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 Alien: Covenant, Power Rangers, Spy 2, and Spider-Man: Homecoming.
First off, let us apologize for the somewhat “spoilery” nature of this headline, but this is also a story (like most of what we cover here) which has been highly publicized this week, and it’s not something we initiated. (Spoiler complaints should be lobbed at the source — in this case, Entertainment Weekly, which didn’t exactly hide this news when they put it right on their cover this week.) That big reveal is, of course, that Darth Vader is returning to the Star Wars movies, and it’s not Hayden Christensen, but the original voice of Darth Vader, James Earl Jones, who turned 85 this year. What is currently unknown is who will actually be physically portraying Darth Vader in the helmet and cape, but so far, it doesn’t sound like 80-year-old David Prowse will be returning for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. In related news, EW also confirmed this week that the character Forest Whitaker will play in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is Saw Gerrera. That’s significant to “deep” Star Wars fans, as Saw Gerrera is a character from The Clone Wars animated series. Finally, in other casting news tangentially related to Star Wars, John Boyega (AKA Finn from the Star Wars episode movies) landed a hot new role this week as the first confirmed cast member to join director Kathryn Bigelow’s untitled movie about the 1967 Detroit Riot, which will be her first feature film since 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty. This film is expected to be an ensemble drama, so we can probably expect to see much more casting in the weeks to come.
The idea of “dueling movies” is decades old (Volcano vs Dante’s Peak, Armageddon vs Deep Impact; heck, there were even two competing Truman Capote movies a while back), but it’s something that Hollywood keeps doing year after year. One of the latest concepts that two different studios are trying to beat each other at producing first is the notion of mystery author Agatha Christie‘s struggles as a young writer. Sony Pictures has an Agatha Christie movie that they hope Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina, The Danish Girl) will star in, while Paramount Pictures has a similar project, and their top choice is Emma Stone. (Vikander is Swedish, Stone is American, and Agatha Christie herself was English.) Sony’s project reportedly would portray the celebrated author as a “proto-feminist” whose early career “intersects” with the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) and future PM Winston Churchill. A key element for either movie to be greenlit will be the approval of Agatha Christie’s estate, which is reportedly known in film development for their tight control of all things Christie-related. One such film project that utltimately did get approval (after seven years of negotiations) is Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, which is now scheduled for release by 20th Century Fox for release on November 22, 2017 (with an ensemble cast likely to include Angelina Jolie).
For the past several months, as news about Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant has emerged, one of the few things that we thought we knew “for sure” was that Noomi Rapace would not be returning after starring in Prometheus (to which Alien: Covenant is a sequel). That was despite confirmation months ago that Michael Fassbender would be reprising his android role from Prometheus. Well, this week, it was reported that you can scratch all that, because Noomi Rapace is indeed in Australia right now to film what is described as “weeks” of production on Alien: Covenant. The duration of her involvement there is important because it eliminates the likelihood that Rapace is just filming a cameo appearance. Rapace and Fassbender will be joined in Alien: Covenant by new cast members Demian Bichir, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, and Katherine Waterston when 20th Century Fox releases the film next summer, on August 4, 2017.
If you follow box office at all (or socially follow sources that report on that stuff), you may have heard that this summer of 2016 has been especially rough on sequels, as long as you don’t count Finding Dory or Captain America: Civil War, that is. The thing is, and let’s be very pragmatic here, that Hollywood is — and long has been — built around the concept of franchises. Now, sometimes those franchises happen organically (such as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, where the multiple movies are clearly based on pre-existing multi-part properties), but if such sources aren’t available, then the most obvious road to “franchisedom” are sequels (or maybe prequels if they’re especially creative about it). There has been a lot of talk that maybe studios and producers should back off on sequels, but one director/producer who doesn’t seem to be fazed is Paul Feig, whose next film is the Ghostbusters remake (7/15/16). It was reported a while back that Feig was working on a sequel to his Melissa McCarthy (and Sandra Bullock) comedy hit The Heat, and this week, he talkd about a sequel to another Melissa McCarthy comedy hit. That movie is last year’s Spy, and Feig is already talking up his interest in reuniting with Jason Statham, the “dimbulb” secret agent that initially seems like the movie’s star. In other “spy-like” movie news (which actually happened late last week, but it missed our deadline), Paramount Pictures is also now reportedly working on reviving another franchise, namely The Saint, which in the 1960s was a Roger Moore TV show, and in 1997, was a movie starring Val Kilmer.
Their new movie Central Intelligence may technically have been #2 last weekend, but when the competition is the $135 million opening of Finding Dory, there are very few movies that wouldn’t have been #2 (or lower). Reportedly produced on a budget of just $50, the action comedy is widely seen as a proportional hit that adds to the box office clout of both of its stars, Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart. So, in the way that Hollywood frequently operates, this was a week with new projects being announced for both of them. In both cases, however, these movies are currently only being produced by the stars, with the possibility of them starring in them implied, but not necessarily confirmed. Dwayne Johnson is now developing the graphic novel adaptation Son of Shaolin at Sony Pictures, which as the title suggests, is a “kung fu” action movie. Somewhat burying the lead arguably, one story about Son of Shaolin also casually mentioned that Universal Pictures apparently is hoping to recruit Johnson to star in their next adaptation of The Wolf Man. As for Kevin Hart, the movie he made news with this week is another action comedy called Run the Jewels, at Universal Pictures, about “a group of unsuccessful rappers trying to rob an eccentric hip-hop mogul” (which sort of sounds like a hip hop Tower Heist or Ocean’s Eleven?).
