang about how she helped Thelma the Unicorn find its sparkle and shine.

Walk me through what it was like to direct an animated film during Covid.

Usually, we’re doing all of this face-to-face, and it’s really fast and free-flowing; you get a lot of creative minds in a room together and throw ideas back and forth, scribbling ideas. We didn’t get to have that luxury during Covid; we were doing it through Zoom, like this. But that format forced us to trust each other a lot more and make sure we could communicate our ideas clearly and create the space for our other team members to do that. There was a lot of trust that we had to create really, really fast.

Lynn Wang. Photo by Mekael Dawson.

What was the adaptation process from the books—did the books create parameters for how the film could look, or did you have the license to go in a different direction?

It was definitely an open conversation. Typically, when adapting a book for animation, you expect it to evolve. Things have to get more intricate to translate a 32-page picture book into a 90-minute movie, especially in CG. We always wanted to take the essence of what Aaron Blabey did in his illustrations, which were wacky, weird, and funny on sight, because we thought that fit the movie’s theme so well.  Celebrating everyone’s quirks and ensuring you were celebrating yourself and what makes you special. So the core of those ideas were there, and there were some other things we wanted to keep: Thelma being short and the textures we loved in Aaron Blabey’s illustrations. Mikros, our animation company, was amazing. They had people who specialized in the physics of hair and cloth simulation and stuff like that, all that added together make this giant whole, and it takes a really long time. [Laughs].

Brittany Howard is Thelma and Jemaine Clement is Vic Diamond in “Thelma the Unicorn.” Courtesy Netflix.

What’s it like to direct and shape voice performances in real-time, especially with someone like Brittany Howard, who has such an iconic voice…

Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s funny because once we found Thelma’s character and finally signed on Brittany—and we were so excited about that—we were thinking about how we could marry her personality to Thelma. The moment we got Brittany into the recording booth, she was so comfortable in front of the microphone, so it was amazing to watch her slip into that so easily. To watch her embody Thelma, she was able to bring so much of her own personality, and as she was recording, we were shifting Thelma because of some of the things she would do or say. A lot of the times, we’d have her read the lines, and as she was saying it, Jared and I would be like, that doesn’t sound quite right, so we’d ask her how she’d say it in her own way, and more often than not, that’s what would end up in the movie. We thought the actors taking hold of the characters and helping direct where the characters would land was right. Especially with comedy.

 

You have some seriously gifted comedians in this cast…

Especially Will Forte, who voiced Otis, he’s so sweet and funny and dorky at the same time, Will really took a hold of that. And the same with Jemaine Clement, who plays Vic Diamond, he was just hilarious. He was riffing a ton of stuff that we ended up not being able to use in the movie, but they were all great and added so much to the character. He was also amazing to watch work through the music.

A scene from “Thelma the Unicorn.” Courtesy Netflix.

How much re-recording did you have to do?

We brought them back quite a bit. It wasn’t weekly, more like once in a few months, because we were working toward screenings. Once we got into animation dailies, we were pretty much locked at that point, because changing animation is a lot more expensive and a lot harder to do. So when we were doing screenings and doing storyboards, we have these moments during the process of making animation where we show the entire movie in whatever shape it’s in—it’s really rough, and it’s all temp scratch, temp audio, and we’re just watching to see how the movie is playing. From there, there’s usually a lot of re-writing and dialogue changing, so after each screening, we bring back the actors to re-record the new audio or get a new take on something.

Did you have any other animated or live-action touchstones while you were working on this? One movie that comes to mind is Sing.

It’s funny that you bring up Sing, we did bring up that film a couple of times just in terms of how we wanted to present this musical movie. Sing is a performance musical versus a Disney musical where you’re singing through the story process and everyone’s emotions. Our film is a performance movie, so that’s where that reference came in. For the most part, we didn’t really use other animated movies as references, the references we used were a lot more from live-action, a lot of musical bios like A Star is Born or Yesterday or Sing Street. We tried to capture the fun of a performance musical. It sounds cheesy, but the project you’re working on does tell you what it needs. You have to follow that down the path without being diverted by something else.

It’s interesting because A Star is Born is a fairly dark reference…

Yes. [Laughs.] That’s true; it’s a very dark reference for a very sparkly unicorn.

You had an embarrassment of riches in terms of musical talent to work with here…

Yeah, we did have an embarrassment of riches, so many songwriters who made demos for us. On top of that, we had Brittany and a great music team at Netflix, who helped us keep our focus on the emotional character arc. And our great songwriters who kept Thelma’s emotional journey in mind, people like Brett McKenzie, who has been writing for TV and movies as well as Flight of the Conchords, and Taura Stinson, who really resonated with Thelma’s journey and who could bring her own truth and history into the songs. That’s why I think a lot of Thelma’s songs are so emotional. And we had Theo Katzman and Louis Cato, and they were phenomenal in helping us make things so ear-wormy.

How did you feel when it was time to put your pencils down, no more tinkering allowed, and you saw the finished film?

I’m really happy with where we landed and that we achieved what we set out to achieve: subverting the unicorn movie. The humor and joy of this movie really come through in the end. And working with my entire team is really excited about where the movie landed. As with any project you work on for so long, you’ll always think, “What if we had more time to explore this a little more,” but I don’t think that’s ever going to stop. [Laughs]. We really strived for whole family viewing; there’s humor for kids, for adults, there’s references for music lovers, needle drops and songs that people will recognize from growing up, and then introducing that type of music to little kids. I hope this is a movie for everybody.

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Featured image: Brittany Howard is Thelma in “Thelma the Unicorn.” Courtesy Netflix.

“Under the Bridge” EP/Director Quinn Shephard on Lily Gladstone & Riley Keough’s Twisty Murder Mystery

Posted on by babrams

In 1997, fourteen-year-old Reena Virk went to a party and never came home, then became front page news around the world when a tight-knit circle of girls and one troubled teenage boy were implicated in her murder. Journalist Rebecca Godfrey wrote about the crime in her acclaimed book “Under the Bridge”, and now Hulu’s narrative series of the same name delves into the life of the victim, as well as those involved in her death. In it, Riley Keough plays Rebecca Godfrey, who finds herself getting too close to the teens in her desire to find the truth. Lily Gladstone plays the fictional character Cam, a childhood friend and police officer with whom Rebecca shares a complicated past. 

Executive producer and writer Quinn Shephard adapted Under the Bridge for Hulu and directed episodes 5 and 6, both of which feature a deeper focus on the teens’ lives. Shephard worked closely on the adaptation with Godfrey, who passed away in 2022. The Credits spoke to Shephard about the pull she felt toward this shocking true story, working with Godfrey, and her experience directing the series. 

 

Rebecca Godfrey is so integral to the show, both as a creator and a character. How important was your collaboration to the finished series?

