Movies Movie News and Notes

Watch the Full Short Film THE SPIDER WITHIN: A SPIDER-VERSE STORY

In the genre-bending thriller The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story, Miles Morales struggles to balance his responsibilities as a teenager, friend, and student while acting as Brooklyn’s friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. After a particularly challenging day living with these pressures, Miles experiences a panic attack that forces him to confront the manifestations of his anxiety and learn that reaching out for help can be just as brave an act as protecting his city from evil.

 
Julia Garner to Play Shalla-Bal/Silver Surfer in Marvel Studios' FANTASTIC FOUR Reboot

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Fantastic Four has found its Silver Surfer. Julia Garner will play a version the classic character, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.

WandaVision director Matt Shakman is directing the feature, which stars Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/The Human Torch, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing.

The film has a release date of July 25, 2025 and is rumored to take place in the 1960s, the era in which writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby first introduced the Fantastic Four, the super team that launched the Marvel Universe in comics. Eric Pearson, known for Black Widow and Thor: Ragnarok, is the current writer on the film.

The Silver Surfer was introduced in in Fantastic Four No. 48 as the herald of Galactus, a planet eating entity, though that version of the Surfer was an alien astronomer known as Norrin Radd. Garner is said to be playing a different surfer known as Shalla-Bal, who was the lover of Norrin Radd.

Garner is a three-time Emmy winner for playing Ruth Langmore in the Netflix series Ozark. She also earned an Emmy nomination for leading Inventing Anna, the series about real-life con artist Anna Delvey. Coming up, she has The Wolf Man due out next year from Universal and Blumhouse.

 
Craig Gillespie to Direct DC Studios' SUPERGIRL: WOMAN OF TOMORROW Starring Milly Alcock

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It’s up, up and away for director Craig Gillespie, who is in talks to helm Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow.

The filmmaker joins James Gunn (Superman) and Andy Muscheiti (the Batman feature The Brave and the Bold) as among the filmmakers building out the slate of projects for DC Studios, the Warner Bros. division led by Gunn and Peter Safran.

With Gillespie, DC gains a tried and true helmer known for putting a grounded yet stylish spin on projects such as Disney’s Cruella, the skating drama I, Tonya and TV’s Pam & Tommy. He was last in theaters with the GameStop movie Dumb Money.

Supergirl stars House of the Dragon‘s Milly Alcock, who will play Kara Zor-El, the cousin of Superman. The feature is inspired by the Tom King and Bilquis Evely comic and will depart from the earnest take on the character audiences may know from the CW Supergirl series.

“We will see the difference between Superman, who was sent to Earth and raised by loving parents from the time he was an infant, versus Supergirl, raised on a rock, a chip off of Krypton, and who watched everyone around her die and be killed in terrible ways for the first 14 years of her life and then come to Earth,” Gunn told reporters in early 2023.

Ana Nogueira penned the script for the project, which does not have a release date. DC Studios is currently in production on Superman, its first feature.

 
First Official Image from MOANA 2 Featuring the Title Character's New Look

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I'm confused. Are they doing a Moana 2 and a live action reboot of the first one within a year of each other?
Moana 2 was originally an animated television series before being reworked as an animated movie. They're saying the live-action adaptation release will be delayed due to Moana 2.
 
Official Teaser Trailer for JOKER 2: FOLIE A DEUX Starring Joaquin Phoenix

 
R-Rated TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: THE LAST RONIN Live-Action Movie in the Works

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After the success of last year’s animated hit film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, Paramount Pictures is keeping turtle power going by putting a new feature project into development.

This one, however, will go beyond the realm of the all-ages material the long-standing property is known for and instead go into gritty, R-rated, territory.

Paramount is developing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin, adapting a popular storyline seen in the recent IDW comics, as a live-action feature with the intent of making it for an R-rating.

Tyler Burton Smith, who co-wrote the upcoming R-rated action movie Boy Kills World and who wrote the 2019 iteration of Chucky horror franchise Child’s Play, is penning the script.

Walter Hamada is producing through his 18hz production company as part of his multiyear deal with the studio. Hamada is the former head of DC Films who rose through the ranks at New Line, where he oversaw the Warner Bros. division’s horror movies, including The Conjuring and It franchises. His 18hz banner is focused on making features in the horror genre.

And Last Ronin is about as terrifying as a Turtles tale can get. Set in a totalitarian future New York City, the comic miniseries told of how the Turtles and master Splinter are killed off one by one, by the grandson of the villainous Shredder and synthetic ninjas. One Turtle manages to survive, barely, and vows to exact bloody vengeance. One trick of the book was that it wasn’t clear, for a while at least, which one of the Turtles lived, as the survivor had the weapons of all four.

Co-creator Kevin Eastman and Tom Waltz wrote the comic based on an older story by Eastman and co-creator Peter Laird. Artists included Esau and Isaac Escorza, Ben Bishop and Eastman.

IDW, the publisher that holds the license for the Ninja Turtles comics, put out the books between 2020 and 2022. The comics were an unexpected massive hit, with the collected trade paperback being the second-highest-selling graphic novel of 2023, per Circana BookScan.

The comic book company recently released the sequel TMNT: The Last Ronin II — Re-Evolution, with the debut issue touted as being one of the biggest comics of the year, with more than 140,000 copies ordered.

Ninja Turtles debuted as a black-and-white indie comic in 1984, parodying comics like Chris Claremont’s X-Men comics and Frank Miller’s ninja-focused work. A toy deal turned the comic into a generational touchstone in the late 1980s, abetted by a bright and cheerful animated series, followed by a hit live-action movie wherein the Turtles were played by actors in suits.

Mutant Mayhem, produced by Seth Rogen’s Point Grey, brought back a respectable sheen to the property by giving it a cool outsider point a view. Critics and audiences liked what the saw, with the animated movie grossing over $118.6 at the domestic box office. A sequel is now in the works.

 
TRANSFORMERS and G.I. JOE Live-Action Movie Officially Announced by Paramount at CinemaCon 2024

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We knew this was coming as indicated in the coda of last summer’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, but the G.I. Joe team and Transformers are getting together for a new feature film at Paramount.

The idea is based on a storyline played out for the Hasbro brands in their 1980s Marvel-published comics. That coda from Rise of the Beasts see that Transformers‘ hero played by Anthony Ramos getting approached in a secret bunker by a member of the Michael Kelly.

Steven Spielberg is executive producing the new film. No filmmaker attached yet, despite the idea being hatched by filmmaker Steven Caple Jr. in Rise of the Beasts.

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producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura is returning along with Mark Vahradian, Michael Bay, Tom DeSanto & Don Murphy.

Di Bonaventura’s production deal at the Melrose Lot was re-upped, per Paramount Pictures CEO Brian Robbins, who made the announcement on Thursday during the studio’s presentation at CinemaCon in Las Vegas.

 
Sad to see that Coppola cannot find a distributor for Megalopolis.

The LA screening was a disaster. None of the US distributors have been willing to buy it.

Coppola supposedly spending $120m of his own money on it is his business. I just want to watch the thing, even if it is terrible.

Somebody somewhere is going to pick it up. I hope. Feels like a sad story though.
 
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