Tom Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt for the seventh film in the deathless Mission: Impossible franchise, and the early reactions hail yet another peerless action epic. After its star-studded world premiere in Rome on Monday evening at the Auditorium della Conciliazione—held up for 90 minutes due to a meeting between Cruise and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at the Palazzo Chigi, no less—the show finally went on as Cruise, director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie, and many of the film’s stars, including Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Vanessa Kirby, Pom Klementieff, Esai Morales, Greg Tarzan Davis, Hayley Atwell, and Shea Whigham arrived.
Dead Reckoning Part One follows the seismic events in Fallout, where Cruise’s Hunt, along with his trusty team of Isla Faust (Ferguson), Benji (Pegg), and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), helped stave off a potential nuclear nightmare. Now, the weapon they’ll be hoping to keep out of the hands of the bad guys is even more severe, and the potential for it to cause an entire system collapse of the known world order makes it the biggest threat Hunt and his Mission: Impossible team have ever faced. (Check out the trailer here for a taste of what’s to come.) This time, the team will be trying to keep an A.I. with the potential to destabilize the entire world out of the hands of villains who will, you guessed it, stop at nothing to try and control it.
Joining the aforementioned cast are newcomers Rob Delaney, Cary Elwes, Indira Varma, Mark Gatiss, and Charles Parnell.
Here’s the official synopsis:
In Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF team embark on their most dangerous mission yet: To track down a terrifying new weapon that threatens all of humanity before it falls into the wrong hands. With control of the future and the fate of the world at stake and dark forces from Ethan’s past closing in, a deadly race around the globe begins. Confronted by a mysterious, all-powerful enemy, Ethan is forced to consider that nothing can matter more than his mission – not even the lives of those he cares about most.
Here are some of those early reactions. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One hits theaters on July 12.
After the insanity of the last few films, #MissionImpossible7 has a tremendous amount to live up to, but one thing I’ll say now in quick reaction format: it does the best job yet of recent “part 1 of 2!!” features in feeling like its own film while setting up for the next half.
#MissionImpossibleDeadReckoning is incredible. The fastest 2 hr 30 min movie I’ve seen in a long time. One of the best films I’ve seen this year and @TomCruise has done it again. Demands to be seen on the biggest screen. Cannot recommend this movie enough. pic.twitter.com/GOB1WyX2Mi
#MissionImpossibleDeadReckoning this phenomenal! Hayley Atwell STEALS ever scene she’s in. This is now my favorite #missionimpossible film. With the AI being the villain, this feels like a cautionary tale. The action had my heart rate elevated. That train scene is mind blowing! pic.twitter.com/raHLqTwqEO
— Joseph Deckelmeier (@joedeckelmeier) June 19, 2023
I had the absolute best time watching #MissionImpossible – an impeccably made action film that does not stop entertaining. Each action sequence is long, crazy & intense. The story is big & sprawling, but I like how it both felt complete & left you dying for what comes next pic.twitter.com/iNaKlDMH8l
There’s a car chase scene in #MissionImpossibleDeadReckoning that brought me so much joy, it reinvigorated my love for the summer blockbuster. The craftsmanship of this franchise is unmatched. The final train sequence is a whopper too – I caught myself leaning IN from my seat.
#MissionImpossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is another winner for the franchise. Yet again, the production value is THROUGH THE ROOF with some of the most well-defined and exhilarating set pieces photographed in ways that truly make you feel like you’re in the middle of the… pic.twitter.com/yAX0eJ1t1t
#MissionImpossible DEAD RECKONING PART 1: Tom Cruise hates streaming so much he’s made an algorithm the villain. And bless his crazy ass, b/c this is a behemoth-sized spectacle, one go-for-broke set-piece after the next, close to FALLOUT excellence. Henry Czerny fans will go nuts pic.twitter.com/Gj7fYdAr8I
Featured image: Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning – Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
“My son, never show mercy,” says Russell Crowe’s character at the top of the first trailer for director J.C Chandor’s Kraven the Hunter. He’s perched with his boy over the body of a dead gazelle while they’re on safari. “They are prey,” he continues, smearing some of the gazelle’s blood on his son’s forehead. “We are predators.”
The son he’s speaking to will take this lesson to heart. Crowe’s growling father figure proves to be the key figure in the life of young Sergei Kravinoff, played as an adult by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the eventual Spider-Man villain known as Kraven the Hunter. With their mother sent away because of her “weakness of the mind” and then, apparently, dead before her sons could even say goodbye, young Sergei is made to learn several difficult lessons early on. One of those is that his father is in the kind of business where being a predator is the only means to survival. He’s a brutal crime lord who lives in a world in which the weak are meat the strong do eat. We find Sergei as a young man face-to-face with a lion that he fails to shoot and kill. Ravaged by the king of the beasts and left for dead by his father, the lion’s blood mixes with his own, and a new kind of man is born.
The trailer provides a glimpse into the R-rated film’s approach to telling Kraven’s origin story, making him a similar kind of antihero to Sony’s stable of misunderstood, monstrously powerful Spider-Man villains—Jared Leto’s Morbius, who boasts the superpowered versions of a vampire bat’s strength, and Tom Hardy’s Venom, the product of the marriage between an alien symbiote and a man. Kraven, now connected deeply to animals after his violent communion with the lion, is able to communicate with them as he tracks his own prey, including any poachers foolish enough to hunt for animals anywhere near the man. “My father puts evil into the world,” Kraven says to Ariana DeBose’s Calypso after she asks why he hunts. “I take it out.”
The trailer ends with a glimpse at the man who will likely be Kraven’s most formidable challenge, Alessandro Nivola’s Aleksei Sytsevich, aka The Rhino, another classic Spider-Man villain. He might finally be a half-man, half-beast hybrid who’s at least able to put up a fight.
Joining Crowe, Taylor-Johnson, DeBose, and Nivola are Fred Hechinger, Christopher Abbott, Levi Miller, Gre
Check out the red band trailer below. Kraven the Hunter hits theaters in October:
For more on all things Spider-Man, check out these stories:
Morocco’s Minister of Culture, Mohammed Mehdi Bensaid, got one heck of a scoop. Bensaid got to visit the set of Gladiator 2, which legendary director Ridley Scott is currently filming in Morocco. In a post on Instagram, Bensaid shared the footage from the set, where a massive siege battle sequence is being staged. The speculation now is that Gladiator 2 might focus, at least in part, on the Roman Empire’s expansion into North Africa.
Gladiator 2 is the long-awaited follow-up to Scott’s 2001 Best Picture Oscar winner, which followed the tortured journey of former general Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe), who went from valor to ruin after his might on the battlefield and natural way of leading men were seen as a threat to the self-appointed emperor of Rome, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix.) So, what was a sociopathic man-child like Commodus going to do about a natural leader like Maximus stealing his thunder? How about murdering Maximus’s wife and children and have him sold into slavery, where, eventually, he ends up fighting as a gladiator for the amusement of the masses and none other than Commodus himself. Gladiator tracked Maxmius’s bloody path of vengeance against Commodus, in which he fought in the gladiator ring as ‘The Spaniard,’ ultimately getting his chance to take on Commodus. He’s successful, but it cost him his life.
The sequel is reportedly centered on Paul Mescal’s Lucius, the nephew of Commodus and the son of Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla (she co-starred in the original and returns for the sequel) and is based on a script by David Scarpa, who also wrote the script for Scott’s upcoming film Napoleon (which stars Joaquin Phoenix). The character of Lucius appeared in the original Gladiator (played by Spencer Treat Clar) as a boy, and the youngster greatly admired the brave Spaniard. The sequel will follow him as a young man, as he forges his own path to glory on what will surely be a dangerous path.
Returning from the original alongside Nielsen is Djimon Hounsou as the gladiator Juba. Newcomers joining Paul Mescal are none other than Denzel Washington, Joseph Quinn, Moon Knight star May Calamawy, and everyone’s favorite rising star, Pedro Pascal.
Gladiator 2 is slated to hit theaters on November 22, 2024.
Director Andy Muschietti’s work on The Flash so impressed new DC Studios co-chief James Gunn that he called it one of the best superhero movies he’d ever seen. Then, he went a step further and tapped Muschietti to direct DC’s upcoming, brand new Batman film The Brave and the Bold, which will introduce not only a new Bruce Wayne but also his son, a very troubled Damian Wayne.
The deal was struck just as The Flash makes its debut in theaters. The Flash gave Muschietti a crash course in handling the Batman character—in fact, he handled two, with both Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton playing Batman in different universes as Barry Allen/The Flash (Ezra Miller) speeds through time and across the multiverse in an attempt to change the past and save his mom. Both James Gunn and his co-chief at DC Studios, Peter Safran, saw the film even before they officially took over at the studio and were blown away.
“We saw The Flash even before taking the reins at DC Studios and knew we were in the hands of not only a visionary director but a massive DC fan,” Gunn and Safran said in a statement. “It’s a magnificent film – funny, emotional, thrilling – and Andy’s affinity and passion for these characters and this world just resonates through every frame. So, when it came time to find a director for The Brave and the Bold, there was really only one choice. Luckily, Andy said yes. Barbara signed on to produce with us, and we were on our way. They’re an extraordinary team, and we couldn’t have better or more inspiring partners as we embark on this thrilling new adventure in the DCU.”
Barbara refers to Muschietti’s sister and producing partner, Barbara Muschietti, who has been his key collaborator throughout his career. The duo now joins James Mangold, who signed on with Gunn and Safran to direct a new film centered on Swamp Thin. DC Studios now has a growing stable of filmmakers, with Gunn himself directing a brand new Superman film, Superman: Legacy, which he’s in the process of casting now.
The Brave and the Bold will tackle one of the more intriguing, darker storylines in the Batman oeuvre. Created by comic book writer Grant Morrison and artist Andy Kubert, Damian Wayne is the murderous son of Bruce Wayne (Bruce wasn’t aware of his existence, mind you) and was raised by two assassins. Damian’s mother is Talia al Ghul, daughter of Ra’s al Ghul (played by Liam Neeson in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins), and eventually, in Morrison and Kubert’s telling, he becomes first Robin and then Batman. It’s a dark father-and-son story that Gunn and Safran teased when they revealed their vision for a revamped DC Studios slate with new takes on some of the most iconic characters.
