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 Jurassic World 2, The Lion King, and new roles for Kevin Hart, Ewan McGregor, and Will Smith.
First off, before you continue reading this story, please be advised that it contains a spoiler for a movie that is not Unbreakable. We’ll wait right here. Okay, if everyone is good to go, let’s proceed! In 2000, M. Night Shyamalan (hot off the success of The Sixth Sense) directed Unbreakable, which was marketed like another supernatural thriller, but was actually a superhero origin movie, long before superhero movies became as popular as they are now. There was talk of an Unbreakable sequel, which eventually subsided, but it jumped back into the pop culture consciousness this January when the ending of Split revealed that film to be set in the same world as Unbreakable. Well, this week, M. Night Shyamalan revealed that his next film will be called Glass, taking its title from the villain played by Samuel L. Jackson. Bruce Willis will also return (as Unbreakable hero David Dunn), as will James McAvoy, reprising his own villain role from Split. Universal Pictures has scheduled Glass for release on January 18, 2019.
With their four part empire (Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, and live-action remakes), Walt Disney Pictures is a goliath right now, and this week, we learned what the studio has in store for 2019 and 2020. The new slate includes dates for Frozen 2 (11/27/19), various untitled live-action remakes, and future Marvel movies in 2020 (potentially including Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Doctor Strange 2). After three years of their Star Wars movies being released in December, Disney appears to be switching back to May regularly, with Star Wars Episode IX (5/24/19) coming a year after the Han Solo prequel (5/25/18). Two months later, Disney will release one of their most ambitious remakes, The Lion King (7/19/19). A few previously announced dates were pushed back, too, including Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2 (from 3/9/18 to 11/21/18), Indiana Jones 5 (from 2019 to July 10, 2020), and the “Jack and the Beanstalk” animated romance (the biggest move, from 11/21/18 to 11/25/20).
As long as we’re talking about Disney, the studio’s live-action remake of The Lion King (7/19/19) is about half cast now (Donald Glover, James Earl Jones, and maybe Beyonce), and after this week, two of the most iconic characters joined them (still no word on Scar). If the deals work out, Seth Rogen and game show host Billy Eichner will voice Pumbaa the warthog and Timon the meerkat, respectively. That’s right… within two years, you will (probably) find out what “Seth Rogen singing Hakuna Matata” sounds like. A less ambitious project in the same vein (maybe more like Pete’s Dragon, in terms of scale) is Christopher Robin, adapted from their Winnie the Pooh movies. Christopher Robin Milne sort of became infamous for rejecting the fame his father (and Pooh creator) A.A. Milne’s animal stories brought him, and it sounds like that will be part of the movie, with Ewan McGregor in talks to play the adult Christopher Robin.
This time last year, few people were really talking about Hell or High Water, which became a true “sleeper hit” in August and went on to earn four Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture). For his next film, Scottish director David Mackenzie is adapting one of his homeland’s greatest historical figures (for what will be a Netflix exclusive). The movie, called Outlaw King, is also going to be a reunion film for Hell or High Water stars Chris Pine and Ben Foster (no word yet about Jeff Bridges). Pine (Star Trek) is in talks to star as Robert the Bruce, with Ben Foster expected to play James Douglas, a Scottish knight who served as an advisor. If the name “Robert the Bruce” sounds familiar to you (and you’re not a Scottish history buff), it might be because his character appeared in Braveheart. The focus of that movie, William Wallace, will probably be a supporting character in Outlaw King, which will be centered on Robert the Bruce.
20th Century Fox also revealed over a dozen release dates this week, and if you saw only one social media post on this subject, it was probably about Fox’s ambitious plans for their “X-titles” in 2018, beginning with The New Mutants on April 14, 2018, from director Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars). The Deadpool sequel (featuring Josh Brolin as Cable) will be released on June 1, and the next “proper” X-Men movie will be released on November 2. That film, Dark Phoenix, will retell the same story we already saw in X-Men: The Last Stand, except it sounds like it will have a more “cosmic” setting (like the original comics story). Of the rest of Fox’s new dates, the highest profile are James Cameron’s four Avatar sequels, which now all have December dates in the years 2020, 2021, 2024, and 2025. Other Fox movies with new release dates include The Predator, Maze Runner: The Death Cure, Jennifer Lawrence’s Red Sparrow, Steven Spielberg’s untitled Pentagon Papers drama, and the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.
