‘Tis the season for junk moives in the theater! It’s a new year!
In this week’s “Weird, random reboot idea” story, remember that interesting film directed by Bong Joon Ho in 2013 called Snowpiecer? The one with Chris Evans on the big train in the snow that was an analogy of human class system? Well, now there’s going to be a reboot series on TNT.
The series will star Jennifer Connelly, and Daveed Diggs, Mickey Sumner, Susan Park, Benjamin Haigh, Sasha Frolova, Katie McGuinness, Alison Wright, Annalise Basso, Sam Otto, Roberto Urbina, Sheila Vand and Lena Hall.
“I’m a personal fan of Bong Joon Ho’s epic film, and jumped at the chance to honor his original vision, yet expand upon the world and characters with a diverse, award-winning cast,” Sarah Aubrey, executive vice president of original programming for TNT, said. “Science fiction is the perfect genre to examine issues of race, class, gender and natural resources with thought-provoking and exciting storytelling. Snowpiercer will explore those relevant issues while embarking on a wild, action-filled ride.”
The reboot is a co-production between Tomorrow Studios and Turner’s Studio T, as well as CJ Entertainment. Scott Derrickson directed the pilot, which was written by Josh Friedman.
Ok, whatever. Seems a little soon, but it’s all reboots and remakes now anyway.
In this week’s “Seems fair” story, turns out, when Ridley Scott did the re-shoots for his film All the Money in the World, Mark Wahlberg was paid $ 1.5 million dollars for the re-shoots, and the star of the film, Michelle Williams, was paid just about $ 1,000. Say what, now?
USA Today confirmed the rumors by revealing that Williams made less than $1,000 for her work on the re-shoots while Wahlberg walked away with a $1.5 million payday. Those numbers mean Williams was paid less than 1% the amount that her co-star earned.
All the Money in the World producers originally stated that the actors all agreed to be paid modestly for the re-shoots. The reason Williams and Wahlberg were expected to take a pay cut was because director Ridley Scott was only filming the re-shoots in order to replace accused sexual abuser Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer.
An early report from The Washington Post stated Williams agreed to a figure in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or less but that Wahlberg demanded more and received a six-figure salary.
In a December interview with USA Today, Scott said that Wahlberg and Williams “came in for free” and agreed to re-shoot their scenes opposite Plummer for no money. Williams at the time said she didn’t hesitate to agree to the re-shoots.
“I said I’d be wherever they needed me, whenever they needed me,” Williams said. “And they could have my salary, they could have my holiday, whatever they wanted. Because I appreciated so much that they were making this massive effort.”
Three people familiar with the situation but not authorized to speak publicly confirmed to USA Today the actual re-shoot salaries for Wahlberg and Williams.
For obvious reasons, most people (Film journalists, fans, and fellow actors) are super pissed, and are expressing that on social media. It really is an outrage. I think Wahlberg should pay Michelle Williams for the privilege of working with her. I have to wonder exactly how it all went down, but it certainly seems like a massive injustice has occurred, yet again.
in this week’s “From Deadpool to Kitty Pryde story, Tim Miller, director of the first Deadpool film, is rumoured to be spear-heading a Kitty Pryde project.
According to Collider, a Kitty Pryde X-Men spin-off is in the works. The special-powered mutant character has appeared in four of Fox’s X-Men movies in the past, initially with minor cameo appearances by different actresses, then portrayed by Ellen Page in X-Men: The Last Stand (see below) and X-Men: Days of Future Past. Deadpool director Tim Miller is actually the one leading this project, which may or may not actually go into production down the road.
Of course, as it often is the case early on, there are a lot of unknowns.Will Miller direct it? Who will they cast in the Kitty Pryde role – someone new, or Ellen Page? What other X-Men characters will be included? Who knows.
With all the Fox/Disney stuff going on, things over there seem to be in a state of flux.
In this week’s “No more ‘Pirates’ Gambit” story, director Gore Verbinski is pulling out of the Gambit film.
