Arguably the biggest news in the film world yesterday was the announcement that Milly Alcock had landed the highly-coveted role of Supergirl for James Gunn and Peter Safran’s new-look DC Studios. Alcock and Meg Donnelly were the final two people vying for the role and had both done screen tests last week. Supergirl has a very bright future ahead of her, as Gunn and Safran plan to deploy her in at least one upcoming film or series (possibly Gunn’s Superman: Legacy, which kicks off the new, united DC Studios) before she features in her own movie, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. Alcock ultimately won the role to play the superpowered Kryptonian and cousin of Superman.
Yet Gunn revealed on Threads that he has been big on Alcock from even before she auditioned, thanks in large part to her fantastic performance in HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon:
“In case you missed this exciting news yesterday. Strangely, Milly was the FIRST person I brought up to Peter for this role, well over a year ago, when I had only read the comics. I was watching House of the Dragon & thought she might have the edge, grace & authenticity we needed for the DCU’s Supergirl. And now here we are. Life is wild sometimes.”
Alcock played Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen in House of the Dragon, the daughter of King Viserys I Targaryen (Paddy Considine) and the person he eventually promises the Iron Throne to. If you’ve ever watched Game of Thrones, you know what a death sentence the Throne can be. Yet Princess Rhaenyra becomes one of the prime movers of House Targaryen (she’s played by Emma D’Arcy after a considerable time jump), a strong-willed, doubt-her-at-your-peril force within Westeros who will not allow herself to be bulldozed for the Throne, or for any other reason, by the many schemers around her. Alcock won raves for her performance from critics, fans, and James Gunn himself.
For the role Kara Zor-El, Gunn was looking for someone with that kind of chutzpah. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow will be based, at least partially, on the comic series by Tom King and Bilquis Evely. In their series, Supergirl steps out of the shadow of her iconic cousin, Superman, and forms a very distinct personality. She’s had it rough, having to bear witness to the destruction of her home planet and find a way to grow up in its ruins. As Gunn said on Twitter when he and Safran announced the initial slate for their upcoming films and TV series, Supergirl’s childhood was vastly different from what Superman experienced in many ways:
“Superman is a guy sent to Earth and raised by loving parents, where Supergirl in this story, she is a character raised on a chunk of Krypton,” Gunn explained on Twitter. “She watched everybody around her perish in some terrible way, so she’s a much more jaded character.”
Gunn is still looking for a director for Woman of Tomorrow, but he’s got his screenwriter in Ana Nogueira. And now, he also has the Supergirl he’s wanted for more than a year.
For more on all things DC Studios, check out these stories:
Christopher Nolan is well aware that he’s in an extremely fortunate position as a filmmaker. Granted, this is a fortune he’s earned through a career of crafting huge and hugely entertaining blockbusters across a variety of genres, but he’s certainly not taking it for granted.
Speaking with Timemagazine, Nolan was quick to point out the smaller films he’s recently seen and loved, including Celine Song’s Past Lives and Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, two beautiful, bittersweet stories that revealed the immense skill of their writer/directors and Nolan’s appreciation of the power available in intimate, quieter films.
Yet Nolan told Time he’s well aware that his success has given him a kind of responsibility to go big, given his history of marshaling huge sets, large ensemble casts, and complex blockbusters on the grandest scale.
“I’m drawn to working at a large scale because I know how fragile the opportunity to marshal those resources is,” Nolan told Time. “I know that there are so many filmmakers out there in the world who would give their eye teeth to have the resources I put together, and I feel I have the responsibility to use them in the most productive and interesting way.”
Nolan’s career features more successful, critically acclaimed blockbusters than almost any other filmmaker not named Steven Spielberg. His Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, Tenet, and his latest, Oppenheimer, which garnered an industry-best 13 Oscar nominations. And Oppenheimer was made for a relatively modest $100 million, given that he’s had a much larger budget for previous films and Oppenheimer‘s massive successive at the box office.
L to R: Emily Blunt (as Kitty Oppenheimer) with writer, director, and producer Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy (as J. Robert Oppenheimer) on the set of OPPENHEIMER.
In fact, Nolan shot Oppenheimer at a very quick pace, a mere 57 days compared to the 85 he’d originally budgeted for it, all to give himself and his team more money for location filming and production design.
The results speak for themselves. Oppenheimer is currently the favorite to win Best Picture, it has broken box office records, and it proved that when a passionate filmmaker makes the very most of the resources he’s given, even a story about a theoretical physicist, albeit one who played a massive role in world history, can become a global phenomenon.
And Nolan’s not going to rest on his laurels. He feels a responsibility to keep going big.
Henry Cavill taking on the Nazis in an action flick from Guy Ritchie based on a true story? That’s a mission we’ll accept. Lionsgate has revealed the first trailer for Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which centers Cavill as a recruit in the British Military’s desperate attempt to turn the tides of World War II.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is based on recently declassified files of the British War Department, centered on what’s considered the creation of the first-ever special forces organization, spearheaded by none other than Winston Churchill himself, and which included author Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. (Fleming was an active covert participant in World War II, featuring in the wild operation that spawned both a great book and a great film, Operation Mincemeat.)
Cavill stars as part of the rag-tag crew that makes up this first-ever special forces unit as they head off on a mission to fight the Nazis with methods that are unconventional, or, more to the point, ungentlemanly and which ultimately laid the groundwork for the British SAS and Black Ops warfare.
Joining Cavill are Eiza González (Baby Driver), Alan Ritchson (Reacher), Alex Pettyfer (In Time), Hero Fiennes Tiffin (After), Babs Olusamokun (Dune), Henrique Zaga (Beyond the Universe), Til Schweiger (Inglourious Basterds), Henry Golding (Crazy Rich Asians) and Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride).
Check out the trailer below. The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare arrives in theaters on April 19.
Milly Alcock is making the move from Westeros to Krypton.
Alcock won the highly coveted role of Supergirl after screen testing for DC Studios heads James Gunn and Peter Safran last week, edging out Meg Donnelly. Alcock is expected to appear in possibly two DC Studios projects before starring in Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which will be the character’s full-throated entrance into the new-look, unified DC Universe.
One of the first questions is whether Alcock will appear in Gunn’s upcoming Superman: Legacy, the first feature film to properly kick off his and Safran’s new DC Studios. Legacy is filming this spring, but there’s a chance she will appear in a different film or series. As for Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, the search is on for a director who will wor off a script by Ana Nogueira.
Nogueira’s script is at least partially inspired by the comic series by Tom King and Bilquis Evely, which found Supergirl stepping out of the shadow of her iconic cousin, Superman, and forming a very distinct and quite different personality. As Gunn said on Twitter when he and Safran announced the initial slate for their upcoming films and TV series, Supergirl had a rougher upbringing than Superman in many ways:
“Superman is a guy sent to Earth and raised by loving parents, where Supergirl in this story, she is a character raised on a chunk of Krypton,” Gunn explained on Twitter. “She watched everybody around her perish in some terrible way, so she’s a much more jaded character.”
