Father Gabriele Amorth (Russell Crowe) has a highly specific and unsettling job—he’s the Chief Exorcist of the Vatican. If you’re the chief demon slayer for the Vatican, you’re likely going to be a busy man, and that is indeed the case for Father Amorth.
In the first trailer for The Pope’s Exorcist, Crowe inhabits Father Amorth as he takes on the case of a young boy’s horrifying possession, and his investigation leads to a secret the Vatican has been trying to keep for centuries. What gives the film some added demonic umph is that it’s inspired on the true story of Father Amorth, based on his own stories, about performing more than 100,000 exorcisms for the Vatican.
The film comes from director Julius Avery (Overlord), from an original script from Michael Petroni and Evan Spiliotopoulos, and is based on the books “An Exorcist Tells His Story” and “An Exorcist: More Stories” by Father Amorth himself.
Joining Crowe is a performer with one of the all-time great voices in cinema, Ralph Ineson (The Witch, The Green Knight) who will be voicing the demon. Crowe and Ineson are joined by Franco Nero (Django, John Wick: Chapter 2), Laurel Marsden (Ms. Marvel), Cornell S. John (Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindewald), Alex Essoe (DoctorSleep), Daniel Zovotta (It Follows), and Peter DeSouza-Feighoney.
Check out the trailer below. The Pope’s Exorcist possesses theaters on April 14.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Inspired by the actual files of Father Gabriele Amorth, Chief Exorcist of the Vatican (Academy Award®-winner Russell Crowe), The Pope’s Exorcist follows Amorth as he investigates a young boy’s terrifying possession and ends up uncovering a centuries-old conspiracy the Vatican has desperately tried to keep hidden.
For more upcoming films from Sony Pictures, check out these stories:
After Mike White’s deliciously biting satire The White Lotus delivered an immensely satisfying Sicily-set second season, there were whispers, some provided by White himself, that season three was headed to Asia. Now, series executive producer David Bernard has essentially confirmed it during a keynote chat at the Berlinale Series Market.
“We’ve tried to work in Asia a lot, and hopefully, season three will be our chance to make something happen there,” the Emmy winner said during his address.
Season one of the hit series was set at the titular White Lotus resort in Maui, Hawaii (most of the action was filmed around the Four Season Resort there), while season two was shot in Sicily. Bernard said the huge success of season two, which was structured as a murder mystery after the opening episode revealed multiple people would die, would hopefully prove once and for all that internationally-set shows can draw a ton of attention.
“U.S audiences have been very closed off but hopefully, the success of The White Lotus shooting in Italy and being half in Italian and others shows like Money Heist that have worked around the world will make them more outwards looking,” said Bernad.
Bernard also revealed that the character of Ethan, played by Will Sharpe in season two, was initially supposed to be filled by Netflix’s Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story star Evan Peters.
Ethan Spiller is a young, successful, and dreadfully uptight young man on a vacation with acerbic wife Harper (Aubrey Plaza), his alpha male college buddy Cameron Sullivan (Theo James), and Cameron’s seemingly cosseted, blissfully unaware wife Daphne (Meghan Fahy). It’s Daphne who literally bumps into a dead body in the first episode of the season while swimming, and for the remaining episodes you keep a very close eye on this foursome’s progressively fraught relationships, searching for clues about who might die (and who might be the killer). It’s hard to imagine anyone but Sharpe in the role now, but it was very close to being Peters’ role.
“That part was the last part we cast in the season, and originally it was supposed to be Evan Peters, but for whatever reason – scheduling or timing – it didn’t work out,” Bernard said. “We were really trying to figure how to cast that part so it didn’t feel like familiar casting. We were in Rome auditioning Italian actors, and I was jetlagged Googling at 4am and I came across Will Sharpe in Giri/Haji, which is a brilliant show in the UK. I’d never seen him before and he was just incredibly talented. I looked at his other work and realized he was kind of a chameleon.”
The second season of The White Lotus was that rare thing for a modern viewing audience—appointment TV. Every Sunday night, many, many people dutifully made sure they caught the latest episode when it aired for fear of not only missing out but having a twist or, worse still, a major reveal ruined by a friend, a family member, or a stray headline. Considering what White and his talented cast and crew have managed to do with Hawaii and Sicitly, the idea of season three set in a White Lotus ski resort in Japan, for instance, is delicious. Wherever The White Lotus season three is set in Asia, it will certainly be one of the most coveted TV gigs to nab, and will once again be appointment viewing when it airs on HBO.
Sadly (and spoiler alert!), we know one person who won’t be making the trip to Asia for season three. We’re grateful, however, that we got to spend time with Tayna in both Hawaii and Sicily. Remember, kids, if you’re going to jump off the side of yacht, make sure you take your heels off first!
Jennifer Coolidge. Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:
Costume designer Deirdra Elizabeth Govan has been working in the film industry for decades but really made a name for herself with Boots Riley’s brilliant 2018 film Sorry to Bother You. Since then, she’s worked on high profile films, including 2019’s The Sun is Also A Star and last year’s Devotion, and projects on the small screen like The L Word: Generation Q and First Wives Club. Most recently, she’s the costume designer for Prime Video’s hit series Harlem, which just started airing season two, and her work will be shown in Boots Riley’s latest project, I’m A Virgo, which premieres at SXSW next month.
Harlem, from writer Tracy Oliver (Girls Trip)tells the story of four stylish twenty-something Black women navigating life, love, and careers in New York City’s iconic neighborhood. Starring Meagan Good as Camille, Grace Byers as Quinn, Shoniqua Shandai as Angie, and Jerrie Johnson as Tye, the second season has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, advancing the final four percent from its 96% it garnered for season one. Harlem has been lauded for centering sisterhood and Black joy in playful and authentic ways rarely seen onscreen. It also looks ravishing, thanks in large part to Govan’s inimitable eye for just the right detail.
The Credits spoke to Govan about her work on the show, including how she’s articulated changes in each lead character, and one design that she’s particularly proud of for how it celebrates New York City.
Deirdra Elizabeth Govan. Credit: Sean Waltrous.
In Harlem, you occasionally highlight some wonderful Black designers while also featuring costumes that are built from the ground up. What determines which pieces you do which way?
I always like to share that it’s on the page. For any costume designer, any work that we do, be it a film or a series, it’s on the page. With Harlem, I have a track record and long working relationship with Tracy Oliver, I understood how she writes, and I know how she wants to see these characters. So I knew I wanted to incorporate designers of color. I wanted to show the world that these women were women who had a very broad style reach, and that they can wear anything by anyone in any given point in time. There are a few designers that, when I looked at their collections, that I said, “Oh my God, that’s perfect. That’s it; I want that.” It wasn’t a concerted decision for me to put this character in this designer because we’re finding looks from everywhere.
And for the custom creations?
This season, in episode 3, there’s a build for Quinn’s 73 questions for Vogue. That’s out of my brain, but it’s in the ethos and the ecosystem of who Quinn is and how she dresses. That look, to me, was quintessential New York City woman. It’s style and elegance. It was inspired by art deco, the Chrysler building, all the different iron work, the latticework, and the glass. But what I loved about that so much is that it was reminiscent of Fortuny meets Mary McFadden and everything that Quinn is now. It showed her depth. It showed her love and sorrow all together. That look just clearly defines Quinn. The bustle on the back, the pleated fabric, the deep blue raw silk jumpsuit. I love it. It’s beautiful.
The Vogue looks. Courtesy of Deirdra Elizabeth Govan.Dressing Grace Byers as Quinn. Courtesy of Deirdra Elizabeth Govan.
It’s connected to how she dressed in the first season, but it’s also a shift.
