Tom Cruise’s final mission as Ethan Hunt is upon us. The official trailer for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has arrived, revealing Ethan Hunt’s deadliest mission yet. Sure, they’re all deadly, but this is a franchise that has consistently upped the stakes, both within the confines of the story and on a practical filmmaking level. If the Academy ever gets around to honoring the work of stunt coordinators and performers, it would be well served by going back and giving a slew to the folks who have been working on Mission: Impossible.
The trailer opens with a simple yet highly effective visual—Hunt, on one of his trusty motorcycles, speeds to the edge of a cliff and stops with about a half-inch to spare. That’s followed by one of the most classic of all Tom Cruise movie moments—the long sprint—as Ethan runs for his life (or to protect someone else’s) while a narrator reminds us we cannot escape our past. Point taken. Ethan’s past has been haunting him for years, and with this final, two-part conclusion to his decades-long journey, Cruise and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie have set us up for the most epic of all sendoffs.
The new trailer only hints at the specifics of the plot, which seems to suggest that the all-powerful weapon Ethan’s enemies are hoping to utilize is artificial intelligence. It’s a guess, but a fairly educated one considering the sci-fi-esque images of what appears to be a quantum computer and the mentions by Ethan’s adversaries that his fate has already been decoded. More fodder for our A.I. theory is the film’s synopsis, which promises that Ethan and the IMF team are tracking down “a terrifying new weapon that threatens all of humanity before it falls into the wrong hands,” a weapon that will give control of the future and the fate of the world to whoever possesses it. This sounds similar to the darkest concerns over A.I. that you can read about just about every day of the week now. Or, you can ask ChatGPT about it.
McQuarrie co-wrote the script with Erik Jendresen, and alongside Cruise, he directs returning stars Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, and Vanessa Kirby. The cast also includes Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Mariela Garriga, Henry Czerny, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Charles Parnell, Frederick Schmidt, Cary Elwes, Mark Gatiss, Indira Varma, and Rob Delaney.
Check out the trailer below. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One hits theaters on July 12:
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The God of Mischief and the Native American assassin will be seeing you this fall on Disney+.
Marvel has revealed that the second season of Loki will premiere on October 6, and then a month and change later, the Hawkeye spinoff Echo will premiere on November 29. What’s more, Echo will be the first Marvel Studios show to release all its episodes at once.
Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige made the announcements during the Disney Upfront on Tuesday. Loki is the first Marvel Studios series on Disney+ to receive a second season, which will continue the story of Tom Hiddleston’s mercurial, time-hopping rogue and his adventures with his new pals, like Owen Wilson’s Mobius and Sophia Di Martino’s Sylvie. Feige also confirmed that season two will boast newly minted Everything Everywhere All At Once Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan, fresh from his historic win for Best Supporting Actor. Rick and Morty writer Eric Martin returns to pen all the episodes for season two, with Moon Knightdirectors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead helming the series.
As for Echo, the series is centered on Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox), the deaf Native American assassin from Marvel’s 2021 Disney+ series Hawkeye. Feige was enthusiastic about the series, which hails from an “incredible team of indigenous writers, directors, and cast members.” Joining Cox are stars Zahn McClarnon (Reservation Dogs), Graham Greene (Dances With Wolves), Chaske Spencer (Wild Indian), Tantoo Cardinal (Killers of the Flower Moon), Docy Lighthing (Hey, Viktor!), and Devery Jacobs (Reservation Dogs). Also making appearances in the series are Vincent D’Onofrio, reprising his role as Hawkeye villain Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. Kingpin, and Charlie Cox, reprising his role as Matt Murdock, a.k.a. Daredevil. Those two did battle on the Netflix series Daredevil and will be locking horns again when Daredevil: Born Again arrives on Disney+. Echo was helmed by Sydney Freeland (Reservation Dogs, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds) and Catriona McKenzie (The Walking Dead, Shining Vale).
Marvel also has the Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn-led Secret Invasionarriving on June 21, while Black Panther: Wakanda Forever spinoff Ironheart and the WandaVision spinoff Agatha: Coven of Chaos moving back to 2024 release dates.
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If you weren’t afraid of animatronic bears before, the fine folks at Blumhouse would like to have a word with you.
Universal has unveiled the first look at Five Nights at Freddy’s, their Blumhouse horror flick that adapts a very popular horror survivor game in which players have to survive an attack by homicidal animatronic animals that come to life inside Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza restaurant. The video game series was created in 2014 by Scott Cawthorn, who helped director Emma Tammi (The Wind, Blood Moon) co-write the adaptation alongside Seth Cuddeback.
Five Nights at Freddy’s follows a new security guard at the pizza joint, Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson from The Hunger Games)—we’re guessing no relation to the Philadelphia Phillies Hall of Fame third baseman—who finds out the hard way on his first night at the job that Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza restaurant is not at all the goofy, kid-friendly place he’d imagined. Cue the murderous animatronic animals (created by Jim Henson’s creature shop, no less), and Mike’s going to have to have to get clever, fast, to survive the night.
Joining Hutcherson are Elizabeth Lail (You, Mack & Rita), Piper Rubio (Holly & Ivy, Unstable), Kat Conner Sterling (We Have a Ghost, 9-1-1), Mary Stuart Masterson (Blindspot, Fried Green Tomatoes) and Matthew Lillard (Good Girls, Scream).
Check out the teaser below. Five Nights at Freddy’s hits theaters and streams on Peacock on October 27:
FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S, from Universal Pictures and Blumhouse in association with Striker Entertainment.
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There was never really a question of whether Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) was going to survive his seemingly fatal fall at the end of Extraction—the question was, and remains, what his survival would mean for his future. In the official trailer for Extraction 2, this question is posed to Rake as he reappears on the scene in a hail of gunfire, doing his level best to get a family out of the crosshairs of some seriously sinister individuals. The film finds Hemsworth and director Sam Hargrave returning to double down on the epic action they ginned up in the original. Also back is Hemsworth’s longtime collaborator Joe Russo (you know him, he co-directed a few little Avengers films), who wrote the script. Rake is back, and he’s got some new people to protect, although the reasons for his survival remain opaque.
The trailer offers a few thrilling set pieces, including an epic fight on a train and some very nifty combat skills—you’ll note Rake’s cleverness when it comes to setting up booby traps. Rake’s got a new mission. somehow more dangerous than the last; rescue the family of a notorious Georgian gangster. As we learned in the original Extraction, as ruthless and skilled as he is, Rake has a heart. He will go above and beyond his job duties; the man’s a mercenary, after all, to save the lives of the people put in his charge. That very often means risking his own against insane odds.
Hemsworth is joined by Golshifteh Farahani (reprising her role from the original film), Adam Bessa, Olga Kurylenko, Daniel Bernhardt, and Tinatin Dalakishvili.
Check out the trailer below. Extraction 2 hits Netflix on June 16:
Here’s the synopsis for Extraction 2:
Chris Hemsworth returns as Tyler Rake in EXTRACTION 2, the sequel to Netflix’s blockbuster action film EXTRACTION. After barely surviving the events of the first movie, Rake is back as the Australian black ops mercenary, tasked with another deadly mission: rescuing the battered family of a ruthless Georgian gangster from the prison where they are being held.
Hemsworth reunites with director Sam Hargrave, with Joe and Anthony Russo’s AGBO producing and Joe Russo writing. Golshifteh Farahani reprises her role from the first film, with Adam Bessa, Olga Kurylenko, Daniel Bernhardt and Tinatin Dalakishvili also co-starring.
This is a sequel to the first film that was based on the graphic novel ‘Ciudad’ by Ande Parks, from a story by Ande Parks, Joe Russo & Anthony Russo, with illustrations by Fernando León González. EXTRACTION 2 is produced by Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, Mike Larocca, Angela Russo-Otstot, Chris Hemsworth, Patrick Newall and Sam Hargrave, with Jake Aust, Benjamin Grayson, Steven Scavelli, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely as executive producers.
Ali Greer has been so focused on editing the fourth season of Barry that it didn’t truly dawn on her that the hit HBO comedy about the master assassin/would-be actor was coming to a close.
“Tomorrow will be my last day. We have our final sound mix on the series finale… tomorrow… yes,” Greer says during a recent Zoom call. “This is the first time I’ve thought about it. You’re always putting your head down and working.”
Greer, whose credits include Portlandia and Hacks, joined Barry in Season 3. She and Franky Guttman, an assistant editor on the first two seasons, cut all of Seasons 3 and 4.
Greer was thrilled at the opportunity.She thought Barry’s oddball world matched her editing sensibilities perfectly. “Seeing previous seasons was helpful,” Greer continues. “Liking the style of a show and making sure I’m a good fit is important — that — and honoring what’s been done, trying to build on it, and finding new ways of pushing the story forward.”
Greer admits she was nervous about meeting Bill Hader. A big fan of SNL growing up, she wasn’t sure how she’d react. Hader quickly put her fears to rest with his disarming demeanor. “We didn’t even talk about the show,” she adds. “We talked about the movies we liked and things we found funny.”
Bill Hader in “Barry.” Photograph by Merrick Morton/HBO
The two bonded over their quirky cinematic tastes. Greer likes foreign comedies — Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (2014),The Square(2017) and Triangle of Sadness (2002) and Toni Erdmannfrom German director Maren Ade.
Greer sees how these films impact her choices. She references Force Majeure’s lingering wide shots and elongated comic commentary. “That’s a very Barry thing to do. Letting it play out wide. Letting the comedy happen in the background,” she explains. “Or downplaying the violence by hiding it.”
