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12/01/21 @ 5:04 pm EST
 Deadline reports that Wanted filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov and his production banner Bazelevs are in development on a new cinematic universe based on the unexploited horror works by Stan Lee. Bazelevs will team with ZQ Entertainment, a production company belonging to CAA vet and producer Ara Keshishian, on Sawbones and Carnival of Killers, both of which show a darker side of Lee’s world. Stan Lee’s POW! Entertainment, the company the comic book architect co-founded post-Marvel, will serve as EPs on the projects. Sawbones follows a frail 12-year old, Alex Covin, who reads a mysterious comic book and is transported into the comic’s terrifying world: a haunted Juvenile Detention Center overrun by demonic forces led by Sawbones, a homicidal entity who preys upon the troubled inmates. Has Alex gone insane? Or is this nightmarish world his new reality? If he is to escape, Alex must find a way to defeat Sawbones, but he quickly comes to realize that Sawbones is the keeper of his darkness and the personification of all his fears. Carnival of Killers, set amid the Dust Bowl storms that ravaged the American Great Plains in the 1930s, centers around a young girl with psychic abilities who senses that the traveling carnival she and her mother sought refuge in is ground zero for a looming alien invasion. 10/21/24 @ 10:11 pm EST
A thriller feature from the mind of Impractical Jokers star James “Murr” Murray is coming to life. Lyndsy Fonseca (Kick-Ass), music star Russ and Tom Cavanagh (The Flash) are among the cast of Don’t Move, which wrapped principal photography in Kansas City on Friday. The horror-thriller movie is based on the best-selling 2020 novel of the same name from co-authors Murray and Darren Wearmouth. Maclain Nelson (Vamp U) directed the film from the script he co-wrote with Murray and Wearmouth. Hunter King (Life in Pieces), Rob Riggle (The Hangover) and Joseph Lee Anderson (Young Rock) round out the ensemble cast for the project that includes cameos from T-Pain, Matt Biedel and Impractical Jokers members Murray and Brian Quinn. Don’t Move centers on Megan Forrester (Fonseca), who joins her church group on a camping getaway after losing her family in a tragic accident. The trip takes a turn when the group, including mysterious member Ricky Vargas (Russ), mistakenly ends up in an area of the forest targeted by a dangerous predator. (via The Hollywood Reporter) 10/21/24 @ 10:04 pm EST
Viewers don’t seem to mind the lack of true heroes on The Penguin: the dark and violent drama from HBO Original continues to grow each week and, in fact, hit another series high on Sunday. The Colin Farrell starrer averaged 1.8 million U.S. cross-platform viewers, the drama’s strongest single-day performance for the overall series in the U.S. That’s up from the previous week’s episode, which drew 1.7M viewers cross-platform, according to Warner Bros. Discovery. New episodes debut Sundays on HBO and stream on Max. (via Deadline) 10/21/24 @ 1:45 pm EST
HBO‘s Harry Potter series will be “a little bit more in-depth than a two-hour film,” the company’s television boss Channing Dungey has confirmed. Dungey was a keynote speaker at MIPCOM‘s C-Suite Conversations on Monday afternoon. “There’s not a lot to talk about [on the Harry Potter series] at this moment, Dungey said. "We’ve got our fantastic writing staff in place and they are doing what they need to do. And casting calls have opened up in the U.K. and Ireland, so the process is moving along. It’s going quite well.” When probed further on the excitement of having an IP like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books to play with, Dungey said: “It’s an unbelievable dream, honestly, and as somebody who is a huge fan of books, the opportunity to get to explore them in maybe a little bit more in-depth than you can in just a two-hour film, that’s the whole reason we’re on this journey.” (via The Hollywood Reporter) 10/21/24 @ 1:48 pm EST
Barbie giant Mattel is teaming up with award-winning animation studio Aardman (Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep, Wallace & Gromit) to co-develop a new stop-motion, animated Pingu television series. The series is inspired by Mattel’s beloved cheeky penguin who lives in the South Pole and has stayed on our screens for decades, famous for his mischief and catchphrase, “Noot Noot!” Designed by Otmar Gutmann in the 1980s, the show first aired on the U.K.’s BBC One in 1990. Josh Silverman, chief franchise officer of Mattel, told The Hollywood Reporter at MIPCOM Cannes on Monday: “You couldn’t ask for a more perfect marriage [than between Mattel and Aardman]. I was just with their team. We are overjoyed about the project. It’s going to be really, really special. Pingu just continues to, organically, have a tremendous amount of affection and attention. And a tremendous amount of relevance.” 10/21/24 @ 1:23 pm EST
After scoring the big deal at the Toronto Film Festival with Neon for Audience Award winner The Life of Chuck, director Mike Flanagan and Stephen King are right back at it. Deadline's The Dish is reporting that their next collaboration will be Carrie, this time in an 8-episode series for Amazon. Flanagan will be the showrunner. The 1974 novel put the young author King on the map, and also bolstered his worth as an author whose genre storytelling was most translatable to the big screen. Brian De Palma was the first director to adapt King’s coming of age story of a young sheltered girl with a domineering mother whose bullying caused unimaginable blood-soaked consequences due to her hyperkinetic powers. Sissy Spacek played the title character, and John Travolta, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen, Betty Buckley and William Katt also starred. After that 1976 hit, several follow-ups came later, including The Rage: Carrie 2, a 2002 telepic, and a 2013 remake that starred Chloe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore. They’re reportedly opening a writer’s room, so this one’s happening quickly. 10/20/24 @ 12:57 pm EST
