Back in November of 2021, it was announced that Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea), Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix), and Emily Beecham (Into the Badlands) had signed on to star in Slingshot, a psychological sci-fi thriller coming our way from director Mikael Håfström (Escape Plan). Filming began on December 1st of that year – and more than two years later, we finally have an update to share on Slingshot! The Hollywood Reporter has broken the news that Bleecker Street has acquired the U.S. distribution rights and are planning to give the film a wide theatrical release at some point before the end of 2024.
Written by R. Scott Adams (Donner Pass) and Nathan Parker (Moon), Slingshot will tell the story of an astronaut struggling to maintain his grip on reality aboard a possibly fatally compromised mission to Saturn’s moon, Titan.
Tomer Capon (The Boys) and The Walking Dead‘s David Morrissey are also in the cast.
Richard Saperstein’s Bluestone Entertainment worked with Filmsquad, Astral Pictures, and Hungarian investment fund Széchenyi Funds Ltd. to get Slingshot into production. Saperstein is producing with Istvan Major and Beau Turpin, while Ivett Havasi, Shara Kay, Michael Hollingsworth, Tom Nohstadt, Matthew Dwyer, Ron Cundy, Nikolett Barabás, Jonathan Krauss, Brooklyn Weaver, and Joanna Plafsky serve as executive producers. Filming took place at Korda Studios and other locations in and around Budapest, Hungary.
Saperstein had this to say about the project when it was first announced: “Slingshot is a wonderful match of filmmaker and material. I thought of Mikael the moment I first read the script. I am thrilled to embark on this production together in Hungary with our partners at Széchenyi Funds, and an incredible cast and crew.”
At the time, Håfström added: “After several years of preparation, it is exciting to take off with this highly talented cast. I am looking forward to the challenge of working within the contained environment of the spaceship. The script carves out some excellent characters and, as the story unfolds, some shocking secrets come to light.”
This was the first time Håfström worked with Affleck, Fishburne, or Capon. He previously worked with Morrissey on the 2005 thriller Derailed and with Beecham on the 2021 Netflix action movie Outside the Wire.
Are you interested in Slingshot, and are you glad to hear that it’s heading for a 2024 theatrical release? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
After months of speculation, the cast for the upcoming Marvel film The Fantastic Four has been announced by way of adorable Valentine’s Day-themed art. The art also revealed a release date: July 25, 2025.
After months of speculation, the cast for the upcoming Marvel film The Fantastic Four has been announced by way of adorable Valentine’s Day-themed art. The art also revealed a release date: July 25, 2025.
While rumours have been flying around about who would finally be playing the Fantastic Four in Matt Shakman’s highly anticipated reboot of Marvel’s First Family, Disney gave fans a Valentine’s Day treat and confirmed the full cast this morning.
All four actors have been heavily rumored for their respective roles. While Kirby and Pascal are well-known due to TheCrown and The Mandalorian, this is poised to be a potentially star-making role for Quinn, who’s risen to fame quickly since playing Eddie Munson on Stranger Things. Ebon Moss-Bachrach plays Richie (cousin!) on The Bear and recently nabbed his first Emmy. Matt Shakman previously helmed Disney Plus’s MCU series, WandaVision, their first (and best) show since the pivot to streaming. Recently, Bob Iger announced a shift in priorities for Disney after a disastrous 100th anniversary year, with fewer films and better quality control. The most recent MCU film, The Marvels, didn’t even make $100 million domestically, while Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was also considered a financial and critical misfire.
Granted, the Fantastic Four has been a notoriously difficult property for Hollywood to get right. In 1994, Roger Corman produced a cheapskate version of the film that never got (officially) released, while the Tim Story/mid-2000s Fox films were also seen as disappointing (although the first film did well enough to get a sequel). In 2015, Fox tried to reboot the franchise with a gritty version directed by Chronicle‘s Josh Trank. It was a financial and critical disaster.
Hopefully, Shakman can finally give the Fantastic Four the big-screen franchise launcher they deserve.
What do you think of the cast? Let us know in the comments.
While rumours have been flying around about who would finally be playing the Fantastic Four in Matt Shakman’s highly anticipated reboot of Marvel’s First Family, Disney gave fans a Valentine’s Day treat and confirmed the full cast this morning.