The Brave and the Bold will fall under the main DC Universe banner, with Robert Pattinson’s version of the Dark Knight in Matt Reeves’ The Batman and the upcoming sequel exists under the new DC Elseworlds title, which is where films that exist in an alternate universe from the main unified world that Gunn and Safran are building will get to explore their worlds.
If you’re looking to extract someone from an impossibly dangerous situation against seemingly insurmountable odds, then Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) is your man. The name says it all. Rake will sweep all obstacles out of his way, including his own demise—the end of the first Extraction toyed with the idea he was dead, but savvy viewers knew better—to pluck whoever you need from harm’s way. So now that Rake is back in Extraction 2 with a new mission to rescue the beleaguered family of a brutal Georgian gangster from a prison, no less, do Hemsworth, director Sam Hargrave, and their team deliver the goods?
The critics are mostly in agreement that, yes, they do. They deliver those goods with their fists on fire, in fact. Extraction 2 was always going to have to take the formidable action set-pieces and breathless action of the original and find a way to kick it up a notch. It’s the same challenge that faces all action franchises; whether it’s a Mission: Impossible or John Wick or Fast & Furious film, the rule is that the new film must be even crazier than the last, and Extraction 2 passes that test and then some.
With the film streaming on Netflix on June 16, we’ve extracted a few quick hits from the critics to help to prepare you for your mission—should you choose to accept it.
— Matt Neglia @Tribeca (@NextBestPicture) June 15, 2023
REVIEW: Chris Hemworth’s mercenary with a talent for rescuing — sorry, extracting — people out of bad situations is bolder, bloodier and extractier in Netflix’s #Extraction2
Not kidding when I say at one point he throws punches while his fists are aflame https://t.co/vRqvfTGqLh
With an impressively executed one-take sequence and various well-choreographed fight sequences, Sam Hargrave’s thriller joins this year’s fine slate of action cinema https://t.co/RfdpRf4Q4F
The Childnet International competition is in its third year. This year’s theme, “Time to Talk,” focused on how people can support each other online. (You can learn more about the competition here.)
Childnet International is a registered UK charity that was founded in 1995 with the goal of making the internet a safe place for children and young people. The film competition began in 2010 and focused on schools and youth groups based in the United Kingdom. Then, in 2021, Childnet broadened the competition to include an international category open to students from schools across the globe.
In 2021, the first year of the competition, the theme was “Separating Fact From Fiction: Finding Trustworthy Information Online.” That’s where Ayra and Soha come in. These two sisters, from Jumeirah English Speaking School in Dubai, won the competition with their film Fake vs. Real, deploying stop-motion animation, clever editing, and fake websites that claim to have concrete proof of a UFO sighting.
“It was a new opportunity that we hadn’t really heard of before, and we just decided to go for it because, why not?” says Ayra.
Going for it included learning a lot—Ayra and Soha had to learn how to build their own website, film and edit their work, sound design, create graphics, and more.
“We learned a lot of like different features of new apps, which was really cool,” Soha says. “We had to make sure that we understood it because if we don’t get it, then who else would?”
“The girls are role models for their classmates,” says their teacher, David Murphy. “They came in and showed me the idea actually of creating their own website with the fake information and using it as that inspiration for their story. That was a really inspiring and brilliant moment as their teacher.”
We spoke with Ayra, Soha, and David about their film, what it’s like working with your sister, and why making a movie might be the best class project there is.
Linda Yvette Chávez tells the story of Flamin’ Hot with faith, passion, and romance. The co-creator of the Netflix series Gentefied saw herself in the true story of Richard Montañez (Jesse Garcia), the Frito Lay janitor who dreamed of a snack that connected with his Mexican American community. With his great coach and partner in life, his wife Judy (Annie Gonzalez), Richard fulfilled his dream with Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
Chávez doesn’t focus on a single person with a singular vision. With director Eva Longoria at the helm, Chávez crafted Flamin’ Hot as a tale about how not just one man but a community can produce greatness. As the screenwriter explained to us during a recent interview, Richard’s journey and burning desire to create something special resonated with her for creative, cultural, and familial reasons.
Linda Yvette Chávez
It’s such a romantic story. Did you see this as much of Judy’s story as Richard’s?
A hundred percent. I met Judy and Richard together, and I got to hear how much she was involved in the whole process. In the movie, Richard says, “Everybody should get themselves a Judy,” and he literally said that to me. He has this respect and gratitude towards her for being this person who was the one who always made him believe in himself.
When I spoke to her, she would say, “Well, Richard did it. It was already in him. I would pray for him to see the gifts and talents that I knew he already had.” For me, it was romantic to see that the two of them had created this life together. It wasn’t just him. The fact that he was able to acknowledge that when I was speaking to him about it was so beautiful. I’m a woman, I’m a Latina, and I know how hard we ride for our partners. I wanted Judy to have the light and the love and the spotlight that she deserved. For me, it was pulling out the heart between them and the struggle that they were in together throughout their lives.
Speaking with them, how’d that help you capture their voices?
It’s funny because I tell people Judy’s really a Chola. She used to be a gangster, but when you talk to them now, they still have their street way of talking, but they’re a little bit more elevated, a little bit more professional about how they speak. For me, half of the film is about who they were in the past, right? When we first were working with them, they didn’t really want that past out for the world to see. They were like, focus on all the good things we did. Eva really wanted them to understand that the good only happened because they went through the bad.
In order to get that voice of that time period, it was a lot of conversations with them. You know, I’m like them. I have a similar background. I knew that that voice was in there and pulled it out of them as we had conversations. Being able to build that trust was a big part of the process for me. It was getting them to a place where they felt comfortable sharing things that they normally wouldn’t be sharing.
As you said, you have a similar background. Obviously, the story is about fulfilling a vision. Personally and professionally, how’d you relate?
Eva says this as well, “Richard’s story is my story.” I grew up working class, dealing with gangs, and not sure of what the future would hold in terms of the community I came from. Talking to Richard was like talking to my cousins or my uncles or the people that I love. Also, Richard had to walk into rooms where he never thought he belonged. For me, when I was growing up, Hollywood was something that I would see from the back of my dad’s truck minivan as we went through West Hollywood. He’d point to mansions and be like, “Someday, you’ll live there.” How, I don’t know; I didn’t know at the time that I could be a screenwriter. I just knew that there were these big dreams that we could maybe fulfill.
I always wrote short stories, but once I started to build my career in the industry, I found that imposter syndrome is similar to how Richard deals with it. “Do I really belong here? Was that a dumb idea? Do I put this out into the world?” I went through that even with this script [Laughs]. We did one version, and then the pandemic hit, and I was going to do another version of it, which would be the one that would get us to the green light.
How was writing during the pandemic for you?
It was hard. It’s hard to be creative when you’re under high anxiety and think that you might die. I had to pull out this solid version of the story, and it was a spiritual experience for me to come through, sticking to my guns in terms of what this story needed to be and what I knew Eva’s vision was for it. Sending it off was terrifying because it’s the version that I know from my heart where I come from, who I am, and how I know these people better than probably anybody knows them in the screenwriting world. What I’ve put down on the page is authentic and the story that I know is gonna resonate with audiences.
It was such an empowering moment for me. I trusted what I knew the story needed to be in spite of so many voices coming at you. At a certain point, you have to go into your cave and shut the world out and say, “Let me put down the vision that I know that this story is,” and that’s what I did. Richard’s story, his ability to rise to the top against all odds, that’s my story. All the odds are against me to get to where I am, my career, and where I am in my life. Here I am, and I did it being authentically myself. I don’t code-switch. I walk into pitch meetings, and I talk the way that Richard talks sometimes. When Richard says, “Sorry, I got a little hood at the end there,” everyone who knows me says that’s so me.
As you said, your childhood wasn’t dissimilar to Richard’s upbringing. You went on to study at Stanford, but would you say you learned just as much, if not more so, about writing from your upbringing?
Everything’s valuable in a different way, but I was always the kid who was in the living room with my Tias. I was always with the adults. My mom and my grandmother, their storytelling abilities were next level. They spun stories that were dramatic and hilarious and frightening and like, oh my God, there’s a ghost. I just had this natural curiosity and this strong love for my people. I’m in love with my people.
When I went to Stanford, I studied with Cherríe Moraga. The first course I did was Social Approaches Theater, and I got introduced to all these artists and writers who wrote from this place of activism, healing, and art being cathartic and healing for communities. I never knew art could do that until that point.
What’d you learn from Cherríe?
Cheríe was a huge influence. Cheríe is rebellious, like Chicana artists, and she was there during the Chicana rights movement. She was a lesbian queer Chicano who was out here killing it as a playwright. She taught me how to be authentic and connect with the stories that mean the world to me.
With Flamin’ Hot, you tell a story about characters with faith, sometimes struggling with it, but you didn’t write a religious movie.
Oh my god, a hundred percent.
Was that a fine line? Did you also find yourself asking a lot of religious questions?
As a recovering Catholic, yes, I did, but I am a spiritual person, and I come from a family that’s very spiritual. My spirituality is not a religious thing, but for Richard and Judy, their faith is important to them. With a film like this, you might wanna stray away from that cuz you don’t want it to seem like a religious film or alienate people. The reality is faith is true for so many people in this world, and it was true for Richard and Judy. As a writer, to erase that from their story is to do a disservice to the story. I need to write them from a place of non-judgment.
What questions did you consider about faith in the process?
It wasn’t only about faith in God; it was about Richard’s faith in himself and Judy’s faith in Richard. Can I believe in myself? Can I trust in myself and know that I’m gonna come out the other side?
And you made it through the other side.
I went through that dream. I understand the significance not only to the story but to storytellers who get to see someone who looks like me, someone who looks like Eva directing it. It doesn’t happen often. I knew I had to kill this for that reason. I had to overcome whatever fear.
So, the power of faith worked in writing Flamin’ Hot?
I believe we all have faith, whether it’s in just ourselves, our own abilities, or high powers. We’re all trying to find a reason to keep going, to keep fighting, to keep persevering, to keep believing in more. I think that’s why this is a story that resonates with so many people.
Not bad for a sequel. Following on its 2018 Oscar-winning predecessor, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ranks as the best-reviewed wide-release movie of the year, boasting a 96 percent approved rating on Rotten Tomatoes while grossing $390 million worldwide since its release earlier this month (at the time of publication). Critics have hailed the film’s ability to stitch together a dizzying array of looks informed by comic books, action painting, Brutalist architecture, and more.
