Movie News Roundup - 30.03.18

Welcome everyone to the Movie News Roundup for the week of Friday 30 March, as this is the first blog of it's kind I want to talk about a few pieces of movie news just to get a feel of what this will be like as I continue to develop this side of the blog, so I am sure that the structure of this Roundup will be very different from what it may be like a few weeks down the line. As I said in my announcement post, I will be covering pieces of news that I found interesting this week, starting from Monday 26 March, 2018 up until the time of posting.

Captain Marvel Cast Announced

                          

On Monday, Marvel Studios announced the beginning of principal photography of their new film, Captain Marvel, by announcing the film's cast. We've known for some time we have known that Academy Award Winner, Brie Larson, will be playing the title role of Captain Marvel and that she would be joined by Samuel L. Jackson as a two-eyed Nick Fury in a 90s set adventure where the Captain will face off against shape shifting aliens, the Skrulls. Joining Larson and Jackson in the film are Ben Mendelsohn, Djimon Hounsou, Lee Pace, Lashana Lynch, Gemma Chan, Algenis Perez Soto, Rune Temte, McKenna Grace, Clarke Gregg and Jude Law.

Now, it may not be as star studded of a cast as Black Panther but this is still an all star cast, full of new and returning faces from earlier films in the MCU. I think it is really exciting that the film is using its 90s setting to its advantage by bringing back old faces like Lee Pace and Djimon Hounsou as Ronan and Korath from the original Guardians of the Galaxy, and Clark Gregg as the always lovable, Phil Coulson. It just makes sense to do this with the period setting and the world that Marvel has already established. Hopefully the film will bring a little more depth to characters like Ronan and Korath than they were given in the original film as Marvel seem to be making more of an effort with their villains. This is just speculation but if we're lucky, we may even get an appearance by Michael Rooker as everybody's favourite space Mary Poppins.

                          

Now a wrinkle has been added to the picture as alongside the full cast announcement, Marvel released a new synopsis for the film along with a picture of Brie Larson pilot training with Brigadier General Jeannie Leavitt:

"The story follows Carol Danvers as she becomes one of the universe's most powerful heroes when Earth is caught in the middle of a galactic war between two alien races. Set in the 1990s, "Captain Marvel" is an all-new adventure from a previously unseen period in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe."

                          

So now we know that Carol become the titular hero during a galactic war adapted from the Kree/Skrull storyline from the original Marvel comics. so it looks as though Marvel will continue to take it's deep dives into the cosmic side of its universe. Now all we have to do is wait and see how it all pans out in a year's time and who knows? Maybe, just maybe, we'll see the Captain make her debut in Avengers: Infinity War later this year.

Fox Sets New Release Dates For a Bunch of Films While Dark Phoenix and New Mutants Undergo Reshoots

                        

While Marvel Studios are getting off to a start with their Captain Marvel project, Fox's Marvel projects appear to be floating around in limbo and Fox announced earlier this week that they are moving around their release schedule for a few of their upcoming films, including X-Men: Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants. Fox has moved the Freddie Mercury biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, up from Christmas Day to November 2, 2018, supplanting the spot that was originally taken by X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which has now been pushed back to February 14, 2019. The New Mutants on the other hand, has been pushed from February 22 to August 19, 2019.

While I am very happy to hear that we are getting Bohemian Rhapsody earlier than we all expected, as it shows that the studio may have confidence in the project. If you did not know, Bryan Singer was fired from the project mid-production, after he failed to turn up on set on a number of occasions, with Dexter Fletcher taking over as director. As a massive fan of Queen, I have had my eye on this project since it was announced and to hear that despite the complications with Singer behind-the-scenes that the movie is moving forward is good news. I also really like Fletcher's last film, Eddie the Eagle, so I had confidence in him as a director to help the project home so this only furthers my confidence in the film.

                        

Now, with X-Men: Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants it is being reported that the reason why both films have changed release dates is because they are both undergoing reshoots and in order to accommodate for the schedules of their actors Fox decided to move the dates. This is understandable, as their actors are in demand right now with Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams playing significant roles in Game of Thrones, and I believe it may be the case with X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which stars Turner. However, I am still worried as The New Mutants has already been pushed back once before as it was originally scheduled to be released on April 13, 2019. That's a massive jump, and while it is being reported that it is because the studio wants to do reshoots I kind of think it is really because they have no confidence in the film. My excitement for this project has diminished greatly over the past couple of months so Fox are already facing an uphill battle because I think that is the consensus all across the board with the fans.