Yes. It also informs her transition because the season is all about transitions. So for me, when I’m looking at designers, even designers of color, the first thing I’m looking at is, does the look service the story? Does it make sense? It’s not a happenstance. It’s a completely curated look that I’m doing. I am trying to convey what’s happening to that character, in that moment, within that storyline. That is my primary focus.
Let’s break down the way you speak to the evolution of these characters through costume. How about Camille?
For Camille, we don’t really see her in the classroom that much this season. So I needed to really create a through-line to, “what is her out-of-school life?” She’s still stylish. She’s still fun. I call her Mahogany meets Annie Hall. There’s a mash up. She has a sense of cultural sensitivity because she is an anthropologist, so her looks are more global. They are curated in a way to where you could find something in a vintage boutique one moment that she’s put on, and the next, something out of Bergdorf’s. So I do like mixing with her. That’s the exciting part about creating Camille for me.
Megan Good (Camille). Cr: Emily V Aragones/Prime Video.
Quinn is going through some changes, too.
There’s definitely a departure from her coy, coquettish kind of aesthetic. She’s evolved. She’s fallen in love hard with a woman. In the first season, she was finding love in all the wrong places. Now she’s finally found it. I am completely hypersensitive to tropes on any runway. I try to go the other direction. And I wanted her to still feel, for herself, feminine, but I wanted a sexiness. I wanted an edge, so I’ve introduced accents of black and accents that are more refined, in an elegant way, as opposed to all the lace. There’s a very revealing sexiness that we’re playing with. Because that is her confidence. She’s fallen in love, so now what happens after that? What’s the aftermath?
Grace Byers (Quinn). Cr: Emily V Aragones/Prime Video.
Angie is just as wonderful and surprising. She’s consistently flamboyant, so how did you make shifts for her in terms of her costume?
For Angie, definitely, there were some things that we were experimenting with in the first season. For Season two, I wanted to try and create a through-line that was more cohesive with her. She’s still over-the-top wildchild-fabulous; the colors are still bright and rich. Anything goes. But I really wanted Angie to find her center, because she is becoming a more evolved woman who really recognizes she doesn’t need every single man. She’s finding someone who really gets her. I wanted to ground her a bit. We really have a baseline where we’re going with her, and her falling in love was a really big indicator of how I wanted to move.
Shoniqua Shandai (Angie). Cr: Emily V Aragones/Prime Video.
And Tye?
Tye is my heart. Really, being in the LGBTQ space is very important with how I create these characters. I was hypersensitive to it because I did the first season of The L Word generation Q, when The L Word came back, and those are several stories of my life, my girlfriends and my personal relationships. So I am very sensitive to Tye. I did not want Tye to come across as someone that was not authentically who she was.
Jerrie Johnson (Tye). Cr: Emily V Aragones/Prime Video.
No doubt Jerrie Johnson provides inspiration for that.
Absolutely. Jerry likes to play. She can wear dresses one moment and looks super feminine, and the next, she’s rocking jeans and a tank top. And she’s a dapper queer, I mean fire, all the way. So with her, the tracksuits, to me, are very much her vibe. What is her daily style? She’s not rocking blazers; she’s rocking a tracksuit. This season, too, you’ll see an Afro-chic, Afro-punk kind of vibe, just risky and edgy. And it gets edgier. I really did not want to play into what people always assumed that a Black queer woman is supposed to look like. I just don’t subscribe to that.
L-r: Jerrie Johnson (Tye), Meagan Good (Camille), Shoniqua Shandai (Angie), Grace Byers (Quinn), CR: Emily V Aragones/ Amazon Prime
What are some of the biggest challenges you find working as a costume designer in the current climate in Hollywood?
I have two undergraduate degrees; I went to Pratt and Parsons. Then I have a Master’s in interior architecture and design, with a focus on exhibition design and set design, because I love creating worlds. That’s my passion. This business is, for me, so creatively rewarding. It’s hyper collaborative, but can be extremely abusive, and if you do not have a grounded footing on who you are, you will lose yourself. But there is this momentum that is very exciting for me that I’ve never experienced, and that is of costume designers really standing together and wanting to make change happen.
It sounds like it’s key to know what you want, be flexible, and trust your own passion.
I grew up in a world that was extremely diverse, and my parents made a very clear point of making sure that I could fit anywhere and do anything. So when I choose projects, I really try to choose interesting projects that mean something, and have some substance and really push something creatively forward. It’s a challenge to be a designer and be a woman, and you add being a designer of color on top of it; it is a very weighty thing. But I don’t lead with that; I lead with my talent, my art, what I’ve been blessed with, and the purpose that I’m trying to leave on this earth.
New episodes of Harlem Season 2 are released every Friday on Prime Video.
For more on Amazon Prime Video, check out these stories:
An all-star cast has gathered to tell the tale of the one of the most notorious serial killers in American history and the two women who risked it all to try and unmask the murderer and reveal the truth. Now, the first trailer for writer/director Matt Ruskin’s Boston Strangler gives us our first look at the film, which was inspired by a true story that has yet to be told on the screen.
Keira Knightley stars as Loretta McLaughlin, a indefatigable reporter for the Record-American newspaper who makes a shocking a discovery. When McLaughlin first begins to suspect that three women who were strangled over the last three weeks in Boston might be connected, her boss, Jack (Chris Cooper) makes a blunt assessment about her reporting bonfaides; “You’re on the lifestyle desk, you’re not covering a homicide.” Yet McLaughlin isn’t so easily disuaded, however, and her belief that the murders are connected leads her and her colleague Jean Cole (Carrie Coon) to pursue the story no matter the risks involved. Once a fourth woman is strangled, McLaughlin and Cole are determined to get to the bottom of the killings, despite the fact that the forces arrayed against them are monolithic.
Those forces include a defiant Boston Police Department, the rampant sexism of the era, and the case’s peculiar twists and turns. What McLaughlin and Cole put at risk is far greater than merely their reputations and careers. With two potent forces leading the investigation in Knightley and Coon, Boston Strangler looks like a potential early year sleeper hit for Hulu.
Boston Strangler boasts none other than Ridley Scott as a producer and a terrific supporting cast. Joining Knightley, Coon, and Cooper are Alessandro Nivola, David Dastmalchian, Morgan Spector, and Bill Camp.
Check out the trailer below. Boston Stranger arrives on Hulu on March 17.
In the strict, honor and duty-bound codes of the Mandalorians, one of the gravest sins you can commit is removing your helmet. We know that’s precisely what Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) did when he bid farewell to Grogu in season 2. It was an unthinkable breach, yet it movingly spoke to the connection Din Djarin and the foundling had forged over their dangerous adventures. In season 3, Din will be doing his best to make ammends for this all-too-human failure as he reunites with Grogu and heads back to his home planet of Mandalore.
Mending ties with his people is but one of the challenges that await Din and Grogu in season 3. We know that the Disney+ smash hit has recruited some incredible filmmakers to direct fresh episodes, including Black Panther cinematographer Rachel Morrison, Minari writer/director Lee Isaac Chung, The Mandalorian co-star Carl Weathers, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse co-director Peter Ramsey. Returning directors include Bryce Dallas Howard and Rick Famuyiwa. Famuyiwa has promised that season 3 will be the most ambitious to date.
In an interview with SFX, Famuyiwa said the upcoming season will boast the biggest, most harrowing adventures yet for our dynamic duo of Din Djarin and Grogu, yet the beating heart of the series, their relationship, remains the narrative engine.“I think every season you try to tell a simple story that connects, I can say that this season has certainly been the biggest yet, the most ambitious yer – it was almost crazy to try to do everything we’ve trite do this season – but I thin that ambition is just driven by wanting to continue to make these stories great,” Famuyiwa told SFX. “For me, the foundation has always been that simple relationship between Mando and Grogu. The adventures get bigger, and the characters you meet might be as iconic as Luke Skywalker, but it’s always in the service of that simple story. That’s taken us to bigger and bigger places, and certainly, this season is the biggest yet.”