Gunn took to Instagram to praise Alcock, not only her rich performance in the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, but also her auditions for the role of Supergirl:
Alcock’s Supergirl figures to be a very big part of the new DC Universe, with Woman of Tomorrow being part of the initial run of films and series that make up Chapter 1. Along with Superman, Supergirl joins Batman in Chapter 1—he’ll be appearing in the feature The Brave and the Bold.
For more on all things DC Studios, check out these stories:
Featured image: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 15: Milly Alcock attends the 28th Annual Critics Choice Awards at Fairmont Century Plaza on January 15, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
“The movie’s poster is usually the first thing you see, so it should create an anticipation to see the film,” said Vasilis Marmatakis, the Greek graphic designer and illustrator behind the alluring poster art for Poor Things, a feminist riff on the Frankenstein legend that is up for 11 Oscars, including Best Picture. “It’s an entry point.”
In the age of social media and star contracts, which specify their face appear front and center on promotional materials, it’s not easy to draw in audiences by simply establishing the look and feel of the movie and who’s in it. Few poster designers today wield more creative control than Marmatakis, who is known for his bold use of impressionistic typography and wonderfully strange collages that put you in the right mind-frame to see the movie — as in the photograph of Emma Stone, dressed in Victorian-era clothes, with all of her emotions metaphorically spilling out (an incongruous sight that appeared nowhere in Poor Things, but that includes various elements from the film) or Colin Farrell looming over a pair of empty hospital beds as the room eerily sinks (The Killing of a Sacred Deer). The labor-intensive designs for his poster art, which turns up in print ads and movie theater lobbies, as well as the DVD case and streaming queues, have become an integral part of their visual identity.
After studying graphic design in London at Camberwell College of Arts and the Royal College of Art in the 1990s, Marmatakis worked at an advertising agency, where he met director Yorgos Lanthimos. Their first movie poster collaboration was for Lanthimos’s breakout hit “Dogtooth,” in 2005, and featured three intersecting lines representing the distorted views of the protagonists, and lots of negative space. For 2019’s “Nimic,” a creepy, comic tale of identity theft, Marmatakis executed a graphic image that would encapsulate the entire film. One thick black brushstroke representing a man’s body disappears and is joined by another brushstroke from a woman’s body, the two lines forming a little portal.
We spoke with Marmatakis about his unusual technique and working with Lanthimos on Poor Things and the dark comedy The Favourite, which received 10 Academy Award nominations in 2018 and a Best Actress win for Olivia Colman.
Was there any specific direction given for the Poor Things poster?
It is quite interesting that I don’t get any direction from your Yorgos. This applies to all the posters I design for his films. There’s a process that’s more or less the same with everything we have worked on together so far. I usually get the script very early on and, if it’s possible, I visit the set to get a sense of what the film is going to look like — Poor Things, for example, is visually quite different from the other films of his I had worked for. Then I acquire all the photography from the set. For Poor Things, I think there must have been around 2,000 stills. I do get sent everything, not a selection, because I might need a specific element, for example, a hand or an eye or a tree. It’s very useful to have gathered all this information before I start working on a film.
Sometimes, what comes actually before the posters are the film’s chapter titles. I have to be very careful and precise about which typography I will use because it will probably end up on the poster, which I haven’t designed yet. For Poor Things, the chapters include these hyperreal black-and-white sequences, so I had to use a font that was very thin in order to complement and make visible what’s going on in the background. Therefore, I created a very thin and long font, like over-the-top, abnormally long. This became the initial typographic identity of the film. Then later it was developed further using a combination of three more handwritten fonts. [Our featured image is a title that Vasilis designed for us in the style he created for Poor Things.]
What were they shooting on the day you visited the set?
They were shooting the scene in which (the scientist Godwin Baxter) Willem Dafoe had just gotten Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) out of the water. She’s dead and lying on the medical table, and he’s about to operate on her.The other scene was with (the local cad Duncan Wedderburn) Mark Ruffalo in the tiny asylum room. In the meantime, I also had the chance to wander around in other parts of the set, including the house in London, which was absolutely amazing. Until now, Yorgos’s films didn’t include that many complicated sets, but it was mind-blowing how well-designed every single detail was for this film. I spent quite some time in there on my own, just going around looking and documenting all these decorative elements. I remember everybody was also going on about the Lisbon set, where apparently a whole city was built. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to visit that set because it was further out from Budapest. Maybe it’s more obvious through the still photography to realize how much detail there is and how much there is to take in visually with this film. I’ve seen it a few times now, and each time I watch it I’ll focus on something else: the costumes, the backgrounds, the windows.
I work at my studio. I kind of isolate myself, and after maybe two or three months, it depends, I tell Yorgos I’m ready, and we meet and go through the proposals. I always present very finished designs — not works in progress. I also usually try not to present them digitally or send them via mail. I do print out the posters, 70x100cm. I’m really old school with that. I like the feel of the paper and the texture. The production values are important. For example, two posters from these proposals were printed on reflective mirror-like paper. The typography and the images really looked like they were screen-printed. For Poor Things, I designed around 12 different posters. Yorgos suggested some minor changes to maybe one or two of them, and then these were presented to the producers.
Let’s talk about the poster showing Emma Stone with waves of emotion waterfalling down her open chest.
Searchlight [Pictures] suggested having one poster depicting the male characters, too. They had already worked on the image of Bella from the neck up. So this one was half-designed by me and half-designed by Searchlight. I used their upper part, and I designed the background with these hand-painted brush strokes and then composed everything from the neck down: the “guts” spilling out with the five male characters trying to balance on this uneven texture, in a way representing how all the unfiltered emotions pouring out of her, create a new environment for the men to adapt.
“Poor Things” studio poster. Courtesy Vasilis Marmatakis/Searchlight Pictures.
So the poster is actually a Frankensteining of your sensibility with the studio’s need to emphasize the film’s star power.
Bella is really childlike-honest in the film. She expresses everything that she thinks and feels, and I tried to visualize this. The “guts” are actually composed of various elements and marble objects that are found in the film. The first poster released was the one with an extreme close-up of Bella’s face with smudged makeup. If you look closely, this is not eye shadow and lipstick. These are the shapes of the main three male characters in the film. Willem Dafoe and Ramy Youssef are placed on each of Bella’s eyelids, and Mark Ruffalo is across her lips. There are three brush strokes composed out of three male figures, but these strokes are smeared, so in a way, these beauty and femininity standards are misrepresented. That’s actually my favorite poster.
“Poor Things” official poster. Courtesy Vasilis Marmatakis/Searchlight Pictures.
