Murphy's Multiverse

Tag: Movies

  • Michael Mann Offers First Look at ‘Heat 2’, With the Words “Coming Soon”

    Michael Mann Offers First Look at ‘Heat 2’, With the Words “Coming Soon”

    Heat was one of those heist films that left quite an impression. For many, it was quite an iconic entry of the genre that would also set the path for future films trying to imitate it. Though while many were focused on the fact that he has been working on a sequel novel by the name; teasing it also acts as a prequel, he also had recently teased that he’s working on a film based on Heat 2.

    Well, it turns out that he jumped into production quite fast as Mann has shared a new picture on Twitter which seemingly hints that he already started working on filming the sequel. There’s always a chance he is making a trailer for the novel release, but given he teased that the Heat sequel is already underway just last week, it wouldn’t be surprising if he already started work on it.

    The “coming soon” is an interesting surprise and in a sea of legacy sequels performing quite well at the box office, its timing couldn’t be better. Given just how long it’s been since the first film was released–1995 to be exact–there might be a crowd waiting for one of the US’ most iconic criminal dramas.

    There’s no word if Al Pacino or Robert De Niro might return in one capacity or another, but a director like Mann is surely going to get together a very talented group of actors to bring the film back to theaters in style. If Top Gun Maverick is anything to go by, it’ll be interesting to see just how well this legacy sequel might perform.

    Source: Twitter, Playlist

  • ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ Director Teases ‘Quantumania’s Will “Do Some Things Differently”

    ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ Director Teases ‘Quantumania’s Will “Do Some Things Differently”

    It’s crazy to think that we’re about to get the third entry in the Ant-Man and the Wasp franchise. Not only did it go through quite a few changes, but San Diego Comic-Con highlighted how this film will be the one to tease the true Kang the Conqueror’s arrival in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He will be the one to build up where the entire arc is heading; ironic how the introduction of the Quantum Realm did the same for Avengers: Endgame.

    In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he did hint that the threequel will potentially head into some new territory, especially in regard to the size of this franchise. Up until now, it was on the smaller side for the MCU and it seems they wanted to go big with the third entry.

    Well, I think we were thrilled to get to do a third Ant-Man movie and do a trilogy. And we knew if we were gonna do that we wanted to do some things differently. We really wanted to take a hard left turn and make a movie that was even more epic, but still progress the story of these family dynamics.

    Peyton Reed

    He also teases what we can expect from our favorite characters, who are facing some new challenges as a result of Lang’s absence during the five years leading into Endgame.

    And everything that’s going on between Scott and Hope and Cassie… Cassie, who’s now 18 years old, and maybe Scott doesn’t quite know how to relate to her as an adult, because he lost those five years from the events of Endgame

    Peyton Reed

    It definitely will shake up the dynamic, but it’s great they want to keep the “family” at the heart of the story. No matter what realm they entered, it still was about the familial relationships everyone shared throughout. So, it just wouldn’t be the same without it, especially going into a story that will be much grander in scale.

    Source: Entertainment Weekly

  • ‘DC League of Super-Pets’ Fetches $2M+ at Thursday Box Office

    ‘DC League of Super-Pets’ Fetches $2M+ at Thursday Box Office

    DC League of Super-Pets is off to a decent start. The animated flick pulled in $2.2 million in Thursday night previews from 3,200 theaters. Industry estimates have had the film eyeing a $25-$30 million opening this weekend when it opens across 4,300 theaters. That would prove to be a strong opening for the film, it would also be ahead of 2018’s Teen Titans GO! To the Movies which only opened to $10.4 million.

    Of course, DC League of Super Pets will have some stiff competition going into the weekend. While it is expected the film will dethrone Nope from the top spot at the box office, Top Gun: Maverick is still performing well and Minions: The Rise of Gru is still doing decent business at the box office. In fact, The Rise of Gru recently passed the $300 million mark at the domestic box office – an impressive feat, especially given it is an animated flick released during the pandemic.

    The film, which was reportedly produced for $89 million, follows Krypto the Super-Dog, Superman’s dog who is voiced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who is tasked with rescuing his owner, along with Kevin Hart’s Ace. While reviews have been mixed and the film is currently sitting on a 71% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, that likely will not hinder the film’s box office potential, especially with Johnson and Hart attached. 