I don’t think I could possibly overstate her level of influence. It was Rebecca’s book, but so much of her essence and life were part of the show. She was quite generous with sharing that with me, and also giving freedom to explore where we could dip a toe into fictionalization with her character. It was really fun getting to work with somebody who didn’t seem at all precious about her character being sanitized or heroic and who was really game for her being flawed and human. It spoke to her overall ethos as a writer. She had a real appetite to tell very complicated stories about young women. I met her in early 2020, and we worked together for almost three years until she passed away. She let me in fully to her world, including looking at family photos, delving into her backstory and psyche, the music she listened to, and how she met the kids. It was all a really incredible resource.

Under The Bridge — “In Water They Sink The Same” – Episode 106 — Past and present wounds entwine as Rebecca and Cam’s alliance is tested. The Virks discuss taking matters into their own hands, and the teens use a school dance as cover for their escape plan — all as another life is threatened. Rebecca (Riley Keough), shown. (Photo by: Darko Sikman/Hulu)

You directed Episode 5, “When The Heat Comes Down,” and Episode 6, “In Water, They Sink The Same.” Can you discuss a choice as a director that speaks to your aesthetic or particular style?

I really wanted to direct those episodes because they are the most heavily focused on the teen storyline. The goal with them was to really throw the audience into how the teens might have felt in that scenario. Our joke in the room was that we should be writing them with the gravity of The Sopranos and that it should feel as intense and real as being in the mafia. Episodes 5 and 6 are one big arc of throwing ourselves into this extremely tense state that the teens are in after the crime and show how that happens. Simultaneously, in the past, we’re exploring the more tender and human moments about those people and seeing how the two timelines meet. There were some sequences in it that I was really excited about from the beginning, especially shooting Riley and Javon as Rebecca and one of the teenagers, Warren, in the warehouse, which is important because it’s their first real bonding experience when they’re tripping on acid together. 

How did you approach that scene? 

It gave me the ability to be really visually creative, because we knew going into the acid trip we wanted to do everything practically, without VFX. I was working with DP Checco Varese for that episode, and we created something that would hold a fixed close-up of an actor while going in and out. It was fully manual, so the dolly grip would move the camera back and forth during all of the close-up coverage of Javon and Riley. The frame wouldn’t change, but the depth perception of the world behind them and the angles of their faces would be shifting slightly the whole time. As a director, stuff like that is really exciting to me to think about how to fully, practically execute a feeling while being grounded and in the world of the show. The directors on the show before me, who I’d been on set with, created such a very grounded language for the show, and I was excited to pick that up and add a little bit of my own spin on it.

 

How did you develop Cam, Lily Gladstone’s character? Is she a composite of real people working to solve the crime? 

Cam was based heavily on details of the entire investigative team and things that the police force went through. One woman worked on the case in real life, but she was not a direct adaptation into Cam, and she was also a white woman. The people tasked with solving this crime, in reality, were largely white men. It was a creative choice to be able to look at this crime through a modern lens and make it something more personal. She also came out of a need in the narrative. Once Rebecca was introduced as a perspective, I wanted to have a meaningful foil to her. I wanted somebody who wasn’t seduced by the world of teenagers or as fascinated by them, but more someone who believed there was no possible way of excusing this sort of violence. In terms of Cam’s relationship with Rebecca, a lot of that is fictionalized. It was such a huge cast of characters in real life, so we took off a lot of men that really existed and created Cam and just made her a badass.  It also gave us an opportunity to dig in a lot harder, both as a critique of the justice system and Canada’s Pacific history. There’s a lot of romanticization of Canada, imagining they have less of a dark history than we do in the US, and that’s not the case. Cam’s fictional backstory and her being a cop were a way to comment on all that.

Under The Bridge — “When The Heat Comes Down” – Episode 105 — Tensions rise as suspicions surround the teens. Rebecca and Cam hatch a plan — but an unexpected detour leads Rebecca down a strange rabbit hole, resulting in a new bond. Cam (Lily Gladstone) and Roy (Matt Craven), shown. (Photo by: Darko Sikman/Hulu)
Under The Bridge — “When The Heat Comes Down” – Episode 105 — Tensions rise as suspicions surround the teens. Rebecca and Cam hatch a plan — but an unexpected detour leads Rebecca down a strange rabbit hole, resulting in a new bond. Rebecca (Riley Keough) and Cam (Lily Gladstone), shown. (Photo by: Jeff Weddell/Hulu)

The series certainly reflects aspects of coming of age rarely expressed onscreen.

It was an opportunity, at least from my perspective, to deal with so many universal themes about girlhood, but completely devoid of the male gaze. It dealt with every universal aspect of childhood and of being a girl that was rooted in identity, wanting a sense of belonging, a sense of family, about bullying, about violence, about the internalized violence that these girls were dealing with, and socio-economic struggles and racism. Honestly, it’s a story that stretches across so many themes. It’s something I hadn’t really seen explored on television, and it was true. I also saw the opportunity, with the adult storyline, to comment on how stories about young women are often told. 

Under The Bridge — “When The Heat Comes Down” – Episode 105 — Tensions rise as suspicions surround the teens. Rebecca and Cam hatch a plan — but an unexpected detour leads Rebecca down a strange rabbit hole, resulting in a new bond. Dusty (Aiyana Goodfellow), Kelly (Izzy G.) and Josephine (Chloe Guidry), shown. (Photo by: Darko Sikman/Hulu)

The story just gets more complicated as it goes on.

There’s a theme in the show that stories never end, and there was something endless about this one, where every crevice you looked into would open up a conversation that was very human. It was never a dead end. I think that was really fascinating to all of us who worked on the show.

What are you hoping for audiences who watch the series?

The most rewarding reactions for me have been people’s feelings of being conflicted and the moral dilemma of having to sit with it. That’s why I’m very happy it’s a weekly show, because as you get deeper into it, it becomes more challenging emotionally. There are definitely episodes intended to have you walk away feeling as if you’re holding multiple opposing opinions, all of which have valid points and flaws. As an artist, that is the thing I want most from an audience. When I walk away from something, and I genuinely want to have a debate even within myself about how I feel about it, that’s the stuff that makes me look at what part I play in the bigger picture. It helps me step up to the plate as a human being. How do I feel about this, and how might I be a part of the aspect of society that contributes to things like this happening? Reflections like that, for me, come from being challenged. 

 

New episodes of Under the Bridge are airing Wednesdays on Hulu. 

 

 

Featured image: Under The Bridge — “In Water They Sink The Same” – Episode 106 — Past and present wounds entwine as Rebecca and Cam’s alliance is tested. The Virks discuss taking matters into their own hands, and the teens use a school dance as cover for their escape plan — all as another life is threatened. Rebecca (Riley Keough) and Cam (Lily Gladstone), shown. (Photo by: Darko Sikman/Hulu)

 

Marvel’s “X-Men” Movie Takes Big Step Forward in Landing “Hunger Games” Writer

Posted on by babrams

With Deadpool & Wolverine slashing its way toward its July 26 premiere date, more big news about the future of the X-Men and Marvel Studios has arrived.