If Spider-Man: Homecoming had stopped adding new actors before this week, it still would have seemed like a superhero movie with an impressive ensemble cast, after such recent additions as Donald Glover (Community), Tony Revolori (The Grand Budapest Hotel), and Logan Marshall-Green (Prometheus). This week, however, is when Sony/Marvel’s ambitious casting really got sort of crazy, with the news of four more actors. For most of them, no details are known, so there’s not much to do but list them. But, let’s start with Fargo season two costar Bokeem Woodbine, because he is the third confirmed “villain” for the movie (though we don’t know who or what that means), in addition to Logan Marshall-Green and Michael Keaton (who may or may not be playing the Vulture). The other new Spider-Man: Homecoming cast members added this week were Michael Mando (Better Call Saul), Abraham Attah (Beasts of No Nation), and comedian Hannibal Buress (Broad City, Daddy’s Home). Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios have scheduled Spider-Man: Homecoming for release next summer, on July 7, 2017.
This week, as studios and production companies sometimes do, Sony Pictures Animation announced new release dates for some of their upcoming films. But this time, included in the mix was a newly revealed movie called The Star. That film (The Star is a working title) will be a Christmas tale about the animals involved in “The Nativity Story,” including “a small but brave donkey and his animal friends [who] become the unsung heroes of the greatest story ever told.” Sony Pictures has scheduled The Star for December 8, 2017. Sony Animation’s other newly dated films include (the fully animated) Smurfs: The Lost Village (4/7/17), Emojimovie: Express Yourself (August, 2017), Hotel Transylvania 3 (9/21/2018), and the animated Spider-Man (12/21/18).
It might seem like a distant memory now, but there was a time, less than a decade ago, when Bryan Cranston was mostly known for playing the dad on the TV show Malcolm in the Middle. Or maybe, if you are a superfan of the 1990s kids TV show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, you also knew that Cranston provided the voices of the characters “Twinman” and “Snizzard.” (This was certainly news to this writer.) The producers of that show probably had no way of imagining the sort of amazing career rebirth Cranston would have decades later, but their decisions in 1993 may have helped them land something of a casting coup in 2016. That’s because Bryan Cranston has agreed to join the cast of next year’s Power Rangers (3/24/17). Cranston will play Zordon, the floating head “creator and mentor” of the Power Rangers. In the original show, Zordon sort of looked like The Wizard of Oz, or maybe Marlon Brando as Jor-El in Superman. Anyway, despite the gravitas Bryan Cranston might bring to the film, this is still going to be a Power Rangers movie after all, which haven’t historically performed well with critics. So, we’re calling this one a borderline “Rotten Idea,” (but our fingers are crossed for the best, honest!).
As you may have noticed in the trailers, this weekend’s sequel Independence Day: Resurgence (35 percent on the Tomatometer) features a 3,000-mile wide alien ship that causes Earth’s gravity to reverse. Of course, that’s the sort of “disaster porn” moviegoers have come to expect from director Roland Emmerich, who has destroyed landmarks in such movies as White House Down, 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and of course, the original Independence Day back in 1996. And if Emmerich’s latest deal eventually leads to a movie, there will be more Earthly disaster to come. That’s because Roland Emmerich sold a pitch to Universal Pictures this week called Moonfall, whose premise is exactly what you might predict from its title. The sci-fi film will be about “an unlikely band of misfits who must unite to save humanity when the moon falls out of orbit and hurtles towards earth,” because of course it is. Roland Emmerich has directed nine feature films since Independence Day, but only 2000’s The Patriot received a Fresh Tomatometer score, so Moonfall is very easy to name a “Rotten Idea.”
For the most part, what we report in the Weekly Ketchup are the various development deals or casting announcements that lead to movies getting made someday, and abstractly, this is all just “fun” stuff. It’s the movies! Unfortunately, sometimes there is a tragedy with very real impact on everyone involved (as well as the movie industry). Such a tragedy happened on Sunday, when Russian-American actor Anton Yelchin died in a freak accident involving his vehicle at his home in Studio City, California. Yelchin was born in Leningrad but moved to the USA as an infant, and became a child actor at the age of 9, including appearances in TV shows such as ER, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Judging Amy, and The Practice. As an adult, he enjoyed an impressively prolific career as a film actor, appearing in over 30 films since 2008. The role that gave Yelchin his highest profile, however, was almost certainly his version of Pavel Chekov in Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness, and next month’s Star Trek Beyond. (This was also a bad week for Star Trek fans for another reason, which you can read about here, and here.) Anton Yelchin’s Certified Fresh films included Star Trek, Like Crazy, Only Lovers Left Alive, Experimenter, From Up on Poppy Hill, and the remake of Fright Night, and he leaves behind several completed films awaiting release, including Star Trek Beyond, Thoroughbred, Remertory, We Don’t Belong Here, Porto, and the Netflix series with Guillermo Del Toro called Trollhunters. Yelchin will be greatly missed by both fellow film collaborators and moviegoers in general.
