Oscar Isaac is already imagining the next Spider-Verse film and has a role for Pedro Pascal.
The Moon Knight star joined the cast of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse voicing the role of Miguel O’Hara, also known as Spider-Man 2099, a Spider-Man from an alternate universe.
When talking to British GQ, Isaac said that production of the film is already “brilliant at finding the right person for the right character” but suggested the Last of Us star voice a character in the next film.
“Let’s find something for him. He should be a Spider-Person, like a cranky, old Spider-Person,” he told the magazine.
In the same interview, Isaac talked about voicing Miguel O’Hara and what he admires about the character.
“He’s got this particular unique quality to him, but there are lots of things about him that I think are very surprising and make him such his own thing,” he said. “The fangs and claws and this violence that’s simmering underneath at all times? He’s just a really interesting character.”
Isaac also talked about his experience voice acting versus regular acting.
“You only have your voice to be able to express a lot of what’s going on. There’s more collaboration involved because it’s your voice, it’s the animators, it’s the design, it’s all these things coming together to create the character,” Isaac explained. “There’s something beautifully communal about putting that together and just adding one element and then seeing it all come together. It’s just such a beautiful work of art.”
He continued, “The art in this thing is so incredible, but specifically with Miguel. The way that he transforms visually and becomes more feral as things fall apart, I just thought, was so, so amazing.”
As of June 2, 2023, YouTube has reversed that decision: The video giant announced that it “will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past U.S. Presidential elections.”
Why is YouTube making this change? The Google-owned service, in an unsigned blog post Friday, tried to explain it this way: “In the current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm.”
YouTube also noted, “As with any update to our policies, we carefully deliberated this change.”
With the 2024 election season underway, according to YouTube’s latest blog post, “The ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions, is core to a functioning democratic society — especially in the midst of election season.”
That said, YouTube said its other election misinformation policies remain in place, including those that prohibit content “aiming to mislead voters about the time, place, means, or eligibility requirements for voting” as well as false claims that could “materially discourage voting, including those disputing the validity of voting by mail” and videos that encourages others to interfere with “democratic processes.”
“Here’s what isn’t changing: We are ensuring that when people come to YouTube looking for news and information about elections, they see content from authoritative sources prominently in search and recommendations,” YouTube said in the blog post. In the wake of the 2020 U.S. election, YouTube said, it discovered that videos from authoritative sources like news outlets represented the most viewed and most recommended election videos on YouTube.
Costume designers comb through reams of fabric, scour the racks in thrift stores, and dig through bins in flea markets in search of just the right textures, styles and flourishes to help bring characters to life. For some productions, this work can be contemporary and with a limited cast. For others, it can mean hundreds of period costumes, thousands of pieces and years of preparation.
At Variety’s inaugural “A Night With Artisans,” senior artisans editor Jazz Tangcay moderated a panel of costume designers from a wide range of television series, reminding the audience of the guild’s ongoing fight for pay equity, “these shows would be naked without you.”
Many of the shows this season were in production during the pandemic, with tight COVID protocols and restrictions. Camille Benda, costume designer for Apple TV+ series “Bad Sisters,” enjoyed working with her five leading women in a unique office outside of the set. “The fitting room was actually in a shipping container, but it kind of felt like a little spaceship bubble that we could go to and talk and spend a couple hours really going through the characters.” These conversations gave them the opportunity to really dig into the individuality of each character.
Working primarily in 1970s Los Angeles, costume designer Denise Wingate enjoyed the amazing costume houses as she put together the looks for Amazon’s “Daisy Jones & the Six.” She did run into a challenge when it turned out there were three other huge shows taking place in the ’70s also in production: “So we’re fighting over things.”
But that didn’t stop her. “Every single weekend, every Saturday, every Sunday, for a year straight, I went to all the flea markets.”
Wingate also found a lot of great resources online, which contributed to more than 1,500 costumes ranging from the 1960s to the ’90s and filming from New Orleans to Greece. She came to learn that an even more valuable resource than money was time. “Having the time to curate a look and get it perfect and having time with the actors to really explore the characters… It was a real gift.”
Laura Jean Shannon, designer of the supersuit on Amazon’s superhero series “The Boys,” found budget constraints added extra pressure, but praised her team. “I’m only as good as the company I keep. It’s imperative that you keep, you know, a healthy environment for your team.” Six years ago, when they designed superhero costumes on a “TV timeline and budget,” she found the challenge “kind of outrageous.” But in the end, it gave her time the opportunity to innovate and find ways to create completely customized suits. “We reworked the way things work!”
Costume designers, especially working in television, have to be able to anticipate new challenges that could come along while episodes are still being written. Lyn Paolo, costume designer for Netflix series “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story,” began asking early on whether there would be a coronation scene for the new king and queen of England. Without waiting for confirmation, Paolo researched and started placing orders.
Paolo remembered, “The production manager kept calling me saying, ‘Why are you buying all that fabric from Paris?’ I was like, I think we’re gonna need all this gold fabric. Please believe me.” When they got the official word, she decided to “go for the gold.” Literally. “If you look at the original portraits of George and Charlotte, they’re covered in gold.”
