Superhero movies are in a weird place right now, especially at Marvel’s house of ideas. Even as recent films struggle to land with audiences like the surefire hits of old, the studio is ready to look ahead with the heightened interest in what’s on the horizon. But part of that horizon includes navigating the murky…
FromSoftware showed us what’s been cooking in the Elden Ring oven, and the results have undoubtedly made Soulslike fans salivate. (I’m Soulslike fans.) The studio unveiled the first trailer for its hotly anticipated DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, and now that we know it arrives on June 21, it’s a good time to round up…
FromSoftware showed us what’s been cooking in the Elden Ring oven, and the results have undoubtedly made Soulslike fans salivate. (I’m Soulslike fans.) The studio unveiled the first trailer for its hotly anticipated DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, and now that we know it arrives on June 21, it’s a good time to round up…
Nic Pizzolatto got his career as a storyteller started by writing short stories and a novel called Galveston, then made his move into television by writing a couple episodes of the first season of the AMC series The Killing. He wasn’t pleased with that experience, telling NOLA.com that, “I want to be the guiding vision. I don’t do well serving someone else’s vision.” So he left The Killing as it headed into season 2 and went off to create his own show: True Detective, which found a home at HBO. Pizzolatto’s deal with HBO was renewed twice over the years as he crafted three seasons of True Detective, with his final deal with the network earning him $3 million a year. He was going to work on the network’s Perry Mason reboot, but had to let it go so he could focus on True Detective. Once True Detective season 3 wrapped up, Pizzolatto’s HBO deal expired and he signed a new deal with FX… but while Pizzolatto was gone, HBO retained the ownership rights to True Detective, and they were interested in bringing in someone who had “a fresh voice with a different point of view” to oversee a new season of the show. That’s how we see Issa López’s True Detective: Night Country – and now only has Pizzolatto’s social media behavior made it clear that he’s not happy to see True Detective continue without him, it has also led fans to wonder what he’s up to these days. So The Hollywood Reporter has put together an article on what Pizzolatto has been doing since his True Detective days ended.
First came the series he set up at FX: a drama called Redeemer, based on the Patrick Coleman novel The Churchgoer, which was set to star True Detective season 1’s Matthew McConaughey. FX gave the project a “script to series commitment”, meaning it would get a straight-to-series order, bypassing the pilot stage, if the network liked the scripts Pizzolatto turned in. Unfortunately, this project was set up in January of 2020, so it came to a standstill during the first year of the pandemic. At the start of 2021, FX decided to pass on Redeemer, and Pizzolatto negotiated an early exit from his FX deal, two years before it would have expired.
During the True Detective years, Pizzolatto had also worked on the scripts for the 2016 remake of The Magnificent Seven, an adaptation of his novel Galveston (which he took his name off of when director Mélanie Laurent did her own rewrite of the script), an unmade World War II drama called Ghost Army (which had Ben Affleck attached to direct and star), and Deadwood: The Movie. While Redeemer was falling apart, he wrote another movie, the Netflix release The Guilty (a remake of a Danish film).
In 2023, it was announced that Pizzolatto had set up “an untitled Western TV series” at Amazon’s Prime Video, again securing a “script to series” commitment… and soon after, Amazon got him to refashion his initial idea into another take on The Magnificent Seven. That project was just getting off the ground when Pizzolatto was hired to write a new draft of the Marvel Comics adaptation Blade, which is set to star his True Detective season 3 lead Mahershala Ali – but his work on that project was cut short when the writers strike hit. Once the strike was over, Marvel set aside Pizzolatto’s version of the story and decided to hire Logan‘s Michael Green to rewrite the screenplay instead.
But Pizzolatto is doing fine without Blade, because Amazon confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that his Magnificent Seven series is still in development. He has also written “a feature film that has attracted a top-name star and director that should be announced this month, and is working on two other TV projects.”
And in just a couple months, he will be making his feature film directorial debut, as production on his film Easy’s Waltz is scheduled to begin in April. Pizzolatto will be directing the film from his own screenplay, with Al Pacino, Michelle Monaghan, Simon Rex, and True Detective season 2’s Vince Vaughn signed on to star. Easy’s Waltz has been described as “Swingers meets A Star Is Born” and will tell the story of a down-on-his-luck comedian-crooner navigating modern Las Vegas with old-school Vegas personalities.
So Pizzolatto has plenty going on, but also takes time to let people know he’s not happy that True Detective is in the hands of others now… which is kind of ironic, coming from someone who has worked on multiple remakes.
Are you a fan of Nic Pizzolatto’s work, and are you looking forward to Easy’s Waltz and/or his Magnificent Seven series (and whatever else he has in development)? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
The post True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto is working on The Magnificent Seven, Easy’s Waltz, & more appeared first on JoBlo.
Dune: Part Two is more than a mere sequel. It’s a continuation, culmination, and ultimately a fantastic elevation of everything you already loved about director Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film Dune: Part One. That film ended with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) embracing a new way of life after almost everyone he loved…
Dune: Part Two is more than a mere sequel. It’s a continuation, culmination, and ultimately a fantastic elevation of everything you already loved about director Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film Dune: Part One. That film ended with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) embracing a new way of life after almost everyone he loved…
The fourth season of The Boys has yet to start. Still, a listing on the Film & Television Industry Alliance website (Production List) says production for The Boys Season 5 begins on April 08, 2024, with plans to shoot until August 22, 2024. While this listing is not an official announcement, the series will likely continue racking up viewership numbers on Prime Video, making a Season 5 renewal inevitable.
