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 The Batman, Jurassic World 2, the possible X-23 spinoff, and new roles for Robert Downey Jr., Oscar Isaac, and Michelle Rodriguez.
Over the last few years, Marvel Studios has largely dominated the online news streams, but lately, we’ve been hearing much more from their Distinguished Competition. This week, for example, there were two big news stories concerning two of DC Comics’ biggest upcoming superhero movies. Let’s start with The Batman, the solo movie starring Ben Affleck (presumably) that might be released sometime in 2018. Affleck had been considering directing The Batman himself, but he recently confirmed that he had dropped out. Warner Bros moved on this quickly, announcing late Friday evening that the director now attached to The Batman is Matt Reeves. If, as expected, The Batman does start filming in 2017, it appears likely that it will be Reeves’ sixth film as director, following such genre entries as Cloverfield, the vampire remake Let Me In, and the two most recent Planet of the Apes movies (the latest being War for the Planet of the Apes, scheduled for 7/14/17). [UPDATE: Late Friday night, after this story was published, news broke that talks between director Matt Reeves and Warner Bros have broken down over Ben Affleck’s solo movie, The Batman. The search for a director for this highly-anticipated film continues.] As big as that was, it’s arguable that the news that received the most attention this week involved just Warner Bros’ early short list for a future sequel, namely Suicide Squad 2. That’s because one of the directors mentioned is Mel Gibson, who is very much “hot again” following the critical success of his comeback war movie, Hacksaw Ridge. What is being lost, it seems, in some of the reporting is that Gibson has not landed the Suicide Squad 2 directing gig for certain, and there are several other viable candidates, including Daniel Espinosa (Safe House), Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland), and Jonathan Levine (Warm Bodies). As for how online media is receiving the possible Mel Gibson news, here’s one example.
Some directors like to work repeatedly with the same actors, and Richard Linklater has definitely done that at least twice. The most obvious example is Ethan Hawke, the star of the Before trilogy and Boyhood, but Linklater has also made a few movies with Jack Black (School of Rock, Bernie). With that in mind, we learned this week that Linklater and Robert Downey Jr. — who starred in Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly — have agreed to partner on what might be Linklater’s next film as director. The movie doesn’t have an official title yet, but it’s based on a Reply All podcast episode called Man of the People, and that sure sounds like it could be a movie title. Robert Downey Jr will star in the crime comedy as “Dr. John Brinkley, a charlatan who scams his way to fame using fake medicine, populism, and radio. Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the journal of the AMA, begins a quest to take him down as Brinkley becomes more famous — mainly for transplanting goat testicles into humans.” The Reply All podcast about Brinkley aired on 1/19/17, and the recent documentary Nuts! also covered Brinkley’s life.
Although every year brings us movies that progress through development with much anticipation, there are others that probably deserve more attention that seem to fly under the radar. This year, one example is Widows, which is director Steve McQueen’s (12 Years a Slave, Hunger) adaptation of a 1983 British TV mini-series. We’ve known for a while that one of the stars of Widows is going to be Viola Davis (along with Cynthia Erivo), but this week, we learned about another female lead. That third actress is Michelle Rodriguez, who appears to taking a break from Fast & Furious movies with this crime story about four widows who team up to complete the heist that killed their criminal significant others.
Much ado has been made about how Logan will be Hugh Jackman’s last movie as Wolverine. While that might be true, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Logan represents the end of the future timeline that it starts (and/or continues). We got an indication of exactly that with the (not yet entirely official) word from director James Mangold that there is a very specific Logan character he wants to make another movie with/about. Speaking about 12-year-old actress Dafne Keen (who plays Laura, AKA X-23, in Logan), Mangold said this week, “I think Dafne is incredible in the film and I would love to see another film about that character and that’s certainly something I’d be involved in.” Of course, as cool as an X-23 movie might be, we’re also left with the quandary of X-23 being yet another character in the X-Men cinematic universe who exists in a different timeline than in the comics. Whereas the Earth-616 version of X-23 is a contemporary teen hero (including a lengthy run in All-New X-Men), it’s quite different from the Mad Max-style future setting of Logan. It’s also worth noting that James Mangold may end up having zero say about whether there is ever a X-23 solo movie. But at least we know someone thinks it’s an awesome idea.