All four actors have been heavily rumored for their respective roles. While Kirby and Pascal are well-known due to TheCrown and The Mandalorian, this is poised to be a potentially star-making role for Quinn, who’s risen to fame quickly since playing Eddie Munson on Stranger Things. Ebon Moss-Bachrach plays Richie (cousin!) on The Bear and recently nabbed his first Emmy. Matt Shakman previously helmed Disney Plus’s MCU series, WandaVision, their first (and best) show since the pivot to streaming. Recently, Bob Iger announced a shift in priorities for Disney after a disastrous 100th anniversary year, with fewer films and better quality control. The most recent MCU film, The Marvels, didn’t even make $100 million domestically, while Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was also considered a financial and critical misfire.
Granted, the Fantastic Four has been a notoriously difficult property for Hollywood to get right. In 1994, Roger Corman produced a cheapskate version of the film that never got (officially) released, while the Tim Story/mid-2000s Fox films were also seen as disappointing (although the first film did well enough to get a sequel). In 2015, Fox tried to reboot the franchise with a gritty version directed by Chronicle‘s Josh Trank. It was a financial and critical disaster.
Hopefully, Shakman can finally give the Fantastic Four the big-screen franchise launcher they deserve.
What do you think of the cast? Let us know in the comments.
The Marvels is now available to watch on Disney+, and while the movie wasn’t the project that was able to pull Marvel Studios out of the fire, it tried to entice the viewers at the eleventh hour that something major was coming when the final teaser stated, “Be there for the moment that changes everything.” Spoiler for those who haven’t seen it, but the post-credits scene features Kelsey Grammer reprising his role as Beast from the X-Men movies. Something that may or may not be addressed in Deadpool & Wolverine. However, according to Zawe Ashton, who played the big baddie Dar-Benn in the film, there was another big moment that was to take place in the ending of the movie.
Digital Spy reports on Ashton appearing on the Phase Zero podcast from ComicBook.com. She reveals that during the finale sequence that had Carol Danvers and Dar-Benn fighting in space, Captain Marvel was originally written to die along with Dar-Benn. Ashton explained, “There was another ending that we did film where Brie and myself are kind of in space still having it out, and they kind of combust together, which was really amazing. And that was just a day on wires hanging out with Brie, which is surreal and fun. But yeah, there were a few different plans, I think.”
Ashton continued, “There was always going to be an epic death just because in terms of, I just think in terms of just bringing that story psychologically for Carol to a close I think was always the best thing. You don’t want to think, did she defeat her? Is this over? Is she going to be kind of doomed to this life of feeling guilty about this whole thing forever and ever? Or is she going to get this redemptive moment where Dar-Benn’s out of the picture and then she gets to almost take on the mantle of what she was trying to do?” Dar-Benn was not meant to continue in the MCU, but the revised ending now has Captain Marvel surviving the ordeal.
“It is a really redemptive arc for that character. I will say I did a day’s diving training, because there was going to be a lot of water involved in the original death,” Ashton concludes. The fate of Captain Marvel is now up in the air. Both of Brie Larson’s entries were met with mixed reception, and the Marvel character’s short franchise has become a hotbed of controversy.
Surely the making of one of the funniest movies ever made can’t be that serious…and it really isn’t! OK, 1980’s Airplane! was a tough sell and there were minor clashes between the directors and Paramount and lawsuits from a rival studio threatened the casting of numerous stars. But there was also perfect against-type casting, clever workarounds to silly DGA regulations and a complete reinvention of the spoof movie, all of which made Airplane! one of the greatest comedies ever.. Oh, and there were fart machines, too!
And so let’s park the taxi, avoid the fish and check in on our drinking problem as we find out: WTF Happened to this movie?!
Airplane! has its origins in the Kentucky Fried Theater, which the trio of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker (collectively known as ZAZ) founded in 1971. One act the fellas grew fond of was dubbing over serious movies with their own dialogue (a sort of proto-MST3K). They, too, loved spoofing commercials, and so would record them on VHS throughout the day and night. It was here that they accidentally stumbled upon a movie called Zero Hour! from 1957. But the plot was so absurd – a former pilot has to man a plane after the real pilots get sick with food poisoning – that they thought they could remake it altogether. They even named their lead character Ted Striker, just like Dana Andrews’ character (although they modified the spelling).
And so the script – then titled The Late Show – could be written. Completed in 1975 – two years before the group’s debut feature, The Kentucky Fried Movie, hit theaters – the script blatantly ripped from Zero Hour!, which must have been easy to do since they practically kept the movie on loop while writing. This is seen immediately as the eventual title – Airplane! – even steals the exclamation. They even took dialogue straight from Zero Hour! because it was so ridiculous, such as: “The life of everyone on board depends upon just one thing: finding someone back there who can not only fly this plane but who didn’t have fish for dinner.” ZAZ was also concerned that they could be sued, so they secured the rights for a mere $2,500 (although, interestingly, part of the movie was owned by Airplane!’s eventual studio, Paramount).