Marvel has hired The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes writer Michael Lesslie to pen a new X-Men movie for the studio. This would be the first time the mutant super-team has been assembled for an MCU film, owing to Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2019. The last X-Men movie was, in fact, in 2019, with Simon Kinberg’s Dark Phoenix. 

Lesslie penned The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, the last installment in The Hunger Games franchise, which was centered on the life of a young Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) and a tribute from District 12, Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler). He co-wrote Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth in 2015, Assassin’s Creed in 2016, and AMC’s John le Carré adaptation The Little Drummer Girl.

Marvel has recently returned to the world of the X-Men with its Disney+ animated series X-Men 97, a reboot of the popular X-Men: The Animated Series that launched in 1992. The X-Men were created by Marvel Comics’ superteam of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963 and made their big screen debut—and introduced Hugh Jackman’s beloved Wolverine to worldwide audiences—in 2000’s X-Men. That film was followed by two sequels and then was rebooted with Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class in 2011. This iteration then saw three more sequels follow suit, ending with Kinberg’s Dark Phoenix in 2019, centered on Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey.

The X-Men aren’t the only ensemble that Marvel and their parent company Disney retained the rights to in 2019—they’re currently well underway with the reboot of The Fantastic Four from director Matt Shakman, with Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach in the title roles. That film is slated for a July 25, 2025 release.

First up, however, will be the return of Hugh Jackman in Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine, with Jackman’s be-clawed mutant, arguably the most popular of them all, fighting side-by-side (and sometimes against) Ryan Reynolds’ mouthy Deadpool.

(L-R): Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool/Wade Wilson and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine/Logan in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo by Jay Maidment. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.

Deadline first reported about Lesslie’s involvement.

For more on all things Marvel Studios, check out these stories:

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“Fantastic Four” Cast Adds Paul Walter Hauser

Featured image: Hugh Jackman as Wolverine/Logan in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.

First Look at Dwayne Johnson as MMA Legend Mark Kerr in Benny Safdie’s “The Smashing Machine”

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A24 has revealed the first look of Dwayne Johnson as MMA legend Mark Kerr in Benny Safdie’s upcoming film The Smashing Machine.

Johnson reunites with his Jungle Cruise co-star Emily Blunt in Safdie’s A24 drama, from a script Safdie wrote with consultation with Kerr. Kerr was a dominant figure in the MMA ring but had no shortage of problems outside of it, including addiction struggles and domestic problems with his wife, Dawn (played by Blunt), more than enough material for the inventive, fearless Safdie to fashion something memorable. The Smashing Machine is in production now in Vancouver and is slated for a 2025 release, but A24 hasn’t yet given it a specific premiere date.

It’s hardly surprising to see Johnson in the ripped physical shape required to play Kerr, a two-time UFC Heavyweight Tournament Champion and World Vale Tudo Championship tournament winner. Where there seems to be a real transformation is in his face, which appears to have been shaped with the help of some prosthetic magic to make him look like the man who won over two dozen MMA titles.

The Smashing Machine is Benny Safdie’s first solo directorial effort. Until now, he has co-directed his previous A24 films, Good Time and Uncut Gems, with his brother Josh. Benny Safdie’s star has risen in front of the camera, recently starring alongside Blunt in Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning Oppenheimer.

Blunt had a lot to do with getting Safdie and Johnson back together. She watched a documentary about Kerr, “The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr,” and told Johnson that he had to make a movie about his life. Johnson then reconnected with Safdie—they’d first connected on the project back in 2019—and now the movie is underway.

Speaking with Variety, Johnson has explained what drew him to explore this film with Safdie: “Benny wants to create, and continues to push the envelope when it comes to stories that are raw and real, characters that are authentic and at times uncomfortable and arresting. I’m at a point in my career where I want to push myself in ways that I’ve not pushed myself in the past. I’m at a point in my career where I want to make films that matter, that explore a humanity and explore struggle [and] pain.”

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Featured image: Dwayne Johnson is Mark Kerry in The Smashing Machine. Courtesy A24.

“The Acolyte” Drops Two Stunning Teasers Ahead of Two-Episode June 4 Release

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How talented is The Acolyte star Amanda Stenberg? In a new teaser for the latest live-action Star Wars series to arrive on Disney+, we get a chance to listen to Stenberg play a solo violin arrangement of John Williams’ deathless Star Wars score. Stenberg is the star of the new series, which comes from creator Lesyle Headland, and will tell the story of Stenberg’s Mae, a former Padawan who reconnects with her Jedi Master to investigate a series of crimes, leading them both into a confrontation with darker forces than they even knew existed.

Stenberg isn’t just an incredible performer, but as evidenced here, she is a wonderful musician, too:

This glimpse of Stenberg’s musical chops is also accompanied by a new teaser, which gives us fresh looks at Carrie-Anne Moss’s Jedi Master Indara, the first look ever at a live-action Wookie Jedi Master in Joonas Suotamo’s Kelnacca, Rebecca Henderson’s Vernestra Rwoh brandishing a light-whip and more.

When the first trailer for The Acolyte arrived, we were plunged into a thriller set at the end of the High Republic era when darkness rises in the galaxy after a brutal crime spree. That included a thrilling hand-to-hand combat scene between Moss’s Jedi Master Indara and Stenberg’s Mae, who was once a student of a Jedi Master played by Lee Jung-jae. The Acolyte will track Mae on her dangerous path and the growth of her formidable power. That aforementioned shocking crime spree is the killing of Jedis, and it brings these three together.

The cast also includes Manny Jacinto, Dafne Keen, Charlie Barnett, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Dean-Charles Chapman.

Headland serves as creator and the director of the first two episodes, and she’s joined by a stellar crop of helmers—Kogonada (episodes 3 and 7), Alex Garcia Lopez (episodes 4 and 5), and Hanelle Culpepper (episodes 6 and 8). Composer Michael Abels, the man behind the music of Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us, scored the series.

For more on The Acolyte, check out these stories:

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“Star Wars: The Acolyte” Adding Rising Star Jodie Turner-Smith

Featured image: (L-R): Mae (Amandla Stenberg) and Jedi Master Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss) in Lucasfilm’s THE ACOLYTE, exclusively on Disney+. ©2024 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

New “Deadpool & Wolverine” Teaser & Images Signal Start of Ticket Sales

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What better way to signal the start of ticket sales for Marvel’s long-awaited Deadpool & Wolverine than with a teaser set to Madonna’s iconic “Like a Prayer”? While the lyrics of Madonna’s 1989 world-beating song include the line “everyone must stand alone,” those lines play over two beloved superheroes who are very much standing together side-by-side. They are, of course, Wade Wilson/Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) and Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), the Merc with the Mouth that he can never turn off and the Mutant with the Claws who believes his best days are behind him.

