Movie News

Noah Centineo is in talks to play the lead role of He-Man in Sony Pictures and Mattel Films “Masters of the Universe,” an individual with knowledge of the project exclusively tells TheWrap.

Aaron and Adam Nee are set to direct from a script rewritten by “Iron Man” screenwriters Matt Holloway and Art Marcum. The Nee Brothers also have screenwriting credit.

The project was previously written by David S. Goyer, who is also an executive producer.

Based on Mattel’s hugely successful 1980s toy line, “Masters of the Universe” follows Prince Adam, heir to the throne of planet Eternia, who uses the magical Power Sword to transform into the heroic warrior He-Man. With the help of his allies Teela, Man-at-Arms, Orko and The Sorceress, He-Man defends the kingdom from the evil wizard Skeletor (so-named because his face

Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter have some exiting news for us! Orion Pictures has released a video featuring the two actors thanking the fans for the support they’ve give to them in their efforts to get Bill & Ted Face The Music off the ground and they announced that the movie will start shooting this summer in New Orleans and the it will be released on August 21st, 2020!

This long-awaited third Bill & Ted movie is actually happening! Dean Parisot will direct from a script written by the original Bill & Ted writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon. Here’s the synopsis:

Following 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and 1991’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, the stakes are higher than ever for William “Bill” S. Preston Esq. (Winter) and Theodore “Ted” Logan (Reeves). Yet to fulfill their rock and roll destiny, the now middle-aged best friends set out on a new adventure,

“Hamilton” star Leslie Odom Jr. has joined the cast of the “Sopranos” prequel film, “The Many Saints of Newark,” an individual with knowledge of the project told TheWrap.

Odom’s character details were not revealed, but he’s in line for a starring role in the project. He joins a cast that includes Alessandro Nivola, Vera Farmiga, Ray Liotta, Jon Bernthal, Corey Stoll, Billy Magnussen, John Magaro and James Gandolfini’s son Michael Gandolfini as a young Tony Soprano.

News of Odom Jr.’s casting was first reported by Deadline.

More to come…

Read original story ‘Hamilton’ Star Leslie Odom Jr. Joins ‘Sopranos’ Prequel ‘The Many Saints of Newark’ At TheWrap

This robust documentary follows the fortunes of three fighters as they compete for the prestigious New York Golden Gloves

Here is a forthright, uncomplicated and robustly made documentary about the New York Golden Gloves, the most prestigious amateur boxing contest in the United States, which has been sponsored by the New York Daily News since its creation in the 1920s. It has been the nursery of more great boxers than the Olympics, including Floyd Patterson and Sugar Ray Leonard.

The film follows the fortunes of three young fighters: Titus Williams, James Wilkins and Nisa Rodriguez and reflects on the time-honoured subject of how boxing offers an aspirational culture and gets young people out of harm’s way. And at the amateur level, then there is some level of innocence – although the film doesn’t touch explicitly on how big money, or the prospect of big money, could change that. Director

France’s National Cinema Centre (Cnc) releases annual production report.

The number of feature films involving French producers remained steady at 300 productions in 2018, but the level of investment dropped 15% to €1.21b year-on-year, according to the annual production report of France’s National Cinema Centre (Cnc).

The in-depth study, published March 18, revealed that the number of feature films spearheaded by French production companies increased 6% in 2018 to 237, against 222 in 2017, but investment fell by 12.1% to €957m ($1.08bn), from €1.08b ($1.2bn) in 2017.

There were another 63 features involving French producers as minority partners. Investment for these films stood at €168.6m ($191.5m).

The combined investment for

Pulse Films and Left Handed Films producing project.

Pulse Films and Left Handed Films have completed the cast on their UK drama Mughal Mowgli, which has now begun shooting in London.

Joining Riz Ahmed in the feature are this year’s Royal Television Society Breakthrough Award winner Nabhaan Rizwan, who won the prize for his work on BBC/Amazon series Informer.

Also newly added to the film are Aiysha Hart, whose credits include Colette and Line Of Duty, Sex Education actor Anjana Vasan, Mary Poppins Returns actor Sudha Bhuchar, and The Valley actor Alyy Khan.

The project is the feature directing debut of Bassam Tariq,

Industry event featuring pitches, work in progress screenings, mentoring sessions and masterclasses wrapped on Wednesday.

The Doha Film Institute wrapped a successful fifth edition of its respected Qumra industry event on Wednesday.

