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 Captain Planet, Deadpool 2, Mary Poppins Returns, and the Willy Wonka prequel
The plundering of childhood nostalgia is (obviously) generational, and progressive. By this point, Hollywood is pretty much done with the 1960s and 1970s, and is starting to run out of material from the 1980s as well. The 1990s, however, is sort of just getting started. Kids cartoon shows really don’t get more 1990s than Captain Planet and the Planeteers, the 1990-1996 show about an international group of five well-intentioned (the four elements plus “the power of heart”) kids who can summon Captain Planet, a blue-skinned superhero and mullet enthusiast. The idea of a Captain Planet movie has been bounced around for a while now, but so far, the closest we’ve gotten is this NSFW Don Cheadle short film. That may change by the end of the decade, however, because this week, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions teamed up with Paramount Pictures to get a screenplay into fast development. There’s not yet any word as to whether DiCaprio will star in Captain Planet, but if he did, it might be more likely as one of the film’s anti-environment villains than as the title hero (and certainly not as one of the young Planeteers). A better possibility to play Captain Planet might be Everybody Wants Some star Glen Powell, who is being eyed as being one of the film’s screenwriters.
It has now been over 10 years since the release of the last stop-motion claymation movie from Aardman Studios directed by Nick Park, who codirected Chicken Run, the Wallace & Gromit shorts, and 2005’s Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. During that time, Nick Park has been focusing his efforts on other projects at Aardman, including the TV series Shaun the Sheep. Park will once again direct an Aardman feature film for 2018, a prehistoric comedy called Early Man, about the cultural shifts that result when Stone Age man (ie, “cavemen”) first come into contact with Bronze Age life (the whiz-bang high technology of the day). Eddie Redmayne will provide the voice of the lead caveman, and this week, we found out who will voice the film’s antagonist. Tom Hiddleston (AKA Marvel’s Loki) has joined Early Man as the voice of Lord Nooth, “governor of the Bronze Age town, who is a money-loving tyrant and rival to the film’s Stone Age hero, Dug (Redmayne).” Previous Aardman films were released in the USA by DreamWorks or Sony Pictures, but Early Man is currently seeking American distribution for its release sometime in 2018.
If your bladder was strong enough for you to stay until the end of Deadpool, you were able to see the Merc-with-a-Mouth confirm that he will be joined by Cable in the sequel (which will probably be called something like Deadpool & Cable). We still don’t know who will be playing Cable (sorry, KK!), but this week, a (relative) shortlist of actresses now testing to play another popular character was revealed. The character in question is fan favorite Domino, a mutant with the ability to manipulate probability (ie, ridiculously good luck for her, very unfortunate luck for bad guys), and a huge black circle tattoo over her left eye. The ten actresses up for the role of Domino include both established actresses and relative newcomers. Two of them have previous experience in comic book adaptations: Sofia Boutella (Kingsman: The Secret Service, Star Trek: Beyond) and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Scott Pilgrim vs the World, 10 Cloverfield Lane). Winstead and Lizzy Caplan (Showtime’s Masters of Sex) also both have the Cloverfield franchise in common. A couple are better known for spy movies: Eve Hewson (Bridge of Spies; Maid Marion in next year’s Robin Hood: Origins), Stephanie Sigman (Spectre; TV’s Narcos), and if you count G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra as a spy movie, Sienna Miller (American Sniper). Even if they’re not cast as Domino, both Mackenzie Davis (The Martian) and Dutch model-turned-actress Sylvia Hoeks will costar (in unknown roles) in next year’s Blade Runner 2049 (10/6/17). (Another model-turned-actress, Kelly Rohrbach, will be the new C.J. next summer in the Baywatch movie.) Speaking of franchise sequels, Ruby Rose has three such films coming in 2017: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, and John Wick Chapter 2. The Deadpool sequel doesn’t have a release date yet, but there’s a very good chance that Fox will schedule it for sometime in 2018.
Arguably one of the most effective trailers of early 2016, 10 Cloverfield Lane used the Tommy James and the Shondells version of “I Think We’re Alone Now” to establish a mood which gets much creepier when the RPM of the song slows down. That song was probably also chosen because the movie is literally about three people who think they’re alone. In 2018, the title I Think We’re Were Alone Now will be used even more literally, as that film will be a sci-fi drama about a handyman who thinks he’s the last human being on Earth, until he meets someone else, a young woman. Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones) and Elle Fanning (Super 8, The Neon Demon) are now both signed on to star in I Think We’re Alone Now. The film will be directed by Reed Morano, who made her feature film debut last year with the indie film Meadowland, which still has a perfectly Fresh Tomatometer score of 100 percent.
