Movie News

Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” topped 100 million at the domestic box office on Friday, becoming one of the rare films without superheroes or dinosaurs to reach that mark. Globally, the Warner Bros. film has made over 170 million, an impressive result for this kind of material.

To be fair, “Elvis” was expensive. The movie which looks at Elvis Presley’s rise to become one of the hottest acts in rock ‘n’ roll, as well as his struggles with drugs and changing tastes, cost 85 million to produce and tens of millions more to market.

“Elvis” stars Tom Hanks as the singer’s manager Colonel Tom Parker with relative newcomer Austin Butler in the title role. Butler, who beat out higher profile actors like Ansel Elgort and Miles Teller to land the part, has attracted Oscar buzz. “Elvis” has a good chance to bypass “Australia” and its 211.8 million haul to become the second highest-grossing film of Luhrmann’s career.

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The Toronto Film Festival is set to give Nicholas Stoller’s romantic comedy Bros, starring Billy Eichner, a world premiere in September.

Universal Pictures’ Bros is billed as the first major studio film with an all-openly LGBTQ principal cast and will have a high-profile red carpet launch at TIFF. Eichner and Stoller co-wrote Bros, which is produced by Judd Apatow.

The ensemble cast includes Luke Macfarlane, Amanda Bearse, Guy Branum, Guillermo Díaz, Dot-Marie Jones, Miss Lawrence, Eve Lindley, Ts Madison, Jim Rash and Monica Raymund. All of the principal heterosexual roles will be played by openly LGBTQ performers.

Bros is also produced by Stoller and Josh Church and is executive produced by Eichner and Karl Frankenfield.

Universal is set to release Bros on Sept. 30, and the film has already had trailer drops and talent appearances at CinemaCon. Toronto returns for a 47th edition from Sept.

“Where the Crawdads Sing,” Sony’s adaptation of the hit novel by Delia Owens and produced by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, earned 2.3 million in its Thursday preview screenings that began at 3 p.m. The film played at 3,150 locations on Thursday and will open in approximately 3,625 locations this weekend.

“Crawdads” opens new this week against Paramount’s animated family film “Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank,” which also had previews on Thursday starting at 3 p.m. It made 505,000 from 2,650 locations; it’s scheduled to open on approximately 3,400 screens this weekend. Both films are expected to fall behind “Thor: Love and Thunder” as it moves into its second weekend.

Sony is projecting a 9-10 million three-day opening weekend against a 24 million budget. And while “Crawdads” is aimed at a younger crowd, prominently featuring a new Taylor Swift song “Carolina” as a means of attracting those audiences, the film is also

While movie buffs love to meticulously rank the filmographies of their favorite directors, filmmakers are often much more hesitant to pit their own works against each other. The process of making a film can be so personal that choosing one over another is often compared to a parent choosing their favorite child. Still, a handful of outspoken filmmakers were inclined to do precisely that.

Whether their remarks came at the end of a lengthy career while in a reflective mood, or in the heat of the moment when defending work against criticism, some of Hollywood’s top directors have singled out one of their films as their all-time favorite. Sometimes their picks are obvious, and other times they’re downright shocking.

Keep reading to see eight beloved directors reveal their favorite films that they made.

"The Shield," FX's cop drama about the LAPD's anti-gang "Strike Team," is easily one of the most satisfying dramas of the Prestige TV era. It's all because of one word: consequence. Stories organically feed into one another across seasons and the characters never escape the results of their actions, even if those results aren't the obvious ones. Watching the bill come due for Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) in the finale, "Family Meeting," is as rewarding a TV experience as can be.

Creator Shawn Ryan is justifiably proud of the series, but he's also admitted that if he had better foresight of the show's success, then he...

The post The One Thing Shawn Ryan Would Change About The Shield appeared first on /Film.

Trigger Warning: This post contains subject matter related to mental health and suicide. If you or a loved one is in crisis, please reach out to National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-talk or the Crisis Text Line (Text Talk to 741741) to talk to someone who can help.In recent years, actor Zachary Levi has become a crusader for mental health. During a Q&a at Los Angeles Comic Con '21, the "Shazam!" star paused questions to check in on the people in the audience, asking if any of them struggled with stress, anxiety, and/or depression. Hands shot into the air....

The post How the Death of Robin Williams Helped Zachary Levi Take his Own Mental Health Seriously appeared first on /Film.

