Happy Death Day 2U trailer: It’s your birthday again, and again
After playing in theaters ahead of the new Halloween movie for weeks, Universal Pictures has released Blumhouse’sHappy Death Day 2U trailer, the sequel to the 2017 slasher hit. Starring returning cast members Jessica Rothe and Israel Broussard, you can check out the trailer in the player below!
Jessica Rothe leads the returning cast of Happy Death Day 2U, the follow-up to Blumhouse’s (Split, Get Out, The Purge series) surprise 2017 smash hit of riveting, repeating twists and comic turns. This time, our hero Tree (Rothe) discovers that dying over and over was surprisingly easier than the dangers that lie ahead. Jason Blum once again produces and Christopher Landon returns to write and direct this next chapter, while Happy Death Day executive producers Angela Mancuso and John Baldecchi are newly joined by EP Samson Mucke (Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse).
The CW drops 20 new photos from the Elseworlds crossover
In just a few days, The CW’s annual Arrowverse crossover event will begin. The crossover, titled Elseworlds, will take place across episodes of The Flash, Arrow, and Supergirl. In anticipation, the network has just released 20 new photos from the three-night event, featuring some reality-bending hijinks involving Barry Allen and Oliver Queen, Superman in an all-black suit, and more. You can check out the photos in the gallery below.
The crossover event stars Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen/Green Arrow, Melissa Benoist as Kara Danvers/Supergirl, Grant Gustin as Barry Allen/The Flash along with guest stars Ruby Rose as Kate Kane/Batwoman, Tyler Hoechlin as Clark Kent/Superman, Elizabeth Tulloch as Lois Lane, Jeremy Davies as Dr. John Deegan, Bob Frazer as Roger Hayden/Psycho Pirate and Cassandra Jean Amell as Nora Fries, the wife of the classic DC comics villain Mr. Freeze.
This story will also mark Ruby Rose’s debut as Kate Kane, a.k.a. Batwoman. While Kate is Bruce Wayne’s cousin in the DC Universe, the Batman isn’t expected to appear in this story or anywhere else in the Arrowverse any time soon. That said, Batman does exist in this world, and his absence will play a role in the storyline. Possibly explaining why Oliver Queen calling him out by name last season on Arrow.
CS Interview: Ron Perlman on Asher and Hellboy, Plus Exclusive Clip!
Momentum Pictures provided ComingSoon.net the chance to talk 1:1 with acting legend Ron Perlman (Sons of Anarchy, Hand of God) about his new hitman film Asher, as well as a little about Hellboy! Check out the interview below, along with an exclusive clip from Asher!
Asher stars Perlman, Famke Janssen (X-Men, The Blacklist), Richard Dreyfuss (Jaws, Book Club), Peter Facinelli (Twilight, Nurse Jackie) and Jacqueline Bisset (Bullitt, Murder on the Orient Express). The film was directed by Michael Caton-Jones (Basic Instinct 2, The Jackal) from a script written by Jay Zaretsky.
Asher (Ron Perlman) is a former Mossad agent turned gun for hire, living an austere life in an ever-changing Brooklyn. Approaching the end of his career he breaks the oath he took as a young man when he meets Sophie (Famke Janssen) on a hit gone wrong. In order to have love in his life before it’s too late, he must kill the man he was, for a chance at becoming the man he wants to be.
Momentum Pictures will release the upcoming action film Asher in theaters and On Demand/Digital HD on December 7.
ComingSoon.net: I heard you on Joe Dante’s The Movies That Made Me podcast the other day, and you were talking about how you read everything that comes through your production company, but only to a point unless it catches your fancy. What caught your fancy about this “Asher” script?
Ron Perlman: Well, this thing opens with this mysterious ritualistic act of shining your shoes, then segues to a dude who’s mysteriously dressed out in the street, stops off and buys a pack of Pall Malls and an umbrella. You spend the first 20 pages wondering what it is he’s going to do. When he finally arrives at his destination, gets the cigarette going, puts up the umbrella because the sprinkler system gets set off because of the smoke he’s created, a door opens and he offs somebody with three shots to the head and the heart you say to yourself, “Holy fuck. What am I watching here?” Through the nuanced genius of our young writer Jay Zaretsky, he never lets up on creating this incredibly nuanced, sophisticated world, where it’s a combination of brute force and elegance and grace and sophistication and civilized behavior, which is what drives you through it. The way he meets this girl that suddenly turns his life around, it’s all incredibly clever and it’s all incredibly minimalized, very minimal, very stylized and very cinematic. So I just couldn’t stop. There was not one page in the script where I felt like, “Okay, you’re losing me.” It was just the opposite.
CS: Like you said, the opening of this film expertly tells you about Asher. You get the sense of the meticulousness, the resourcefulness, how casual and confident he is in his work, how lonely he is. What do you think you brought to defining this character that wasn’t in the script?