Because you’ve already read the title, you know what this story’s about, but humor us as we fill up the rest of the requisite text here. Although Jurassic World was relatively light on returning characters (basically just B.D. Wong), for the sequel, Universal Pictures is bringing back a franchise favorite. Jeff Goldblum is now attached to reprise his character Dr. Ian Malcolm in the Jurassic World sequel, which will be his third film in the franchise (following the original Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park). The fifth film in the Jurassic Park franchise will be directed by J.A. Bayona (The Impossible, A Monster Calls), and Universal Pictures has scheduled it for June 22, 2018. Goldblum will also join the Marvel Cinematic Universe later this year as the Grandmaster in Thor: Ragnarok (11/3/17).
In any given week, there are so many new movies announced that many of them inevitably never get made… but in some cases, that’s only true until they do. Consider, for example, the action movie Gemini Man, which first made the news 20 years ago in 1997. It’s officially back now, with Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Life of Pi) in advanced talks to direct it for Skydance. And for a movie that sat around that long, it moved pretty quickly this week, making a second announcement about who’s going to play the title role. Will Smith is now in talks to star in Gemini Man as “an aging assassin who finds himself in a battle with the ultimate opponent: his clone, who is 25 years younger and at the peak of his abilities.” Smith also recently played the assassin Deadshot in Suicide Squad (and is also expected to reprise that role in a sequel or spinoff someday).s
Though biopics are sometimes made of people who are still alive (such as Erin Brockovich and Stephen Hawking), it’s far more common for them to be made posthumously. The second half of this particular story might help demonstrate why that’s sometimes the case. You see, the top voted title in last year’s Black List of Unproduced Screenplays was Blond Ambition, a script by Elise Hollander about Madonna’s early pre-fame years in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Universal Pictures has had success with a few musical biopics (like Straight Outta Compton), so, unsurprisingly, the studio this week picked up the rights to Blond Ambition. Madonna herself replied soon after via Instagram, “Nobody knows what I know and what I have seen. Only I can tell my story.” If there’s a bright side for the pop icon, it might be that this poll suggests people think she should be played by her daughter, Lourdes Leon (Madonna wasn’t blonde when she went to NYC, hence the ambition).
As the current wave of remakes continues to plunder the 1980s and 1990s, one revered filmmaker whose filmography has remained relatively untouched is the late John Hughes (except for National Lampoon’s Vacation, which he wrote, and which was rebooted in 2015). That may all change, though, if this news this week is any indication (and again, it’s another film that Hughes wrote, but didn’t direct). Universal Pictures is now developing a remake of the 1988 comedy The Great Outdoors, which starred Dan Aykroyd and John Candy as two Chicago brothers-in-law who vacation together in a cabin in rural Wisconsin. To that end, Universal has already attached Kevin Hart to play one of the two leads. We’re calling this one a Rotten Idea because a) nobody’s asking for a remake of The Great Outdoors, and b) Kevin Hart’s Tomatometer looks like this (it’s getting better, but he still has scores like Get Hard, Ride Along 2, and The Wedding Ringer).
Last year’s hit Netflix series Stranger Things took filmmaking and storytelling inspiration from several 1980s movies, including E.T. the Extraterrestrial, The Goonies, and Stand By Me. Another was the 1984 adaptation of Stephen King’s Firestarter, which starred a very young Drew Barrymore and probably flew under the radar of a lot of today’s young moviegoers. It also might just be the film with the strongest fingerprints all over Stranger Things season 1 — both center on young girls held captive in government facilities while their powerful mental powers are being studied… and then bad things happen. So, of course, Universal Pictures and Blumhouse are now developing a Firestarter remake. The director attached is Akiva Goldsman, who made his feature debut with Winter’s Tale (13 percent) and whose sci-fi/horror screenwriting credits include The 5th Wave (16 percent), Insurgent (29 percent), Rings (6 percent), and the 1997 movie that nearly killed a franchise, Batman & Robin (11% Rotten).