As Lucasfilm continues to flesh out their post-George Lucas backstory with the prequels-that-aren’t-those-prequels, the characters who are cast fall into a few categories. First, there are the famous, de-aged canon characters (Han, Lando, etc), followed by the canon characters we’ve met elsewhere before (and even those, like Sana Starros, are still very much in the “rumor” category). But if the Han Solo prequel plays out like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story did, most of the characters will actually fall in the third category: completely new characters introduced for the first time in that movie. It’s important to know those limitations and precedents, for example, when a story breaks like this week’s news, which reports that Thandie Newton (Mission: Impossible II, HBO’s Westworld) has been cast in a mystery role in the Han Solo prequel (5/25/18). We don’t know who Newton might play, but two possibilities are the mother and/or aunt/stepmom/whatever of either Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) or Emilia Clarke’s character (particularly if you think Clarke is playing Sana Starros). Whoever she’s playing, Newton joins a growing cast that also includes Aldren Ehrenreich (Han Solo), Woody Harrelson, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
When he’s not going to extreme lengths to protest in favor of animal rights, actor James Cromwell also appears in a surprising number of “genre movies.” Yes, many know him as the farmer from Babe or LAPD Captain Dudley Smith in L.A. Confidential, but Cromwell has also co-starred in such sci-fi movies as Big Hero 6, Deep Impact, I Robot, Spider-Man 3, and Star Trek: First Contact. Well, we can now add another very popular sci-fi franchise to the list, as Cromwell has now been cast in an unknown role in Universal Pictures’ Jurassic World 2, joining returning cast members Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard alongside franchise newcomers Toby Jones (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and Justice Smith (Netflix’s The Get Down). Universal Pictures has scheduled the sequel for release on June 22, 2018, which places it in between The Incredibles 2 (6/15/18) and Barbie and the next X-Men movie (both on 6/29/18).
Every year, the Berlin International Film Festival packs early February with film development stories with potential awards-friendly impact. Even with ten stories a week, it’s still impossible to include every potentially interesting story (this week, we’re offering ten out of a possible 26 news items). One movie that stuck out from the crowd is the World War II thriller called The Garbo Network, in which Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) is now attached to star. Isaac will play “Juan Pujol Garcia, an eccentric double-agent who, with no military or covert training, somehow persuaded both the Germans and the British to hire him as a spy. His real allegiance was to England, and working closely with MI5, he created a fictional network of 27 spies said to be spread out over England, Scotland, and Ireland. The ruse helped the English to deceive the Germans about the invasion of Normandy.” Oscar Isaac will soon be working with Steven Spielberg as the title character in The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, another true story drama with potential to be an awards candidate next year (if Spielberg finishes it in time).
For people who were alive in the mid-1970s, the long, strange case of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army may still linger as one of the most memorable events of the decade. In pop culture, however, the legacy of Hearst’s experience is arguably dwindling. Of course, that’s partly because Hearst herself reportedly doesn’t like to discuss that time, preferring instead to focus on her various Westminster Dog Show winners. Meanwhile, American Crime Story: The People vs O.J. Simpson offered recent proof that when it comes to fascinating celebrity cases still make for top tier entertainment, so Paramount Pictures is now in pre-production on a police thriller called 77, about two LAPD officers who team up to “rescue” Patty Hearst from the SLA. The film will be set mostly in 1974, so it’s unclear as to what the 77 of the title refers to (maybe the police code for an ambush?). Paramount has recruited actor Jared Leto to direct 77, in what will be his dramatic feature film directorial debut (having previously directed the documentary Artifact), based on a screenplay by James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential), and one of his producing partners will be Dick Wolf, famously of the Law & Order TV franchises. It’s not yet known if Leto will also costar in 77.
Typically when “dueling movies” are announced, only one of the competing projects ends up getting released (Patriots Day was a recent example). Of course, there are plenty of examples to the contrary (Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman, Olympia Has Fallen and White House Down, etc). Just over a week after the New England Patriots’ historic surprise comeback at Super Bowl LI, we learned of two different movies based on the game (or the players involved). If you heard only one of them, it was probably the one involving Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. The as yet untitled book and film project will be co-written by three figures behind Patriots Day (also set in Boston), and in addition to focusing on Super Bowl LI itself, the film will reportedly not “shy away from controversy and will include the team’s battle to overcome the Deflategate debacle in 2014, follow Brady’s fall from grace and then his triumphant return to lead the Patriots to his fifth world championship.” With that in mind, the second Super Bowl LI film — ostensibly the underdog here — has an appropriate title: The Secondary. This film will follow a more traditional biopic formula, depicting how New England Patriots cornerback Malcolm Butler went from being a small-time Popeye’s frycook to a two-time Super Bowl winner, including the memorable interception versus the Seattle Seahawks during the final seconds of Super Bowl XLIX. The Secondary will be produced by Daniel Levin, whose recent true story drama Lion is currently a multiple Academy Award nominee. Which movie do you think has the better chance of getting made first?
Every year, it gets a little less fun to make up news items for April Fool’s Day (and now more so than ever, with the advent of “fake news” as an online plague). Having said that, Hollywood and the international film community (in particular) continue to produce real movies that sound like April Fool’s Day jokes on paper. For example, one of the best selling movies on the market at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival is an action thriller called Hard Powder, in which Liam Neeson will star as a Rocky Mountains snowplow driver “whose life is up-ended by his son’s killing at the hands of a powerful local drug lord,” sending the “Plow King” on a bloody path of revenge. Filming of Hard Powder will start at locations in Canada in March, 2017. Very often, “Rotten Ideas” are chosen by the Tomatometer scores of those involved, but director Hans Petter Moland‘s films have all tracked well (two of them are at 100 percent). What makes this a Rotten Idea is how absolutely bonkers it sounds. Maybe we’re wrong, and that will be exactly why the movie works. If so, be prepared for a wave of snowplow action movie clones.