How were you able to create this surreal makeup effect?
Well, these images are handpainted. I did hundreds of brush strokes, and then I found the right figures for each actor that would fit these strokes. For example, Mark Ruffalo (as lipstick smudge), in order to have this “broken” effect, is actually composed of four different body parts taken from different photographs. Then, I digitally superimposed them on the brush strokes.
When you were designing the poster for The Favourite, you seemed to want to leave a little mystery.
With The Favourite, the idea was to use the profile image of the queen (Olivia Colman), which is the classic image you get on stamps, but there are these two extra figures (her lovers) manipulating her. You don’t know if she’s dead or if they’re decorating her or if they’re torturing her. You can’t tell. Emma Stone is holding a brush and she’s about to stroke the queen’s eyeball and Rachel Weisz sits on her lips and her crotch is blocking the queen’s breath. She’s also holding a string of pearls, kind of adorning her.
“The Favourite” official poster. Courtesy Vasilis Marmatakis/Searchlight Pictures.
The struggle for the queen’s affections.
Earlier, I was talking about the chapters that I created for Yorgos’s films. The font used for The Favourite is called Village, and it was originally designed in the early 1900s. The typographic composition is odd. The longest word dictates the spacing of every other word, resulting in extremely spaced-out kerning. It is inspired by the letterpress typography of that time, and it comments on the over-the-top visual elements of the film. The same applies for the title of Poor Things. I had to create a typographic style that could somehow belong to the subversive logic of Bella Baxter.
We all know who to call when there’s something strange in the neighborhood—but what happens if that strange thing is a deep-winter cold front in the middle of July? That’s the question posed by Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire trailer, which finds the latest addition to the franchise blowing in on a blast of arctic air.
The official trailer for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire has arrived, with the new film following the events in director Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife. The new installment comes from Afterlife co-writer Gil Kenan, who puts the heroes from the original film up against a new supernatural force that’s threatening the world with a second ice age. Frozen Empire finds Callie (Carrie Coon) and her kids Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) returning to New York City from the dilapidated Oklahoma house where the action in Afterlife took place. Callie’s father was Egon Spengler (the late, great Harold Ramis), and in Frozen Empire, the Spenglers return to the Big Apple and the iconic Ghostbusters firehouse where the team, including the original Ghostbusters—Dan Ackroyd’s Raymond Stantz, Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman, Ernie Hudson’s Winston Zeddmore, and Annie Potts’ Janine Melnitz—have created a brand new, high-tech research lab to bust ghosts at a whole new level.
Afterlife stars Paul Rudd returns as Gary Grooberson, Logan Kim returns as Podcast, and Celeste O’Connor returns as Lucky. Newcomers to the franchise include Kumail Nanjiani, Patton Oswalt, James Acaster, and Emily Alyn Lind.
Kenan directs Frozen Empire from a script he co-wrote with Reitman.
Check out the trailer below. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire arrives on March 22:
For more upcoming films from Sony Pictures, check out these stories:
Despicable Me 4 is adding a slew of superstars to voice brand new characters to bring the franchise back to the big screen in a major way.
Will Ferrell, Sofia Vergara, Stephen Colbert, Chloe Fineman, and Joey King are all joining the voice cast in Universal and Illumination’s latest addition to their ongoing animated adventures with Gru and company. Ferrell plays one Gru’s (Steve Carrell) new nemesis, Maxime Le Mal, while Vergara plays his girlfriend, Valentina.
The full cast was revealed via a trailer during the AFC Championship game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens. Another new addition is newcomer Madison Poland, onboard playing one of Gru’s daughters. Returning stars include Pierre Coffin, Kristen Wiig, Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier, and Steve Coogan.
Thanks to Maxime Le Mal’s shenanigans, Despicable Me 4 will find Gru going on the run. The film is directed by returning helmer Chris Renaud and co-director Patrick Delage, based on a script by Ken Daurio and Mike White.
This marks the sixth film in the installment, which began with 2015’s Minions and has become a box office juggernaut. In fact, the entire franchise is the most successful animated series in history by global ticket sales.
Check out the trailer below. Despicable Me 4 arrives in theaters on July 3:
For more on Universal Pictures, Peacock, and Focus Features projects, check out these stories:
Tickets are now on sale for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, easily one of the biggest releases of the year. Warner Bros. has dropped two new teasers, titled “Heart” and “Rise,” to tease your opportunity to scoop up seats, and each gives us a very brief refresher on where we left off in the original and braces us for the war to come. And that war, and all the breathless action it will entail, promises that Part Two will trade in the magisterial world-building and slow-burn thrills of the first film for something far meaner and more relentless.
When we spoke to Dune: Part One and Two co-writer Jon Spaihts a year ago, he revealed that he and Villeneuve had left much of the most thrilling action from Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel for the second installment, choosing to focus Part One on the treachery and galactic scheming that led the galaxy to the brink of all-out war. Part One was centered on a young Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), who moves, along with his father, Duke (Oscar Isaac), the leader of House Atreides, his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and nearly all of House Atreides’ soldiers, scientists, and advisors to the invaluable but dangerous desert planet Arrakis to help manage the crucial manufacture and distribution of Spice, the native element rich on that planet that makes interstellar travel possible. They do this by galactic decree (an unseen Emperor Shaddam IV has sent them—we will meet him in Part Two), and at the start of Part One, Paul convinces himself that even if his noble family is involved in the extraction of a precious resource from a planet not their own from a people they try very hard to ignore, what they’re doing is ultimately right.
Paul learns the hard way all is not what it seems. The major narrative thrust of the first film is the plot that unfolds against House Atreides, schemed up by the unseen Emperor and carried out by the ruthless, warmongering House Harkonnen, which led to the assassination of Duke Atreides and an assault on an unprepared House Atreidesby House Harkonnen.
Part One ended with Paul and his mother, Lady Jessica, escaping to the vast dunelands of Arrakis, where Chani (Zendaya) and the native Fremen, led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem), agreed to help them escape and plot their revenge. Part Two will focus on what happens when House Harkonnen and their vast intergalactic armies try to wipe out what’s left of House Atreides and the native Fremen entirely. Major characters from Herbert’s book now make their entrance, including Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken), Princess Irulan Corrino (Florence Pugh), Lady Margot (Léa Seydoux), and the psychotic Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler), the man who features in one of the book’s most iconic sequences.
Check out the two new teasers below. Dune: Part Two arrives in theaters on March 1:
For more on Dune: Part Two, check out these stories:
From the cockpit of Top Gun: Maverick and the laboratories in Lessons in Chemistry to the Marvel Cinematic Universe—Lewis Pullman is having quite the ride.