Perlman: Not very much. Let me amend that, I was trying to be falsely humble there. What attracted me about the notion of playing Asher is the quietness of his life, the solitude of his life, how that is part and parcel of what he’s doing. He needs to be expert in not being noticed, in slipping in and out of places, almost as if he never was there. So he’s ghost-like, and yet he’s a guy who has this professionalism and this approach to his work that is really interesting, really compelling and really well articulated. So I just knew that in the playing of him, part of the trick was just existing on-screen without doing anything. When he is doing stuff, the stuff is doing him. He’s not doing it because that’s the mastery of this guy’s profession. The gun that he carries is just an extension of his arm. It’s not a gun. It’s part of him, as is everything he does. And that’s what made the playing of him different than any role I’ve ever approached before.How little I felt I needed to do, how much I was willing to trust the quiet moments where he’s just sitting there, waiting for night to fall, waiting for sleep to come up on him, you know? Just waiting to die.
CS: You grew up Jewish in New York, and a lot of this movie takes place in the Jewish community there. What is the biggest thing that’s changed from the New York you knew as a child?
Perlman: Well, the New York I knew as a child had -and I’m not exaggerating- a world-class deli and a world class Chinese restaurant on literally every street. Now I would defy you to find one of those things in the entire borough of Manhattan. So the city was just this very ethnically drawn reflection of all of this melting pot with mom and pop, shoemakers, delis, Chinese restaurants and pizza places, reflective of small business owners that came from Europe or Asia or wherever the hell they came from, to find this promised land in America. And the city was reflective of that. Now the city is just a reflection of the iPhone. Your existence is just one long tweet or one long photograph that you can post on Instagram, or one long sitting there in the fucking Starbucks on your computer with your head buried and not noticing that there’s any other people out there.
CS: You were working with Michael Caton-Jones on this film, who’s no slouch. He’s proven that he can handle action and character work, and there’s a lot of both in this movie. What do you think made him right for this story, specifically?
Perlman: Well, one, his willingness to make a movie that was as low budget as this, and that we gave him as few days to shoot as we did. For somebody who probably had 75 day shoots with tens of millions of dollar budgets come down and shoot “Asher” for what we made it for in 23 days meant that he loved the project enough so that he was willing to reinvent himself as a filmmaker and do what needed to be done to get it done under those conditions. That was huge. The more we started talking about the world of the movie, the more I realized he and I love the same things about this thing. That was huge. The movie that he made, considering all of the things I had listed, which is a 23 day shoot, and I won’t tell you the budget, but it was not big, he ended up making a beautiful neo-noir masterpiece that looks gorgeous, that plays beautifully and that delivers on all the dynamics in the script that we both loved. So my hat’s off to Michael.
CS: Mike Mignola announced that March 23, 2019 will be Hellboy Day, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the character.
Perlman: It might be Hellboy Day for Mike, but it won’t be for me.
CS: If Big Red was sitting next to you, what would you say to Hellboy on his birthday?
Perlman: Can I have a hit of that cigar, bro?
CS: You’ve done a lot of iconic roles, but those two “Hellboy” movies are such a huge part of your legacy. I was wondering if you could tell me real quick your favorite and least favorite memory of working on those films?
Perlman: I mean, it would be hard to nail down my favorite because every second of both films was my favorite and just knowing that I was going to sit for four hours with Jake Garber and Mike Elizade putting on Rick Baker’s makeup, and then walk out on set and play this deliciously contradicted, reluctant superhero, who really wanted to stay in his room and watch “The Three Stooges” and eat pizza… and do it in front of Guillermo del Toro and his chosen crew, it was all pleasure. The most decadent moment was when Guillermo has me running towards a train that’s coming at me. Usually, you run on a train that’s going away from you. Not Hellboy. He jumps on a train that’s coming at him. And I broke a rib and a toe doing that shot. And so, that’s probably my least favorite moment of “Hellboy”.
CS: Those are souvenirs you don’t want to walk away from the set with.
Perlman: They still hurt.
CS: The two films you made with Jean-Pierre Jeunet (“The City of Lost Children” and “Alien: Resurrection”) are still amazing. He’s one of the handful of filmmakers, Guillermo del Toro being another, where you can tell it’s hiss movie just from watching any random 30-second hunk of it.
Perlman: Even a frame of it, you can tell.
CS: Exactly, yeah. So did you and Jean-Pierre ever talk about working together again?
Perlman: Oh yeah. I think we had two experiences and our friendship only grew the more we knew each other. And there was a project that Jean-Pierre did that he asked me to be a part of and it just conflicted with something else I was doing. But yeah, there’s this great articulated enthusiasm to go find something to do again together.
Tom Hanks in talks to play Geppetto in Disney’s live action Pinocchio
Disney’s live action Pinocchio remake may have just been granted an enormous wish. According to The Hollywood Reporter, none other than two time Academy-award winner Tom Hanks is in early talks to play Geppetto, the old man who gave life to the titular wooden puppet.
This is good news for Pinocchio, as every other take on the puppet that longs to be a real boy — including Roberto Benigni’s 2002 misfire that is relevant only in that it carries a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes — has struck out at the box office. And while Hanks may not be the box office draw he once was, the veteran actor still has enough clout to guarantee another hit for Disney.
Hanks currently has a number of high-profile films in his lineup, including Pixar’s anticipated Toy Story 4, the World War II drama Greyhound, a Mr. Rogers biopic, and the post-apocalyptic drama BIOS.
