This week’s Ketchup brings you another ten headlines from the world of film development news (those stories about what movies Hollywood is working on for you next). Included in the mix this time around are stories about such titles as Spider-Man: Homecoming, Daddy’s Home 2, Now You See Me 3, and Three’s Company.
We’re still nearly two months away from seeing Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart team up in the action comedy Central Intelligence (6/17/16). Their on-screen comedy chemistry is already, apparently, inspiring other studios to try to repeat it, because this week, the team of Johnson and Hart made some big casting news again. Sony Pictures has signed Dwayne Johnson and hopes to sign Kevin Hart to star in their planned remake of their 1995 fantasy comedy Jumanji. The late Robin Williams starred in the original movie as a man trapped in a magical jungle for over 25 years. Who’s playing who hasn’t been confirmed yet, but it’s likely that Hart is being eyed to play the trapped man-child, while Johnson seems like the more likely choice to play the “game” hunter trying to get him back into the game (along with his new friends). The Jumanji remake will be directed by Jake Kasdan (Sex Tape, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story), and Sony Pictures has already scheduled it for release on July 28, 2017, a date it currently has to itself (the week before Alien: Covenant, Pitch Perfect 3, and the animated comedy Blazing Samurai).
There are a relative handful of characters (both fictional and historical) who have appeared in the most number of movies, with some examples being: Dracula and Sherlock Holmes (fictional); and Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte (historical). Biblical figures have also appeared in many films, with the three most prolific being God, Moses, and Jesus Christ (not necessarily in that order). In the last few decades, the actors who have played Jesus Christ in feature films have included Willem Dafoe, Henry Ian Cusick, Jim Caviezel, Diogo Morgado, and most recently, Ewan McGregor (Last Days in the Desert). This week, we learned that the next major movie star who is now in talks to play Jesus Christ is Joaquin Phoenix. If Phoenix signs on, he will portray Jesus Christ in Mary Magdalene, which Rooney Mara (Carol) is already attached to star in as the titular Biblical figure. Phoenix and Mara previously costarred together in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her. Mary Magdalene will be the next film for Top of the Lake director Garth Davis, who will make his feature film debut with the upcoming film Lion, in which Rooney Mara also stars (along with Nicole Kidman, Dev Patel, and David Wenham).
You may have heard recently about the controversy over Scarlett Johansson’s casting in the (currently filming) live action remake of Ghost in the Shell (scheduled for 3/31/17). This week, Johansson signed on for a very different type of movie, as she is now attached to star as Zelda Fitzgerald in the biopic The Beautiful and the Damned. As her name suggests, Zelda Fitzgerald was the wife of author F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night), and together, they were both famed figures of America’s “Jazz Age” of the 1920s. Later in life, Zelda Fitzgerald was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spent her remaining years institutionalized. A director hasn’t been announced yet for The Beautiful and the Damned, which was adapted by screenwriter Hanna Weg (Septembers of Shiraz; cowriter of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet). Scarlett Johansson is also expected to start filming later this year, reprising her role as Black Widow in Avengers: Infinity War Part I (5/4/18).
J.J. Abrams may be moving on to other non-Lucasfilm projects after Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he won’t still be reuniting with actors that he collaborated with on that film. We know that because this week, it was revealed that Abrams will be reuniting with Daisy Ridley (Rey in SW:TFA) on a “fantasy thriller” called Kolma. Abrams will be producing (not directing) Kolma, which is an English-language adaptation of the 2003 Israeli TV movie All I’ve Got (Kol Ma She’Yesh Li). Ridley will play an elderly woman who, when she dies, is given the chance to return to the day when, as a 22-year-old, the great love of her life died in a horrible car accident. Kolma will be directed by Marielle Heller, who made her feature film directorial debut last summer with The Diary of a Teenage Girl. The last time J.J. Abrams produced a movie he didn’t direct, it was released as 10 Cloverfield Lane, but it’s not expected that such a “fake out” will happen this time with Kolma (but you never know!). (Late breaking Friday news: Marielle Heller is also attached to direct a feature film adaptation of the HBO documentary The Case Against 8, about the legal battle to overturn California’s same sex marriage ban.)
