WonderCon turned out to be an unexpectedly fruitful occasion for horror aficionados. After unveiling the first footage from its upcoming sequel Sinister 2, Blumhouse Productions and Focus Features also showed off a clip from this summer's Insidious: Chapter 3, a prequel that finds Lin Shaye's Elise Rainier taking on a different supernatural entity before she ever met the Lambert family.
The first Sinister arrived during a glut of inferior horror pics but set itself apart with a nightmarish central villain and some truly chilling direction from Scott Derrickson. Its quality aside, though, there's no telling whether Blumhouse Productions and Focus Features are onto something by spinning the legend of Buhguul into a franchise with this summer's Sinister 2.
Evidently undeterred after Machete Kills got utterly slaughtered at the box office in the fall of 2013, taking in a measly $15 million at the box office and never recouping its slight $20 million budget, actor Danny Trejo confirmed recently that he and director Robert Rodriguez are still proceeding with their previously planned third installment, titled Machete Kills Again... In Space.
With only three episodes remaining in the third season of its Cold War spy drama The Americans, FX has renewed the series for a 13-episode fourth season.
One of the more notable trends in recent television has been putting powerful women on the frontlines of the war against terror. From Showtime's Homeland to CBS' Madam Secretary and NBC's State of Affairs, network execs seem caught up on a certain character type: a tough-as-nails, proudly female protagonist who's strong-willed enough to go it alone whenever she's as obstructed by people on her own team as the ones she's fighting against. NBC's American Odyssey isn't exactly revolutionary in that aspect - and it owes a lot more than just its hero's characterization to Homeland - but by casting Anna Friel in the lead role of a betrayed soldier finding her way home, it does set itself apart.
Coming off the Oscar-nominated American Sniper, director Clint Eastwood has his pick of projects right now, and though he's being aggressively courted for a number of them, the title that insiders say he's most interested in is The Ballad of Richard Jewell.
Though Disney undoubtedly has Warner Bros. licked in the studios' race to get competing Jungle Book projects into theaters, the latter's take on Rudyard Kipling's classic novel certainly seems more interesting. Supposedly grittier than the more traditional Disney take, Jungle Book: Origins boasts Andy Serkis in the director's chair and a starry voice cast. Now, the buzzy pic has taken another step forward, with word that The Americans' Matthew Rhys is in talks to star.
Perhaps TV audiences will be kinder than moviegoers. After The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones went embarrassingly belly-up at the box office in the summer of 2013, Constantin Film was left in quite an unenviable position, having already planned a follow-up film that it was then forced to pull the plug on. Now, it appears that the YA supernatural fantasy series, based on the novels by Cassandra Clare, are getting another shot at success in the form of an ABC Family series titled Shadowhunters.
After wowing Hollywood with his spec script Section 6, up-and-coming scribe Aaron Berg has been tapped by Paramount to pen a new script for G.I. Joe 3, which will revamp the action franchise with an eye toward setting up future installments.