While we await the arrival of The Mandalorian season 3, creator Jon Favreau revealed to French television network BFMTVthat season 4 is already written. “I’ve written it already. We have to know where we are going to tell a fully formed story. So, we had mapped it out, Dave [Filoni] and I. And then slowly you just write each episode. So I was writing it during post-production, because all of it has to feel like a continuation and one full story.”
The live-action Star Wars universe has expanded on Disney+ since The Mandalorian first bowed back in 2019. Since then, we’ve had The Mandalorian spinoff The Book of Boba Fett about the iconic bounty hunter from the original Star Wars trilogy, the look at the life of a venerable Jedi when he was at his lowest in Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the thrilling Andor, which focused on Diego Luna’s thief-turned-Rebel leader Cassian Andor. There’s more to come, with Star Wars: Ahsoka, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, Star Wars: The Acolyte, and a season season of Andor all in the works.
For now, however, all eyes are on the bounty hunter that kicked it all off when The Mandalorian returns to Disney+ on March 1.
For more on The Mandalorian, check out these stories:
A potent team of funny filmmakers is combining to adapt a beloved animated film into a live-action romp. The always game (and painfully funny) Zach Galifianakis is teaming with director Dean Fleischer Camp, the filmmaker behind the little indie film that could, Marcl the Shell With Shoes On, to remake Disney’s 2002 Lilo & Stitch as a live-action movie. The Hollywood Reporterbroke the story.
Lilo & Stitch tracks the story of a very lonely little girl named Lilo living in Hawaii. Her life changes when she meets an alien named Stitch, a cuddly, friendly extraterrestrial that has the lovable loyalty and spirit of a dog. The problem is that Stitch is the source of some unwanted attention (from other aliens, social workers, etcetera), and Lilo and Stitch need to bond together to create their own unique family and protect each other. The result was an animated film that marched to the unusual beat of its own drummer and slowly but surely built up an audience as loyal as Stitch.
Galifianakis would seem an ideal candidate to voice or embody the digital creation that will inevitably be Stitch, but details about his role are being kept on a short leash. Casting is currently underway for Lilo. The adapted screenplay comes from Chris Kekaniokalani. The original animated film came from How to Train Your Dragon creators Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders. DeBlois is currently setting off to turn How to Train Your Dragon into a live-action film for Universal.
Galifianakis will next appear alongside Elizabeth Banks in The Beanie Bubble for Apple TV about the 1990s toy craze, and in director Susanna Fogel’s film Winner, about whistleblower Reality Winner.
For more stories on Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, Marvel Studios and what’s streaming or coming to
Featured image: NEW YORK, NEW YORK – APRIL 07: Actor Zach Galifianakis attends the “Missing Link” New York Premiere at Regal Cinema Battery Park on April 07, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)
Seeing is believing. At least, the four prophets preaching the end of the world in M. Night Shyamalan‘s Knock at the Cabinhope that is the case. The quartet predict a series of plagues that will bring about the end of humanity unless a sacrifice is made, but will the sacrifice buy their story in time? VFX Supervisor with FuseFX Tommy Tran led work on the first global catastrophe and the eerie aftermath of all four events.
*Caution, don’t answer the door if you are afraid of spoilers*
“It was a lot of work for something that doesn’t really say, ‘Wow, visual effect,’” Tran admitted. “Everybody knows it’s a visual effect, but when you’re dealing with a spaceship or robots, there’s a little bit of suspension of disbelief that the audience has. Okay, it’s not really real, but it looks really good. But when you’re dealing with elements of nature, it’s gotta look like there’s no suspension of disbelief there. Otherwise, someone is gonna say, ‘Eh, that looks weird.’ When dealing with natural events or natural occurrences, there is no leeway for someone to say, ‘Okay, it’s not really real.’”
Leonard (Dave Bautista) and his doomsday crew first make inroads with their skeptical hostages by proving a flood they predicted comes to pass. An enormous wall of water makes landfall following massive earthquakes. Tran’s team was challenged to digitally create footage of the giant wave that looked realistic. Additionally, all of Tran’s work on Knock at the Cabin began with plates, or practical footage. The effects team worked with what they were given to paint the disasters into the peaceful scenes.
“When it comes to the billions of polygons it takes to do a wave and then multiply that by 100. The time constraints are exponential to that process,” Tran noted. “And then there’s all the other tertiary elements that go with the water wall, which is the sand, the receding water, the foam, the spray, the interaction with the spray to the actors, which 90% of them were day players. Some would run, some would walk, some would go the opposite direction. I think we ended up removing almost everybody in the background and replacing them with tiny, miniature digi-doubles that no one would have ever known that we did, but it was something that we had to do.”
Animating water is notoriously challenging. It can move as a unit but is also amorphous and constantly shifting. The physics of a giant wave overtaking a beach is extremely complicated and difficult to capture in only a few seconds. The practical footage shot for the scene ended when the wave hit the character filming the footage on their phone, leaving Tran’s team to finish the destruction of the sequence.
“A big discussion with our group was, what happens to the camera after the wave hits you? You would think it’s mayhem,” Tran recalled. “You are topsy turvy, turn after turn, swirl after swirl. We knew that we couldn’t get too crazy with the camera rotation because motion blur takes effect. We needed a sense of being in the water without too much chaos. We ended up with a certain number of camera rotations so we could still see bubbles and bodies and the murk around us. Then at the end, the camera settled, and it was a very poignant moment like a dead body floating. You’re looking up at the world as you’re dying, and you see God rays and you see silhouettes of the last vestiges of the moments of your life.”
Ultimately, fiery destruction rains down over the Earth. The serene cabin where Andrew (Ben Aldridge), Eric (Jonathan Groff), and Wen (Kristen Cui) hoped to have a peaceful, remote retreat succumbs to a forest fire. No real trees were harmed in the making of the film, but the digital trees that were burned were replicas of the original footage provided by director M. Night Shyamalan.
“We had to research where they shot, what kind of trees are prevalent there, do we have those trees in our asset library? We didn’t, so we had to make trees that were of that species around the cabin,” Tran explained.
Wind and water did appear in the filmed sequence, but they weren’t always working in tandem. The digital team had to reset the canvas, erasing any contradictory elements.
“The leaves are kind of blowing to the left and for some reason, one of their rain machines was blowing to the right,” Tran recalled. “If we have leaves moving left and practical rain moving right, we had to get rid of all the practical rain and add CG rain to match.”
The woods around the cabin were gorgeous, but dense. The VFX artists had the tedious task of erasing the trees that would be affected by the fire, particularly one that falls on the cabin. Once removed, they then built digital replicas to be able to manipulate the burning and crashing that the director called for.
(from left) Leonard (Dave Bautista) and Wen (Kristen Cui, back to camera) in Knock at the Cabin, directed by M. Night Shyamalan.
“There are a lot of leaves in the forest,” Tran laughed. “We actually removed trees to get full control of the tree. The tree that we made exactly resembled the tree that we removed. At some point we couldn’t tell what tree was what. So, it took a lot of time to clean it out so that we can have full control over the wind direction where the smoke blew, because it was a full location shoot and not full digital environment with blue screens or anything like that. It was a time challenge to remove trees and get the wind and rain to cooperate.”
Wide scale and very personal horrors come to pass before the apocalypse is averted. When peace finally resumes, the survivors are left to marvel at the devastation, and process whether they truly had any role in it. Wen and her father drive into town in solitude where they find other shellshocked witnesses to the near end of humanity.