The rising star is now Marvel Studios’ top choice to replace Steven Yeun in the role of the antihero Sentry in their upcoming antihero film Thunderbolts. Pullman would be joining a starry cast that includes Florence Pugh, reprising her role as the Black Widow Yelena Belova, Sebastian Stan returning to the MCU as Bucky Barnes, Julia Louis-Dreyfus returning to her role of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, Wyatt Russell returning as the failed Captain America John Walker, David Harbour returning as Alexei Shostakov/The Red Guardian, Olga Kurylenko returning as Taskmaster, Hannah John-Kamen reprising her role as Ava Starr/Ghost, and Harrison Ford stepping into the late William Hurt’s role of Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross. The film is being directed by Jake Schreier.
Yeun had been attached to the project since February of 2023, but after delays due to the writers and actors strike last year, the film was pushed a full year to July 25, 2025.
Pullman charmed in Top Gun: Maverick as Lt. Robert “Bob” Floyd, the rare ego-less pilot in the Top Gun program. He recently starred opposite Brie Larson in Lessons in Chemistry, playing fellow chemist Calvin Evans, her love interest. He’s the son of the actor Bill Pullman,
Journalist Daniel Richtman was the first to report that Marvel was circling Pullman for the role. The character Sentry is a relatively recent Marvel addition, created by Paul Jenkins, Jae Lee, and Rick Veitch in 2000. He’s a Superman clone with many of the same abilities, but in the comics, his alter ego, The Void, becoming the kind of Jekyll & Hyde antihero that both Bruce Banner and Wanda Maximoff have been.
For more on all things Marvel Studios, check out these stories:
Featured image: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 14: Lewis Pullman attends The BAFTA Tea Party presented by Delta Air Lines and Virgin Atlantic at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills on January 14, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for BAFTA)
Creating any animated feature film is an awesome commitment of time, talent, and resources. But the animated films of the Poland-based husband-and-wife directing team of Hugh Welchman (who is British) and D.K. Welchman (who is Polish) go well beyond the common description of “labor of love.” For their groundbreaking debut in 2017, the Oscar-nominated animated feature Loving Vincent, the team used a hand-painted animation technique to bring the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh to life.
The Welchmans’ second feature, The Peasants, opening January 26 from Sony Pictures Classics, is even more epic and ambitious. The film is a stunning achievement in hand-painted animation that was “born of trauma and conflict,” said Hugh Welchman.
Directors Hugh Welchman and DK Welchman. Photo Credit: Norman Wong. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
The Peasants is based on Nobel laureate Wladislaw Reymont’s 1,000-page novel that spans the course of four seasons in its sweeping depiction of early 20th-century Polish rural life. The film centers on a radiant, headstrong young woman, Jagna (Kamila Urzędowska), who is forced into marriage to an older widower, the rich landowner Boryna (Miroslaw Baka). But Jagna secretly continues to see Antek (Robert Gulaczyk), her husband’s tempestuous married son, as she struggles to maintain her own identity and independence in a small village where roles are rigidly defined by tradition and deep-rooted patriarchy.
The Peasants. Photo credit: Vladimir Vinkic Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
“We chose it because the book is like a moving painting being described before your eyes. It’s heightened and impressionistic,” said Welchman. “We wanted to bring the prose to life like a painting. If you’re going to work with the slowest form of filmmaking ever invented, you have to have a really good reason to do it in that style rather than computer or live action, which are much easier processes.”
The filmmakers shot a live-action feature film on a sound stage with the actors against green screen backdrops. A team of more than 90 animators, led by head of animation Piotr Dominiak, working in studios in Poland, Lithuania, Serbia, and Ukraine, then hand-painted the footage onto canvas using oils to duplicate 40,000 frames from the live-action shoot, said Welchman. The artists were inspired by realist and pre-Impressionist paintings, particularly the Young Poland movement, a modernist period roughly spanning the years from 1890-1918, which included art and literature of that period, such as Reymont’s novel.
The novel and its lusty characters and larger-than-life descriptions of landscapes also provided direct inspiration. The Peasants is required reading in schools in Poland, said Welchman. But few outside Poland know about it. “My wife gave it to me. I’ve never read anything like it,” says Welchman. “The level of description—it gives you the gamut of human relations and problems. I grew up in rural Britain in the 1980s and I could relate. It felt universal. It won the Nobel Prize in 1924 over Thomas Mann, Thomas Hardy and Maxim Gorky.”
THE PEASANTS key frame painted by Julia Spiwakowa. Photo credit: Julia Spiwakowa. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
The Welchmans’ script was completed in 2019, but the COVID epidemic delayed production. Then, with production finally underway, Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. There were some 25 Ukrainian artists working in the Kyiv studio, which “was operational for one month before the Russians invaded and we had to close down,” said Welchman. “But out of all that, we knew a good film was emerging. We would have gone bankrupt, so we could not give up.”
The Peasants. Photo credit: Magdalena Wolf. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Since men of military age were required to fight, the directors arranged for the women painters to travel to their homes and studios in Poland. “They turned up with their kids, their elderly mothers; we had to find them places. They were a positive injection into our studio because we were all feeling miserable,” Welchman said. “There was 20 percent inflation in Poland because of COVID, and everyone was depressed. If it was computer animation, you could have people working remotely, but we needed to have people physically looking at a canvas under lights in a room full of paints. We were feeling raw and disorientated, and a bunch of women turned up after they’d just been bombed and separated from their families, and they were like, “This is amazing! It’s great we are here!’ You expect refugees to be depressed, but they were so positive; they lifted all of us up. We could not complain once they turned up with backpacks and suitcases — the contents of their whole lives.
They became an important part of the family.”
The Peasants. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.
The Kyiv studio re-opened after four months. “We wanted to give jobs to male painters there. But there were power cuts,” said Welchman. “Our film [cost] $7 million, which is not a small budget, but we never had any surplus to buy the generator we needed. So we [launched] a Kickstarter campaign and sold some paintings that had been created for Loving Vincent.”
All these hardships give an urgency to The Peasants and underscore its relevance to the present, he said. Besides political divisions, the sexism and scapegoating in the film, particularly the brutal scene in which male and female villagers violently turn on Jagna, resonates today, said Welchman. “How much have we moved on from nineteenth-century peasants?” he said. Going forward, the filmmakers will have to “choose out subject matter more carefully. Our lives and the subject matter are too closely linked.”
For more upcoming films from Sony Pictures, check out these stories:
Road House is now open for business, but fair warning—don’t mess with the bouncer.
Jake Gyllenhaal stars in Amazon MGM Studios’ remake of the 1989 classic that starred Patrick Swayze as the bouncer Dalton, an impossibly tough fella—imbued with Swayze’s singular charm and grace—who was hired as a bouncer at a rough Florida bar to tame the unruly. Things got a lot more complicated than your average bar brawl, however, and that’s precisely what will happen in director Doug Liman’s new take. Gyllenhaal takes on the Swayze role as Dalton, an ex-UFC fighter who washes up in the Florida Keys with not a whole lot going for him when the owner of a local roadhouse offers him a chance to turn his fortunes around while helping her clean up her bar.
