Sonic the Hedgehog 3 doesn’t seem to be a Christmas movie, but that hasn’t stopped Paramount from leaning into the fact that the movie is launching less than a week before the holiday. Jim Carrey has at least one scene in the film dressed as Santa Claus, and now Paramount has released several parody posters…
Action movies are a dime-a-dozen. Still, now and again, filmmakers go above and beyond the call of duty to bring something fresh to the genre. In Novocaine, when the girl of his dreams (Amber Midthunder) is kidnapped, everyman Nate (Jack Quaid) turns his inability to feel pain into an unexpected strength in his fight to get her back.
For a concept this outlandish, we needed to speak with the film’s directors, Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, who, in their talk with us, shared the details of their approach to making an off-the-wall action film featuring a disabled protagonist who turns his condition into a superpower. The following interview explains how the duo navigates Nathan’s rare condition, how Leigh Whannell’s Upgrade inspired aspects of the film, and how the limits of the film’s violence are kept in check.
JoBlo: The premise for Novocaine is really off the wall. I’d like to hear your thoughts about your first response to the screenplay. How did you know this was going to be your next project?
Dan Berk & Robert Olsen: When we read the original draft of the screenplay, it had a different tone than what we had wound up with. But that idea just stuck with us, you know. We’re sent a lot of scripts, and a lot of times, there’ll be something wrong with them, and you’re always going to have to fix something. You’re just looking for that one golden nugget. Does this have the seed of an idea that can turn into something? This one really did. The concept of a normal person who can’t feel pain going on a journey like this. That felt like it was an easily communicated idea because there’s so much shit flying at everybody all the time. There are so many new shows and movies coming out. So, you need something that’s going to stick out a little bit. People often use the term “sticky concept.” That’s what you’re looking for when you’re trying to find a project that you think might be successful. You’re going to want a concept people won’t stop talking about, and our brains immediately lit up with all of these set pieces that weren’t in that original draft that we incorporated when we took our pass.
JoBlo: There’s a particular energy to the concept and trailer. Aspects of Novocaine remind me of Leigh Whannell’s Upgrade.
Dan Berk & Robert Olsen: Oh, yeah. Upgrade was definitely one of our references. That’s a great example of a “sticky concept” movie. There’s a fight scene in Novocaine where Nova fights goons in his apartment, and the fight extends to the kitchen. You see his body and mind fighting with one another. His body is fighting back, but his face is apologetic. It’s a funny juxtaposition you can see in every fight scene. What makes Novocaine unique is that the action scenes don’t feel like John Wick, where your protagonist is kicking everybody’s ass the whole time. Nova is getting his ass kicked for the majority of the fight until he figures out some way to win.
There are a lot of movies featuring a gardener who’s actually a former CIA agent, and they’ve got these crazy assassination skills locked away. For us to engage and dedicate two years of our lives to a concept, it needs to stand out from the pack and do something for the genre that takes it in a different direction. We wanted to make something funny but action-packed. Finding that balance is part of the fun. Movies like 21 Jump Street and Lethal Weapon are good examples of balanced comedic action films. They’re funny, but there’s also drama and actual stakes. There’s also romance, but it’s not the foundation of either film. With Novocaine, we want you to invest in the relationship on-screen.
JoBlo: The concept of an action hero who can’t feel pain introduces a near-limitless amount of opportunities for outlandish exploits. Did you feel a creative rush while shooting Novocaine‘s elaborate set pieces?
Dan Berk & Robert Olsen: Yes, definitely. We even felt a rush filming the dialogue scenes. Once we started seeing dailies from our fight scenes, we were like, okay, fuck yeah! When you’re filming a comedic fight scene and making the crew laugh, that’s how you know it will hit. The crew is often the toughest audience.
