Looking to take your first steps into Square Enix’s acclaimed and newly expanded MMO, Final Fantasy 14? We’ve got you covered with some great beginner guides. We’ve also got tips for Palworld, Once Human, and The First Descendant, as well as recommendations for games to pick up before the Xbox 360 online store shuts…
We all celebrated when it was announced that Neve Campbell would finally be getting her due salary for another Scream movie. That may take care of Sidney Prescott, what about Cindy Campbell, her spoof counterpart? As it turns out, Anna Faris – who played the central character in the Scary Movie franchise – is also down for reprising her character…and for the same reason, no less.
When People asked Anna Faris what it would take to get her to sign on for another Scary Movie entry, the actress was straight up in her response: “Well, money!” Cindy Campbell served as the primary protagonist of the first four Scary Movie installments, outsmarting (OK, maybe smart isn’t the right phrase) any Ghostface that came her way. But Faris sat out Scary Movie 5, which came out in 2013, seven years after the fourth movie.
Anna Faris’ words come after it was announced that a sixth Scary Movie is headed to theaters next year. No plot details or cast have been announced, but no doubt you can expect the exact style that was found in the first five. While the series has passed around between the Wayans Brothers and spoof hall of famer David Zucker (Airplane!, The Naked Gun), the format has remained the same: a loose plot based around spoofing whatever movies – mostly horror – are hot at the time. So no doubt we’ll see someone with literal long legs…
Anna Faris said she could also be coaxed into another Scary Movie if a certain co-star returned. Faris also revealed, “I would love to work with Regina [Hall] again. I just love her so much. We would make each other giggle all day long. Regina Hall would be my answer. And money. But mostly all Regina!” Hall, like Faris, appeared in the first four Scary Movies, playing best friend Regina Meeks.
Anna Faris is well aware that the Scary Movie franchise made her a star and helped her hone her comedic chops. “I love that franchise. It was like my bootcamp, my beginnings…If there is a high school comparison for my growth experience, those four movies played an important role in my life in terms of teaching me how to use props, teaching me how to fall, how to get hit in the head — how to hold Chiclets in my mouth and then spit them out with blood at a convenient time for the camera.”
Across five movies, the Scary Movie franchise has grossed $830 million worldwide, with the original nabbing $157 million domestically and becoming one of the highest-grossing movies of 2000.
Are you down for another Scary Movie if Anna Faris signs on?
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Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine is one of the most anticipated movies of the year. But that’s not just because it’s part of the MCU (we all know not every one of its entries is a fan fav); it’s because it looks like quality filmmaking and genuine entertainment. With that, you better believe it’s going to be one of the biggest box office hits of the summer. And that’s just the goal that Marvel head Kevin Feige continues to have for the studio.
Speaking with Deadline, Kevin Feige said that Marvel’s number one goal is putting butts in seats by “making engaging, entertaining films that have to be experienced in a theater with a crowd and is worth people getting into their cars and making the trip. Of the many forms of entertainment that people can get scrolling on their screen in their pocket, we as a Hollywood industry need to make product that stands above all of that and that represents a destination entertainment that you can’t get anywhere else.”
Feige in particular cited Pixar’s Inside Out 2, which opened in June and has raked in $1.35 billion worldwide, with a $154 million domestic haul on opening weekend. Notably, Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine has been pegged to bring in upwards of $165 million.
While it has become increasingly easy to just stay home instead of hitting the cinema – especially with some shrinking theater-to-VOD windows – Feige is holding strong on his morals, championing the moviegoing experience in a way that feels refreshing, even though it shouldn’t. “That’s our job at Marvel, that’s our job as the 100-year old Hollywood industry — to remind people that we have the best storytellers and can provide the best entertainment in the world. As we keep doing that in ways that engage, excite and grab onto the imagination and the psyche of the audience, that’s all we ever wanted to do, that’s all we tried to do. I think we have to keep evolving and expanding the ways we do that.”
Whether you agree with Feige that Marvel is proving that they are “evolving” and “expanding” might be besides the point here. Really, it’s all about hitting the theater and showing that you care about that experience, that you need to see these movies on a giant screen and not on your phone.
How often do you go to the movie theater compared to a few years ago? Has your habit increased or dropped? Let us know below!
