Grab your stoutest friends and prepare a fellowship for a quest because multiple return trips to Middle-earth are currently being plotted.
Fresh details have emerged that Warner Bros. and New Line have struck a deal with Embracer Group AB, the folks who hold the film rights to the property, which will allow Warner Bros. and New Line to develop new features based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings” books. Considering the abundant wealth of storylines, characters, and mythical history Tolkien packed into those works, there’s no shortage of cinematic opportunities to explore. Warner Bros. Discovery announced the news on an investor call on Thursday.
Embracer Group AB is a Swedish gaming company that acquired the rights to produce Lord of the Rings films, theme park attractions, games, merchandise, and live productions after it bought Middle-earth Enterprises last year from The Saul Zaentz Company.
Peter Jackson’s original Lord of the Rings trilogy was a critical and commercial smash, igniting the passions of a legion of Tolkien’s fans and ushering in a huge swath of newcomers to Middle-earth, earning a combined $2.9 billion at the box office. Jackson’s third and final installment, Return of the King, won an Oscar for Best Picture in 2003. Jackson then delivered his The Hobbit trilogy between 2012 and 2014. Jackson and his Lord of the Rings creative partners Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh released a joint statement saying they are aware of the news and looking forward to learning more: “Warner Bros. and Embracer have kept us in the loop every step of the way. We look forward to speaking with them further to hear their vision for the franchise moving forward.” Jackson, Boyens, and Walsh did not have any input in Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series.
New Line currently has one Lord of the Rings project already lined up—the animated feature The War of the Rohirrim—which bows in 2024. As for any potential overlap between the new films and the Amazon series, it shouldn’t be an issue. Amazon’s series is focused on an entirely different era within the Lord of the Rings timeline, the Second Age, which takes place thousands of years before the adventures of Bilbo, Frodo, and the Fellowship of the Ring depicted in the films. Warner Bros. and New Line will almost certainly focus on the Third Age, when Tolkien’s most beloved creations lived and went on their adventures, including the wizard Gandalf (so memorably played by Ian McKellan in the films), the heroic Aragron (also memorably played by Viggo Mortensen) and many more.
Warner Bros. film heads Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy released a statement saying they’re not looking to simply redo what Jackson accomplished but are excited to tap into the vast world Tolkien created for new narrative opportunities: “Twenty years ago, New Line took an unprecedented leap of faith to realize the incredible stories, characters and world of The Lord of the Rings on the big screen. The result was a landmark series of films that have been embraced by generations of fans. But for all the scope and detail lovingly packed into the two trilogies, the vast, complex and dazzling universe dreamed up by J.R.R. Tolkien remains largely unexplored on film. The opportunity to invite fans deeper into the cinematic world of Middle-earth is an honor, and we are excited to partner with Middle-earth Enterprises and Embracer on this adventure.”
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:
“I’ve noticed an uptick in mushroom articles,” production designer John Paino jokes. So have I, actually, but it might be a case of being suddenly aware of the ubiquity and centrality of fungi to the living world ever since HBO’s The Last of Us premiered. The series, based on the critically acclaimed video game by Naughty Dog, asks us to look afresh at the fungus and fear. It presents a world in which fungi, specifically the Cordyceps genus (it includes some 600 species), has infiltrated the human body and mind, turning formerly healthy people into a variety of zombies nearly as variable as the fungus kingdom itself (there are an estimated 2.2 to 3.8 million species, but nobody knows for sure—only 148,000 have been identified). Co-created by Chernobyl visionary Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, the man who dreamed this nightmare into existence for Naughty Dog, The Last of Us is making a very strong case for being one of the best zombie stories of all time and, by a wide margin, the best video game adaptation, ever.
Paino was aware of the game, of course, as were all the creatives who came onboard Mazin and Druckmann’s series, but he didn’t log the necessary hours to really take it on. “It’s so engrossing that you really have to take the time to devote your life to it,” he says. Yet he was a major fan of was the game’s concept art, from which he began developing his ideas on how to create a world in which fungi rule to such an extent that even the most ardent mycologist or truffle pig would rue the day they ever became interested in mushrooms, molds, and all the other living organisms that fall under the fungi umbrella.