Master-minded by writer-producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Across the Spider-Verse required three directors and more than three years to make. Some 1,000 animation artists (including a 14-year whiz kid) contributed to the story of Brooklyn’s one and only Spider-Man, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), and Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) as they journey through alternate universes populated with previously unknown Spider-People. One of those people is actually a T-Rex.
Look of Picture Supervisor Bret St. Clair helped fine-tune the movie’s array of painterly styles. Raised in Tennessee and schooled in animation at Dallas Institute of Art, St. Clair, a self-described “jack of all trades,” initially worked in video games before taking on Hollywood blockbusters like Matrix Reloaded to Haunted Transylvania. At the start of the Pandemic, St. Clair began work on Across the Spider-Verse, rarely leaving his home office in South Pasadena. Speaking from a parked car outside his house, St. Clair talks about digitized paint brushes, Indian comic books, and Blade Runner production designer Syd Mead as inspirations for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
You’re not the production designer, you’re not the VFX supervisor, you’re the “Look of Picture Supervisor.” What exactly does that mean?
My job is to develop the tools and techniques to match all the various styles in the rendering and compositing stages. The title is unique to these films, and it’s actually listed as “Spider-Verse Look Supervisor” in the credits.
Can you give an example of what that entails?
A lot of it has to do with creating techniques for brush strokes or various kinds of line work.
Miles Morales as Spider-Man (Shameik Moore) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation’s SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
How many of these techniques did you repurpose from the first Spider-Verse movie, or did start from scratch?
For Miles’ world, we maybe added a couple of new tools for brushing on his face. For every other world, we had to go back to the well and figure out new ways to do things.
Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) and Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
Can you deconstruct each of these new worlds starting with the movie’s opening set piece that takes place on “Earth 65,” home to Gwen Stacy?
Gwen’s world was based on comic book art by Jason Latour. Jason’s art is beautiful, but it’s also loose and subjective, so sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s represented by a particular brush stroke. There were all these visual things we had to dissect and interpret. Earth-65 was the most intensive of any of the worlds we worked on. It was really about writing tools to create brushes that exist in 3-D space while also moving in ways that look good.
Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation’s SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
JasonLatour applies ink on paper with a brush. You created that same kind of texture with digital tools. How did you do that?
I bought a scanner and bought a lot of paint and during the first month of the film, I spent my weekends painting and scanning and building up a library of things so we could test out different ideas. And a lot of those ended up being used in the film. We studied the way paint diffuses, how paint rubs, the way a brush picks up different colors and smears them together.
After spending time in Miles Morales’ “Earth 1610” world, the story moves on to a futuristic Mumbai AKA Mumbattan, Earth-50101, home to Pavitr Prabhakar/Spider-Man India.
The Mumbattan style was based on Indrajal Comics from the seventies. It’s a very simplified style in India created by artists who didn’t have a lot of time working for a publisher who didn’t have much budget. The artists worked under incredible constraints. In art school, you learn that it’s through limitations that great artists innovate and create unique things, so it was really fun that the directors want to pay homage to that look. For example, a background in Mumbattan would dissolve into a very simple representation with a heavy reliance on outlines because [in the Indrajal era] the artist wouldn’t have had time to hand paint the building.
Spider-Man India (Karan Soni) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
Then we’ve got Miguel O’Hara’s “Nueva York,” Earth-928, populated with hundreds of Spider-people.
That style was based on Syd Mead, the designer famous for Blade Runner. It was exciting to look at his art and dissect it. The unique thing is that Earth-928 was less about paint strokes and more about markers.
Miguel O’ Hara (Oscar Isaac) clashes with Vulture (Jorma Taccone) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
Markers, as in felt-tipped “Magic Markers?”
Yeah. Markers are transparent, so they have to be layered in a very certain way. If you put one marker stroke on a piece of white paper and then put a second marker stroke on top of that, [the image] becomes darker where the two things overlap. Because our rendered markers are transparent, we can’t add too many layers before we hit a dark value, so it becomes really important to control the placement of the marker stroke so it won’t become too dark and opaque.
Along the way we meet Spider-Punk with his cool Mohawk haircut. He embodies the DIY punk rock aesthetic famous for its cheap Xeroxed graphics. How did you approach Spider-Punk?
Early on, I worked with the artists who developed Spider-Punk, and we did a lot of exploration, playing with things like the question of should the layers of collage cast shadows? Should we be using little pieces of tape that would be included in the Xerox or staples? A lot of it had to do with taking traditional renders and then coming up with treatments aimed at emulating different styles of printing or copying that reflect posters from that era.
Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
Animated features often have two directors, but Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, like its predecessor Into the Spider-Verse, has three. How did you deal with three different people steering the ship along with writer-producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller?
On the previous film, you might get comments from all the directors at once, and sometimes they didn’t agree. This was much more streamlined. Justin Thompson had been the production designer on Into the Spider-Verse, and here, he was promoted to director, so Justin was the one we interacted with. Obviously, Chris and Phil also had very specific artistic ideas. Occasionally we’d get comments from Phil to change something.
The visuals for Across the Spider-Verse are so dense and rich, it must have been a very labor-intensive project. When did you start work on the show, and when did you finish?
I came on in early 2020 when we went home for the lockdown — maybe a week after that — and I’ve been working on Across the Spider-Verse until a few weeks ago. I went into the office twice and did pretty much everything from home. We wrote the tools, and then we rewrote the tools to make them faster, and then we rewrote the tools again to make them even faster. Knowing we had to deliver so many shots was stressful. The way to deal with that stress was to make sure our tools were as fast as they could possibly be so that we could hit our target.
A visual development image featuring Pavitr Prabhakar, aka Spider-Man India, Gwen Stacy and Miles Morales fighting The Spot in the city of Mumbattan on Earth-50101 – a kaleidoscopic hybrid of Mumbai and Manhattanfor Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
You spent many months watching Across the Spider-Verse scenes in bits and pieces on your computer monitor. Last month, you finally got to see the whole thing on a big screen at the world premiere in Westwood. What was that experience like?
It’s hard to be objective about the visuals, but having spent years looking at this stuff from my tiny little room in my house, to see everything together on a giant screen, with the music and the sound effects? That was pretty impressive. But the biggest part for me was hearing the audience’s response. When you’re trapped in your room working, you don’t really know what people will think. You worry, “Are people going to get it? Are they going to understand this little corner frame that we put so much effort into?” But people have responded so well to the artistry, it makes me proud. This is the kind of movie you want to make every chance you get. It’s the reason I got into the industry.
For more on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, check out these stories:
We’ve already written about how Deadpool 3, the eagerly-anticipated pairing of Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, will now hit theaters six months earlier than originally scheduled, yet it’s but one move that Disney recently released. As the studio readjusts its upcoming slate due to the writer’s strike, they’ve added a new Star Wars film to the schedule. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key moves.
For Disney’s nautical-themed adventures, a live-action Moana will sail into theaters on June 27, 2025. Later that year, James Cameron’s Avatar 3 will now hit theaters on December 19, 2025, with the two remaining sequels coming later than originally planned—Avatar 4 has been moved to December 21, 2029, and Avatar 5 will land on December 19, 2031. That would close out Cameron’s epic saga 22 years after the original Avatar burst into theaters in 2009.
These Avatar moves will provide some extra time for the production team, who are consistently pushing the envelope and developing new technology to capture the franchise’s signature look and feel:
Each Avatar film is an exciting but epic undertaking that takes time to bring to the quality level we as filmmakers strive for and audiences have come to expect. The team is hard at work and can’t wait to bring audiences back to Pandora in December 2025. pic.twitter.com/DrFX01qzTa
Over in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the reshuffling includes the aforementioned Deadpool 3, which will now move up to May 3, 2024, a full half year earlier than its original November 8, 2024, scheduled premiere date. Captain America: Brave New World has moved from May 3, 2024, to July 26, 2024. This has bumped back the antihero team-up movie Thunderboltsto December 20, 2024, the long-awaited arrival of Mahershala Ali in Bladeto February 14, 2025, and Fantastic Four to May 2, 2025. The next Avengers films are getting the most significant bump; Avengers: The Kang Dynasty is now arriving a year later than originally planned, from May 2, 2025, to May 1, 2026, in turn moving Avengers: Secret Wars from that May 1, 2026 release date to May 7, 2027.
And what about that new Star Wars movie? It will arrive on December 18, 2026, which means it will be one of two Star Wars films to debut that year, as a secondfilm set in a galaxy far, far away has gone into hyperdrive and moved from December 19, 2025, to May 22, 2026. A third Star Wars film is slated for December 17, 2027. If you’re curious which Star Wars films they’ll include—the Daisy Ridley-led, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy-directed film, or possibly the one set in the ancient past by director James Mangold, Disney isn’t telling—yet.
For more stories on Disney, Marvel Studios, and what’s streaming or coming to Disney+, check these out:
Disney recently announced a whole host of changes to their upcoming film slate, with major releases moving for both live-action Disney remakes and pending Marvel movies. A bit of bright news in this release date musical chairs is that the long-awaited pairing of Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine will be coming to theaters earlier than expected.
Deadpool 3 will now arrive on May 4, 2024, a full six months earlier than its previously scheduled premiere of November 8, 2024. Getting a chance to see Reynolds’ hyper-voluble, potty-mouthed superhero square off against Jackman’s taciturn, iconic mutant is manna from Marvel heaven for fans. We know that Karan Soni, Leslie Uggams, and Rob Delaney are all returning (Delaney reprises his role as Peter, the human X-Force member who…has no superpowers.) Unfortunately, one person not returning is Zazie Beetz, who played the ever-lucky Domino in Deadpool 2.
The major draw to Deadpool 3 is, of course, Jackman reprising his role as Wolverine. He and Reynolds have been playfully sparring for years about the potential of teaming up together in a Deadpool movie, and their abundant offscreen chemistry will be one of the things fans will be most excited about seeing onscreen. There’s no telling just how badly Reynolds’ Wade Wilson is going to annoy Jackman’s Logan, but it’s all but assured it will be a big feature of the film. It was funny enough seeing Reynolds and Josh Brolin go mouth-to-fist in Deadpool 2, and you can be sure that Jackman’s Wolverine will have no more patience for Deadpool than Brolin’s Cable did.