The five-day meeting, running March 15-20, followed its tried and tested formula of pitches, work in progress screenings, mentoring sessions and masterclasses around 36 projects backed by the Dfi, in an informal, friendly atmosphere.

Industry professionals – spanning producers, directors, festival programmers and sales agents – heaped praise on the fifth edition as it came to an end with its traditional open-air party in the Qatari desert.

“To my knowledge, it

Refugees rarely get to tell their own stories, which means their stories get told for them — often inaccurately and with undue hostility. Lack of resources is one issue, but a lack of stability is another: Asylum-seekers are in a frightening state of limbo, fleeing the imminent dangers of their native countries only to suffer the indifference or suspicion of potential adoptive homes. Filmmaker Hassan Fazili and his family logged three perilous years and hundreds of miles in exile from Afghanistan, where the Taliban had put out a call for his death. Shot on three mobile phones, Fazili’s “Midnight Traveler” is a documentary that feels like a modern-day message in a bottle, an urgent appeal for help from a family that’s still searching for a home. After lapping ashore at the Sundance Film Festival and other spring festivals, it should find an empathetic reception in the West.

Speaking via

Dominated by new character Forky, a spork having an existential crisis, the latest trailer may reveal the institution that launched Pixar is running into trouble

Laying into Toy Story is a bit like dissing the Beatles or picking holes in a Picasso painting. The Pixar series is an institution, a gilded saga that ushered in the modern era of CGI animation and introduced us to some of the most beloved characters of all time in the form of Tom Hanks’ rootin’ tootin’ cowboy Woody and his ever-expanding motley gang of plastic playmates. Without John Lasseter’s 1995 film we wouldn’t have The Incredibles, Wreck It Ralph or the Despicable Me films, Disney might still be putting out second-rate sequels to its classic hand-drawn fare, and Batman would exist only in live action form. It’s enough to make one shudder at the very thought.

The Writers Guild of America has authorized managers and lawyers to negotiate deals for writers in place of agents — if the guild tells members to fire their agents on April 7.

The guild’s negotiating committee notified members of the plans in a message Wednesday. The WGA and the Association of Talent Agents having made little progress in negotiations to revamp the 43-year-old rules governing how agents represent writers. The WGA said it will require its members to fire their agents if they have not agreed to a “code of conduct,” which eliminates agency packaging fees and ownership in production companies, before April 7.

The two sides have held five negotiating sessions since Feb. 5 but have made little progress. “While we are working toward a swift and equitable resolution of our differences with the agencies, we must still plan for other contingencies,” the message said.

California law states that only licensed talents are allowed to procure employment.

Mania Akbari reaches for the sublime with a dreamlike film that tries to join the dots between past and present

This is a deeply intimate, personal and moving work from the Iranian film-maker Mania Akbari, whose movies have often been meditations on beauty and body image. Akbari has made this in collaboration with her partner, the artist and sculptor Douglas White, and the result is a form of digressive-poetic cinema, connecting images and ideas in a dream-associative logic.

It is loosely structured around the idea of letters written between Akbari and White, alternating voiceovers as they muse on how what is happening to them to now relates to their family and childhood. Akbari speaks in (subtitled) Farsi on these occasions, but in English to everyone else. The film opens with material shot about five years ago: a very candid scene of Akbari being photographed in a hospital suite after a

It seems a little bizarre to think now, but it’s hard to overstate just how massive a success “Forrest Gump” was. At the end of its theatrical release, the story of one man’s unlikely front row seat to decades of American history had the third-highest domestic box office gross of all time. Adjusted for inflation, its $327 million had a bigger final total than “Black Panther” did last year.

So it’s a bit surprising that the movie never got a sequel, but the film’s screenwriter Eric Roth explained in an interview with Yahoo Entertainment that it’s not for lack of trying. Roth said that the next “Forrest Gump” movie would have followed Forrest Jr.’s struggles with living with AIDS in addition to following through on the Zelig-like nature of the 1994 original.

“I had him in the back of Oj [Simpson]’s Bronco, and that he would

In today’s film news roundup, “Gone with the Wind” sets a new record, “Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles” is acquired, and Tracy Oliver signs with Topic Studios.

Event Cinema Record

The 80th anniversary release of “Gone with the Wind” has grossed $2.23 million in six nationwide screenings on four dates — a record as the highest-grossing classic film for Fathom Events.

The previous record was set in January by Fathom’s re-release of the 1939 classic “The Wizard of Oz” with $2 million. Fathom said its re-releases of “My Fair Lady” and “Dirty Dancing” in February have given it $5.5 million at the classic film box office in 2019.