Tickets are now on sale for the one and only Marvel Studios film of 2024, which arrives on July 26 and is led by director Shawn Levy, who has promised that Deadpool & Wolverine is very much a two-hander. This is the Reynolds and Jackman team-up that fans and Reynolds have been clamoring for. The ticket sales teaser provides a few cool new shots, including Wolverine and Deadpool going claw-to-katana, a sick action sequence involving the one and only Dogpool, another look at the villain Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), Professor X’s very evil twin, and a raunchy joke (and a few F-bombs) to end the new look.

Marvel has also dropped new images from the film, including a fresh shot at Cassandra Nova, Wolverine, and Deadpool loving up on Dogpool.

Deadpool & Wolverine will find Wade Wilson popping up in Wolverine’s world because he needs the surly mutant’s help in saving his own. Joining Jackman, Reynolds, and Corrin is Matthew MacFayden, the Time Variance Authority’s Mr. Paradox, who is likely the man who helps Deadpool move about the timeline and give the Merc and the Mutant their shot at redemption. Then there are returning stars like Leslie Uggams as Blind Al, Karan Soni as Dopinder, Rob Delaney as Peter, and Morena Baccarin as Vanessa. 

Check out the new images below. Deadpool & Wolverine slashes its way into theaters on July 26:

Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool/Wade Wilson in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo by Jay Maidment. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.
(L-R): Hugh Jackman as Wolverine/Logan and Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool/Wade Wilson in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo by Jay Maidment. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.
(L-R): Dogpool and Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool/Wade Wilson and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine/Logan in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo by Jay Maidment. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.
Emma Corrin as Cassandra Nova in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo by Jay Maidment. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.
(L-R): Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool/Wade Wilson and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine/Logan in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo by Jay Maidment. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.
Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool/Wade Wilson in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.
(L-R): Matthew Macfadyen as Mr. Paradox and Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool/Wade Wilson in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.

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Featured image: Hugh Jackman as Wolverine/Logan in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo by Jay Maidment. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.

Get Mauled by The Trailer for the Remastered “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace”

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The new trailer for the remastered Star Wars: The Phantom Menace brings us back, chronologically speaking, to the events that reshaped the galaxy forever. George Lucas’s world-beating sci-fi franchise began in earnest with 1977’s Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, yet it was The Phantom Menace, released 22 years later in 1999, that began to piece together the story behind the original trilogy, tracking the rise of the Emperor and his most lethal ally, Darth Vader, by introducing us to a child by the name of Anakin Skywalker.

The trailer celebrates the re-release of the first film in Lucas’s prequel trilogy, which carried on with Attack of the Clones in 2002 and Revenge of the Sith in 2005. The film returned to theaters over the May 4th weekend, pulling in an extremely impressive $14.5 million at the global box office, a pretty stunning achievement for the re-release of a film that’s a quarter of a century old.

The Phantom Menace is centered on the life of a young Anakin Skywalker, a gifted child whose journey will come to have a massive effect on the galaxy (and, as we know, he will go on to father Luke and Leia Skywalker, although he’ll have a, um, troubled relationship with them. We watch that child (played in Phantom by Jake Lloyd) become a young man (played by Hayden Christensen) in The Clone Wars and The Revenge of the Sith, the latter of which detailed Anakin’s final, excruciating descent into the Sith lord Darth Vader after a brutal lightsaber battle with his former mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor). That fight also explained how and why Darth Vader ended up in that iconic helmet, and it was far more brutal than anything we’d seen in Star Wars up to that point. 

Christensen has since reprised the role in two Star Wars series for Disney+: Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka. In these series, his tortured Sith Lord battles his old Jedi master Obi-Wan and battles and teaches his former Padawan warrior, Ahsoka, how to survive in a brutal galaxy.

The remastered re-release of The Phantom Menace celebrates its 25th anniversary—it premiered on May 19, 1999—and also introduced us to Ewan McGregor’s younger version of Obi-Wan, Liam Neeson’s Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, Natalie Portman’s Queen Amidala/Padmé (Luke and Leia’s mother), Ian McDiarmid’s Senator Palpatine, and Ahmed Best’s Jar Jar Binks, as well as re-introduced Anthony Daniels and Kenny Baker as C-3P0 and R2-D2 respectively and Frank Oz as Yoda. The film also introduced us to Ray Park’s formidable Darth Maul. If you head to the theater to see The Phantom Menace, you’ll also get a special glimpse at the upcoming series Star Wars: The Acolyte.

Check out the trailer below. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace is in theaters now.

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Featured image: Ray Park is Darth Maul in “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.” Courtesy Lucasfilm.

Dressing a Spy in Plain Sight and Many Robert Downey Jrs. in “The Sympathizer”

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Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel “The Sympathizer” won the Pulitzer Prize and was subsequently adapted into a miniseries by showrunners Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar, a historical black comedy now airing on HBO. The show follows the journey of the Captain (Hoa Xuande), a communist operative working as a mole in South Vietnam’s army who winds up fleeing to the U.S. alongside the General (Toan Le) he putatively works for. Ultimately landing in California, the Captain remains embedded in a South Vietnamese refugee community whom he monitors and reports on to the Viet Cong.

Hoa Xuande in “The Sympathizer.” Photograph by Hopper Stone/HBO

As a spy hiding in plain sight, the Captain interacts with a few different Americans in an official capacity, almost all of whom are played by Robert Downey Jr. In Vietnam, he works alongside a CIA operative, Claude. In the U.S., he encounters a deceptively welcoming California congressman, Ned Godwin, and winds up working on a film set for Niko Damianos, a bearded 1970s auteur. Costume designer Danny Glicker (The Whale, Ghostbusters: Afterlife), dressed Downey Jr.’s different characters to appear distinct, but with a similar soul. “The visual idea was no matter how a person presents themselves to the Captain, all these characters played by RDJ, whether they’re conservative or liberal, whether they seem progressive or a little bit stuck in the past, they’re always the same person. He always hits the exact same wall,” Glicker said.

 

While Glicker’s approach to Downey Jr.’s different roles was to dress them in a heightened, “gonzo” but still historically accurate version of what the protocols of their different positions in life would require, for the Captain, what mattered most was his ability to quietly navigate different environments, which he does in muted, preppy style. “It’s a highly calculated form of presentation because it’s a way of expressing himself that allows for genteel respectability, effortless mobility, and communicates a really important idea, which is the academic class within the American social class, which, of course, is ultimately a training ground for the Western hierarchy of politics and social infrastructure,” Glicker said. Half-French, half-Vietnamese, and a U.S. college graduate, the Captain’s quietly presentable wardrobe references his 1960s academic career. “This look, which appears so kind and calm and safe and gentle, is actually this very calculated aesthetic that the Captain has assembled, which makes him seem trustworthy, bookish, conservative, and reliable,” the costume designer explained. 