Deadpool 3 comes from director Shawn Levy and was written by Levy, Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Wendy Molyneux, Lizzie Molyneux, and Paul Wernick.
Featured image: L-r: Ryan Reynolds stars as Deadpool in Twentieth Century Fox’s DEADPOOL 2. Photo Credit: Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox. Hugh Jackman in ‘Logan.’ Courtesy 20th Century Fox.
An elite force of female soldiers, the Agojie, is all that stands between the African Kingdom of Dahomey and the combined forces of the Oyo Empire and Mahi people. The Oyo and Mahi plan to raid Dahomey villages and sell their captives to European slavers. We open on a Mahi village where raiders heat their machetes over a fire at night. Their leader hears something in the tall grass surrounding them and quiets his men, standing to get a better look. A flock of birds burst from the grass. The men laugh. Their leader is paranoid. All is well, and their raid will go off as planned.
A moment later, the leader of the Agojie, Nanisca (Viola Davis), rises from the grass, followed by her fellow female soldiers. It’s an ambush. And despite it taking place at night before we’ve met Nanisca and her elite force, the action is framed by someone who knows exactly where she wants her camera to be, exactly whose story she’s telling, and exactly what the purpose for every beat is.
We’re 90 seconds into the beginning of director Gina Prince-Bythewood‘s The Woman King — her second brilliantly conceived and executed action epic in a row, following her 2020 movie The Old Guard, an adaptation of a graphic novel that tracked a team of immortal mercenaries led by Charlize Theron’s Andy and joined by KiKi Layne’s Nile. With The Woman King, Prince-Bythewood once again centered the action on women, only the degree of difficulty was significantly higher for reasons technical (larger cast, larger crew, more complicated set pieces), global (Covid-19), and professional (the film had been delayed for years over concerns that its predominantly Black female cast would not attract audiences). Yet Prince-Bythewood once again deployed her immense gifts for crafting visually coherent, emotionally resonant action sequences, an ability shaped by the fact she’s a former top-tier athlete herself. Few directors better understand that action has to be legible to be enjoyable, but to make great action, each moment, each beat, each punch, and each kick have to be supercharged by the personalities, histories, and heartbreaks of the combatants involved.
For this reason and many more besides, Gina Prince-Bythewood is the Motion Picture Association’s 2023 Creator Award recipient, having created a thrilling body of work that has consistently reframed whose stories get told and who gets to tell them. From her breakout hit Love & Basketball in 2000, through The Secret Life of Bees (2008) and Beyond the Lights (2014), Prince-Bythewood has gravitated toward intimate stories that, occasionally, as of late, happen to take place on an epic scale. You can’t separate her vision when shaping an action sequence from her years as an athlete, nor can you separate her action movies from her early, intimate, personal films.
L-r: Sanaa Lathan and Gina Prince-Bythewood on the set of “Love & Basketball” in 2000. Courtesy New Line Cinema.
Prince-Bythewood has approached every film with a mantra. “I see a connection between [all my movies] in terms of the stories I want to tell, which I call intimately epic,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what size canvas I’m working with; you have to care about the character’s story first.”
One of the reasons Prince-Bythewood is one of the best action directors working is she understands on a visceral level what it takes to compete, what it feels like to believe you can and will defeat your opponent, and what it requires to achieve that. She can make a large-scale scene of hand-to-hand combat flow as beautifully and cogently as she made an offense flow on the basketball court when she was running point.
“All the lessons you learn from sports, especially as a girl, are things that are normally not encouraged or thought of as assets for girls,” Prince-Bythewood says. “To learn that aggression is good, to learn that ambition is good, to learn how to outwork everybody, to learn to have stamina, to learn to leave it all out on the floor, I’ve been able to take that to sets when I’m a director to pull the team together, to inspire and lead, and hopefully encourage them with my vision. These are all things I learned on the court and on the track.”
L-r: Queen Latifah, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Jennifer Hudson on the set of “The Secret Life of Bees” in 2008. Courtesy Searchlight Pictures.
Crucially, for The Woman King, Prince-Bythewood also excelled in the ring as a kickboxer after college.
“To be able to know what a good punch looks like, what a good kick looks like, the intensity of when you’re in a ring and what it means when you’re facing an opponent, the intention behind your swings and kicks — those were all things I was able to talk to the actors about,” she says.
As incredible as the women in Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King cast were — Viola Davis, Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch, Sheila Atim, and more — she knew she was going to ask them to do things they’d never done before. She and her team — fight and stunt coordinator Danny Hernandez, fight choreographer Jénel Stevens, and lead cast trainer and nutritionist Gabby Mclain — built them into a cohesive fighting unit, one brutal day of training at a time.
Jenel Stevens on set of “The Woman King.” Courtesy Sony Pictures
“I knew I didn’t just want my actors to learn the moves; I needed them to really do it because I think that’s the best way to film action,” Prince-Bythewood says. “The question was, how can I build athletes? So I talked to my team, Danny Hernandez, my incredible fight and stunt coordinator who’s also a martial artist, and Gabby Mclain, who was in charge of building up their bodies so that they could withstand [the training], and we built athletes to see what they could do.”
Gabriela Mclain and Viola Davis training during “The Woman King.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
They could do a lot, it turns out. The cast went through a grueling training regimen that began months before Prince-Bythewood shot a single frame, and they continued training once they were on location in South Africa. At one point Prince-Bythewood had them training six days a week, including morning sprints for an hour and a half, martial arts training with Hernandez, and two hours of strength training with weights.
“It was a really beautiful thing to see women who hadn’t been in touch with that part of themselves overcome so much of the negative self-talk that had been built up over time to realize the way you do one thing is the way you do all things,” Prince-Bythewood says. “That’s something you learn from sports as well. For them to see their bodies get stronger, to see their swagger increase, to see the way that they walked into a room, the confidence, all of that was built in the gym. Because I’d been through it myself, I knew that’s what it would do.”
But what about the practicalities of her profession, the technical aspects of turning a melee into a meaningful moment of violent catharsis? How does she find the poetry within all those bodies slashing and slamming into each other? How does she avoid the trap that so many directors seem to fall into, where the camera seems to move as hyper-kinetically as the action, and the viewer is left dazed and a little defeated by the scene?
“Building and shooting the action sequences in The Woman King, I could be right there with Danny [Hernandez] saying, ‘I didn’t believe that; she really needs to have intent.’ Talking to the actors, I could say, ‘You’re not just swinging a machete, you’re swinging it through flesh and bone, you have to have an intent, so what is your intent?’” she says. “And that changes the way that people swing.”
Camera placement is key. Prince-Bythewood has honed her skill as a visual storyteller by remaining committed to the emotional beats that make a physical showdown meaningful.
“First and foremost, it starts with the fact that as a director, I’m the first audience, so I need to understand the scene, I need to be able to follow the story, and then it’s my job to tell that story,” Prince-Bythewood says. “I put the camera where I feel like I can watch the action, follow the action, and care about the action. We always start with, ‘What is the character doing? What is this revealing about the character? What is the story of this moment? Honestly, I equate it to a love scene. I love doing love scenes, and it’s the same concept. It has to have a story, it has to be character-based.”
L-r: Lashana Lynch, Thuso Mbedu and director, Gina Prince-Bythewood.
Caring about the emotional state of a character is as crucial for a director to succeed as it is for a viewer to lose themselves in a story. It’s why you watch The Old Guard and feel so caught up in the initial terror and fury of KiKi Layne’s Nile as she fights Charlize Theron’s Andy on a cargo plane (an all-time great action sequence). Or why, in The Woman King, you find yourself drawn to each of the main characters within a given action set piece and know not only who they are by how they fight, but why they fight that way.
Gina Prince-Bythewood on the set of “The Old Guard.” Courtesy Netflix.
“If you take Lashana Lynch’s character Izogie, the very first time you meet her says so much about her as a character,” Prince-Bythewood says. “The fact that she uses her nails as a weapon, the intensity in her face. We talked about a feral abandon with the way she fights where she’s trying to humiliate her opponent to get back at all the trauma she’s experienced. This is opposed to Viola’s character Nanisca, who’s a general and has this brutal efficiency and shows no emotion. That tells you a lot about her. That’s the fun part, building these scenes and knowing you want them to look cool and have cool moves, but you have to have an intent, a story, and a character behind those moves for an audience to care.”
Lashana Lynch stars in THE WOMAN KING. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
Prince-Bythewood has followed her own instincts and interests, from athletics to film, from smaller intimate films to action epics, yet there’s been a remarkable consistency in all her work, no matter the scale, a genuine interest in the interiority of the characters she depicts.
“I truly believe that the first thing you come out with should tell the world who you are as an artist and tell Hollywood who you are as an artist,” she says about that crucial first movie. “I also believe everyone has a story only they can tell, and that’s what’s going to separate you. It’s something I had to learn — I really thought the way to break in was to mimic the things that were successful. People want fresh stories. Fresh perspectives. It took me a second to get there, but also, it takes courage to say, ‘My story is meaningful enough that millions of people will want to see it.’ [Laughs] Whether that’s courage or swagger, it goes back to that athlete mentality. When I walk on the court, I am the best person on it.”
It’s hard enough to write a personal story, harder still to share it, and perhaps hardest of all to hear no. Prince-Bythewood knows from this experience.
“You have to have that to be able to sit down and write a personal story and believe that others will care. That’s a hard thing to do, and there will be times where you’ll lose confidence and certainly, for me, I kept thinking [about Love & Basketball], ‘Who’s going to care about a story about a Black girl who wants to be the first woman in the NBA?’ But I believed in it so much that it kept getting me back into the chair, even after every single studio and production company turned down that film. It was soul-crushing to put something on the page that you believed in so much, that was a personal story, and to be told essentially, your voice doesn’t matter, your story doesn’t matter. But that never made me question the story, it was just a hard thing to push through. But overcoming no is something you have to learn in this industry because you just need that one yes. I was so, so fortunate to get that yes from Sundance, which changed the trajectory of my career.”
L-r: L-r: Sanaa Lathan, Omar Epps, and Gina Prince-Bythewood on the set of “Love & Basketball” in 2000. Courtesy New Line Cinema.
