Another week, another round of opinions and spicy takes for you to sift through. Rather than making you search the site and find them yourselves, however, we’ve gathered our best opinion pieces of the week right here. From Diablo IV’s loot game change making it a good game again to a wild Tetris story, we’ve got…
Another week, another round of opinions and spicy takes for you to sift through. Rather than making you search the site and find them yourselves, however, we’ve gathered our best opinion pieces of the week right here. From Diablo IV’s loot game change making it a good game again to a wild Tetris story, we’ve got…
Although Daredevil: Born Again features the return of Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio as Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk, the series originally didn’t have any other connection to the Netflix series. When Daredevil: Born Again was forced to shut down last summer due to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and other executives grew displeased with the direction of the show and demanded a creative overhaul. According to Cox and D’Onofrio, that overhaul has brought “a lot” of crossover with the original show.
“It originally wasn’t going to be at all, but now it’s a lot,” D’Onofrio told TVInsider. Since the overhaul, we’ve seen other members of the original Daredevil series return, including Jon Bernthal as The Punisher, Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page, Elden Henson as Foggy Nelson, and more. As for whether this is due to fans being vocal about bringing these cast members back, Cox said, “I think [it’s] the fans. I think [it’s] the studio as well.“
Cox continued, “That’s a really fine balance to strike. If you’re going to remake a show and call it Season 1 and it was a successful show and it was kind of beloved, then you’ve got to do what people liked. But also you’ve got to have a reason for remaking it. So you have to change it up a bit. And that’s just a really fine balance to find.“
Production on Daredevil: Born Again wrapped up last week, and the first trailer was screened behind closed doors during Disney’s Upfront 2024. According to IGN, the trailer showed Matt Murdock putting on the Daredevil suit, along with glimpses of Kingpin, Foggy, and Karen. At the end of the trailer, Murdock is asked, “What kind of a lawyer are you?” To which he responds, “A really good one,” as he puts on his red glasses.
Daredevil: Born Again was originally announced as an 18-episode series, but it has since been revealed that the first season will consist of 9 episodes. The show will premiere on Disney+ in March 2025.
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I don’t live in tornado country, so I’ve never experienced one, but they seem pretty frightening. However, Twisters star Glen Powell does have a history with tornados, and he told Total Film that he was able to bring that experience to his role.
“It’s actually something I got to incorporate a little bit into the movie,” Powell said. “I had an experience with this tornado in Jarrell, Texas. It was an F5 – one of the big ones. It decimated Jarrell. I was outrunning it with my aunt Taffy, and a car full of cousins. And I remember us having to take shelter. It didn’t get close enough to do any damage to us, but I remember the fear of being on the road when, you know, the biggest imaginable one was kind of coming through.“
Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung is also familiar with tornados, and he told Total Film that one of his earliest memories was living in a trailer home in Arkansas when his parents yelled that there was a tornado on the way. “We didn’t have any storm shelter,” he said. “So we were immediately looking for a place where we could hide it out.“
Whenever I see reports of tornados, hurricanes, or tropical storms wreaking havoc, I start to wonder how people can live in the path of those natural disasters without feeling constantly stressed out. Then I remind myself that I live in a province that’s on fire for more than half the year. I guess we deal with it.
Glen Powell plays storm-chasing superstar Tyler Owens in Twisters and stars alongside Daisy Edgar-Jones, who plays Kate Cooper, “a former storm chaser haunted by a devastating encounter with a tornado during her college years who now studies storm patterns on screens safely in New York City. She is lured back to the open plains by her friend, Javi (Anthony Ramos) to test a groundbreaking new tracking system. There, she crosses paths with Tyler Owens (Powell), the charming and reckless social-media superstar who thrives on posting his storm-chasing adventures with his raucous crew, the more dangerous the better. As storm season intensifies, terrifying phenomena never seen before are unleashed, and Kate, Tyler and their competing teams find themselves squarely in the paths of multiple storm systems converging over central Oklahoma in the fight of their lives.” The film also stars Brandon Perea (Nope), Sasha Lane (American Honey), Daryl McCormack (Peaky Blinders), Kiernan Shipka (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), Nik Dodani (Atypical), Katy O’Brien (Love Lies Bleeding), and Maura Tierney (Beautiful Boy).
