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Cloverfield is now a trilogy, Star Trek: Discovery Loses a Captain, and Wes Anderson is Rolling

By  · Published on October 28th, 2016

Movie News After Dark

The day’s top headlines in bite-size portions

It’s been a hot minute, but with the new FSR comes an old chestnut, Movie News After Dark, a late-nite column dedicated to all the news we didn’t get to during the day. We got movie news, TV news, interesting articles and other film-related shenanigans, and really anything else I can scrounge up.

We’re kicking off this first relaunched column with a surprise from uber-producer J.J. Abrams that really shouldn’t be a surprise…

An insider has revealed exclusively to The Wrap that the Bad Robot film God Particle, in pre-production now, is actually the third film in the Cloverfield series, following the original movie and last year’s 10 Cloverfield Lane. What’s more, said insider claims more films in the shared universe are being plotted, with an aim to release one per year over the next several. That’s a lot of misdirection coming our way.

Bryan Fuller, televisual genius behind Hannibal, Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me and the upcoming American Gods series on Starz has stepped down from showrunning duties on the upcoming Star Trek: Discovery series, citing scheduling conflicts with Gods and the Amazing Stories reboot he’s developing for NBC. All’s good, though, Fuller will remain an executive producer of Discovery, and will stay involved in breaking stories, while showrunning will be handled now by Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts. Furthermore, Oscar-winner Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind, I Am Legend, The Dark Tower) is expected to join the team in a “top creative role.” Variety has the exclusive details.

Auteur Wes Anderson in an interview with GQ let it slip that the stop-motion animated film he’s working on for his next feature is already in production. At the end of the interview – which is about Metrograph, New York City’s newest arthouse cinema – Anderson dishes up this juicy tidbit: “I’ve got an animated movie I’m doing that’s happening across the room from me right now. So I can see a long list of emails from people on the set whom I now need to address.” Though there’s been little information about the plot other than the central characters are canines, we do know that the voice cast at this point includes Bryan Cranston, Jeff Goldblum, Bob Balaban, and Ed Norton. The film will mark Anderson’s second venture into stop-motion territory after 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and is rumored to be set for a 2017 release. You have every right to expect that between now and then Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, and at least one Wilson will be added to the cast.

More: Great Cussing Kingdom – Creating Fantastic Mr. Fox

Want a new film from Ingmar Bergman? How about a new film from Federico Fellini? Or Akira Kurosawa? Hell, while you’re shooting for the moon, how about one from all three collaborating? Okay, so none of these things are ever likely to happen, what with all those guys being very dead, but we’re getting as close as possible now that Swedish director Suzanne Osten (The Mozart Brothers) is going to be shooting an unused script written by Bergman as a collaboration with the other two cinematic titans mentioned above. The script in question is called Sixty-four Minutes with Rebecka and it was completed in 1969, intended to be shot in English under the title The White Wall, but plans fell through and the script ended up in the hands of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation about a decade ago. Osten tells Dagens Nyheter of Reuters that the film is about a “pregnant and emotionally alienated teacher of the deafmute” “exploring her sexuality.” Bergman himself called the script, among other things, “feminist,” “queer,” ‘homo erotic,” “anti-authoritarian,” “incredibly courageous,” “complex,” and “radical.” Osten’s plan is to produce the script as a radio play in Sweden next month, then start shooting next year with an aim to release the film in time for the 100th anniversary of Bergman’s birth. Via The Film Stage.

That’s all we got today, so go sleep on all this and come back tomorrow night for a fresh crop of top headlines.

Novelist, Screenwriter, Video Essayist