Month: September 2024

The Batman 2, Matt Reeves

Fans have been anxiously awaiting the release of The Batman Part II, but the project has been rather slow to start as director Matt Reeves wants to get it exactly right. While speaking with SFX Magazine (via ComicBookMovie), Reeves dropped a few slight yet tantalizing tidbits about the upcoming sequel.

We’ve shared [the script] as we’ve been going along with DC, and they’re super excited,” Reeves said. “It’s going to dig into the epic story about deeper corruption, and it goes into places [Bruce Wayne] couldn’t even anticipate in the first one. The seeds of where this goes are all in the first movie & it expands in a way that will show you aspects of the character you never got to see. Batman is constantly battling these forces. But those forces can’t be entirely exorcised. So the next movie delves deeper into that.” Corruption. Mystery. Batman. I like it. The director also confirmed that “Colin [Farrell] will be part of the movie” as the Penguin.

While the Batman comics (and some of the movies) do include plenty of fantastical characters, Reeves is set on keeping his version of Gotham City more realistic. “What was important to me was to find a way to take these pop icons, these mythic characters that everybody knows, and translate it so that Gotham feels like a place in our world,” Reeves explained. “We might push to the edge of fantastical, but we would never go into full fantastical. It’s meant to feel quite grounded.

That said, this doesn’t mean we won’t see some of the more iconic Batman characters, they’ll just be seen through the more grounded lens of Reeves’ story. “It doesn’t mean that you won’t see characters that people love. That’s exactly what we want to do,” Reeves said. “Gentleman Ghost is probably pushed a bit too far for us to be able to find a way to do, but there is a fun way to think about how we would take characters that might push over into a bit of the fantastical and find a way to make sense of that.

As a big fan of the first movie, I’m eager to see where Matt Reeves takes us with The Batman Part II, but we’re still a ways off from the project hitting our screens. Co-writer Mattson Tomlin told ScreenRant last month that the sequel would finally start shooting next year. The Batman Part II is currently slated for an October 2, 2026 release.

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Alison Brie, Evil-Lyn, Masters of the Universe

Alison Brie is ready to let her villain flag fly as THR reports the actress will play Evil-Lyn in the upcoming live-action Masters of the Universe movie.

Masters of the Universe will star Nicholas Galitzine (The Idea of You) as Prince Adam/He-Man and Camila Mendes (Do Revenge) as Captain Teela. The project has been in the works for quite some time with a revolving door of directors, writers, and actors, but at long last, it seems like it’s finally happening. Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings) will direct from a script by Chris Butler, with initial drafts penned by David Callaham, and Aaron & Adam Nee.

Evil-Lyn is a malevolent sorceress who serves as Skeletor’s second in command. Extremely powerful, she secretly hopes to overthrow her master and rule over Eternia herself. Meg Foster (and her eyes) played Evil-Lyn in the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie.

The Masters of the Universe movie was previously set up at Netflix, but the streaming service scrapped the project last summer. Aaron and Adam Nee were tapped to write and direct the project before it fell apart, reportedly due to budget issues. Netflix had already spent close to $30 million on development costs, with the budget ballooning to over $200 million. There was an attempt to bring the budget down, with the idea of shooting the movie back-to-back with a sequel in order to amortize the cost, but an agreement couldn’t be reached. The project later found a new home at Amazon MGM Studios. Masters of the Universe will be released in theaters on June 5, 2026.

Alison Brie was last seen starring alongside Sam Neill and Annette Bening in Apples Never Fall, Peacock’s mystery miniseries based on the novel by Liane Moriarty. The series centers on the seemingly picture-perfect Delaney family. Former tennis coaches Stan and Joy have sold their successful tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. While they look forward to spending time with their four adult children, everything changes when a wounded young woman knocks on Joy and Stan’s door. When Joy suddenly disappears, her children are forced to re-examine their parents’ marriage, and dark secrets begin to surface. You can check out a review from our own Alex Maidy right here.

What do you think of Alison Brie playing Evil-Lyn?

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Beau DeMayo, Marvel, X-Men 97

A week before the premiere of X-Men ’97, Marvel shockingly fired creator Beau DeMayo. At the time, it wasn’t entirely clear why DeMayo was fired from the series, but subsequent months have seen tensions rise between Marvel and the former showrunner. Marvel later claimed that DeMayo was fired following an internal investigation that turned up findings of an “egregious nature,” but DeMayo is fighting back.