In the trailer, there’s a scene of Nathan being tortured, and everyone was laughing. Jack [Quaid] is so incredible. We knew early on that we had something that would blow audiences away. It does take someone like Jack to carry that tone. The concept is cool, but you still need an actor who can carry the weight of comedy and drama. Because our character can’t feel pain, Jack has to relearn how to take a punch. When you get hit, you wince because of the pain. In Nathan’s case, he’s getting hit but can’t feel it. How do you get hit and not react? It’s a difficult line to walk, physically and visually. Sometimes, we’d be filming, and Jack would say, “I think that looked like I was in pain. Let’s go again,” and he’d give us different versions of the scene. It was a huge rush to see all that come together.
JoBlo: It’s a thin line to walk for sure. Did you research Jack’s condition, CIPA (Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis), during filming?
Dan Berk & Robert Olsen: Yeah, it’s a fascinating medical condition. There are obviously liberties taken with the condition in Novocaine, as it’s very debilitating. Anyone who knows about people with that condition would say that what we’re doing goes beyond the ability of someone in that situation. At the same time, it’s a movie. We wanted to tell a story about this disability, but also someone who learns to turn that condition into a weapon. Nathan has felt like a liability his whole life, but in the movie, he turns that disability into a superpower. We did test screenings for people with disabilities, and the feedback was very positive. A lot of them were happy to see someone with a disability using it to their advantage, like it was something not to be ashamed of.
JoBlo: Was there any point while making the film when you had a great idea but, upon further reflection, realized it needed to be scaled back or cut for its absurdity?
Dan Berk & Robert Olsen: Not necessarily because of its absurdity. During production, you will have set pieces that need to be scaled down for budgetary purposes. Still, it’s funny; in almost every case, we end up falling in love with the solution to the problem more than the original concept. Honestly, though, there were only so many things we had to scale down on this movie. Novocaine is like a freight train; once it starts, it doesn’t stop. If there was any scaling back, it was during the writing phase. We needed to know what type of damage Nova’s body could take. We didn’t want him to bleed out or experience brain trauma. So, he’s not just a human pincushion. You have to keep track of the damage being done so you don’t step outside the bounds of what’s believable.
Novocaine comes to theaters on March 14, 2025.
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This weekend sees the release of Sony’s final (?) live-action instalment of their extended Spider-Verse franchise focused around Spider-Man’s rogues gallery. While the Venom trilogy did good business, Morbius and Madame Web were all-out disasters, and their poisonous reception will likely keep Kraven the Hunter from making much of a dent at the box office this weekend. The knives have been out for this one for some time now, and even if the movie got good reviews, it would still have had an uphill climb at the box office. As it is, the reviews have been poor (including ours), so I’m not expecting this to make more than $15 million this weekend, which should keep it from either of the top two spots, which will undoubtedly go to holdovers Moana 2 and Wicked.
As Moana 2 had a steeper decline at the box office last weekend than I anticipated, I’m thinking this weekend it should make about $25 million. Wicked, which is now riding a wave of awards buzz (it garnered a lot of Golden Globe and Critics Choice nominations) should come in second place with about $20 million. Expect Kraven the Hunter in third place with $15 million. Gladiator II should be right behind it with about $7 million
The weekend’s other new release is the animated Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, which might manage to crack the top 5 with about $5 million – if it can beat Red One (although given the fact that it’s now streaming on Prime Video – it might start to decline at the box office). Another possibility is that the re-release of Interstellar might be able to crack the top five, as it’s selling out pretty much everywhere. It might be playing on too few screens to make the top five, but it would be quite an achievement if it did.
My predictions:
Are you going to give Kraven the Hunter a shot this weekend? Let us know in the comments.
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While Sylvester Stallone is enjoying success on his show Tulsa King, he doesn’t stray too far from movies, but it’s looking more and more like his side hustle nowadays. Stallone was recently featured in Armor, which was a low-budget action thriller that primarily focused on a single location on a bridge. In his review, our Alex Maidy said Armor “is nowhere near mediocre due to formulaic action that cannot even muster enough energy to keep attention on screen.” Plus, there’s talk that Sly received a supposed $3.5 million for a single day’s work. Enter the trailer for Alarum, which flaunts Stallone in the marketing but looks as if he’s carved out the same deal for this film.