Stephen Root. Photograph by Merrick Morton/HBO
Believing many of today’s comedies tend to race to the punchline, Greer compares Barry’s rhythm to that of a 1970s movie. Its sly humor doesn’t need to be rushed. She was thrilled when Hader agreed with her.
“Once I realized that Bill was comfortable with a slower pace, that allowed me to relax,” Greer says. “Not specifically “cutty” — but making sure the jokes hit. It’s okay if every piece of dialogue is not on camera. It’s okay if whole scenes go by and you don’t see the other characters. Having that freedom is something that I absolutely love.”
The more comfortable Greer got, the more she felt she could take bigger swings. Her favorite was Season 3’s “all the sauces” sequence when Sally attends the premiere for Joplin.
“I made it kind of weird, magical, not very specific. It doesn’t follow a straight trajectory,” says Greer. “I was worried people would think that’s not this show. There’s been no scene like it. But when I showed everybody the episode, that’s the part that worked best. They gave me the freedom to express myself and have fun. And that led to things I find funny, cool, and interesting.”
Elsie Fisher, Sarah Goldberg. Photograph by Merrick Morton/HBO
There’s another reason Barry is unique from Greer’s previous editing experiences. “It’s the only show I’ve ever worked on where the director and the other editor are in the room while I’m cutting,” she says. “When I was doing Episode 1, Franky was on the couch and Bill was hanging out making suggestions. And then we switched. I’m on the couch while Franky’s editing. We each know the entire season intimately because we’ve been through all the footage. Whether it’s my name or Franky’s name on it, we’re both active in the process.”
Having three sets of eyes can come in handy. When there’s not consensus, majority rules. “Happily, there’s a tiebreaker,” laughs Greer. “But I would say it’s making sure that it’s the funniest take. If there’s a toss-up, it’s usually little things — the way their lip does this or the lighting.”
Zachary Golinger, Bill Hader. Photograph by Merrick Morton/HBO
Greer offers a unique perspective on the latter. Her mother was a commercial photographer. During high school, Greer would help her on shoots. “There was always talk about imagery and lighting and stuff like that,” she says. “A certain amount of that is ingrained in the way I think about images.”
Even when directing, editing is in the back of Hader’s mind. Greer often finds notes he’s recorded to her during filming. “He’ll just talk on the footage — ‘Ali, this last one…,’” she says. “Once we’re in the edit, he is focused on making sure all the characters feel authentic. That’s really important to him.”
Hader does have an Achilles heel. He’s uncomfortable watching himself. “There are instances where he’ll say, ‘I don’t like when I did that,’ and we’ll say, ‘No, that works,’” Greer says. “He trusts us to let it play the way we think.”
Barry also allowed Greer to utilize her unique talent for sounds. In “all the sauces,” Noho Hank hires Barry to blow up the Bolivian gang’s house. Greer thought it would be funny to have the bomb talk in foreign phrases. When Barry moves it, a voice in Korean proclaims, “You’ve picked up a bomb.” The second time it moves, the warning is in Japanese. But that’s not Greer’s only sound contribution in the episode. That’s her on the phone as the customer service rep who assists Barry when the bomb’s detonation app malfunctions.
Bill Hader carrying a bomb in “all the sauces.” Photograph by Merrick Morton/HBO
The Season 3 finale, starting now, presented Greer with another unique audio challenge. Captured by the Bolivian cartel, Hank finds himself in a stark concrete room handcuffed to a radiator. Suddenly, he hears what sounds like a ferocious beast (it’s never seen) being released into the adjoining room. Horrified, he listens as his fellow captives are torn to bits.
“It’s such an incredible scene. The footage is just a wall and Hank reacting,” says Greer. “My assistant DeAndre (Vidale) and I spent a week figuring out what’s happening on the other side. We worked so hard to get the sounds right. It’s getting a puzzle, and none of the pieces have anything on them.”
Anthony Carrigan. Photograph by Merrick Morton/ HBO
The effort on that episode rewarded Greer in a way she never anticipated — an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing for a Comedy Series. Greer learned of the nomination when a friend texted.
“It’s crazy. I think I forget that the work is seen by other people,” Greer admits. “I hit ‘save’ and think, ‘Okay, that looks good.’ I’ll hear people are viewing it. ‘Oh, That’s great. I’m happy they like it.’”
She describes the honor as “surreal,” especially when it was announced that she won. “I was so convinced I wouldn’t. I was utterly shocked,” she recalls. “Our table was next to the stage. I had no time to gather myself. I stood up. I was on stage. I’m not used to speaking publicly, so I left kind of a voicemail – ‘Hello. Nice to meet you all. Thank you. Okay, bye.’ I forgot to thank a lot of important people. I forgot to thank my husband… all the classics.”
When I joke her speech could be fixed in post, Greer reveals the ultimate irony of her Emmy win. “They cut it,” she continues. “My award got cut from the Creative Emmys broadcast. Some editor edited out the editors.”
A twist even Barry couldn’t have scripted.
The Barry finale airs on May 28 on HBO.
Featured image: Sarah Goldberg, Zachary Golinger, Bill Hader. Photograph by Merrick Morton/HBO
Fast X races into theaters in just a few days, and to hype the tenth installment in the venerable gearhead-turned-hyper action thriller, Universal has revealed one of the major sequences in the film—a fight between Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and Cipher (Charlize Theron). Their hand-to-hand combat comes inside a medical ward in a black site prison at night. We can give you these details because the new video even offers a glimpse at the script page, which includes this bit of Michael Buffer-level fight night hype:
INT. MEDICAL WARD – AGENCY BLACK SITE PRISON – NIGHT
WHAM! Letty attacks! She CRACKS Cipher across the face with a surprise punch and then pops her up in the stomach!
Here we go!
It’s LETTY V. CIPHER
A battle royale between two of the biggest bad-asses in our franchise.
Director Louis Leterrier explains that the goal was simple; to make this the best fight in the Fast & Furious franchise. That’s quite a tall order considering the number of brawls that have been created in all these years. Fight coordinator Patrick Vo explains that in the scene, Cipher doesn’t really want to fight, but Letty does and is ready to kill her. Their fighting styles are also highly different; Letty is a street fighter who brawls with the reckless abandon of someone passionately furious, whereas Cipher’s a technically lethal fighter who breaks her opponent down.
Check out the making of the Battle Royale between Letty and Cipher below:
So what is Fast X about? The Family will face their fiercest, most lethal challenge yet in the form of Dante (Jason Momoa), a man with a major vendetta against Dom (Vin Diesel) and the family that began during the events of Fast Five (2011). That was when Dom and the crew took down the Brazilian drug kingpin Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida) in Rio de Janeiro. That kingpin was Dante’s father, and he watched his father get killed. This is what turned him into the fearless, ferocious lunatic he is today, and he’s spent the past dozen years planning his revenge on Dom.
Joining Jason Momoa, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, and Charlize Theron are Tyrese Gibson’s Roman, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges’s Tej, Jordana Brewster’s Mia, and Sung Kang’s Han. Old friends of the family like Nathalie Emmanuel’s Ramsey, Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw, and John Cena’s Jakob will get involved. There’s more—Scott Eastwood’s Little Nobody and Helen Mirren’s are all on hand.
The biggest newcomers are Momoa’s Dante and Brie Larson’s Tess, who turns out to be the daughter of Kurt Russell’s Mr. Nobody. Also onboard are Alan Richtson as Aimes, the new head of the Agency; Daniela Melchior as a Brazilian street racer connected to Dom’s past; and the icon Rita Moreno as Dom and Mia’s Abuelita Toretto.
Already renewed for a second season, the Rian Johnson-created series Poker Face garnered universally enthusiastic reviews and built a passionate following ever since its first episode dropped in late January. Johnson has said Poker Face was built in the tradition of the great crime series of the 70s and 80s, including Columbo and Quantum Leap. As such, each episode is constructed to stand as its own “How Dunnit” (a twist on the “Whodunnit”), with guest stars playing roles central to each story, but with one character, Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne), acting as the through-line for the series as a whole. Charlie is a drifter on the run from folks set on killing her, and she has learned how to live below the radar by taking odd jobs in a series of forgettable small towns. Her uncanny skill at telling lies from the truth involves her in solving the unconnected murders taking place around her.
The Credits spoke to Poker Face production designer Judy Rhee about the hand she played in pulling this delicious new series off. An artist with decades of experience, she excels at creating environments that further the story and offer small revelations about character. The devil, as always, is in the details, and Judy Rhee’s a master of choosing just the right ones.
How did the fact that Poker Face was inspired by shows like Colombo influence your choices as the production designer?
With this series, we knew each episode was going to be its own individual story, and the only thread was Charlie’s character, with Cliff [Benjamin Bratt] occasionally showing up here and there. As a result, we had the opportunity and also the challenge of creating ten specific worlds. The fun part is experiencing parts of the country most people don’t get to encounter, so for the production design, it was about creating places with distinct personalities. Rian and I talked about it feeling more timeless, even though it takes place in the present day. When you travel, you often find places where time has stood still in varying periods, so you may see hints from the 60s through the 90s. Most people don’t upgrade or renovate regularly outside of more affluent metropolitan areas of the country, and people aren’t necessarily buying new stuff all the time, which helps to show the history.
Can you give me an example?
In Episode Two, the aesthetic choices we made for the convenience store were to reflect how it may have been recently acquired by a family with a specific background. Maybe it’s been newly painted on the surface, but the building has been there for some time. In contrast, the garage across the street has been owned by the same man for many years, and he’s made very few changes, so that’s going to have a different look, feel, and texture altogether.
POKER FACE — “The Night Shift” Episode 102 — Pictured: Jaswant Shrestha as Arvind — (Photo by: Evans Vestal Ward/Peacock)
How did you approach designing for episode five, “Time of the Monkey,” which features Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson as 60s radicals?