                        

Donald Glover Deadpool Animated Series Script

Earlier this week, FX announced that they had decided to not pursue their planned Deadpool animated series with Donald Glover due to creative differences. When this series was first announced I was so excited as a fan of both the Deadpool character and Donald Glover as a creator, and I thought Glover's comedic sensibilities would have been great for the Deadpool character. I was also glad to hear that it would be different from the Deadpool movies, because as much of a fan as I am of the first film I recognise that it would have been a different format for Glover to work in. So when it was announced that FX had decided to pass on the series, I was disappointed because I wanted to see what Glover would have done with the project as I love what he's done with his comedy in the past.
                           

However, it was then speculated that the reason the show was cancelled was because Donald Glover was simply too busy to work on the show with his star now currently on the rise with his show, Atlanta, and his upcoming roles as Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story and Simba in Jon Favreau's The Lion King. Donald Glover then went on to tweet out a "script" for the show stating in a deleted tweet that he wasn't too busy for Deadpool, disproving those theories. Of course, I then went on to read the script that Glover tweeted out and I am now even more disappointed. The script has great comedic sensibilities that are perfectly in line with the character, but what is crazy to me is how the script is a commentary on the cancellation of the show! I think that it's amazing that Glover even had the time to write this mock script for the show with all the work he has going on right now but apparently he wrote the script in the early hours of the morning one day.

As the script is what I assume is a rough draft, I think this script is a great indication of the style that Donald would have gone for on the show and if FX didn't envision the same show as Donald Glover, I question why they even commissioned it in the first place. I really think it is a missed opportunity of a show as I think the fans would have gone crazy for a show like this. Unfortunately we'll never see the series come to pass but I just wanted to give a shout out to Donald Glover as I think if this is any indication of what the series would have been like, I think it would have been a hit.

Marvel & DC Actors Support a Terminally Ill Child

And finally, as of late there has been a lot of conflict between fans of different properties such as Marvel and DC, and even Star Wars, and sometimes it can be difficult to see past the aggression than can be found on the internet but this week I found something that gave me a little hope, I just wish it was under different circumstances. In sad news, a little boy named Emilio died earlier this week from Neurofibromatosis type 1, but a few days before his death he made a wish that he could receive a greeting from an Avenger and his wish caught the attention of Fox News @ Night host, Shannon Beam, who sought out on Twitter to make this boy's dream a reality and it worked. Getting on to Twitter, Beam asked for people to spread the word of this young boy's wish and the community came together with the wish reaching its intended audience.

                          

Stars such as Chris Evans, Ryan Reynolds and Shazam's Zachary Levi, and many, many more reached out to say hello to Emilio and thankfully their wishes reached the young boy before he passed a few days ago. This story is incredible and I am so happy for Emilio that he got his wish, with Beam saying that it brought some light into his hospital room before he passed away. Now, the support of the stars and fans who helped young Emilio can be directed towards his family, I think I speak for us all when I say that our thoughts are with them. Like I said, this is an incredible story and a demonstration of how people can come together for a common cause and how the internet can be a place for good. I'm glad that Emilio could bring the best out of everyone.

Small Talk

Now onto Small Talk, which is the segment in which I'm just going to rundown a list of bullet points of a few other pieces of movie news that got my attention this week and that I think you may find interesting.

• First Look at Tom Hardy as Al Capone in Josh Trank's 'Fonzo'
• John Cena Wants a Fast & Furious Team-up With Dwayne Johnson
• Wonder Woman 2 Casts Pedro Pascal in a Key Role
• Jack Whitehall Joins the Rock and Emily Blunt in Disney's Jungle Cruise
• Scarlett Johansson to Co-Star in the Taika Waitit led 'Jojo Rabbit'
• Stranger Things 3 Set in 1985; Has More 'Dad Steve'
• Jurassic World 3: Spielberg Confirms Colin Trevorrow As Director
• Arnold Schwarzenegger in Recovery After Emergency Heart Surgery
• Spider-Man: Matt Damon Reportedly Passed On Homecoming 2 Villain Role
• Robert Downey Jr. Announces a Huge Cast for Voyage of Doctor Dolittle

                                    

So that's the Movie News Roundup for this week, there were quite a lot of announcements and a lot of exciting news. Of course, this time next week there will be more news to cover as I will be including the movie news from over the weekend too. Hope you all enjoyed the read, you can follow me on Twitter @DBanksy and I'll be back next week.

Update on the Blog - Movie News

Hi Guys, just thought I'd give you all a little update about some plans that I have for the blog. as I have not published any written pieces since the Oscars a few weeks ago. As you may know from my previous thought pieces, I love keeping up to date with movies and developments in the movie news. For the past couple of weeks I haven't been able to write any blog posts because I have been working on my assignments for university, but that has not stopped me from keeping up with all the latest movie news. It has always been my intention to write about movie news on this blog but it was always my plan to establish a foundation for my writing before starting to write about my thoughts on movie news. However, given my current situation at university I have decided that once a week I am going to start writing a movie news roundup of all of movie news that I found the most interesting in the week. For example, this week I plan to write about the recent Captain Marvel casting announcements that were made alongside the announcement that the film had just started production.

