Matthew Monagle
The First ‘Dark Tower’ Trailer Should Drop Sometime This Week
While decades of film journalism has taught us to treat Hollywood insiders as the sole source of movie rumors, there are plenty of places to go for production updates if you know where to look. Movie studios are businesses, after all, and business have to do things like file for copyrights, pull permits, and, sometimes, submit films and trailers to government agencies for review. That’s how we are able to bring you today’s update on the long-anticipated trailer for Columbia Pictures’ The Dark Tower adaptation. It didn’t come from some studio executive sending text messages on the sly; it came from the Consumer Protection agency of British Columbia.
Weekend Box Office Report: ‘Fate of the Furious’ Wins a Turbulent Weekend
In a week devoid of any major releases, we still saw some major changes at the box office, with familiar faces like Kong: Skull Island, Power Rangers, and Get Out (RIP) all falling from the Top 10 in favor of new releases or aggressively expanding art films. Of course, not everything was different; if you read these box office reports every weekend, I’ll bet you can name the top three movies (in order) with minimal effort. Here’s the weekend box office projections as of Sunday afternoon:
Rumor: The Creator of ‘Mr. Robot’ Is Working on an Obi-Wan Kenobi ‘Star Wars’ Prequel
Unlike the previous Obi-Wan Kenobi — sorry, Alec Guinness — Ewan McGregor has long been excited about the prospect of returning for more Star Wars movies, telling Empire Magazine last October that he was the “right age” to make two more movies as the beloved character. While fans were sometimes unimpressed by the prequels, McGregor’s winning performance as the young Jedi was one of the highlights of the film, leading fans to clamor for a standalone Kenobi movie while McGregor was still the right age.
Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Robert De Niro May Reunite for an FBI Murder Mystery
When Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro aren’t busy trying to figure out ways to digitally de-age the latter in Netflix movies about professional hitmen, they do field offers from other studios. That seems to be the case now with Imperative Entertainment, the production house that recently snapped up the rights for David Grann’s non-fiction novel Killers Of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI. After spending a whopping $5 million dollars for the rights, Imperative immediately pivoted into convincing the two Hollywood stars — and their frequent collaborator Leonard DiCaprio — to accept the project on their behalf.
James Cameron Announces the Release Dates for the Four ‘Avatar’ Sequels
It’s been nearly eight years since James Cameron’s Avatar took the global box office by storm, and while it’s become très chic for some corners of the internet to endlessly bash Avatar, I still maintain my stubborn affection for Cameron’s movie. Very few filmmakers can create action-driven science-fiction that operates at Cameron’s level; just look at how many times people have messed up Cameron’s Terminator franchise, a near-flawless formula for blockbuster movies that studios have nevertheless run directly into the ground. We may laugh at Cameron’s planned sequels, but they are both original (technically!) and creator-driven movies. Isn’t that what we claim to want from Hollywood?
HBO Announces a ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Adaptation Starring Michael Shannon and Michael B. Jordan
Dystopian cinema is all the rage right now. Not only is the release of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale only a few days away, we were also recently treated to a series of synchronized screenings of 1984, the film adaptation of George Orwell’s seminal novel. While some may view this as a collective piece of cinematic snark, plenty of others are using these projects as an opportunity to open the door for increased education and awareness about media literacy, politics, and art. And while HBO may only really be interested in art and politics, it is putting one foot firmly in the dystopian game, announcing an upcoming production of Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451.
Weekend Box Office Report: ‘Fate of the Furious’ Zooms Up the Record Books
Audiences don’t turn their back on family. That’s the lesson to be learned from this past weekend, anyways, when The Fate of the Furious proved that this is one franchise showing no signs of slowing down. It was never a question of whether The Fate of the Furious would take the top spot this weekend, but even the most optimistic of projections couldn’t have expected the global domination that this movie undertook. Here’s the box office estimates as of Sunday afternoon:
‘The Fate of the Furious’ Screenwriter on Addressing Paul Walker’s Character
It may seem strange to describe the eighth film in a blockbuster franchise as a transitional moment in the series, but then again, few franchises have had to deal with the death of an actor as essential as Paul Walker. The Fate of the Furious was always going to be a bittersweet affair for those involved; while the movie promised to push new characters and new relationships to the forefront, fans wondered how exactly they would choose to address the loss of Walker’s beloved Brian. The solution screenwriter Chris Morgan came up with should leave diehards and newcomers alike very pleased.
The ‘Star Wars’ Canon Expands in the First Trailer for ‘Star Wars Battlefront II’
When is a video game more than just a video game? When the story it tells is woven into the legends and events of one of the biggest blockbuster movie franchises of all time. This weekend, Electronic Arts debuted the first footage from its upcoming Star Wars Battlefront 2, the sequel to the bestselling 2015 Star Wars video game, with the promise that this game would tell canonical stories not previously seen in the Star Wars universe. It’s all part of an ambitious effort by Lucasfilm to weave these Star Wars stories across a variety of media, including the films, television shows, video games, and books.
Pennywise Is Mighty Hungry in This New ‘It’ Production Photo
Studio math might be one part proprietary data and one part alchemy, but here’s something I feel pretty confident saying: when your trailer sets the all-time record for most views in a day, you’re about to make some moolah. We all remember that the first teaser trailer for It had 197 million views in its first 24 hours online, shattering the previous (albeit short-lived) record of 139 million set by The Fate of the Furious. Those would be extraordinary numbers for any movie, but for an unapologetic horror film about a demon clown? Not even the most aggressive Warner Bros. projections could have predicted that.