A combination of Amazon acquiring MGM in a multi-billion dollar deal and a string of high profile projects in various stages of production and development certainly makes it look as though the future of big budget espionage lies largely in the hands of streaming services, with Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible one major exception.
Christopher Nolan has a lot to answer for after the critical and commercial acclaim that greeted Batman Begins sixteen years ago led to a ton of well-known properties deciding that if a dark and gritty reboot worked for the Caped Crusader, then it would work for them. While the results have been mixed to put it lightly, few people could have predicted that we'd be getting an intensely dramatic new version of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air out of the equation.
At long last, a plot thread that's been left dangling for seven whole years will be paid off this Friday when the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings comes to theaters, after the presence of Ben Kingsley at the world premiere confirmed that he'd be back as Trevor Slattery for the first time since One-Shot All Hail the King.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings exploding into theaters and changing the face of blockbuster fantasy cinema forever, and it's unsurprisingly coincided with plenty of movement on a number of on and offscreen endeavors connected to J.R.R. Tolkien's mythology.
The internet was buzzing last week when photos began circulating that showed two Marvel Cinematic Universe alumni pictured outside of the exact same hotel just an hour apart. Franchise newcomer Oscar Isaac is currently in Budapest shooting Disney Plus series Moon Knight, so fans understandably got hyped when longtime veteran Mark Ruffalo was also spotted in the Hungarian capital.
It's only been less than six weeks since M. Night Shyamalan's Old hit theaters, where it topped the box office in its first weekend, but the filmmaker is already hard at work on his next screenplay. His most recent effort scored mixed reviews, currently sitting on a bang average Rotten Tomatoes score of 50%, but having earned close to $85 million at the box office on an $18 million budget, it can't be called anything other than a pandemic-era smash hit.
Netflix subscribers are clearly enamored with the idea of high concept vampiric content, as evidenced by recent smash hit Blood Red Sky becoming the streamer's most-watched German original project ever after racking up 50 million streams in four weeks, dominating the most-watched and going down a storm with genre fans.
The comic book genre is virtually ubiquitous at this point, but it's easy to forget that Bryan Singer's X-Men was a huge gamble when it was gearing up for release in the summer of 2000. Director Bryan Singer was known for his low budget thrillers, the comic book adaptation had spent years trapped in development hell, and the stench of Joel Schumacher's infamous Batman & Robin was still lurking in the background.