While the sequel doesn’t have a big connection to the original film, Powell has previously said that it’s definitely not a reboot. “We’re not trying to recreate the story from the first one,” Powell said. “It’s a completely original story. There are no characters from the original movie back, so it’s not really a continuation. It’s just its own standalone story in the modern-day.” Twisters will hit theaters on July 19th.
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Over the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of intimacy coordinators in Hollywood, but Michael Douglas wonders whether it’s not just executives stepping on the toes of filmmakers.
“It’s interesting with all the intimacy coordinators,” Michael Douglas told The Telegraph. “It feels like executives taking control away from filmmakers – but there have been some terrible faux pas and harassment.“
Douglas added: “Sex scenes are like fight scenes, it’s all choreographed. In my experience you take responsibility as the man to make sure the woman is comfortable, you talk it through. You say, ‘OK, I’m gonna touch you here if that’s all right’. It’s very slow but looks like it’s happening organically, which is hopefully what good acting looks like.“
Times have changed since the era of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, and Douglas admits that there has been bad conduct on sets. “I’m sure there were people that overstepped their boundaries, but before, we seemed to take care of that ourselves. They would get a reputation and that would take care of them,” he said. “But I talked to the ladies, [because] I did a few of those sex movies – sexual movies – and we joke about it now, what it would have been like to have an intimacy coordinator working with us…“
Intimacy coordinators work closely with the director and actors involved in the scene to ensure everything is done safely, respectfully, and consensually. They also serve as advocates for the actors, ensuring they continually consent to all aspects of the scene and aren’t forced to do anything beyond the previously agreed-to choreography. While some may argue that this removes some of the spontaneity of such scenes, others say it’s a small price to pay to make sure everyone is safe. Plus, as Douglas says, if it’s done right, it all looks organic anyway.
Michael Douglas is currently starring in Franklin on Apple TV+. The miniseries’ finale premiered today. You can check out a review of the miniseries from our own Alex Maidy right here.
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In 2002, M. Night Shyamalan had already done the impossible in Hollywood: He was a director who became a household name. At the time, you couldn’t probably only say that about a handful of directors, the usual suspects: Spielberg, Scorsese, Tarantino. Maybe a few others. But after the blockbuster success of 1999’s The Sixth Sense, which became one of the biggest movies of all time, not to mention a Best Picture nominee, Shyamalan was now a brand. One year after The Sixth Sense, Shayamalan brought us Unbreakable, a brooding, suspenseful drama about a man who’s burdened with a great responsibility he doesn’t even know about. To say it was an unusual take on the superhero genre would be an understatement, and as hard as it is to believe, superhero movies were not a “thing” when Unbreakable came out. So the movie, while respected and destined to build a loyal following, was not held in the same regard as Night’s breakout hit. So what was the still-young director going to do to prove the cultural touchstone that was The Sixth Sense was not a fluke? He’d have to make another rollercoaster ride for an audience eager for original storytelling. That’s how Signs (watch it HERE) was born, and we’re going to find out just WTF Happened to this movie.
Night had complicated feelings about the somewhat muted reaction to Unbreakable, which he himself described as a movie filled with burdens. Both The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable – while not without their fun moments – are movies with overtly somber atmospheres. Believe it or not, it was a trip to Denny’s that helped spur on Signs. In an interview conducted some years later, Night described being in a Denny’s and seeing a family having a very serious meal, before noticing another couple sitting in silence. Night found that he wanted to make those people – or anyone who was going through a rough patch – feel better. He called Disney, which had produced The Sixth Sense and Signs, and told them he wanted to make a movie that was joyous, almost childlike in its point-of-view. It would still have conflict in it, but it wouldn’t carry the weight of the world on its shoulders the way his past two movies seemed to. He trained himself not to write his new script if he was feeling uptight or unsettled; he’d only work on it during his lighthearted moods, conjuring up one fun idea after the other.