                           

The goal with this movie news roundup is to continue to produce content with minimal breaks in my writing. As much as I would like to write about various issues in film and television it is just not feasibly possible for me to do with all of my various responsibilities, however writing about movie news is something that I can do very easily and I can write about as soon as I hear the news ready for the blog post to be published. I aim to publish the movie news roundups every Friday, and if not on Friday, I will accommodate for the disruption by including the movie news announced after the normal scheduled release. This does not mean I will abandon my plans to write about current topics or personal pieces about my favourite films but it will be more infrequent than I wanted it to be. So the first blog post will be published this Friday and will cover all the movie news from Monday onwards and the following roundup will cover the following week. Here's to the beginning to the Movie News Roundup.

The 2018 Oscars Results

Hi Guys, as you probably know the 90th Oscars were held last night and a tonne of awards were given to the filmmakers of the very best of cinema in 2017. Now, as I mentioned in my introductory post I am student which means I don't have a lot of money and I also don't have much time on my hands to go out and watch movies as much as I would like to which I haven't been able to watch all of the nominees this year. However, I did want to voice my opinion on the awards from what I did see and even my thoughts on how the night turned out as well.

                           

Now of course, the Oscars are a prestigious event in Hollywood that celebrate the best of cinema in the previous film year. This year there were a lot of great movies that went up for nominations and a few of these films ended up winning awards in several big categories. I don't think I'm going to be the only person to say that there were not a lot of big surprises at this year's Oscars and that may well be because of the various award shows that were held before the Oscars but that's not to say that winners were not well deserved. Now, I have not seen all of the nominees but just by watching the circulation of hype for each of the nominees over the past couple of months you can get a sense of why certain films have been nominated and of course, the past works of each of the nominees being an example of their talent.

The Nine Best Picture Nominees were obviously the main priority of the night but first I want to talk about some of the smaller categories such as the technical awards and animated and musical categories. Unfortunately I cannot talk about the nominees for Best Documentary Feature, Best Documentary - Short Subject, Best Live Action Short Film or Best Animated Short Film categories and all I can say about the Best Foreign Language Film is that I really like Loveless. I thought it was a really great film about grief and loss, and but I will also say that it's a very depressing film so just keep that in mind if you want to give it a watch. That's all I can really say about Best Foreign Language Film, I wish I could watch more but it's just a little hard given my current situation and I only got a chance to watch the film because of my university. Otherwise, I would have a lot less to say about Loveless so I'm grateful I got the chance to watch it.

                             

Onto the categories that I can properly talk about now and give my full thoughts on. Right so I want to start with the category that gave Suicide Squad an Oscar win, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, because while I once again haven't seen any of the nominees, I can actually visually see the work of these artists onscreen from what I've seen in the promotional campaign. I think out of three nominees Darkest Hour is probably the most deserving of the award simply just because of the work that went into Gary Oldman's Churchill makeup which only enhanced since performance, he looks like Churchill, and that's not to take anything away from the other nominees but I can see why it won. Although, I will say this...how on Earth did The Shape of Water not get nominated for this award? The creature in that film looked amazing! I was shocked when it wasn't nominated but I digress. A similar award is Best Costume Design and while I think a lot of credit should go to the costumes in Beauty and the Beast I think that if a movie about clothes maker does not win something is just wrong.

For Editing I would have loved to have seen Baby Driver get the win, it was one of my favourite films of last year, and I thought the editing in the film was amazing but I can see why Dunkirk won. The film was also very precise in its editing but it also relied on it's editing just as much with the way that Nolan orchestrated the film with the different perspectives of the battle. I also thought that Baby Driver should have won for Best Sound Mixing for how precise it was and how in tune it was with the music and the actions of the film but once again, Dunkirk pipped Baby Driver to the post. Maybe it's just a prestigious thing, I loved Dunkirk but I think Baby Driver should have at least one that award but I'm not too annoyed by it because Dunkirk was very well edited.