“Concept art is fascinating to me, and I remember seeing the concept art for part one of the game and how cinematic it was, with great attention to detail and to light sources,” Paino says. “It looked exactly like the kind of concept art you’d do for a TV show or a film, it was what really what drew me in. It’s just so beautiful.”
Bella Ramsey. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
The Last of Us is centered on a hardened, resourceful smuggler named Joel (a terrific Pedro Pascal) who, like every other adult who has survived the Cordyceps plague, lives with the memories of those he lost in a constant, exhausting state of alarm. In Joel’s case, he lost his daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker), during the first blush of the plague’s spread, when a soldier was ordered to shoot her for fear she might be infected. Years later, he finds himself tasked with a very unusual smuggling job; get some special cargo out of the Quarantine Zone in Boston and deliver it to a group of people who believe very strongly in the cargo’s importance to fighting the plague. The cargo has a name—Ellie (an equally terrific Bella Ramsey)—and she might hold the key to defeating the plague in her veins. Their journey, fraught and frightening, is the backbone of season one.
This narrative conceit also presented Paino with unusual challenges, as the story dictates that Joel and Ellie are never in the same place twice, tasking him with the responsibility of creating fresh ruins for them to explore and often flee.
“We never repeated anything,” Paino says. “Joel and Ellie are going from A to Z, so everything they’re passing through is new. I think we had 180 locations, and we built somewhere to the north end of 90 sets.”
Anna Torv, Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
As Joel and Ellie move west from the QZ in Boston across the living nightmare of post-plague America, they run afoul of increasingly bizarre and grotesquely beautiful variations of the infected. They also bear witness to the reclamation of manmade structures by nature. In this case, a berserk, murderous nature. Some of Paino’s design choices were inspired by the Cordyceps fungi itself.
“[The sets] are evocative of this new lifeform which very well may take over the planet and which comes from this plant-based plague,” Paino says. Yet co-creator Craig Mazin was clear from the jump that they weren’t making “disaster porn.” “It’s hard because there is this point where the natural world has very much taken over society, the architecture, civilization as a whole. Especially through Ellie’s eyes, having never been outside the QZ, there is a kind of awe with all of that. As adults, Joel and Tess [Anna Torv] are very much aware of how dangerous this world is, so it wouldn’t be a surprise to them, but it’s a surprise to Ellie and the viewer, so we wanted to play with that. We didn’t want to make it too beautiful, but it is beautiful.”
Pedro Pascal, Anna Torv, Bella Ramsey. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
The beauty and the horror are locked in a deathly embrace in The Last of Us in a way that’s unusual for a show about the living dead. That becomes apparent during the second episode, “Infected,” when Joel, Ellie, and Tess make it out of the QZ and have to pick their way through a museum. It’s here they come across a sub-species of the infected known, un-scientifically but evocatively, as “clickers.” This variation of zombie (in the third stage of their infection according to The Last of Us wiki) enjoy a unique kind of migraine—their skulls have been exploded open by the fungus, which fans out on either side of their head with a gruesome panache that would have made H.R. Giger blush. What’s left of their faces is basically the lower jaw and a row of jagged teeth. They earn their nickname by moving via echolocation (producing a clicking sound) towards their prey.
A “clicker” hears Joel, Ellie, and Tess in episode 2. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
During the episode, two clickers hone in on our heroes, and what follows is a deliciously terrifying chase through the museum. Paino and his team pored over every little detail to ensure the place looked just right, even though his most brilliant stroke never made it to the screen.
“We had this incredible commemorative Revolutionary War tea set that the fungus was growing through,” he says. “At one point, Joel side glances this tea set, and that was our nod to the line between the civilization and history and how the fungus and infected have grown through it, literally and metaphorically. The infected don’t care; they’re just going to go everywhere.”