Meanwhile, The Boys Season 4 premieres in 2024, though no official premiere date has been announced. The Boys Season 4 picks up about a month after the Gen V Season 1 finale. When Season 4 begins, Butcher knows about Indira Shetty’s (Shelley Conn) engineered virus to kill Supes. Additionally, Homelander is going to trial after obliterating a protestor at a political rally during The Boys Season 3 conclusion. The new season also welcomes new cast members, including Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Rob Benedict, in mysterious roles. New Supes flying onto the scene include Firecracker (Valorie Curry) and Sister Sage (Susan Heyward), with Rosemarie DeWitt making things complicated as Hughie’s long-lost mother.
In other news related to The Boys, the property will introduce a Spanish-language spin-off called The Boys: Mexico from Blue Beetle writer Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer, with Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal set to executive produce. Details regarding The Boys: Mexico are being kept under wraps for now, but the series will be shot in Mexico. The search is on for someone to serve as co-showrunner alongside Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer. Deadline adds that Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal are also considering appearing in the series, although they would not be main roles.
Since the debut of The Boys in 2019, we’ve seen two spin-off series released: The animated anthology series The Boys Presents: Diabolical debuted on Prime Video in 2022, followed by Gen V. This college-set spin-off wrapped up its first season in November and has already been renewed for a second. With The Boys: Mexico now on the way, seeing how the franchise will expand with this latest spin-off should be fun.
How are you enjoying The Boys after three bloody seasons of superhero-related carnage? Are you excited about The Boys Season 4? How about hearing there’s production plans for The Boys Season 5? How long can Prime Video ride the wave before the property becomes oversaturated? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
The post The Boys Season 5 has seemingly been confirmed before the anticipated launch of Season 4 appeared first on JoBlo.
Do you know why Army of Darkness rules? Chief among the countless reasons I can think of is that Ash retains his boomstick even though he’s been displaced out of time. Everyone around him is doing battle against the forces of evil with swords and bows, while he’s lighting demons up with his shotgun. I love baffling…
Do you know why Army of Darkness rules? Chief among the countless reasons I can think of is that Ash retains his boomstick even though he’s been displaced out of time. Everyone around him is doing battle against the forces of evil with swords and bows, while he’s lighting demons up with his shotgun. I love baffling…
PLOT: Two young women, fleeing heartbreak, embark on an impromptu road trip to Tallahassee. Unfortunately for them, the drive-away car they sign for happens to have some precious cargo being sought by deadly parties.
REVIEW: As a lifelong fan of the Coen Bros, it’s a drag for me to say that Drive Away Dolls is a bit of a dud. Granted, it’s apparently “trying” to be bad, with it a gay-themed take on B-movies, but it’s so winking and self-aware that it feels more like an extended episode of Showtime’s cheesy Rebel Highway series from the nineties than a real movie. Running just a hair over eighty minutes, it feels like little more than a lark for one-half of one of the greatest directing duos ever. For some, that’s reason enough to make it worth seeing, but despite some inspired moments, it largely falls flat.
Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan star as Jamie and Marian, two gay young women looking to shake their lives up. In classic quasi-rom-com fashion, the two are opposites, with Jamie the sexually voracious one. Marian prefers planting her nose in the literature of Thomas Hardy and early nights. Jamie’s been sleeping around on her cop girlfriend (played by Beanie Feldstein) and needs to lay low for a while, so the two head to Tallahassee to visit Marian’s aunt. They sign up for a “drive-away”, where they drop off a car in Tallahassee for a shady small-time car dealer (Bill Camp – delivering the film’s most amusingly deadpan performance), only to discover they’re transporting precious cargo being sought but a well-connected big shot (Colman Domingo).
While it certainly seems like the kind of movie that would be fun for Coen to do, he and his producer/screenwriter/ editor, Tricia Cooke, get carried away in trying to make it self-consciously a B-movie. I suppose we’ve never seen a “love on the run” type movie from a lesbian perspective before (although we’re about to get a great one with Love Lies Bleeding), but the film is all silly/ no substance. It’s all done in this nudge-nudge, wink-wink fashion that grows tiresome, with the girls randomly being invited to high school “basement parties,” straight out of a 50s Roger Corman movie (with a gay twist) where all the girls are gay and randomly make out with each other, and other such episodes. If you decide to roll with it, you might find Drive Away Dolls fun in a stoner way, but the problem is that as much as it’s trying to be amusing, it isn’t.
Virtually all the gags fall flat, with a big star-cameo in the last chuck of the film being embarrassingly telegraphed. The only positive thing about Drive Away Dolls is that Qualley and Viswanathan do their best with the material. Qualley is tasked with delivering a very over-the-top (Coen-esque) performance as the “wacky” Jamie and certainly seems game. You’ve never seen her like this before, and she deserves kudos for willing to be so “out there” in her performance. At the same time, Viswanathan gets to be lower-key (and funnier) as the more buttoned-up Marian. The large ensemble cast shows up to play in the Coen sandbox, but only Pedro Pascal, in a tiny role, really makes the most of his cameo. The others tend to be grating – except for Domingo, who is the only one who gets to underplay a bit (it makes him seem like he’s in a different movie from everyone else – a better movie).
In the lead-up to its release, Coen and Cooke warned that critics might not get the vibe they’re going for, and that’s fair. As a midnight movie, Drive Away Dolls could find a following, as it has aspirations of being high camp. For me, it’s just not memorable, funny or stylish enough to work as the kind of entertainment it wants to be. Midnight movies are supposed to be fun, but this is just grating.
The post Drive Away Dolls Review appeared first on JoBlo.