Tekken 8 comes out on January 26 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, and reviews are popping up ahead of the game’s release date. It’ll be the eighth mainline entry in Bandai Namco Entertainment’s long-running franchise, and it seems critics are enjoying the game, with Tekken 8 currently boasting a score of 90…
Yesterday, we shared a new interview with director Renny Harlin that mostly focuses on his latest film, the action movie The Bricklayer, which was given a theatrical, On Demand, and Digital release earlier this month. But the interview also branches out with mentions of other Harlin projects, including the 1999 shark thriller Deep Blue Sea (watch it HERE), which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. During his conversation with JoBlo’s own Chris Bumbray, Harlin revealed that Samuel L. Jackson’s character – and therefore the famous scene involving that character – was added into the script at the last minute.
Harlin said, “The whole scene has its roots in the fact that I had done Long Kiss Goodnight with Sam, and we sort of made a pact that we would always work together as often as we can. So then Deep Blue Sea came up and Sam called me and he’s like, ‘I hear you’re doing a new movie, what’s my role?’ and I’m like, ‘Oh shit, I don’t have anything for him, this is horrible.’ So I sat down with the writer and I said, ‘We have to create a role for Sam.’ I got my idea, I totally ripped off Alien, where in Alien Tom Skerritt was the best known actor in that movie and he was the captain of the ship and everybody was like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna follow him,’ and the audience was like, ‘Okay, thank God, as long as we have Tom Skerritt we’re going to be okay.’ Then Tom Skerritt tells everybody, ‘I’m going to go around the corner and take care of business, and don’t you worry about anything.’ And he goes there, turns on the light, and there’s the alien and Tom Skerritt’s gone. The audience is left completely rudderless and then they realize they have to rely on Sigourney Weaver, who is this woman who wasn’t that well known at that point and they have to re-calibrate their brains and they realize nothing is safe in this story. I took that and I said, ‘Let’s create a Tom Skerritt character for Sam Jackson so that he comes into the movie, we think he’s the lead, he’s the most famous person in it, he has to be the lead, and then we give him this speech that has to be long enough that you start feeling like, ‘Oh yeah, sure,’ but it’s short enough so that you don’t get bored, and then we’re going to just take him in the middle of it and we’re going to throw everybody off balance.’ It worked and Sam relished that role and we got to work together, but his character was completely added to the story. Nothing like him was in the story until I realized that I had to have Sam in the movie.“
Once he had that scene in the movie, Harlin then had to argue with the studio over whether or not they should spoil it in the trailer. “There was a huge debate with Warner Bros. whether to put that in the trailer or not. I refused to put that in the trailer. They wanted to put it in the trailer because they felt like, ‘Oh my God, that will sell so many tickets.’ We’ll never know if that would have made a difference or not, but to me it had to be a surprise.“
Directed by Harlin from a screenplay by Duncan Kennedy, Donna Powers, and Wayne Powers, Deep Blue Sea has the following synopsis: On an island research facility, Dr. Susan McAlester is harvesting the brain tissue of DNA-altered sharks as a possible cure for Alzheimer’s disease. When the facility’s backers send an executive to investigate the experiments, a routine procedure goes awry and a shark starts attacking the researchers. Now, with sharks outnumbering their human captors, McAlester and her team must figure out a way to stop them from escaping to the ocean and breeding.
Jackson is joined in the cast by Thomas Jane, Saffron Burrows, L.L. Cool J, Jacqueline McKenzie, Michael Rapaport, Stellan Skarsgård, and Aida Turturro.
What do you think of that famous Samuel L. Jackson moment in Deep Blue Sea? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.
The post Deep Blue Sea: Renny Harlin on the famous Samuel L. Jackson scene and fighting to keep it out of the trailer appeared first on JoBlo.
Netflix is making the tag, as the streaming giant has just acquired exclusive broadcast rights to WWE Raw. The deal, worth $5 billion over the course of 10 years, will find the flagship show moving from the USA Network to Netflix in 2025.
This is just the latest major business deal related to the WWE over the past year, as the sports entertainment company merged with the UFC under Endeavor’s TKO Group Holdings in April 2023.
In a statement, TKO President and COO Mark Shapiro said of the deal, “This deal is transformative…It marries the can’t-miss WWE product with Netflix’s extraordinary global reach and locks in significant and predictable economics for many years. Our partnership fundamentally alters and strengthens the media landscape, dramatically expands the reach of WWE, and brings weekly live appointment viewing to Netflix.”
WWE president Nick Khan stated, “In its relatively short history, Netflix has engineered a phenomenal track record for storytelling…We believe Netflix, as one of the world’s leading entertainment brands, is the ideal long-term home for Raw’s live, loyal, and ever-growing fan base.”