Samuel Hoeksema plays a “clicker” in “The Last Of Us.” Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
As for the design of the clickers themselves and the hordes of the ingeniously infected who haunt the series, Paino points to prosthetics designer Barrie Gower. “That’s totally his wheelhouse,” he says. “Our thing was making sure we had some interesting things for the Cordyceps to grow through, like that the museum in Boston. Working with the infected and creature effects, it was about making sure that the creatures either came out of our environments or really popped against them with the colors we chose.”
Paino says that despite the continental sweep of The Last of Us, following Joel and Ellie’s journey for thousands of miles, the series rarely makes use of green screens to fill in backgrounds digitally. “Most of the interiors are built and the locations are dressed,” he says. For the sets and locations, only visuals like two ruined skyscrapers leaning against each other, frozen in mid-collapse by their mutual support, are one hundred percent VFX.
One of the most memorable builds for Paino and his team, and one of the best episodes of television this year (or any other, if you ask me), was for episode three, “Long, Long Time,” which shifted the focus from Joel and Bella’s journey to a skilled if lonely doomsday prepper named Bill (Nick Offerman) and his shock at finding a starving man named Frank (Murray Bartlett) begging, from the bottom of a hole Bill had covered to trap would-be intruders, for a little food. The episode, which spans years, tracks their relationship inside Bill’s compound which, thanks to Frank, becomes a home.
Nick Offerman, Murray Bartlett. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
“When I read the script, I immediately emailed Craig and said it’s one of the best I’ve ever read,” Paino says. “It’s just haunting and beautiful. And it was so great to have a respite, because it’s a show where you don’t really stop; you don’t get to dig into people’s lives and flesh out their personalities and characters. But in episode three, we were able to, and it was really great from a design and art point of view. It was really wonderful.”
Nick Offerman, Murray Bartlett. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
Designing Bill and Frank’s house required adding little touches that turned what was a booby-trapped, heavily fortified suburban fortress into a place where two men fell in love and lived their lives in the most darkly romantic setting possible. Frank, an amateur artist, begins populating the walls of the house with his portraits of Bill.
“It was a little difficult to land on how talented Frank was,” Paino says. “It was also important to make sure that we showed his skills degrading, even though it’s never said what exactly his degenerative disease is, whether it’s Parkinson’s or MS, that would certainly effect his ability to paint. And the actors were just so great. Murray Bartlett as Frank, you could see his mind wander as his illness takes hold. He did such a great job of showing his cognitive skill decaying.”
One of the biggest challenges for Paino was doubling Calgary’s architecture, where The Last of Us was filmed, for some of the American locations. “We’re going from the east coast of America to the west coast, and there wasn’t a lot of appropriate architecture in Calgary,” Paino says. “Once we get to the middle of America and the middle of our journey, on the vast plains, Calgary was great for that. But when we were in the cities, that’s where the challenges were.”
Melanie Lynskey in episode 4. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
Those challenges included imagining what a world that hadn’t had a functioning electrical grid, or any reliable infrastructure, for decades.
“Nothing has worked for 20 years, and nature has claimed things, so finding locations where we were able to give that much desiccation was our biggest challenge,” Paino says. “It’s really hard to break things down like that, actual places where people to go to work in. So making sure we had the time not only had the time do that, but then restore the location, that was hard.”
Whether Joel and Ellie were fighting for their lives in a museum, a laundromat in Kansas City, or a suburban culdesac outside of it, much of what you see in The Last of Us are real places turned into ruins by Paino and his team. For the climatic battle in the suburban culdesac towards the end of episode 5, Paino built the set in a parking lot adjacent to one of their stages. The scene saw Joel, Ellie, and two new (and brief) fellow travelers, Henry (Lamar Johnson) and Sam (Keivonn Woodard), beset by a group of rebel humans led by Melanie Lynskey’s Kathleen, who unleashes her vast amount of firepower in an effort to punish Henry for a past transgression. Things look bleak for our heroes when it’s just human vs human, but this is a world where humans no longer rule. Cue a truck that explodes and falls into a sinkhole, unleashing a horde of infected that includes a “bloater,” a massive zombie in the final stages of infection. (The show’s cultural impact is such that you can even test your knowledge of the various stages of zombification via Elle Magazine, not an outlet you’d usually associate with keen-eyed analysis of the varietals of the living dead.)