While the notion of presenting multiple, independent stories as sharing a larger, interconnected super-narrative is a conceit that goes back at least as far as Homer, modern sci-fi nerds can credit modern notions of "canon" to Trekkies and to Whovians in the 1960s. The notion that fictional characters were having adventures outside of what was depicted on screen — that is: canon, but in a pop media context — began with "Star Trek." Since then, much of sci-fi TV has endeavored to keep canon an active part of its writing with creators paying close attention to characters' personal histories, the way fictional technologies work, and...

The post Futurama Relied On The Fans To Keep Its Canon Straight appeared first on /Film.

Disney+ has Jedis and superheroes, but Hulu has prestige. The Disney-backed streamer scored 58 Emmy nominations this year, more than doubling its haul from 2021, but the prestige factor goes well beyond accolades for “Only Murders in the Building.” For at least five years, Hulu money — that is, Disney money — has been critical to sustaining arthouse distributors.

Hulu’s output deals with Neon, IFC, and Magnolia, as well as its in-house relationship with Searchlight, keeps the distributors in business. The only other major entity with similar deals is Showtime (aka Paramount money), with A24 and Bleecker Street. Now, if only they could spread those dollars around a bit more.

Earlier this year, this column argued that Sundance is now a market for VOD movies. Time for some clarity: We live in a VOD market bankrolled by the streaming landscape. Beyond the visibility provided by a theatrical release, cinema’s survival comes down

"No Country for Old Men" turned Josh Brolin's whole career around. 2007 was a big year for Brolin: He appeared in "No Country" and another Tommy Lee Jones film, "In the Valley of Elah," along with "Grindhouse" and "American Gangster." Prior to 2007, Brolin had costarred in other scattered studio pics like "Mimic" and "Hollow Man," which saw him working with directors like Guillermo del Toro and Paul Verhoeven, but his biggest claim to fame — apart from being the son of "Amityville Horror" star James Brolin — was arguably still his film debut in "The Goonies" back in 1985.

Brolin didn't have the...

The post Josh Brolin's No Country For Old Men Audition Didn't Play Out The Way He Had Hoped appeared first on /Film.

(Welcome to Year of the Vampire, a series examining the greatest, strangest, and sometimes overlooked vampire movies of all time in honor of "Nosferatu," which turns 100 this year.)

Guillermo del Toro's filmography and frequent collaboration with actor Ron Perlman began almost thirty years ago in an antique shop, where clocks are always ticking in the background and cockroaches come crawling out of the eye of an archangel statue. That seems symbolic somehow, as the does the white-haired shopkeeper's name, Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi), which could be translated as "Jesus Grey" ("Gris" is the Spanish word for "grey"), but in the context of...

The post Year of the Vampire: Guillermo del Toro's Cronos Reimagines Forever as a Gold Invention appeared first on /Film.

​The Lost City, ​Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum’s remote island romp​,​ joins classics from The African Queen to Fitzcarraldo

When The Lost City unassumingly racked up £160m at the global box office this spring, it proved a few things: the enduring appeal of the adult-targeted, star-driven romantic comedy, a genre that franchise-fixated studios have nonetheless sidelined of late; the near-supernatural ability of Sandra Bullock to conjure chemistry with just about any co-star you care to throw at her, in this case the resurgent Channing Tatum; and that laughs can still be wrung from the age-old premise of sticking two beautiful people in the wilderness and letting them fight their way out of it.

The far-flung great outdoors – be it Amazonian jungle or African plain – is among the most eternal antagonists in Hollywood cinema: it gives film-makers spectacle and actors obstacles, lending a sense of scale and heft to even the slightest stories.

Everyone loves a good surprise! Well, almost everyone. Audiences definitely do, particularly when it comes to horror movies. Some of the most memorable moments in horror history were completely unplanned, either improvised by the cast at just the right time or carefully (and stealthily) orchestrated by select crew members for maximum impact. The best reaction, after all, is usually an honest one, and if you're going for scares, there's really no better way than the sneak attack. The same is true of laughs, which often tend to overlap in the genre. 

Here we have the best of the best, some of the most iconic improvised moments in horror movie...

The post The Best Unscripted Moments in Horror History appeared first on /Film.

In 1994, Universal Pictures released the thriller "The River Wild" starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon. It was the story of a couple, their kid, and a dog who are white water rafting on the Salmon River in Idaho. They ultimately run into some criminals and find out that the rapids are the least of their worries on this dangerous family outing. 

Directed by Curtis Hanson, "The River Wild" also starred David Strathairn, John C. Reilly, Benjamin Bratt, Joseph Mazzello, and a very good dog named Maggie. (At least, that was the dog's name in the film, and its real name isn't in the...

The post The River Wild: Everything We Know So Far About the Thriller Remake appeared first on /Film.