Both “The Wizard of Oz” and “My Fair Lady” were presented as part of Fathom Events’ TCM Big Screen Classics series in partnership with Turner Classic Movies. The series continues with “To Kill a Mockingbird” in March; “Ben-Hur” in April; and “True Grit” and 1989’s “Steel Magnolias” in May.

As “Heathers” approaches the 30th anniversary of its U.S. premiere, television has made yet another failed attempt to pay homage to Michael Lehmann’s 1989 pitch-black high school comedy. The cult classic starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater inspired a whole genre of dark school comedies that tried to emulate the film’s quippy dialogue, heightened style, and satirical look at the grim realities of teenage life.

Add to that list of imitators The CW’s Archie Comics melodrama “Riverdale,” which presented its second musical episode on Wednesday. This time around, it featured the Broadway musical “Heathers,” which is a more heartfelt and navel-gazing adaptation of the movie. Even though the gothic “Riverdale” would seem like a good fit for this homicidal high school tale, the show managed to fail in honoring both the film and stage versions of “Heathers.”

In fact, it didn’t even try. There’s no

Lucasfilm Games, the video game company that later became known as LucasArts and developed numerous classic adventure games and published major titles like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, has come back from the dead. A new report points us to several job listings on Disney’s website (which is Lucasfilm’s parent company) searching for […]

The post Lucasfilm Games Has Been Resurrected Six Years After It Was Left For Dead appeared first on /Film.

It’s a Herculean effort to take a multi-volume manga like author Akihito Tsukushi’s “Made in Abyss,” adapt it into a popular anime television series, and then compress the show into a coherent feature, but the folks at Sentai Filmworks have done just that. Part one, “Made in Abyss: Journey’s Dawn,” will screen around the U.S. in its original Japanese on March 20 and in an English dub on March 25, to be followed at a later date by “Wandering Twilight,” which opened in Japan in January.

While the first half of director Masayuki Kojima’s cinematic cut-down hits more ebbs than flows, its character-driven escapades and colorful fantasy landscape are captivating enough to engage the uninitiated. Give or take a few tweaks to the material, this catchy premise about an adventurous tween girl and her amnesiac robot-boy companion exploring a mysterious chasm in her city adapts decently well

Eighteen prizes were presented on Wednesday afternoon at the closing ceremony of the Hong Kong Asia Film Financing Forum. The project market sits alongside FilMart as part of the Entertainment Expo in Hong Kong.

“Wong Tai Sin Assassination” to be directed by Wong Hoi and produced by Derek Kwok Tsz-kin, was named the winner of the Haf Award for Hong Kong films. “Our Apprenticeship” to be directed by Hamaguchi Ryusuke, and produced by Yamamoto Teruhisa, won the Haf award for international projects.

In the documentary category, “Odoriko,” directed by Okutani Yoichiro, and produced by Shiobara Fumiko was named the best film.

The film project market is in its 17th edition and remains one of the most influential in the world. Albert Lee, director of the Hong Kong International FIlm Festival, called Haf: “such a useful springboard for film projects.”

Completed recent films that benefitted from Haf support include Chinese smash hit “Dying to Survive,

What’s that? You thought casting on the Sopranos prequel movie The Many Saints of Newark was over and done with? Think again! Leslie Odom Jr., who won a Tony award for playing Aaron Burr in Hamilton, is the latest name to climb aboard the movie. As has been the case for most of the casting surrounding this film, Odom […]

The post ‘Sopranos’ Prequel Cast Adds ‘Hamilton’ Star Leslie Odom Jr. appeared first on /Film.

First off, I'd just like to say more like the power of Bae-Skull, am I right? Let's just get that out of the way. Okay, now that we're all on the same page: The Wrap reports that Noah Centineo is in talks to star as He-Man in Sony Pictures and Mattel Films' Masters of the Universe movie, based on the toy line and animated series from the 1980s. Centineo is coming off a 2018 that saw him blasted into the stratosphere courtesy of To All The Boys I've Loved Before, director Susan Johnson's …

With Bumblebee speeding toward its Blu-ray release next month, Paramount has released several deleted scenes from the film’s special features, including an alternate opening scene that points to a darker, more serious version of the Transformers spin-off movie. Watch the Bumblebee deleted scenes below. Bumblebee Deleted Scenes Love or hate the opening sequence on Cybertron, it gives us a Transformers […]

The post ‘Bumblebee’ Deleted Scenes Include Original Opening Sequence and a Car Wash Gone Wrong appeared first on /Film.