A “bloater” emerges in episode 5. Photograph by Courtesy of HBO
“It was one and a half acres in length and at least as wide as an acre,” Paino says. “It had 13 houses on it, including the three story sniper house. After a lot of planning, we picked which house the truck would crash into, then rigged that structure to collapse when the truck ran into it. Flame units and explosive charges went off at the moment of impact. The truck was then moved and the hole was created and made safe for the extras who were made up as the infected to emerge. We added ladders and ramps to facilitate them moving quickly.”
It’s riveting television, designed by Paino down to the very last fungal tendril creeping along the cracked floors and up the walls. It’s a nightmare vision of the planet, all the more heartbreaking for still being so beautiful.
For more on The Last of Us, check out these stories:
The Flash is going to race into theaters for the very first time at CinemaCon 2023 this coming April.
Warner Bros. will be premiering director Andy Muschietti’s film at the annual convention of theater owners in Las Vegas, Varietyreports, fueling the speculation that the studio is very enthusiastic about their upcoming superhero film. DC Studios co-chief James Gunn went on record saying The Flash was one of the best superhero movies he’d ever seen, a big vote of confidence from a man who is re-designing the future of all Warner Bros. superhero storytelling alongside Peter Safran. The Flash was a project Gunn and Safran absorbed rather than spearheaded, so to hear Gunn’s enthusiastic support of the film has further suggested Warner Bros. has a potential big winner on their hands.
The Flash stars Ezra Miller as the speedy superhero Barry Allen, a young man torn to shreds over the death of his mother and determined to do anything within his powers to change her fate. Barry’s powers are rather immense, and his solution is to travel back in time to change past events, but as we’ve learned in just about every time travel film, you can’t change the past without altering the future. In this case, Barry gets trapped in an alternate reality where General Zod (Michael Shannon) is not only still alive, but prepared to annihilate the world. What makes Barry’s problem even more pressing is that in his universe, there are no metahumans (no Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, etcetera), and his only hope lies in luring an older, very retired Batman (Michael Keaton, reprising his role from more than 30 years ago) to help him save the world. Batman is, of course, not a metahuman but rather a very rich, very committed, all-too-human vigilante.
Joining Miller, Keaton, and Shannon are Sasha Calle playing Supergirl, 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.
CinemaCon runs from April 24 through 27, and is the place where studios bring some of their buzziest upcoming projects, revealing brand new trailers and sizzle reels, as well as major stars. The event helps get exhibitors enthused about the movies they’ll be splashing across their screens. It’s particularly exciting for the theater owners when a studio unveils an entire film, as Paramount did last year with Top Gun: Maverick, which, in case you hadn’t heard, did quite well at the box office and with critics.
Though Haifaa Al-Mansour is known as the first female filmmaker in Saudi Arabia by virtue of her award-winning 2012 feature Wadjda, she has since become a go-to director inside and outside Hollywood through both features and projects on the small screen. The writer/director’s releases Mary Shelleyand The Perfect Candidate were lauded by critics and audiences, and her artistic contributions to shows like The Good Lord Bird, Archive 81, and Tales of the Walking Dead elevated the already well-regarded projects. Al-Mansour’s commitment to empowering women is evidenced in the subject matter she chooses, especially as writer/director, as well as in the advocacy she is devoted to in her personal life.
