The manslaughter trial against Alec Baldwin over the fatal shooting of Rust cinematographer Halyna Hutchins has been dismissed. Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer threw out the case over how police and prosecutors treated a handful of bullets, which they failed to turn over to the defence.
“The state is highly culpable for its failure to provide discovery to the defendant,” Judge Sommer said. “Dismissal with prejudice is warranted.” The dismissal came as a surprise as gasps were said to be heard in the courtroom and Baldwin was congratulated by his family and supporters.
Emerald Fennell, who wrote and directed Saltburn, had set her next project, an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel Wuthering Heights.
The novel, which was first published in 1847, deals with “Heathcliff, an orphan-turned-foster-son who falls in love with the daughter of the family who owns the estate on which he now lives, Wuthering Heights. After running away, Heathcliff rises up through the ranks of the gentry and exacts revenge on the families — the Earnshaws and the Lintons — who kept him from his true love.” Although some early reviews didn’t quite know what to make of the novel, it has since been accepted as one of the greatest English-language novels of all time.
Wuthering Heights has been adapted numerous times, including in 1939 with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, 1970 with Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall, 1992 with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, and 2011 with Kaya Scodelario and James Howson.
While speaking with Vanity Fair last year, Fennell said that she’s always been drawn to darker stories. “For that completely overwhelming carnal desire to take hold, there has to be an element of revulsion, there has to be an element of transgression,” she said. “My favorite thing in general is sympathy for the devil. The sorts of people that we can’t stand, the sorts of people who are abhorrent — if we can love them, if we can fall in love with these people, if we can understand why this is so alluring, in spite of its palpable cruelty and unfairness and sort of strangeness, if we all want to be there too, I think that’s just such an interesting dynamic.“
Fennell was also once slated to write a script for DC’s Zatanna movie, but due to all the changes at the studio, the project was scrapped. “I don’t know a huge amount about the superhero genre. It’s not a genre that I naturally gravitate towards. I was like, ‘How do I make a movie like that for people like me, who maybe don’t know so much and wouldn’t necessarily buy a ticket the first time around?’” Fennell said last year. “It was sort of that kind of thing and I was like, ‘Okay, this is interesting.’ Zatanna is just a really, really cool character. I think, just like everything — I did write it. It was complicated. It’s the classic studio stuff, classic studio stuff. J.J. is incredible, his team is incredible. I wrote, in the end, a script that I think is reasonably demented. In a good way, I think. In the end, I think the whole universe was changed.“
Dead Rising has always played second fiddle to Capcom’s vastly more popular and successful Resident Evil franchise. Yet, while Dead Rising might not be as famous or beloved as Resident Evil, its quirky characters, oddball tone, endless hordes of zombies, and tension-building ticking clock made it feel unique and…
Dead Rising has always played second fiddle to Capcom’s vastly more popular and successful Resident Evil franchise. Yet, while Dead Rising might not be as famous or beloved as Resident Evil, its quirky characters, oddball tone, endless hordes of zombies, and tension-building ticking clock made it feel unique and…
Paul Walter Hauser is one of the busiest actors in Hollywood, and one of his many (and I mean many) upcoming projects is a Chris Farley biopic. Stepping into the shoes of the iconic comedian is no small task, but Hauser told Variety that he’s been “practicing to play Chris Farley my entire life.“
Hauser has played a handful of real-life people throughout his career, including Shawn Eckhardt in I, Tonya, Richard Jewell in Richard Jewell, and Larry Hall in Black Bird, but Farley is by far the most well-known, which makes Hauser’s task more difficult.
“Everybody’s going to judge the crap out of the movie and have very passionate, hard-line opinions. I’m not worried about playing Chris because I know I’m going to approach it with a lot of love and effort,” Hauser said. “At the end of the day, all you can do is work hard and try your best to love the character and the project as much as possible. To me, that doesn’t seem like much of a hurdle with Chris. I adore him. I want to honor him. I want people to leave the theater, having laughed and cried together.“
Josh Gad will direct the Chris Farley biopic, which is based on the New York Times best-selling biography The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts by Tom Farley Jr. and Tanner Colby. The script is by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber.
Now, about those many projects Hauser is involved in. The actor can currently be heard voicing Embarrassment in Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and will next be seen starring alongside Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, and Hong Chau in The Instigators, a heist thriller directed by Doug Liman. The film will hit theaters on August 2nd before streaming on Apple TV+ on August 9th. He’s also set to appear in The Naked Gun reboot with Liam Neeson and will star in Press Your Luck, which depicts the ’84 cheating scandal orchestrated by Michael Larson. He will also star alongside Mark Wahlberg in Peter Farrelly’s action comedy Balls Up and will appear in Marvel’s long-awaited Fantastic Four movie.
Lionsgate will be bringing a new version of The Crow to theatres on August 23rd – and while we had previously been referring to this project as a remake, Lionsgate recently let it be known that this is not to be called a remake, but rather a new adaptation of the source material, the comic book series created by James O’Barr. Now, with the release dates just one month away, TV spots for the film have started showing up… and since these TV spots feature some new footage, we have dropped them into the video embedded above.
