With filming on James Gunn’s Superman having taken flight, we’re excited for any updates and revelations that come with each passing day. Of course, with Gunn’s frequent use of social media, we expect a lot of both. But one recent snapshot has prompted some additional speculation, with fans wondering if Star-Lord could be crashing the DCU after a set visit from Chris Pratt.
Approached by TMZ about the photo, Pratt diabolically – and jokingly – putting his hands together as if a plan has been concocted for him to enter the DCU. Naturally, he didn’t outright confirm nor deny the potential, saying, “Well, there’s always a chance. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to spoil it here on the sidewalk with you…[I could] but I better not.” As for if there was a particular character Pratt would like to play for DC, he added, “Man, I just have to leave that to the fans and people like James to decide. I’m not exactly sure, I’m truly not sure.”
Chris Pratt and James Gunn, of course, are pretty tight, having worked together on the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy. Pratt even mentioned that if his schedule allowed for it and there was a logical reason for him to join the DCU, he would be game. Even still, considering Pratt has said he would like to continue playing Star-Lord and a distinct jump from the MCU to the DCU would seem unprecedented considering the embedded studio rivalry, we don’t truly expect the actor to actually be signing on for any projects soon. Backed by the point that Marvel is gearing up for Avengers 5 and it all just feels highly unlikely to be on the horizon.
Then again, Chris Pratt hasn’t been shy in the past about his interest in joining the DCU and James Gunn has said an MCU/DCU crossover is certainly possible. While he claimed last year he hadn’t actually spoken to Gunn about that prospect, that he turned up on the Superman set put in motion rumors that maybe he and the director finally did have a sitdown on the matter.
Do you see Chris Pratt suiting up for the DCU in the future? If so, which character do you envision him playing? Give us your pick below!
What Do We Know About the second season of Shogun? More thank you may think. After a critically acclaimed run as a limited series, FX is bringing the Japan-set epic drama for two more storytelling runs. With casting, set photos, and the official synopsis, we know quite a bit about what to expect from the second season, so let’s jump in and discuss.
There will be a total of three seasons
Based on the 1975 novel by James Clavell, Shogun the series ends in the same place that the book does. If you have watched the finale, you know it closes abruptly, leaving a lot of room for expansion of the story. Series creators Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks have said they have worked with Clavell’s estate on where the story could go next and said, “The third season is an ending. We know where it starts, and we know where it ends, and we know who is there on that journey. We’re just focusing on part two right now to really make sure we can get to that point. But part two is, as second chapters go, kind of a darker chapter.”
Season Two could head into the 17th Century
The ending of Shogun’s first season wrapped with on-screen text that explained that Lord Toranaga, played by Hiroyuki Sanada and based on the real-life Lord Tokugawa, consolidated power over the course of fifteen years and then aimed to turn over his regime to his son, Hidetada. He remained friends with William Adams, the real-life version of John Blackthorne, played by Cosmo Jarvis. This leads to a rebellion and a massive siege of Osaka Castle, all of which could be fodder for the second season. So, the range of 1600 through 1616 could be the focus for the sophomore chapter of the show, with the third season following Blackthorne’s return to his homeland.
There could be a massive time jump
Novelist James Clavell wrote Shogun as part of an epic series known as the Asian Saga. The third book published in the six-novel series, Shogun, is the first entry in the sprawling story chronologically. The next book, Tai-Pan, is set in Hong Kong in 1841, which would be an unlikely choice for continuing a series already titled Shogun, but the third novel, Gai-Jin, is set in Japan in the mid-19th century. That sprawling novel comprises over a thousand pages of source material but would be great for a separate series.
James Clavell left ideas for further stories in his saga
Like many authors before him, Clavell had more ideas than time to develop them. Working with producer Michaela Clavell, some concepts could be brought in to flesh out the direct continuation of the Shogun storyline. We did get a glimpse of an elderly John Blackthorne in the final episode of the first season, so decades of material could be blended together for this second season.