That owner is played by Jessica Williams, who reveals in the trailer that she’s grown a little tired of a new breed of nasty clientele coming to her establishment. That’s why she asks Dalton to step in and step up, deploying his skills as a fighter to keep the riff-raff at bay. He’s got that part handled in spades, but when the real heavies come in with a plan to bulldoze the roadhouse in favor of a new property, they deploy a man with the ability to take Dalton to the very limit. The person playing that man is MMA legend Conor McGregor, making his acting debut.
Joining Gyllenhaal, Williams, and McGregor in the cast are Billy Magnussen, Daniela Melchior, Gbemisola Ikumelo, Lukas Gage, Hannah Love Lanier, Arturo Castro, Dominique Columbus, Travis Van Winkle, and B.K. Cannon.
Check out the trailer below. Road House arrives on Prime Video on march 21.
For more on Amazon Prime Video, check out these stories:
The casting process for DC Studio’s next Supergirl is heating up and narrowing down as the search for the Kryptonian reaches its final phases.
Supergirl will play a huge part in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s new-look DC Studios, appearing in Gunn’s upcoming Superman: Legacyand then starring in her own standalone Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow.
The latest scoop from The Hollywood Reporter is that Milly Alcock and Meg Donnelly have recently taken screen tests in Atlanta for the role and stand as the two finalists. Alcock recently starred as Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen in HBO’s House of the Dragon, their Game of Thrones prequel centered on the twisted, tumultuous Targaryen family. Donnelly starred in Disney Channel’s musical franchise Zombies, and she’s got a personal connection to the Supergirl character already, having voiced her in DC’s animated Legion of Super-Heroes and Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths – Part One.
While Gunn’s Superman: Legacy is well into pre-production (with David Corenswet playing Superman), Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow comes from a script being penned by Ana Nogueria and will be based on Tom King’s miniseries published in 2021 and 2022 that took Supergirl out of Superman’s shadow and gave her a rich interior life and a bit more fire than her iconic cousin. This will be a different version of the Supergirl that Sasha Calle played in 2023’s The Flash.
“Superman is a guy sent to Earth and raised by loving parents, where Supergirl in this story, she is a character raised on a chunk of Krypton,” Gunn explained on Twitter after he and Safran announced the upcoming slate DC Studios. “She watched everybody around her perish in some terrible way, so she’s a much more jaded character.”
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow doesn’t yet have a director attached. One imagines that once Gunn and Safran settle on who their Supergirl is, that news won’t follow too far behind.
For more on all things DC Studios, check out these stories:
Featured image: L-r: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 15: Milly Alcock attends the 28th Annual Critics Choice Awards at Fairmont Century Plaza on January 15, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images). NEW YORK, NEW YORK – NOVEMBER 15: Meg Donnelly attends the GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE World Premiere on November 15, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Sony Pictures)
Tran Thi Bich Ngoc is an established Vietnamese film producer with a long track record of success and an eye for great stories. Among her latest projects are Bui Thac Chuyen’s Glorious Ashes, Vietnam’s submission to the 2024 Academy Awards for the best international feature film category.
In 2022, the rural drama received its world premiere as the first Vietnamese film selected for the main competition of the Tokyo International Film Festival. One year later, Ngoc returned to the festival as a jury for the same main competition, which was chaired by German director Wim Wenders.
While Ngoc has made a name for herself as a successful producer, we wanted to talk to her about what it’s like making movies in an emerging film market like Vietnam, where local talent, filmmakers with a great story to tell, and an audience hungry for local films are all helping fuel the industry. Yet there’s another side to the story that we wanted to ask Ngoc about, where issues, including piracy, remain an enduring challenge, and awareness about the problem and sensible tweaks to both cultural norms and the laws could make a huge difference to create the thriving industry Vietnam is capable of.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
We last spoke in 2021 during Covid. You talked about Vietnam’s emerging talent and censorship regulations. What changes has the Vietnamese film industry seen since then?
The Vietnamese film industry has recovered well after Covid. Just the top five local films in 2023 have reached over $40.8m (VND1,000 billion) at the box office, compared to the total box office of local films at $36.7m (VND900 billion) in pre-Covid 2019. This positive sign is again evidence that local films are still the audience’s favorites. But looking at the number of local films produced, it has dropped to only 27 titles this year from 42 before Covid.
What can you tell us about the current Vietnamese film industry? How is it contributing to the global creative community?
On the international scale, Vietnam has gained much recognition in 2023 through Pham Thien An’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, which won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and the documentary Children of the Mist by Ha Le Diem, which was shortlisted for the Oscars.
There were also some important changes to the law?
2023 was also the first year when the amended cinema law was implemented, which led to some positive developments. The first Danang Asian Film Festival took place last May and will have its second edition in July 2024. There is also the new Ho Chi Minh International Film Festival that is expected to take place in April 2024. Such exciting news is made possible by the cinema law amendment that allows cities to hold their own international film festival. Vietnam has continued to be an attractive movie market, with a growth rate of 20% year-on-year at the local box office. It also has a crop of young, talented filmmakers. But to continue the steady growth, a lot still needs to be done, such as providing strong training and education for film students, easing the foreign investment procedure in film production, and emphasizing the importance of copyright and content protection.
From your perspective, how big a threat is digital piracy to Vietnam’s creative marketplace and the overall Vietnamese film industry?
According to Akamai Technologies, Vietnam ranks eighth in the world for access to illegal websites, while the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) puts Vietnam on the priority watch list for IP violations. To build an industry based on creativity, copyright is a serious issue. IP protection needs to be seen as the foundation for the industry to grow. So much needs to be done.
Tran Thi Bich Ngoc scouting in Vietnam.
What is being done in Vietnam to address digital piracy? And what more do you think should be done to close the gaps?
The pastdecade saw some positive improvements from the government. The law on intellectual property was also passed in the latest amendment and became effective in 2022. Since its launch in 2005, the intellectual law has gone through three updates to comply with international law and all the international organization regulations that Vietnam is a member of. However, effective implementation requires the collaboration of all sectors: society, the movie community, and legal implementation.
Can you explain how that collaboration might work?
Most people still favor “xem chùa” (Vietnamese for free watching). Filmmakers and producers have spoken out, but mainly only when their own products are leaked. Their voices are still fragmented, and they are not strongly unified. As a result, there is a lack of pressure and motivation for the law enforcer. Penalties are in place for violators who might even be charged with a criminal offense, but there’s a lack of motivation to follow up each case to the fullest. Besides, the definition is not clear on commercial loss for film studios to claim their IP violation case.
