Warner Bros. may have found its very own Wolf of Wall Street. The studio has preemptively acquired film rights to David Howard's book proposal Chasing Phil: The World’s Greatest Con Man, Two Undercover FBI Agents, and Their Amazing Around The World Adventure, for Robert Downey Jr. and his wife Susan to produce through their Team Downey banner.
It's curious how 20th Century Fox was able to get away with a whole Q&A live stream for its upcoming Independence Day sequel without anyone answering the only important question: why the hell does this exist? Sigh. In lieu of providing any meaningful reason for the movie's existence, the cast and director Roland Emmerich appeared on stage in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to reveal some intel on the follow-up.
Who could have expected that USA would be behind the show of the summer? By the end of its hour-long pilot episode, Mr. Robot is already one of the most ambitious and involving dramas on television, a tech-savvy conspiracy thriller about nothing less than the downfall of our corrupt system, barbed with punk-politic antagonism, bathed in Internet-age anxieties and blessed by an intensely hypnotic lead performance from Rami Malek. You'd be well-advised to log on early.
Though Stanley Kubrick passed away in 1999, movies bearing his name are still working their way to the big screen. Marc Forster, who directed Paramount's tentpole World War Z, has become attached to direct and produce a movie based on the 2001: A Space Odyssey auteur's 1955 screenplay The Downslope.
With Justified recently concluded on FX, Chris Provenzano, whose position on the acclaimed crime drama rose from executive story editor to executive producer over the course of six seasons, is looking to another Elmore Leonard property for his next project. Provenzano has struck a deal with AMC that will include him developing Leonard's Western novel Gunsights for the network.
Daniel Craig's James Bond a little too brooding for your tastes? Matthew Vaughn's got you covered - his Kingsman: The Secret Service is the most entertaining and riotous spy flick in years, as well as one that's unquestionably made for adults. Unrepentantly ribald, delectably blood-soaked and filled with more genre in-jokes than you can shake a martini at (with gin, of course, stirred for ten seconds while staring at an unopened bottle of vermouth), Kingsman is a blast of gleeful filmmaking exuberance from first frame to last, clever enough to up-end spy movie conventions while simultaneously serving as a high-flying, rip-roaring adventure that stands among the genre's best.
This summer's Ant-Man occupies a curious place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Taking place after the earth-shaking events of Avengers: Age of Ultron but before the monumental Captain America: Civil War, it's technically part of the MCU's Phase Two but seems like a strangely small-scale affair with which to end that section of the franchise, especially since many are marking Avengers movies as the dividing points between phases. Nevertheless, Ant-Man will function as an origin story for a key Avenger - the title character, played by Paul Rudd - and now it's been revealed that the Peyton Reed-directed pic will also introduce another key Marvel character: The Wasp.
The stakes have never been higher in this summer's Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, from the looks of the latest trailer for Paramount's July tentpole. The IMF's very existence is under threat from a nefarious bureaucrat (Alec Baldwin), a top-secret organization of assassins known as the Syndicate is gunning for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and company, and there's absolutely no back-up should the spies find themselves in trouble.
Though he's currently preoccupied giving Hugh Jackman's Wolverine an appropriate swan song as the actor prepares to hang up his adamantium claws, James Mangold is already eyeing a very different kind of project. Deadline reports that the versatile helmer will tackle an adaptation of Chris Greenhalgh's Seducing Ingrid Bergman, possibly to be titled Blood and Champagne, about the heated love affair between actress Bergman and war photographer Robert Capa.