“What we got was a plate of the actors driving with no rain,” Tran explained. “Midafternoon, just driving down that street. The sides of the street were populated with buildings and houses and street wires. Then we took that, and we erased everything, keeping the form language of the street. We removed all the houses, painted out all the street wires, removed the sky.”
The somber drive strikes a very specific tone that is all thanks to the visual effects that manipulate an otherwise typical car ride. The VFX team painted in what the characters were seeing, but they also capture the mood of the moment. Though silent, the audience is given all the visual clues needed to understand how the survivors are feeling. Awestruck, distressed, disbelief, and relief.
“It was a lot of smoke, rain, embers, and then burning tree carcasses. Repopulating the tree line to feel as if it was once a lush, picturesque mountain road to the world just ended kind of feel,” Tran said. “It was just a normal plate, and we added all that darkness to it. Then at the end of that shot, we come out of the rain, and we drive past all the darkness and there’s this beautifully framed shot of the horizon. There is a city burning back there, but the golden hour and the God rays, the sun, the way that the rain kind of dissipated but left enough rain on the windshield to catch the golden hour peaceful feel. That shot was very poignant in my mind and we put a lot of work into making it feel like you’re coming into the light. The reveal is humanity has been saved. A lot of effects in that.”
(from left) Director M. Night Shyamalan and Dave Bautista on the set of Knock at the Cabin.
Tran noted that his team joined the project late in production but received a noteworthy amount of support from Shyamalan and his group. The director even sent an ice cream truck to visit the FuseFX studio over their lunch break.
“I always give all my clients 100% no matter what – good, bad, indifferent. But when you get a client such as this, you want to give them 101%,” he noted. “Thank you for making this fun. There should be no other reason. This should never not be fun. We’re playing video games for heaven’s sake all day long. We’re doing what we love. Let’s have some fun.”
Knock at the Cabin is now playing in theaters.
Featured image: Dave Bautista as Leonard in Knock at the Cabin, directed by M. Night Shyamalan.
Nearly fifty years ago in the Bronx, on August 11, 1973, Jamaican American DJ Kool Herc used two turntables to spin funky drum breaks at his sister’s back-to-school party. The event turned out to be hip hop’s big bang moment. In the decades that followed, the music became a politically charged platform empowering Black America to share its culture through rhymes brimming with wit, ferocity and pathos. Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World, developed by Public Enemy rapper Chuck D and his producing partner Lorrie Boula, documents rap music’s explosive power as it expands from an impoverished New York City borough to become a global phenomenon.
The four-part series from PBS and BBC Studios, which airs its final two episodes on February 21 (check local listings) combines archival footage and interviews with hip hop luminaries including Ice-T, Fat Joe, MC Lyte, Eminem, Grandmaster Caz, Abiodun Oyewole of The Last Poets, KRS-One, Roxanne Shanté, will.i.am, Melle Mel and Lupe Fiasco.
Fight the Power producer Helen Bart helped put the series together with a cohort of British colleagues, including director Yemi Bamiro, producer/director Shianne Brown, researchers Chandler Pierre, Lola Mosanya and Yeota Imam-Rashid, assistant producer Samora Tikli, editor Paul Holland, commissioning editor Max Gogarty and BBC Music director Lorna Clarke. “We’re all massive hip hop fans,” Bart says. “I spent 15 months working on this, so it took longer than we expected, but we wanted to make sure we got it right.”
Speaking from her home in London, Bart reflects on the challenges of condensing the history of hip hop into four concise chapters.
How did you get involved in Fight the Power?
I’d worked with Steve McQueen on the Small Axe series about London’s west Indian community from the late sixties to the 1980s, which is very much my background, and his background as well. We wanted to shine a spotlight on what is essentially untold history. I also produced Black Power: A British Story of Resistance and Uprisingabout the 1981 Brixton uprising [of Black youth against police]. These films all made the point of fusing social history with the politicization of these events and that was partially why I was asked to work on Fight the Power.
Half a century of hip hop makes for a sprawling topic. How did you go about organizing all that material into four episodes?
From the word go, there was a very clear sense of what Chuck D and Lorrie Boula wanted to achieve.
Which was?
They wanted to show that the music itself was a revolutionary act that helped shaped the thinking of the Black, Brown and Hispanic population in the United States. We ran with that. We had regular meetings with Lorrie, who’d grown up in the south Bronx, and she constantly liaisoned with Chuck who brought his own experience of the music having grown up in Long Island. We were Black British and even though we were massive hip hop fans, we needed that curation from the American side. They were very particular.
Chuck D. Courtesy PBS
Can you give an example?
Our director Yemi Bamiro beautifully illustrated the influence of Kool Herc, with his Jamaican background, which is something we’re very aware of here in the UK dancehall community. Kool Herc contributed to the block parties where hip hop really begins so when we’d present that information, Chuck, Lorrie and [consultant] Nelson George would say “Trim it back a bit because we’ve only got four episodes.” It’s the idea that you can’t do everything so let’s keep it tight and get into some political beats.
The series documents how the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the sixties created a climate of social unrest and covers politicians like New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who recommended a “benign neglect” policy for Black citizens. The situation seemed pretty grim in the early seventies.
But what we didn’t want to do was to portray a community that was consistently down. We wanted to show the joy and the love and the creativity within the community as hip hop emerges through these four disciplines [of emceeing, deejaying, breakdancing and beatboxing]. By the time we get to Episode 2, we’re showing this duality where, on one hand, you’ve got a rising Black middle class but you’ve also got the crack epidemic. And we also get into the move from New York to L.A. and how that manifested in gang culture.
Chuck D talks about writing “Fight the Power” for Spike Lee’s 1989 movie Do the Right Thing. Around the same time, west coast rappers start making music that addresses police brutality in Los Angeles.
We go into some of the reasons behind songs like “6 ‘n the Mornin'” by Ice-T or NWA’s “F*** tha Police.” We wanted to show police brutality going back to graffiti artist Michael Stewart [who died in 1983 after being beaten by New York City transit cops] through the L.A. Rebellion in 1992 [following the acquittal of cops charged with beating Rodney King]. I hope we showed that without being too overbearing. At one point it was quite bloody.
The series’ high-energy archival footagealternates with some very colorful interviews. How did those interviews come together?
We went to Los Angeles and New York and flew to Detroit to do the interview with Eminem.Chuck in his interviews brought the gravitas, the detail, the expertise, the revolutionary focus and I think we got that too from rappers like KRS-One and others.
Episode Four covers the last couple of decades when hip hop artists start making large sums of money but overall, it seems you wanted to remain focused on political messages rather than commercial hits?
Yes absolutely. The series begins with Black Lives Matter and the killing of George Floyd so we had to go back to that and show that this music has a revolutionary impulse, with Black Lives Matter as our endpoint. Along with that, Chuck references how rap has become a force for revolutionary change around the world, and played an extraordinary role in the Arab Spring, the Hong Kong protests, in Ukraine, in Senegal. I think you leave Episode Four understanding that rap is still a call to action. Yes, some rappers become billionaires, but they’re still making cutting-edge music that says something about the world we live in.
On a personal note, when did you first start listening to hip hop?
I was 11 or 12, but it wasn’t called hip hop at that point in the UK, it was called electro. My brother bought Def Jam records and I’d listen to that stuff and L.L. Cool J. Then I got into A Tribe Called Quest and the Native Tongues movement, which you could argue was equally important but with jazz influences and not as blatantly male or misogynistic. And then Public Enemy. I saw Do the Right Thing when that came out. I visited with my aunt in Bed-Stuy for a while and really got a sense of where the energy of this music came from, so that was exciting.
In the course of making Fight the Power, what did you learn about hip hop that you didn’t know before?