In that particular episode, there’s an overall general aesthetic of a retirement home, which is manicured and impersonal. It’s slightly sterile but also attempts to be homey. Their individual living space, though, has been personalized to show a bit of their history from the 60s and all the things they’ve collected throughout their lives, including their political beliefs, musical tastes, and all that, without being too obvious and hitting people over the head. So, when those flashbacks happen, it makes sense why those posters, or that macramé, or that particular piece of textile is in their home. Then there’s that quick moment where we see a neighbor’s kitchen that has the exact same cookie-cutter layout but is decorated in a less colorful way to reflect her different history. I think it’s important for the design to always visually support the story whenever possible and show how the characters occupy and move through their surroundings.
POKER FACE — “Time of the Monkey” Episode 105 — Pictured: (l-r) S. Epatha Merkerson as Joyce Harris, Judith Light as Irene Smothers — (Photo by: Peacock)
Did you find a place you could use for the stage and backstage in Episode Six, “Exit Stage Death,” or was it built?
That was created. We built almost everything. We started with the obvious of scouting for an existing theater or stage that we could modify and dress. Rian wanted it to feel like a small-town dinner theater, so it had to feel intimate but spacious enough to accommodate tables and chairs, not theater seats or risers. We scouted every possibility without going too far out of our hub, but couldn’t find the right configuration to create what was needed. Then we realized it had to be separated into different parts. The catwalk we built on our stage in Newburgh, the stage of the theater, the theatrical set onstage, and the dressing rooms were all constructed at a nearby abandoned event space. That’s also where we created all our interior casino floors and bar, crow’s nest, and Sterling Jr’s office in Episode One. The theater kitchen was modified at the same location, with connecting hallways and doorways. There were a lot of specific camera angles that needed to work with each set, so everything was designed and fabricated with that in mind, like her climbing up to the catwalk and looking down from there, the feather falling, the trapdoor, the backstage, and the wings of the stage. All these elements required close coordination with the DP, lighting, and the art and set decorating departments to achieve what was written and how it was shot. I don’t think this would have worked in an actual theater location.
POKER FACE — “Exit Stage Death” Episode 106 — Pictured: (l-r) Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale, Audrey Corsa as Rebecca — (Photo by: Sara Shatz/Peacock)
In Episode Eight, “The Orpheus Syndrome,” Nick Nolte plays old special effects artist Arthur Liptin, inspired by special effects pioneer Phil Tippett. Arthur’s workshop is full of pieces representing his entire career. What were your collaborations in pulling that together?
We knew early on in the schedule that Arthur’s barn was going to be a big endeavor. The art and set decoration departments worked together in reaching out to various special effects makeup teams, model makers, sculptors, and puppeteers to ensure we had the quantity and variety we needed to represent Arthur’s years of work. We also had our incredible scenic department fabricate what they could to supplement our rentals. In terms of working with the legendary Phil Tippett, I mean, what an honor and a dream. After a few discussions and feedback with Rian and Natasha, Phil and his team created the “Orpheus Syndrome” stop-motion creatures, as well as the miniature tabletop set. After it was shipped from California, our art department did some augmentation to it for practical shooting purposes. Because Phil and Rian had previously worked together, they trusted us enough to send some of their other existing models for Arthur’s barn and his museum exhibit. After several months, we rented and made enough to represent Arthur’s career and fill his barn. It worked in our favor that it was originally empty and open, except for a few columns, so we could design and lay everything out to be what we wanted it to be. It took a lot of time. Thankfully, we had a great crew to execute it with believability.
All episodes of Poker Face are currently streaming on Peacock.
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“It felt, to me, that this might be the most important of the Guardians for James [Gunn],” says Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 composer John Murphy after reading the script. “What struck me was how much darker the story was compared to the first two films. When I say darker, I mean emotionally within the characters. It became obvious the story descended upon Rocket [voiced by Bradley Cooper] and it was fascinating to have all this backstory revealed and to find out how Rocket came to be and what shaped the character.”
Exploring Rocket’s emotional roots became the North Star for Murphy in composing the score for Gunn’s third andreported final installment to the space saga. Now in its second week in theaters, the film has grossed over $145 million domestically ($365 worldwide), placing it in the domestic top 10 widest openings for a PG-13 movie. Those numbers are for a good reason—Gunn has helmed a stirring tale that caps a trilogy he’s poured his heart and soul into. “There is so much hope in this movie,” says Murphy. “You can’t help but feel for Rocket and Lylla the otter [voiced by Linda Cardellini] because what they represent is vulnerable people. You see that in these animals.”
The “animals” Murphy is referencing are part of Rocket’s origin story. It’s revealed in Vol. 3 the wise-cracking genius was part of an experiment to produce a perfect society of innocent creatures. The villainous face behind it all is The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), who repeatedly fails until Rocket fixes his animal-generating machine. Living in a cage during his younger years, Rocket befriends three furry friends: Floor, a white rabbit; Teefs, a chunky walrus; and Lylla, an otter – all with genetically modified bodies. Rocket develops deep feelings for Lylla during their time together.
The emotional depth pushed Murphy to dig into the story to shape the score. “James and I had some long conversations and it was clear that he did not want to sugarcoat this,” says the composer. “He [Gunn] wanted it to be very raw, very grounded. He wanted people to feel what Rocket went through.” What became clear for Murphy was the importance of each cue and a conscious understanding that the score would be “very emotionally dynamic.” “I think this is some of the most violent music I’ve ever written for a movie, but then in a heartbeat, it’s some of the most tender pieces of music I’ve written,” he says.
Murphy stepped into the composer role for Vol. 3 taking over duties from Tyler Bates to deliver 26 pieces of original music – all of which can be listened to online. But the Liverpool native already established shorthand with writer-director Gunn, having collaborated on Suicide Squad and the Guardians Holiday Special.To give Vol. 3 a distinct musical palette, Murphy experimented with two unique instruments: a tongue drum, which is a plate-sized metal drum that looks like a UFO, and the GuitarViol, which has six strings and 24 frets, similar to a guitar but it can be played with a bow or plucked.
“A tongue drum is almost like a xylophone but it’s much softer, deeper, and is quite mournful,” says Murphy. “It has a bit of innocence to it but also this sadness, almost ghostly sound. I ended up having a man in Hungary make six or so of them in different keys.” The tongue drum is played throughout the film, especially during the darker, more traumatic moments. “The very first sound heard in the score is the tongue drum at its most innocent and pure. Then the GuitarViol comes in. It’s just two instruments but it has this innocence,” says Murphy. “They’re two instruments I’ve never heard in a movie before.”
Another idea Murphy experimented with takes when the Guardians infiltrate the Orgoscope, a highly secured jelly-like place that houses the greatest ideas of the galaxy. “The world is very organic but there’s a real metallic element to the whole environment,” says Murphy. “We went to the hardware store and brought back armfuls of different bits of metal to get sound out of them because we didn’t want to use the same ‘ole percussion everyone uses. The best percussion came from this immersion heater tray. For whatever reason, when you hit it, it had this beautiful natural reverberation. And it was dark and loaded harmonically. Bit by bit, we experimented with different things.”
Guardians has become known for its needle-drop moments. Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream,” Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain,” Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky,” and George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” to name a few. In Vol. 3, Quill (Chris Pratt) has a Zune MP3 Player containing hundreds of songs that were given to him by Yondu (Michael Rooker) at the end of Vol. 2. The opening song in Vol. 3 is an acoustic version of “Creep” by Radiohead playing over an intimate sequence with Rocket which helped to set the tone for Murphy’s score.
The composer was also conscious that he was composing for a Marvel movie and, when needed, created a familiar score found in the MCU. “Nothing beats a big choir, brass, and big strings when you want to go there. We found some sounds that I hope made the score unique,” he says. “A lot of the violence was done with distorted bass guitars that were built up and layered to have a wall of grunge. We mixed it with an old analog synth and a guitar pedal that gave it some depth and muscle.”Murphy also found moments to place score by Tyler Bates from the first films into Vol. 3. “I felt a big responsibility to not just do it in a way that James wanted but in a way that would work for Guardian fans,” he says. “If I’m a fan and I went to see the film, I would expect to hear the original theme in some places. Hopefully, we put them in the right places.”
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is playing in theaters now.
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For a healthy portion of Succession’s viewing audience last night, the antepenultimate episode, “America Decides,” was not an easy watch. The episode shone a bright, pitiless light on old wounds and deep scars from the 2016 American presidential election when a seemingly improbable, far-right fantasy became an inescapable and very real living nightmare.
The episode centered on Election Night in the United States, playing out across voting districts from Milwaukee to Maricopa County in Arizona, yet we more or less never left the Roy children at ATN headquarters, where the kids played kingmakers. America was choosing between the Democrat candidate Daniel Jimenez (Elliot Villar) and the far-right Republican Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk). Oh, yeah, and Connor Roy (Alan Ruck), who finally conceded his hapless candidacy halfway through the episode will a chillingly out-of-touch concession speech that still managed to capture, in its pure Connorian delusion, something close to poetry— “Alas, Kentucky. Alas, vanity.” Alas, Connor Roy.