But USA won’t be completely void of WWE content, as SmackDown will move from Fox back to the network in the fall. However, it’s worth noting that Netflix will host SmackDown — in addition to the pay-per-view events, the most famous of which are the “big four” of Royal Rumble, WrestleMania, SummerSlam, and Survivor Series — outside of the US. The January launch of the WWE and Netflix partnership will presumably begin with the first Monday of the year.
USA has been home to Raw for the majority of its 30+ years in existence. The program launched in 1993 with New York’s Manhattan Center serving as the central venue until it branched out to other cities. To date, more than 1,600 episodes have aired. As per the press release, Raw draws more than 17 million unique viewers per year.
This move further demonstrates Netflix’s interest in live streaming, as they have previously aired Chris Rock’s Selective Outrage special, the Love Is Blind reunion and more.
What do you think of the WWE teaming up with Netflix? Will this change how you watch pro wrestling? Give us your thoughts on the matter below.
The post WWE Raw moves to Netflix next year in $5 billion deal appeared first on JoBlo.
What is the meaning of success? And how far would you go to be successful? These are just some of the many questions I’m left with after watching Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut film- Nightcrawler. A film that packs many questions and shockingly few answers as intended by the filmmakers behind it. It’s a movie firmly planted in “literally me” culture with a main character who is equally interesting and terrifying- yet strangely observable at the same time.
For a riveting viewing experience that will entertain you (and leave you heavily reflecting on your morals)- Nightcrawler may be what you’re looking for as we follow Lou Bloom, a shady L.A. loner who gets by on low-level schemes and odd jobs. But when he discovers the dark and dangerous world of freelance crime scene photography- Lou becomes obsessed with rising to the top of the food chain as a professional stringer. Along the way, we’re taken for a ride complete with breakneck speed, back ally deals, blackmail, betrayal, manipulation (mentally and physically), and even murder while we watch the unlikely success of a truly despicable person.
But what can we learn from this movie and the brilliant first-time filmmaker behind it? What does the character of Lou Bloom say about the news industry, and what does that say about us for watching it? These are all questions I hope to unpack in today’s episode, where we take a thrilling look back on Dan Gilroy’s film and try to determine, once and for all, what Nightcrawler is really about.
So, where do we start? How about the same place that Gilroy started? L.A crime-scene reporting. Specifically, the world of stringers- a freelance industry of videographers that film crimes and sell the footage to news networks. Gilroy was fascinated with photography in general and originally wanted his film to be centered around the medium. Still, once he learned about the world of news stringers, he found that to be a unique and deeply rich perspective from which to tell his story. In my opinion, he’s right- but inherent themes need to be acknowledged with the story being set around this kind of industry. Things like the questionable ethics of certain kinds of journalism and our constant need to consume it as an audience. Are we feeding the beast? Is it our fault? Did we do this? Well, it’s not for me, or even Gilroy, to say.
Dan Gilroy is an interesting storyteller. He delivered this movie with style and confidence, and I really admire that level of effort. But I love how Gilroy plays with the audience by using his main character as very unlikeable. Of course, this has been done before- but rarely in this way. The character of Lou is clearly a master manipulator and arguably just a flat-out sociopath. He’s creepy, his tone and vocal cadence are unsettling, and he doesn’t do anything other than feed a plant that proves he’s even human. But somehow, for some reason, we want to watch him. We want to see what he’s going to do. We don’t want him to lose if it means the rush will be over. Do you know what this sounds like to me? The news.
Lou’s many interactions with Nina and other news executives show that the business thrives on shock value. Basically, the more bloody and gnarly the news, the better the numbers for their news station. They don’t see these victims as people but rather as content for their show. Lou sees them as financial opportunities, as made clear many times throughout his journey. Above all, the very nature of their work has de-sensitized them to the reality of what they’re doing because we, as consumers, have given them the incentive to do so. Listen to this line that Nina says to Lou in their first interaction-
That scene shows us two things. One, it shows us that this is how Lou automatically sees the industry. He didn’t get into it innocently and became jaded over time. His first impression is “If it bleeds, it leads.” and this scene solidifies that idea. It also shows how Lou finds his competitive edge. He learns from what Nina tells him: the key to success is finding the worst-case scenario and exploiting it for all its worth. I think Gilroy wanted to parallel the dynamics of unethical journalism and viral consumption to his film, where we see an unethical man doing horrible things- but we all sat firmly in our seats lined up to watch it.