Emma Stone is currently filming the 1970s-true-story-tennis-comedy Battle of the Sexes, playing Billie Jean King against Steve Carell’s Bobby Riggs. As much as that film is aiming (arguably) for a female audience, Stone is now attached to another such comedy. Stone, Kate McKinnon, and Jillian Bell (Workaholics) are all now signed on to star in the 20th Century Fox comedy Women in Business, which the studio won the rights to recently following a bidding war versus other major studios. Women in Business will be a road trip comedy, as the premise follows two corporate coworkers who are sent to Canada, where they are met up by a young intern. It’s currently unclear who has been cast to play the intern; it might be Jillian Bell, though Emma Stone is the youngest of the three actresses, at age 27 (Bell is 31, McKinnon is 32). Women in Business will be directed by Jake Szymanski, who will make his feature film debut this summer with Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, which is also a 20th Century Fox film. (Jake Szymanski also directed last year’s HBO sports mocumentary 7 Days in Hell.)
Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures are going to start filming very soon on Spider-Man: Homecoming (7/7/17), so right now, there is a lot of casting news going on for that highly anticipated third take on the classic superhero. Last week, there had been a story about Michael Keaton potentially being cast as the (or “a”) villain in the film, but this week, we learned that is no longer the case. However, we do know now that Robert Downey, Jr. has been confirmed to be costarring in Spider-Man: Homecoming as Tony “Iron Man” Stark (which isn’t terribly surprising, if you’re familiar with the Civil War comic event). Tony Revolori (the bellboy from The Grand Budapest Hotel) and soap opera actress Laura Harrier have also been cast in key roles. As for who might be replacing Keaton as the Vulture (if Vulture is indeed one of the film’s villains, obviously), there was also a rumor this week that Jeff Goldblum might be in the running (because he basically hinted so).
In other superhero movie casting news, Willem Dafoe is also set to return to the genre (following his turn as Green Goblin in the first Spider-Man), but this time, there’s two key differences. Willem Dafoe is following J.K. Simmons (formerly Marvel’s J. Jonah Jameson, now DC’s Jim Gordon) into the Justice League movies from Marvel to DC, and from a villain to a “good guy.” Other than that, however, we don’t know anything else about Dafoe’s character, although there has been speculation that he will not be playing a superhero. There are plenty of non-superhero characters in the extended DCU that Dafoe could play, especially if his character is indeed at least “sort of” a superhero. You can read some speculative “listicles” here, here, and oh look, here too. Warner Bros has scheduled Justice League Part One for November 17, 2017, and Justice League Part Two for June 14, 2019. Both films are expected to be directed by Zack Snyder (Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice), hence this being one of the week’s “Rotten Ideas” (not so much because of Willem Dafoe).
As we see frequently, when it comes to sequels, box office success is more generally a factor than critical success (ie, “duh”). So, when Paramount Pictures sees a worldwide box office take of $240 million for the relatively inexpensive comedy like Daddy’s Home, well, it’s obvious what this story is about. Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg have both signed on with Paramount Pictures to return for Daddy’s Home 2. The premise hasn’t been revealed yet, but it’s easy to speculate that, as with similar sequels (Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, for example), the setup might be “basically the same, except the opposite.” Unless it’s not. Anyway, Daddy’s Home earned a Rotten score of just 32 percent, so this is one of this week’s Rotten Ideas.
We’re still two months away from knowing if the sequel Now You See Me 2 can achieve the sort of “surprise” box office success that the first film did. However, Lionsgate is very much looking for every new franchise opportunity (with The Hunger Games done, and Divergent soon to be). So, the studio is eyeing Now You See Me and are already developing Now You See Me 3. For the third film, Lionsgate has recruited director Jon M. Chu, whose most recent film as director was last year’s flop adaptation of Jem and the Holograms. This is one of the week’s Rotten Ideas, not just because of Chu’s Tomatometer, but also because Now You See Me only earned a 49 percent Rotten score, and we don’t know how critics will receive Now You See Me 2.
Gripes about remakes or box office-fueled sequels are much more common, but another seemingly unending trend in Hollywood (dating back to the 1980s) is the urge to adapt old TV shows into new properties via feature films. The thing is, sometimes these movies actually work, but that doesn’t necessarily mean pundit columnists like this writer can’t be a little cynical about some of them. This week’s example is the 1977-1984 ABC sitcom Three’s Company, whose feature film rights New Line Cinema is now in negotiations to acquire. Presuming the deal goes through, New Line will be hiring the screenwriters of their Rotten (40 percent Tomatometer) 2009 comedy He’s Just Not That Into You to adapt the show into a movie. The Three’s Company movie, like the original sitcom, will be set in the 1970s and will presumably depict a straight man (Jack Tripper) who pretends to be gay so that he can live with two cute girls without getting in trouble with his/their landlords. The behind-the-scenes story of the making of Three’s Company was also adapted in 2003 as the TV movie Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Three’s Company.