While a fire rages in Milwaukee—likely set by far-right accelerationists looking to purge potential democratic votes—the power players behind ATN’s news coverage start to get impatient. Roman (Kieran Culkin) is rooting for Mencken to win thanks, in large part, to Mencken’s promise to scotch the Waystar/GoJo deal so that the kids can keep Daddy’s company rather than sell it to the charmless Swede Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård). Kendall (Jeremy Strong) nominally wants Jimenez to win, you know, for the sake of his children, but he’s trying to imagine what his dad would do and spends most of the episode waffling. Shiv (Sarah Snook) is fully pulling for Jimenez and trying to keep Tom (Matthew Macfaydan) from doing Roman’s bidding and calling Wisconsin for Mencken and, eventually, the entire election for him. She is also simultaneously working with Lukas Mattson behind the scenes to keep the potential deal afloat. Oh, and she’s pregnant with Tom’s child, the very man she obliterated in a feral fight at the end of episode 7 and was, in turn, annihilated by herself. He told her she wasn’t fit to have children.
Directed by Andrij Parker and written by creator Jesse Armstrong, the episode is almost exclusively set inside the ATN offices and offered a chilling portrait of how a single media empire, and really, just a few people within that empire, can warp the entire country’s perspective to the degree that a crime by followers of one camp (the far right) becomes a false flag operation by those in the other (supporters of Jimenez). Up is down, left is right, and the white supremacist is named the next President of the United States by a media company run by children trying to prove they’re just as cutthroat as their late father.
In an “Inside the Episode” video, Armstrong reveals that he utilized political advisors to help craft the episode, making sure that the dark, extremely tense situations he was creating were plausible. “Sometimes, we’d talk about it in the room, like ‘Does this feel real?’” Armstrongsays. “Then in 1960, the year 2000, and 2016 these unbelievably close election moments kept on coming in the U.S., and it felt legitimate to have another one.”
“I think to Roman, it really doesn’t matter to him who the president is—the president is the president, who cares. What’s best for us?” Kieran Culkin says in the video. “It’s really nice for me when I show up to work and have to play the character, and Roman has one clear objective and focus. This is how it is; just call it. That was a lot of fun to play.”
Shiv, meanwhile, spends the episode in an increasing state of alarm. While no Roman child has ever been a proper proxy for the audience—who among us grew up grotesquely wealthy—in “America Decides,” she’s as close as liberal America has to one. What’s happening all around her is a nightmare she almost has the power to stop, but only if she can convince Kendall to side with her against Roman. But Shiv makes a tactical error when she lies and tells her brothers that Jimenez has expressed an openness, should he win the election, of potentially tanking the Waystar/GoJo deal as well. When Kendall discovers this isn’t the case, he also uncovers Shiv’s backdoor dealings with Lukas, and it’s this revelation that pushes him firmly into Roman’s camp. He instructs Tom to call Wisconsin for Mencken and then, when Mencken wins Arizona, to call the entire race. “America Decides” goes from political thriller to straight up horror.
“Yes, Shiv is being clandestine about her intentions,” Sarah Snook says. “But at the same time, that’s exactly what he [Roman] is doing. He’s like, ‘I want Mencken to win so I can be top dog, I can be CEO, I can have the power.’ I’m like, that’s cool, that’s fun, but it’s Mencken. It’s Jaryd Mencken. It’s convenient it’s an altruistic side to her,” Snook says of Shiv’s stance during the episode. “Let’s remember; she’s not an altruist. But she does believe in democracy and, you know, a dictator not being president.”
The episode ends with an expression of peak cynicism from Roman, whose awfulness has always been more front and center Kendall and Shiv, who prefer to operate in the shadows and present themselves as reasonable and righteous in the light.
“We just made a night of good TV,” Roman says at the episode’s close. “Nothing happened.”
“Things do happen,” Shiv says, arms folded in a defensive position, standing at the door as if she wants to flee. And she likely does. We all do by then. And the scary thing is we know Shiv’s right. Things do happen. Bad things. And people like Roman make those bad things far more possible.
Go “Inside the Episode” with HBO Max’s video here:
James Gunn has revealed that his hotly-anticipated Superman: Legacy will begin filming in January 2024. In a conversation with Wired, Gunn answered a slew of questions about the future of DC Studios, which he co-heads along with Peter Safran, and the sweeping changes they’ve made in an effort to create a completely unified DCU. Superman: Legacy will be the first feature released from their new DC Studios, which Gunn wrote and will direct. It’ll boast a new actor in the role of Clark Kent and a new future for the character and the studio.
Gunn recently announced that Superman: Legacy had already begun pre-production, so the January 2024 start date for production means that, as Gunn promised, the new DCU will move at a pace conducive to putting the best possible movie together rather than rushing to make pre-determined release dates (although Superman: Legacy currently does have a release date pegged for July 11, 2025). The idea he and Safran are pursuing is to make sure every new film and series in their unified DCU puts the script first, and then, when that’s in order, the march toward production begins.
It’s an interesting time at DC Studios, not just because we’re witnessing a major seachange in leadership and the way they’re approaching building a new unified universe but also because there are still three films pending release that were produced before Gunn and Safran came on board. The first and the one people are already extremely enthused about (including Gunn himself) is The Flash, which bows on June 23. After that, there’s Blue Beetle (August 18) and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (December 20). Once Jason Momoa’s Arthur Curry has made his second big splash, DC fans will be waiting for Superman: Legacy to begin the new era of DC Studios.
It’s been a long time since we’ve seen Clark Kent in his own movie. Superman: Legacy will be the first new stand-alone Superman film since Zack Snyder’s 2013 Man of Steel, which, of course, starred Henry Cavill, who went on to portray Superman in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Justice League (2017) and had a brief cameo in Black Adam (2022).
Although Gunn is well-known for his offbeat sensibility and love of the oddball superhero—his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy and The Suicide Squad film as prime examples—Superman: Legacy will find him playing it straight. Here’s how his co-chief Peter Safran described Superman: Legacy after he and Gunn unveiled the first part of their DC Studios slate: “It focuses on Superman balancing his Kryptonian heritage with his human upbringing. He is the embodiment of truth, justice, and the American way. He is kindness in a world that thinks that kindness is old-fashioned.”
A James Gunn film centered on kindness and a character who, despite being an alien, is also an earnest and soulful young man trying to do good in the world? Yeah, that’ll be wild.
Featured image: SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA – APRIL 18: Director James Gunn attends the press conference for “Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol.3” at the Conrad Hotel on April 18, 2023 in Seoul, South Korea. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)
Rebel Rodriguez knew about Hypnotic even before the screenplay was written. The composer is one of the sons of its writer-director Robert Rodriguez, the famed helmer behind countless cult classics like From Dusk Till Dawn, the neo-noir stylized Sin City, Planet Terror, and the blood thirst avenge tour Machete. “This idea has been gestating for like 20 years,” says Rebel of Hypnotic, which stars Ben Affleck as a detective attempting to piece together clues to a string of mysterious bank heists. “Throughout my whole life, I heard about this story. My dad would tell us about the one [film] that was on the cusp of being made. It was like this mythical movie to me. To finally hear it was moving forward, I was excited to be part of it.”
Now 24, Rebel is a trained pianist and first scored the short The Limit (2018), followed by the features Red 11 (2018) and We Can Be Heroes (2020), all Robert Rodriquez projects. With Red 11, Rebel, along with co-composer Elia Cmiral, created a pulsing score using only a synthesizer. We Can Be Heroes was tuned entirely with orchestral music. For Hypnotic, the composer combined the two approaches to musically layer the psychological thriller that has a number of twists and turns.
Being on the inside track of Hypnotic’s development, which first began in 2002, allowed Rebel to ripen the score well before production. He wrote the main theme in pre-production a year prior to finishing the rest of the score. “Robert has always approached his films thinking about the whole process. How he would shoot it, edit it, the music, the sound effects. It makes more sense when the music is part of the conversation from the very beginning because we can conceptualize things while he’s writing the script,” says Rebel.
The score, as well as the story, was inspired by Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). “This idea started with Robert saying that he wanted to make a Hitchcock film. He thought about what if Hitchcock’s career continued, what would be his next title,” recalls Rebel. “Hitchcock always had great one-word titles. Psycho, Spellbound, Vertigo. Hypnotic immediately came to him. It was a cool idea for a title; now he [Robert] had to figure out what it means.”
On its surface, Hypnotic is a good versus evil story where detective Danny Rourke (Affleck) is trying to catch a man, in this case, Dellrayne, a suit-wearing bank robber played devilishly well by William Fichtner. But the antagonist has more up his sleeve than firearms and explosives to enter vaults; he has the ability to control people with his mind. Dellrayne is Yoda on steroids, using “hypnotics” to reshape reality. He can manipulate others to do his bidding, have chasing police officers turn on each other, or physically “construct” a different world around him. The film is rife with action and perfect shots that rival Heat (1995) or Baby Driver (2017), but there’s a story about family and hope simmering underneath.
In the opening scene, Danny (Affleck) sits across from a therapist (Nikki Dixon), and the two are talking about his missing daughter. An airy synth sound accompanied by strings swells in the background as a sound effect of a tapping pen beats like a drum to heighten the moment. There’s a mysterious aspect to the score that subliminally lulls you into each scene. Something feels off but you can’t quite place it. “Hypnotic has a dizzying sound similar to Vertigo,” notes Rebel. “With Vertigo, the first title song has an almost mesmerizing sound but then it has a really tragic love theme. Hypnotic has that dizzying sound but with a heavy driving pulse for the action. And instead of a love theme, it has a family theme. It has this feeling that something is broken, and it has to be pieced back together. It feels more hopeful.”
As the story unfolds, we learn Danny’s missing daughter might have a connection to Dellrayne. Rebel says he approached writing for Fichtner’s character differently than the rest of the film. “When I write scenes, I am paying attention to the pacing, the editing, the sound, and the actors’ performances. His performance instantly makes you write differently. You see his character and he’s really scary. There is this air to him that I wouldn’t have captured unless I’d seen the performance. It needed to have more of that creepy, psycho sound to him.”