Prince-Bythewood credits having a great support group of filmmakers and friends. Her biggest rock, however, is her husband Reggie Rock Bythewood, who she’s collaborating with on Genius: MLK/X, which is focused on the relationship between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She and her husband will serve as Executive Producers under their production company Undisputed Cinema.
“My husband is my biggest champion and my biggest support and my favorite writer,” she says. “So on those days where you’re on the floor, there’s somebody saying, ‘Get up, keep fighting.’ That’s supremely important.”
As for the MPA Creator Award, she says it speaks to something she’s believed since she was working on Love & Basketball.
“The thing I’m excited about with the MPA Creator Award is what I’m being honored — that those who make film and television can change the world. That’s how I approach the work even 23 years later; I’ve never let go of the knowledge of the power of film and how it literally can change lives and change perception and shift culture. So, to be honored for that, to know that people are seeing that in my work, that it’s not just about entertaining but I am actually trying to say something to the world — it’s incredibly meaningful.”
For more on Gina Prince-Bythewood, check out these stories:
With the latest installment of the Transformers franchise, director Steven Caple Jr. wanted to evoke the experience of growing up a kid in the 90s. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts begins in Brooklyn in 1994, and from the settings to the costumes and the era-defining hip-hop, everything evokes the style and sensibilities of the period.
The story takes place after the happenings of 2018’s Bumblebee, which is set in 1987. Former US Army private Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) and archeological researcher Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback) are thrown into a struggle of intergalactic proportions when Elena unknowingly triggers a beacon hidden within a statuette, calling the evil Scourge (voiced by Peter Dinklage). Scourge is in league with Terrorcon robot Unicron (voiced by Colman Domingo), an entity that destroys worlds. Noah and Elena join forces with the Autobots and an ancient group of robot beasts, the Maximals, to prevent Earth’s annihilation, which takes them from the streets of Brooklyn all the way to the mountains of Peru.
One element essential to capturing the 90s aesthetic was the costume design. With three distinct groups of transformers bringing so much action and technology to the screen, it was important to keep the human characters grounded and believable. Costume designer Ciara Whaley researched styles and fashions from the 90s and brought an authenticity to Noah, Elena, and the other human characters that helped make them relatable while their lives are upended by a legion of colossal alien robots.
We spoke to Whaley about being inspired by the 90s and more for her work in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.
You were mentored by costume designer and educator Mimi Maxmen. How did she influence you in your career?
I didn’t know costume design was even a job. I had done a few short films, but I didn’t know what you did besides just getting the clothes you needed. I had no idea about costume warehouses. My first time walking into one with her, my jaw dropped open. I just felt like I was in a safe space where I belonged. She was so strict and did everything by the book, like doing her costume breakdowns by hand with pencil, and she had me doing that with her. So now, on every project, I do my breakdowns by hand. There are so many apps that you can use now, but I like to do it myself just to feel it through my hands. Also, the relationship she had with her directors was so special, I really saw it was a collaboration between the costume designer, the director, and the actors, who had their own insights. I saw she wasn’t just the costume designer, she was there to help bring everyone’s vision to life and to act as a person to channel everyone’s ideas and get that right thing on screen. I always try to do that, too.
Dominique Fishback, left, and Anthony Ramos. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
Why is it important to you to express identity and individuality as part of your aesthetic, and how does that figure into your designs?
The world is so large, and we’re reminded of that every day now through social media. I wish I had that as a kid. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and went to a Catholic school. I had to wear a uniform, and that was really boring to me. Then, as I started to do this job, I realized I was channeling my upbringing of being an observer and wishing I could express myself through my fashion. When I’m on set, I’m able to see beyond the surface or just a pretty face. I’m able to translate whatever the character is calling for with their clothing.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is set in 1994, and the 90s had a very strong style profile. What were some of the choices for the characters that furthered storytelling? First, tell us about Anthony Ramos.
For Anthony, Steven wanted to create a hero with his character Noah Diaz, so I really wanted to stay grounded in how he looked. When we first see him in his apartment, he’s wearing thisvery colorful Jordan tank top, but that’s the most color we see on him the whole film. We wanted to give a glimpse of how he is at home with his family. Once we go out in the world, he’s thrown into this interview that doesn’t go well, so we have him in a muted brown suit. He’s not flashy. He’s getting beaten up by the world a little bit. We want the audience to relate to him, which meant his color palette outside of home was going to be more muted.
Dean Scott Basquez, left, and Anthony Ramos star in “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.” Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
In Peru, we stuck with really simple 90s silhouettes like light-washed jeans and a simple white top, in part because so much happens there; we didn’t want to take anyone out of the film.
Anthony Ramos stars in “TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS.” Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
For Dominique Fishback’s character Elena, you researched wardrobes of actresses from the time, like Nia Long. Who else was your inspiration for her character?
The character Hilary Banks from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was a huge one for me. I looked at lots of magazine covers of the time, I watched a lot of music videos like “En Vogue” just to see how women were actually wearing their clothes. I felt like I needed to have a huge collective in my mind of not just what I thought the 90s were but how the era was seen around the country and the world.
Dominique Fishback stars in PARAMOUNT PICTURES and SKYDANCE Present In Association with HASBRO and NEW REPUBLIC PICTURES A di BONAVENTURA PICTURES Production A TOM DESANTO / DON MURPHY Production A BAY FILMS Production “TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS”Dominique Fishback stars in “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.” Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
What were some of the choices for Luna Lauren Velez, who plays Breanna Diaz, Noah’s mom?
Breanna, she’s on the go. She doesn’t go to what should have been a very important appointment with her son. She puts the responsibility on Noah. We wanted to portray why she can’t come to these things without getting into a huge amount of backstory. So, what kind of job does she have? We thought she would work somehow in the service industry and gave her a smock that could mean anything to many different cultures, but you definitely know she’s not the boss, and she has to answer to somebody else. That’s why she’s relying so heavily on her son. We wanted to make her feel very down to earth when she’s at home and give you an idea she’s loving, but she also has work to do.
Luna Lauren Velez stars in “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.” Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
What did you learn on Transformers: Rise of the Beasts you can take to your next project?
I confirmed that the character is number one, even on a huge project like Transformers. There are so many cooks in the kitchen, so many producers, but for me, it was about looking at each character and what makes them them. When you have all these robots on screen, the characters can really be just side players. Whenever you’re able to focus on why you like Noah or Elena, It’s really because of the heart they’re bringing to the screen. The costume is a huge help in that. For every project going forward, I’m going to remember to keep character first, no matter how big the budget or the audience is.
MIRAGE and Anthony Ramos in “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.” Courtesy Paramount Pictures.L-r. RHINOX, WHEELJACK, OPTIMUS PRIME, MIRAGE, CHEETOR, ARCEE, OPTIMUS PRIMAL and Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback, below. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is in theaters nationwide.
For more on Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, check out these stories:
Featured image: Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback star in PARAMOUNT PICTURES and SKYDANCE Present. In Association with HASBRO and NEW REPUBLIC PICTURES. A di BONAVENTURA PICTURES Production A TOM DESANTO / DON MURPHY Production. A BAY FILMS Production “TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS”
Visually, the sequel continues to marry artistic styles to make it feel as if a comic book has come to life, but this time around, there is more of it. A lot more. The story is bigger, more villainous, and a heck of a lot more Spider-y. Thankfully, the emotional arc doesn’t get lost in the multiverse – it’s only Miles who physically gets trapped and tries to sling and swing his way out. The new story brought in a fresh trio of directors (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson) and behind-the-scenes creatives to reinvigorate the success of the original.
“They wanted something entirely fresh,” says character designer Kris Anka about the approach to the visual language. “The whole thinking was just because the animation of the first film was good doesn’t mean it can’t be better.” Anka was one of several character designers on Across the Spider-Verse and oversaw the creation of Miguel (voiced by Oscar Isaac), a Spider-Man-like superhero responsible for producing the multiverse travel technology that has Miles and Gwen (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld), along with new characters, Spider-Punk Hobie (voiced by Daniel Kaluuya) and Jessica Drew (voiced by Issa Rae) fighting a portal-jumping “villain of the week” named Spot (voiced by Jason Schwartzman).
Spider-Man 2099 (Oscar Isaac) and Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation’s SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
Anka spent around 15 months in creating Miguel, adding new layers to the suit design and silhouette of the character. “Depending on how close you are to him, you see different layers of detail. At the macro level, it’s this simple red, black, and blue design, but as you get closer, there’s patterning on everything,” says Anka. The designer added layers of cultural specificity to Miguel’s suit. “I went on a deep dive into Mesoamerican patterns and tried to find ways to add culture to the suit.” In using textiles and familiar patterns, the design language was grounded in something tangible instead of arbitrarily conceived.
Jessica Drew (Issa Rae) and Miguel O’ Hara (Oscar Isaac) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
“Another aspect the directors had coming into the film was that Miguel was intentionally giving himself his powers. It wasn’t a bite or an accident, but he was actively doing this,” notes Anka. “Miguel’s entire persona is that he’s willfully doing all this, and he takes things seriously. He puts in the work compared to someone like Peter Parker [voiced by Jack Quaid], who has a naturalistic body and attitude. Miguel had to be the opposite, where everything is designed, and everything Miguel is doing is with intent. It was about trying to find a balance and a look that suggests Miguel takes this way too seriously.”
Miguel O’ Hara (Oscar Isaac) clashes with Vulture (Jorma Taccone) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
In creating how Miguel moved on screen, head of character animation Alan Hawkins took inspiration from the character Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) from the hit television series The Wire. “He [Stringer] has this really interesting posture,” notes Hawks. “He looks like a tough guy, but there’s a slouch to him. It feels like he’s burdened by the weight of responsibility, but still seems like he’s aggressive. That nature inspired Miguel’s posture for most of the film.”
For Hobie, a very English (and cool) punk version of Spider-Man, Hawkins and the team used mixed frame rates in his design to make him feel chaotic and inconsistent. “The jacket he wears is on 4s, but his body is sometimes on 3s, and his guitar is even lower,” says Hawkins. The 4s and 3s Hawkins is referring to are the number of individual drawings for each second of animation based on a 24 frames per second timeline. Animating on 1’s means there are 24 individual drawings for each second of animation – the action is fast and fluid. Animating on 2’s has 12 drawings, 3’s there’s 8, and 4’s has 6 drawings. The lower the number (3, 4…), the slower the animation can look. Having Hobie’s body and jacket on different animations delivered a juxtaposed style that matched his rocker personality.