A still from “Glorious Ashes,” the film Ngoc produced and premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 2022.
Have you experienced copyright infringement? What actions could you take if that happens?
That was my fear when I released my film Glorious Ashes last year. Since we are independent filmmakers, we don’t have much finance and resources to take action if that happens. The “notice and takedown” procedure in Vietnam does not exist. If the film gets leaked, it takes a while to get to the authorities because of all the procedures and paperwork. The process will be repeated if another illegal website screens the film. The right holder cannot claim directly to the internet service providerso it’s best to protect ourselves first. I took cautious action with the protected link and the KDM for DCP, but the fear still loomed.
How can the Vietnamese film industry prepare its creators for new threats to copyright?
There are quite a lot of IP conferences going on nowadays for creators. This is a good sign in a way to educate creators on how to value and protect their IP. This is productive, but these activities need to reach out to the community to change their perception of IP gradually. IP violation nowadays means dealing with digital platforms over internet service providers, so the need to include these ISPs in the campaign is crucial.
What about changing people’s mindset around piracy?
The need to change people’s behavior on free watching is significant. This takes time and money, but it must be done through educational campaigns in schools and universities over a long period of time. The procedure for claiming IP also needs to be simplified, where “notice & take down” should be implemented, as the spreading of materials on the internet is so fast nowadays. If the IP claiming procedure needs to go through many approval levels, it cannot help producers when a violation happens. IP protection will need to be considered as a foundation for the creative industry. It cannot be done by any sector alone but by a strong and tight collaboration among them.
This interview is the first in a series we’ll be conducting with filmmakers in the Asia Pacific region on their work with a focus on content protection and safeguarding their work and livelihoods.
For more stories on international filmmakers making a difference, check these out:
The Merc with the Mouth and the be-clawed Canadian mutant have done the deed.
That is, Deadpool 3, after a robust delay caused by SAG-AFTRA strike, has wrapped filming. Deadpool himself, Ryan Reynolds, announced the news on Instagram on Wednesday, thanking the cast, crew, and director Shawn Levy. He also took up some space in his caption, as you know he’s wont to do, to have a little fun with co-star Hugh Jackman, who Reynolds has long been courting to join him in a Deadpool film while maintaining a very spirited public bantering that has seen countless potshots leveled by both of them.
In a different world, Deadpool 3 was slated to arrive in theaters on May 3, 2024, but now you can expect it on July 26. This is the first Deadpool film to fall under the official Marvel Cinematic Universe banner, yet everyone involved, including Marvel president Kevin Feige, has promised the franchise will retain its raunch and irreverence.
Reynolds and Jackman have played these roles in the same film before, but to say that 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine is nothing like what Deadpool 3 will be is a massive understatement. In that previous film, Reynolds’ Merc with the Mouth couldn’t even speak—his lips were sewn shut—so to have him in his fully chatty form spewing words at the iconically gruff Wolverine is what fans have been waiting for. In fact, this pairing has been so sought after it even brought Jackman back into the fold for a character he thought he said goodbye to, given that Wolverine died in James Mangold’s stellar 2017 film Logan.
But death, in the MCU, is not often a dealbreaker, especially when it’s all that stands between Reynolds and Jackman sharing the screen together.
The longtime host of The Daily Show is returning to host on Mondays through the 2024 election, with the rest of the week led by the correspondents. This new approach will begin on February 12, with Stewart returning to the chair that made him a star to kick off each week, setting the table for the rest of The Daily Show team, which will likely include Desi Lydic, Jordan Klepper, Michael Kosta, Ronny Chieng, and Dulcé Sloan.
Stewart turned The Daily Show into a juggernaut for Comedy Central, hosting 16 awards-laden seasons. He’s not only returning as host but will also take on executive producing responsibilities. Stewart’s most recent show was his Apple TV+ series The Problem, which he recently left due to creative differences. The Problem was a markedly different show than what Stewart did every weekday night on The Daily Show, with the former giving him the chance to drill down on a single issue per episode rather than tackling the broader themes shaping America in a given week.
Stewart’s new role on The Daily Show offers him the chance to tackle the looming election without plunging back into the grind of hosting every night. Taking the Monday show means that Stewart will set the agenda for the week, and it will also give him the chance to work with new and rising talent, something he did so successfully during his initial run. (The list of people Stewart helped along the way includes the likes of Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert, Michael Che, John Oliver, and his successor, Trevor Noah.) Returning to The Daily Show lets Stewart weigh in on a range of topics and will once again thrust him into the spotlight in the middle of an election year, one that promises to be bruising.
“Jon Stewart is the voice of our generation, and we are honored to have him return to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show to help us all make sense of the insanity and division roiling the country as we enter the election season,” said Chris McCarthy, President/CEO of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios. “In our age of staggering hypocrisy and performative politics, Jon is the perfect person to puncture the empty rhetoric and provide much-needed clarity with his brilliant wit.”
The move comes after Trevor Noah officially signed off in December 2022, after which the show saw a rotation of celebrity guest hosts beginning in January 2023. Those hosts included Leslie Jones, Sarah Silverman, and Chelsea Handler. For a while, it looked as if beloved Roy Wood Jr. might take the new top spot, but he eventually exited the show. Both Stewart and Noah have been open about the challenge of hosting The Daily Show, being plugged into the news that deeply, that consistently, and trying to do right by all the people in the building who work so hard for the host to succeed. Now, with this new template, Stewart has found his way back to the show that he made a sensation, and right as the 2024 election is heating up, but with a format that should keep him fresh during the long, grueling election season to come.
Featured image: NEW YORK, NY – AUGUST 06: Jon Stewart hosts “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” #JonVoyage on August 6, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Brad Barket/Getty Images for Comedy Central)
Thirty-five years ago, in January of 1989, Steven Soderbergh brought an edgy drama to Sundance that ended up changing the film business. His now iconic sex, lies, & videotape was sold for $1 million and went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and ultimately grossed $25 million at the box office. It is the movie that has a credible claim for lighting a fire under the independent film community, turning it into a real business and its filmmakers into future stars.
Cut to Sundance 2024—while Soderbergh is no longer 26 years old, he’s still passionately making films, and his latest, Presence, is being acquired by Neon, Deadlinereports. Soderbergh directed Presence from a script by Davie Koepp (who is currently working on a new Jurassic Worldscreenplay), with Deadline reporting there were about ten bidders vying for a film that got strong reviews at the festival.
Presence is centered on a family’s troubles after moving into what they’re convinced is a possessed home, with a ghostly presence especially interested in their daughter.