    Nope, which topped the box office with $44 million last weekend, is expected to pull in between $17-$18 million in its second weekend. Of course, as word of mouth continues to grow for Jordan Peele’s third feature film, it’s possible those numbers could go higher. Should that be the cast, Nope could stop League of Super-Pets before it truly gets a chance to take off at the box office.

    DC League of Super-Pets is now playing in theaters.

    Source: Deadline

  • MGM Loses Film Rights to ‘Tomb Raider’, Alicia Vikander No Longer Attached

    Well, it was sadly a question of time before MGM would end up losing the film rights to Tomb Raider. Many speculated that the silence on the sequel, which was greenlighted for quite some time now, wasn’t moving forward. It seems that the window has passed and many Hollywood movie studios are after one of gaming’s most prolific heroines. Of course, 2018’s Tomb Raider star Alicia Vikander is subsequently no longer attached to the project in any way.

    The previously mentioned film didn’t make a huge splash at the box office but still pulled in $275M worldwide. It was swiftly renewed for a sequel with Lovecraft Country‘s Mischa Green attached to write and direct. It seems that they are likely to reboot the franchise, producer Graham King under the GK Films banner is looking into buyers after acquiring the rights back in 2011 from Square Enix.

    Tomb Raider is no longer under their umbrella and has been purchased by the Embracer group, as Square Enix just sold its entire Western division for $300M. The new owner is excited to expand its ventures into the cinematic territory but it’ll likely strongly depend on who buys the project. There is an animated series in development by Netflix, which will likely try its best to get its hands on it, especially as it fits perfectly into its IP-growing portfolio.

    Source: The Wrap, Twitter

  • Latest ‘Madame Web’ Set Photos Offer First Look at Adam Scott

    Latest ‘Madame Web’ Set Photos Offer First Look at Adam Scott

    Madame Web remains a web of mystery as we try to figure out what exactly Sony’s endgame is here and where they are heading with their Spider-Man universe that doesn’t actually feature the webhead. They have quite a few projects in some form of development, but the one to currently stand out is the mysterious Madame Web.

    Hinted at as their take on Doctor Strange, it may actually be used as a different kind of film altogether. There’s no clear hint at if this might be the film to introduce us to Sony’s version of Spider-Man, may it be someone new or even familiar. Yet, the casting of Adam Scott had many thinking that perhaps he’s the one to take on the mantle in this project. While we don’t get any clarification, we do get our first look at Scott in some new set photos.

    As these photos were shared by Just Jared, we can’t share them here but you can check them out by clicking here.

    It definitely isn’t revealing anything as he’s wearing some casual clothes. Though his style isn’t something that a Spider-Man wouldn’t wear. The idea of an older version of the character is definitely an interesting choice; even if Tobey Maguire is also around the same age.

    Who knows if they actually explore the multiverse and we’re introduced to a variety of Peter Parkers throughout the film’s runtime. Whatever direction they are taking, it’ll definitely be interesting to see how it comes together once we get some more official information on the project.

    Source: Just Jared

  • Holt McCallany Accepts ‘Mission: Impossible’ Role

    Holt McCallany Accepts ‘Mission: Impossible’ Role

    Mindhunter actor Holt McCallany has signed on for a role in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning – Part Two. The actor will play Secretary of Defense Bernstein. He joins Hayley Atwell, Shea Whigham and Pom Klementieff, who all star alongside leading man Tom Cruise.

    Part Two will serve as the eighth title in the hit franchise. Cruise returns as agent Ethan Hunt who leads his team on globe-trotting missions as a means to avert global disaster. Details regarding the film’s plot are sparse, but the film could potentially serve as the end of the franchise, although no decision looks to have been made as of yet. Christopher McQuarrie returns to direct the film from his own script after wrapping on Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning – Part One.

    McCallany starred as FBI Special Agent Bill Tench on Netflix’s critically acclaimed series Mindhunter. He currently stars in the AMC drama 61st Street alongside Courtney B. Vance, which has been renewed for a second season. Other credits on his resume include Lights Out, Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley and Blue Bloods. 

    The last Mission: Impossible film, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, earned $791 million at the worldwide box office back in 2018. Cruise can currently be seen on the big screen in Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick, which continues to fly high at the box office after two months in release.

    Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning – Part Two will hit theaters on June 28th, 2024.