Pinocchio will center on the wooden puppet who dreams of becoming a “real boy,” and the relationship between a father and son, the ramifications of lying and creating stories and living in a fantasy world. Paul King, director of both Paddington and Paddington 2 as well as The Mighty Boosh and Bunny and the Bull, is helming the feature.
The original Pinocchio, based on the 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, first debuted in theaters in 1940 and won two Academy Awards. In the 1940 Disney-animated film Pinocchio, the lead role was voiced by Dickie Jones, Jiminy Cricket by Cliff Edwards, and Master Geppetto by Christian Rubb.
According to Variety, Baby Driver star Eiza Gonzalez has joined Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham in the testosterone-filled Fast and Furious spinoff Hobbs & Shaw. Per the report, Gonzalez’s role was added at the last second, and scheduling had to be worked out with that of Legendary’s Godzilla vs Kong, which also features the actress.
This is just par for the course for Gonzalez, who will next be seen in Robert Zemeckis’ Welcome to Marwen this Christmas, and stars in the anticipated Alita: Battle Angel this February, and Paradise Hills.
Hobbs & Shaw will follow Johnson’s Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs and Statham’s assassin Deckard Shaw. The spin-off features a script from Chris Morgan, who has worked on the franchise since Tokyo Drift in 2006.
Johnson’s Hobbs first appeared in 2011’s Fast Five and has appeared in each Fast & Furious film since then, with Statham’s Shaw making his debut in a post-credit scene during 2013’s Fast Six and serving as the main antagonist of Furious 7 with an appearance in The Fate of the Furious as well. The upcoming spin-off is a separate film from the in-development ninth and tenth films in the series. Fast & Furious 9 will be released on April 10, 2020 with Fast & Furious 10 set to conclude the series on April 2, 2021.
Johnson will produce alongside Dany Garcia and Hiram Garcia through Seven Bucks Productions. Statham, Neal H. Moritz for Original Film, and Chris Morgan for his eponymous production company will also produce, with executive producers Kelly McCormick, Steve Chasman, Amanda Lewis, Ainsley Davies, and Ethan Smith.
In addition to Johnson and Statham, Idris Elba (The Dark Tower, Avengers: Infinity War) will be playing the film’s villain. Hobbs & Shaw speeds into theaters on August 2, 2019.
Lionsgate has revealed that Angel Has Fallen, the third film starring Gerard Butler (300) as Secret Service Agent Mike Banning, will open on August 23, 2019. The film also stars Morgan Freeman (Se7en), Jada Pinkett Smith (The Matrix Reloaded), Lance Reddick (Fringe) and Piper Perabo (Covert Affairs).
The third film in the series follows Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) as he becomes the target of a terrorist attack, this time while mid-flight on Air Force One. The original film, Olympus Has Fallen, saw the White House (codenamed “Olympus”) captured by a terrorist mastermind. With President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) kidnapped, disgraced former Presidential guard Mike Banning finds himself trapped within the building. As our national security team scrambles to respond, they are forced to rely on Banning’s inside knowledge to help retake the White House, save the President, and avert an even bigger disaster.
Angel Has Fallen is being directed by Ric Roman Waugh (Shot Caller) and produced by Millennium Films. The movie was scripted by Olympus writers Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt, and will also star Mark Gill, Matt O’Toole, Alan Siegel, and John Thompson. Avi Lerner, Christine Ota, and Trevor Short will serve as executive producers.
Earlier this fall, Netflix canceled both Iron Fist and Luke Cage, which called the future of Marvel’s Netflix series into question. Now, Deadline is reporting that Netflix has canceled Daredevil as well. Marvel confirmed the news with an official statement released to Deadline.
“Marvel’s Daredevil will not return for a fourth season on Netflix. We are tremendously proud of the show’s last and final season and although it’s painful for the fans, we feel it best to close this chapter on a high note. We’re thankful to showrunner Erik Oleson, the show’s writers, stellar crew and incredible cast including Charlie Cox as Daredevil himself, and we’re grateful to the fans who have supported the show over the years. While the series on Netflix has ended, the three existing seasons will remain on the service for years to come, while the Daredevil character will live on in future projects for Marvel.”
Why has Netflix canceled over half of its Marvel shows? Disney’s new streaming service, Disney+, may have played a role in the increasing tensions between Disney/Marvel and Netflix. Deadline suggests that there was also a push from Netflix to reduce the episode count from 13 episodes to 10. Marvel reportedly resisted that. The report also cites creative issues as a possible reason that three Marvel shows are now defunct.
Netflix probably won’t cancel Jessica Jones or The Punisher before their new seasons in 2019. But after that, their future on Netflix isn’t very bright. Given Disney+’s family friendly focus, it’s hard to picture these R-rated Marvel characters making the leap to that streaming service. Marvel’s official statement even says that “the three existing seasons will remain on the service for years to come.” However, the good news is that “the Daredevil character will live on in future projects for Marvel.” Perhaps Daredevil could get a big screen debut in the MCU.
How do you feel about Daredevil‘s cancellation? Let us know in the comment section below!
