Month: March 2024

19 Mar

A Nightmare on My Street: New Line took Will Smith to court over Elm Street tribute

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

New Line Cinema teamed up with the rock band Dokken when they needed a song and music video to help promote their 1987 film A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, but when the time came to make another Elm Street sequel the following the year, they decided to switch musical genres and find a rapper they could work with on a song for the soundtrack of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. According to the recently published book Maverick Movies: New Line Cinema and the Transformation of American Film by Daniel Herbert (pick up a copy HERE), New Line wanted a rap song for Elm Street 4 because the company “understood that 40 percent of the Nightmare series audience was Black.” The rap song that ended up on the soundtrack was The Fat Boys’ “Are You Ready for Freddy?”, which also got a music video that featured Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger… but DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (a.k.a. Will Smith) also recorded their own Elm Street-inspired rap song that year, “A Nightmare on My Street,” and circumstances led to New Line taking the Fresh Prince to court over his “A Nightmare on My Street” video.

Herbert explains: In the summer of 1988, the rap group The Fat Boys released the album Coming Back Hard Again, which featured the song “Are You Ready for Freddy?” This track features the Freddy character talking and rapping along with the Fat Boys. The song was released in the wake of another song that invoked Freddy and NOES, “A Nightmare on My Street,” by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, which appeared on the album He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper, released in March. Documents show that New Line negotiated with representatives for DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince to create a video based on NOES at the same time the company was working out a similar deal with the Fat Boys. Negotiations with the Fresh Prince broke down, however, just as He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper came out, which still included the NOES-themed song. Moreover, a music video for “A Nightmare on My Street” was produced that featured characters and settings that resembled the NOES films. New Line sued the music company responsible for the video, and a court upheld an injunction against it being aired. Instead, the video for the Fat Boys’ “Are You Ready for Freddy?” aired on MTV in fall 1988 and depicted the Freddy character terrorizing the Fat Boys.

A disclaimer sticker was added to the He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper album packaging to notify buyers that “A Nightmare on My Street” was not part of the The Dream Master soundtrack and not officially connected to the Nightmare on Elm Street films, and the music video directed by Scott Kalvert was allegedly destroyed… but at least one copy survived, because the video did make its way online thirty years later. You can watch it HERE.

What do you think of Will Smith getting in trouble for the “A Nightmare on My Street” video? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

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19 Mar

Millie Bobby Brown’s Damsel continues to slay the Netflix Top 10, while Adam Sandler’s Spaceman floats toward the bottom of the chart

By . FilmTV No Comments

Stranger Things breakout Millie Bobby Brown is driving a sword through Netflix’s English Films List this week with her fantasy action flick Damsel, slaying the number one spot for the second week in a row! The Juan Carlos Fresnadillo-directed action-adventure film added 50.8M views to its coffers and was the most-watched title of the week. Damsel’s viewing total stands tall at 86.1M views in ten days, hitting the coveted #1 spot in 87 countries and reaching the Top 10 in 93.

Meanwhile, Lindsay Lohan’s romantic comedy Irish Wish pranced into the #2 slot, with 30.6M views in its first three days of release. The action-thriller Code 8: Part II nabbed the #4 spot (3.6M views), while Johan Renck’s Spaceman, starring Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan, floated into the #9 spot with 3.1M views. Spaceman’s performance is shocking, as Sandler typically owns the Netflix Top 10 whenever he drops a new film onto the streamer. GiantFreakinRobot recently ranked the Sandman’s films, and it’s interesting to see where Spaceman landed.

On the television side, The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie’s aristocratic gangster series starring Theo James and Kaya Scodelario, topped the English TV List with 20.1M views. The outstanding live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender held strong in its fourth week with a second-place finish and 5.2M views. The docuseries The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping took third with 3.3M views, and Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War claimed the sixth spot (2M views).

Hot Wheels Let’s Race, the animated kids series, hit the gas on 3.3M views for a fourth-place finish during its second week on the chart, with Love Is Blind’s sixth season taking fifth with 3.2M views. One Day, the limited series adapted from David Nicholls’ bestselling romance novel, took seventh place in its sixth week on the list (1.9M views).

Have you watched Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s Damsel, starring Millie Bobby Brown? I’ve heard positive things about it and plan to check it out this weekend. I want to watch Spaceman, too, despite its poor performance on the Netflix English Film chart. The concept for Spaceman is bizarre, and I prefer Sandler’s dramatic roles to his questionable comedy stylings. What do you think about Netflix’s Top 10 Lists this week? Let us know in the comments below.

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19 Mar

Mad Max: The Wasteland – Will It Ever Happen?