The family of comedian Jak Knight has announced his death at the tragically young age of 28 years old. Knight was a writer and co-star on Netflix's envelope-pushing cartoon series "Big Mouth," playing the character DeVon. He died Thursday, July 14, 2022, and the family hasn't released any other details at this time.

Knight was a well-loved performer within the L.A. comedy scene and was just establishing himself as a top comedy writer with his multi-season-long contributions to Netflix's "Big Mouth" and his co-creator credit on Peacock's "Bust Down" with Sam Jay, Chris Redd, and Langston Kerman. He also worked with Sam Jay on HBO's talk show...

The post Jak Knight, Big Mouth and Bust Down star, dead at 28 appeared first on /Film.

Depending on who you ask, Robert Zemeckis' 1997 sci-fi drama "Contact" is either a philosophical masterpiece or a boring morality lesson. Wherever you land, though, it's hard to separate the film from the many problems it ran into after it was released. From George Miller suing Warner Brothers over a contract dispute to a First Amendment debate brought forward by the White House, a lot of attention was heaped upon the adaptation of Carl Sagan's 1985 novel, and not a lot of it was positive.

However, there was also quite a bit of trouble the film faced before and during production. The film, which centered around...

The post Contact Had A 'Cursed' Production From Start To Finish appeared first on /Film.

Across six seasons of the FX neo-Western "Justified," Timothy Olyphant gave one of the most indelible TV performances of the past decade. As ambivalent U.S. marshall Raylan Givens, the actor put an effortlessly charismatic spin on an archetype that audiences were already quite familiar with. The series is based on an Elmore Leonard story, and Raylan is a Leonard character to a T: daring, clever, sexy, and more than a little bit haunted by the demons of the Appalachian hometown he's forced to return to at the series' beginning.

Olyphant has carved out a satisfying niche for himself as a performer since...

The post How a Guest Role On Damages Led to Timothy Olyphant's Justified Casting appeared first on /Film.

Halloween episodes are something special for TV audiences. Some series, like "The Simpsons," take the opportunity to don darker clothing in their October "Treehouse of Horror" episodes, ramping up the mischief-making. Others, like Netflix's nostalgia goldmine "Stranger Things," bring a lighthearted blend of hilarity, horror, and maybe a little bit of nostalgia-mining. Among them all, absurdity blooms from the natural peculiarities of each character, and few shows have done it like "The Office" did. Former "Daily Show with Jon Stewart" correspondent Ed Helms, who played Dunder Mifflin paper salesman Andy Bernard on the stateside iteration of "The Office" (a show first originating...

The post Why a Rutherford Falls Halloween Episode is So Special to Ed Helms appeared first on /Film.

Of all the Doctor/companion dynamics of showrunner Russell T Davies' tenure on "Doctor Who," season 4 had the most interesting. After two companions in a row where the show flirted around with the idea of Ten (David Tennant) falling in love with his companion, they finally gave him Donna (Catherine Tate), a woman whose relationship with him was purely platonic the entire time. At no point did the show even consider the possibility of giving the two a melodramatic love story; they were simply good chums from start to finish.

This is part of why season 4 is often considered the strongest of the revival, with "Turn...

The post How Catherine Tate's Doctor Who Contract Determined Donna's Fate appeared first on /Film.

The Russo Brothers have officially entered the streaming-versus-theaters debate, weighing in on the “crisis” Hollywood faces due to a “culture war” over how films get made and released.

“We’re in crisis right now because everyone’s at war with each other,” Joe Russo told The Hollywood Reporter while promoting the release of Netflix’s “The Gray Man,” which opened today in select theaters ahead of its streaming premiere July 22. “It’s sad to see, as guys who grew up loving film. A thing to remember, too, is it’s an elitist notion to be able to go to a theater. It’s very fucking expensive. So, this idea that was created — that we hang on to — that the theater is a sacred space, is bullshit. And it rejects the idea of allowing everyone in under the tent.”

Joe Russo continued, “Where digital distribution is valuable, other than what I

Are you a Pokémon fan who knows every bit of trivia about every single creature? The Pokémon Company is looking for you! They recently posted a job listing for an archivist to help them create a real-life Pokémon archive and museum (via Vice). As someone who only joined the Pokémon train with "Pokémon Go," I definitely don't qualify, but maybe you do.

You would get to work with the company's Game Data Librarian, write policy, do large-scale inventories, catalog and preserve items, and help "develop the company's first internal archive from the ground up." It might sound a little dry from the description, but as Vice...

The post The Pokémon Company is Looking for a Pokémon Historian, Could It Be You? appeared first on /Film.