The latest Disney theme park ride getting a big-screen adaptation is Tower of Terror, the haunted Hollywood hotel/elevator ride. Collider reports that Scarlett Johansson has her next Disney project (post-Black Widow, above) all lined up: She’s on board to star in and produce the Tower of Terror film. Josh Cooley (Toy Story 4, Inside Out) is writing the script.
Engrossing, horrifying, and vivid, Kerstin Hall’s debut novel Star Eater is a hard one to talk about. This is in part simply because there’s so much there there—so much inventive worldbuilding, so much carefully structured power, so many things I want to exclaim over. As with many complicated things, it’s occasionally boiled down to something both accurate and not, a hook like “cannibal cat-riding nuns in space!”
This description isn’t wrong, but it’s nowhere near the whole picture, either. There are cats the size of horses; there are cannibal not-really-nuns and horrifying zombies (called Haunts); there is something weird about the world of Aytrium, with its Pillars and vague references to the Edge. But this isn’t a book about the meticulously created world. It’s about corrupted power, and the sacrifices necessary for change.
The latest brilliant person to join the ranks of MasterClass teachers is none other than LeVar Burton: actor, director, podcast host, Reading Rainbow icon, and upcoming Jeopardy host (for a week in July). Burton’s class, The Power of Storytelling, will “help you connect authentically with any audience.”
As Burton says in the promo video, “Storytelling is one of the primary building blocks of civilization. Everything that is important to us as a species has been contained in stories.”
The first words spoken in the latest trailer for Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins are “Fish boy!” which is not exactly an auspicious start. But this trailer has a lot more to offer than the brief first teaser, including a little bit of story and longer glimpses at some other G.I. Joe characters who turn up in Snake Eyes’ movie.
Happy Picard Day! Time to make the captain uncomfortable by surrounding him with children. Luckily for the rest of us, the festivities also include a new teaser for the second season of Star Trek: Picard.
“What’s next, a prequel about Gaston?” is no longer just a joke about Disney’s current love for creating backstories for its villains. Though the company was “in talks” with Luke Evans and Josh Gad about a Gaston-and-LeFou series over a year ago, it’s only now official: Disney+ has ordered an eight-episode musical series about the two characters from 2017’s live-action Beauty and the Beast.
There’s a red cape and a forest and a wolf, but Hannah Whitten’s debut novel For the Wolf isn’t just a Little Red Riding Hood retelling. It is a story about a young woman named Red who goes into a dark forest where a Wolf lurks. But the familiar imagery is a means, not an end. Whitten isn’t tweaking one fairy tale, or even a cluster of them. She’s borrowing pieces and ideas and images to stitch together a whole new red cloak, a story that understands how powerful fairy tales are—and how misused that power can be.
Is a summer action movie really a true summer action movie if no one yells “Light ’em up!” about the oncoming hordes of faceless enemies? Never fear; that moment happens in the latest (and apparently final) trailer for Amazon’s The Tomorrow War, a movie about Chris Pratt going into the future to fight aliens with large guns and corny lines.
Paramount+’s slow, steady drip of details about the first children’s animated Star Trek series, Star Trek: Prodigy, continues apace. In April, they explained what Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) is doing on a show set in the future: She’s the voice of the ship’s built-in emergency training hologram. But who are the young alien crew members who need her help? The cast and character list Paramount+ released this week gives a little more insight, and includes both young actors and familiar names.
For all her excellent, wide-ranging roles, Saoirse Ronan has not yet been to space. And alas, though she’s set to star in writer-director Garth Davis’s adaptation of Iain Reid’s near future SF novel Foe, she’s still not going to space. That honor goes to Paul Mescal (Normal People), who will play Junior, a man randomly chosen to visit an experimental space station. But his wife, Hen (Ronan), won’t exactly be left alone at home.
Deadline’s piece about the film and the book’s cover copy are both teasingly vague, but it sounds like there’s either a clone or a robot involved.
There’s been no major news on the long-gestating Spawn reboot for a while now, but creator Todd McFarlane remains busy. Deadline reports that McFarlane has teamed up with Wiip, the studio behind the recent HBO Max hit Mare of Easttown, for a TV series based on two human characters from Spawn: detectives Sam Burke and Twitch Williams.
Listen. It’s He-Man. This trailer isn’t going to tell you a single thing about the story for Kevin Smith’s Masters of the Universe: Revelation, which is not a reboot but a continuation, picking up right where the ’80s cartoon left off—He-Man defending against Skeletor and the forces of evil. It’s not real heavy on dialogue, and it’s kind of going to make your eyeballs bleed.
In other words, it is just as it should be.
In 2019, it was announced that Zack Snyder and Netflix were teaming up for an anime series inspired by Norse mythology. There’s been little news since there—presumably because Snyder’s been busy with other things—but Netflix just announced the voice cast for the series, and the lineup is spectacular.
A lot of movies have been delayed in the last year, but Free Guy feels especially like it’s been coming soon forever. Originally scheduled for July 3, 2020, it now has a “no, really!” release date of August 13th—only in theaters.
The latest trailer is a lot like the the last trailer, and also features someone in a bunny suit.
More than two decades after Michael Jordan starred in Space Jam, the Looney Tunes are on the court again. In Space Jam: A New Legacy, it’s LeBron James who winds up in an animated world where he has to save his son (and the Looney Tunes) from Don Cheadle’s rogue AI—by winning at basketball, of course.