Her latest work is on the 5th and 6th episodes of Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches on AMC, based on Rice’s best-selling trilogy, “Lives of the Mayfair Witches.” The series focuses on neurosurgeon Rowan (Alexandra Daddario), who has discovered she is part of a powerful centuries-old family of witches silently ruling New Orleans. At odds with her is the evil matriarch controlling the family, Carlotta Mayfair (Beth Grant). There’s also an insidious threat posed by demonic entity Lasher (Jack Huston). Helping her win against Lasher is Ciprien Grieve (Tongayi Chirisa), an agent with a secret paranormal society called the Talamasca. Episode 5, “The Thrall,” finds Rowen and a wounded Ciprien trapped at the Mayfair House in a time loop. In Episode 6, “Transference,” Rowen takes part in a Mayfair ritual to transfer Lasher’s connection to another witch in the family.
The Credits chatted with Al-Mansour about that powerful scene of sisterhood in “Transference,” using Groundhog Day as inspiration in “The Thrall,” and more.
By coming in on the 5th and 6th episodes, you got some juicy storylines to sink into, but a lot of the visual language of the show had been set. How did you approach your work to bring your personal aesthetic as a director to bear?
With episodic television, you go to a show that is established, but you have to find your own voice as a director, and for me, the way it comes through is really about shaping the performance with the actors, and trying to find the right camera angles and shots. Within that world and aesthetic that is already established, you find your own angles and find your own lighting. It’s always digging, and talking to the creatives around you, trying to find that thing that speaks to you individually. I always follow the characters, and they lead me into the unfolding visual storytelling. Follow the emotion. Follow the character. That is my approach. That is the glue that brings my own style together with the original construct of how the show is designed.
BTS, Director Haifaa Al Mansour and Alexandra Daddario as Dr. Rowan Fielding – Mayfair Witches _ Season 1, Episode 5 – Photo Credit: Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
Shooting in New Orleans for a story like this, which is so famously based in the city, must offer some major inspiration.
Absolutely! We felt Anne Rice’s legacy around us all the time. We felt her presence, and it was just the perfect place to shoot. New Orleans has this magical and charming quality, and has so much history with jazz and all that. It was especially cool because Alex got married during our show in New Orleans, which really was amazing. To be able to be present as she was celebrated, not only as the star of the show, but to celebrate with her at such a special moment in her life in that magical city made it so special for all of us.
Alexandra Daddario as Dr. Rowan Fielding – Mayfair Witches. Season 1, Episode 6 – Photo Credit: Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
The city is like another character, especially the Mayfair house.
The house where we filmed, especially the exterior—because we divided the scenes between the house used as the Mayfair House and interiors shot at the studio—became a local hit where people go and take pictures with it. There is a pride of bringing a series like this to their town, and people felt a lot of ownership of it. That attitude by the people of New Orleans really helped us with challenges, like how the city can get really hot and muggy in summer when we were shooting, but people were excited, so we were powering through it because of the passion and really loving the project.
BTS, Alexandra Daddario as Dr. Rowan Fielding – Mayfair Witches. Season 1, Episode 5 – Photo Credit: Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
For “The Thrall,” what was your inspiration for how you dug into the episode?
The movie Groundhog Day was a major touchstone, and we referenced it a lot, but there are a lot of differences, too, that made it interesting. There is a progression within our story. Being trapped in time and space is such an amazing concept to play with. And Tengayi did a great job bringing all the subtleties of discovering his wound and having his body decay. For me the most exciting thing is when the bubble bursts, and you see the actors portray their characters becoming themselves after they were trapped in that world.
There are power dynamics at play that you lean into with your shots.
Yes! When Alex and Beth, as Rowan and Carlotta, are in that pivotal scene together, the framing of it is very symmetrical to divide the power, but then when Rowan comes into the frame, it’s about Rowan visually taking over the space and foreshadowing her success. It’s also outside, so it gives her that power of being in the clear, where she can step into the light. The film The Babadook is one I like to reference for framing in terms of isolation and power dynamics. Also, putting people in structures like in this episode shows how trapped they are, where they stand in relationship to themselves, and their inner thoughts. I really try to play within the locations we have, to find those positions where I can tell the inner story visually.