For moments when Dellrayne physically “constructs” a new reality that makes people believe they are somewhere they’re not, music took a backseat to sound effects. “We talked about these scenes throughout the entire production. Originally, there was going to be a lot more music, but it felt jarring to shift to the music that much,” says Rebel. The high-concept sequences were met with a unique visual cue; an almost blurring warp effect accompanied by sound effects. “This allowed the music to tell the storyline straighter.”
As Danny’s fight for his family intensifies, so does the score. In a climactic scene, drums drive the action while a string orchestra brings out the emotion. “It’s not just a heroic story. It’s about how much a person can endure physically and psychologically for the people they love. What are they willing to go through? It’s the victory of perseverance and endurance while holding on to hope. That’s what was always resonating throughout the whole process of making this film.”
Even though It Ain’t Over is about Yogi Berra, one of baseball’s preeminent figures during his 18 seasons as catcher with the New York Yankees and a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, director Sean Mullin says the “last thing I wanted to do was make a sports movie.” Instead, Mullin took as inspiration the Oscar-winning 1955 film Marty starring Ernest Borgnine as an Italian-American butcher from the Bronx.
“It’s one of my all-time favorite films and a beautiful love story,” says Mullin. “Marty was a war veteran who came back and was looking for love. The emotional core of [It Ain’t Over] is the love story between Yogi and Carmen [his wife of 65 years]. I wanted to make a movie about a life well lived.”
That’s just what Lindsay Berra, Yogi Berra’s granddaughter, and the documentary’s executive producer, had in mind. Even though Lindsay Berra has an impressive sports journalism background — she was a national correspondent at MLB.com and a senior writer at ESPN Magazine — she understood that her grandfather, who died in 2015 at age 90, had a legacy that extended well beyond baseball.
“He was a microcosm of the American Dream,” she says, citing Berra’s status as the son of immigrants and a United States Navy veteran awarded the Purple Heart for his role in D-Day during World War II. “There’s more than baseball in his story and we wanted that to resonate,” she says.
There’s another film that proved a major influence in getting Lindsay Berra to participate. “When I was at ESPN magazine and MLB, folks would ask me if I was going to write a book about grandpa. I’d shared so much already, and I wanted to keep some stories just for us. I had not thought about a documentary until, in 2018, producer Peter Sobiloff brought the idea to my uncles Tim and Dale after seeing the Mister Rogers documentary [Won’t You Be My Neighbor?]. He asked them why there wasn’t a Mister Rogers documentary about their father. Peter had done a film with Sean, so we met, and I was glad once I realized I didn’t have to write the book. This was a better way to do it.”
One of the threads running through the film is that Berra, at 5’7 with a squat frame and infectious personality, became better known over the years as a colorful character dispensing his “Yogi-isms” — “It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” among many more — than for his considerable skills and baseball acumen.
Berra was one of the premier hitters of his time and one of the greatest catchers in baseball history. He was a three-time AL MVP winner, a 10-time World Series champion with New York Yankees, and holds numerous regular and Worlds Series records.
“I’ll be honest, I knew he was this lovable, goofy guy; I knew he was a tough, Italian immigrant kid … I knew he was a good ballplayer but I didn’t know how great he was,” said Mullin. “It’s unbelievable that he caught both ends of a doubleheader 145 times in his career. But my favorite stat is that he finished in the top four of MVP voting seven years in a row. Only two players have done that: Yogi and Mike Trout.”
The filmmakers assembled an impressive roster of former players, managers, baseball writers, and broadcasters to talk about Berra’s on-the-field skills and his later influence as a coach and manager with both the Yankees and New York Mets.
“From the moment I met Sean, I [said] ‘Vin Scully, Vin Scully.’ He was not a young man at the time. He had been the Dodgers announcer for pretty much all my grandfather’s career and had seen him play, so he was number one and the first interview we traveled to do in June 2019,” Lindsay Berra says. “I had a list of people who’d seen grandpa play or played with him: Tony Kubek, Bobby Richardson, Hector Lopez. We started with the older folks for practical purposes and then [interviewed] as many as possible who were tied to the Yankee legacy.”
Vin Scully in IT AIN’T OVER. Photo credit: Daniel Vecchione. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
There’s also actor and lifelong baseball fan Billy Crystal who calls Berra “the most overlooked superstar in the history of baseball.”
“There was so much material,” says Mullin, who will tackle another American icon in astronaut Buzz Aldrin for an upcoming documentary. “Billy Crystal’s interview alone was ninety minutes and all I had to do was say, ‘Yogi’ and then shut up. We had Derek Jeter for just thirty minutes but I was able to get him to open up. Lindsay and I are talking about doing a podcast with outtakes because there were so many stories could not get in.”
Billy Crystal in IT AIN’T OVER. Photo credit: Daniel Vecchione. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
One that did make it in was Yogi’s feud with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner after he fired Berra as Yankees manager just 16 games into the 1985 season. What upset Berra was that Steinbrenner didn’t deliver the news himself but handed the task to assistant Clyde King.
The slight kept Berra from Yankee Stadium for years. “It wasn’t something he talked about,” says Lindsay Berra. “I remember a friend had tickets to a Yankees game, and I asked, ‘Am I allowed to go?’ He said, ‘Why not? You ain’t got no beef with George.’”
It took nearly 15 years, but as soon as Steinbrenner personally apologized to Berra, the feud was over. Berra returned to the Yankees and began coaching young players starting in 1999.
“He worked with catcher Jorge Posada; he was close to Mariano Rivera; Paul O’Neill; Bernie Williams; Nick Swisher, all those players,” says Lindsay Berra. “Being back at the ballpark where he belonged brought him so much joy and added a decade to his life.”
It Ain’t Over from Sony Pictures Classics opens May 12 in New York and Los Angeles and everywhere on May 19.
For more upcoming films from Sony Pictures, check out these stories:
Emma Stone and filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos have reunited, and the world is a better place for it. After their delicious collaboration in Lanthimos’s excellent 2018 film The Favourite, Stone and Lanthimos are back with Poor Things, which is centered on Bella Baxter (Stone), a young woman given a second shot at life after she’s brought back from the dead by the brilliant Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Lanthimos has made a string of unforgettable films, some of which have been deeply unsettling—Dogtooth (2009) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)—and some of which have been hilarious and off-kilter—The Lobster (2015) and The Favourite. Where will Poor Things fall?
The first teaser, just released by Searchlight Pictures, gives off more of a comedic vibe, with Stone’s Bella Baxter something of a Frankenstein’s monster, brought back to a world she is eager to learn more about. The way Bella will satiate that hunger is by running off with a debauched lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), who takes her on a global adventure that highlights for the restored Bella just how inequitable and grotesque the world she is. Thus, Bella becomes an undead champion for liberation and equality.
It’s been five years since The Favourite, so we’ve been long overdue for a Lanthimos film. With a stellar cast led by Stone, Poor Things will be one of the most eagerly anticipated films when it premieres on September 8.
Check out the teaser below.
Here’s the official synopsis for Poor Things:
From filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and producer Emma Stone comes the incredible tale and fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.
Natalie Auxier, the Manager of Collection & Outreach at NBCUniversal Archives & Collections, has something of a photographic memory. Given the rigors of her job, this ability makes sense, as does her passion for the collection she oversees.
“I think all of us archivists have a passion for this field. We love knowledge, and we go into this for the information,” Auxier says. “I would say this is across the board with all archivists—we love to do a deep dive into the collection. Everything we see, we retain. It’s just kind of how our brains work.”
The collection Auxier oversees includes some of the most iconic props and costumes in cinematic history, from Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park to brand new additions, including Jordan Peele’s sensational 2022 sci-fi epic Nope and the highly anticipated next installment of the Fast and Furious franchise, Fast X
We spoke to Auxier about her job’s (joyful) demands, how her team collects assets they think will stand the test of time, and whether or not she’s willing to pick just one item as her favorite.
Steven Yeun’s outfit as Ricky “Jupe” Park in Jordan Peele’s “Nope” was one of the items preserved by the Archives department. It is currently on loan to the Motion Picture Association. Courtesy Universal Pictures.
Let’s start with the basics–can you describe your role?
My role is overseeing the Archives, collections, policies, and process procedures. I’m also the spokesperson for the Archives, so whenever there are interviews like this, I’ll talk about the wonderful things we do at the NBCUniversal Archives & Collections. We’re the central reference source for historical information about NBCUniversal and all of our productions. We fulfill this mission by collecting, preserving, and exhibiting all of the historical assets of the company and our productions. So overall, the day-to-day job mostly consists of acquiring, cataloging, loaning, and exhibiting the assets – all in an effort to support the many businesses of NBCUniversal.
Considering the vast catalog of films and series that fall under the NBCUniversal umbrella, the breadth of potential archival material seems like it would be almost infinite.
The archive started in the 90s. Prior to that, everything was kind of scattered all over the lot. Beginning in the 1990s, we pulled from various storage areas, the prop department, and the wardrobe department, and found all these treasures and brought them all together. It was quite a Herculean effort. And we just keep that going today. In addition to props and costumes, we keep models, clay maquettes, and continuity storyboards. We love movies and television and want to show that whole history and process. We also collect from our theme park. We’ll bring in the most memorable items as the park evolves.
Do you have a favorite asset in the collection?
We love all of our children the same, but one asset I want to highlight is we have the original board of directors meeting minutes that document the formation of the company on April 30, 1912. So literally, within our collection is the first piece of paper that says Universal Film Manufacturing Company on it. That’s the document that started the whole thing. That’s why we’re all here.