It was shot entirely at a single location, and knowing Soderbergh was being edited as it was being shot, given the speed and surefootedness of his approach. (Soderbergh famously often serves as his own editor and cinematographer, which he does again here). Koepp’s razor-sharp script and Soderbergh’s minimalist approach turn the haunted house story on its head, with the camera itself acting as the presence. As Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Coggan writes, “…his camera is the action, watching and influencing the Payne family like a particularly nosy roommate.”
The cast includes Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Julia Fox, Eddy Maday, and West Mulholland. Neon scooping Soderbergh’s latest, 35 years after his original triumph at the festival, must feel good for a studio that just saw another of its films, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, scoop up five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.
For more recent stories in the world of film, check these out:
Featured image: PARK CITY, UTAH – JANUARY 19: (L-R) Eddy Maday, Callina Liang, Steven Soderbergh and West Mulholland attend the “Presence” Premiere during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival at Library Center Theatre on January 19, 2024 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)
Would you watch a reality show where someone is actively being hunted for a million-dollar prize? Morally, the answer is no. In Jake Johnson’s directorial debut, Self Reliance (streaming on Hulu), he believes the answer is yes. The concept for Johnson’s new film is one he developed years ago after watching a Japanese reality show (Susunu! Denpa Shōnen) where contestants were placed in bizarre situations and filmed.
“And then in the middle of the night, members of the production would sneak in and replace batteries,” he laughed.
That bizarre contrast between behind-the-scenes production and what viewers are actually shown on screen was such an intriguing aspect to him that Johnson incorporated it into his own film.
Johnson wrote, directed, and stars in the film. He plays Tommy, a man who finds himself courted by Andy Samberg (playing himself) to participate in the biggest reality show on the dark web. It’s as ominous as it sounds. Tommy is told from the jump that there will be people trying to kill him, but only if he’s alone. So long as he has someone, anyone, by his side, and he keeps them there for a month, he’ll win a million bucks.
Johnson said he’s been working on screenwriting since he was 17 (“as dorky as it sounds”) and so a lot of the ideas in this film were similar to earlier versions he’d created as a teenager. Directing is a feat in itself, but launching your directorial debut in a film you’re also starring in was “trickier” than Johnson imagined.
“It’s not something I would jump back into because it’s manic,” he explained. “And as you’re directing, everybody that I was in a scene with — it’s my job to give them notes. It would have been better if I had been, like, fifth lead,” he laughed. “I should have been Eduardo Franco [who plays the P.A. Ninja in his film], and Eduardo Franco should have been Tommy.”
L-r: Maddy (Anna Kendrick) Charlie (GaTa) and Tommy (Jake Johnson), shown. (Photo: Courtesy of Hulu)
Johnson said he was fortunate to have “allies” surrounding him on production that he could lean on for guidance.
“Anna Borden, the AD [assistant director] of the movie, she directed episodes of Minx, so she came on and did me a favor to AD [this film], so I really leaned on her direction,” he said. “Ali Bell, our producer, she’s the executive from The Lonely Island, I leaned on her creatively. And Adam Silver, our DP, [director of photography]…I could say to him after a take, ‘How’s it looking?’”
Much like the film’s concept, Johnson said the characters morphed and evolved along with the individuals playing them. The cast is stacked with comedy heavyweights like Samberg and Anna Kendrick, but Johnson said it was Biff Wiff’s unhoused character, James, that was a casting dealbreaker for him.
“He was the first person we locked in because if we couldn’t find the right guy for that, I didn’t want to make the movie,” Johnson said. “The glory of the performance is Biff Wiff. Because if you get the wrong actor to do that, it’s too heavy. It’s sad.”
James/Walter (Biff Wiff), shown. (Photo: Courtesy of Hulu)
James’s character also reminded him of another character from his past.
“I see a big connection between James in [Self Reliance] and Tran in New Girl,” he said.
For the family dynamic in Self Reliance, however, Johnson based it on “the feeling” he got around a lot of families in Chicago — the no-nonsense attitude.
“Where they just say really honest, kind of in your face — a midwestern family that’s not into whatever phase you’re going through,” he joked.
Self Reliance was shot in only 17 days, but Johnson said the post-production was more difficult than he anticipated
“Putting the puzzle together while dealing with notes from all the different people,” he explained.
Johnson said he’s an actor first and foremost, so while he’s not eager to jump back into directing film any time soon, he’s open to directing other projects.
“I would love to direct a pilot of television, and I’d love to do a commercial,” he said. “I love being a director in terms of a crew, but a film is such a beast. It’s not something you casually jump into. Some of my most fun acting jobs, I’ve casually jumped into.”
Self Reliance is streaming now on Hulu. Check out our full video interview here:
For more on hot titles on Hulu, check out these stories:
Featured image: Self Reliance — When a middle-aged man (Jake Johnson) is invited into a limo by famous actor Andy Samberg, his dull life takes a thrilling turn. Johnson is offered a chance to win a million dollars in a dark web reality TV show, where assassins from all over the world attempt to kill him for 30 days. The catch? He can’t be killed if he’s not entirely alone, leading him to recruit an unlikely team to help him survive. Tommy (Jake Johnson), shown. (Photo: Courtesy of Hulu)
The official trailer for Netflix’s live-action series Avatar: The Last Airbender has arrived with a gust of wind and a burst of fire.
Showrunner Albert Kim’s ambitious new series follows the young Avatar Aaang (Gordon Cormier), as he faces the challenge of mastering the four elements in an effort to harmonize the world in the face of a grave threat from the Fire Nation and the Fire Lord Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim). Aang will rely not only on his own skills, as he sets to master earth, wind, fire and water, but on his new friends Sokka (Ian Ousley) and Katara (Kiawentiio).
The trailer unveils the sweeping vistas, stunning creatures, and wall-to-wall magic that made Nickelodeon’s original animated series so beloved. The new series will consist of eight hour-long episodes,
The cast also includes Dallas Liu as Zuko, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee as General Iroh, Casey Camp-Horinek as Gran Gran, Arden Cho as June, Maria Zhang as Suki, Sebastien Amoruso as Jet, Utkarsh Ambudkar as King Bumi and Danny Pudi as The Mechanist.
Check out the trailer below. Avatar: The Last Airbender arrives on Netflix on February 22::
Here’s the official synopsis from Netflix:
Water. Earth. Fire. Air. The four nations once lived in harmony, with the Avatar, master of all four elements, keeping peace between them. But everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked and wiped out the Air Nomads, the first step taken by the firebenders towards conquering the world. With the current incarnation of the Avatar yet to emerge, the world has lost hope. But like a light in the darkness, hope springs forth when Aang (Gordon Cormier), a young Air Nomad — and the last of his kind — reawakens to take his rightful place as the next Avatar. Alongside his newfound friends Sokka (Ian Ousley) and Katara (Kiawentiio), siblings and members of the Southern Water Tribe, Aang embarks on a fantastical, action-packed quest to save the world and fight back against the fearsome onslaught of Fire Lord Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim). But with a driven Crown Prince Zuko (Dallas Liu) determined to capture them, it won’t be an easy task. They’ll need the help of the many allies and colorful characters they meet along the way. AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER is a live-action reimagining of the award-winning and beloved Nickelodeon animated series. Albert Kim (Sleepy Hollow, Nikita) serves as showrunner, executive producer, and writer. Jabbar Raisani (Lost in Space, Stranger Things) and Michael Goi are executive producers and directors alongside directors Roseanne Liang (also a co-executive producer) and Jet Wilkinson. Dan Lin (The Lego Movie, Aladdin) and Lindsey Liberatore (Walker) serve as executive producers from Rideback.