Rupert Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman) directed this version of The Crow, working from a screenplay by Oscar nominee Zach Baylin (King Richard). The film is produced by Victor Hadida, Molly Hassell, John Jencks, and Edward R. Pressman. Dan Farah serves as executive producer. Here’s the synopsis: Soulmates Eric (Bill Skarsgard) and Shelly (FKA twigs) are brutally murdered when the demons of her dark past catch up with them. Given the chance to save his true love by sacrificing himself, Eric sets out to seek merciless revenge on their killers, traversing the worlds of the living and the dead to put the wrong things right.
As the synopsis mentions, Bill Skarsgard plays the lead character and is joined in the cast of The Crow by singer FKA twigs, who takes on the role of Shelly, the love of Eric’s life. Danny Huston (Yellowstone) plays the lead villain. David Bowles (Brothers), Isabella Wei (1899), Laura Birn (A Walk Among the Tombstones), Sami Bouajila (The Bouncer), and Jordan Bolger (Peaky Blinders) are also in the cast.
Based on the comic book series created by James O’Barr, the first version of The Crow was released in 1994. Following the production of three sequels (each about a different resurrected character), a redux was first announced in late 2008… then it had to make a long journey through development hell. Several screenwriters came and went, scripts were written and scrapped, studios went bankrupt, and directors like Stephen Norrington, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Corin Hardy, and Francisco Javier Gutiérrez were all involved along the way. Actors up for the lead role during the long development period included Bradley Cooper, Mark Wahlberg, Tom Hiddleston, Luke Evans, Jason Momoa, and Jack Huston.
Are you looking forward to seeing the new version of The Crow? Check out the TV spots, then let us know by leaving a comment below.
In the wake of saving the universe from a time-ending calamity, the question that remains for the world of Final Fantasy XIV after the events of 2021’s Endwalker expansion is: How do we move on? This question sets up the quests immediately following Endwalker’s climax to become an arc that perfectly acts as an…
In the wake of saving the universe from a time-ending calamity, the question that remains for the world of Final Fantasy XIV after the events of 2021’s Endwalker expansion is: How do we move on? This question sets up the quests immediately following Endwalker’s climax to become an arc that perfectly acts as an…
Filming wrapped on director Eli Roth‘s adaptation of the Borderlands video game series from Gearbox and 2K way back in June of 2021. A year and a half later, Deadpool director Tim Miller had to step in to handle the project’s two weeks of reshoots because Roth had the chance to finally – after sixteen years – make a feature based on the Thanksgiving faux trailer he put together for the Quentin Tarantino / Robert Rodriguez collaboration Grindhouse. The Borderlands reshoots have been completed, Thanksgiving has come and gone, and Lionsgate is now gearing up to finally release Borderlands into the world on August 9th… and with that date right around the corner, a featurette has arrived online to give us a look at the “dysfunctional family” of characters at the heart of the story. You can watch it in the embed above.
The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin wrote the initial screenplay for Borderlands, but removed his name from the project after the script was rewritten by Roth, Juel Taylor, Tony Rettenmaier, Joe Crombie, Chris Bremner, and Sam Levinson. Zak Olkewicz wrote scenes for Miller during the reshoots. Elements from drafts Aaron Berg and Oren Uziel wrote before Mazin have reportedly made their way into the film as well. So there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen on this one.
The film stars Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Edgar Ramirez, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Haley Bennett, Olivier Richters, Gina Gershon, Cheyenne Jackson, Charles Babalola, Benjamin Byron Davis, Steven Boyer, Bobby Lee, Ryann Redmond, Penn Jillette, and Janina Gavankar, who plays “a new, key character” called Commander Knoxx, someone who has not been in the video games. Jack Black provides the voice of the robot Claptrap. Here’s the synopsis: Lilith (Blanchett), an infamous outlaw with a mysterious past, reluctantly returns to her home planet of Pandora to find the missing daughter of the universe’s most powerful S.O.B., Atlas (Ramirez). Lilith forms an alliance with an unexpected team – Roland (Hart), a former elite mercenary, now desperate for redemption; Tiny Tina (Greenblatt), a feral pre-teen demolitionist; Krieg (Munteanu), Tina’s musclebound, rhetorically challenged protector; Tannis (Curtis), the scientist with a tenuous grip on sanity; and Claptrap (Black), a persistently wiseass robot. These unlikely heroes must battle alien monsters and dangerous bandits to find and protect the missing girl, who may hold the key to unimaginable power. The fate of the universe could be in their hands – but they’ll be fighting for something more: each other.
Borderlands is produced by Arad Productions’ Avi Arad and Ari Arad, along with PICTURESTART’s Erik Feig. Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford serves as executive producer with Strauss Zelnick of Take-Two Interactive. James Myers and Aaron Edmonds are overseeing the project for Lionsgate, while Emmy Yu does the same for Arad Productions and Lucy Kitada and Royce Reeves-Darby are overseeing for PICTURESTART.
I know nothing about the video games, but the Borderlands movie looks like fun to me. I’ll definitely be checking it out at some point.
Are you looking forward to Borderlands? Take a look at the featurette, then let us know by leaving a comment below.
Pop star Katy Perry, who you will know for one of the best pop albums of the 21st century with 2010’s Teenage Dream, has been chasing that high without replicating it ever since. In the past 14 years, Perry has been having trouble finding relevance in a pop space where she was once dominant, and that could not be more…
