This Week’s Ketchup brings you seven headlines from the world of film development news, covering such titles as One-Punch Man, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark 2, and Venom: Let There Be Carnage.
(Photo by ©Marvel/©Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
This week saw a number of release date changes for some of Sony’s biggest titles, beginning with the Venom sequel, starring Tom Hardy as the titular anti-hero and Woody Harrelson as (presumably) the crimson red serial killer Carnage. That movie had been scheduled for October 2, 2020, but Venom 2 became Venom: Let There Be Carnage as it got bumped back eight months to next summer on June 25, 2021 (taking the spot where The Batman previously was to have been released). Sony Pictures also quickly took advantage of the announcement to Tweet out a brief teaser of the new title. Then, late on Friday, Sony further announced that its third Spider-Man film featuring the MCU’s Tom Holland, which was set to open on July 16, 2021, will be pushed back four months to November 5, the release date of Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which was itself then also pushed back to March 5, 2022. Remember that domino effect we were talking about? Holland’s other big film, the video game adaptation Uncharted, was then moved forward from October 8, 2021 to replace the untitled Spider-Man sequel in the now-vacant July 16 slot. To top it all off, the sequel to the Oscar-winning animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which had been planned for April 8, 2022, was also pushed back six months to October 7 of the same year. Whew!
(Photo by Matt Reeves)
Some of the movies originally scheduled for the summer of 2020 have been pushed back because of COVID-19, which has resulted in a domino effect, with their delays leading to delays in other films. In some cases, the movies scheduled for next year that were supposed to be filming right now need that much more extra time to get filmed, get through post-production, and get released. Few movies need quite as much time as supehero movies do, so it was probably always inevitable that Warner Bros. would have to push some of their 2021 and 2022 DC Comics movies back a bit. The biggest film being delayed is The Batman, from 6/25/2021 to October 1, 2021. Shazam! 2 was to have been released on April 1, 2022, but is now scheduled for November 4, 2022. Another studio that delayed two of their big franchise movies is Paramount Pictures, which has delayed Mission: Impossible 7 from 7/23/2021 to 11/19/2021 and Mission: Impossible 8 from 8/5/2022 to 11/4/2022, which is a curious move because it means they just put their big Tom Cruise action movie right up against… the Shazam! sequel that also just moved.
(Photo by CBS Films)
Lionsgate probably did not have as big of box office success with last year’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (Certified Fresh at 78%) ($105 million worldwide) as they might have hoped, but the PG-13 horror film was also produced relatively cheaply ($25 million), and it’s also one that should have a good shelf life, since it can be revived every Halloween for a new generation of kids. That is presumably part of why Paramount Pictures (taking over from CBS Films) felt confident enough with the possible new franchise as they have pulled the trigger on a sequel by hiring the same director and writers. Director André Øvredal (Trollhunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe) and writers Dan and Kevin Hageman can now spend their COVID-19 stay-at-home time working on a new set of stories from Alvin Schwartz’s original anthology books for the next movie. Which stories from the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books do you think should be adapted for the second movie?
(Photo by Murray Close/Lionsgate courtesy Everett Collection)
Before Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace came out over 20 years ago, there was a time when people were perhaps more optimistic about a popular franchise going back a generation to tell a prequel story about the franchise’s big bad villain. Now, people look back at the Star Wars prequels and many think three movies about the young Darth Vader were maybe not a great deal, but hey, another popular franchise would never make the same mistake, right? Tell that to the people who mad The Hunger Games, because author Suzanne Collins has written an upcoming novel called The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (5/19/2020) about the future villain Coriolanus Snow when he was a young 18-year-old man. Lionsgate has quickly picked up the rights to The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which will again be directed by Francis Lawrence, who directed all of the Hunger Games movies except the first one. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes tells the story of young Coriolanus Snow, who is frustrated when he discovers he has been “assigned to mentor the girl tribute from impoverished District 12” (the same district that Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen will also eventually come from).
(Photo by Viz Media)
Although last year’s Pokemon: Detective Pikachu was usually credited as being a success for “video game movies,” the argumennt could also be made that it was just as much an adaptation of anime and manga, which is another type of live-action adaptation that has mostly struggled in Hollywood to date. As with most of these situations, it’s inevitably just a matter of time before someone in the industry figures out the right project, which then becomes a big enough success that it opens the gates for others. Sony Pictures is gambling that perhaps the popular anime series One-Punch Man could be exactly that, as they are now developing a live-action One-Punch Man movie, which will be adapted for the big screen by Venom screenwriters Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinkner. One-Punch Man tells the continuing adventures of a superhero called Saitama who has perfected his fighting abilities to the point where he can literally defeat any opponent with just one punch, but that overwhelming power has also left him bored with his life.
