After an acclaimed breakout turn in the bittersweet romantic drama Like Crazy, Felicity Jones is moving up the Hollywood totem pole with a leading role in Juan Antonio Bayona's dark fantasy A Monster Calls, which Focus Features recently scheduled for release in the fall of 2016.
HBO is famed for its miniseries, from Band of Brothers to Parade's End, so it's no surprise to hear that, even with the massive success of shows like Game of Thrones, True Detective and Boardwalk Empire, the network isn't planning on moving away from the format. Today, we learned that HBO is teaming with BBC One to produce a three-hour miniseries adaptation of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling's mystery novel, The Casual Vacancy.
In news that should surprise absolutely no one, director Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed) recently told Empire that Universal Pictures is eying next summer's blockbuster Jurasssic World as the potential start to a new series of films centering on the fictional (and disaster-prone) amusement park populated by actual dinosaurs.
A tight, claustrophic thriller that puts a premium on character development, Last Passenger is one of the best surprises I've had at the movies in a long while. Indie thrillers, working with leaner budgets and lesser known stars, are often dead on arrival, thanks to scripts too weak to compensate for the lack of top-tier effects work. Luckily, writer-director Omid Nooshin and co-writer Andrew Love are smart enough to maintain a level of frightening plausibility in their film even as they ratchet the suspense up to agonizing levels. Couple their efforts with remarkably strong performances, and you've got one of the year's best thrillers so far.
NBC suffered a number of setbacks this year, with its original series Ironside, Welcome to the Family, The Michael J. Fox Show, Sean Saves the World, Dracula, Crisis and Believe all proving dead on arrival, and Revolution shedding viewers at an alarming rate in its second (and likely last) season. Only James Spader drama The Blacklist arrived as a modest hit, while perennial underdogs Community and Parks and Recreation have been holding their own in the comedy department. To put it simply, the Peacock network really needs a hit, and execs are now pinning their hopes and dreams on pirate drama Crossbones, which arrives next month.
The CW experienced a modest success last fall when it spun off flagship drama The Vampire Diaries into New Orleans-set The Originals, airing the pilot episode of that show as a mid-season episode of Vampire Diaries. The spinoff has since been renewed for a second season and is rapidly building a small fanbase of its own. So, it makes sense that the network wants to try its luck again with another spinoff - this time of its longest-running show, cult fave Supernatural.
Though most of the films at next month's Cannes Film Festival are keeping their plot details and advertisements to a bare minimum, David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars is still moving full force ahead with its marketing campaign. Last week, we brought you the first official trailer for the film, which embraced the sex, violence and intrigue of its tantalizing subject matter.
Certainly one of the fall's most feverishly anticipated movies is David Fincher's adaptation of Gillian Flynn's bestselling mystery novel, Gone Girl. The film, which stars Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry and Emily Ratajkowski, is due to open in October, but more news related to it seems to emerge weekly.
Today, Underworld director Len Wiseman signed on to direct a supernatural sci-fi thriller titled Black Chapter for Skydance Productions. The project, which boasts a script from The Incredible Hulk writer Zak Penn, will focus on an FBI agent “who is drawn into a classified military program that trains its operatives to use paranormal abilities.”
The jury's still out on Showtime's upcoming original series, Penny Dreadful, which has already been put in the unsavory position of going up against major hits like Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Veep and Silicon Valley. The cast, which includes Eva Green, Josh Hartnett and Timothy Dalton, is superb, but it's unclear whether the horror series will debut with enough narrative force to make much of an impression.