So, why do we like this? We see this guy blackmail Nina into some unexplained fetish thing. We see him tamper with dead bodies and crime scenes. We see him lie, cheat, steal, and even set up his own partner to be murdered to get good footage to sell. This guy should repulse us. Jake Gyllenhaal once spoke on the character and said he saw Lou as a coyote. Someone who sort of wanders around at night only eats when he needs to, and is focused completely on his one goal. The character almost seems like an alien impersonating a human in the way that Gyllenhaal gives the character a rapid and sharp speech pattern that pierces through each page of dialogue. The actor states that he did this as a means to get all of Gilroy’s writing into the scene so that none of it had to be cut for time. I hope that’s true because, honestly, what a compliment.
The character of Lou is also similar to that of many “literally me” characters that all seem to share some sort of skewed vision of right and wrong. Lou can smile while he’s filming gunshot wounds and dead bodies and can also give a menacing stare when you’ve pissed him off. He can change on a dime. He’s unpredictable.
So, why is Lou somehow not scaring us off?
Well, simply- we want to know if he’ll win. This movie is the perfect way to do a villain origin story because they don’t make Lou a hero in any sense of the word. He’s only a hero to himself. If the movie had been told from, say, Riz Ahmed’s character, Rick’s perspective, Lou would be all villain in our eyes. But the difference is that from the beginning, we know Lou is only out to do one thing- succeed at something. That’s it. He doesn’t even know what he wants to succeed in at first. He just wants to be a memorable guy with social status. We’re really watching a terrible person with vague but intense ambition who figures out his goal as he goes, and, in the end, – he gets it. Lou wins.
See, this differs from other unlikable success stories because in other films, for instance, The Wolf of Wall Street- Leo as Jordan Belfort was sort of an anti-protagonist. He was definitely loose on his morals and ethics, cold and manipulative to his customers, and immensely motivated. But Scorsese didn’t tell the story as a success story. It was more, the rise and fall of a real-life person. But Lou doesn’t have the fall. Just the rise. He doesn’t get his just dessert or learn from any of the many wrongdoings he’s racked up. Instead, he’s rewarded for his bad behavior by becoming the head of his own successful newsgroup, video production news- and obtains an entire catalog of freelance stringers who are ready to go as far as it takes to uphold the company’s ruthless standards.
Think about the feeling you get when you watch movies like The Sandlot or The Matrix. We see our leading characters start at the bottom, learn their craft (like baseball or jujitsu), and then take on the antagonistic force and win the day by the end. And we feel that warm and cozy feeling because the leading characters we follow are generally likable and good. But with Lou, he’s none of those things- but he follows the traditional outline only. Gilroy replaced the likability with ruthless determination and the good nature with gross manipulative charm. Take, for example, this scene where Lou is literally dragging a dead body closer to the headlights of a flipped car to get a better shot. The behavior is horrifying, but the music and the framing are inspirational and triumphant. This makes for conflicting feelings about the kind of news we watch.
So, what’s the point of it all? Why care if a bad person gets everything they want, even if it means sacrificing innocent people for your desires? I don’t think we’re really supposed to know. Dan Gilroy seems to be happy raising questions rather than giving his own commentary. I find this to be immensely annoying when trying to figure out what he wants us to think about his movie, but I think that’s also kind of the point of it. Gilroy’s ambition was to create a movie that shows us the world and lets us decide if we’re morally conflicted enough to watch it unfold. He isn’t interested in judging Lou or the other stringers for their loose morals, but rather, he’s interested in what we might think of their behavior once we’ve seen behind the curtain.
So, at the end of the day, what I take away from Nightcrawler is that it’s a movie about success, the cost of getting success, and the vicious cycle of perpetuating success by our deep and dark desires to watch bad things happen. It’s not a movie that says I’m a bad person for consuming unethically sourced news. It’s not saying you’re a bad person for it. It’s not even saying Lou is a bad person for it. It’s simply saying that this is how it is- and you can do what you will with this information. And that is what Nightcrawler is really about.
The post What’s Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler really about? appeared first on JoBlo.
A new advanced treadmill-like floor invention from Disney could solve one of the biggest problems with VR: movement. But, it could also bring the world one step closer to making Star Trek-like holodecks a reality.
A new advanced treadmill-like floor invention from Disney could solve one of the biggest problems with VR: movement. But, it could also bring the world one step closer to making Star Trek-like holodecks a reality.
A few months ago, the Shudder streaming service announced that they’ve renewed The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs for a supersized sixth season that is expected to get rolling sometime in March of 2024. But before that season begins, we’re getting another Joe Bob special! This one is called Joe Bob’s Very Violent Valentine and it will be airing live on Shudder TV and AMC+ TV (in the US and Canada) at 9pm ET on February 9th. The archive of the show will then be available to watch on Shudder as of February 11th.
Here’s the official description of Joe Bob’s Very Violent Valentine: Joe Bob Briggs and Darcy the Mail Girl honor the lusty sting of Cupid’s arrow with a kinky double-feature featuring blood, sex, and the dark side of love.