The scene with the women’s circle in “Transference” is so powerful.
That is the most exciting scene ever. We had to do the rig, and bring in the camera, and go around and around, but for me, that scene is about the power of feminism, all the women coming together and giving their power to one person. That is such an amazing symbol of sisterhood, and that we have to travel in a pack. Women are always loners, because that is how we’re raised and how society has programmed us for centuries, but I think there is a power in becoming and cultivating that sisterhood and coming together. So that was one of the most exciting scenes I’ve ever enjoyed shooting. Audiences should see that performance when Alex is calling on Lasher. She was feeding off the people around her, it was her scene and she owned it, but it was also really an amazing collective experience.
Each project gives a director some insight about their own style or something new for their bag of tricks. What did you take with you from Mayfair Witches?
Trust actors. I really love to trust actors, be there for them, and give them the chance and the environment to give me their best. A lot of the choices are made between the two of us, and sometimes it’s important to give them more space, because they’ll give me more. Also, as I said, it was great filming in New Orleans because all of Anne Rice’s books take place there, so it’s the original setting. I enjoyed being in a place where things originally happened. It reminded me a lot of when I shot Wadjda or The Perfect Candidate. When I go to a place that is original and where it happened, there is an integrity to it, and some kind of a charm that gives the shoot something special. I think I’ll strive a little bit more now to be in places that have a soul that serves the story.
Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches air on Sundays at 9:00pm ET/PC on AMC and are available on Thursdays prior on AMC+.
Featured image: BTS, Alexandra Daddario as Dr. Rowan Fielding and Jack Huston as Lasher – Mayfair Witches – Season 1, Episode 5 – Photo Credit: Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
Production for House of the Dragon season 2 is just beginning, and HBO and HBO Max content CEO Casey Bloys has confirmed with Varietythat viewers can expect to return to Westeros in 2024.
Bloys told Variety that the popular Game of Thrones spinoff series will likely not be eligible for the 2024 Emmy season, and considering that eligibility ends on May 31, 2024, you can pencil in season two for the summer of 2024. When asked whether HBO will be exploring any other Game of Thornes spinoffs alongside House of the Dragon, Bloys said the primary focus is on making sure any series set in the fictional world of Westeros (or anywhere else, for that matter) is narratively tight. Any future Game of Thrones spinoffs will have to pass the rigorous internal process that House of the Dragon went through.
“My philosophy is a good script is number one priority,” Bloys told Variety. “I am not doing it based on wanting to have one a year, two a year. I want to do it based on the scripts that we’re excited about.”
There were a number of potential Game of Thrones spinoffs that HBO was exploring once the flagship series ended in May of 2019, but ultimately, House of the Dragon was the only one to make it to air. The series, co-created by Ryan Condal and George R. R. Martin, with season one shepherded by Condal and Miguel Sapochnik, explores the inner turmoil in House Targaryen some 172 years before the birth of Daenerys Targaryen (memorably played by Emilia Clarke in Game of Thrones). It was a ratings hit, and a slow-burn, evocative look at how arguably the most powerful house in Westeros history ultimately flew their dragons too close to the sun, so to speak.
“Remember to get House of the Dragon following up from Game of Thrones, we developed a lot of shows, shot a pilot, developed a bunch of scripts and we got House of the Dragon,” Bloys said to Variety. “To do that again is going to take the same amount of effort. You have to develop a lot of things, try things. You never know what’s going to work. So we’re currently doing that. I’m not opposed to any number of shows. There’s probably a natural limit to how many fans want, but I’m open to any as long as we feel really good about the scripts and the prospects for a series. It takes a while to get one that hits the mark. I know George [R.R. Martin] feels the same way. You want to do one that everybody’s really proud of and excited about.”
Lots of fans will be excited about the return of House of the Dragon, but we’re betting they wish it would be arriving a little bit sooner.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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:
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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:
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