Hobie Brown/Spider-Punk, voiced by Daniel Kaluuya. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
Miles, now slightly older, saw a refresh to his look (based on models by Omar Smith) that combined new fabrics and reflective patterns to a black suit that has a red stripe down the side and different-sized Spider-Man logos on the front and back to differentiate him while in motion. “We wanted that immediate read for the audience,” notes Anka. In animating Miles, the team referenced the first film to pose his eye and get the angle of his cheeks right. Gwen saw subtle changes in her costume, adding different hints of pink to her suit.
However, the biggest hurdle was creating a near-infinite number of Spider-Man found in the so-called Spider Society – the central “lounge” (created by Miguel) for all the Spider-Man traveling through the multiverse. For the climatic sequence that has Miles being chased by every single society member, the animation team aimed to make it as interesting as possible, creating different looks to avoid repetition. The edge-of-your-seat scene is packed with action and well-placed humor that even sees a T-Rex version of Spider-Man chomp on screen.
Though Across the Spider-Verse immerses you with a visual style where any frame could be used as a promotional poster, the guiding light for the creative team was the emotional beats of the story. “Animation is hard, and making a strong acting choice is different from a strong animation choice. Something the movie has always strived for was good acting and not good animation,” says Hawkins. “We ignored animation. It was the tool we were using, but we thought about how a real person acts who is feeling these complex layers of emotions. We wanted to inject that into each one of our characters.”
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is in theaters now.
For more on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, check out these stories:
Featured image: A visual development image featuring Pavitr Prabhakar, aka Spider-Man India, Gwen Stacy and Miles Morales fighting The Spot in the city of Mumbattan on Earth-50101 – a kaleidoscopic hybrid of Mumbai and Manhattanfor Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
“My friends, the future of sports is purple and gold.”
This is how Lakers owner Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly) greets us in the opening seconds of Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty‘s season 2 teaser, but there’s another team from the other side of the country that would suggest the future of sports is green and white.
The first season explored Magic Johnson’s (Quincy Isaiah) arrival in Los Angeles as Buss, the newly minted Lakers owner, sought to change both the Lakers team and the entire NBA with the help of Magic’s singular talent and Kareem Abdul Jabar’s (Solomon Hughes) dominance inside. The gambit worked, as the Lakers ushered in a new style of play, coined the Showtime Era, that took the league by storm. Season one culminated with the Lakers winning the 1980 NBA Finals (Magic had one of the all-time greatest finals performances ever, with 42 points and 15 rebounds), and season 2 will continue the story from there, focusing on 1980 through 1984. The primary thrust of season 2 will delve into one of the greatest personal rivalries in sports history, Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird, as the Lakers and the Boston Celtics battled for NBA supremacy. The teams, their respective players’ personalities and styles of play, and the cities they represented couldn’t have been more different.
That rivalry between Magic and Larry was glimpsed in season one—it began when the superstars were in college—but it’s bigger than just two men. The teaser reveals how Pat Riley (Adrien Brody), the unlikely rising star coach of the Lakers, felt that the only way a Lakers title could actually matter is if they beat their hated rivals in Boston. Season 1 also explored what a phenomenally awful place Boston was for opposing players—especially Black players—so much so that even Celtics legend Bill Russell was mistreated by the unruly, in his case, downright criminal fanbase [they broke into his home while he and his family were away on a vacation and vandalized it, even smashing his trophies]. The animus between the two teams and between Magic and Larry was real, and what was teased in the first season will be a major plot in season two.
Winning Time season 2 will see Reilly, Isaiah, Hughes, and Brody joined by returning stars Jason Clarke, Gaby Hoffmann, Jason Segel, Hadley Robinson, DeVaughn Nixon, Tamera Tomakili, Brett Cullen, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Spencer Garrett, Molly Gordon, Joey Brooks, Delante Desouza, Jimel Atkins, Austin Aaron, McCabe Slye, Thomas Mann, Gillian Jacobs, with Michael Chiklis and Rob Morgan.
Winning Time season 2 takes the court on Max on August 6. Check out the teaser below:
Here’s season 2’s logline:
Season two continues to explore the professional and personal lives of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers. This season hones in on the period just after the Finals in 1980 through 1984, culminating in the first professional rematch of the era’s greatest stars: Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.
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What more can be said about Arnold Schwarzenegger that hasn’t already been said? Plenty, as it turns out. Arnold, the three-part documentary (streaming now on Netflix), includes loads of archival footage, plus interviews with famous collaborators like Jamie Lee Curtis and James Cameron, but the core story comes directly from the world-famous bodybuilder-turned-movie star-turned-California governor. Filming intermittently over two years mainly at Schwarzenegger’s Brentwood home, director Lesley Chilcott and cinematographer Logan Schneider also visited the Austrian village where Schwarzenegger grew up. “The house had no electricity or plumbing, but it was across the street from a castle and surrounded by this beautiful forest,” says Schneider. “Until we did these interviews, I had no idea of the breadth of Arnold’s journey.”
Schneider studied film at Montana State University, made his mark as a DP with the Drunk History comedy series, then shifted focus to shoot documentaries about big personalities, including Chicago chef Charlie Trotter and rapper Tupac Shakur. Speaking from his Bozeman home, Schneider revisited his Arnold experience, including the tools he used to conjure Schwarzenegger’s childhood and to capture the larger-than-life icon.
What were you and director Lesley Chilcottaiming for in making this documentary about one of the most famous people in the world?
We didn’t want to do a hagiography where you’re just golf-clapping him all the way. We wanted this to be warts and all. Arnold was not a producer on the project, and I give him credit for letting Leslie tell a story that didn’t shy away from hard things.
The archival footage is informative, but the heart of the story comes from Schwarzenegger himself, who’s basically sitting in a room talking about his life. How did you structure the interviews?
We were originally scheduled for four or five days, but we wound up doing 10 or 12 interviews over about two years. He’s a busy guy, and at one point, he went to Toronto for five months to film FUBAR.
Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Arnold.’ Courtesy Netflix.
Yet it looks and feels like the session could have happened in one afternoon. How did you create that sense of continuity?
We tested the lighting on our first visit and made very precise diagrams for two setups, one in his office and one in the gym. We had as much crew continuity as possible to recreate the same lighting because we needed to match [previous sessions] side by side so that you’d never know. In making a documentary, unlike a narrative feature, how do you create something cohesive when you can’t control the pieces? When you don’t have a script, a production design, or a character arc? How do you build the rules, the guard rails to make it feel like one movie? To give this documentary a cinematic feeling, I used the same gear I would use on a feature narrative.
Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Arnold.” Courtesy Netflix.
During the visit to Austria, when Schwarzenegger’s sitting on the little bed of his childhood bedroom, you shot some very evocative exteriors and dramatic re-creations. What were your references?
When Arnold’s talking about his childhood, we wanted to create the feeling of memories, so we built these LUT [Look Up Tables] based on movies from that era. One of our looks was based on [1956 Oscar-winning short film] The Red Balloon; another was based on The Sound of Music. And then, for the second episode, we created what we called the True Lies LUT, which was higher contrast and punchy [in the spirit of] eighties-nineties, big-budget action extravaganzas.
Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Arnold.” Courtesy Netflix.
In Austria, your footage of the forest near Schwarzenegger’s home has an almost fairytale quality.
That’s actually inspired by Sofia Coppola’s film The Beguiled. [French cinematographer] Philippe Le Sourd didn’t expose for inside the forest; he exposed for only the sun creeping in. Based on that idea, we fogged up the forest at four a.m. and on this gorgeous morning, we were able to create a magical memory version of that dark forest.
A scene from “Arnold.” Courtesy Netflix.
It’s no secret that Schwarzenegger’s father was a Nazi, but here, he describes how Austria’s post-war “broken man” syndrome affected family life and this very strict upbringing.
It was fascinating to hear Arnold talk about the damage emotionally on people [experiencing] the shame of losing and being on this [wrong] side of the war.
His family lived on the second floor of the house?
His dad was the country policeman, so he got the second floor; the first floor went to to the forest ranger. All the beds and tables and everything had been put up in the attic, and everybody forgot about it until they made this house a museum.
In Episode 3 of the film, Schwarzenegger addresses a dark chapter of his personal life by talking about the affair with his family’s housekeeper and the child he fathered with her. Was that tough to film?
None of us knew how that was going to go, but Leslie had built up enough trust to go into those harder places. I thought Arnold handled it quite well. He didn’t try to re-direct – the classic politician [response] to answer the question you wished you were asked. That didn’t happen. Schwarzenegger’s 75 years old, and I think he wanted this to be a definitive life story. He wanted to put it out there rather than have people say, “Well, they left this part out.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Arnold.” Courtesy Netflix.
Even with all the talking heads, you lend this documentary a cinematic quality starting with the opening close-up of Arnold Schwarzenegger smoking a cigar in the hot tub. What kind of equipment did you work with?
I used the Mini ARRI, which is the same camera that Dune was shot on. We built the look around ARRI Signature prime lenses because they’re so sharp and clean and high resolution in terms of colors and tonal hues. Bringing those tools into the documentary space is the price of entry for the high-end look.
Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Arnold.” Courtesy Netflix.
Circling back to the lighting, that seemed to help create this portraiture-like ambiance for the interior shots.
We had a very soft top light triple diffused so the light wrapped into the eyes and around his skin nicely. It’s the kind of angled top light that you might see in The Sopranos or The Godfather, where you get this dramatic chiaroscuro that supports the emotional points of the story. Arnold’s not vain, but he is a movie star, and he should look like a movie star, so we found a nice balance in the way the lighting brought out natural skin tone compared to what you’d normally get from LED lights.
Hanging out with Schwarzenegger between takes, do you have a favorite memory or two?
I got to ride in his tank, which is fun.
He has a tank?
Arnold has a tank he keeps in Santa Clarita. It’s the same model tank he drove when he served in the Austrian army. He got permission from the Department of Defense to ship one over here, obviously, not functioning with a weapon. He likes to run over stuff. We couldn’t lose that showman part of his personality which is baked into him at this point. He’s still Arnold. It’s not an act.During the lighting tests, we’d pulled out this couch, and the very first moment Arnold walked on set, he goes [imitating Schwarzenegger’s accent], “The couch is no good for me. Couches make me slouch. slouching is a loser’s position. I need a chair, so I am moving forward. I am always moving forward.” He won over the whole crew in like eight seconds.
Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Arnold.” Courtesy Netflix.
You do a pretty good Schwarzenegger impression.
Thank you. I’ve been working on it for years.
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Daniel Pemberton knows how to create energy. The composer, who’s frequently worked with filmmakers Aaron Sorkin, Danny Boyle, and Guy Ritchie, is a musician with an ear for the eclectic and electric. For proof, look and listen no further than his lush score for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
Pemberton scores different universes, Spider-Men and Spider-Women—and everything Spider-Inbetween. The thematic throughline is capturing the journey of Miles Morales’ (voiced by Shameik Moore) as he swings across the multiverse. Although the sequel remains as personal as the first film, which Pemberton also scored, it is an even more eye-popping, mind-melting voyage into the wilds of the Spider-Verse.
Pemberton’s score maps Miles’s struggles with destiny as his life, and the lives of those he loves, are put at cross purposes with his fellow Spider-Men’s methods for protecting the universes.“I think what’s great about Spider-Verse is it’s a world where you can allow all your influences into the film,” he says. “There are not a lot of films that will allow that. But Spider-Verse is one of them. I think that’s why it feels like such a crazy score ‘cause it’s basically most of my life’s musical adventures.”
We spoke to Pemberton about a few of his unconventional recording methods, how overwhelming and frightening the sequel was, and why there are musical secrets he will never tell. At least not in an interview.
Since the movie plays as an epic piece of pop art, did you approach the score at all like a pop record? It has that style to it.
I approach every film differently, but deep down, I approach a lot of my film scores from a slightly more pop, rock, and modern viewpoint. Many of these scores are produced more like records than traditional film scores. With Spidey, the world they’re in is so contemporary that you have to reflect that. The sound world needs to be developed in a way that feels special and unique, which can only be achieved through a more modern production approach. If it were done as a traditional orchestral score, it wouldn’t have the same impact. There are other films where a traditional orchestral score works great, but for this one, it had to be approached differently.
You scored the first movie as well. Did you want to develop certain elements or themes in the sequel? How’d you want the score to grow with Miles?
A big thing for me is having themes that pay off in different ways and having sounds that are all connected. Going from the first film to the second film, people might notice a whole bunch of themes from the first film that have been developed, changed, or referenced. Some of them are universal or relate to a character. For example, Miles has a bunch of themes, like his “Destiny” theme, which applies to all Spider-Men. There’s the general Spider-Man theme. There are themes for family and certain characters. There are also sounds and themes representing the Spider-Verse, which were actually introduced in the first film but come back in the second film. So, there’s a lot of connectivity between the characters, the worlds, the universe, the themes, and the concepts. Some connections are obvious, like the distinctive noise whenever Prowler appears, but others are more subtle. Toward the end of the film, we combine Miles’ “Destiny” theme and his Spider-Man theme with a chord structure and baseline that represents the Cannon event.
The score is incredibly dense. When you’re scoring different universes and all these different Spider-People, where do you start?
It’s completely overwhelming and terrifying. Since the first film, I’ve been in a panic state until we finished this new one. You approach it bit by bit. For this film, I spent about two years on what I call low-level research and development, just trying things out. I was working on other films during that time, so whenever I had downtime, I would experiment with sounds and ideas. Some turned out great and made it into the movie, while others were discarded.
How did you ultimately decide on what belonged in the film?
It’s fascinating to note that the opening and ending of the film were one of the first things I wrote for it, based on my initial reaction to the script. I threw them a lot of concepts and goofy ideas during meetings with the directors in LA. The opening track was eventually pulled out and worked perfectly for both the beginning and the ending. We went through countless ideas until we realized we had something special right at the start.
How’d the idea for Gwen and the drum solo come about? It pulls you right into the movie.
As much as I would love to take full credit for that, it was actually Phil Lord, the producer/writer’s idea. Phil was like, “I wanna start it with this big drum solo, and she’s gonna drum, and you just record the drums, and you play along.” And it’s one of these crazy complicated chicken and eggs because I’ll get a scene that is unfinished, like really unfinished. I’ll write something, and then they’ll try to animate roughly, but they’re gonna change it, and everything keeps changing. It’s an unbelievably complicated process.
It was so surprising and satisfying because you assume the movie will open on Miles…
For the drums, Phil wanted to have a different intro because a lot of people wanted to start the movie on Miles, you know, initially. But that start with Gwen, I think, sets you up for the universe just getting bigger. But those drums are great. Played by a fantastic drummer called Mike Smith, who’s played on a ton of my scores. I got a mixer called Sam Okell, who’s fantastic. He just makes them sound brilliant. I just sit and go, “Well done, guys.”
In that early testing phase, were there any ideas that, on paper, you thought wouldn’t work or were ridiculous but ultimately worked?
Oh yeah, the whistle. I basically recorded a bunch of whistles in a graveyard in Peckham, London. There’s a cemetery called Nunhead Cemetery, which is a beautiful, old cemetery. I’m wandering around there, and they’ve got these big mausoleums. One of them had a metal grill so you could stick your head in and make a noise, which I like doing. I was like, “Oh my God, this reverb is insane.” All stone. I recorded a bunch of those and then resampled them and turned them into instruments. They’re all featured in “The Anomaly,” the train chase [sequence] when he talks about an anomaly. The anomaly in the film was often represented by a whistle.
Any other unconventional recording methods you used?
We brought back the record-scratching, which is a really big part of the first film. When Miles tells us what he’s been up to, I wanted to do something that’s like a scratch showcase. Because in the first film, we recorded stuff, sort of put it on vinyl, so to speak, and then we scratched it in to make it feel more unconventional and more a part of Miles’ world. We did that a lot in this film as well. There’s loads of stuff where we’ve scratched the orchestra, recorded the orchestra, mixed it, put it on vinyl, digital vinyl, and then DJ Blakey, this amazing scratch DJ, has been scratching it back in, which we then re-edit and then re-put in the film. It’s unbelievably time-consuming and exhausting, but it sounds cool.
Can you give us an example of when you deploy this method?
In the sequence where we meet Miles, I want to scratch every sound effect that we see on screen. S0, we scratch car crash noises, punches, pens, spray cans, and orchestral stabs. My favorite one is a goose. Remember a goose in the car wash? We got the sound of a goose, and then we scratched the sound of a goose, and it sounds really awesome. You can hear it in the film, but not as clearly as I’d like because there are a million other things going on. On the track “My Name is Miles Morales,” the last third of that is pretty much beats and goose-scratch solos.
The classic goose scratch!
Just like all those other film scores! Not another record-scratched goose solo. I’m so fed up. Trust me, they’re gonna be the Taiko drums and staccato strings of the next decade. Every film is gonna have a scratched goose solo in it.
[Laughs] That’s great. Are there any hidden secrets in this score?
Yeah, there are millions of those. And you know what, I’m not gonna tell people how to do them because I spent effing ages working them out. If I tell everyone else, then they can just do this score instead of me [Laughs]. There is so much crazy under-the-bonnet stuff going on in this score. And I’m not gonna tell everyone how to do it.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verseis in theaters now. The score is available here.
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This has to be one of the best stories we’ve come across all week. Dare we say we’ve been ensnared by how lovely it is?
Sony’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has been hailed as a masterpiece, a stunning, emotional tour de force of animation, filmmaking, and storytelling. And one of the people who count themselves among the artists to bring this kaleidoscopic fever dream into reality? The 14-year-old artist Preston Mutanga, a young man who earned his way into a spot on the animation team by creating a shot-for-shot version of the trailer with animated Lego characters. Mutanga’s story could be a movie itself.
The New York Timesreveals that the moment early in Across the Spider-Verse when Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) swoops into a dimension that looks like Lego building blocks and figures, a hat tip to The Lego Movie, was the work of Mutanga. The Times reports that the Minnesota-born, Toronto-based son of immigrant parents from the Northwest Region of Cameroon has been an artistic dynamo since he was a very little kid. Whether it was building Lego cars using his own designs or creating his own comics, young Preston was irrepressible.
“I also used to make comics when I was younger,” Mutanga told the Times during a recent video interview. “Looking back at them now, they’re not the greatest, I’m not going to lie, but it was good practice for telling stories.”
Then, this past December, the teenager revealed to the world just how prodigious his artistic abilities have become when, using his dad’s old computers, he recreated the Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse trailer shot-for-shot—but as if it were a Lego movie.
Mutanga had taught himself how to make computer-generated Lego short films with a little help from his dad, Theodore, who showed him a 3-D software called Blender. “I instantly got hooked on it,” he told the Times. “I watched a lot of YouTube videos to teach myself certain stuff.”
Mutanga’s shot-for-shot trailer remake got the attention of none other than the two directors of The Lego Movie and writer/producers of the Spider-Verse films, Christopher Miller and Phil Lord. Once it was decided that Across the Spider-Verse would include a foray into a Lego universe, Christina Steinberg, one of the film’s producers, got in touch with Mutanga to see if he wanted to animate it.
“We found out that it was a 14-year-old kid who made it, and we were like, ‘This looks incredibly sophisticated for a nonadult, nonprofessional to have made,” Miller told the Times. “It blew us all away, including some of the best animators in the world.”
His parents, Theodore and Gisele, were a little wary at first—Preston’s YouTube channel had been hacked before, so at first, they worried that this could be a ruse. But a LinkedIn search led them to Across the Spider-Verse‘s Toronto-based production designer, Patrick O’Keeve, who confirmed that the offer was legitimate. Mom and dad had been nurturing their son’s gifts all along, and now, it seemed, was a huge opportunity to let him take that next step.
So, during the week of spring break and then for several weeks after (once his homework was finished), Mutanga worked on the Lego sequence. Every other week, he had a video call with Miller to go over his progress and get feedback. He learned in real-time what it was like to work on a team and how filmmaking is an evolutionary process, with things changing right up until the very end.
“The Lego Movie is inspired by people making films with Lego bricks at home,” Phil Lord told the Times. “That’s what made us want to make the movie. Then the idea in Spider-Verse is that a hero can come from anywhere. And here comes this heroic young person who’s inspired by the movie that was inspired by people like him.”