I loved the interview with Roxanne Shanté talking about how she didn’t win this best rapper contest because they wouldn’t give it to a woman. That affected her terribly but then she’s also the person who meets and nurtures Nas. I didn’t know that until we worked on this series. There were loads of little moments like that which took me by surprise.
Roxanne Shanté attend the “Roxanne, Roxanne” party at the Acura Studio during Sundance Film Festival 2017 on January 22, 2017 in Park City, Utah.
For more on upcoming TV series and films, check out these stories:
M. Night Shyamalan is taking his talents to Warner Bros.
The writer/director is moving studios, after a long, fruitful relationship with Univeral that saw Shyamalan hone his chops with taut, contained, but still ambitious thrillers. His next feature, Trap, will be a Warner Bros. film when it debuts on August 2, 2024.
Shyamalan’s first-look deal with Warner Bros. will see him develop projects for both Warner Bros. Pictures and New Line. The latter just struck a deal with Shyamalan’s daughter, Ishana, to make her debut feature The Watchers, after directing episodes of M. Night’s own Servant on Apple TV. Ishana will both write and direct the feature.
Shyamalan’s tenure at Univeral was a bountiful one, debuting with his found-footage horror movie The Visit that had a budget of $5 million and went on to earn $98 million. Shyamalan’s next project was 2017’s Split, starring James McAvoy as a man with 23 personalities who kindness three girls (one of them played by Anya Taylor-Joy). His 2019 Glass was a sequel to Split and pitted McAvoy’s bruising beast against two characters from Shyamalan’s film past, Bruce Willis’s David Dunn and Samuel L. Jackson’s Elijah Price, the main players in his 2000 film Unbreakable. He followed those films up with the beach-set creepfest Old in 2022 and his recent feature, Knock at the Cabin, in 2023.
Shyamalan burst onto the scene in 1999 with The Sixth Sense, his Bruce Willis-led thriller with one of the most iconic twist endings in film history. He nabbed Oscar nominations for best screenplay and best director. His penchant for the twist ending was on full display in his three follow-up films, all of which were successful—2000’s aforementioned Unbreakable, 2002’s excellent alien invasion film Signs, and 2004’s cult thriller The Village.
“Night is one of the most iconic and influential directors of his generation and an auteur in every sense of the word,” Warner Bros. Pictures heads Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy said in a joint statement. “From The Sixth Sense through Split to his latest chiller Knock at the Cabin, he’s one of the few directors in contemporary cinema whose name alone promises a bold, singular vision, compelling original storytelling and a provocative, surprising and entirely unique experience at the theater. We couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome him to the Warner Bros. family, and look forward to an exciting collaboration with Night and the entire Blinding Edge team.”
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:
Featured image: BERLIN, GERMANY – FEBRUARY 10: Jury President M. Night Shyamalan is seen on stage at the Opening Ceremony and “Peter von Kant” premiere during the 72nd Berlinale International Film Festival Berlin at Berlinale Palast on February 10, 2022 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)
Slashers don’t take sick days, even during a lockdown. Leave it to Scream writer Kevin Williamson to give us more to fear than the virus in Peacock’s Sick, which takes us back to the peak of the COVID pandemic. Best friends Parker (Gideon Adlon) and Miri (Bethlehem Million) quarantine together at a luxury lake house, but their isolation is interrupted by a masked killer.
Production Designer Jenny Möller rolled back the clock to an eerie experience we all shared – visiting grocery stores in 2020 with rows and rows of empty shelves, particularly the toilet paper aisle.
“We didn’t really know what was going on. This was unprecedented,” Möller recalled. “The idea that the whole world was shutting down. The idea that we were not going to be able to get food or medicines. Looking back on it, it’s like well of course. We were all freaking out. There was reason, but the systems in place wouldn’t have let us fail that badly. It’s not 1900 here, but we didn’t know that. So, I really wanted to convey that slightly post-apocalyptic feeling that we were all walking around in.”
A stalker pursues college student Tyler (Joel Courtney) and takes a stab at him in his off-campus housing. Working with Set Decorator Gabriel Jessop, Möller gave the space personality and a contrast to the luxury lake retreat where Parker would become the next victim. Tyler’s house is grungy and cluttered, as college living spaces often are, but look closely and you can catch some one-of-a-kind pieces of art.
“I didn’t want it to be just posters on the wall, so I found a couple of vintage paintings that looked like they had been painted over,” she explained. “So, a landscape and I painted over an alien spaceship with an alien walking through it. We had one that was an old landscape. I put a rally car driving through it with mud splattered everywhere. Just to create something that wasn’t posters that was just a little cooler in there.”
Filled with “stacks of things”, “cheap furniture”, and “used junk”, there’s a lot to grab in a scuffle. Möller said that was intentional to not only give insight into Tyler’s world, but also give the characters more ammunition.
“We wanted you to know that Tyler lived in this house and then it gives you something to play with when you’re fighting,” she noted. “It’s more interesting to have a fight with a bunch of stuff to throw around in there than a big empty space. You can draw that fight out because you have more weapons at your disposal.”
Sets in slasher films do more than just establish a mood. They are interactive spaces, providing hiding spots for the prey and pathways for the pursuers. A great set like the lake house in Sick gives the killer the potential to jump out from anywhere.
Gideon Adlon is Parker in Sick. Courtesy: Peacock
“I think the fact that there were multiple entries to this house within the same level, the killers were easily able to pop in and out of doors and it’s so open that it creates a false sense of security that you can see everything,” she explained. “There were actually lots of places to hide that you don’t think are there. When something is that lofty, the sheer size of it creates a whole other element that you can hide in. It’s a little scarier. Sometimes a smaller space, you feel more in control of than you do in a larger space.”
To survive, the final girls made daring attempts to escape. There was a tense scramble on the roof and a major moment that required a more controlled environment to film in. To allow the stunt team to properly implement ropes and harnesses for safety, Möller designed a stand in set.
Gideon Adlon is Parker and Bethlehem Million is Miri in Sick. Courtesy: Peacock
“I built a roof extension onto an existing structure,” she explained. “We went into another location; we built out the attic room into that to make it match. We built that trap door to work the way that it did and the windows to match. We took out the existing windows and matched the windows from the main house into this other location. Then we built a physical set extension. The roof on the main house is actually a tin roof. It’s pressed tin, so if we stepped on it, it would damage it quite a bit.”
During the film’s climax, Parker finally takes the plunge, riding a raft into the lake. While the house the team scouted had a true lake front view, the dock was recreated elsewhere.
Gideon Adlon is Parker in Sick. Courtesy: Peacock
“[The owners of the house] had some old stairs, there was an access, but it just wasn’t functional,” Möller described. “Set construction and real construction are two different things. It would have taken us a lot of engineering to get access to that. And getting cameras and dollies and things like that down there – those are very heavy pieces of machinery.”
Of course, the water doesn’t deter a knife wielding maniac with a bone to pick. Parker has a tense scramble trying to evade the killer’s blade from below. Möller had to specially design the floating set for the carefully choreographed scene to ensure the actors could safely take a stab at one another.
“We had a marine unit so everything that you see under, the knives coming up – there was actually a person under the raft trying to get her,” she revealed. “I built the raft so that it floated on pontoons, and we made sure that the center section was hollowed out so that someone could get under there. We had choreographed where those things were going to be. So, under the raft, the person knew where they were going in the dark scuba diving under a raft. I’m pretty sure that it was tied off to another unit to keep it safe when Gideon was on there, so off camera the platform was attached to another unit, a larger floating unit, but there was still somebody under there.”
The best kind of horror films come from universal fears we all share, and there was no escaping COVID. Sick gives us a reason to revisit the days of lockdown and share a scream and a laugh now that the darkest days are behind us.