But it wasn’t just Zero Hour! that ZAZ pulled from; it was the disaster movie Airport (1970) and its sequels. There is a link between those two as well, as Arthur Hailey wrote the “Airport” novel and co-wrote Zero Hour! (the latter being adapted from his own TV play Flight into Danger). Here, Universal threatened to sue because Airplane! was too similar to their Airport series. They didn’t even want it to be called Airplane! but they eventually relented.
Unlike most spoofs, however, Airplane! didn’t require knowledge of its genre to appreciate the story, characters and jokes. In fact, most of us had probably never heard of Zero Hour! until we found out it influenced Airplane!
But ZAZ had trouble actually selling the script and, at the urging of John Landis, moved on to Kentucky Fried Movie, which Landis directed. This would give them some of the experience they needed and make them want to have more control of their scripts. Going back to Airplane!, ZAZ got interest from Avco-Embassy and AIP at various points. But it eventually made its way to Paramount and then-president Michael Eisner (who first got wind through Susan Baerwald), who loved it and enlisted Jeffrey Katzenberg – then working as president of production for the studio – to sit down with ZAZ and recruit them. Despite still being relatively fresh on the scene, ZAZ had some conditions if they were going to sell: they had to direct, which, surprisingly, Paramount agreed to, saying they could direct under the condition that if their work was bad, they would be fired after two weeks. Still, ZAZ would have to relinquish their insistence that it be shot in black and white and on a propeller plane to match Zero Hour! further! (sounds of a propeller are still heard, however).
With the studio lined up, casting on AIRPLANE! could begin. Another demand ZAZ had was that the movie be populated by non-comedy actors, some of whom we now can’t imagine comedy movies without!
Flying sky high in the lead was Robert Hays as Ted Striker, who beat out one of the oddest group of potentials ever compiled: David Letterman screen-tested but admitted – along with ZAZ – that he couldn’t act (the team would later show his audition on LATE NIGHT when they were guests); Paramount’s top choices, meanwhile, wanted Chevy Chase or Bill Murray, while everybody from Fred Willard to Bruce (now Caitlin) Jenner and – woah! – Barry Manilow, all circled the role. Willard apparently didn’t “get” it but later admitted it was a mistake, while Jenner read for the part, and Manilow would continue writing the songs that make the whole world sing. While Hays did have fun making the movie, he would say that simultaneously shooting Airplane! and the ABC sitcom Angie took a toll on him.
Julie Hagerty, then doing far-off-Broadway, would land Elaine Dickinson, edging out Shelley Long and Sigourney Weaver, who objected to the “sit on your face and wiggle” line. Leslie Nielsen, then known for his dramas, would play Dr. Rumack, beating out Dom DeLuise and Jack Webb (Joe Friday on Dragnet), which would have been his last movie, as he died in 1982. Others considered were horror icons Christopher Lee and Vincent Price; instead, Lee did Spielberg’s 1941, and Price did some voice work. There, too, was Peter Graves as Captain Clarence Oveur. Graves didn’t particularly like the script, even calling it a “disgusting piece of garbage” and saying his character came across as a pedophile. Still, he wound up laughing the hardest at the premiere! The role of Steve McCroskey was offered to George Kennedy, star of the Airport movies, but Universal talked him out of it. Instead, Lloyd Bridges won out…after some convincing from Robert Stack. Stack – known for his dramas and Oscar-nominated turn in Written on the Wind – would play Captain Rex Kramer. To nail his performance, he actually looked at comedian John Byner’s impressions of him and ended up “doing an impression of John Byner doing an impression of Stack.” And you thought there was nothing complex about Airplane!
The rest of the supporting cast also has their own individual backstories, so let’s take a look:
Kentucky Fried Theatre alum Stephen Stucker played flamboyant air traffic controller Johnny, even writing his own lines.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played co-pilot Roger Murdock and himself. But it took some extra coin, getting his salary upped so he could purchase a new Oriental rug. Believe it or not, non-hall of famer Pete Rose was the original choice! Through Abdul-Jabbar, ZAZ even worked in another nod to Zero Hour!, as that movie cast pro football hall of famer Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch as a co-pilot.
Helen Reddy was originally cast as Sister Angelina due to her role as Sister Ruth in Airport 1975, but after Universal threw yet another fit the role went to Maureen McGovern.
Stage legend Ethel Merman turns up as a delusional lieutenant, looking like she’s still in the 1960s.
Good Times’ Jimmie Walker – one of the few comedians in the cast – has a cameo as Windshield Wiper Man, while you’ll also spot James Hong as Japanese General and Breaking Bad’s Jonathan Banks as an air traffic controller.