(Photo by Suzie Gibbons/Getty Images)
The critical and box office successes in 2018 and 2019 of both Bohemian Rhapsody ($903 million worldwide) and Rocketman (Certified Fresh at 89%) have already led to the rapid development of other musical biopics. Two that will be released in 2020 or 2021 are Respect (Aretha Franklin as played by Jennifer Hudson) and Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (Elvis Presley as played by Austin Butler, or “Tex” from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). After some rumors last years, this week it was confirmed that Whitney Houston will also be getting a biopic, and it will be called I Wanna Dance With Somebody, named after Houston’s Grammy-winning 1987 hit. The project is being produced by Clive Davis, the A&R executive who helped shepherd Houston’s early career, and who will almost certainly also be a major character in the film. I Wanna Dance With Somebody will be directed by Stella Meghie, who recently directed The Photograph (Fresh at 73%), starring Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield. The next question the producers will have to figure out is, “Who can play Whitney?”
(Photo by A24)
The best-reviewed comedy of 2019 was Booksmart (Certified Fresh at 97%), the directorial debut of actress Olivia Wilde,which made her a hot commodity among various studios and producers hoping to snatch up her next film. That project will be Don’t Worry, Darling, a 1950s-set psychological thriller for New Line Cinema that Wilde will star in as well as direct and produce. Don’t Worry, Darling will have an ensemble cast and a secret premise (though it sounds a bit like The Stepford Wives), set at “an isolated, utopian community in the 1950s California desert and centers on a housewife who uncovers a disturbing truth about her seemingly perfect life.” Florence Pugh (Midsommar, Little Women) will play the housewife, and Shia LaBeouf and Chris Pine are also in talks for other roles.
(Photo by Warner Bros.)
Speaking of Chris Pine, Paramount Pictures will definitely make more Star Trek movies someday, but it’s unclear if those films will continue the “Kelvin” setting from the 2009 Star Trek reboot (Certified Fresh at 94%). (That version’s Scotty, Simon Pegg, recently spoke up about the difficulties of the Star Trek franchise at this point.) As such, the various stars of the current iteration of the USS Enterprise crew are free to continue their careers post-Star-Trek, and that includes Pine, the current Captain Kirk. Paramount seems eager to keep Pine around, though because the two parties are currently in talks for the former to star in a new reboot of the classic 1920s “gentleman thief” franchise, The Saint, taking over the role previously played by Val Kilmer on the big screen and by Roger Moore in the original British TV series. Chris Pine’s The Saint will be directed by Dexter Fletcher, who is coming off both the Elton John musical Rocketman and some directing work on Bohemian Rhapsody. Fletcher is also attached to Sherlock Holmes 3 and the Dracula spinoff project Renfield for Universal Pictures, but it seems possible that The Saint will be his next film before Sherlock Holmes 3.
(Photo by Zade Rosenthal/Marvel/©Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
Presuming Hollywood’s decades-old tradition of “one for them, one for me,” directors Joe and Anthony Russo can basically pursue whatever passion projects they may have, thanks to delivering blockbuster hits like Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame. Both brothers (born 1970 and 1971) are solidly members of Generation X, so it is perhaps of little surprise that one of their dream projects is an adaptation of the 1970s anime TV series Battle of the Planets. With their Chris Hemsworth movie Extraction debuting today on Netflix, Joe Russo is doing lots of publicity talks, and that included updating everyone about Battle of the Planets (and the Community movie). Russo said, “It’s not going to be a direct adaptation of the series. It’s going to be our own story that we tell surrounding a group of genetically altered kids who are involved in a space war… That could take months of gestating, and trying to figure out what the new mythology is. And then we commit that to a bible, and then from that bible we do some artwork as exploration, and once we have artwork that we’re inspired by, we then commit that to a script. So we’re in the bible phase for Battle of the Planets at the moment.” Distilling that down, it sounds like we’re at least two years before Battle of the Planets is likely to start filming, but it seems like it’s definitely happening.
(Photo by 20th Century Studios)
With COVID-19 essentially pushing most release dates back three to six months, the Ryan Reynolds action comedy Free Guy is now about eight months away from release, on December 11, 2020 (pushed back five months fom 7/3/2020). The movie was presumably pretty much done (except for maybe some post-production), so its star Ryan Reynolds and its director Shawn Levy are already talking about doing another movie. The film doesn’t appear to have a title yet, but it’s being described as a time travel drama about a man (Reynolds) who travels back in time to get help from his 13-year-old self, which leads to an encounter with his now-dead father, who back then was the age Reynolds is now.