Four actors are confirmed to return for Season Two
Series star and producer Hiroyuki Sanada has spent years wanting to make a faithful adaptation of Shogun. Now that his dream has been realized, you better believe he will be front and center for the second chapter. Yoshii Toranaga is a fan-favorite character, and Sanada will be accompanied by some of his on-screen compatriots in Cosmo Jarvis as John Blackthorn, Takehiro Hira and Ishido Kazunari, and Fumi Nikaido and Ochiba no Kata. Many others could reprise their roles, so expect more details as the scripts develop. While unlikely, we could see Anna Sawai’s Lady Mariko and Tadanobu Asano’s Yabushige come back in the form of flashbacks, but that remains to be confirmed.
Season Two will not premiere until at least 2026
It sounds far away, but with the script development stage still in the early going, it will be a long road towards the next chapter of Shogun. Since Shogun was developed as a limited series with no guarantee of further episodes, no development took place until April 2024. Due to the scale of the storytelling needed and the production quality we saw in the first season, cameras would be virtually impossible to start rolling until sometime in 2025. Post-production would then mean we won’t see the return of these characters on screen until the following year. But, with tons of awards coming their way, FX may expedite season two. As series co-creators Kondo and Marks have said, the stories must be right for the story to continue, so that bar may keep us waiting for some time.
Stay tuned to JoBlo.com as we learn more about seasons Two and Three of Shogun and all of your other favorite shows. What do you expect to see in the upcoming season of Shogun? Let us know in the comments, click like, and subscribe to follow all of our latest original videos.
It’s always fun to find a hidden gem from a star’s early years. Eddie Murphy’s Best Defense is not one of them – at least according to the star. But Kino Lorber is going to try to give it a new life, announcing that they will release Best Defense on 4K later this year.
Best Defense came out at the dawn of Eddie Murphy’s box office tear, arriving after 48 Hrs. and Trading Places and before Beverly Hills Cop. Those are all classics of ‘80s comedy, but Murphy would apparently prefer you just ignore Best Defense altogether…so we can’t imagine he’ll be too happy hearing it is getting a restoration.
Murphy was pretty much in a position to take any movie he wanted at that time. Yet, even knowing the script was awful, he signed on anyway – hey, that’s what a $1 million paycheck can do to you (and who didn’t want to play “strategic guest star” to Dudley Moore in the mid-’80s?). Such a dent in his career and integrity at the time, Murphy actually called out Best Defense during his opening monologue when he hosted SNL later that year. “I read the script at first, and the script was terrible, I was like, ‘What?! How dare you give me a script like this! Oh, that much money? Let’s go!’ So I read the script Best Defense, I went out and did Best Defense, Best Defense turned out to be the worst movie ever done in the history of anything, and all of a sudden, I wasn’t that hot no more. So, I called up the producer of Saturday Night Live, and I go, “Um, you still got my dressin’ room?”
Here is the plot of Best Defense: “If you’re out to build the ultimate Super Tanker/Super Weapon, and you find out Dudley Moore has something to do with designing the missile guidance system, you’ve got to be concerned. Then, when you find out Eddie Murphy is going to test the tank in an actual combat situation, you ought to forget about it all together. Luckily for us, the government and Dynatechnics Incorporated don’t know Moore and Murphy like we do. And both comics are turned loose on a high-tech, hilarious adventure that sets modern warfare back a couple of hundred years.”
Best Defense might not take a Vampire in Brooklyn-level beatdown but it was no doubt a mark on Murphy’s blossoming movie career. Then again, good for Kino Lorber for giving fans a chance to discover a lesser-known title in a comedy legend’s filmography.
Have you seen Best Defense? Will you give it a shot when it comes to Blu-ray later this year?
The weekend box office results are in, and as we predicted earlier this week, Pixar’s Inside Out 2 was able to hang on to the top spot, earning a strong $57 million in its third weekend, bringing its domestic total to an outstanding $469 million. To put that number in context, it’s already grossed over $100 million more than the first film did in its entire North American run. It received heftier than expected competition from A Quiet Place: Day One, which set a franchise record with an outstanding $53 million gross. Clearly, the slow start to the summer box office has turned a corner, with audiences finally hitting theatres again.