Ultimately, Night said Signs was the easiest script he ever wrote. That’s food for thought when considering the movie’s central plot, which revolves around a minister who has lost his faith in God after the accidental death of his wife. Never one to hide his own faith, Night saw an opportunity to make a movie about a man’s conversation with God; a man who was literally looking for signs from above. With this theme in place, Night returned to a phenomena he’d always been fascinated by: crop circles. Intrigued by the fact that corn stalks are quite tough to break, Night reasoned that crop circles just had to have explanations that perhaps weren’t terrestrial. Now he had a sub-genre to work with: the alien invasion thriller.
Night wasn’t interested in telling a big, Independence Day style extravaganza, though. For him, a smaller, more intimate drama would better fit his overall theme of faith in the face of disaster. His main inspirations for the scope of his story would be George Romero’s iconic siege movie Night of the Living Dead, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic end-of-the-world thriller The Birds, and Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with its subtle, powerful suspense and paranoia. Of course, you can throw a little War of the Worlds in there for good measure.
The minister at the heart of the narrative, Graham Hess, would not be facing the invasion alone. Shyamalan initially envisioned a large family for Graham to interact with during the crisis, as the event would take place during a busy Thanksgiving gathering at the Hess farm. But Night ultimately found he had too many characters on his hands, comparing the scenario to The Towering Inferno, and began to whittle down the amount of characters to just four, the immediate family consisting of Graham, his brother, and Graham’s two young children. Night also had an idea for a teacher character to be involved, imagining his The Sixth Sense star Toni Collette in the role, but he eventually cut this character out as well.
Additionally, his original idea of filming the entire movie inside the farm house was abandoned; he’d allow the characters to venture out once in a while to the neighboring village. Still, this was predominantly going to be a sci-fi epic on a rather small scale.
If you believe the rumors, Graham was initially going to be an older man than he ended up being, and Night supposedly had his sights on Hollywood royalty for the part. Clint Eastwood was approached to star, but he passed on it. Night then allegedly took the offer to Paul Newman, who was in his mid-70s at the time, but Newman declined the part. Needing a true leading man, Night turned to Mel Gibson to play a role that was far from his usual heroes in action-heavy blockbusters. Very protective of his screenplays, Night had his cousin drive the script to Gibson’s house so the actor could read it. As Gibson recalled, he called Night immediately after reading Signs and said yes to the part. A man of faith himself, Gibson saw the themes of spirituality and belief very clearly in the script, which is what made him want to take it on. Gibson would later say he’s only worked with three geniuses in his career: Peter Weir, George Miller, and M. Night Shyamalan.
For the secondary lead role of Merrill, Graham’s younger brother, Night offered the part to Mark Ruffalo, who accepted. Unfortunately, a few weeks before production was to begin, Ruffalo had to have surgery on his inner ear, which made his participation in the film impossible. Night turned to Joaquin Phoenix, then just coming off an Oscar nomination for Gladiator. At the time, Phoenix was happy to have a role that was a bit more lighthearted than the ones he was known for – as he put it, “I didn’t get arrested or kill anybody, so that was really good.”
The two children in the film would go on to be recognizable adult thespians: Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin. Apparently the kids were so good at their jobs that they forced their adult co-stars to up their games – especially during the dramatic dinner scene, which the youngsters blew the doors off of.
As is the case with all of his films, Night storyboarded the entire thing front to back. Much like a screenplay, Night does different drafts of the storyboards as time goes on, and in total it takes somewhere in the neighborhood of three months for him to complete them all. These he shares with his most trusted collaborators, like cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, and composer James Newton Howard. The latter is interesting because Night wants Howard to start working on themes for the film before production has even begun; he wants the composer to work off the story being told and not necessarily the footage he’s being delivered. So it goes that the iconic and intense theme for the film was composed before principal photography even began. Night had wanted a score that was Bernard Herrman-esque in how it’s almost visual in its boldness. Night was able to take that theme music to preproduction meetings and play it for his crew, so they knew exactly what kind of movie they’d be making. He also decided to use the theme in the opening credits to give the audience a similar notion of what they were getting into.