Yep, the Pirates of the Caribbean times 3 …or 4… director was going to direct the Gambit X-Men film but has – amicably – split from the 20th Century Film project. The split is due to scheduling issues with several other projects on the director’s plate. Channing Tatum remains aboard as the lead role.
Fox has already set a February 14, 2019 release date for the film; no word if that will have to change given the new news.
It is the latest turn on the project, which at previous points had Doug Liman and Rupert Wyatt attached to direct the pic about Gambit/Remy LeBeau (Tatum), who has the ability to charge matter with volatile kinetic energy, turning anything he touches into a weapon. The character had a brief appearance in 2009’s unpleasant X-Men Origins: Wolverine, played by Taylor Kitsch.
In this week’s “Deadpool shows up early” story, the Untitled Deadpool Sequel has been bumped up by two weeks and will now land in theaters on May 18, 2018 instead of June 1. Ryan Reynolds will return as the foul-mouthed vigilante alongside Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Morena Baccarin as Vanessa, and T.J. Miller as Weasel and newcomers Josh Brolin as Cable and Zazie Beets as Domino. The new release date puts Deadpool 2 a week ahead of the Star Wars box office domination that’s sure to come with Solo: A Star Wars Story, which seems like a good idea considering the Star Wars films tend to make money for in theaters for months. Deadpool will now return to theaters up against Sony’s horror pic Slender Man. That seems like minimal competition.
In a related comic book movie way, The New Mutants film will be getting pushed further away.Josh Boone‘s horror-tinged take on The New Mutants is getting a major bump back on the schedule and will now land in theaters 10 months later than originally scheduled. The film moves from April 13, 2018 to February 22, 2019. Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams and Charlie Heaton star in the YA X-Men spinoff about a group of diverse teenage mutants kept in a research facility against their will. The shift prevents Fox from having two superhero films in theaters at the same time overseas, but it may have more to do with the film needing more time because of the Disney/Fox merger.
Or, maybe they just need more time on it. Per The Tracking Board, the film tested OK, but the studio wants to rework it to be scarier in the wake of last year’s landmark year for horror. Hmmmm….
In this week’s “Ol’Switcheroo” story, Natalie Portman is in talks to replace Reese Witherspoon as the lead in Fox Searchlight’s drama Pale Blue Dot.
Witherspoon departed the role last November due to scheduling conflicts with Season 2 of Big Little Lies, though she will continue to produce with Bruna Papandrea.
Fargo and Legion creator Noah Hawley is directing from a script by Brian C Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi.
Pale Blue Dot follows a successful female astronaut who, after coming back home from a mission in space, starts to unravel when confronted by her seemingly perfect American dream life. The film explores the theory that astronauts who spend long periods of time in space begin to lose their sense of reality when they return home.
Searchlight will now look to find Portman’s male co-star and hopes to get the film in motion this spring, now that Hawley is done shooting his FX series Legion. FX recently said at its Television Critics Association panel that his other show, Fargo, would not return till 2019, which would give Hawley plenty of time to shoot Pale Blue Dot.
For me, the extra good news is that season two of Legion is done shooting. Yay!
In this week’s’ “FINALLY!” story, Marvel’s Black Widow movie may actually happen!
Variety reports that Marvel studios has put the wheels in motion on the long-speculated project and recruited TiMER writer/director Jac Schaffer to pen the script. The report specifies that the film is in very early development and hasn’t got the greenlight, but this project has been talked about for years. It’s good to see there’s actually some progress happening.
In this week’s “Not so fast, Fox!” story, Fox’s Patty Hearst biopic gets shut down – by Patty Hearst.
“Twentieth Century Fox Film and its production partners have decided to cancel the studio’s planned project based on the book American Heiress,” a spokesperson for the studio said.
The move came a few hours after Hearst had issued a strong denunciation of both the Fox movie biopic and a CNN documentary series about her 1974 kidnapping. She blasted author Jeffrey Toobin, whose unauthorized 2016 biography American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst was being turned into the feature film and who is an executive producer of CNN’s The Radical Story of Patty Hearst.