When people think of archives, they think of the past, but a part of your job is providing assets to current productions. I was hoping you could explain that aspect of your work a bit.
As you know, Fast & Furious is one of our biggest franchises of all time. We also have the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World universe and the Bourne movies. The franchise filmmakers will reach out to us, and we’ll loan the set plans from previous movies if they’re recreating a set. We’ll loan them some props or costumes if they need that. Fast & Furious is very big on their continuity. They do a lot of flashbacks and winks and nods to their previous films. We’re there to help them keep that continuity. I do think fans really appreciate that attention to detail. As you mentioned, we always think of archives as the past. While yes, preserving the past is part of the work, we’re also all about the future and helping keep Universal’s legacy going and in people’s minds.
How do you and your team decide what props and costumes from a current production are worthy of the archive and will stand the test of time?
There are some obvious choices, like iconic props or costumes that a character wears throughout the film, or it’s the prop that everybody in the film is chasing. Our archivists are trained and well-versed in the production. They’re watching the films, and they’re reading the scripts. Sometimes, they go to screenings to get a sneak peek. Then they’ll make a selection. We make a judgment call on what we think will be historically significant and what best describes a character’s arc and a story’s arc.
Let’s touch upon a few of the most iconic films in Universal’s history, Jurassic Park. Do you have a favorite asset from Spielberg’s game-changing film, and how is it stored?
Let me highlight one thing we have from the original Jurassic Park—the Barbasol can with the dinosaur DNA. It’s one of the most iconic pieces in all of cinema, if I may be so bold. As for how we store these items, we keep everything in a climate-controlled environment with high-level security. We strive to store everything in acid-free archival boxes. Our Manager of Archive Operations, Eric Chin, does an amazing job keeping the archive safe, secure and up-to-date.
The Barbasol can from 1993’s “Jurassic Park.” Courtesy NBCUniversal Archives & Collections
Totally agree that the Barbasol can is one of the most iconic props of all time. What about Battlestar Galactica?
The original or the new one?
Both?
We have items from both, including uniforms and props. One asset that’s been on display before is Tricia Helfer [she played the mysterious Cylon model Number Six]’s iconic red Cylon dress from the newest iteration.
Another aspect of your work is some of the pieces in your archives go on the road. Can you talk about that?
We do loan out to various museums and institutions, such as the MPA, and we partner with a lot of internal NBCU groups because that’s who we’re here to serve first and foremost. To prepare for a loan, we create condition reports for the objects, archivally pack them, and work with fine art shippers to transport the items. Our loan agreement describes how the items need to be stored and protected.
How has your role evolved alongside the evolution of filmmaking technology?
For the businesses and divisions within the company that deals directly with the digital world, we provide them with the physical photography to scan and help them with the metadata because we have all that information.
For our non-tech-savvy readers (including myself here), can you explain what metadata is?
It’s all the information that surrounds a digital image. It describes who is in the image, who the photographer is, and what film or television show it’s from, all of which will help a future user be able to find that information or find the image by using those search terms. We’re creating the keywords in the search terms for that one image.
Okay, I’m going to make you pick another favorite child again. Any other props you love?
It’s really hard to pick. It’s so massive, the breadth of what’s in the collection, it’s so difficult to choose.
So diplomatic. Okay, how about one final aspect of your job that delights you the most?
I’m always surprised and delighted by the craftsmanship that goes into a costume or prop. For example, we have the Book of the Dead from the 1999 version of The Mummy in the Archives. It’s an actual practical prop, so when you turn the round disc on the cover where the key goes, it releases the hinges and the book pops open. That’s exactly what happens in the movie. To see that craftsmanship up close is so exciting.
The Book of the Dead from 1999’s “The Mummy.” Courtesy NBCUniversal Archives & Collections.NBCUniversal Archives & Collections
For more stories on the works of archivists, check these out:
Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis are re-teaming for a fresh crack at the body-swap comedy genre.
Curtis and Lohan are reprising their roles from their hit 2003 body-swap comedy Freaky Friday, where they played mother and daughter Tess and Anna Coleman, who wake up one Friday morning and found out that, you guessed it, they’ve swapped bodies. Insanity and hilarity ensued. The original film, directed by Mark Waters from a script by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon and based on a Mary Rodgers novel from 1972, was a hit, pulling in $160 million globally and, at the time, cementing Lohan’s status as one of Hollywood’s rising stars.
The Hollywood Reporter has the scoop that Elyse Hollander is writing the sequel. Curtis, for her part, has long reflected on the appeal of the original film, which remained in the cultural ether for two decades and even inspired the Blumhouse horror film Freaky and which Curtis has said she still gets questions about.
The sequel will also be a major turning point for Lohan, who has been quietly but assuredly making a comeback. She recently made a two-picture deal at Netflix, which included the 2022 rom-com Falling for Christmas, which was directed by Janeen Damian and starred Lohan as a newly engaged heiress who wakes up after a skiing accident to find that she’s got amnesia and, a very handsome caretaker in the handsome ski lodge owner who’s looking after her.
Seeing Lohan and Curtis together again will be a treat. We’ll fill you in on any more Freaky details that come our way.
For more stories on Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, Marvel Studios and what’s streaming or coming to
Featured image: UNIVERSAL CITY, CA – AUGUST 2: Actress Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan presenting at The 2003 Teen Choice Awards held at Universal Amphitheater on August 2, 2003 in Universal City, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
For her foray into romantic comedies, writer/producer Jemima Khan looked, in part, at her own life for inspiration. While living in Pakistan with her ex-husband and his family for many years, she witnessed firsthand the process behind arranged marriage, now termed assisted marriage, and eventually returned to her native U.K. with a unique perspective on this cultural norm (her own union developed organically). Couple this insight with interviews she conducted with people either considering or already in an assisted marriage and an inside track into the dating woes of friends, and the kernel of her screenwriting debut was born. The end result is What’s Love Got to Do With It?, a sweet and engaging rom-com that turns the camera, literally and narratively, on assisted marriage.
The movie, directed by Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth: The Golden Age), follows Zoe (Lily James), a successful documentarian who has not yet found her soulmate. When her childhood friend, Kaz (Shazad Latif), decides to enter into an assisted marriage at the behest of his parents, Zoe films Kaz’s journey to husbandhood. In so doing, she learns valuable lessons about finding lasting love. Emma Thompson co-stars as Zoe’s mom.
A former journalist and veteran television and film producer — Impeachment: American Crime Story, The Clinton Affair, and The Case Against Adnan Syed are among her many credits — Khan also handled producing duties for the film, which premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and won Best Comedy at the 2022 Rome Film Festival. She recently spoke with The Credits about the film; edited interview excerpts follow.
It took a decade to bring this film to the big screen. What were some of the obstacles you faced?
It was longer than a decade, and there were lots of challenges along the way, particularly learning how to craft a script as a first-time screenwriter. I read that for independent films, the average length of time to get them made is ten years, so that’s somewhat reassuring, especially in this day and age where it’s hard to get cinematic releases and get people into cinemas and get things funded. And then COVID added another layer of challenge because we filmed during the second lockdown. We had to go on hiatus for six months, so there were challenges that were logistical.
Is this the first film produced by your company, Instinct Productions? And how was it working with Working Title Films and StudioCanal?
It is the first rom-com that I’ve produced, and it’s the first thing I’ve written. I was thrilled that Working Title ended up making this film, particularly because they’re so good at rom-coms; this is the genre that they really specialize in. And StudioCanal, they were incredibly supportive. They were fantastic from the first moment they read the script. I really enjoyed working with them.
I love that the story revolves around a female filmmaker. Was this a conscious decision because of your own background?
Yeah, I think the first thing anyone writes themselves is probably quite autobiographical. Even if it’s not your actual story, there’ll be stuff that’s pilfered from your own life. I was also interested in leaning into the examination of different points of view, and so having Zoe filming really kind of played into this idea of who’s telling which story and what’s the perspective.
What did you bring to the script from your work as a journalist?
I worked at Vanity Fair and the New Statesman, which is a political magazine, and I’d done quite a lot of journalism around some of the movie’s themes. I’d done a piece for the Sunday Times and the New Statesman about the arranged marriage business in the U.K. and a BBC Radio 4 show on the same subject. And then I’d lived in Pakistan for ten years, in a house with my ex-husband’s father and his sisters and their husbands and their kids, like 26 of us in the same house, and all of them had arranged marriages. So the film’s partly inspired by that experience. But then I also interviewed something like 50 men in their 30s who had decided to have an arranged marriage. I also spoke with people who had long-term arranged marriages. Those interviews form the basis of the interviews that run throughout the film.
There were so many drafts before I even showed anyone and had the confidence to say, “Would you mind taking a look?” For a bit, I would only show my friend, who’s a screenwriter/director, and who said that he would read it and give me notes. And then, of course, I wrote a different draft for every single person that came aboard the project and even people who didn’t stay aboard the project, whether it was financiers, cast, producers, directors, or whatever.
What compelled you to focus on the subject of assisted marriage as your first script?
In part, the reason why I chose the genre of rom-com was because I’d never seen a rom-com that features Pakistan. And I felt that Pakistanis I know definitely feel that their country and culture have been somewhat unfairly demonized on screen. They feel they’re always seen as the terrorist, the butt of the jokes, the shady ISI operatives, or whatever. I understand that there is a scary side to Pakistan because I experienced that as well. But there is also this incredibly beautiful side of that country and the people, which I experienced when I was there — whether it’s the music, the food, the architecture, the color, the vibrancy, the hospitality, all of that I felt was worth showcasing.
How was your collaboration with director Shekhar Kapur?