Grindstone Entertainment, which resides under Lionsgate, has released the trailer, which stars Scott Eastwood (The Fate of the Furious, Suicide Squad), Sylvester Stallone (Rocky franchise, Creed), Willa Fitzgerald (Strange Darling, “Scream: The TV Series”), Mike Colter (Men in Black, “Luke Cage”), Isis Valverde (“Pure Beauty,” “Edge of Desire”) and Joel Cohen (Desperation Road, Savage Salvation). The film is directed by Michael Polish (Twin Falls Idaho, Jackpot) and written by Alexander Vesha (Deadly Impact).
The official synopsis reads,
“Academy Award nominee Sylvester Stallone, Scott Eastwood, Mike Colter, and Willa Fitzgerald star in this explosive action-thriller about two married spies caught in the crosshairs of an international intelligence network that will stop at nothing to obtain a critical asset. Joe (Eastwood) and Lara (Fitzgerald) are agents living off the grid whose quiet retreat at a winter resort is blown to shreds when members of the old guard suspect the two may have joined an elite team of rogue spies, known as ALARUM.“
These side projects that Stallone picks up during break from Tulsa King are pretty lucrative, plus the Rocky star is also working on a new deal for his Paramount+ show with a new contract extension as the cinema icon returns back to Tulsa as Dwight Manfredi. The deal reportedly includes a pay bump for the Italian Stallion that would double his per-episode pay from $750,000 to $1.5 million. That equates to about fifteen million per season if they keep the ten-episode count that comprised the second season.
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Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail and Julia Roberts have worked together multiple times already. She starred in the series Homecoming, which he co-created; he was an executive producer on the limited series Gaslit, which she starred in; and she starred in his thriller Leave the World Behind, which was a big hit for the Netflix streaming service, landing on their list of Top 10 Most Popular Movies. As of right now, Leave the World Behind stands as Netflix’s fifth most popular English-language film of all time, with 143.4 million views. Last week, we learned that Esmail and Roberts are going to continue their working relationship with another thriller, this one called Panic Carefully, with Elizabeth Olsen (WandaVision) set to share the screen with Roberts. Now, The Hollywood Reporter has broken the news that Eddie Redmayne, whose credits include the new version of The Day of the Jackal, the Fantastic Beasts films, and an Oscar-winning performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, is also in the cast.
Esmail will be directing Panic Carefully from his own screenplay. Plot details are being kept under wraps, but the project is being described as “a paranoid thriller in the vein of Esmail’s Emmy and Golden Globe winner Mr. Robot, as well as The Silence of the Lambs.“ According to The Hollywood Reporter, the story involves the hunt for a cyber terrorist.
The project went out to assorted studios and streamers earlier this year, kicking off an intense bidding war. Warner Bros. came out the winner of that bidding war, and Deadline notes that their victory was “in part due to their commitment to a theatrical run.” So, while Esmail and Roberts had great success taking Leave the World Behind to streaming, they want this one to get more play on the big screen. (Leave the World Behind got a limited theatrical release about two weeks before it started streaming.)
Esmail and Chad Hamilton are producing Panic Carefully for Email Corp. Roberts is also producing the film, as are Scott Stuber, Marisa Yeres Gill, and Lisa Gillan. Kevin McCormick and Chrystal Li are overseeing the project for Warner Bros. Filming will take place in England and cameras are expected to start rolling in January.
What do you think of Eddie Redmayne joining Julia Roberts and Elizabeth Olsen in the cast of the Sam Esmail thriller Panic Carefully? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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The vibes in the Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero community have been absolutely rancid lately, but a huge free update has just changed that. The 3D arena fighter’s latest patch fixes a ton of broken mechanics and OP abilities that were ruining the game’s ranked mode. Even more importantly, local multiplayer can finally be…
The vibes in the Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero community have been absolutely rancid lately, but a huge free update has just changed that. The 3D arena fighter’s latest patch fixes a ton of broken mechanics and OP abilities that were ruining the game’s ranked mode. Even more importantly, local multiplayer can finally be…
A while back, we featured director David Fincher’s 2002 home invasion thriller Panic Room on a list of hard to find movies, given the fact that the movie had never made it to Blu-ray. Thankfully, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has now decided to make the movie easier to find, as they have announced that they’re giving Panic Room a 4K UHD release on February 18th!