“Jeffery Toobin’s unauthorized book, American Heiress, which cites one of my kidnappers as its main source, romanticizes my rape and torture and calls my abduction a ‘rollicking adventure,’” she said in a statement released by her daughter Lydia Hearst’s spokesperson.
WHAT. Well, shit, sounds like they really didn’t get the idea right at all. If that’s how you’re going to spin a film like this, then perhaps you shouldn’t have even considered making it. But then, hey, it’s Fox, right? Hardly surprising they’d spin this story as “a rollicking adventure”. Somebody fire the person that came up with that.
The move also comes less than a month after Disney reached a deal to buy the movie studio and other 21st Century Fox assets as part of a $52 billion transaction.
James Mangold was attached to direct the untitled adaptation of Toobin’s best-selling book about Hearst’s 1974 kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and re-emergence as a bank robber and member of the left-wing terrorist group. Hearst captured the world’s attention when she was caught on tape participating in armed bank robberies and declared her allegiance to the SLA.
Her arrest and trial sparked a media frenzy. Hearst, who claimed she was brainwashed, was captured after 18 months on the run and served 22 months in prison.
The six-part CNN original series, The Radical Story of Patty Hearst, is set for Feb. 11 and includes interviews with Bill Harris, who was part of the SLA, and Steven Weed, who witnessed the abduction.
In this week’s “Shazam!” story, Warner Bros. Shazam! movie gets a release date.
The film will open April 5, 2019, the studio announced Friday. (It had previously carved out that date for an untitled DC movie.) The month is currently pretty open at the box office, with Paramount’s Pet Sematary opening a week after Shazam!.
Zachary Levi stars in the film as the adult superhero Captain Marvel, who is actually a young boy named Billy Batson (played by Asher Angel). Billy is able to transform into the hero by uttering the magic word “Shazam!”
Mark Strong is in talks to play the film’s villain, with director David F. Samberg at the helm from a screenplay by Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke.
Shazam! opens four months after the next DC film, Jason Momoa’s Aquaman (Dec. 21 of this year).
In this week’s “Leo with Tarantino again” story, Leo DiCaprio has signed on to be in Quesntin Taratino’s next film.
Leonardo DiCaprio has said yes to starring in Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, which will re-team the actor and director from 2012’s Django Unchained. The new film, Tarantino’s ninth as director, was scooped up by Sony and already has an August 9, 2019 release date. The deal is expected to close soon, and this will become DiCaprio’s first film since he won the Oscar for The Revenant.
DiCaprio will play an aging actor in the story that is being kept under wraps but is a Pulp Fiction-esque movie set in the 1969 Los Angeles during the summer of the Manson murders.
Tarantino has already asked Margot Robbie to play the role of Sharon Tate, and as Deadline has reported Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt have been circling the project with DiCaprio for what is known to be two meaty male roles.
The release date coincides with the 50th anniversary of Tate’s murder at the hands of the Manson family.
In this week’s “Judge Malkovich” story, John Malkovich is joining the cast of the cumbersomly titled Ted Bundy film, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile.
The film also stars Zac Efron and Lily Collins. Malkovich will play Judge Edward Cowart, the man who presided over Bundy’s sensational trial in 1979 and sentenced Bundy to death.
Efron will play Bundy with Collins co-starring as Elizabeth Kloepfer, the serial killer’s longtime girlfriend. Joe Berlinger, best known for his Oscar-nominated true-crime documentary Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2012), will direct from an original, Black List-ed screenplay by Michael Werwie.
Werwie’s script tells Bundy’s story from the perspective of his girlfriend, who allegedly had no knowledge of the murders while they were together but saw her boyfriend become America’s most famous killer when his trial was nationally televised.
in this week’s “Saul gets action” story, Bob Odenkirk, star of Better Call Saul, will produce and star in the action/thriller Nobody for STX Films.
Derek Kolstad, who wrote John Wick, is attached to write the screenplay about an ordinary man who comes to the defense of a woman being harassed by thugs, then learns later that one of the thugs is the brother of a drug kingpin and is out for vengeance.