    Source: Deadline

  • Marvel Studios Director Takes Himself Out of the Running to Helm ‘Avengers: Secret Wars’

    Marvel Studios Director Takes Himself Out of the Running to Helm ‘Avengers: Secret Wars’

    Kevin Feige delighted and confused Marvel Studios’ fans with the announcement that Avengers: Secret Wars is targeting a November 2025 theatrical release. Though the project had been teased as early as June of 2021 in Season One of Loki, the debate about whether or not something on the scale of Secret Wars could be put together in less than a decade raged on amongst fans.

    That debate hasn’t ended with the announcement of the film, but some attention has been diverted to who might be directing Avengers: Secret Wars. When it was announced that Destin Daniel Cretton signed on to helm Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, which will debut just six months before Avengers: Secret Wars, it was also revealed that Cretton was not on board for Secret Wars. It’s hardly uncommon for a Marvel Studios’ film that’s over 3 years away to be without a director, but for one of this magnitude, it’s become a talking point and most of the discussion seems to center on directors who have worked with Marvel Studios in the past.

    One such director, Scott Derrickson, who directed 2016’s Doctor Strange and served as an executive producer on Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness, has been mentioned as a possible candidate, but according to Derrickson, it’s not in the cards. When asked if there were any possibility of him landing the gig, Derrickson promptly replied with a GIF that provided a firm “NO” as an answer.

    https://twitter.com/scottderrickson/status/1552688255795171329

    If Derrickson is truly out of the running, the pool of candidates who have worked with Marvel Studios in the past is still pretty deep. While Feige has said the Russo brothers aren’t on board for the project, it had the “they aren’t on board YET” feel. Other candidates could include Ryan Coogler, Sam Raimi, Peyton Reed, Nia DaCosta and Jon Favreau, who while he’s been busy with Star Wars, could return for a project the size of Avengers: Secret Wars. And there’s no reason to close the door to directors who haven’t worked with the studio before, as a big project like this could attract the interest of some big names in the industry. Whoever they land, Marvel Studios could have an announcement as early as this September at their D23 presentation in Anaheim.

  • Kevin Feige on Marvel Studios’ New Outlook on Avengers Films

    Kevin Feige on Marvel Studios’ New Outlook on Avengers Films

    For the first decade of its existence, Marvel Studios rolled out an Avengers film every three years or so to signal the end of a Phase. Fans were treated to The Avengers in 2012, Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015 and then double-dipped with Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame in 2018 and 2019. Endgame, of course, was the final film in what’s now known as The Infinity Saga, a long-form narrative told over the course of 23 films.

    Three years removed from the release of Endgame, Marvel Studios’ next phase is off and running and, in less than two years, has seen the release of more than half of what the studio did in the first eleven years. Thanks to the addition of in-universe streaming series on Disney Plus, Phase 4 is already 13 projects deep with two more coming in 2022 (She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) and 26 more scheduled from 2023 through 2025. As it stands, when Daredevil: Born Again releases on Disney Plus in the Spring of 2024, Marvel Studios’ post-Infinity Saga output will surpass what the studio released in its first 10 years, with 25 total projects released in just over 3 years (2021-24). None of those projects, however, will have been Avengers projects.

    At SDCC ’22, Marvel Studios head cheese Kevin Feige revealed the studio’s upcoming slate, which includes two upcoming Avengers films. With both of those films slated to hit theaters in 2025, fans are staring down a six-year stretch in between Avengers films, double what they’ve been accustomed to. Feige explained why the studio has broken free from the pattern they once set for themselves:

    The truth is, when we were doing Phase 1, Phase 2 and Phase 3, there were less projects over more years. They were smaller projects and individual character stories, and it felt appropriate at that point, that after every two or three years that it took for a phase, we would do an ‘Avengers’ film. As [Phase] 4, 5 and 6 were coming together, there are more projects in less years – because of all the amazing stuff we’re now allowed to do on Disney+, and getting characters from Fox, Fantastic Four and Deadpool — that it felt like, certainly after ‘Infinity War’ and ‘Endgame,’ that we thought ‘Avengers’ movies aren’t cappers. So many of our movies now — ‘Multiverse of Madness’ and what you’re about to see in [‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’], all are big team-up films introducing big parts of the mythology… ‘Avengers’ films really should be the capper to a saga.