Scripted by David Koepp, Panic Room has the following synopsis: Trapped in their New York brownstone’s panic room, a hidden chamber built as a sanctuary in the event of break-ins, newly divorced Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart), play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with three intruders—Burnham (Forest Whitaker), Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) and Junior (Jared Leto)—during a brutal home invasion. But the room itself is the focal point because what the intruders really want is inside it.
The 4K UHD release will feature the following extras: 4K ULTRA HD DISC – Feature presented in 4K resolution with Dolby Vision, supervised by Director David Fincher – English Dolby Atmos + English 5.1 FEATURE + SPECIAL FEATURE BLU-RAY DISCS – Feature presented in high definition, sourced from the 4K master – English 5.1 – Special Features: – Commentary by David Fincher – Commentary by Jodie Foster, Forest Whitaker and Dwight Yoakam – Commentary by writer David Koepp and special guest – PRE-PRODUCTION: – 6 featurettes on the prep phase, from pre-visualization through testing – Interactive previsualization: Compare the pre-visualization, storyboards, dailies and final film in a multi-angle, multi-audio feature with optional commentary – PRODUCTION: – Shooting Panic Room: An hour-long documentary on the principal photography phase – Makeup effects featurette with Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. – Sequence breakdowns: An interactive look at the creation of four separate scenes in the film – POST-PRODUCTION: – 21 documentaries and featurettes on the visual effects – On Sound Design with Ren Klyce – Digital Intermediate and other featurettes dealing with the post-production phase – A multi-angle look at the scoring session conducted by Howard Shore
The Panic Room 4K will be available as a limited edition steelbook, and an image of the steelbook can be seen at the bottom of this article.
Are you a fan of Panic Room, and will you be buying the 4K UHD? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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Jagged Edge Productions and ITN Studios are building The Twisted Childhood Universe, which will consist of horror movies inspired by children’s stories. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey and Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 got the universe started, paving the way for Bambi: The Reckoning, Pinocchio: Unstrung, and Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (not to mention Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 3), building up to the crossover movie Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble. We’ve known for a while that Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare would be released sometime in 2025, and now we know exactly when it’s going to reach screens. Iconic Events Releasing will be bringing the film to theatres for three days only, from January 13th through the 15th.
Written and directed by Scott Chambers, who is also producing all of these Twisted Childhood movies, the film follows Wendy Darling as she strikes out in an attempt to rescue her brother Michael from “the clutches of the evil Peter Pan.” Along the way she meets Tinkerbell, who in this twisted version of the story will be seen taking heroine, convinced that it’s pixie dust.
Chambers previously told our friends at Bloody Disgusting, “This is tonally an extremely darker film to Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. When dealing with children being abducted, it felt right. All of the films from our Poohniverse will feel different from the last. So, if one isn’t for you, then maybe the next will be. Peter Pan is the most vicious of them all. He is twisted, cruel and cunning.“
Martin Portlock (Scream of the Wolf) plays Peter Pan and is joined in the cast by Megan Placito (Doctors) as Wendy Darling. Also in the cast are Peter Desouza-Feighoney (The Popes Exorcist), Kit Green (The Blazing Cannons), Nicholas Woodeson (Skyfall), Kierston Wareing (Fish Tank), Olumide Olorunfemi (Venom: Let There Be Carnage), Teresa Banham (No One Gets Out Alive), Charity Kase (RuPaul’s Drag Race UK), and Campbell Wallace (Anne). It has already been confirmed that Placito will be reprising the role of Wendy Darling in Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble, which also feature the likes of Pooh, Tigger, Rabbit, Owl, Piglet, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, Bambi, The Mad Hatter, Peter Pan, and Tinkerbell.