“I think coming off the pandemic, a lot of us were aware of the feelings that we had during the pandemic,” Möller observed. “We were so glad that it was over, that we were vaccinated, that we were back to work, but at the same time, we all were still very much aware of all that fear that we had. I think this was playing on that very, very well.”
Sick is now available to stream on Peacock.
For more on Universal Pictures, Peacock, and Focus Features projects, check out these stories:
Two sequels to two very distinct but potent films are coming to Warner Bros. Deadlinereports that Akiva Goldsman has inked a multi-year first-look deal with the studio and sequels to I Am Legend and Constantine are a part of the deal.
Warner Bros Pictures co-chairs De Luca and Abdy said this of the veteran Goldsman in a joint statement: “[Akiva] is a consummate producer, a brilliant writer, and a kind and generous human being. We’ve both known and worked with Akiva for years, and never cease to be amazed by his combination of filmmaking mettle and limitless imagination. We couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome him back to the Warner Bros. family, where he has delivered some of the Studio’s most successful and acclaimed projects of the past two decades.”
Goldsman is getting the ball rolling with three massive stars in Smith, Jordan, and Reeves. Here’s what Goldsman said in a statement:
“We’re starting with two projects that are fun and very much Warners; the sequel to I Am Legend, with Will and Michael B. Jordan, and the sequel to Constantine with Keanu Reeves that Francis Lawrence is going to direct. So I’m coming out of the gate fast. We’re doing it with JJ Abrams, and Francis and Keanu and I have been pretty deep in the story-breaking stage.”
Reeves will be reprising the role of demonologist and supernatural exorcist John Constantine that he first played in the 2005 original. Goldsman told Deadline that Reeves has been saying for years that John Constantine was a character he wanted to return to. “Finally, he said it enough times that it stuck,” Goldsman told Deadline. The sequel will expand on the themes explored in the 2005 film, with Constantine fighting to secure the barrier between earth and the evil creatures that are on the other side.
“The character is very much Keanu and the way he and Francis saw the world of good and evil, and the wonderful and authentic noir where there is a world behind the world of good and evil coexist with our world right up close,” Goldsman told Deadline. “Beyond that, we are still discovering it as I am writing the script.”
As for the I Am Legend sequel, Goldsman is staying mum on how Michael B. Jordan factors into the new film, which follows Smith playing the last man on earth fighting a plague of vampires. He did say, however, that the sequel will utilize themes explored in Richard Matheson’s novel, upon which the first film was based. He also revealed the sequel will begin decades after the 2007 film, and added he’s obsessed with HBO’s stellar zombie series The Last Of Us, which depicts a world decades after the apocalypse.
“You see how the earth reclaims the world, and there’s something beautiful in the question of, as man steps away from being the primary tenant, what happens? That will be especially visual in New York,” Goldsman told Deadline about his I Am Legend sequel. “I don’t know if they’ll climb up to the empire state building, but the possibilities are endless. We trace back to the original Matheson book, and the alternate ending as opposed to the released ending in the original film. What Matheson was talking about was that man’s time on the planet as the dominant species had come to an end. That’s a really interesting thing we’re going to get to explore. There will be a little more fidelity to the original text.”
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:
Featured image: ROME – FEBRUARY 10: Actor Keanu Reeves attends a photocall to promote his new movie “Constantine” at the St. Regis Rome Grand Hotel on February 10, 2005 in Rome, Italy. (Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images) *** Local Caption *** Keanu Reeves
How To Train Your Dragon creator Dean DeBlois is going to help Universal breathe fire into a live-action film.
DeBlois is the man who guided the critically acclaimed animated trilogy from DreamWorks, and now he’s going to bring his beloved dragons and Vikings into the live-action realm. Universal has tapped DeBlois to write, direct, and produce the live-action film—in fact, the film is already in the works, with a March 14, 2025 release date set. Casting is currently underway.
DeBlois used Cressida Cowell’s books as his inspiration as he built his trilogy around the story of a young, decidedly unheroic Viking boy named Hiccup and an injured dragon named Toothless whom he helped nursed back to health. The three films were centered on the pair’s devotion to one another, their battle against humanity’s fear and hatred of dragons, grieving a lost parent, and the joys and sorrows of first love. As the movies went on and time passed, so, too, did Hiccup and Toothless grow and age. The voice cast included Jay Baruchel as Hiccup, Jonah Hill as Snotlout, Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Fishlegs, T.J. Miller as Tuffnut, and Kristen Wiig as Ruffnut.
The films were a smash hit. All three were nominated for Oscars for Best Animated Film, and the trilogy roared to more than $1.6 billion at the box office. There were series on Netflix, Hulu, and Cartoon Network based on the movies.
The challenge for DeBlois is translating the animated magic he and his team created in their Oscar-nominated original trilogy into real sets, real actors, and CGI dragons that will look, one imagines, a little less adorable and a whole lot more dangerous in their live-action CGI incarnations. Striking the right balance between making the dragons realistic but not Game of Thrones-level terrifying will be one of the big hurdles.
This will be Deblois’s live-action debut. He’ll be aided by veteran producer Marc Platt, who has Legally Blonde, La La Land, and Universal’s upcoming Wicked adaptation on his resume.
Live-action remakes of beloved animated classics are, of course, nothing new. Disney has done it, to great success, with live-action versions of Aladdin, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Cruella and more. This will be the first time, however, a live-action remake is being undertaken by the same creator who brought the animated original to life.
For more on How To Train Your Dragon, check out these stories:
The documentary Descendant is about many things, but mostly it’s about storytelling — how oral histories, passed down from generation to generation, inform identity and community and connect the living to their ancestors. History can’t be erased or denied as long as stories are still being told.
Descendant, which won the US Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and is now on Netflix, follows various residents of the small community called Africatown, now part of Mobile, Alabama, who for generations had heard and shared stories about the slave ship The Clotilda. Owned by wealthy Mobile resident Timothy Meaher, the Clotilda brought 110 human beings from Dahomey (now known as Benin) West Africa to the Mobile region in 1860, more than 50 years after the international slave trade was abolished and considered a crime punishable by death.
To cover his crime, Meaher set The Clotilda on fire and sunk it. The Meahers and other white residents for years dismissed tales of The Clotilda as myth or lore. But the existence of the last slave ship was an “open secret” in Mobile for generations of descendants of The Clotilda survivors.
Descendant also documents a team of marine archeologists as they confirm in 2019 that the charred vessel sunk 20 feet down in the Mobile River is indeed The Clotilda. There are mixed reactions from some of the Africatown residents and descendants who wonder what this might mean for their small community since Africatown is already overrun by heavy industry and factories that spew cancer-causing toxins.
But there was a sense of vindication. “They told their story no matter what,” says Dr. Kern Jackson, the film’s co-writer and co-producer. Jackson is also a subject in the film since, as a longtime folklorist in Mobile and Director of the African American Studies Program at the University of South Alabama, he conducted many filmed interviews with Africatown residents over the years which appear in the documentary. Though not originally from Mobile, Jackson’s connection to Africatown runs deep. His grandmother was the vice principal of a high school in the neighborhood and his Godmother was a counselor and he spent much of his childhood there.
When Mobile started a larger project celebrating 300 years of history, says Jackson, “Nothing was being done in Black neighborhoods. I wanted to explore the neighborhoods of Plateau and Magazine [which are] now Africatown.”
Jackson’s interest and expertise in documenting personal narratives and his deep ties to the community came full circle with Descendant.