Here’s someone you may not recognize…unless you were heavy into politics in the ‘70s. Howard Jarvis played the man waiting inside a taxi cab for the entire movie. The joke itself is good but made so much better – and smarter – when you know that Jarvis was a fiscally conservative politician, with the ultimate joke being that he would be content paying who-knows-how-much by sitting inside of a cab with the meter running. Here’s one more obscure cameo: the intercom people who keep bickering about red zones, white zones, and abortions were the actual people who provided the voices at LAX, where some of the movie was shot. Oh, and there’s Otto as himself, of course!
Every cast member was told to play it completely straight during filming, as is often the case with the best comedies. As the directors told them: “Pretend you don’t know you’re in a comedy.”
Filming on Airplane! began on June 20th, 1979, with a budget of $3.5 million (originally pegged at $7.5 million), and right away, it was a set of loopholes, language barriers and, yes, farts. Leslie Nielsen, who, again, was not known for comedy at the time, brought a small device on set that would mimic fart noises, breaking people in the middle of takes. At first, people thought he had a serious issue, while at other times, he blamed it on Julie Hagerty. He even sold a few of the devices – which Hays said he played “like a maestro” – on set for $7 apiece.
But ZAZ had bigger issues than flatulence. DGA regulations said that a movie couldn’t have three directors billed on the credits, and when ZAZ tried to develop the collective pseudonym of Abraham N. Zuckers, they were shut down. And so ZAZ developed a plan: Abrahams would be deemed the director (that is, working directly with the actors) while the Zuckers hid behind closed doors. As such, the three had to discuss notes in private secretly. Fortunately, the silly rule was cleared by the guild, thus all three names appear in the credits.
And while Zero Hour! was on standby so the team could match the composition and lighting, that doesn’t mean they hit every note right away. ZAZ had to nudge the actors in the right direction whenever there were spaces in the script to fill, while they had no idea how to write “jive talk.” This was improvised by Al White and Norm Gibbs, who further taught the speak to Barbara Billingsley, best known as June Cleaver aka the least jive woman on the planet!
But not everyone was quite on the same page. Ross Harris, who played the young Joey, admitted he was “oblivious” to the adult content Peter Graves was throwing at him. At the same time, Graves himself had reservations and thought he was misled, later being told by ZAZ that all of his perverse questions about Turkish prisons and naked men would be explained later on (they were not). Bridges, too, had trouble adapting to the style, asking at one point, “What the hell’s going on here?” (Of course, he’d grow fond of the spoof genre, later co-starring in the Hot Shots! movies and Mafia! for Jim Abrahams.)
On the music front, for the flashback sequence involving a Saturday Night Fever parody, ZAZ acquired the rights to The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive”; it sounds like a cover because it has been sped up. Another one who appreciated the style was Elmer Bernstein, who nailed the desired B-movie score that stands unique to his iconic works from The Magnificent Seven, The Ten Commandments and more.
But if you thought eating the fish was the biggest poison, imagine this: at an advanced screening of Airplane!, some reels were played out of order! After some proper rearranging – and trimming the movie down to sub-90 minutes from nearly two hours, the comedy was ready for theatres, debuting in Toronto and Buffalo on June 27th, 1980, before going wide on July 2nd, just a few weeks after The Blues Brothers and a few before Caddyshack. With such a small budget, Airplane! easily made back its money in less than one week, going on to gross $83.5 million during its run and become one of the highest-grossing movies of 1980.
Awards-wise, it would earn a BAFTA nod for its screenplay (losing to Being There) and even win the WGA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. It, too, would be nominated for the Best Musical or Comedy Golden Globe, losing to Coal Miner’s Daughter.
Like so many upon release, today we consider Airplane! one of the funniest movies ever. The American Film Institute would rank it as the 10th funniest ever, behind The Graduate and ahead of The Producers. That list’s #1 is Some Like It Hot, although the team thinks Airplane! will one day be considered the best comedy ever – once all of the Some Like It Hot fans die. The AFI, too, would rank the exchange “Surely you can’t be serious” / “I am serious…and don’t call me Shirley.” as one of the greatest movie quotes ever, actually one of the few comedies represented. The Writers Guild of America would name it the 4th funniest screenplay ever, behind Groundhog Day, Some Like It Hot and Annie Hall. And in 2010, Airplane! would be added to the National Film Registry, the same year as All the President’s Men, The Exorcist and more.