However, adult-oriented fare seems to be struggling, with Kevin Costner’s three-hour passion project, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, only earning $11 million this weekend. That’s a low result for a movie that Kevin Costner invested a significant chunk of his own money in, but hopefully, word of mouth will pick up over the next few weeks. Whatever the case, Horizon: Chapter 2 is slated for an August 16th debut, so it’s full steam ahead on the sequel. With a little less competition in the dog days of summer, maybe audiences will discover Costner’s franchise a little later, but this is still a troubling start for such an ambitious franchise.
Another poor result for adult-oriented fare is Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders, which made a decent $10 million debut last weekend but lost a massive 66% of its audience to fall to sixth place with only $3.3 million. It’s already set for VOD, so hopefully, audiences who missed it in theatres will give it a chance at home.
Sony’s Bad Boys: Ride or Die continued to post strong numbers, with the $10.35 million weekend bringing the domestic gross to $165 million. It won’t end too shy of the $206 million total of Bad Boys For Life back in 2020, which is great for a thirty-year-old franchise.
One of the more surprising entries in the chart this weekend was the Telugu-language Indian film Kalki 2898 AD, which made a really solid $5.4 million domestically, with an $11 million total. It’s already one of the 10 highest-grossing India-made movies at the North American box office and should climb even higher in the coming weeks. Another movie from India, the Bollywood film Jatt & Juliet 3, also showed up in the top 10, coming in ninth place with $1.5 million.
Meanwhile, The Garfield Movie stayed in the top 10, making $2 million for an $89 million domestic total. With steep family competition from IF (which dropped out of the top 10 this week), Inside Out 2 and next weekend’s Despicable Me 4, don’t expect this one to cross $100 million domestically. Disney’s hit Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes came in 8th place with $1.7 million for a $168 million total. Finally, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness expanded to 490 theatres this weekend and came in 10th place with $1.5 million, for a total of just over $2 million. That’s a good number, but it won’t come anywhere near Lanthimos’s total for Poor Things, which was a mighty $34 million. This one will likely top out at just a fraction of that, although as far as arthouse releases go, that’s not a bad number. Still, Disney might have been smarter to give this one a fall release, with Jesse Plemons generating Oscar buzz for his triple role.
Next weekend should be another big one at the box office, with Despicable Me 4 primed to rule the holiday box office. Do you think it’s opening gross will come anywhere near what Inside Out 2 opened with? Let us know in the comments!
PLOT: In the mid-nineties, a group of young actors known for starring in movies like St Elmo’s Fire and The Breakfast Club became popularly known as The Brat Pack, but many members of that group felt the term torpedoed their careers.
REVIEW: If you grew up in the eighties, you for sure knew what the name “The Brat Pack” meant. I was born in ’81 and only watched the movies this gang was known for in the nineties, but if you had asked me as a kid who was in The Brat Pack, I probably still would have been able to list them off by name. There was Emilio Estevez (a recent WTF Happened to this Celebrity pick), Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy, and Andrew McCarthy. Some of them became enduring stars, and some didn’t. For those whose fame perhaps didn’t endure beyond the eighties, the label, in their minds, limited their careers, and now one of them, Andrew McCarthy, has made a feature-length documentary (streaming on Hulu) about grappling with the label.
For those who may not know, the term’s genesis came from journalist David Blum, a writer for New York Magazine, who was assigned a profile on Emilio Estevez in the lead-up to the release of St. Elmo’s Fire. Estevez, in a moment he’d come to regret, invited Blum to go out partying with him, Nelson, and Lowe one night, and the chronicle of their bratty behaviour, which included dodging paying $7 to see Ladyhawke at a movie theatre and making fun of the women that threw themselves at them, ended up becoming an article that would define them forever.
Brats feels like a therapy session for McCarthy, who seems utterly unable to reconcile how his career turned out with this label. What’s ironic is that McCarthy is only mentioned once in the article, with one of the guys sniffing that that he’s not going to make it as a star. Yet, the label stuck with him because he was in St. Elmo’s Fire. As he explains in the documentary, he was a serious actor from New York with aspirations of greatness (and a hefty dose of pretentiousness), and he felt that it sidelined him as a lightweight. Emilio Estevez seems to feel the same way, but McCarthy’s narrative is flawed. He never acknowledges the fact that Estevez became a huge star AFTER the whole Brat Pack phenomenon died down and that he himself went on to star in two massively successful comedies, Mannequin and Weekend at Bernie’s (as well as its sequel) and that is was likely those movies that classified him, rightly or wrongly, as a lightweight.
Yet, as flawed as his narrative is, Brats is utterly absorbing in how unguarded it is; it is clear McCarthy is still extremely bitter about the whole thing, especially once he sits down with the writer David Blum, who’s (rightly) unapologetic. But McCarthy also doesn’t shy away from presenting himself as someone who can’t let go, with everyone else he was able to convince to go on camera trying to convince him that being in The Brat Pack wasn’t all bad. Demi Moore, who became the biggest female star of the nineties, looks back at the eighties fondly, with her even stating that her work on St Elmo’s Fire saved her from spiralling into drug addiction (with her praising the late Joel Schumacher’s interventions). Ally Sheedy admits to struggling with the label and says if she could choose a life with or without the label, she’d opt to keep it, as it opened doors for better or worse. Best of all is Rob Lowe, who seems genuinely surprised that McCarthy is bitter about it, with him remembering it as something that bugged him at the time but that he’s now able to look back fondly at.
What’s perhaps most telling of all are the folks McCarthy wasn’t able to interview, such as Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson and Anthony Michael Hall. While Hall’s had a great career, Ringwald’s excuse that she doesn’t like looking at the past rings hollow, while Nelson, who’s perhaps had the hardest time of all escaping its shadow, seems quite bitter about the whole thing by virtue of being absent. By the time it ends, McCarthy still seems to be struggling with the label, but perhaps not for long, as the notoriety of the documentary seems to have reinvigorated his career, with Columbia now developing a St Elmo’s Fire legacy sequel that may reunite the Brat Pack on the big screen. While I disagreed thoroughly with McCarthy’s thesis that it ruined his career, Brats is still utterly compelling, and the director deserves praise for allowing himself to be contradicted by his contemporaries.
If you keep dying in Elden Ring’s new Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, we’ve got a tip that may help make you more resilient against the dangers of the Land of Shadow. We’ve also got a primer on how to explain the whole Dr Disrespect situation to the normal people in your life, explainers for Shin Megami Tensei V:…
If you keep dying in Elden Ring’s new Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, we’ve got a tip that may help make you more resilient against the dangers of the Land of Shadow. We’ve also got a primer on how to explain the whole Dr Disrespect situation to the normal people in your life, explainers for Shin Megami Tensei V:…
Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders ranks in our developing list of the best movies of the year, so we’d love to tell you to go check it out on the big screen. But that opportunity has narrowed, as it is now clear that The Bikeriders will be hitting VOD on July 9th – that’s 18 days after it debuted in theaters!
It’s a bit disappointing that the chance to see The Bikeriders at the cinema is dwindling, but certainly more so that Focus Features won’t give it the chance to breathe there. While nobody expected it to be a box office juggernaut, that it is already being written off by the studio is a tremendous insult to not just the filmmakers but the whole concept of moviegoing. To date – that is, barely over a week – The Bikeriders has made around $14 million on a budget pegged upwards of $40 million. As such, Focus will redirect to streaming, where they might be able to recoup some expenses via that route.
But The Bikeriders’ trip to VOD isn’t a surprise whatsoever, as this is just the newest approach to how studios are treating even those movies that were poised to be big moneymakers. Take Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which just barely matched its budget at the box office; eleven days after its release, it was already on VOD. The Fall Guy had a similar fate, crashing to VOD less than three weeks after its own debut
Yes, The Bikeriders coming to VOD in that tight of a window is a drag for those who wanted to see it at the theater. But hopefully now it can find an even bigger audience and establish the fanbase it missed.
The Bikeriders “captures a rebellious time in America when the culture and people were changing. After a chance encounter at a local bar, strong-willed Kathy (Jodie Comer) is inextricably drawn to Benny (Austin Butler), the newest member of Midwestern motorcycle club, the Vandals led by the enigmatic Johnny (Tom Hardy). Much like the country around it, the club begins to evolve, transforming from a gathering place for local outsiders into a dangerous underworld of violence, forcing Benny to choose between Kathy and his loyalty to the club.”
If you didn’t get a chance to see The Bikeriders in theaters, will you catch it on VOD?
While far from a smash hit in its original 1983 theatrical release, Brian De Palma’s Scarface, over time, became seen as a classic. The rise of home video played a big role, with it having an outsized impact on hip hop artists, with many (MANY) songs sampling the soundtrack/score and dialogue. In fact, its reputation in the rap community was so strong that, around the time of its 20th anniversary, Universal Pictures, in association with Def Jam Records, attempted to redo the movie’s soundtrack with hip hop.
According to a new book, “The World is Yours: The Story of Scarface,” by Glenn Kenny, star Al Pacino and producer Martin Bergman actually weren’t opposed to the idea of dropping Giorgio Moroder’s classic score (and songs) and replacing it with hip hop, only for Brian De Palma to (thankfully) put the kibosh on the whole deal. As excerpted in the book (buy it here), De Palma said, “No one changes the scores on movies by Marty Scorsese, John Ford, David Lean. If this is the ‘masterpiece’ you say, leave it alone. I fought them tooth and nail and was the odd man out; not an unusual place for me. I have final cut, so that stopped them dead.”
While Def Jam did indeed put out a compilation album of hip-hop tracks inspired by the film, the original cut of the movie was left alone. However, in an interview with The Talks from a few years back, De Palma says Universal “continually” wanted to change the soundtrack, saying, “They’re very unhappy with me because they could obviously make a tremendous amount of money, but I said, “That score’s not being changed.”
One has to admire De Palma’s tenacity here, as a new score would, in the opinion of many of the film’s fans, be something akin to vandalism. Given that the movie takes place in early 1980’s Miami, a contemporary hip-hop score would be out of place, with Moroder’s music, dated as it is, very evocative of the era and the film’s setting.
Do you think a director less committed than De Palma would have stuck to his guns the way he has? Let us know in the comments!
Look, children, it’s a falling star! And he’s pretty pissed off, too! By the time 1995 rolled around, Eddie Murphy had undoubtedly taken a tumble: Another 48 Hrs. captured none of the magic of the original, Boomerang flew back in his face, Beverly Hills Cop III killed the franchise, and Vampire in Brooklyn sucked the life out of the box office. This was all David Spade needed for one infamous joke he did on Saturday Night Live, targeting Murphy on his “Hollywood Minute” segment.
While Eddie Murphy and David Spade have patched things up, the former – who was an SNL cast member from 1980-1984 (three years before Spade was a skater dude in Police Academy 4) – thought his alumni status should have meant more. As he told The New York Times, “He showed a picture of me, and he said, ‘Hey, everybody, catch a falling star.’ It was like: Wait, hold on. This is Saturday Night Live. I’m the biggest thing that ever came off that show. The show would have been off the air if I didn’t go back on the show, and now you got somebody from the cast making a crack about my career? And I know that he can’t just say that. A joke has to go through these channels. So the producers thought it was OK to say that. And all the people that have been on that show, you’ve never heard nobody make no joke about anybody’s career. Most people that get off that show, they don’t go on and have these amazing careers.”
Murphy added that Spade’s dig – one of many one-liners he would deliver on his celebrity-skewering segment – went too far. “It was personal. It was like, ‘Yo, how could you do that?’ My career? Really? A joke about my career? So I thought that was a cheap shot. And it was kind of, I thought — I felt it was racist.” On this final matter, Murphy aligned Spade’s “Hollywood Minute” bit with many in the press around that time, saying they promoted racism towards him in their publications.
Murphy actually confronted Spade on the phone the week after the incident, but the feud lasted for decades. As a result of Spade’s joke, Murphy avoided Saturday Night Live even longer than he already had, only returning to Studio 8H in 2019 for a hosting stint.
Was David Spade’s Eddie Murphy joke warranted or did he take it too far? Do you think Murphy overreacted? Give us your take below!