Executive producers on the project are Kolstad, Deadpool 2 director David Leitch, Chad Stahelski and Kelly McCormick of 87eleven. STX’s’ Drew Simon and Kate Vorhoff will oversee production.
Odenkirk is best known for portraying lawyer Saul Goodman on the AMC crime drama series Breaking Bad and its spin-off Better Call Saul. He’s currently starring in Steven Spielberg’s The Post, in which he portrays journalist Ben Bagdikian.
Well, isn’t that a turn of events.
In this week’s “Inconsolable” story, actor James Franco was not in attendance at the Critic’s Choice awards, because he is apparently very upset about the numerous sexual misconduct allegations against him – according to sources connected to Franco that told TMZ.
Franco won Best Actor in a Comedy Film but was not in the hangar at the Santa Monica Airport to claim the trophy.
Sources say the actor is in a bad place … upset and frustrated over allegations he says are untrue. Franco endured several grillings on talk shows in the last few days, saying he’d rather take a bullet than cast aspersions on the #MeToo movement.
One source said on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being inconsolable, Franco’s a 6.
He flew to L.A. Thursday to attend the awards, but obviously had a change of heart.
Gee, James, if you’re upset about the allegations, think how the WOMEN feel! Ugh, am I going to have to stop supporting Franco now, too?
In this week’s “Tell us how you REALLY feel, Bob” story, at this year’s National Board of Review Gala, Robert DeNiro had a little something to say about our current President.
The National Board of Review’s 2018 Awards gala — honoring Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Greta Gerwig, Jordan Peele and The Post, among other creators and projects — continued the charged, often political awards-season conversations begun at the Golden Globes on Jan. 7.
Robert De Niro proved the most direct in his introduction of Meryl Streep, who was picking up the best actress award for her performance in Stephen Spielberg’s “The Post.” De Niro encouraged applause for an off-hand dismissal of Trump. “Let’s clap for that,” he said. “This f—ing idiot is the president. It’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’ The guy is a f—ing fool. Come on.” He went on to call the president the “jerk-off in chief.”
LOL – Yeah, I still love DeNiro.
AND, in this week’s “Crazier than Depp?” story, Lindsay Lohan may have an island named after her soon.
If, like me, you were wondering what she’s been up to lately, you’ll love this one.
The 31-year-old stopped by the Wendy Williams Show for an interview airing Friday revealing a new (old) accent and big plans for world domination.
The actress revealed to host Wendy Williams in a PEOPLE exclusive clip, that she is in talks to design one of the islands within The World Islands, an artificial archipelago of small islands off the coast of her adopted home Dubai.
“I’m discussing designing an island in Dubai,” Lohan said (and with her European accent mysteriously missing).
“I have a lot of little projects there because I like to keep busy. So, when I’m finished filming [British sitcom] Sick Note I can go back to Dubai, start the lipstick, discuss that and then design this island — Lohan Island.”
She joked that she was “out-Trumping Trump with the name Lohan!” as Donald Trump is known for branding developments with his moniker. The President does not have an island in Dubai but he does have a large golfing and residential real estate development with his name on it.
Lohan also spoke about her nightclub in Greece – which is where she first revealed her so-called “LiLohan” accent when it launched last year.
“I have my club too, in Athens, and then we’re opening one in Mykonos,” Lohan told Williams about her businesses. “I figured I’ve gone to enough, I should have my own!”
The Mykonos nightclub will also be named Lohan Nightclub like her Athens club, the star said, as she described it as “a fun place.”
Williams cautiously asked whether that was a good idea for someone who has substance abuse issues in the past, saying, “Wouldn’t that be the worst place for a clean person… to have?”
Lohan said there was no danger in her slipping back into substance abuse, revealing she had more fun watching other people party too hard.
“No, actually. It’s really fun to watch other people look ridiculous,” she said.
Well, Lindsay, we sure have been entertained by YOUR boozy shenanigans over the years. No pointing and laughing over here, though. If I’d had paparazzi following me during my boozing days, I’d probably have moved to Dubai, too.
And that’s another week of stuff happening in entertainment!