Per Deadline, DeMayo claims the “allegations of egregious misconduct are false” before bashing Marvel for fostering a “toxic environment” and “near criminal working conditions” that “turns individuals against one another, stokes paranoia to ensure compliance.” DeMayo acknowledges that “personality conflicts happen” and that he wasn’t “everyone’s cup of team,” but claims that the real issue Marvel has was him “being gay, Black and open about it at Marvel Studios.

The rumors being spread around me online are lies, and they are offensive, but more concerning is that they’re a smear campaign designed to discredit my credibility in order to cover up the egregious prejudicial misconduct stretching from select crew members on X-Men ’97, all the way all the way to the top at Marvel Studios,” DeMayo said. “In the end, the offenses Marvel and others have leaked are designed to distract you from what really offended them. Someone like me dared to speak truth to people like them. They wanted me to be the Black stamp of approval on this project, I declined. They wanted to erase aspects of my personality that clashed or proved inconvenient with the misguided narratives they wanted to establish. I declined. They tried to intimidate me with both explicit and implied threats. I was not intimidated. Everything they have done since then has been designed not just to silence me and smear me, but to crush me and to remind me to know my role.

He’s also going to court to have an “illegal non-disparagement provision” removed from his exit package documents and to keep his “bonus and writing credits.” Attorney Bryan Freedman said, “There are only two possible explanations for why Marvel and Disney had Beau sign an NDA that so obviously violated basic California law. Either incredulously Marvel and Disney’s hundreds of lawyers who advise over 250,000 employees all just happened to make a mistake or Marvel knowingly and intentionally attempted to silence Beau so they could have total control as to why he was no longer at Marvel, why he had his credits removed on season 2 and why he was uninvited to attend the very award show that nominated his hard work for an Emmy.

DeMayo also claims he has “the receipts and the eyewitnesses so long as you stop coercing them to lie, you can keep attacking me with lies and misinformation, but we can become the ugliest, most annoying version of that of that … or you can start acting like a studio that is worthy of a show like X Men ‘97.” Now, I’m no big city country lawyer, but I have a feeling we haven’t heard the last of this.

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It’s not unusual for changes to be made to the source material when adapting it to a different medium. It happens all the time with books as they make the leap onto movie or television screens. However, late last month, Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin vowed to detail the behind-the-scenes problems on the new HBO series House of the Dragon. In a new blog post on his official website, Martin said he’d reveal “everything that’s gone wrong” with House of the Dragon, the latest live-action series set in the Game of Thrones universe. Martin co-created the show and is an executive producer, with the series based on his novel Fire and Blood.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Martin explained (in a post that has since been deleted) that he was strongly opposed to changing Aegon and Helaena’s three children to just two for the show. Changes like that are common and seemingly don’t have an impact on the story. However, Martin professes that it causes a “butterfly effect” of consequences. In the “Blood and Chase” sequence in the season two premiere, Helaena is forced into a “Sophie’s Choice” moment between her two children, but in the book, it’s between all three children.

Martin writes in his blog, “I still believe the scene in the book is stronger.  The readers have the right of that. The two killers are crueler in the book. I thought the actors who played the killers on the show were excellent… but the characters are crueler, harder, and more frightening in FIRE & BLOOD. … I would also suggest that Helaena shows more courage, more strength in the book, by offering her own own life to save her son. Offering a piece of jewelry is just not the same … As I saw it, the ‘Sophie’s Choice’ aspect was the strongest part of the sequence, the darkest, the most visceral. I hated to lose that. And judging from the comments on line, most of the fans seemed to agree.”

He also explained, “I argued against it, for all these reasons. I did not argue long, or with much heat, however. The change weakened the sequence, I felt, but only a bit. And Ryan had what seemed to be practical reasons for it; they did not want to deal with casting another child, especially a two-year old toddler. Kids that young will inevitably slow down production, and there would be budget implications. Budget was already an issue on HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, it made sense to save money wherever we could. Moreover, Ryan assured me that we were not losing Prince Maelor, simply postponing him. Queen Helaena could still give birth to him in season three, presumably after getting with child late in season two. That made sense to me, so I withdrew my objections and acquiesced to the change.”

Martin, then, added, “Sometime between the initial decision to remove Maelor, a big change was made. The prince’s birth was no longer just going to be pushed back to season 3. He was never going to be born at all. The younger son of Aegon and Helaena would never appear.”

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