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 Justice League, The New Mutants, and new sequels for The Boss Baby, Mamma Mia!, and Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween.
(Photo by Jay Maidment/Walt Disney Pictures, Simon Cardwell/Warner Bros. Pictures courtesy Everett Collection)
This week, we learned that on March 20th, director Zack Snyder’s 20-year-old daughter, the young activist Autumn Snyder (creator of the Write-a-Thon charity), committed suicide. As Snyder, his wife Deborah (producer and frequent partner on his films), and the rest of their family continue to grieve Autumn’s death, the couple are stepping away from their next film, WB and DC’s Justice League (scheduled for release on November 17). Joss Whedon (Marvel’s Avengers, TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is now stepping in to continue the directing duties on Justice League as the production is set to commence a series of reshoots written by Whedon. Justice League will be Whedon’s first DC Comics project, but it’s his second announced for DC, after Batgirl (which was announced on March 30, 10 days after Autumn Snyder’s death). It is not yet known if Zack Snyder will direct another DC Comics adaptation after his work on Justice League, but he had originally been attached to the second Justice League film as well. (Footnote: This story about the Justice League reshoots also broke this week, just hours before the Joss Whedon news.)
(Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)
There have obviously been movies and TV shows inspired by Internet pop culture before, but this week, we learned of a particularly strange and funny example. Let’s start at the beginning. In 2014, an image was posted to Tumblr of pop singer Rihanna and actress Lupita N’yongo at a Miu Miu fashion show. The Tumblr caption read, “They look like they’re in a heist movie with Rihanna as the tough-as-nails leader/master thief and Lupita as the genius computer hacker.” Can you guess where this is going? This week, we learned that director Ava DuVernay (Selma, next year’s A Wrinkle in Time, scheduled for 3/9/18) has signed a deal with Netflix to direct a film for the streaming service in which Rihanna will play a master thief planning a heist, and Lupita Nyong’o will play a genius computer hacker. The meme-inspired movie is probably at least a year (or two) away from release; in the meantime, Rihanna will costar in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and next year’s Ocean’s Eight. Lupita Nyong’o’s upcoming films include this December’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi (reprising her role as Maz Kanata), and next year’s Black Panther.
(Photo by Steve Dietl/Lionsgate courtesy Everett Collection)
We’re now less than a year out from 20th Century Fox’s The New Mutants, an X-Men spinoff previously described as a “Young Adult” movie (it will be directed by Josh Boone, of The Fault in Our Stars). With filming scheduled to start soon, we can now report that The New Mutants will be “a full-fledged horror movie set within the X-Men universe… There are no costumes. There are no supervillains.” Considering we’ve known that they’re adapting the “Demon Bear Saga”, that’s not really that surprising. What’s more surprising is that Rosario Dawson (who ties Netflix’s Marvel shows together as Night Nurse Claire Temple) is now in talks to co-star in The New Mutants as Dr. Cecilia Reyes, who in the comics was once a member of the X-Men. We also heard about some Deadpool 2 casting this week, in that Jack Kesy (TV’s The Strain) is now in talks to play a villain who might be Black Tom Cassidy. And finally, Sony has hired director Gina Prince-Bythewood (The Secret Life of Bees) to work on their second Spider-Man (they’re-not-calling-it-a-) spinoff, Silver and Black, about the adventures of Silver Sable and Black Cat. Prince-Bythewood also recently directed the pilot episode of Marvel’s upcoming Cloak and Dagger TV series on Freeform.
(Photo by Richard Foreman Jr./Weinstein Company courtesy Everett Collection)
We are far enough from Hollywood’s golden age that the closest modern audiences have gotten to seeing classic Hollywood stars on the big screen is when they’re played by other actors. We’re thinking, for example, of Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, or Cate Blanchett and Kate Beckinsale as Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. Most recently, it was announced this week that Jessica Chastain will produce and star in Seducing Ingrid Bergman as the titular star of Casablanca in the true story of her romance with famed WWII photojournalist Robert Capa. The role of Capa has not been cast yet, and the film also does not yet have a director.
(Photo by Universal courtesy Everett Collection)
When it comes to movie news, release dates aren’t typically the first thing we hear about, but it does sometimes happen, as we saw (at least) twice this week. Probably the most surprising was the late breaking news on Friday that Universal Pictures has scheduled Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! for release on July 20th, 2018. So, yes, 10 years after the first ABBA musical adaptation gave Universal a summer hit, they’re bringing Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan back for a sequel. Not much else is known yet, except that it will be directed and written by Ol Parker (screenwriter of the two Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies), and will feature various ABBA songs which weren’t in the first movie. There were a lot of ABBA songs in that movie, so it should be interesting to see how deep into their catalog the sequel will dive. The original Mamma Mia! has a Rotten Tomatometer score of just 54 percent.