Mutanga’s dream to become a professional animator seems very well in hand. He just needs to finish high school first.
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Is Geralt (Henry Cavill) getting soft? Hardly, but the indomitable force at the center of The Witcher is definitely becoming more emotionally attached to Ciri (Freya Allan), the young princess he’s been entrusted to keep safe through the perilous journeys depicted thus far. The official trailer for season 3 finds Geralt, Ciri, and Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) once again being hunted by all manner of beasts, both supernatural and of the human variety, as they travel to the fortress of Aretuza where, they hope, they might be safe for a while.
The trailer boasts all the action that fans have come to expect in creator Lauren Schmidt Hissrich’s bloody, often beautiful fantasy saga. Our brave trio has become something of a family, with Ciri the centripetal force around which everything revolves. And Jaskier (Joey Batey) is back, the bard with the big (but funny) mouth that Geralt has grown fond of—even if he’d never admit it.
Season three will arrive in two parts—or volumes, as it were—the first with five episodes, streaming on June 29, and the second containing the final three episodes, streaming on July 27. Season three is also the last hurrah for Cavill in the role. While we’ll be getting more Witcher action with the series renewed through season 5, Cavill will be handing off the broadsword to Liam Hemsworth starting in season 4.
Check out the trailer below.
Here’s the synopsis for season 3:
As monarchs, mages, and beasts of the Continent compete to capture her, Geralt takes Ciri into hiding, determined to protect his newly-reunited family against those who threaten to destroy it. Entrusted with Ciri’s magical training, Yennefer leads them to the protected fortress of Aretuza, where they hope to uncover more about the girl’s untapped powers; instead, they discover they’ve landed in a battlefield of political corruption, dark magic, and treachery. They must fight back, put everything on the line – or risk losing each other forever.
If you’re craving a feel-good underdog story with a kick, bite into Flamin’ Hot. The spicy Cheetos flavoring that has become a pop culture icon started with the passion of Mexican-American Frito-Lay janitor Richard Montañez (Jesse Garcia). Told from his sizzling perspective, Eva Longoria’s directorial debut is technically a biopic but has the DNA of a 90s snack commercial. It’s colorful, bursting with energy, and instantly addictive.
“Something we always kept track of is Richard and his energy and his excitement and his passion,” editor Kayla Emter explained. “That dictated what the pace wanted to be on its own. We always chased that with our cutting style.”
Flamin’ Hot grabs hold fast and tight. Montages from Montañez’s life, his own narration, and even heroic fantasies make for a memorable telling of his climb to the top of the corporate food chain. The movie spans decades, and Emter wanted to be sure that the audience kept up. She employed a few tricks to help viewers take in every important moment.
“I have to give a lot of credit to Federico [Cantini], our DP, who is so talented. He delivered amazing footage that had a lot of dynamic movement,” she noted. “So that made it easy for me to keep things flowing, but at the same time, I try to complement that with a classic concept of film editing, which I think we forget about a lot – eye trace. From the montages, I would always pay attention to where the audience is looking and how I use that to span transitions to the next shot. I think when I did it well, it really helps the flow of where we’re going, but not losing track of the info, because people are just following along exactly as I wanted them to.”
Emter never closed the door on a scene – literally. “Another thing I learned a few movies ago is I tried to either remove an entrance into a scene or omit the exit,” she revealed. “I always want there to be some kind of flow or leaving things unresolved so it would add momentum into the next scene.”
Much like Emter’s work on Hustlers, Flamin’ Hot is equally generous with both visuals and soundscape. The crunch of crispy chips, the life of a Latino neighborhood, and the hum of the Frito-Lay factory all give the story a savory rhythm.
“Katie Halliday, who is our sound supervisor, she was just a gem to work with,” Emter said. “So talented, and we had a lot in common. We had the same sensibilities. We spent a lot of time geeking out about the different neighborhoods that Richard goes into over the course of decades. The sound is really important for each one that it feels like we’re really there.”
Once Montañez charms his way into a janitor position at the factory, he is eager to learn everything he can about production. The assembly line is filled with complicated equipment and a hierarchy that is arduous to climb. To truly understand the system, he must employ all his senses and a little help from a new ally.
“Something that we really dug into was the sound of the factory. The machines,” Emter said. “There’s that scene where Clarence (Dennis Haysbert) is like, ‘Listen, I can hear everything. Belts, gear, movement.’ So, there’s this rhythm we created. When Richard is listening, it’s white noise. Rhythmically it’s one thing, but then the sound adding to that is a whole different layer. We were lucky to be able to come up with these concepts and designs, and I would work with them in Avid, so by the time it got to the mix stage, all that heavy lifting was done. We could just mix it because there were so many layers. That way, we could really elevate everything as we needed to when it’s time to shine was there.”
Montañez’s path to a better life is part dream, part determination. Lacking the education that many of the executives enjoyed, he is sometimes left to simply imagine what happens in the boardrooms. The most fun moments in the movie are when he puts a personal spin on the corporate bureaucracy in fantasy sequences.
One enlightening moment comes when he hears CEO Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub) speaking to him via a taped pep talk. “When Enrico is talking to him through the TV, we switched up the soundscape dramatically,” Emter revealed. “We were kind of clued into this isn’t quite real. We leaned into the slow-motion footage when he meets Enrico. So, we always tried to find the balance, so everybody was following along.”
The road to bring Flamin’ Hot Cheetos from the Montañez’ kitchen to store shelves was rocky. Through the successes and setbacks, Emter shaped the pacing and even influenced the order in which the events unfold onscreen.
“Something we were always keeping an eye on is not staying in one spot too long because we didn’t want the audience to think this is where we are landing if we actually had several more places to go,” she explained. “We always tried not to exhaust them with any one thing, and that required movement and decision-making on what is the core information we need. The script was originally nonlinear. There were a few flashback scenes of Richard’s childhood and his days with the gang that were interspersed throughout. While it had a purpose in those original spots, watching it back, we realized that Richard’s arc and journey were more impactful and meaningful when you could actually see where he started from and the growth. So, we moved everything to a linear fashion.”
Emter has a rule to live by that serves as good advice for all storytellers. “I’m always like, ‘Not too many endings.’ Some movies have five endings, and I hope we don’t have that on this one.”
Avoiding many of the pitfalls that threaten to lead film projects awry can be avoided by enlisting an editor as early as possible, Emter noted. Even before scripts are finalized.
“Transitions are really important to talk about in pre-production. Expectations as far as inserts and extra tricks to have up your sleeve if you get in a bind,” she explained. “I think the editor is so important the full time. The editing is the editing, but after picture lock is where we become wildly important because we know the movie so well at that point, and we know the small nuances and why things were chosen. There’s a rhythm and a beat.”
Flamin’ Hot debuts just in time to spice up the summer movie scene. “I am very much an uplifting movie-going kind of gal,” Emter declared. “So, whenever I get a chance to work on a movie that I’m going to put on repeat throughout the rest of my life, I’m just so grateful.”
Flamin’ Hot hits Disney+ and Hulu Friday, June 9.
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That’s the first thing 21-year-old Maitreyi Ramakrishnan tells me when she hops on our Zoom. It’s wholly indicative of her character — an actress plucked out of obscurity at 17, grounded, down-to-earth, unapologetically herself no matter the circumstance.
It’s something she says she’s never had to think about — being herself in the public eye.
“When I first got the role and then, like, the Deadline article came out, a lot of my Canadian friends were like, ‘Hey, dude, are you going to take down that strike post that you put up from high school?’” she says. “Because context: When I was in grade 12, I went on strike. I led a student walkout for 500 kids in my 700-kid school because of cuts to public education and, therefore, extracurriculars. And I was like, ‘No, I’m definitely not taking that down because that’s who I am.’”
Since Maitreyi was chosen for the part of Devi out of 15,000 kids who responded to an open casting call on Twitter, she has not shied away from staying true to her beliefs, even as her fame continues to rise.
“I wouldn’t have gotten Never Have I Ever if it wasn’t for public education and extracurriculars because it was free extracurriculars provided by public education that gave me my passion to know I love acting,” she says very firmly.
This attitude has followed Maitreyi into her adulthood. She’s outspoken about her beliefs in gender and racial equality and has openly posted about abortion and LGBTQIA+ rights on Twitter.
“I can’t not speak up about what I believe in,” she said with the same emphatic oomph as her character. “And I can’t just choose not to learn about things because I don’t want to be involved. At the end of the day, like, yeah, I’m an actor, I am a public figure, but also being an actor—I’m not curing cancer. I’m a human being. At most, all we’re doing as actors is either providing the people with cancer entertainment or providing the people who are curing cancer with entertainment.”
While she may not yet consider herself a serious actor, serving as a role model for millions of teenage girls is a task she does not take lightly. As a Tamil-Canadian actress playing a Tamil American onscreen, Maitreyi views the responsibility of representation (40 million Americans watched Season 1 alone!) as a “privilege” but a “daunting” one.
“It’s my privilege to be able to represent anyone who really can relate to me, not just brown young women like myself,” she says.
The “daunting” part comes from the reality of having millions of people observing your every move, an aspect of fame she says she underestimated.
“I never like, of course, prepared myself for the fame part of it,” she says. “The, you know, so many people watching you part of it.”
Maitreyi had never professionally acted before Never Have I Ever. But starring in a hit, Mindy Kaling-created Netflix show is a sure-fire way to propel oneself into stardom.
“That’s the biggest change,” she says, thinking. “Because, like… Otherwise, I would just be a kid, just running around the streets of, you know, the good ol’ Greater Toronto Area. But now I’m a GREMLIN in front of BILLIONS.”
The ease with which Maitreyi can switch between humor and sincerity is something that could be studied in public speaking courses. Like her character, she speaks in colorful metaphors at speeds that would make NASCAR tremble.
“Yesterday, at the premiere, I had this moment where I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is my life,’” she said. “Of all the lives that I could have possibly lived in this lifetime, this is the one I get to.”
Never Have I Ever airs its fourth and final season on June 8. Maitreyi says knowing this was the finale helped “wrap up” all the characters nicely.
“Instead of just leaving characters on the fishing line, which is nice,” she says. “I was very, very happy about that because, you know, sometimes in TV, you don’t get the nice kind of endings. Not that it’s a perfect show, but the writers definitely do a good job by everyone’s fave.”
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