During the sixth episode of Agatha All Along we got a glimpse at what Agatha Harkness ( Kathryn Hahn) had been up to all those years between killing her coven and showing up in Westview. The series used newspaper clippings and internet searches to show that she had been at a lot of the major tragedies in the world like the Hindenburg explosion… and then we get a quick glimpse of a headline that claims Agatha was the inspiration for the Dolly Parton hit song Jolene. This has been confirmed by showrunner Jac Schaeffer as she explained how they had given the writers room an assignment to come up with five low-level nefarious things Agatha could’ve done in the past. “I remember being one of the most fun days in the room, was everybody coming in with their sort of low-level Agatha nasties. And that was Laura Donney. She was like, ‘She’s Jolene.’ And we were just like, everybody fell out. It was so funny.” Parton has in the past revealed that the song was about a red-haired bank clerk that would flirt with Parton’s husband Carl Dean.  10/20/24 @ 12:43 pm EST
New York Comic Con attendees where surprised by an appearance of Daredevil: Born Again stars Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio. Along with unveiling a teaser trailer for the new series, it was also revealed that the first episode will debut on Disney+ on March 4th, 2025. The nine-part series brings back Matt Murdock (Cox) and Wilson Fisk (D’Onofrio) from the original Netflix series that ran for three seasons and ended in 2018. The rest of the cast is filled with both returning actors and new including: Margarita Levieva, Deborah Ann Woll, Elden Henson, Zabryna Guevara, Nikki James, Genneya Walton, Arty Froushan, Clark Johnson, Michael Gandolfini, with Ayelet Zurer and Jon Bernthal.  10/20/24 @ 12:30 pm EST
It was announced this weekend that Our Flag Means Death star Rhys Darby will be boarding a very different ship, one that flies through space. Darby will be a guest star in the upcoming third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The series is based on the Captain Christopher Pike ( Anson Mount) years on board The Enterprise with his first officer ( Rebecca Romijn) and science officer ( Ethan Peck). Details on Darby’s role remain a secret, but the series has added Cillian O’Sullivan as the legacy character of Dr. Roger Korby. The third season is set to debut in 2025 on Paramount+.  10/19/24 @ 1:20 pm EST
For those of us who are watching Agatha All Along, it’s surprising to learn that Joe Locke’s real identity in the show wasn’t always the plan. Jac Schaeffer, creator of the series, explained, “I know it sort of feels like it should be self evident. I mean, we had an idea that we were locked on before the writers room. So it was early, but in my early brainstorming for Agatha All Along, it was so important to me that it’d be her story … but once that piece clicked in, it did feel right.” No Billy? Schaeffer said, “So my early idea was I wanted some sort of a goth teen character, or a group of goth teens. I love The Craft the movie, and I really liked the idea of this ancient witch coming in contact with younger witches. I feel that Agatha, at her best, is a mentor. So I was looking for that relationship. It was executive producer Mary Livanos who came up with the idea of Billy for that role. Then, once we were into it, okay, it’s going to be Billy, how do we do that? What do we do? Those specific conversations, with Marvel especially, I don’t remember a lot of detail to them. I mostly remember being in the writers room and trying to figure out who this young man is and how we can best serve him. The structure that we came up with, where he is this eager fanboy who loves witchcraft and is studying at the feet of these women, we loved front loading with that, but it felt thin and disingenuous to have that be all there is. So it was so fun to be able to bake it so that his complexity and darkness and the texture of him would detonate at the midpoint.” Now the powered version of Billy, called Wiccan, first appeared in the Young Avengers, a group of teen heroes that we’ve been meeting all over the MCU. Schaeffer was asked if this was part of bringing the team together. “I’m not working on anything right now for Marvel, but it is my hope that there will be more for him, both because I’m such an admirer of Joe, and because I think the character is really interesting.”  ... 10/19/24 @ 12:57 pm EST
Sony showed the first seven minutes of Kraven the Hunter at a panel at NYCC this weekend which featured the titular hunter being taken into a Russian prison as an inmate before revealing that he’s really there to kill a mob boss, which he does with the use of a tooth from a Siberian tiger rug… which is an interesting way to start a film. Kraven is then chased through the woods by a team of soldiers, one of whom gets a bear trap wrapped around his face. And if you can’t tell from the description, then Director J.C. Chandor lays it out specifically by calling this “some really intense grindhouse.” Kraven being a grindhouse style movie was not on my bingo card but does make the film seem more interesting. Along with the director, start Aaron Taylor-Johnson was on stage where he described Kraven as “He’s real, he’s not a visual effects monster, he’s a man who has made a choice to be a hunter,” and went on to talk about his connection to the environment. “Like all great hunters, Kraven respects his prey, top of the food chain … he’s a hunter, not a poacher. Like every hunter knows, sometimes you have to cull the herd, to call order. Once he applies to human beings, it becomes a dark story.” Kraven the Hunter opens December 13.  |