Chambers is producing Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare alongside Rhys Frake-Waterfield, the director of the Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey films.
Are you looking forward to seeing Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare in January? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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PLOT: As a boy, Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) was mauled by a lion, only to be saved by a mysterious serum that granted him amazing physical and mental powers. Abandoning the criminal empire run by his father (Russell Crowe), Sergei, now known as Kraven, hunts down evildoers, only to be pulled back into his father’s orbit when his half-brother, Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) is kidnapped.
REVIEW: It’s gotten to the point now that when you see the Sony logo before an “in association with Marvel” banner, you can’t help but cringe. The live-action films the studio has made based on Spider-Man’s rogues gallery have been pretty terrible, with Morbius and Madame Web ranking among the worst superhero films ever. The fact that the Venom trilogy was mediocre is something of a triumph for the beleaguered slate of films, but for a while now, the director of Kraven the Hunter, J.C. Chandor, has been promising this would be different.
I went into the movie with decently high hopes, as I’d seen twenty minutes of footage a few weeks ago before interviewing Aaron Taylor-Johnson (look for our interview soon), and liked what I saw. I also think Chandor is a great director, having been a fan of all of his previous films, in particular A Most Violent Year and the underrated Triple Frontier. Sadly, the film is a total mess in a way the isolated bits of footage I saw earlier didn’t reveal.
Like other movies in the Spider-Verse, it feels made by committee, with any of the interesting elements Chandor brings to the film having been washed away in a sea of re-shoots and (I presume) re-edits. The script is a mess, with it never clear just exactly why Kraven hunts down evildoers and if he profits from it (his sprawling jungle hideaway and private pilot makes it seem like he does), with it loaded with corny dialogue that I find it impossible to believe comes from the pen of co-screenwriter Richard Wenk (known to be a very solid scribe).
The tone of the movie is all over the place. For one thing, this is meant to be a hard R-action film, but there’s a lengthy, twenty-minute section featuring Sergei as a child that feels out of a YA fantasy film and will likely cause a massive chunk of the audience to tune out. When it starts to happen, the action is gory, but the choreography and editing make the action sequences hard to decipher, with no real standout moments to speak of.
Every once in a while, you get a glimmer of what Chandor might be going for, with the opening ten-minute sequence (partly scored to Basil Poledouris’s music from The Hunt for Red October) having a stylishness and sense of pace, the rest of the movie doesn’t have. The script and many of the performances are pretty clunky, with Ariana DeBose as Kraven’t a future love interest – Calypso stuck with some clunky exposition she has a hard time delivering (who could blame her).
The villains are a mixed bag, with Alessandro Nivola camping it up as Rhino. At the same time, Christopher Abbott delivers a quiet, almost method-like performance as an assassin based on the comic’s The Foreigner, who shows up too late to make any impact. The best of the three baddies is Russell Crowe as Sergei’s dad, but his screen time is sadly limited.
All of which leaves us with Aaron Taylor-Johnson. So here’s the thing – Johnson is good as Kraven. He’s got the physical look and a sense of humour that makes me think he could be an A-plus action hero if given the chance. But, they give him next to nothing to work with, with the dialogue often atrocious and groan-worthy, while the movie’s concept about it being the birth of a super-villain is laughably tacked on in the last five minutes.
While Chandor has advocated for the film throughout its lengthy production, I can’t help but feel like his version of the movie is not what we’re seeing here. Everyone’s been promising this would be “grounded,” but it’s also a movie featuring a man transforming into a rhinoceros. The CGI animals are poorly rendered and are bound to elicit chuckles from the audience that turns out to see this over the holidays.
Kraven the Hunter’s failure is a shame, as Aaron Taylor-Johnson is well-cast, and had he been left to his own devices, I think Chandor would have delivered a good movie (heck – maybe there’s a fantastic director’s cut sitting on a hard drive somewhere). This feels like one of the bad superhero movies Fox regularly churned out in the 2000s. It’s marginally better than Madame Web or Morbius, but it’s still far from being a legitimately good film – although there was potential.
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