                          

However, if I do have one quibble with the Oscars this year was the Best Visual Effects Award. Blade Runner 2049 was one of my favourite movies of the year and I think that it looked incredible which is in large part due to the great Roger Deakins who finally won his well deserved win for Best Cinematography but I thought War for the Planet of the Apes should have won this award. The entire trilogy of Apes films has had spectacular visual effects and they have lost their award every time. I thought that the Apes looked their best in War so I'm quite honestly lost for words how they did not win Best Visual Effects, because the apes do not look in any way artificial, whereas Blade Runner 2049 looked amazing but it also had special effects that were meant to look artificial. The Apes in War were as believable as any human being in the movie for the entire runtime of the film. I loved the effects in Blade Runner but Apes was just superior feat in my opinion. As I said, Roger Deakins won Best Cinematography which is long overdue but I also thought that both Dunkirk and The Shape of Water looked fantastic. For Best Production Design I thought Blade Runner 2049 had a great shot at winning this award but The Shape of Water's win is very well deserved, it looked very Guillermo, his fingerprints were all over that movie and that's even within the production design.

For Best Original Score, I thought Dunkirk had a great shot at winning, Hans Zimmer's score in that film really puts you in the middle of the conflict and it is so intense but Alexandre Desplat's score for The Shape of Water is just wonderful, I could never argue against it. Unfortunately John Williams wasn't going to win this year as much as I love his score for The Last Jedi. While the music of The Greatest Showman is in infectious, I think Coco's win for Remember Me was also very well justified. It's such a beautiful song and while I think This Is Me is great, I just think there is more meaning behind Remember Me and it truly brings a tear to the eye. After what I just said about Coco you won't be surprised to hear me say that the right film won. However, I will also say that the nominees for Best Animated Feature was off this year. I mean, The Boss Baby instead of The Lego Batman Movie? That's another snub of just the nominees. 

                         

Going into the Oscars I had a few hopes and one of them was that Get Out would win Best Original Screenplay and I am so happy that it did. Jordan Peele is so deserving of that award, for everything that it said, for everything that it did and the fact that it came from the mind of a first time filmmaker is just amazing. It certainly had my vote to say the least, but I also think that it would have been great had The Big Sick won the award too. Many people will say that Logan was robbed of Best Adapted Screenplay and while I haven't seen any of the other nominees I still don't think that it probably deserved to win and Logan was one of my favourite movies of last year. I have not seen Call Me by Your Name but from the groundswell of support for the film I can't argue with the results. The fact that Logan was even nominated for an award is an achievement in and of itself, and it is a big step forward for Superhero films. Although...I would have been pretty happy had Logan would the award.

The acting categories are tough for me to talk about as out of all the nominees I have only seen two of the films and although I would have been delighted to have seen Daniel Kaluuya or Sally Hawkins or Richard Jenkins walk away with their respective awards I did not think any of them would have won the awards that they were nominated for. What I said at the beginning of this post was that I was not really too shocked about the results this year and where that really came to play with the acting categories as there had been so much conversation about all of the winning performances that it was pretty clear who was going to win. I am so happy Gary Oldman won his Oscar, even if it was more of a life time achievement award as he is one of my favourite actors and his performance looks incredible in Darkest Hour. And the same can be said for Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri and Allison Janney in I, Tonya but the real story here is Frances McDormand's acceptance speech...that was incredible. What a great moment. We may not have got a La La Land/Moonlight moment like last year but that speech made the night. 

                        

Now, Guillermo...so deserving. I have admittedly not been a big fan of all of Guillermo's films. I tend to like them from the ones that I have seen. I'm afraid to say that I haven't seen either The Devil's Backbone or Pan's Labyrinth but they're on my watch list. However, I fell in love with The Shape of Water and the fact that it won Best Director and Best Picture makes me so happy because it was truly one of my favourite films of last year. Guillermo achieved a lot with this movie and you can see it in his direction as a lot of the films relies upon you believing the relationship of Eliza and the Creature, two characters that have no dialogue and you believe in their relationship wholeheartedly and that's on top of the rest of the film that was wonderful too. It was a two way race between The Shape of Water and Three Billboards and while I have not seen Three Billboards I think that the exclusion of Martin McDonough from the Best Director category showed the Academy's hand at who would win Best Picture ultimately. I also would have loved it had Get Out shocked the world and won but I was rooting for The Shape of Water to win the entire night. 

                          

Overall, I think the Oscars this year was great. I didn't agree with all of the wins or even necessarily all of the nominations but I think that a lot of winners were well deserved and a lot of the films that did win that did not necessarily gain a lot of attention may now get the attention that they deserved. I know that I'm very excited to catch up and watch all of the films that earned nominations this year to see the greatness that was onscreen last year. Three Billboards is on the top of my watch list this year. Hope you all had a lot of fun with the Oscars this year and that you may have won your Oscar pools. Hopefully next year will be just as great of a year for cinema if not even better. Here's to the year in cinema ahead of us and enjoy a picture of Guillermo with his very deserved awards.