Hoa Xuande and Roberty Downey Jr. Photograph by Beth Dubber/HBO
Robert Downey Jr. in “The Sympathizer.” Photograph by Hopper Stone/HBO

For the Captain and Downey Jr.’s different characters, Glicker initially looked to a few historical figures. Among the Captain’s bookish looks, “there was a little bit of Steve McQueen and Ryan O’Neal thrown in there. The idea was these were iconic aesthetics, iconic silhouettes that inspired both trust, but also, in the case of McQueen, a little danger, and in the case of Ryan O’Neal, a little romanticism,” he said. In the case of CIA agent Claude, Glicker expanded on silhouettes out of Graham Greene. “It was incredibly fun for me to think a lot about the opposite of how you would imagine a CIA agent to be. This is not a guy who’s disappearing,” the costume designer aid of Claude, who presents himself as a tourist in vibrant, vacation-ready clothing. “But there’s a real darkness to it because he is deeply embedded in some truly miserable activities. He’s walking into an interrogation wearing a peach Guayabera shirt, and it’s a horrifying image.”

Sandra Oh. Photograph by Hopper Stone/HBO

Similarly, the dangerous, savvy congressman the Captain encounters in the U.S. wears lighter colors than you’d expect from someone working in Washington. “I wanted to play with the sinister idealism of California-based politics because in the 70s, the country was definitely moving toward deeply influential politicians from California,” Glicker said. Through the congressman’s deceptive dress, he also has the audience wrestle with the same issues the Captain faces — the juxtaposition of California’s surface-level brightness and cheer with the darkness contained in the people he meets there.

Robert Downey Jr. Photograph by Hopper Stone/HBO

Given the show’s stunts, blood, military uniforms, and several characters played by Downey Jr. who all appear together in one scene, as well as the fact that a lot of clothing original to the 1970s is falling apart, The Sympathizer entailed an enormous amount of building, which Glicker accomplished alongside a team of fiber technicians, whom he credited with “making things look well-loved and giving them a story.” For the period setting, the costume designer aimed to be as truthful as possible. “I think the thing that I wanted to remind everyone was how earthy the world was then. It’s not just crisp, hilarious polyesters,” he said. For the Captain’s friend Bon, for example, he was inspired by the Asian American protests of the 70s. “You begin to understand that the humanity that is within those clothes is something that is born of struggle or complexity.”

Hoa Xuande, Fred Nguyen Khan. Photograph by Hopper Stone/HBO

The series begins in 1975, but many of the clothes on screen come from earlier eras. “A lot of our refugees, when they arrive to the United States, are people who have cultivated beautiful tastes but are still wearing the clothes given to them,” Glicker said. Moving on from these items became a part of their personal and visual journey. Among his favorite characters to dress was Lana, the General’s daughter. “That was one of the more touching things because we were spending so much time in this very dark story of people who are going into a system that was rigged against them, and Lana was this bright spot, someone who was moving through it and doing very well at it,” Glicker said. At first, Lana is almost intentionally invisible, but she comes into her own as a character in the Captain’s orbit, trying to forge her way in a new country. “I wanted to really express the experience of people who come to the United States with limited resources, but not limited imagination or limited taste,” Glicker said, which is just what Lana’s slowly unfolding visibility communicates.

Toan Le, Vy Le. Photograph by Hopper Stone/HBO.
Vy Le. Photograph by Hopper Stone/HBO

 

 

 Featured image: Robert Downey Jr., Hoa Xuande. Photograph by Hopper Stone/HBO

“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” VFX Team on Bringing a New Generation of Primates to Life

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The events in Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes take place 300 years after the death of Caesar (Andy Serkis), the focus of the previous Apes trilogy kickstarted by director Rupert Wyatt in 2011 and then led by director Matt Reeves for the final two films. Apes have now evolved into a fully talking species while humans tread backward. It would seem like a win for the apes, but it’s still not enough for the powerful junky tyrant Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand)—he wants to wipe out mankind for good, and the key to doing that are the secrets a young girl named Mae (Freya Alan) might hold. While the goons of the self-proclaimed king track her down, they ransack the peaceful village of the Eagle Clan. The devastation marks the start of a long journey for the franchise’s new protagonist, Noa (Owen Teague), who wants to bring his family back home.

Weta FX was behind the demanding visuals, delivering more than a dozen new characters, creating new environments, and teaching apes to talk. More than 1,500 visual effects shots were required, and 33 minutes of the film were completely digital. Heading the way was visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist, who worked on the three latest films, starting with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011. Winquist and animation supervisor Paul Story explains how they took the franchise’s sensational effects to new heights.

 

Performance Capture

To capture performance, actors wear a performance capture suit that is equipped with active markers that allow motion capture cameras to record the action. The technology has evolved dramatically, back to Weta’s work on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. For the Apes franchise, the challenge was moving from a studio setting to a physical location. “Mocap is done in a controlled space where an array of mocap cameras emit infrared light that bounces off reflective markers on the suits and back to the cameras. That doesn’t work in sunlight,” Winquist tells The Credits. “So instead of reflective markers, we have infrared LED lights on the suit. Those are the markers that allow us to take the process outside.” Kingdom has actors using third-generation suits. The upgrade has markers embedded in the suits so nothing can get caught on them when they come in contact with something.

The other key capture ingredient is the camera that records the actor’s face. “In the previous film, there was a single small camera on the end of a boom. In the march of technology moving forward and miniaturization, we now have a pair of stacked stereo cameras that are viewing their facial performance at 48fps,” says Winquist. “So we can use those perspective views of the two cameras and derive a three-dimensional mesh of their face at 48fps. This gives us a much more nuanced view of every little tick in their face.”

All the information then feeds into a Deep Learning Facial Solver, which Winquist says has never been used on the Apes movies before. “What the solver enables us to do is get the mechanics of the performance and frees up the animator to really focus on the actual emotional content of the performance,” Winquist explains.

(L-R): Noa (played by Owen Teague) and Raka (played by Peter Macon) in 20th Century Studios’ KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2024 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Facial Animation

Even with the latest technology, the emotional soul of the characters starts with the actors. The trick for visual effects is taking the human performance and transposing that onto the ape’s face and body. “What we are putting on screen is entirely the performance the actors give on the day. The translation is the secret, but we are not inventing those moments,” Winquist says. Bringing it all together is a challenging task for the animators.

“With our setup, the Deep Learning Facial Solver translates their performance and gives us a base motion. Then each animator can go through with the reference side by side so we can match the ape performance exactly to the human performers are doing,” explains Paul Story.

(L-R): Soona (played by Lydia Peckham) and Noa (played by Owen Teague) in 20th Century Studios’ KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

For performance moments that needed to be pushed further, visual effects could augment and enhance them with the facial solver or keyframe them to better match a performance. The team didn’t rely solely on the solver, as many of the characters are fully keyframe facial animated.