Production took place, of course, in Night’s home state of Pennsylvania, Buck’s County to be precise. The production was able to find a perfect place in the form of Delaware Valley agricultural college, where they actually had corn fields at their disposal. The college even planted more corn for the movie’s benefit. The crop circles in the film are indeed real, as Night was then famously averse to using too much CGI, and these formations were shot in upstate New York.
The Hess house was built from the ground up right near the college, with interiors that could actually be used, though much of the film’s interiors were shot on a soundstage. The house was built in a Victorian style to give it a classic all-American look.
Shooting on Signs was scheduled to begin September 12, 2001. Yes, the day after 9/11. Night recalls that the effects of the tragedy were naturally felt throughout the entire cast and crew, the latter especially since plenty of crew-members were from nearby New York. Ironically, the first scene shot days after the attacks was perhaps the most dramatic in the film, when Graham speaks to his wife for the last time as she lays dying after her car accident. Night intentionally wanted this to be the first scene shot because it colors everything the Graham character does afterward, and he also wanted Mel Gibson to tackle a highly emotional scene right off the bat. The fact that they ended up shooting this right after 9/11 is almost like some kind of sick cosmic joke… Before shooting, Night and the crew held a candlelight vigil for those who lost their lives on that fateful day.
That unfortunate prelude aside, Night would eventually find Signs to be the easiest shoot of his career – even admitting himself that his shoots are usually torturous. To further involve himself in his work, he made the decision to play a pivotal supporting role, that of the man involved with Graham’s wife’s car accident. Funnily enough, he hadn’t told Gibson that he was playing the part, so the star was quite surprised when he found out who his scene partner was going to be. Shyamalan lost his grandfather one day prior to shooting the sequence, which made his raw emotions in it all the more real.
The other main players in the film are, naturally, the extraterrestrials themselves, who went through a bit of a transformation over time. Initially, Night saw them as being translucent, able to completely camouflage themselves to the point of invisibility. But early CGI tests disappointed the director, and a revised vision was brought to the table, one that would still see the aliens have the ability to blend into their environments but without going completely invisible.
ILM was hired to bring the creatures to life; CGI was utilized for the majority of their bodies, though a practical arm was built for the film’s main alien in the memorable pantry sequence; it was again used to hold Rory Culkin’s body toward the very end. The fact that we barely see the creature was of course by design.
The movie’s other iconic sequence, that of the birthday party video that reveals the alien in full for the first time, was shot by Night using an ordinary household camcorder. It was all done in one take and proved to be the most compelling footage in the entire film.
As he’s involved in all aspects of this movies, Night made sure he was heavily instrumental in how Signs was to be marketed. He allegedly told Disney that he didn’t want Mel Gibson’s face on the posters, because he didn’t want the film being pitched as a star vehicle; he preferred the marketing to focus on the mystery and intrigue of the plot. Furthermore, he didn’t want the trailers to say “from the director of The Sixth Sense” because he wanted the new feature to be sold on its own merits. That said, much of the material leading up to the film’s release pitched it as “M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs.”
Signs came out on August 2, 2002, a little less than a year after production began. It opened with a bang, making $60 million during its first weekend, the second biggest August opening of all time. Critics were generally kind to it, and audiences ate it up, and if it fell short of having the kind of cultural impact The Sixth Sense had, that’s because most movies simply can’t achieve such heights. Signs ended its box office run with over $400 million worldwide, a success by most measures.
Looking back, Signs was something of an end of an era for M. Night Shyamalan. His following feature was “The Village,” which many thought was a huge step backwards for the director. After that came “Lady in the Water,” another major blow to the reputation of the man who was at one time thought as the heir to the throne of geniuses like Spielberg and Hitchcock. That said, lucky for us Night is still at it, making thrillers and filling us with hope that he can hit some of those early high notes once again. You can’t help but root for the man, who is an artist still determined to show us sights that no one else can. We should have faith he can still pull it off.
A couple of the previous episodes of WTF Happened to This Horror Movie? can be seen below. To see more, head over to our JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
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The people behind the immensely popular iOS retro game emulator, Delta, have been forced to quickly change the app’s logo after receiving legal threats from Adobe and warnings from Apple.
The people behind the immensely popular iOS retro game emulator, Delta, have been forced to quickly change the app’s logo after receiving legal threats from Adobe and warnings from Apple.
Dabney Coleman, the character actor who delighted audiences in films like 9 to 5, Dragnet, The Muppets Take Manhattan, Tootsie, WarGames, Cloak & Dagger, You’ve Got Mail, and the TV shows The Guardian and Boardwalk Empire, has died at 92. The news leaked earlier today but has only just been confirmed by his daughter, Quincy Coleman. Often underappreciated in Hollywood’s vast populous of show-stopping performers, Dabney Coleman was a master of playing smarmy, selfish, hot-headed, and dick-ish characters with class and playfulness. Details about Coleman’s passing spread quietly on Twitter before getting confirmed by mainstream outlets, with many showing their love for Mr. Coleman’s rich body of work and unforgettable contributions to the entertainment industry.
Dabney Coleman made his Broadway debut in a brief run of A Call on Kuprin before setting up camp in the television space with roles in Kraft Suspense Theater’s The Threatening Eye and as Dr. Leon Bessemer in the first season of That Girl. Coleman began dabbling in film with his mighty mustache, with early roles in Downhill Racer, The Towering Inferno, and Bite the Bullet. In 1980, Coleman made a splash in 9 to 5, starring alongside Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Holly Parton as the trio’s hot-headed asshole of a boss. Coleman’s powerful performance as the sexist, egotistical, and hypocritical bigot helped put him on the map.
In 1982, Coleman played a supporting role alongside Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange in Tootsie, a classic romantic comedy about an unsuccessful actor who disguises himself as a woman to get a role on a trashy hospital soap opera. Coleman followed Tootsie with a starring role in the Richard Franklin-directed adventure film Cloak & Dagger (a movie we just did a retrospective video about). Starring Henry Thomas (E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial) and Michael Murphy, Cloak & Dagger focuses on a young boy (Thomas) and his imaginary friend, Jack Flack (Coleman), on the run while in possession of a top-secret spy gadget.
In 1984, Coleman appeared in one of his greatest roles as the Broadway producer turned con man Martin Price in The Muppets Take Manhattan. Before an older woman reveals his actual identity, Mr. Price greenlights the Muppets’ new musical. However, once the woman blows his cover, Price threatens the life of Gonzo’s partner in show business, the chicken Camilla: Gonzo, Camilla, and Animal attack Price before the criminal gets arrested by the dim-witted local fuzz. He also starred in two short-lived, but critically acclaimed sitcoms, Buffalo Bill (1983-84) and The Slap Maxwell Story (1987-1988). More recently, he played the villainous “Commodore” in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.
Coleman’s last on-screen role was in Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone, where he played the father of Kevin Costner’s character, patriarch John Dutton Sr.
With 180 acting credits to his good name, Dabney Coleman was a beloved figure in Hollywood. Despite playing some of cinema’s most notorious dickheads, friends and co-stars regarded Coleman as a warm, talented, and caring individual. He will be missed, and we wish him safe passage to the Great Hereafter.
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Animal Well is a very puzzle-driven game, and solving those puzzles often requires creative use of the items in your inventory. However, Animal Well also contains some standalone brainteasers that even a full set of tools can’t overcome. Take, for instance, the three-lever wave chart puzzle you’ll encounter in the…