As one of Hollywood’s biggest and most successful studios, Walt Disney Pictures is something of a corporate master of the publicity-generating slow rollout of casting news. We’re still over two years away from the Christmas, 2018 release of the sequel Mary Poppins Returns, but throughout 2016, Disney has consistently generated headlines for the film through a series of announcements. The initial news that the titular nanny would be played by Emily Blunt (The Girl on the Train) was followed by news about Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton) and adult Banks siblings Ben Whishaw and Emily Mortimer. This week, the news is about yet another famous British actor, Colin Firth (The King’s Speech, Bridget Jones’ Diary), who will play the president of a bank. Mary Poppins Returns will be directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago, Into the Woods) when it umbrella-sails back into theaters on December 25, 2018.
Something else (besides Mary Poppins Returns) that Colin Firth and Ben Whishaw have in common is that Firth was originally cast as the voice of Paddington before dropping out, and being replaced by Whishaw. That film became an international box office hit ($288 million on a budget of around $55 million), and so of course, there’s going to be a sequel, which now started filming. We learned this week that in addition to several returning cast members, two new stars have joined Paddington 2. The two big new names are Hugh Grant (who one can hypothesize himself might have been a good choice to voice the bear) and Irish actor Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s son Domhnall Gleeson also made the news this week for joining the voice cast of Peter Rabbit (who will be played by TV’s James Corden). Domhnall Gleeson is probably best known for playing Bill Weasley in the later Harry Potter movies, and also for playing one of the Imperial villains in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Sony Pictures will release Peter Rabbit in time for the Easter season in April of 2018.
With a film acting career that now numbers close to 40 films (38, to be exact), Leonardo DiCaprio is now at a point where he can start ticking off all the different genres and themes that his movie roles haven’t yet touched. Up above, you may have noticed that DiCaprio is now attached as the producer of the Captain Planet movie, and if he costars in it as well, “superhero” will be another such genre addressed. The accomplished actor has already been in a few biopics (Catch Me If You Can, Wolf of Wall Street, The Aviator), but a specific type of biopic he hasn’t starred in yet is the “musical biopic.” If this week’s third DiCaprio story works out (he was busy this week), that will change, because he’s now attached to produce and star in an adaptation of the Peter Guralnick book Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘N’ Roll, which, as the title suggests, is a book about Sam Phillips, a man who at least helped popularize rock and roll. When Memphis DJ Sam Phillips opened his own recording studio and launched a label (Sun Records) to go with it, he set the path for the world discovering such musicians as Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Ike Turner, and the most famous of them all, Elvis Presley.
Photo: Jenny Anderson / Getty Images
Leonardo DiCaprio wasn’t the only Inception star to attach himself to an ambitious biographic film this week. Another such film is the long-planned film about Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, who is most famous for the 1914 Endurance expedition, which became an unintentionally ironic name for a struggle to survive at the bottom of the world. Tom Hardy is now attached to star in the untitled Ernest Shackleton biopic (which is sometimes called just Shackleton). It will probably take a few years for this film to get produced, but in the meantime, we already have the award-winning 2000 documentary The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition.
Especially if you don’t count ensemble films (like The Dark Knight Rises and Inception), Joseph Gordon-Levitt continues to struggle to identify with audiences as a stand-alone movie star who can reliably draw significant crowds. To his credit, however, JGL remains able to find producers and financiers who are willing to take the chance that any day now, he will be a huge movie star. The latest such effort is a British science fiction film called Sovereign, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt will star as a man who sets out to find his wife and the crew of a space station after they both disappear (it’s unclear if she was also part of the space station).
Sequels (and their very close cousins, prequels) can be divided into three groups: 1) movies with an obvious demand; 2) movies that people don’t realize that they actually want; and 3) movies that there is very little demand for, realized or not. Some are lucky enough to be #1, others are sublimely #2, but the reality is that most end up being #3 (and always were). Another obvious sequel truth is that success doesn’t require succession. But alas, this is a lesson rarely learned. This week, the embodiment of the unnecessary sequel in film development news is the newly revealed plan to develop a Willy Wonka prequel, about his adventures before settling down as a chocolate factory wunderkind. To that end, Warner Bros has acquired the rights to the entire Willy Wonka intellectual property from the Roald Dahl Estate. The movie will not necessarily be an “origin story,” but that it will indeed tell Wonka’s early adventures, with an eye towards establishing a new franchise of films (because, well, obviously). One possibility is that the first film could address how Wonka first met the Oompa-Loompas. There’s no word yet as to what actor might play Willy Wonka, but since the 2005 remake was 11 years ago, and this is a prequel, you can pretty much bet that it will not be Johnny Depp.