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Back in 2010, it was reported that director George Miller would be shooting two new entries in his Mad Max franchise back-to-back: the sequel Mad Max: Fury Road and a follow-up called Furiosa. But things didn’t work out that way, and making Mad Max: Fury Road on its own proved to quite a struggle – a five month shoot in the deserts of Namibia, with two lead actors (Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky and Charlize Theron as Furiosa) who couldn’t stand each other. Miller didn’t let the grueling process put him off making more Mad Max movies, though. Immediately after the release of Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015, Miller announced that he had already written a screenplay and a novella of further stories… and Max himself would return in a film called Mad Max: The Wasteland. But eight years have passed, and while Furiosa is ready to go (with an all new trailer just released), there’s still no word on whether or not Mad Max: The Wasteland will be moving forward. So let’s try to solve this mystery… Mad Max: The Wasteland – Will It Ever Happen?

LAWSUIT

There are a couple reasons why it has taken Miller so long to get back to the world of Max Rockatansky. First, he didn’t want to go straight back into the wasteland after making Mad Max: Fury Road. He wanted to make a different, smaller film first. That movie turned out to be Three Thousand Years of Longing, which didn’t get made and released until several years after Fury Road. Another thing slowing down the franchise’s progress is the fact that Miller filed a lawsuit against its home studio Warner Bros. Suing the studio for unpaid Fury Road earnings, he accused executives of behaving in a “high-handed, insulting or reprehensible” manner and destroying their relationship with his production company. Warner Bros. fired back that Miller shouldn’t receive those earnings because they had wanted a 100 minute, PG-13 movie and he had delivered a 120 minute, R rated movie. The lawsuit was filed in 2017 and appeared to be settled to Miller’s satisfaction in 2019, clearing the way for him to finally get around to making Furiosa (starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the title character) after he was finished with Three Thousand Years of Longing.

STORY NOT READY

We now know that when Miller said he had a screenplay and a novella written, Furiosa was the screenplay. In fact, the Furiosa script was “virtually complete” before Fury Road even started filming. (Which must be why there was talk of making the movies back-to-back.) Within the novella is the foundation for Mad Max: The Wasteland – and it still needs to be completely figured out and then worked into a screenplay. As recently as 2022, Miller described the story as “still not fully evolved”. As for what exactly the Wasteland novella deals with, Miller told AV Club, “We also wrote, not a screenplay, but almost in novel form, Nico Lathouris and I, what happened to Max in that year before (the events of Mad Max: Fury Road), and that’s something that we’ll look at further down the track later.” Since the story is set “before”, Miller has confirmed that the Furiosa character is not involved.

TOM HARDY

Director George Miller says the script for Furiosa was already written before Mad Max: Fury Road started filming 10 years ago.

The long delay between films does bring up the question, if Mad Max: The Wasteland does ever go into production, will Tom Hardy still be playing Max, or would he be replaced? Recasting doesn’t seem entirely out of the question, especially since Hardy replaced Mel Gibson in the role to begin with. Hardy was contracted to play the character in multiple films, but it’s not clear when that contract would expire. Despite the rough experience of working on Mad Max: Fury Road, Hardy is totally on board with the idea of coming back for a sequel, and even said it’s not a question of if he’ll make another Mad Max movie, it’s just a question of when. He told Collider, “I’m really just waiting for the call like, ‘All right, let’s get the leathers on and get back out there and do some more.’ It’s there. I’m just waiting for it and looking forward to it.”

DIRECTOR

It will be quite impressive if Miller does indeed return to the wasteland for both Furiosa and Mad Max: The Wasteland, as the director – just like the rest of us – isn’t getting any younger. Miller turned 78 this year, which surely adds another degree of difficulty to shoots that are already massive undertakings. Of course, Richard Donner was still planning to make another Lethal Weapon movie before he passed away at the age of 91, so Miller might still have plenty of time left to do Mad Max: The Wasteland without issue. But if making these movies becomes too much of a burden, Miller has let it be known that he has three different directors in mind that he would like to see make movies set in the wasteland he created. He indicated to IGN that Guillermo del Toro is one of those directors.

So will Mad Max: The Wasteland ever happen? The truth is, we don’t know. We’ll have wait and see what happens with Furiosa. If it’s successful, maybe it will inspire Miller and Lathouris to finally get the story into its fully evolved state and get the movie rolling. For now, we’ll just have to take Miller and Hardy’s word for it: it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. In 2019, while waiting for the Warner Bros. lawsuit to run its course, Miller even went so far as to tell IndieWire that there’s an idea for another Max story beyond The Wasteland: “There are two stories, both involving Mad Max, and also a Furiosa story. We’re still solving, we’ve got to play out the Warners thing, it seems to be pretty clear that it’s going to happen.” For now, we keep hoping… and make plans to see Furiosa when it’s released on May 24, 2024.

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