(Photo by 20th Century Fox Film Corp.)
If you go back and think about what films were expected to become early 2017 box office hits, DreamWorks’ The Boss Baby was barely a blip on the radar for most pundits. And yet, the movie did indeed become quite a hit for 20th Century Fox (just before DreamWorks Animation transitioned over to Universal Pictures). The Boss Baby is currently the #6 worldwide hit, with a global take right now at just over $468 million (in between Kong: Skull Island and Fifty Shades Darker). So, like the aforementioned Mamma Mia! sequel, we also learned this week about The Boss Baby 2 (working title) via its release date, which will be March 26th, 2021. The Boss Baby was DreamWorks Animation’s biggest non-sequel box office hit since 2013’s The Croods (which at one point was going to get a sequel — that plan has since been scrapped). Alec Baldwin is expected to return as the voice of the titular infant, but little else is known about the sequel’s potential premise. The Boss Baby received a Rotten Tomatometer score of just 52 percent.
In August of 2012, Hollywood mourned the loss of director Tony Scott (Enemy of the State, Man on Fire, Unstoppable) to suicide. In the aftermath of his death, we learned that Scott had spent his final days with Tom Cruise, scouting locations for Top Gun 2, with production scheduled to start in 2013. This week, Cruise made quite a bit of news (you may have seen this on your social media) with the proclamation that the Top Gun movie is indeed still happening, with filming now scheduled to start in 2018. In this sequel, Cruise’s “Maverick” will reportedly play a modern “drone” pilot to a whole new generation of pilots. As for who might direct this Top Gun sequel, the top contender is Joseph Kosinksi, who previously worked with Tom Cruise on the sci-fi movie Oblivion (which like his first film, Tron: Legacy, earned Kosinksi a Rotten Tomatometer score).
(Photo by Jonathan Prime/Warner Bros. courtesy Everett Collection)
The video game adaptation Uncharted has been in development at Sony Pictures for several years now, as evidenced by this piece from MTV back in 2009 predicting that Nathan Drake could be played by Nathan Fillion. Mark Wahlberg might have come closer, but we heard about his departure in December. This week, we heard news that might explain why neither of these 40-something stars will be Nathan Drake (at least not in the first movie). Sony Pictures is going younger — much younger — and making the Uncharted movie a prequel showing how Nathan Drake became the adventurer we know from the games (similar to next year’s Tomb Raider movie, starring Alicia Vikander). We know that because Sony has cast 20-year-old Tom Holland, who is also starring in Sony’s Spider-Man: Homecoming this summer. Uncharted will be directed by Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum, Real Steel), which gives this story two reasons for being Rotten: Levy’s own Tomatometer, and the awful track record for video game movies in general.
(Photo by Brenden-John Bugatti/Screen Gems courtesy Everett Collection)
Earlier this year, director Paul W.S. Anderson and his wife Milla Jovovich wrapped their sixth film in the Resident Evil franchise with Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. The curious thing about the franchise is that, because each sequel spun off Alice’s original story from the first movie, none of them has been a direct adaptation of any of the Resident Evil video games. If you’ve ever thought, “Hey, they should reboot the Resident Evil franchise and actually adapt those great games,” well, then this week’s news has got you half-covered, even if it’s the less interesting half. The German production company Constantin Film, which has been behind the Resident Evil franchise all along, is now planning to reboot the series with another six movies. What we don’t know is whether or not the new movies will adapt the video games, or whether or not they’ll be good enough to break the cycle of Rotten video game adaptations mentioned in the item above.
(Photo by Daniel McFadden/Lionsgate courtesy Everett Collection)
One of the most surprising announcements early last year was the revelation that Tyler Perry was indeed turning the “joke” movie Tyler Perry’s Boo: A Madea Halloween (from Chris Rock’s Top Five) into an actual movie. Well, we received another similar surprise this week when Lionsgate announced that Tyler Perry’s Madea will return in another Halloween “horror” comedy, scheduled for October 20, 2017. This time around, “Madea, Bam, and Hattie venture to a haunted campground and the group must literally run for their lives when monsters, goblins, and the bogeyman are unleashed.” If you don’t count 2009’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself, the highest any proper Madea movie has ever scored on the Tomatometer is 38 percent (2011’s Madea’s Big Happy Family).