Joe Bob said they’ll be showing “two movies that will scare your crotchless panties off“.
On The Last Drive-In, the world’s foremost drive-in movie critic hosts eclectic horror movies, talking about their merits, histories and significance to genre cinema.
Beyond Joe Bob’s Very Violent Valentine, we know the new season of The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs will be taking a different approach from the weekly double features of previous seasons. Episodes will air every other Friday night, and Joe Bob will be presenting “single titles and surprises”. Single titles every other Friday is how Shudder intends to spread the episodes out over a longer period of the year. So it’s not quite what we’re used to, but more Joe Bob is always a wonderful thing. The legendary drive-in critic and movie host will be presenting more than thirty different films over the course of this season.
Deadline notes that The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs, which was previously filmed in Texas and then New Jersey, is now set up at the Senoia, Georgia studios where the Walking Dead shows have been filmed, and this location gives Joe Bob access to a backlot for the first time.
Joe Bob provided the following statement: “As everyone knows, you should never invite me into your home, because I always show up. Shudder has graciously invited me to stick around for a sixth year, and I intend to use that kindness to haunt your phones, laptops and big-screen TVs with the most ghastly examples of perversity in the history of cinema. Plus a few old jokes and some celebrity guests who will still return our phone calls. Put it all together and it spells PARTAY.“
Courtney Thomasma of Shudder owner AMC Networks said, “We’re delighted to bring Joe Bob, Darcy and the rest of The Last Drive-In Team back for our biggest season yet of crazy, scary and crazy-scary movies and specials, with the most entertaining commentary on TV. Joe Bob will be hosting more movie nights than any previous season and we can’t wait to continue the Friday night party with our Shudder family.“
The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs is produced by Matt Manjourides and Justin Martell and directed by Austin Jennings.
Are you a fan of The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs, and will you be tuning in for Joe Bob’s Very Violent Valentine? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
The post The Last Drive-In special Joe Bob’s Very Violent Valentine airs the week before Valentine’s Day appeared first on JoBlo.
This March we receive the triumphant return of the ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom, Her Majesty Princess Peach. Princess Peach: Showtime, the resilient monarch’s first headline game since 2005’s Super Princess Peach, is a stage-based action-adventure, as shown in new footage released by Nintendo today.
This March we receive the triumphant return of the ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom, Her Majesty Princess Peach. Princess Peach: Showtime, the resilient monarch’s first headline game since 2005’s Super Princess Peach, is a stage-based action-adventure, as shown in new footage released by Nintendo today.
Freya Allan clearly hasn’t gotten her fill of working on material that involves magic and monsters with her role on the Netflix series The Witcher, as she also has the lead role in the new horror film Baghead, which is set to reach theatres in the UK this Friday, January 26th. With that release date swiftly approaching, a short clip from Baghead has made its way online, and you can check it out in the embed above. In this clip, we see Allan’s character checking out a creepy basement.
First announced four years ago, Baghead went into production in late 2021 and is a feature expansion of director Alberto Corredor’s 2017 short of the same name. Scripted by Christina Pamies and Bryce McGuire, the film has the following synopsis: After the death of her estranged father, Iris learns she has inherited a run-down, centuries-old pub. She travels to Berlin to identify her father’s body and meet with The Solicitor to discuss the estate. Little does she know, when the deed is signed she will become inextricably tied to an unspeakable entity residing in the pub’s basement. Baghead – a shape-shifting creature that can transform into the dead. Two thousand in cash for two minutes with the creature is all it takes for desperate loved ones to ease their grief. Neil, who has lost his wife, is Iris’ first customer. Like her father, Iris is tempted to exploit the creature’s powers and help desperate people for a price. But she discovers breaking the two-minute rule can have terrifying consequences. Together with her best friend Katie, Iris must battle for control of Baghead & figure out how to destroy her, before she destroys them.
Allan plays Iris and is joined in the cast by Jeremy Irvine (War Horse), Ruby Barker (Bridgerton), Ned Dennehy (Guns Akimbo), Peter Mullan (Top of the Lake), Julika Jenkins (Dark), and Saffron Burrows (Deep Blue Sea).
Baghead was produced by The Picture Company’s Alex Heineman and Andrew Rona as part of their deal with Studiocanal. Vertigo’s Roy Lee, Alibi’s Jake Wagner, and Corredor’s short film collaborator Lorcan Reilly serve as executive producers. Ron Halpern, Shana Eddy, and Rachel Henchosberg oversaw the project for Studiocanal.
What did you think of the Baghead clip? Are you interested in this horror movie? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
The post Baghead clip sends Freya Allan of The Witcher into a creepy basement appeared first on JoBlo.