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The latest film from The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman writer/director Robert Eggers‘ is a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent classic Nosferatu (watch it HERE), and Focus Features will be giving the film “a prime holiday season release” when they bring it to theatres on Wednesday, December 25th. Anticipation levels are high for this one, so we have decided to put together a list of Everything We Know about this version of Nosferatu:
Nosferatu tells a familiar story. An unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the original Nosferatu has the following synopsis: In this highly influential silent horror film, the mysterious Count Orlok (Max Schreck) summons Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) to his remote Transylvanian castle in the mountains. The eerie Orlok seeks to buy a house near Hutter and his wife, Ellen (Greta Schroeder). After Orlok reveals his vampire nature, Hutter struggles to escape the castle, knowing that Ellen is in grave danger. Meanwhile Orlok’s servant, Knock (Alexander Granach), prepares for his master to arrive at his new home.
Stoker’s heirs sued Murnau over the film and a court ordered that all copies of Nosferatu were to be destroyed, but thankfully some survived, so we still have Murnau’s movie to watch and enjoy. Werner Herzog directed a remake in 1979, and the movies Shadow of the Vampire and Mimesis Nosferatu both dealt with the making of Nosferatu movies.
Eggers’ take on the concept is described as being a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman in 19th century Germany and the ancient Transylvanian vampire who stalks her, bringing untold horror with him.
Eggers’ remake was first announced soon after The Witch premiered at Sundance in 2015. This is a passion project that he has been wanting to make for decades, as his first viewing of the film was a pivotal moment in his life. He even co-directed a stage production of the movie when he was in high school. He told IndieWire that watching Nosferatu was “when I realized this is what I want to be doing. Nosferatu has a very close, magical connection for me. Though if I were to make the movie 17-year-old Rob was going to make of Nosferatu it would have been something between like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Sin City, whereas this is going to be the same approach as The Witch, where 1830s Biedermeier Baltic Germany needs to be articulated in a way that seems real.” Eggers felt that it was “ugly and blasphemous and egomaniacal and disgusting” for him to be doing a Nosferatu remake as his second feature film, but that’s how it looked like things were going to play out. This wasn’t as easy to get into production as expected, though, so it turned out that Nosferatu will be his fourth film.
Eggers envisioned his The Witch star Anya Taylor-Joy as the female lead, and her involvement with the project was confirmed in August of 2017. But Taylor-Joy’s career took off in a major way after The Witch, so they found it difficult to find room in her schedule to make Nosferatu. At one point, the project was moving forward with Taylor-Joy as Ellen Hutter and Bill Skarsgard of the It films as her husband Thomas Hutter. But it fell apart. Then it was on track again in 2021, with filming expected to take place in Prague that fall. Taylor-Joy was still on board to play Ellen, with singer Harry Styles as Thomas. But, at the last minute, Styles dropped out due to scheduling concerns and everything fell apart again.
It began to look like Nosferatu was cursed. Speaking with IndieWire again, Eggers said, “It’s fallen apart twice. … I’ve been trying so hard. And I just wonder if Murnau’s ghost is telling me, like, you should stop.” Thankfully, it didn’t take him long to put the pieces back together again.
Once Eggers managed to get Nosferatu on track for the third time, Taylor-Joy was too busy to fit the movie back into her schedule. So the role of Ellen Hutter went to Lily-Rose Depp of The Idol. Nicholas Hoult (Renfield) was cast as her husband Thomas, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Bullet Train) as Thomas’s friend, German ship merchant Friedrich Harding, and Emma Corrin (The Crown) as Friedrich’s wife Anna. The role of a crazy vampire hunter named Von Franz went to Willem Dafoe (Spider-Man: No Way Home). Ralph Ineson (The Witch) was cast as Von Franz’s cohort Dr. Wilhelm Sievers, and Simon McBurney (The Conjuring 2) landed an unspecified role.
Bill Skarsgard had been wanting to work with Eggers for years. As previously mentioned, he was cast as Thomas Hutter in a version of Nosferatu that fell apart. They were going to work together on The Northman, which starred Skarsgard’s brother Alexander Skarsgard, but then the younger Skarsgard ran into scheduling issues. As he watched Nosferatu come back together again, he was desperate to get involved. But then Hoult was cast as Thomas Hutter, so he couldn’t step back into that role. He had also read for the role of Friedrich Harding in the past, but that role went to Taylor-Johnson. Things weren’t looking promising for Skarsgard… until Eggers offered him the chance to read for the vampire Count Orlok. Skarsgard is just in his early thirties, and Eggers had been looking for an actor in their forties to play the Count… but Skarsgard not only won the job, it has been said that he disappeared into the role once he reported to set.
Speaking with Empire, Eggers said, “I’ll say that Bill has so transformed, I’m fearful that he might not get the credit that he deserves because he’s just…he’s not there… In my opinion he looks like a dead Transylvanian nobleman, and in a way that we’ve never actually seen what an actual dead Transylvanian nobleman would look like and be dressed like.” He explained to Coming Soon, “There are things that are Schreck-like but I felt we had to do something else. Basically I was like, ‘What would a dead Transylvanian nobleman actually look like for real?’ Bill lost a tremendous amount of weight. He’s so transformed in every aspect that I don’t know if people will give him the credit. You can see Bill [as Pennywise] in the It make-up; you can’t detect any Bill here. He worked with an opera coach to lower his voice an octave. I think people are going to think we treated it digitally, but that’s his performance.“
During an interview with Esquire, Skarsgard revealed that he had to spend three to six hours every day getting the makeup and prosthetics put on so he could become Count Orlok. He mostly stayed away from his co-stars and worked with an opera singer to bring his voice down to its lowest possible pitch. He said, “It took its toll. It was like conjuring pure evil. It took a while for me to shake off the demon that had been conjured inside of me. … I do not think people are gonna recognize me in it.” When asked if the vampire is sexy, he replied, “He’s gross. But it is very sexualized. It’s playing with a sexual fetish about the power of the monster and what that appeal has to you. Hopefully you’ll get a little bit attracted by it and disgusted by your attraction at the same time.“
Eggers was also asked how into character Skarsgard got. He said, “I remember early on, him trying to talk to me about what it meant to be a dead sorcerer—and I’m into some pretty heavy occult shit, but he was on a different level. I was like, ‘This sounds accurate, but I don’t know how to converse about this with any fluidity.’“
Eggers, who is also producing the remake with Jeff Robinson, John Graham, Chris Columbus, and Eleanor Columbus, was so intent on making his dream project something special, he tried to push himself beyond what he felt he was previously capable of. In the middle of production, he told Empire, “As always, it was a difficult shoot. Last night we were doing a scene on a ship with a lot of rain and waves, and the rain deflector, which tries to blow rain out of the lens, was breaking down and fogging. I spent the past several days working only with Russian sailors on a boat. I’m so happy to have made The Northman first and to have learned what I learned. When I think about the production plan of Nosferatu that we had the first time around, I’m sure I would have somehow pulled it out of my butt, but it’s hard not to imagine it being a failure.“
It sounds like this version of the film has turned out to be a success. It certainly impressed Dafoe, who had worked with Eggers on The Lighthouse. He told IndieWire, “(Eggers) gets better and better and better, gets more articulate, more on top of it. He’s so clear when he works. It opens in December of next year, which is a long time away. Trying to be an optimist, I think the studio must feel very strong about it, because that’s quite a tough slot, so I’m excited about that. I saw some footage when we were shooting, and I can honestly say, visually, it was like unlike anything I have seen. … The look of it and how it was shot was extraordinary.” He added that the look is very beautiful, and that his co-stars look like they stepped out of 19th century paintings in their wardrobe.
A teaser trailer for Nosferatu was released in June of 2024, and can be seen right here:
And that’s everything we know about Nosferatu… for now.
The post Nosferatu: Everything We Know About the Robert Eggers Remake appeared first on JoBlo.
Before he became Hollywood’s latest wunderkind with The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan had a lot to prove. Remember, prior to breaking out with that 1999 film, he was making indies and clashing with Harvey Weinstein, the now-disgraced mega-producer only releasing Wide Awake (shot in 1995) after the spec script for The Sixth Sense sold for a reported $3 million. Fortunately, he had Bruce Willis by his side, the actor finding Shyamalan to be one of the most promising talents he had ever seen.
M. Night Shyamalan recounted one story of confidence he received from Bruce Willis while making The Sixth Sense, likening him to another recent up-and-comer. As the story goes, one day Willis summoned him to his trailer. “I go up, and I knock on the door, and the door opens. I go, ‘Hey, did you want to say something?’ and he goes, ‘I’ve only felt this once before. I felt it on Pulp Fiction, and I just felt it now.’ And then he goes, ‘You’ve got it, kid.’ So I said, ‘Oh, thanks!’ He closed the door, and I literally skipped down the sidewalk. But that’s who he was. He would test you, and basically say, ‘Do you believe in yourself? Because I don’t think you do.’ And if it works, it works. If it doesn’t work, you’re dead. And it worked!”
Nabbing Bruce Willis for The Sixth Sense was obviously a huge get for Shyamalan. But this only came about because of a movie called Broadway Brawler, which you’ve probably never heard of because it remains unfinished. Such a tumultuous shoot it was that Disney shut it down and threatened to sue Willis. Instead, a contract was worked out that would force him into a three-picture deal with the studio; hence, The Sixth Sense. And yes, this is also why he got dragged into The Kid.
Even still, he was Bruce Willis, which can be an intimidating thing, whether for a young director or a seasoned vet. But Shyamalan still had a job to do: direct. And so he did, moving forward even knowing Willis’ sometimes tough reputation. “There was a slightly tense moment in the last thing we were shooting on that Friday where [Bruce] did a line and I had a note. You never know when that moment happens, when you make or break your career, when you become who you’re going to become. I was like, 26 or 27. He gave me the ice look: ‘I think we got it.’ And I went over to him. He was ice. And I whispered in his ear the note. I said, ‘I want you to der-der-der-der’. He kind of looked at me, and I quickly go, ‘Alright, roll sound. Here we go!’ I didn’t even give him a conversation.”
The Sixth Sense would go on to nab an appropriate six Oscar nominations, including Best Director for Shyamalan, making him one of the youngest for the category. Haley Joel Osment would also be one of the youngest nominees in his category, Best Supporting Actor.
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It has been more than two years since the untimely death of Full House star and comedian Bob Saget. That Saget was both a beloved sitcom star to a generation and one of the more revered vets on the stand-up circuit made the loss all the more impactful in the world of entertainment. As is the case with losing any close friend, those that knew and worked with him had to find a way to cope with the sudden loss. For John Stamos, it was in the comfort of his voice.
John Stamos revealed on the Full House Rewind podcast – hosted by Dave Coulier – that he found himself turning to listening to the audiobook version of Bob Saget’s 2014 memoir, Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian. “Do you remember when his book came out? It was very dirty and weird. And so and for whatever reason, the night [Saget] died, I put on his audio tape and it gave me such comfort. I don’t know why. I listened to it every night when I went to sleep.”
That’s a sweet gesture from Stamos – who was actually inspired to write his own memoir after Saget’s death – but it also found him hearing some eerie foreshadowing. “One morning I woke up and I was like, ‘Did he say, in his book, did he say he hit his head and that’s how he died?’ And I’m like, ‘Nah, that couldn’t be.’ And I went back to it and he talks, as a joke, about, ‘I would hit my head and call TMZ and [say] I’m dying.’” Saget, as you may remember, died from blunt head trauma, with most indications saying he likely hit his head and went to bed soon after.
Such stories of perceived premonition made the rounds not long after Bob Saget’s death, with the most famous being from a 2021 episode of his Here for You podcast, in which he said – also as a joke – “So, I don’t have long to live…I’m going to be found dead in bed.” (This was in reaction to his wife listing films like Goodfellas and Casino as her favorites.)
What was your favorite movie, show or stand-up bit from Bob Saget? Drop your pick and tell us why it stood out.
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This week, a Pokémon GO event accidentally reminded us of how much better the game used to be. Also, PSP tactical RPG classic Jeanne d’Arc hit PlayStation Plus and we just had to sing its praises. We also vented about how frustrating trying to become a PC gamer can be, and oohed and ahhed at the wonder of video game…
This week, a Pokémon GO event accidentally reminded us of how much better the game used to be. Also, PSP tactical RPG classic Jeanne d’Arc hit PlayStation Plus and we just had to sing its praises. We also vented about how frustrating trying to become a PC gamer can be, and oohed and ahhed at the wonder of video game…
Twisters is blowing past our box office expectations, with Deadline reporting that the movie has been overperforming in a big way. It’s on track for an opening north of $74 million, with an $80 million debut not out of the question. This is a huge win for Universal, with many questioning the wisdom of making a sequel to a twenty-eight-year-old film with only tenuous connections to the original. Yet, director Lee Isaac Chung made a fun movie and benefits from the star power of Glen Powell, whose ascent as a leading man seems all but guaranteed now, with it giving him his third big hit next to Top Gun: Maverick and Anyone But You.
It’s also a good showcase for the talented Daisy Edgar Jones, who had a hit of her own with Where the Crawdads Sing, and Anthony Ramos, coming off of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Clearly, Universal knew what they were doing building a movie like this around a solid cast of up-and-comers.
Despicable Me 4 and Inside Out 2 will likely take second and third place with $21.5 million and $11 million a piece. Longlegs seems set for a fourth-place finish with $10.2 million, with it looking like it is going to fall 54%, which is very solid for a polarizing horror film like this one. It’s printing money for Neon, that’s for sure.
As well as Twisters is doing, the box office is set to be completely annihilated next weekend by the release of Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems like it will be one of the biggest opening weekends of all time. Will Twisters be able to hang on to a good chunk of the box office in the face of the big-time competition from Marvel? We’ll see, but this is still a great start for Twisters, which seems likely to get a sequel at this point.
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Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 is now available on VOD. There’s no way around it – the film’s theatrical release was a huge disappointment, as it earned back only a fraction of its reported budget and has put the release of the second film in major jeopardy. However, now that it’s streaming, the hope is that people will be able to discover it at home, perhaps paving the way for this saga to continue. If you’ve watched Horizon and are jonesing for more modern westerns to check out, here are some we really like here at JoBlo.
This is perhaps an ironic one to put on a list that pays tribute to Costner’s Horizon, as the star’s own big-budget western epic, Wyatt Earp, was badly overshadowed by this competing story about the same historical events. The fact is, George Pan Cosmatos and Kurt Russell’s Tombstone is among the best modern westerns, embracing old-fashioned, epic storytelling, albeit with a dose of harder-edged violence that makes it feel contemporary. It remains one of Russell’s career-defining films, although it can’t be denied that the movie is all but stolen by Val Kilmer as Doc Holiday, with his final showdown with Michael Biehn’s Johnny Ringo the film’s coolest moment. When are we going to get this one on 4K?
The tragedy of Dances With Wolves is that, in the decades since it won Best Picture and Director at the Oscars, people look back and feel that Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas was robbed. I’m inclined to agree, to the point that I actually never watched this movie until about five years ago. While it’s not Goodfellas, it’s still pretty damn close to a masterpiece, with Costner’s moving, humane depiction of an army officer becoming part of a Lakota tribe being one of the greatest stories ever told in a Western. The film also has one of the greatest musical scores of all time, courtesy of the late John Barry.
This one is similar to Dances With Wolves but a bit harder-edged. In it, an English aristocrat, played by Richard Harris, is captured by a band of Sioux. While initially their captive, he begins to appreciate their lifestyle and values over time. Eventually, in a brutal sequence, he’s inducted into their tribe (in a gruesome ceremony that involves him being hung by his pectoral muscles -which was VERY controversial in its time). The movie received two sequels, but they’re more fantasy-based, with the realistic approach of the first film (where the tribe speaks unsubtitled Sioux) being done away with. One of the movie’s enduring legacies is that it inspired everything from Dances With Wolves, to The Last Samurai to Avatar.
This is a sneaky film in that it begins as a lighthearted satire and slowly becomes a heart-wrenching tragedy as it goes on. In it, Dustin Hoffman plays a white man raised by the Cheyenne who goes out into the world and has a series of adventures that include brief spells as a gunfighter (known as the Soda Pop Kid), con man, preacher, and finally, an alcoholic. Throughout, he returns to his Cheyenne home and his adopted father, Chief Dan George’s Old Lodge Skins, and eventually bears witness to their near extermination by a genocidal General Custar (brilliantly played by comic actor Richard Mulligan in a complex depiction). One thing about this movie is that many of the Native American characters, such as the woman who becomes Hoffman’s wife, are played by Asian actors in an attempt to draw parallels to the war in Vietnam. Over time, its legacy has grown and grown, with Killers of the Flower Moon star Lily Gladstone recently calling it a great film (she’s 100% right).
John Hillcoat made one of the greatest modern westerns of all time, and it doesn’t even take place in the American West! Rather, this takes place in the Australian Bush, where a bandit, Charlie (memorably played by Guy Pearce), is forced to hunt down and kill his psychotic older brother (Danny Huston) to save his more innocent younger one. Danny Huston delivers an unforgettable performance in this, with Nick Cave (who also wrote the movie) and Warren Ellis also contributing a superb score. If you like this, check out another terrific western written by Cave, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
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