This week’s Ketchup brings you more headlines from the world of film development news, covering such titles as the TRON: Ares, M3GAN 2.0, and the Michael Jackson biopic.
(Photo by ©Walt Disney Pictures)
Walt Disney World is getting ready to introduce their new TRON: Lightcycle / Run ride on April 4, 2023, and considering how Disney introduced their Avatar: Flight of Passage attraction before Avatar: The Way of Water, savvy Disney fans could probably have guessed this week’s news, which is that Disney will start filming the third TRON movie, TRON: Ares, in Vancouver in the summer of 2023. Jared Leto has been attached to star in TRON: Ares since 2017, and director Joachim Rønning is in talks to direct after previously working with Disney on two sequels, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (Rotten at 30%) and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (Rotten at 39%). TRON: Ares would actually be Rønning’s fourth film for Disney, however, as he has recently wrapped production on Disney’s Young Woman and the Sea, starring Daisy Ridley in the true story of the New York teen who became the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Neither TRON: Ares nor Young Woman and the Sea have a release date yet, but TRON: Ares will probably come out in either 2024 or 2025.
(Photo by ©Penguin Random House)
Sam Raimi and Paul Feig are both directors famous for their respective genres (horror comedies like Evil Dead 2 and comedy-comedies like Bridesmaids). Like the classic Reese’s Cup commercials, Raimi and Feig are preparing to bring their styles (or, at least, influences) to an adaptation of the novel Surburban Hell, which Raimi and Feig are both partnering on as producers for Legendary Entertainment. Suburan Hell tells the story of “a tight-knit group of suburban moms whose friendship is put to the ultimate test when one of them becomes possessed by an evil spirit,” so it’s easy to see how and why the directors of Bridesmaids and Evil Dead were inspired to team up with each other for it.
(Photo by Everett Collection)
Channing Tatum has started doing press for his upcoming sequel Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2/10/2023), and along the way, he has been talking about movies that he almost starred in (specifically, the X-Men spinoff Gambit), as well as an old movie he plans on rebooting. Tatum now has the rights to remake and reboot the classic 1990 romantic fantasy Ghost (Certified Fresh at 75%), starring Demi Moore as a pottery enthusiast, Patrick Swayze as her newly dead husband, and Whoopi Goldberg as a psychic who can actually see Swayze’s ghost. Tatum is currently seeking a director for the reboot, in which he might star in Swayze’s role, but he is also aware that the film will need to address “problematic stereotypes” present in the original. Tatum has not yet indicated who he has in mind to play the female lead.
(Photo by Nadja Klier/©Amazon Studios)
The year 2021 was difficult across the board for most movies, but in some cases, at least, Hollywood is giving franchises (like, as we recently reported, Mortal Kombat) hit hard by the pandemic a second chance with a new sequel. One example of a film seriously impacted by the pandemic was Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse (Rotten at 45%), which was originally supposed to be released theatrically by Paramount Pictures in October, 2020, before it eventually went “direct-to-Prime Video” in April of 2021. That film’s star, Michael B. Jordan, is getting a second chance to star as Tom Clancy’s John Clarke character in an adaptation of Clancy’s novel Rainbow Six, which also went on to inspire a whole franchise of popular video games. Rainbow Six will be directed by Chad Stahelski, who most famously directed John Wick (Certified Fresh at 86%) and recently wrapped the upcoming sequel John Wick Chapter 4 (3/24/2023). Michael B. Jordan will soon be seen in another sequel, Creed III (3/3/2023), which will also be his feature directorial debut.
(Photo by Amy Sussman, Samir Hussein/Getty Images)
Selena Gomez is likely to start filming season 3 of Only Murders in the Building (Fresh at 99%) later this year, but in the meantime, she’s sneaking in a musical crime comedy called Emilia Perez for French director Jacques Audiard, which starts filming this Spring. Gomez’s co-stars in Emilia Perez will include Zoe Saldana (coming off Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and with extra time now that her Star Trek 4 has been delayed and/or shelved), and Argentinian trans actor Karla Sofia Gascon, who will play the title character, a feared “Mexican cartel leader who has a sex change to get away from the law and become the woman he’s always wanted to be.”
(Photo by Geoffrey Short/©Universal Pictures)
After M3GAN (Certified Fresh at 95%) opened two weeks ago to over $30 million, we reported in last week’s Ketchup that Universal, Blumhouse, and Atomic Monster were already developing a M3GAN sequel. Another week, and with a box office total to date of $92 million, Universal Pictures has confirmed that the sequel, now titled M3GAN 2.0, will be released on January 17, 2025. Allison Williams and Violet McGraw, who played aunt and niece in the first film, are already signed to return for M3GAN 2.0 (though curiously, there’s no word yet about Amie Donald and Jenna Davis, the body and voice of M3GAN). M3GAN 2.0 is being written by screnwrriter Akela Cooper, who also wrote the first film.
(Photo by KMazur/Getty Images)
Director Antoine Fuqua is jumping from one historical biopic mired in controversy (because of “the slap”), Will Smith’s Emancipation (Rotten at 45%), to a musical biopic that seems even more rife with complications. Fuqua is attached to direct Michael, the long-in-development biopic about the life of pop star Michael Jackson. With Jackson’s estate on board as some of the producers, it’s expected that the biopic will focus more on his rise to fame and stardom, and probably a bit (or a lot) less on his later legal accusations. The Michael screenplay was adapted by screenwriter John Logan, who also tackled a controversial celebrity with Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator (Certified Fresh at 86%), and one of the producers is Graham King, who previously produced the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (Fresh at 60%). The role of Michael Jackson has not yet been cast.