“When [journalist] Ben Raines claimed to have found the Clotilda, I picked up the phone and called [director] Margaret [Brown] in Austin. I said, ‘Get here and bring your camera. We’ve got to document this, but particularly, we have to participate in the process to amplify the neighborhood story,’” says Jackson. Jackson had worked with Brown, a native of Mobile, on the 2008 documentary The Order of Myths about Mobile’s still segregated Mardi Gras celebration.
Jackson, along with some of the descendants featured in the film, was concerned about who would take control of The Clotilda narrative; who would profit; and who would be exploited. It doesn’t take long in the film to see that these concerns are well-founded.
“Alabama is not good with transparency,” he says. “Margaret is a wonderful artist who does a movie about her hometown every fifteen years. She is trusted. Margaret is interested in transparency … She does cinema verite but she’s collaborative. Others [were going to] document this so why not go with home folks who know the shorthand and the sensibilities?”
Jackson and Brown had roots in the area and were familiar to Africatown residents. But Jackson says the Descendant team, a mix of Black and white artists including cinematographers Justin Zweifach and Zac Manuel and musicians Ray Angry, Rhiannon Giddens, and Dirk Powell, also worked to earn the community’s respect and trust.
“And it doesn’t hurt to have the drummer from The Tonight Show [Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, one of the film’s executive producers and himself a descendant] or the former President of the United States in your corner,” says Jackson. Descendant is presented by Participant and Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions.
The many Clotilda descendants featured in the film include Emmett Lewis, whose direct ancestor is Cudjoe Lewis. When writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston interviewed and filmed Cudjoe Lewis in the 1930s, footage of which appears in Descendant, he was believed to be the only living survivor of The Clotilda. Lewis’s account of his capture from Africa and the journey on The Clotilda became Hurston’s 1931 book, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo. But because Hurston insisted on writing in Lewis’s vernacular, publishers rejected Barracoon and it was not available until 2018.
In 100 days, Disney will release their live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, and a brand new teaser gives us a fresh look at Halle Bailey as Ariel. The timing of the teaser release does double duty, too, as this year Disney is celebrating their centennial.
The new teaser features Bailey singing “Part of Your World” while we get a glimpse of the aquatic world in which The Little Mermaid is set. We get a very quick glance at some other mermaids, Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), and the film’s villain, Ursula (Melissa McCarthy), along with her villainous cackle.
The film takes a new look at the iconic story of Princess Ariel, the youngest daughter of King Triton (Javier Bardem), a man who detests the world above the waves. His youngest daughter, however, feels the opposite, and her fascination with the surface world, and her heroism in saving Prince Eric from a shipwreck, are what ignite the story. As Ariel starts to fall in love with Prince Eric, the challenges begin to mount. For starters, King Triton isn’t happy about it, and then there’s the sea witch Ursula, a menace if ever there was one.
Joining Bailey, McCarthy, Bardem, and Hauer-King are Jude Akuwudike as Grimsby, Daveed Diggs as Sebastian, Jacob Tremblay as Flounder, Awkwafina as Scuttle, Lorena Andrea as Perla, and Kasja Mohammar as Karina. These latter two characters are new additions created for this film.
The Little Mermaid swims into theaters on May 26. Check out the new teaser below:
For more stories on Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, Marvel Studios and what’s streaming or coming to
Harrison Ford is no stranger to playing the U.S. president. The legendary actor famously played one very resilient Commander in Chief in Wolfgang Petersen’s Air Force One, where he personally kicked butt as President James Marshall and literally tossed Gary Oldman’s communist radical Ivan Korshunov off Air Force One with the deathless quip “get off my plane.” Ford will once again be playing the U.S. president in Marvel Studios’ upcoming Captain America: New World Order, only this time, he might have some skills and abilities even President Marshall would find shocking.
In a bountiful interview with Entertainment Weekly, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige revealed that Ford’s role in the Anthony Mackie-led New World Order as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (which he is taking over from the late William Hurt) will find Ross elevated to the position of Commander in Chief. Here’s what Feige told EW:
“This is certainly a big part for Thaddeus Ross. He’s the president of the United States in the film. And with Harrison, you think about Air Force One, and you think about some of his confrontations with the president in Clear and Present Danger. There’s a dynamic between President Ross and Sam Wilson. They have a history together, but in this film, we’ll be seeing the dynamic between Captain America and the president of the United States in a way that is just incredible.”
It’s the last bit about how the dynamic between Mackie’s Sam Wilson and Ford’s Thaddeus Ross is “just incredible” that’s been getting MCU-heads attention. This is because Thaddeus Ross isn’t just a United States military officer, a politician, and a governmental heavy, he’s also got an alter ego, the Red Hulk, possessing, as you’d guess, superhuman strength, among other capabilities.
Is Ford’s Thaddeus Ross going to transform into the Red Hulk in New World Order? Nobody outside of Marvel Studios knows, but it’s certainly a possibility. It would also give Ford an even meatier role, pun intended, as he enters the MCU.
Until we see Ford kicking butt as the Red Hulk in Captain America: New World Order, we still have this moment from Air Force One:
For more on all things Marvel Studios, check out these stories:
Before Valentine’s Day was over, Joker: Folie à Deux co-writer and director Todd Phillips made sure we were all reminded that romance is far from dead, even if it’s deadly. Phillips shared the first image of Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn in his upcoming sequel, pictured looking quite smitten with psychopath Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix).
“Happy Valentines Day,” Phillips wrote in the caption of his Instagram post. Gaga’s Harley Quinn is pictured up close and personal with Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, holding the sides of his face and looking deep into his eyes. She’s all vivid and in color, while he looks pale, wan, and almost shocked by the intensity of the moment.
In 2019’s Joker, in which Phoenix won an Oscar for his performance, Arthur Fleck seemed to have a relationship with his neighbor, Sophie Dumond (Zazie Beetz), but it was revealed later (extremely belayed spoiler alert) that the entire thing was in his mind. It seems a safer bet that this romance with Harley Quinn in Folie à Deux — which translates into “shared madness” — will be a real one. The Joker and Harley Quinn are arguably the most iconic (and most demented) couple in comic book history, a darkling romance that’s been depicted on screen before in David Ayer’s 2016 film Suicide Squad.
The Quinn/Joker relationship will likely get a much different treatment in Folie à Deux considering Joker was a gritty, unflinching psychological profile of a man losing his mind, snapping, and inadvertently becoming a murderous icon for a Gotham buckling under corruption, crime, and widespread misery. Once Arthur Fleck embraces the Joker persona, his folk hero status is assured, despite (or perhaps, because of) the blood on his hands. Considering Folie à Deux is the medical term for two or more people suffering from the same or similar mental disorder, it’s easy to see how Harley Quinn and the Joker will be enthralled by each other and their coextensive shared madness.
Phillips directs the sequel off a script he co-wrote with his original Joker collaborator Scott Silver. Production is underway in New York and Los Angeles, with a release date slated for October 4, 2024.
For more on Joker: Folie à Deux, check out these stories:
Featured image: R-l: Caption: JOAQUIN PHOENIX as Arthur Fleck in Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures and BRON Creative’s “JOKER,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise; LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – APRIL 03: Lady Gaga performs onstage during the 64th annual GRAMMY awards on April 03, 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for The Recording Academy).
Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania arrives in theaters on February 17, and the reviews are already calling it a mind-melting, psychedelic sci-fi extravaganza and a stellar way to kick off Marvel’s Phase 5. If you’ve been keeping up with director Peyton Reed’s film, you know by now it introduces the next Big Bad in the MCU—Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror. Unsurprisingly, critics say Majors absolutely crushes his performance. There’s a reason he’s one of the most sought-after actors of his generation. Owen Gleiberman of Variety wrote, “Jonathan Majors holds you with the quiet force of his pensive scowl… You hang on his every word; he makes vengeance and genocide sound like the most hypnotically casual of propositions.” Over at The Hollywood Reporter, critic Frank Scheck said Majors “invests his performance with such an arrestingly quiet stillness and ambivalence that you’re on edge every moment he’s on screen.”
