Movie News After Dark
The day’s top headlines in bite-size portions.
It’s hard to believe that this time next month there’s going to be another Martin Scorsese film out in the world, mostly because we’ve seen so little of it. The film, Silence, stars Andrew Garfield (Hacksaw Ridge) and Adam Driver (Paterson) as Christian missionaries who travel to Japan in search of their missing mentor, played by Liam Neeson (Taken). Problem is, at the time of the film Christianity is outlawed in the country, making them the epitome of personas no grata. Scorsese has been making this film in one way or another for the last three decades, and finally it’s on the verge of release. Despite this, however, all we’ve seen are a couple of still images. Until today, that is, when the film’s marketing machine rolled out the first poster, which is right here:
The trailer can be seen before Robert Zemeckis’ WWII epic Allied, which opens on Friday, and then will debut online the next day. Until then, tide yourself over with this beautiful if soft-spoken image. Silence opens in select theaters December 23rd and goes nationwide in January.
One of the most iconic recurring images of the Star Wars franchise has got to be the opening crawl that sets the scene before the films begin. It got one of the loudest cheers of the whole movie when I saw The Force Awakens, but many have wondered if Rogue One, the first film in the franchise that is adjacent to but not a part of the main saga, was going to continue the tradition, or if that particular facet is intended for canon films only. Well, now there’s an answer: no crawl.
Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy in speaking with Variety revealed that as Rogue One is more like a standard war film than a sci-fi epic, they wanted to open it in a style that better reflected that particular genre.
“We felt [the crawl is] so indicative of what those saga films are. Initially, we probably will begin [Rogue One] in a way that is traditional, with just the title.”
Me personally, I get it. There’s a distinction in the Star Wars film universe now, and the best, easiest, and most visible way to tell the individual films apart, saga and one-shot, is to lose the crawl in the latter category. The whole point of the anthology films is to broaden the universe, and we shouldn’t expect every telltale image, technique or aesthetic to transfer from film to film. Where’s the diversity in that?
Rogue One opens December 16th.
Prepare for everyone you know to start bringing “Finish him!” back into our popular vernacular, because THR is reporting that not only is video-game-based martial arts action film Mortal Kombat getting a reboot from New Line produced by James Wan (the Saw, Insidious, and Conjuring franchises), but now it has a director attached: Simon McQuoid. McQuoid has never made a feature film before, but he has extensive experience in the commercial world ‐ like David Fincher, Michael Bay, and tons of other feature directors ‐ including spots for Samsung, HP, and this Star Wars Duracell spot from last year you might remember:
There are two other films in the Mortal Kombat franchise, the first from 1995 ‐ also helmed by a first-time director, Paul W.S. Anderson, famous now for the uber-successful Resident Evil franchise ‐ and the second, Annihilation from 1997. There’s no release date for this newest flick as yet, but expect them to have it out around next summer.
John Wick directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch might have made their names together, but since that breakout film they’ve mostly gone their separate ways. Only Stahelski is back in the chair for John Wick: Chapter 2; Leitch is still producing the sequel but went off to direct his own feature, The Coldest City, which stars Charlize Theron and James McAvoy and is slated for a July 2017 release. With JW2 in the can and a proposed third film still in the developmental stages, both men have lined up their next respective projects: Leitch is going to be filling the void left by Tim Miller over at Deadpool 2, and it was announced today that Stahelski will be taking over the long-gestating Highlander reboot for Lionsgate/Summit Entertainment. That latter project has been in the works since 2008 but nothing much has been heard since 2014, when it was rumored that Cedric Nicolas-Troyan (The Huntsman: Winter’s War) was going to direct with Tom Cruise possibly starring. No word if Cruise is still in the mix, but likely he is not.
There’s no release date for Highlander, but 2018 seems like a safe bet; that’s when Deadpool 2 is scheduled to open, March 2nd to be specific. John Wick: Chapter 2 is much, much closer. It opens February 10th of next year, less than three short months from now.
That’s all for now, but come back tomorrow night for more Movie News After Dark.