“Not having to set keyframes for the entire facial performance now, we can build upon that base the solver has established and let the animator use their time on every shot, every character to make sure they can match the emotional beats of a particular performance,” Winquist continues. “The animator is part of the recipe and translates what the actor did to make sure what you see on the screen [as apes] gives you the same emotional response you would get from a human actor.”

 

Talking Apes

With Kingdom, apes have more dialog than in the previous three films combined. The challenge for visual effects was translating how much an ape’s mouth should move since the muzzles are much larger than a human mouth. “We had to rely on a solver to get the consistency between the shots, but it was definitely tough up front to find that balance between how a human and ape would talk,” notes Story. “There’s all these sort of ratios you need to find, good talking ratios that change per character.”

For Proximus Caesar, the team tied his physicality to his speech. “Part of the design is making sure we have a similar eye shape, and when we are animating, we are making sure the chimp brows read the same,” says Story. “The human brow is different; we can read more about the hairy shape of our brows, whereas chimps tend not to have as much hair up there. It’s all about the underlying side of the brow as it’s related to the eye that conveys that emotion.” The team of animators would reference the captured human performance to create the speech of the ape and, at times, push it further to help sell it.

 

Soaring Eagles

Noa belongs to the Eagle Clan, and the golden eagle plays a crucial role in their culture. Each ape must climb to a nest to secure an egg as a rite of passage. From birth, they bond with the eagle, forming a lifelong kinship where the bird of prey becomes their eye-in-the-sky protector. Ball introduces us to the adventurous ritual in the film’s opening sequence. Noa and close friends Anaya (Travis Jeffery) and Soona (Lydia Peckham) bring us to the peak of their world, a lush, overgrown forest as far as the eye can see. Still without an egg, Noa climbs to the top nest, and it nearly costs him his life, a feat he tries to impress upon his father Koro (Neil Sandilands), who is the tribe’s master of birds.

Visual effects looked to next-gen technology Weta calls Apteryx, which is the scientific name for the kiwi, to create a village of digital eagles. The computer-based toolset allows artists to generate, hand sculpt, and groom feathers more efficiently and realistically. “Birds are very difficult; every feather is not a single piece of geometry but a complex organization of what is fundamentally hair coming off a central stem. And every bird has thousands of these,” explains Winquist. “It very quickly becomes a computational nightmare not only to simulate but also to groom and sculpt the layout of the feathers.” 

Winquist points out Weta initially used their existing plumage tools for grooming because Apteryx “wasn’t quite production ready” when they started building the eagle characters. “By the time we got through to the end of the show, the toolset had become rich enough that we were able to go back and re-groom our eagles. There are some shots of the before and after that go from a really nice-looking CG bird to a bird that looks real.”

Noa (played by Owen Teague) in 20th Century Studios’ KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Water World  

War of the Planet of the Apes (2017) gave Weta an early crack at water interaction as Caesar and his tribe take refuge behind a waterfall. Some of the shots included rain dripping down Caesar’s face and walking through the waterfall. At the time, Winquist admits even those limited frames “were a struggle.” Fast-forward to post Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), the team was able to springboard techniques from the James Cameron film to now have the ape characters interact, swim, or even fight in the water with believable results. One of the more challenging sequences happens during a raging flood at the oceanside encampment of Proximus Caesar. It’s a death-defying moment for every ape on screen.

“It was a big collaboration between our effects team, which does all the water simulation, and our creature team, which takes care of the hair simulation, whether that is interacting with wind, water, or other characters,” Winquist says of the climactic scene.  

Creating the imagery required some baton passing in post. “With a lot of the water stuff, we had to previs and make the shots ourselves, with the direction of Wes,” notes Story. “That was a fun task, but keeping that in line with the water, there was a lot of back and forth.” To start, the effects team would make a low-resolution simulation of the water, for example, a crashing wave, and then pass that on to the creature team for them to animate how the apes would interact with the water. After the initial low-res simulations, the effects team create a targeted high resolution simulation to add additional water not part of the original pass. For instance, water running down an ape’s face or water draining off its fur as it emerges from the water. “With water, it needs to feel like a thin film draining off their bodies,” notes Winquist. “It was important to make sure the volume of water coming off seemed justified for how much they got splashed. If they come out of the water, we also have to show how long the water needs to continue to drain out of their hair.”

A scene still from 20th Century Studios’ KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is in theaters now.

 

 

Featured image: Raka (played by Peter Macon) in 20th Century Studios’ KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2024 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Netflix’s Production of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is a Bold Showcase of Latin American Culture

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“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” 

With these haunting words, acclaimed as one of the best opening lines in literature, Gabriel García Márquez introduces readers to the enchanting world of Macondo in his celebrated novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Now, after a decade since the passing of the Nobel laureate, Netflix embarks on a momentous endeavor to translate this literary masterpiece to the screen, promising an adaptation that honors the allure of García Márquez’s timeless narrative. 

Published in 1967, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” chronicles the Buendía family across generations as they navigate love, loss, and the passage of time. This monumental work of literature magisterially weaves themes of the cyclical nature of destiny, the illusion of progress, and the enduring power of memory. In 1982, García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the Swedish Academy praising his work “in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.” With sales exceeding 50 million copies and translations available in over 46 languages, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” stands as the crowning jewel of the literary style known as magical realism. 

The prospect of witnessing the story unfold on screen is magical in itself. It’s worth recalling that Gabriel García Márquez was initially opposed to the idea of adapting the story for the film, once even stating: “In a time of conflict with cinema, I said that I had written ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ against cinema.” 

However, in 2019, when Netflix acquired the rights to adapt the novel, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, sons of the author and executive producers of the series, addressed their father’s stance. While García Marquez believed it “impossible to capture it within the time constraints of a movie and thought that producing it in a language other than Spanish would not do it justice,” they emphasized that the current golden age of series and a global appreciation for content in foreign languages, presented an opportune moment to bring this adaptation to Netflix’s global audience.

“But mostly our conscious is clear, because he always said: when I’m not here, do whatever you want” the García Barcha brothers told Bloomberg. Apart from overseeing the most general aspects of the adaptation — ensuring it was in Spanish, predominantly Colombian, and of sufficient duration to do justice to the book — the siblings allowed Netflix to unleash all its resources to make their father’s seminal book shine.

The outcome is nothing short of epic, as Netflix has spared no expense in bringing to life the enchanting world of Macondo. Spanning across various locations in Colombia, the main set of One Hundred Years of Solitude sprawls over 128 acres in Alvarado, Tolima, making it one of the largest sets ever built in Latin America. Painstakingly recreated, we will witness multiple iterations of Macondo as it unfolds through a century of events, seamlessly blending reality with wonder.

Mexican Oscar winner Eugenio Caballero (Pan’s Labyrinth) and Oscar-nominated Bárbara Enríquez (Roma) are leading the production design. Based on what we can see in the teaser and further explorations of the production, every aspect reflects a dedication to capturing the essence of García Márquez’s literary masterpiece.