    Kevin Feige

    Feige left a lot to unpack there, but the key points are that the increase in the number of productions, the ability to tell stories on Disney Plus, the addition of new properties via the Fox merger and the fact that the studio can use the already existing wealth of characters in team-up style films all helped the studio rethink what an Avengers film might need to be. Part of the allure of an Avengers film is seeing multiple heroes working together and that’s something that the studio can do in nearly every project they roll out these days, given that they have dozens of already established characters at their disposal. And so, at the end of the day, what it really means is that the Avengers films will feel like even bigger events than they did before with the ability for them to all include something on the scale of the final battle in Avengers: Endgame. For fans of Marvel Studios, that’s a prospect worth waiting to see on the screen.

    Source: Variety

  • Maris Abela in Talks to Portray Amy Winehouse in ‘Back to Black’

    Maris Abela in Talks to Portray Amy Winehouse in ‘Back to Black’

    The forthcoming Amy Winehouse biopic looks to be zeroing in on an Industry actor. Just weeks after confirming Sam Taylor-Johnson (Nowhere Boy) will direct the film, Variety is reporting that newcomer Marisa Abela is in talks to portray the singer in Back to Black, although the outlet has noted a deal is not yet in place.

    Abela currently stars in the BBC drama Industry where she plays the privileged but troubled Yasmin Kara-Hanani. The series will return for its second season next month. Outside of Industry, Abela has starred in the Sky TV series COBRA and starred alongside James Norton in the film Rogue Agent. She’ll next be seen alongside Haley Bennett and Sam Riley in She is Love. She is also set to appear in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie which will hit theaters next year.

    The biopic is a passion project for Taylor-Johnson who was good friends with the singer and the project always intended to find a newcomer to portray Winehouse, rather than a pop star. The production also made sure to find someone that was of Jewish heritage to stay true to Winehouse’s background. While Abela has not sung in any of her projects to date, her RADA profile notes that she does sing and is described as an alto.

    The script for Back to Black was written by Matt Greenhalgh. The biopic is being produced by Studiocanal along with Alison Owen and Debra Hayward alongside Tracey Seaward. A deal for a Winehouse biopic was first signed off on in 2018, when the estate signed a deal for the movie. Owen and Hayward have been attached to the project since then. Winehouse’s father, Mitch Winehouse, has thrown his support behind Back to Black.

    As of now, a deal for Abela has not been finalized nor has a release date been announced for the film.

    Source: Variety

  • Xochitl Gomez Talks America Chavez’s Future…As a Possible Mutant

    Xochitl Gomez Talks America Chavez’s Future…As a Possible Mutant

    Xochitl Gomez is a star on the rise. The actress debuted as the dimension-hopping hero America Chavez in this year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and it seems likely that Marvel Studios has even bigger plans for her future. In both the comics and on the big screen, her character has the ability to punch her way across Marvel’s never-ending plethora of universes. With the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the midst of it’s Multiverse Saga, and with a Secret Wars adaptation on the way, America could end up being the piece that ties it all together. She could also play an interesting role in what the MCU has planned next.

    The finale of Ms. Marvel on Disney+ pulled a shocking twist when it revealed Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan would be the MCU’s first major mutant. Traditionally an Inhuman, the move proved Marvel Studios was not afraid to tweak origins on the road to folding former Fox properties into their timeline. Making Khan a mutant also helped simplify her somewhat messy on-screen backstory, and a similar unveiling could do the same for America Chavez, whose powers and origin are usually fairly complicated to explain. Speaking with Comic Book Movie, Gomez was asked how she felt about her character’s potential to also be a mutant in the MCU. Her response was not a denial:

    Yeah, I mean I’m honestly open to anything. As long as we get to see…I think there’s so much more to her and her story that we haven’t really seen yet. I think there are lots of layers to America, and I think there are some fun things to explore. Hopefully, we get to explore the things, and yeah, I think that’s all I’m gonna say.

    Xochitl Gomez

    The last time fans saw Chavez, she was training with Wong in Kamar Taj to become a sorcerer. If not a mutant, than perhaps the young heroine could join the ranks Doctor Strange and the Sorcerer Supreme. When asked about this alternative possibility, Gomez continued:

    Yeah, you see her in Kamar Taj and she’s learning the mystic arts, which is a different form of magic than her powers. I think it’s really cool that she’s learning that, and also just being at Kamar Taj gives her some discipline and just a place to call home since, obviously, she doesn’t really have a place like that. Being there with Wong I think is a good choice and a smart decision.

    Xochitl Gomez

    Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is now streaming on Disney+. Whether America Chavez could turn out to be a mutant or a sorcerer remains uncertain.

    Source: Comic Book Movie