While Airplane! wasn’t the first parody comedy; it launched the most prolific decade for them in the history of movies, for good or bad. On the hardly debatable bad side, it launched a 1982 sequel, the appropriately titled Airplane II: The Sequel. And while it had a wealth of the original stars, ZAZ sat it out, instead shifting focus to the series Police Squad!, soon enough adapted into The Naked Gun.
And despite all of those spoofs that came after it and all of the directors it influenced (including the Farrelly Brothers, who admit they wouldn’t exist without the Zuckers), there is no greater spoof – or perhaps purely insane comedy – than Airplane! Even ZAZ couldn’t top it, although Top Secret! and The Naked Gun give it a worthwhile go.
In the end, it looks like we picked the wrong week to stop producing…WTF HAPPENED TO THIS MOVIE?!
Toho released a new Godzilla film, titled Godzilla Minus One (read our review HERE), in Japan on November 3rd, which happens to be Godzilla Day – the anniversary of the 1954 release of the original Godzilla movie. The film made its way over to the United States in December… and it became the highest grossing live-action Japanese film in North America even before a black and white version was released under the title Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color. Director Takashi Yamazaki has let it be known that he’s interested in making a sequel, and during a new interview with Empire magazine he revealed that he would like to feature some “kaiju vs. kaiju” action in the follow-up, if Toho lets him make it!
Yamazaki said, “I would certainly like to see what the sequel would look like. I know that Shikishima’s war seems over, and we’ve reached this state of peace and calm – but perhaps [it’s the] calm before the storm, and the characters have not yet been forgiven for what has been imposed upon them. … I don’t know that anyone has pulled off a more serious tone of kaiju-versus-kaiju with human drama, and that challenge is something that I’d like to explore. When you have movies that feature [kaiju battles], I think it’s very easy to put the spotlight and the camera on this massive spectacle, and it detaches itself from the human drama component.” He went on to say that he would have to “make sure that the human drama and whatever’s happening between [the] kaiju both have meaning, and both are able to affect one another in terms of plot development.“
Written and directed by Yamazaki, Godzilla Minus One sees an already devastated postwar Japan facing a new threat in the form of Godzilla. Interestingly, one of Yamazaki’s previous credits is the 2007 film Always: Sunset on Third Street 2, which features a Godzilla cameo in a fantasy sequence.
The film stars Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando, and Kuranosuke Sasaki, with music by Naoki Sato.
Toho’s Koji Ueda has said, “Set in a post-war Japan, Godzilla Minus One will once again show us a Godzilla that is a terrifying and overwhelming force, which you already get a sense of from the teaser trailer and poster. The concept is that Japan, which had already been devastated by the war, faces a new threat with Godzilla, bringing the country into the ‘minus.’“
Yamazaki directed a trilogy of Always: Sunset on Third Street films, as well as Juvenile, Returner, Ballad, Space Battleship Yamato, Friends: Naki on the Monster Island, The Fighter Pilot, Stand by Me Doraemon, Stand by Me Doraemon 2 (with Ryuichi Yagi), Parasyte: Part 1 and 2, Fueled: The Man They Called ‘Pirate’, Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura, The Great War of Archimedes, Dragon Quest: Your Story, Lupin III: The First, and Ghost Book Obakezukan.
Toho brought Godzilla Minus One to the states in its original Japanese version, with English subtitles. The film secured a PG-13 rating for its U.S. release. This is Toho’s 33rd film in the franchise. The most recent entries were the 2016 live-action film Shin Godzilla and a trilogy of animated features; Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters, Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle, and Godzilla: The Planet Eater. While Toho sends this one out into the world, Legendary is keeping their own Godzilla MonsterVerse alive with Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (which is set to reach theatres on March 15, 2024) and the Apple TV+ series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
If Toho were to let Yamazaki make a Godzilla Minus One sequel, it would be the first sequel in their franchise since 2002’s Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla received the direct follow-up Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. in 2003. While the Godzilla films released in the Shōwa era had some connection to each other, and same for the films in the Heisei era, (most of) the films released during the Millennium era and the current Reiwa era have been designed to be standalone entries.
Would you like to see Takashi Yamazaki get to make a “kaiju vs. kaiju” sequel to Godzilla Minus One? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
After the welcome reception of the Super Mario RPG remake just three months ago, Nintendo is back with another remake in the form of Mario vs. Donkey Kong. The original 2004 title on the Game Boy Advance was a charming puzzle platformer that pits the two titular stars and age-old rivals against each other once again.…
After the welcome reception of the Super Mario RPG remake just three months ago, Nintendo is back with another remake in the form of Mario vs. Donkey Kong. The original 2004 title on the Game Boy Advance was a charming puzzle platformer that pits the two titular stars and age-old rivals against each other once again.…