So you know Majors is going to bring it—he always does—as Kang, but he’s not only the villain lurking in the Quantum Realm and threatening Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), or Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton). If you don’t want to know anything more about Quantuamania, now’s a great time to stop reading.
The Quantum Realm is filled with bizarre creatures, wild tribes, and all sorts of dangers. Kang the Conqueror is, without a doubt, the gravest threat of them all, so grave, in fact, the fourth Avengers film has his name in the title (Avengers: The Kang Dynasty). Yet there’s another force lurking in the miniaturized madness of the QR, and his (or its) name is M.O.D.O.K., played by original Ant-Man villain Corey Stoll.
In the original Ant-Man, Stoll played Darren Cross, a real pain in Scott Lang (Rudd)’s side and the man who eventually became the Yellowjacket. Ant-Man defeated Yellowjacket in the first film (obviously), sabotaging his suit and shrinking him to bits. In Quantumania, however, Darren Cross/Yellowjacket has become M.O.D.O.K. (now that the MCU has begun meddling with the multiverse, these sorts of things are possible), the Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing. And he’s a total lunatic.
The first iteration of M.O.D.O.K. appeared in 1967, created b Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, in “Tales of Suspense #94” as a human cyborg with superhuman intelligence and psionic powers. He started out as George Tarleton, a technician for Advanced Idea Mechanics (A.I.M.) who underwent a slew of medical experimentation that gave him superintelligence, but with a costly side effect; it gave him a gigantic head. Because his dome was so massive, he required a hoverchair to move around and, ultimately, became a killing machine. He often fought Captain America and also tangled with Doctor Doom, Iron Man, and Namor. M.O.D.O.K. went on to have a colorful, demented life within the pages of Marvel comics, truly one of the more bizarre and most evil supervillains. He even had his own moment on the small screen in Hulu’s Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K., which was stop-animation and totally nuts. M.O.D.O.K. was voiced by Patton Oswalt, no less, and delighted in being a show that wasn’t afraid to devote an entire episode to the 90s band Third Eye Blind. It had zero connection to the MCU, of course, and it only lasted a season, but it was bizarre and worthy of one of the weirder Marvel villains of all time.
Which brings us back to Quantuamania, where M.O.D.O.K. is a floating menace with the canon-correct colossal head. And yes, he’s designed only for killing, but crucially graced with Stoll’s deadpan wit. While Quantuamania and Marvel’s Phase 5 will be dominated by Kang, don’t sleep on the lunatic joy that M.O.D.O.K. will be bringing to the party. Stoll’s M.O.D.O.K. won’t have the same origin story as the one from the comics, of course, but he’s got a big role to play. Which is fitting for a villain with such a big head.
Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania hits theaters on February 17.
For more on Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantuamania, check out these stories:
There’s a very good chance Tom Holland will be swinging into theaters for a fourth time as Peter Parker in Spider-Man 4. Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige confirmed the news in an interview with Entertainment Weeklythat the script for Holland’s fourth turn your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is currently being written.
This is major news considering the fate of Holland’s tenure as Spider-Man was in some doubt after completing his initial trilogy with the critical and commercial smash hit Spider-Man: No Way Home. That film was an absolute monster success, earning more than $1 billion worldwide (the first pandemic release to do so) and invigorating fans with a multiverse-spanning, multiple Spider-Man-starring epic that saw the return of both Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield in their respective iterations as Peter Parker. It would have been a perfect swan song for Holland’s time as Spidey if he’d wanted to hang up his web-shooters, but it sounds as if that’s not happening yet.
“All I will say is that we have the story,” Feige told EW about Holland returning for a fourth Spider-Man. “We have big ideas for that, and our writers are just putting pen to paper now.”
In this same, bountiful EW interview, Feige revealed that Deadpool 3 will be the first R-rated MCU movie ever, which confirms the promise that screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick and director Shawn Levy had made that the third film in the franchise would be as hardcore as the previous two. It was also confirmed that The Crown star Emma Corrin would be playing the film’s villain, and everyone knows the film will team up Ryan Reynolds’s Merc with the Mouth with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, a pairing that Reynolds has been clamoring for since he first took up the Deadpool mantle in 2016.
In fact, Feige was an associate producer on the very first X-Men, which was Jackman’s debut as Wolverine, and he enthused to EW about now leading Marvel Studios for Jackman’s return.
“I remember sitting behind the camera — well behind the camera — at [Hugh’s] audition for the film,” Feige told EW. “It was his first on-set audition, and he flew up to Toronto to do a read with Anna Paquin. For him, and for me, and I think for all of the fans of Marvel, it’s unbelievable what has happened in those 23 years.”
For more on all things Marvel Studios, check out these stories:
Seeing is believing. That’s the message in the first teaser for Ted Lasso season three, which has an official premiere date.
The critical and commercial hit series returns to Apple TV on Wednesday, March 15, with a new episode dropping weekly after that. Season 3 will boast 12 episodes and will track Coach Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) and AFC Richmond’s new reality as they’ve now been promoted to the Premier League. As the featured image reveals, season 3 will also explore the new rivalry between Coach Lasso and his former assistant Nate (Nick Mohammed), who defected from AFC Richmond to go coach West Ham United, owned by the hilariously unlikable Rupert (Anthony Head). Will Nate continue down the road of insufferability? Will AFC Richmond flourish or flounder in the Premier League? These are just a few of the questions season 3 will answer.
Yet Coach Lasso has some new help on the coaching front, with Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) now stepping into the role of assistant coach, alongside the dependable Coach Beard (Brenand Hunt). Other storylines include Keeley (Juno Temple) taking on running her own PR agency, and AFC Richmond owner Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham)’s longstanding feud with her ex-husband, Rupert, who she yearns to obliterate (on the field, and probably off it, too.)
Returning cast members include Jeremy Swift, Phil Dunster, Toheeb Jimoh, Cristo Fernandez, Kola Bokinni, Billy Harris, and James Lance.
Emma Corrin has landed a major role in Deadpool 3 alongside Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman. Deadlinehas the scoop that The Crown season four star (she played Lady Diana Spencer) will play the villain in the movie, although details about her character are being kept under wraps. It’s a major coup, both for Corrin and for director Shawn Levy and the Deadpool 3 team, and both will benefit mightily from the connection.
Deadpool 3 is the first film in the franchise to be released directly by Marvel Studios (the first two films were under the 20th Century Fox banner) and is already the source of a ton of fan excitement over Hugh Jackman’s return as Wolverine. Deadpool reports that Marvel has been eyeing Corrin for a while now, and after working out scheduling details, the deal seems to be done. Corrin won a Golden Globe and Critics Choice award for her work in The Crown and picked up an Emmy and SAG nomination, too. Corrin recently starred in Amazon’s My Policeman and the Sony and Netflix co-production Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Deadpool 3 will find Ryan Reynolds’ Merc with the Mouth coming into contact, at long last, with Wolverine (Reynolds has been courting Jackman for years), with Levy directing from a script by longtime Deadpool scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. Levy has already promised fans of the first two films that Deadpool 3 will be as hardcore as ever, and adding a talent like Corrin in the villain role only adds to the intrigue surrounding Marvel Studios’ first full dance with one of the most absurd and beloved characters in their stable.
Featured image: LONDON, ENGLAND – OCTOBER 15: (EDITORS NOTE: Image has been converted to black and white) Emma Corrin attends the “My Policeman” European Premiere during the 66th BFI London Film Festival at The Royal Festival Hall on October 15, 2022 in London, England. (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for BFI)