It was great. You know, he’s such an old pro. He’s brilliant at strong female leads. He’s really, really good at getting to the heart of the story and making it about something else beyond the laughs. It was interesting for him, I think, because he’d never done a comedy before. I think he gave the script and the story a profundity and a truth that we might not have gotten if it had been a more broadly comedic director.
Any lessons learned with this film that you’ll take with you to the next?
I learned the start-to-finish process, from getting it cast to being involved in the edit. I got so much experience because I was given the opportunity to be that close to the actual process, and you don’t always get that as a producer. It was a really collaborative team, a really collaborative process, and so I learned a huge amount. The main thing, I think, is that the edit teaches you a lot about screenwriting. I think it teaches you what you need that you haven’t put into the script and what you don’t need that you have put in. I think this experience will really inform the next thing that I write.
What’s Love Got to Do With It? is now in theaters.
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“I’ve been playing music since I was two or three, piano specifically, and then I was really into film starting in middle school, and I thought, ooh, maybe I’ll be a director one day,” says composer Tangelene Bolton, whose work can currently be heard on season three of Awkwafina is Nora From Queens. “I started experimenting with making a bunch of short films, and I realized the music heavily influenced how I approached cutting the footage and telling the story. So I had to marry the two.”
The marriage has been a happy one. Bolton has been steadily building a name for herself as a composer, helping directors, producers, showrunners, and executive producers find the musical soul to their stories, from the recent Blumhouse horror film Unseen to Awkwafina and Teresa Hsiao’s hilarious aforementioned Comedy Central series. Awkwafina is Nora From Queens is centered on Nora Lum, a young woman living in Flushing, Queens, trying to unpuzzle adulthood alongside her cousin, Edmund (Bowen Yang), and with help from her father (BD Wong) and grandmom (Lori Tan Chinn). The result is a show that’s consistently hilarious, scored with an eye towards the perfect song to speak to a moment alongside contemporary compositions that speak to Nora’s sharp-witted soul.
We spoke to Bolton about learning from living legends, what constitutes the perfect needle-drop moment, and which instrument she turned to give season three of Awkwafina is Nora From Queens a touch of a melancholy vibe.
You began your career as an intern for Hans Zimmer’s company Remote Control Productions—I imagine that’s a very hard internship to get.
It is. I was lucky that my friend Tori Letzler, who’s an amazing composer, was working there at the time, and she was able to get me an interview. So I went to LA and I started in 2013 working as an intern at Hans Zimmer’s company. I was fresh out of the Berklee College of Music and I was ready to get some experience. After the internship, some time went by; I worked at a yoga studio for a little bit and then eventually got hired back at Hans’s company as a general studio assistant. It was cool because I got to meet so many other amazing composers.
What did you learn while working at Hans’s studio that you’ve carried with you into your own work?
He was a huge inspiration to a lot of people in my generation. We were in school studying John Williams, but then you’ve got people like Hans Zimmer doing a lot of experimentation with synthesizers and cool things like sampling. That was one of the fun things about working at Remote Control Productions because they’ve got a whole sampling team who are sampling a ton of cool instruments and making custom instruments for Hans. It was definitely awesome being a part of that kind of contemporary way of approaching film composing.
How’d you land at Awkwafina is Nora From Queens?
So things started picking up a few years ago after being a Sundance Fellow. I landed a few Disney shorts at the same time, then I eventually got repped and got my first series, Warrior Nun, on Netflix. After that, I got this Blumhouse feature, Unseen. So things started picking up. Toko Nagata is the music supervisor for Awkwafina is Nora From Queens, and she’s incredible. She reached out to my agent to see if I was interested in pitching for the series. I knew I really wanted to approach the series with a needle-drop approach.
Can you describe for me what, exactly, the needle-drop approach is?
So sometimes, when you’re watching a series or a film, you’ll hear a licensed track, something from an artist or a band that you could hear on the radio. Because the show is so contemporary, I wanted to make sure it had tinges of that feeling to it and that the score felt seamless with the licensed tracks. So I brought on board Hotae Alexander Jang to do some collaborations as well. He’s a Grammy-winning engineer and producer, and he’s worked with Beyoncé, John Legend, Solange, and many others. So I knew I wanted to get him involved in some way. What’s really cool is if you listen to the score, you might not know which part is licensed and which is a composed track. I wanted to find a way to marry the two together but still have a score that sounds like it could be a licensed track, but marry to this underscore that might be created with a more traditional approach but have a contemporary feel.
And how do you decide when you’ll spend the money to license a track versus when you’ll create your own underscore?
That happens a lot in the spotting session. We’ll all be there—me, the executive producers, the music supervisors, and the editors—and we’ll go through each episode. A lot of times, there’s already some licensed tracks in there that Toko [Nagata] brought to them and they’re working great. Other times, there are placeholders that will need to be replaced. But it all depends on how we want to tell the story at that moment. The fun thing is making sure you have really great licenses in there, great bands and artists, to do that. Toko did an amazing job.
Any favorite musical moments from season three?
There’s an episode that takes place in Iceland, and that one was so much fun. There are tons of rhythmic cues, synth-based cues, and then the Icelandic instruments I used, like zithers and dulcimers. I just had a lot of fun on the Iceland episode. It’s really funny and there’s lots of crazy stuff that goes down.
Any Bjork needle-drop moments?
All I can say is I’m definitely inspired by Bjork. I think she’s amazing.
How would you describe the overall score for season three?
I’d describe it as a mashup of lo-fi eclectic beats with a lighthearted melancholy vibe. I use a lot of cool instruments, like the OP-1 , which is kind of like the pocket knife of all synthesizers. It’s a sampler, a sequencer, and a digital tape machine, and it added a really fun quality to the overall tone of the show. As well as other weird synthesizers, like an OP-Z, which is a 16-track sequencer that’s pretty weird…once you can figure it out, it creates some really quirky vibes for the tracks.
How much experimentation are you doing yourself on these instruments in your downtime?
I love to play with different types of synthesizers and instruments. Like on Warrior Nun, I played with a lot of water phones…
What’s a water phone?
It kind of sounds watery and weird; they used to use them a lot in horror films. For Awkwafina is Nora From Queens, I’d just come up with tons of melodies on various synths and I’d throw it over to Hotae [Alexander Jang] and he’d run it through a tape machine to give it that texture. I’m also so grateful that Awkwafina, Teresa [Hsiao], and [director] Jordan Kim all responded to guitars as well. The guitars gave season three this melancholy vibe.
How many instruments do you play?
I play a lot—guitar, I can sing, and the piano is my principal instrument, but really anything I can get my hands on. I tend to play them unconventionally.
Do you have any favorite current or former composers who inspired you?
I love Jon Brion. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Huge fan. I was really influenced by him growing up. John Williams and James Horner are just classics. Right now, I love Bobby Krlic, who just did Beefon Netflix. Our director, Jordan Kim, worked on Beef as well. It’s incredible. I just started listening to the score for Beau is Afraid.
I feel like almost every composer I’ve ever interviewed also mentions Jonny Greenwood?
Oh, I do love Johnny Greenwood, too!
I didn’t mean to force him onto your list.
No! There Will Be Blood! Also, Licorice Pizza. That was a great score.
Awkwafina is Nora From Queens airs every Wednesday night at 10:30/9:30C on Comedy Central & Paramount +
In filmmaker Dawn Porter’s newest documentary, The Lady Bird Diaries, Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Johnson speaks for herself. Porter’s film is based on 123 hours of audio diaries that Lady Bird recorded during the presidency of her husband, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The personal, often poignant diaries reveal the First Lady’s key role as her husband’s advisor and confidante during his tumultuous presidency.
“I knew very little about Lady Bird, though I knew a lot about President Johnson,” says Porter, who listened to President Johnson’s White House tapes when she was making her 2020 documentary John Lewis: Good Troubleand her 2018 Netflix series Bobby Kennedy for President. “Lewis talked about meeting LBJ and navigating all these civil rights efforts but I knew nothing about the First Lady during that time.”
“That motivated me to try and imagine what it was like to be her. I don’t imagine myself as a white woman very often, so it was interesting to stand in her shoes. She comes of age in the 1950s; she’s a Southerner but also such a contradiction. You see her struggling. She’s a woman who has ambitions; she’s intelligent, educated, and wants things for her daughters, but she’s also a product of her upbringing and you see her navigating all these things in real-time,” says Porter.
The Lady Bird Diaries premiered at SXSW and will stream on Hulu. Porter credits her friend and colleague, Jackie Glover at ABC Studios, for calling and asking, “Do you think there’s a film here?” Glover was working on the podcast In Plain Sight: Lady Bird Johnson, an eight-part series hosted by author Julia Sweig who’d spent five years researching Lady Bird Johnson for her 2021 biography Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight.
Director Dawn Porter (Credit: Kevin Scanlon)
Porter was impressed by the volume and the substance of Lady Bird’s recordings which she began after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 and continued through her family’s departure from the White House in January 1969. The tapes were not publicly released until 2017, a decade after Lady Bird’s death.
“I wanted to let her tell the story with no talking heads, no one to speak for her. Then there was the challenge of whether there was enough archival [footage] so that the film could be just archival and her voice,” says Porter.
Turns out there was plenty of footage to accompany the voluminous audio. “It was really fascinating to dig in and see how much footage there really was. Nobody had asked because it was about a woman. When we put a request into archival for ‘Lady Bird Johnson,’ there was nothing,” says the director. “But when we [searched] ‘Mrs. Johnson,’ then ‘the president’s wife,’ there was much more. So many times, she was right there [at events] but not identified. Her presence was literally ignored. That strengthened my resolve that no one was going to speak for her this time because she was so involved, so to have her erased is just wrong.”
The diaries offer fascinating insight into not just Lady Bird’s character and her relationship with Lyndon Johnson but also the role she played from the moment that JFK’s assassination thrust her into the White House and the glare of public scrutiny. In the midst of a tragedy, she had to follow one of the world’s most beloved and glamorous women, Jacqueline Kennedy, into the role of First Lady.
“She described herself as a brown wren who had to follow this beautiful, colorful bird. That’s where her coming of age is important,” says Porter. “She grew up in Texas, more or less a tomboy who loved nature; she wasn’t girly, she didn’t feel glamorous. The Kennedys [after the 1963 visit to Dallas] were headed to the Johnsons’ ranch, where the Johnsons would host them. Lady Bird had spent a long time planning the visit, which was to be a weekend retreat where they were going to show off Texas [to Jackie and JFK]. And it’s in her beloved Texas that he is killed.”
“What’s forgotten is that when President Kennedy was killed [and LBJ sworn into office], Johnson had no vice-president,” says Porter. “There was no plan for succession; the assassination caused the government to put in a plan of succession. That didn’t exist before, so LBJ referred to his advisors and many referred to Lady Bird as VP because she was in all his meetings and strategy calls.”
Among the many revelations in The Lady Bird Diaries is that Lady Bird had helped LBJ come to the decision, after his landslide victory in 1964, that he would not seek a second term. Lady Bird even composed a resignation letter that LBJ planned to read at his State of the Union speech in January 1968 but, in the end, did not. Later that year, he famously announced he would not seek reelection during a live television address.
“I love, love, love marrying archival with her narration; it gives a completely different take on footage that is familiar,” such as LBJ giving his speech, says Porter. “We know she’s written his resignation, and she’s waiting in real-time to see if he’s going to reach into his pocket and step down. We’ve seen that footage but the world didn’t know that in his pocket was a resignation letter. It’s an astounding look behind the scenes of history.”
Porter, whose next project is a series for Showtime on the United States Supreme Court, says Lady Bird’s judgment and style remind her of First Lady Michelle Obama.
“Lady Bird was very honest, very in touch with herself. She was pragmatic. Michelle Obama, a double Ivy League graduate, had to figure out how not to offend people with her intelligence and capability, and she did that without seeming to capitulate. She found causes that engaged her intellect and interests but it’s not easy to navigate that in public. Lady Bird did that as well; her beautification efforts were the building blocks for the EPA. She allowed it to be called ‘beautification’ even though she did not like it because she was playing the long game. ‘This is what a woman can do, decorate with flowers, but she’s actually laying the groundwork for the protection of the environment. We have an East Wing with a paid professional staff because of Lady Bird. That says a lot about her, and it gives her grace when she makes other choices,” says Porter citing the 1968 White House luncheon where actress Eartha Kitt famously confronted Lady Bird about the war in Vietnam.
“Eartha Kitt never really worked in Hollywood again, which does not seem like a coincidence,” Porter says. “But then there were white women protesting outside the White House for Eartha Kitt. The complexity, you can’t make up. It’s why I love documentaries; they are more compelling and interesting than fiction sometimes.”
For more on stories on films and series streaming on Hulu, check these out:
“You want to get nuts? Let’s get nuts.” This is one of the most iconic lines from Michael Keaton’s time playing Batman, which began way back when with Tim Burton’s iconic 1989 film Batman and continued in Burton’s 1992 sequel Batman Returns. Keaton was on top of the world at the time, so it was surprising when he turned in his cape and cowl and was seemingly done with the role after those two films. We know now, of course, that Keaton still fits into the Batsuit—he returns as Gotham’s greatest hero in director Andy Muschietti’s The Flash, and a new TV spot was focused solely on him.
Let’s have a look at Keaton in fine form as Batman here:
The Flash is, of course, centered on its titular speedy superhero, Barry Allen, played by Ezra Miller. The reason for Keaton’s return as Batman has to do with Barry’s desperate attempt to solve a problem Bruce Wayne never could—bring back his parents, who he tragically lost. Unlike Bruce, Barry actually has a path to pull this off, but it comes at a great cost; by speeding back through time to change past events, Barry can solve his most pressing problem, but he’ll cause a million more in the process.
The Flash explores this most fundamental of all time-travel conundrums, explored in films from Back to the Future to Avengers: Endgame; you can’t change the past without altering the future. This is why in the above clip, you have Keaton’s Batman fighting Michael Shannon’s General Zod, despite the fact that Zod was killed by none other than Superman in Zack Snyder’s 2013 film Man of Steel—in the universe that Barry has sped into, Zod’s alive and essentially unbeatable because there are no metahumans to stop him. That means no Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, etcetera. This is why Barry recruits Keaton’s older, very retired Batman to help him save the world. Batman is many things, but he’s not a metahuman. Luckily they’ll get major help from a very special someone—Sasah Calle’s Supergirl.
Joining Miller, Keaton, Shannon, and Calle are Ben Affleck (as the Batman of his universe), Ron Livingston as Barry’s father, Henry Allen, Kiersey Clemons as Iris West, and Antje Traue as Faora-Ui.
The first reactions are in for director Rob Marshall’s live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid, and everyone is more or less in agreement that star Halle Bailey is absolutely phenomenal as the young mermaid Ariel. While Bailey is, understandably, getting the ocean’s share of love, her supporting cast is also coming in for plaudits, including Javier Bardem as Ariel’s father, King Triton, Melissa McCarthy as the sea witch Ursula, and Daveed Diggs and Awkwafina as Ariel’s beloved friends Sebastian (a crab) and Scuttle (a seagull), respectively.
A quick refresher on the story of The Little Mermaid; Bailey’s Ariel is the youngest daughter of King Triton (Bardem) and she’s also the most defiant. She has long harbored a desire to learn more about the world beyond the sea, and her natural curiosity eventually leads her to the surface, where she falls in love with Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) after saving him from a shipwreck. While Ariel’s actions are obviously heroic, they’re also deeply problematic for her underwater kingdom, where mermaids are forbidden from interacting with humans, let alone falling in love with them. So, Ariel makes a choice that will change all their fates when she strikes a deal with the evil sea witch Ursula (McCarthy), allowing Ariel to experience life on land but plunging her father’s kingdom into jeopardy in the bargain.
Marshall’s live-action take on this legendary short story by Hans Christian Andersen includes the most diverse cast to ever perform in an iteration of the story. The film was written by two-time Oscar nominee David Magee (Life of Pi, FindingNeverland) and boasts a sensational cast. Joining Bailey, McCarthy, Bardem, Diggs, Awkwafina, and Hauer-King are Jude Akuwudike as Grimsby, Jacob Tremblay as Flounder, Lorena Andrea as Perla, and Kasja Mohammar as Karina. These latter two characters are new additions created for this film.
Check out the reactions below. The Little Mermaid swims into theaters on May 26:
#TheLittleMermaid is the best Disney live-action adaptation to date. Halle Bailey IS Ariel. Major props to the sound effects team. Good changes, though one new song with too much autotune. Could watch this version’s Under the Sea all day, it was the highlight of the whole thing.
Disney’s live-action is magical, emotional and enchanting. Rob Marshall just directed Disney’s best ever live action film. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Alan Menken’s beautiful music shines. Halle Bailey is absolutely extraordinary! and Melissa McCarthy is a bad-ass Ursula. pic.twitter.com/4ZlpsF8m0D
It gives me so much joy to tell you to run (or swim) not walk to go see #TheLittleMermaid! A-MAZING. Halle is a STAR. Wonderful renditions of classic songs w/ new (wonderful) surprises. A well-done screenplay, strong performances, and such a magical tone. They got this one right. pic.twitter.com/gommJ2CPf3
— Chauncey K. Robinson (@MsChaunceyKR) May 9, 2023
I was blown away by #TheLittleMermaid. Some visual issues aside, it’s the most romantic and, dare I say, magical Disney has been in years. The best live-action remake by a mile. Daveed Diggs is the MVP. Halle Bailey is a superstar, and her Part of Your World is a showstopper. pic.twitter.com/496HuuTfcd
The Little Mermaid is magical. Halle Bailey is absolutely phenomenal. That girl has some pipes! Scuttle & Sebastian are hilarious & had me laughing the whole way through. Love the new songs & added plot points! Some CGI issues, but they don’t take away from it. #TheLittleMermaidpic.twitter.com/PCDRNotK7L
— Tessa Smith – Mama’s Geeky (@MamasGeeky) May 9, 2023
#TheLittleMermaid can be an enchanting reimagining that expands upon the story of the animated original with modern themes. It’s romantic and full of musical joy, even if it’s slightly overstuffed. If anything, Halle Bailey carries the film entire film with her performance. pic.twitter.com/S2A8egDeqj
#TheLittleMermaid makes it pretty close to being the best live action Disney movie, however it still struggles in the villain department. Halle Bailey IS Ariel and I had literal chills throughout her performance. This is a little mermaid retelling like you’ve never seen before. pic.twitter.com/JjtLOR61vL
Disney’s #TheLittleMermaid is definitely one of the better live-action adaptions. Halle Bailey pours incredible emotion into Ariel and I got chills watching her, while Melissa McCarthy’s Ursula and Daveed Diggs’ Sebastian steal scenes all day. pic.twitter.com/DHhIkbIj8s
#TheLittleMermaid is a live-action remake that retains the heart and soul of the story we know and love, and it’s elevated even further by a note-perfect star-making performance from Halle Bailey – she was born to be on the big screen, & she’s why this new take is worth watching. pic.twitter.com/Tcewp2L4MY