In the hands of Dynamo Producciones (Narcos, American Made), the series boasts a collaboration between Argentinian Alex García López (The Witcher) and Colombia’s own Laura Mora (The Kings of the World) as co-directors. 

A plethora of predominantly Colombian talent will portray the saga of the Buendía family. Claudio Cataño takes on the role of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, second-born of the patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendía, played by Marco González. Given the narrative’s emphasis on the passage of time, across the 16-episode series, we will see Colonel Aureliano depicted as a boy by child actor Jerónimo Barón (Sound of Freedom); and as a teenager by Santiago Vázquez. Leonardo Soto portrays the firstborn of the Buendía clan, Jose Arcadio, while Susana Morales makes her debut as the indomitable matriarch, Úrsula Iguarán. Additionally, Melquíades, the enigmatic wanderer pivotal to the Buendía’s fate, will be brought to life by Spanish actor Moreno Borja.

The production of One Hundred Years of Solitude arrives at a pivotal moment for Netflix as it refines its global strategy. As Francisco “Paco” Ramos, VP of Latin America Content, emphasized, “Netflix in each country has to feel very unique to that country.”

Indeed, Netflix is delivering! Alongside this monumental project, the streaming giant is simultaneously undertaking the adaptation of another Latin American classic, Pedro Páramo, in Mexico, as well as The Eternaut, a sci-fi series filming in Argentina, and a drama centered around Brazilian F1 idol Ayrton Senna. As Netflix’s most ambitious project in the region, One Hundred Years of Solitude represents the pinnacle of its commitment to showcasing the diverse voices and cultures of Latin America on the world stage.

As anticipation mounts for the 2024 series release, fans eagerly await a faithful portrayal of their beloved story. Moreover, they welcome the chance to witness Colombian culture depicted in a manner that defies clichés, offering a fresh perspective on the region’s rich tapestry. The ambitious adaptation promises to be a fitting tribute to one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century.

One Hundred Years of Solitude will debut on Netflix this year.

For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:

Jennifer Lopez Takes on a Lethal AI in Official “Atlas” Trailer

First Trailer for Netflix’s Animated “Thelma the Unicorn” Boasts Singing Phenom Brittany Howard in First Acting Role

Penelope and Colin Conspire in First “Bridgerton” Season 3 Trailer

Featured image: Claudio Cataño is Colonel Aureliano Buendia in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Courtesy Netflix.

James Gunn’s “Superman” Coming to IMAX Next Summer

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Last week, we got our first look at David Corenswet as Superman, and now we’ve learned that we’ll be seeing Corenswet’s take on the iconic Clark Kent on the biggest possible. It’s been confirmed that James Gunn’s Superman will be released on IMAX next summer. It’s an appropriate venue for the biggest film to come out of DC Studios in years and the first marquee feature from Gunn and Peter Safran’s new version of DC, which will unify all titles across film and TV under a new vision for the studio. Gunn and Safran have titled the first phase of their film and TV slate, of which Superman is the first offering, “Chapter 1: Gods & Monsters.” It’s extra appropriate considering Gunn is filming Superman entirely in IMAX.

Corenswet becomes 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 Gunn is clearly inspired by considering he lopped 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. 

Corenswet’s Clark Kent/Superman is joined by newly cast Neva Howell and Pruitt Taylor Vince, playing Martha and Jonathan Kent respectively, alongside Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher, Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific, Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, Anthony Carrigan as Metamorpho, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, María Gabriela de Faría as The Engineer, and Gunn’s longtime collaborator Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner.

Gunn revealed the first look at Corenswet as Superman on Threads, offering fans a tantalizing glimpse of the Man of Steel and clues about how Gunn plans to approach this crucial reboot for DC Studios. Gunn has made it clear that although he’s well known for his irreverent take on superheroes, evidenced in his cheeky Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy and his madcap Suicide Squad reboot for DC Studios, his Superman is going to be a decent, hopeful young man with the burden of an entire planet—two, really, when you consider his Kryptonian roots—on his shoulders. When it comes to the look of the film, the image offers us a chance to make some educated guesses as to how Gunn, costume designer Judianna Makovsky, and production designer Beth Mickle have approached what has to be the most anticipated film of 2025.

Superman hits theaters and IMAX on July 11, 2025.

For more on Superman, check out these stories:

First Look at “Superman” Revealed: Behold David Corenswet as The Man of Steel

James Gunn’s “Superman” Finds its Martha Kent in Neva Howell

James Gunn’s “Superman” Casts Crucial Role of Jonathan Kent

Nicholas Hoult on Becoming the New Lex Luthor in James Gunn’s “Superman”

Featured image: David Corenswet is Clark Kent/Superman in “Superman.” Courtesy James Gunn/Warner Bros.

After “Furiosa” Blows the Doors off Cannes, George Miller Revs Up the Possibility of Another “Mad Max” Film

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George Miller is currently riding high at the Cannes Film Festival after Furiosa, his scorching sequel to Fury Road, made its world premiere last night. The premiere came nine years after Fury Road blew the roof off the fest, and, once again, Miller, his team, and his talented cast have managed to wow the Cannes crowd. Furiosa‘s screening ended with a seven-minute standing ovation. So far, so good.

Miller is an iconically meticulous filmmaker. Mad Max: Fury Road was an epic labor of love, and Furiosa was in no way an easier ride—it took more than a decade of development and once again required a punishing shoot that included a 79-day portion devoted to a single 15-minute action sequence involving 200 stunt performers. [At the press conference following Furiosa, star Anya Taylor-Joy shouted out her stunt double, Hayley Wright, for her incredible work. “She is now one of my best friends in the entire world. Rather than it being an environment of aggression…it was, ‘I love you. I believe in you.”]

So, it was quite something when Miller suggested he was open to filming another Mad Max installment, saying there are plenty more stories to tell of the men and women who roam the Waste Lands. Miller has made five Mad Max films thus far—in 45 years—with Fury Road stunning critics, engrossing audiences, and winning six Oscars.

“There are certainly other stories there. Mainly because in order to tell the story of Fury Road, we had to know the backstory of Furiosa and Max in the year before,” Miller said at the press conference following Furiosa‘s premiere. “That was a tool for the cast and crew. We know the Max story from the year before. I’ll definitely wait to see how this [Furiosa] goes, before we even think about it.”

Furiosa continues the story of Imperator Furiosa, played in Fury Road by Charlize Theron in what has to be considered one of the most iconic roles of the 21st Century. Furiosa is the character’s origin story, with Taylor-Joy playing a younger Furiosa in a story that establishes what tragedies and triumphs came together to make this indomitable woman.

The world of Mad Max has always been one that celebrated, maniacally and wonderfully, the power of practical effects. Fury Road was a balletic combination of madness and mastery over the physical and mechanical world, and according to critics so far, Furiosa is more than a worthy sequel. If it proves to be as formidable at the box office as its predecessor, we might be getting a fresh installment, even if it takes another ten years.