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
The 2024 Oscar nominations have been announced. The two-headed Goliath that is Barbenheimeris well represented, with both Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer nominated for Best Picture, among a slew of other nominations each film received. Nolan’s Oppenheimer leads all movies with 13 nominations, followed by Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things with 11, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon with 10, and Gerwig’s Barbie with 8.
However, Gerwig was not nominated for Best Directing, one of the first surprises. Joining Gerwig’s Barbie and Nolan’s Oppenheimer in the Best Picture category are Cord Jefferson‘s American Fiction, Justin Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Celine Song’s Past Lives, Lanthimos’s Poor Things, and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. Gerwig, Triet, and Song, each having their films nominated for Best Picture, sets a record for most nominations by female directors in Oscars’ history.
In the directing category, Christopher Nolan is joined by Jonathan Glazer, Martin Scorsese, Justine Triet, and Yorgos Lanthimos.
Here’s the complete list:
Best Picture
American Fiction Anatomy of a Fall Barbie The Holdovers Killers of the Flower Moon Maestro Oppenheimer Past Lives Poor Things The Zone of Interest
Best Directing
Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest) Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things) Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer) Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon) Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall)
Best Cinematography
El Conde (Edward Lachman) Killers of the Flower Moon (Rodrigo Prieto) Maestro (Matthew Libatique) Oppenheimer (Hoyte van Hoytema) Poor Things (Robbie Ryan)
Best Actress in a Leading Role
Annette Bening (Nyad) Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon) Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall) Carey Mulligan (Maestro) Emma Stone (Poor Things)
Best Actor in a Leading Role
Bradley Cooper (Maestro)
Colman Domingo (Rustin)
Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers)
Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer)
Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction)
Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Sterling K. Brown (American Fiction) Robert De Niro (Killers of the Flower Moon) Robert Downey Jr. (Oppenheimer) Ryan Gosling (Barbie) Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things)
Best Costume Design
Barbie (Jacqueline Durran) Killers of the Flower Moon (Jacqueline West) Napoleon (David Crossman & Janty Yates) Oppenheimer (Ellen Mirojnick) Poor Things (Holly Waddington)
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Golda Maestro Oppenheimer Poor Things Society of the Snow
Best Animated Short Film
Letter to a Pig Ninety-Five Senses Our Uniform Pachyderme War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko
Best Live-Action Short Film
The After Invincible Knight of Fortune Red, White and Blue The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
American Fiction (Cord Jefferson) Barbie (Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig) Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan) Poor Things (Tony McNamara) The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)
Best Writing (Original Screenplay)
Anatomy of a Fall (Arthur Harari & Justine Triet) The Holdovers (David Hemingson) Maestro (Bradley Cooper & Josh Singer) May December (Samy Burch & Alex Mechanik) Past Lives (Celine Song)
Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer) Danielle Brooks (The Color Purple) America Ferrera (Barbie) Jodie Foster (Nyad) Da’Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers)
Best Original Song
“The Fire Inside” (Flamin’ Hot) “I’m Just Ken” (Barbie) “It Never Went Away” (American Symphony) “Wahzhazhe (A Song For My People)” (Killers of the Flower Moon) “What Was I Made For?” (Barbie)
Best Original Score
American Fiction (Laura Karpman) Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (John Williams) Killers of the Flower Moon (Robbie Robertson) Oppenheimer (Ludwig Göransson) Poor Things (Jerskin Fendrix)
Best Documentary Feature Film
Bobi Wine: The People’s President The Eternal Memory Four Daughters To Kill a Tiger 20 Days in Mariupol
Best Documentary Short Film
The ABCs of Book Banning The Barber of Little Rock Island in Between The Last Repair Shop Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó
Best International Feature Film
Io Capitano (Italy) Perfect Days (Japan) Society of the Snow (Spain) The Teacher’s Lounge (Germany) The Zone of Interest (United Kingdom)
Best Animated Feature
The Boy and the Heron Elemental Nimona Robot Dreams Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Best Production Design
Barbie Killers of the Flower Moon Napoleon Oppenheimer Poor Things
Best Film Editing
Anatomy of a Fall The Holdovers Killers of the Flower Moon Oppenheimer Poor Things
Best Production Design
Barbie Killers of the Flower Moon Napoleon Oppenheimer Poor Things
Best Sound
The Creator Maestro Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One Oppenheimer The Zone of Interest
Best Visual Effects
The Creator Godzilla: Minus One Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One Napoleon
Featured image: NEW YORK – FEBRUARY 25: Overview of Oscar statues on display at “Meet the Oscars” at the Time Warner Center on February 25, 2010 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)
A dinosaur-sized piece of news dropped yesterday when it was revealed that Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park writer David Koepp will be penning a new addition to the franchise.
The last film in the franchise was director Colin Trevvorow’s Jurassic World: Dominion, presumably the third and final film in the trilogy that began with 2015’s Jurassic World. Yet while that particular storyline, starring Chris Pratt’s Owen Grady and Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire Dearing, might have roared its last, the talented Koepp is back in the saddle, penning a brand new film. His screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original was a practically flawless piece of writing.
Koepp’s script will usher in a new era of the Jurassic era, various outlets report, with a brand new storyline. That means that not only is it unlikely that Pratt or Howard would return, but original stars and Jurassic World: Dominion returnees Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Sam Neill will also not be involved in this adventure. Because it’s being billed as a Jurassic World film rather than Jurassic Park, it’s also likely the story will take place in the present-day or in the future, opening up a wide vista of possibilities that a period piece would not.
Koepp has been quietly working on the script for long enough that Universal Pictures believes they might even be able to make it a 2025 release. Returning to the franchise are Jurassic World producers, Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley, with Spielberg executive producing.
Koepp knows his way around a blockbuster, having also penned the first Mission: Impossible (1996), the first Spider-Man (2002), and last year’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Koepp also made a splash at this year’s Sundance, writing Steven Soderbergh’s ghost movie Presence, with another Soderbergh collaboration on the way, Black Bag, a spy thriller set to star Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender.
For more on Universal Pictures, Peacock, and Focus Features projects, check out these stories:
