Movie News

Disney and 20th Century Studios’ “Free Guy” is expected to score the No. 1 spot at the domestic box office for the second week in a row.

The comedic action film, starring Ryan Reynolds, is projected to add another $16 million to $18 million to last weekend’s haul, for a total gross of $56 million to $58 million. The video game-based film took in $5.1 million on Friday from 4,165 theaters. “Free Guy” topped the box office charts in its opening weekend, pulling in $28.4 million and beating expectations in the process.

Despite growing concern over the Covid-19 delta variant, “Free Guy” has had a strong start for a movie during pandemic times. The film is the first Disney movie to have a theatrical-only release for the first time in about a year — with all of its prior releases being simultaneously available to rent on Disney Plus Premier Access — and the new strategy appears to be paying off.

Disney has filed a motion to force Scarlett Johansson into a private arbitration to address whether she is owed millions from the hybrid release of “Black Widow.”

In the motion, attorney Daniel Petrocelli also argues that Disney lived up to its obligation to give the film a “wide theatrical” release, but that nothing in the contract required the release to be exclusive to theaters.

Johansson filed a bombshell lawsuit on July 29, arguing that the decision to simultaneously release “Black Widow” in theaters and on Disney Plus cannibalized the film’s box office revenue and cost her tens of millions of dollars.

In the motion to compel arbitration, Petrocelli argued that “Black Widow” actually performed well, considering the ongoing pandemic. The film opened on July 9 and grossed $80 million domestically in its opening weekend — well below pre-pandemic Marvel standards, but $10 million more than Universal’s “F9” — which was an exclusive theatrical release.

“Lovecraft Country” and “Underground” creator Misha Green and Jurnee Smollett are teaming up for a third project, taking Smollett’s “Birds of Prey” character Black Canary on a new adventure in her own standalone film for HBO Max.

Smollett confirmed the news on Twitter, writing: “Guess the Canary is out of the cage! So excited to finally embark on this adventure with my creative soul sis.” The pair are developing the project with DC Films president Walter Hamada and Galen Vaisman.

Last year, Green and Smollett teased their interest in teaming up for a Black Canary project, telling Variety that they used to compete in the Dceu fighting video game “Injustice 2,” with Green choosing to play as Black Canary (the alter ego of songstress Dinah Lance).

In the interview, Green said that Smollett landing the role in 2020 movie “Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn” (directed

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and Bron Creative’s “The Addams Family 2” will be made available for at-home rental in the U.S. and Canada on the same day it opens in theaters.

The animated movie, which debuts Friday, Oct. 1, is a sequel to 2019’s “The Addams Family,” which made more than $203 million at the box office.

Oscar Isaac (who voices Gomez Addams), Charlize Theron (Morticia Addams), Chloë Grace Moretz (Wednesday Addams), Nick Kroll (Uncle Fester), Snoop Dogg (It) and Bette Midler (Grandma) reprise their roles from the original movie. Bill Hader joins the voice cast for the new installment as “Cyrus,” with Javon ‘Wanna’ Walton taking over the role of Pugsley Addams (voiced in the first movie by Finn Wolfhard).

Directed by Greg Tiernad and Conrad Vernon, and based on the beloved characters drawn by Charles Addams, the film will be released in the U.S. via MGM’s United Artists Releasing banner.

Disney+’s “Ironheart” series may still be pretty far off, but the heroine herself is not. Dominque Thorne’s Riri Williams will make her debut in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” according to an individual with knowledge of the project.

Disney’s “Ironheart” series was first announced at its Investor Day in December, revealing that Dominique Thorne will play Riri Williams, a young Black woman who takes over the mantle of Iron Man. “She started shooting, I think, this week before her Ironheart series,” Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige told ComicBook.com.

In the comics, Williams is a Black teen prodigy attending MIT who builds her own suit by reverse-engineering Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit design. Williams is also a genius like Tony, if that’s not immediately clear. In the comics, Pepper Potts mentors Riri in a similar fashion to how Tony took Peter Parker under his wing in the MCU,

Other than film festival audiences, “Dune” won’t be seen by most audiences until October. Still, director Denis Villeneuve is already preparing fans for his plans to move forward with a franchise. He’s currently writing “Dune: Part Two” with screenwriter Jon Spaihts and recently stated he could “realistically” begin filming the sequel in the fall of 2022.

Read More: Denis Villeneuve Says ‘Dune: Part Two’ Could “Realistically” Shoot Next Fall

Now, he’s jumping towards the idea of even making a “Dune” trilogy.

Continue reading Denis Villeneuve Teases A ‘Dune’ Trilogy & Potentially Adapting ‘Dune Messiah’ at The Playlist.