 

For more on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, check out these stories:

“Furiosa” First Reactions Hail Another Super-Charged Stunner

“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” Reveals a Younger (But Still Psychotic) Immortan Joe

“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” Drops its Scorching First Trailer

Featured image: Caption: Tom Burke as Praetorian Jack and Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland

“The Fantastic Four” Adds Natasha Lyonne to Cast

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There’s a supremely bright new star in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—Natasha Lyonne has been cast in The Fantastic Four.

The creator and star of Netflix’s Russian Doll and the face of Poker Face has joined the cast of Marvel’s reboot of one of the most iconic super-groups in all of comics. Director Matt Shakman has added the stellar Lyonne to an already sensational cast, although what role the multi-talented performer, writer, producer, and director will play is unknown.

The original Fantastic Four were created, of course, by Marvel’s iconic super-team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and they are Marvel’s First Family. Once Disney acquired 21st Century Fox and the rights to the quartet in 2019, Marvel began patiently planning their reboot of the franchise. After a thoughtful lead-up, the cast has rounded out: Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards (aka Mr. Fantastic), Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm (aka the Invisible Woman), Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm (aka the Human Torch), and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm (aka the Thing). Then there’s Julia Garner as the Silver Surfer and Ralph Ineson as the supervillain Galactus, joined by Paul Walter-Hauser and John Malkovich in unspecified roles.

Shakman, who did incredible work on Marvel’s first Disney+ series, WandaVision, directs from a script by Jeff Kaplan, Eric Pearson, Ian Springer, and Josh Friedman. Production is slated to begin this summer, and the release date is currently set at July 25, 2025.

By the time Shakman’s The Fantastic Four premieres, it will be the first iteration of the superfamily in a decade. Fox produced three films—Fantastic Four (2005), Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), and a reboot, Fantastic Four (2015). 

Deadline was first to the scoop of Lyonne’s casting.

For more on The Fantastic Four, check out these stories:

“The Fantastic Four” Casts Ralph Ineson as Supervillain Galactus

“Fantastic Four” Cast Adds Paul Walter Hauser

Marvel’s “The Fantastic Four” Casts Julia Garner as Silver Surfer

Featured image: Natasha Lyonne is Charlie Cale in “Poker Face.” Courtesy Peacock.

The First “Wicked” Trailer Arrives on the Wings of Flying Monkeys

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The first trailer for director John M. Chu’s Wicked has arrived on a pair of wings.

Chu’s Wicked is the first big-screen adaptation of one of the most successful Broadway shows of the 21st century, and he’s got the help of two otherworldly talents to help enchant Universal’s adaptation. The first is Emmy, Grammy, and Tony-winner Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba, a phenomenally gifted young woman whose unusual green skin has made her the subject of scorn. The second is the Grammy-winning, multiple-platinum superstar Ariana Grande as Glinda, a young woman who has had the opposite experience to Elphaba, a cheery figure whose popularity has been secured by privilege and been super-charged by her ambition.

The trailer gives us a sampling of the ballads “Defying Gravity” and “Popular,” as well as the moment when Elphaba and Glinda cross paths at Shiz University in Oz, where an unlikely but profound friendship will blossom and will take on epic, potentially tragic proportions after a meeting with the Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum). The trailer also boasts flying monkeys (of course), silver slippers, and those yellow bricks. Wicked tells the story of what eventually turns these two young women into Glinda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West.

The film is based on Gregory Maguire’s novel, which is set before Dorothy arrives in Oz and provides a richly realized story that helps restore the Wicked Witch of the West’s humanity in the incredible person of Elphaba. Joining Erivo and Grande are Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible, Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero Tigelaar, Ethan Slater as Boq, Bowen Yang as Pfannee.

Check out the trailer below. Wicked will enchant theaters on Thanksgiving.

For more on Wicked, check out these stories:

Ariana Grande & Cynthia Erivo’s “Wicked” Wows at CinemaCon

First “Wicked” Trailer Finds Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo Getting Witchy With It

Michelle Yeoh Will Star in “Wicked” Movies as Madame Morrible

Featured image: L to R: Ariana Granda is Glinda and Cynthia Erivo is Elphaba in WICKED, directed by Jon M. Chu

The First Teaser for “Dune: Prophecy” Unveils the Powers That Shaped the Dune Universe

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The first teaser for Max’s Dune: Prophecy has landed, taking us back 10,000 years before the events depicted in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films and centered on two Harkonnen sisters fighting against dark forces who will eventually found the secretive, powerful sect called the Bene Gesserit. Prophecy will offer lovers of both Villeneuve’s astonishing two-part epic and Frank Herbert’s novels a look at how the combative, fragile intergalactic community present during the rise of Paul Atreides (played in the films, of course, by Timothée Chalamet) was shaped. The series is inspired by Brian Herbert (Frank Herbert’s eldest son) and Kevin J. Anderson’s novel “Sisterhood of Dune.”

The cast includes Emily Watson and Olivia Williams as sisters Valya Harkonnen and Tula Harkonnen, along with Travis Fimmel, Jodhi May, Mark Strong, Sarah-Sofie Boussnina, Josh Heuston, Chloe Lea, Jade Anouka, Faoileann Cunningham, Edward Davis, Aoife Hinds, Chris Mason, Shalom Brune-Franklin, Jihae, Tabu, Charithra Chandran, Jessica Barden, Emma Canning, and Yerin Ha.

The series comes from showrunner and executive producer Alison Schapker. Prophecy was co-developed by Diane Ademu-John, who serves as executive producer. Anna Foerster directed multiple episodes, including the all-important episode one, and serves as executive producer. Jordan Goldberg, Mark Tobey, John Cameron, Matthew King, Scott Z. Burns, and Dune and Dune: Part Two screenwriter Jon Spaihts executive produce alongside Brian Herbert. Byron Merritt and Kim Herbert are executive producers for the Frank Herbert estate. 

Check out the teaser below. Dune: Prophecy arrives on Max this fall.

Here’s the official longline from Max: From the expansive universe of “Dune,” created by acclaimed author Frank Herbert, and 10,000 years before the ascension of Paul Atreides, DUNE: PROPHECY follows two Harkonnen sisters as they combat forces that threaten the future of humankind and establish the fabled sect that will become known as the Bene Gesserit. DUNE: PROPHECY is inspired by the novel SISTERHOOD OF DUNE, written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. 

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

Zendaya Double Feature: “Dune: Part Two” Returns to IMAX as “Challengers” Serves Up Premiere

Desert Power: The Lasting Success of “Dune: Part Two” & Future Adaptations

“Dune: Part Two” Cinematographer Greig Fraser on Finding Clarity in Chaos

Featured image: Emily Watson in “Dune: Prophecy.” Courtesy HBO Max.