Jamie Lee Curtis is making her debut with a climate-changed theme slice of horror. Michael Bay is lending his particular brand of extra to the novel coronavirus pandemic. Tomorrow Studios’ Marty Adelstein gives an optimistic update about Netflix’s One Piece adaptation. Plus, what’s to come when Legends of Tomorrow gets trapped in the TV. Spoilers, away!
Moonfall
Halle Berry has secured the lead role in Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall, an upcoming disaster movie in which the Moon breaks orbit and begins hurtling toward Earth. According to Variety, Berry will play “a NASA astronaut-turned-administrator whose previous space mission holds a clue about an impending catastrophe.”
The Blacksmith
Nick Jonas and Laurence Fishburne are attached to star in a film adaptation of The Blacksmith, a 2011 spy-fi graphic novel by Malik Evans and Richard Sparkman. Jonas is said to play Wes Loomis, “a go-to weapons expert for the intelligence community on the run after his lab is destroyed and colleagues murdered,” while Fishburne is “a retired blacksmith” named Mather who guides him on “a journey that keeps this improbable pair one step ahead of their pursuers in a breathless, action-filled thriller that is just the beginning of [several] globe-trotting adventures.” [Variety]
Mother Nature
Bloody-Disgusting reports Jamie Lee Curtis will direct her feature debut at Blumhouse with Mother Nature, a horror film “centered around climate change.” Curtis is also said to be co-writing the script with Comet Pictures’ Russell Goldman.
The Hawkline Monster
Yorgos Lanthimos will once again team with The Favourite screenwriter, Tony McNamara, on a film adaptation of Richard Brautigan’s surrealist western, The Hawkline Monster. The story concerns a pair of gunslingers hired by a 15-year old girl to kill a monster living in an ice cave beneath the basement of a woman named Miss Hawkline. [THR]
Songbird
According to Deadline, Michael Bay and Adam Goodman are attached to produce Songbird, a new pandemic thriller planning to film just five weeks from now in Los Angeles. Directed by Adam Mason from a script he co-wrote with Simon Boyes, the story is set two years in the future where the covid-19 pandemic “has not gone away. Lockdowns have been rolled back and then reinstated and it becomes even more serious as the virus continues to mutate.”
Please prepare your long, exhausted, and very exasperated sighs accordingly.
Malamander
THR reports Josh Cooley (Toy Story 4) will direct a film adaptation of Thomas Taylor’s fantasy novel, Malamander, at Sony. The story centres on Herbert Lemon, a boy working at a seaside hotel’s lost-and-found who aids a girl named Violet Parma in finding her missing parents. The team-up kicks off an adventure “that involves a half-man, half-monster who is said to make dreams come true and a hook-handed man pursuing them.”
Chairman Spaceman
Andrew Stanton (John Carter, Wall-E) is currently in talks to direct a film adaptation of Thomas Pierce’s short story, Chairman Spaceman, for Searchlight Pictures and Simon Kinberg’s Genre Films. Originally published in The New Yorker, the story “is set in the near future, and follows a notorious corporate raider who renounces his worldly wealth. To redeem himself, he signs up for an interplanetary mission to colonise the greater solar system. The story follows his final days on Earth and the fallout when the trip doesn’t go as planned.” [Deadline]
The Murders of Molly Wright/The City of Brass
Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish’s new production company, Complete Fiction, is developing a film adaptation of Tade Thompson’s horror novel, The Murders of Molly Wright. The story concerns a woman able to creates murderous clones of herself whenever she bleeds. Variety also reports the studio is also planning a film based on S.A. Chakraborty’s The City of Brass, “a historical fantasy series inspired by Islamic folklore.”
Star Trek 4
Simon Pegg one again stated the future of the Star Trek film franchise remains uncertain in a new interview with Collider.
We’re all still in contact, we were emailing with each other the other day, just checking in, ‘how are we,’ and stuff. But it’s not like any of us have been banging on the door at Paramount saying, ‘Hey, when are we doing this?’ If they say, ‘We’d like to do another movie,’ I’m sure we’ll all jump at the chance. I miss those guys, and I love making those films. But I just don’t know. Noah Hawley’s project has been mentioned, and maybe that will happen. I don’t know anything about that. So yeah, I’m as in the dark as everyone else, I’m in the same boat as you guys.
The fact is, the appeal of Star Trek is slightly more niche than the appeal of, say, the Marvel movies, which make huge amounts of money, and have this really, really broad appeal and they do very well. I think Star Trek is just a little bit more niche, so it isn’t gonna hit those kind of numbers. So yes, the obvious thing to do would be to not go for that massive spectacle, go for something a little bit more restrained in the vein of the original series. Yes, that would be a brilliant thing to do, and I’m sure it probably has been discussed… You specialise a little bit more.
Dune
In conversation with Empire Magazine, Denis Villeneuve revealed he spent a full year perfecting the sandworm’s design in Dune. Whether Villeneuve’s take is still functionally a tube with a mouth at the end remains to be seen.
We talked about every little detail that would make such a beast possible, from the texture of the skin, to the way the mouth opens, to the system to eat its food in the sand. It was a year of work to design and to find the perfect shape that looked prehistoric enough.
[/Film]
The Old Guard
Coming Soon has a poster for Netflix’s adaptation of Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández’s The Old Guard ahead of the trailer coming Thursday.
Bloody Hell
Bloody-Disgusting also has our first look at Bloody Hell, an Australian horror film in which “a man with a mysterious past flees the country to escape his own personal hell—only to arrive somewhere much, much worse.”
Justice League Dark: Apokolips War
Lex Luthor plows through select members of the Suicide Squad in the latest clip from Apokolips War.
Artemis Fowl
“The Irish Blessing” is a clue to a kidnapping in a new clip from Kenneth Branagh’s Artemis Fowl.
Motherland: Fort Salem
Good news! Motherland: Fort Salem has been renewed for a second season at Freeform. [Spoiler TV]
Meanwhile, Deadline reports Lyne Renee (General Alder) will be promoted to series regular in season two.
Lockwood and Co.
Edgar Wright’s new production company is also developing a series based on Lockwood and Co., the supernatural action-adventure detective series by Jonathan Stroud. The series concerns a trio of young paranormal investigators in an alternate modern London overrun by monsters. [Variety]
One Piece
Tomorrow Studios founder Marty Adelstein offered Syfy an update on Netflix’s live-action One Piece series.
We have basically all 10 scripts written. We will start casting when we go back. My suspicion is June 1, but we will start doing our casting. We have a lot of names that we’re talking about, and we should be in production in September. We have been working very closely with Sensei Oda. So, we’re going to get started, and this one is very big. I mean, Snowpiercer was a big production; this is even bigger.
Legends of Tomorrow
The Legends become trapped in various television programs in the trailer for next week’s episode, “The One Where We’re Trapped on TV.”
Stargirl
Luke Wilson pilots S.T.R.I.P.E. in the trailer for next week’s episode of Stargirl.
Agents of SHIELD
Finally, the gang explores 1930s New York in a clip from the season premiere of Agents of SHEILD.
Banner art by Jim Cooke.