The search for a successor to late “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek has been a rocky one, culminating August 20 in executive producer Mike Richards’ resignation from the post. An executive producer on the series, Richards stepped down as host after numerous past scandals resurfaced including a harassment lawsuit and derogatory remarks he made on the podcast “The Randumb Show.” According to a new report out of The New York Times (via Uproxx), an awkward encounter on the set between Richards and “Jeopardy!” Mvp Ken Jennings, who hosted the series in early 2021, checkered Richards’ final moments on the production.

The taping for Season 38 took place on Thursday, kicking off with a ceremony prior to honor Trebek and featuring Jennings and fellow former contestant Buzzy Cohen. Per the Times:

A group of “Jeopardy!” loyalists had gathered for a ceremony to rename the show’s studio after Mr. Trebek, including Mr. Trebek’s widow,

Despite the fact that the Delta variant of Covid-19 has the pandemic getting worse around the country all over again, some major studios are opting to give movies exclusive theatrical releases without providing a home option by releasing them on streaming or VOD at the same time. However, MGM and Annapurna Pictures isn’t making that […]

The post ‘The Addams Family 2’ is Getting a VOD Rental Release the Same Day It Hits Theaters appeared first on /Film.

“Impeachment,” the latest outing in FX’s evolving “American Crime Story” universe, charts the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that rocked the nation in the 1990s. In the limited series debuting on September 7, “Booksmart” star Beanie Feldstein plays Monica Lewinsky opposite an unrecognizable Clive Owen as Bill Clinton, with Sarah Paulson, Annaleigh Ashford, Margo Martindale, Edie Falco, Billy Eichner, and Cobie Smulders rounding out the cast as the various figures involved in the controversy. Check out a new trailer for the series below.

According to Feldstein, Monica Lewinsky was personally involved every step of the way in the series’ creation. As she explained to Entertainment Weekly, “When I received the scripts, I knew that every word that I was saying was approved and had been to Monica first… [The producers] would go through the scripts with her and [she would] give all her feedback and her notes. And by the time it got to me, I was

BBC Reel’s online film festival LongShots returns this summer with a new format. The online streaming event, which makes 13 documentary shorts available to watch for free through September 22, convenes 13 international film festivals to showcase the best undistributed works in nonfiction filmmaking. You can watch them all through the BBC Reel website here.

Last year’s LongShots garnered more than 400,000 video views. This year’s showcase features a jury of four who will decide on the festival’s grand prize next month: Director Nandita Das from India, Oscar-nominated Polish director Anna Zamecka, Mexican-Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir, and award-winning Vietnamese American filmmaker Bao Nguyen (director of last year’s Bruce Lee documentary “Be Water”).

Per BBC, the films in the program “will explore inspiring and exhilarating stories that remind us of the pleasures and joys of human existence, honouring new beginnings and the wonders of our diverse, colorful and flamboyant world.

In Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the incomparable Tony Leung has stepped into the role of a character named Wenwu. You may know Wenwu by another name: the Mandarin. In a new interview, Leung discusses his approach to playing a proper version of the comic book villain on the big screen, and it […]

The post ‘Shang-Chi’ Actor Tony Leung Says He Never Played the Mandarin as a Villain appeared first on /Film.

The Walt Disney Company is taking Scarlett Johansson to task over her lawsuit against the Mouse House regarding the day-and-date streaming release of “Black Widow,” which she filed in July — and the studio is claiming the film made $125 million in “streaming and download retail receipts,” a rare admission of non-theatrical grosses. As reported by Deadline, a motion filed in LA Superior Court on Friday from Disney outside lawyers Daniel Petrocelli, Leah Godesky and Tim Heafner of O’Melveny & Myers Llp states, “Periwinkle agreed that all claims ‘arising out of, in connection with, or relating to’ Scarlett Johansson’s acting services for ‘Black Widow’ would be submitted to confidential, binding arbitration in New York.”

Periwinkle Entertainment is the company through which Johansson, who is suing Disney over box-office losses incurred when the film was put on Disney+ and in theaters simultaneously, offered acting services for the film.

Essentially, Disney’s lawyers

Yesterday, it was announced by WarnerMedia that they’ve added two more actors to their cast of “Our Flag Means Death,” a pirate comedy series at HBO Max that will be led by New Zealand comedian Rhys Darby and Taika Waititi as history’s most notorious pirate, Blackbeard.

They’ll be joined by Fred Armisen and Samba Schutte (“Sunnyside“)

Read More: ‘Peacemaker’: James Gunn Explains Why He Loves Writing The “Alt-Right Douchebag” In The New HBO Max Series

“Our Flag Means Death” is loosely based on the true adventures of Stede Bonnet (Darby), a pampered aristocrat who abandoned his life of privilege to become a pirate.

Continue reading ‘Our Flag Means Death’: Fred Armisen Joins Taika Waititi In HBO Max Pirate Series at The Playlist.

Leos Carax had a problem: he wanted to incorporate a small child with preternatural singing prowess into his deranged Sparks brothers movie musical “Annette,” but the director didn’t want to use a series of actual small humans, or digital technology. The solution? A puppet, which turned out to be perhaps the most polarizing element in an already quite polarizing musical starring Adam Driver as a sociopathic, narcissistic comedian called “The Ape of God” opposite Marion Cotillard as his soprano, opera-singing wife. The puppet dares you not to suspend your disbelief, but to actually embrace the artifice of the piece.

“The film seemed impossible to make,” Leos Carax said in a statement shared about his film. “Then an image came to me: a tiny star, alone and lost in the dark infinite — the smallness of Annette in the face of the world. I thought of Masha, a little girl I knew years ago in Ukraine.

Marvel Studios has long toyed with the idea of solo movies for supporting characters, but most of those ideas migrated to limited series for television on Disney+. “Hawkeye” is one of those coming in November, and another one announced in December is “Armor Wars,” a vehicle for Don Cheadle’s War Machine character. In the classic “Iron Man” storyline from the comic books, Tony Stark’s technology falls into the hands of some really nasty people leading to him tracking down multiple armored villains (Crimson Dynamo and Titanium Man are good candidates).

Continue reading ‘Armor Wars’: Marvel Hires ‘Black Monday’s Yassir Lester As Head Writer at The Playlist.

The actor, 53, talks about her charming dad, never reading her reviews in the papers, staying strong and eating nothing but shepherd’s pie

We grew up without money: two rooms and an outside loo. I remember shyly cowering behind the coal shed as Mum tried to photograph me, but by the age of four I was playing Mia Farrow’s daughter in The Great Gatsby. I loved the fantasy of acting, the contrast of the worlds in which I lived. It’s not that one was better, but going from life with not very much to this extravagant, surreal set opened my eyes to possibilities.

Dad was charming and a genius with numbers – he was also deep in the organised crime world. In the 60s, he worked with both the Kray twins (Reggie was my brother’s Godfather) and their arch enemies, the Richardsons. He went to prison quite a

Documentary filmmaker Drew Xanthopoulos started reading about whale cognition, culture and communication around four years ago, and was blown away by what he found.

“It was stranger than any science fiction I’d ever read or watched on the screen,” Xanthopoulos says. “It occurred to me that if I’m having this much of an emotional effect from reading about the science, surely the people who are out there on boats for months and months doing the work, it must be profound for them.”

So he started attending whale research conferences, where he met Michelle Fournet (pictured above right) and Ellen Garland, the subjects of his latest documentary “Fathom.” The film follows the two researchers out into the field as the former attempts to have a conversation with humpback whales, while the latter pieces together how whale song travels across vast swathes of ocean.

Variety caught up with Xanthopoulos ahead of the film’s U.

After wowing in Watchmen, the Emmy-winning actor is starring in a reboot of the timely 90s horror. ‘I want to inspire others to be magical,’ he says

Say his name: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Maybe repeat it five times into a mirror? Whatever it takes: commit it to memory because Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is a name you’ll need to know. This summer he’s starring in the new Candyman movie. It’s a terrifying, timely reimagining of the urban legend about the hook-handed, sweet-toothed bogeyman, who is conjured any time some fool recites his moniker into a reflective surface.

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The 55th edition of the Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival returned to life in a fully live format Friday after a year-long Covid-forced break, with its traditional rousing dance numbers and a lifetime achievement Crystal Globe for Michael Caine.

The versatile two-time Oscar winner prompted his third standing ovation from the audience packed into the fest’s Grand Hall at the Hotel Thermal when he raised his walking cane from the stage in thanks to his fans.

Saying he began his actor’s journey as “a nobody from nowhere who knew nothing,” Caine told the crowd, “You’ve given me an award for something I love doing.” Fest president Jiri Bartoska honored him with what the actor called the heaviest prize he’s ever tried to lift at an upbeat ceremony featuring elaborate choreography themed around the 1960s U.S. pop song “Popcorn,” with dancers whirling discs that riffed on

David Ondricek’s epic account of Olympic gold medalist and multiple record holder Emil Zatopek, who attained legendary status in the darkest days of the Czechoslovak communist regime, makes for a powerful opening film at this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

The director of “Whisper” and “In the Shadow,” who co-wrote the biopic with Alice Nellis and Jan P. Muchow, says the ambitious shoot, with detailed period depictions of five Olympic competitions for the star runner and the role of his gold medalist wife Dana, took 14 years to materialize and presented the challenge of capturing the gut-wrenching conflicts of a champion’s life under a system that forced upon him the role of socialist success symbol.

What was it about the life of Zatopek that drove your ideas while developing this story and how did you feel you finally found a way to crack the story?

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