Montgomery also had a lot of fun with details in “What We Do in the Shadows,” particularly when it came to designing for vampire Nadja (Natasia Demetriou). In the Season 4 opener, Nadja returns to Staten Island from a season in the U.K., so Montgomery “just stole from U.K. designers who I love.” Namely, Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen’s tartan collection.
One dress Nadja wears later in the season involved a black and red silk with a yellow stripe. But the fabric they found didn’t have the yellow stripe. “My wonderful team, I convinced them that what we needed to do is sew a yellow ribbon onto all of these maybe 30 yards of fabric. And bless them, they did.”
On the HBO series “The Last of Us,” based on the hit video game, the world stopped in 2003 when a pandemic wiped out most of civilization. As a costume designer, Cynthia Summers had to consider what this would mean for characters living 20 years later. “The world’s stopped in 2003. And specifically, we started our story in Austin, Texas. So that was where we began, and that’s where everything ended.”
As for clothing characters would wear in this world, they had to consider, “Anything after that was black market, it was 2003 or prior. It was also what would last through a pandemic — what would last on a person’s body, traveling across North America and having to go through all these horrible things, living out in the wild.”
They had to remain faithful to the game so that fans would be happy, and they had to consider how clothing would break down over multiple episodes. So the team assembled collections of 30 versions of every costume for every character, from leads to background.
Movement was an important part of the design for Paramount+’s “Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies,” as Samantha Hawkins needed to create costumes the actors could dance in. “It’s a lot of putting gussets in the right places when you are unlucky enough to have time to do builds,” she explained.
She also recalled the specific challenge in Episode 9, which involved paper doll costumes. “You want them to look flat and not move, but then the choreographers are going in with arm raises every 10 seconds. It’s a lot of fitting, figuring it out and what you can do to create a look that still has movement,” she said. “And then you know, we didn’t have time to build looks for every dancer on screen. So we did use a lot of vintage, and a little bit of contemporary, but the vintage, we reinforced the seams beforehand… The build team was just fabulous to get everything done.”
Marina Toybina (“Beauty & the Beast: A 30th Celebration“) expressed the importance of confidence and building a team that can complement the others well. In designing the costumes for a classic, beloved story, she knew she faced a particular challenge and a lot of expectations. “I have to really have that belief in strengthening myself as a designer and creator and a leader, to then guide my team,” she said. “A lot of it comes with a need to have self-confidence.”
Toybina added, “As a designer, you need to know your role, you need to know your weaknesses, because then you have to make up for it in your team. And make sure you’re surrounded with the people that can help you execute. And being honest, at the end of the day, I can only deliver so much without killing my team.” She emphasized one vital point: “That’s a conversation we all need to have. Toxic environments, toxic labor and creativity, you can only get the best out of all of us is if we’re in the right space, and I have my entire team in the right mental space to create the most magical place possible.”
The voice of the WGA was represented loudly in Austin at the ATX TV Festival with various panels informing attendees about the issues of most importance to writers in the stalled negotiations with studios, like AI and staffing minimums—a set minimum number of writers that a series has to employ—as well as why production shutdowns during the ongoing strike are an important part of their fight for a fair deal.
On Saturday, Deadline spoke with WGA negotiating committee member Greg Iwinski following his discussion of the writers strike alongside Julie Plec and Zoanne Clack on a panel hosted at Stateside at the Paramount. Iwinski has been a writer on Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
DEADLINE: There have been questions regarding the need for production shutdowns. Can you share why this is important?
GREG IWINSKI: Nobody is happy or enjoys that productions are shut down because we want to be back at work and making stuff. There’s been an incredible amount of solidarity and support from the Teamsters and IATSE and them saying, ‘We will honor your lines.’ We want this to be done as soon as possible so that all 11,500 writers and the Guild are back to work, and so we can get back to full production as an industry.
We believe the fastest way to do that is to close the pipeline of production so that— although it is painful and we acknowledge that it’s awful— the hope is that it’s a sharp, quick, fast pain now so that we do not have a prolonged thing later. We want the strike to be over tomorrow and so this is hopefully moving that forward faster.
DEADLINE: There are below-the-line workers who are vocal about losing out on jobs and not being able to support their families by choosing not to cross those lines. What do you say to them?
IWINSKI: The experience that I’ve had out on the line is an incredible amount of solidarity, but also an ability and a willingness to work with those people who are honoring our picket lines, to try to find the ways to inflict the most damage to the studio pipeline while also inflicting the least amount of damage to the crew. If there’s a way to get everybody paid but also stop production, we will always aim for that because those people are not the people we’re trying to hurt.”
DEADLINE: Staffing minimums is one of the WGA’s asks that has triggered a lot of discussions. Some believe that if someone like Taylor Sheridan can write TV shows on their own, others should have the right to do so too. What is your opinion on this?
IWINSKI: I mean, there are like 10 of those shows so it’s very interesting to try to set the new standard for 11k writers for 10 shows run by 10 single people. I don’t think that that’s a representative or fair way to negotiate our contracts based on what like .001 percent of our members are doing. I think it’s important to say that writing is a collaborative form, especially television writing as opposed to screenwriting which leads to a collective voice.
In late-night writing, I’ve been in many rooms where the collective voice of the room is the voice of the show and that’s incredibly important. So we not only want to protect writers who won’t be powerful enough to demand a staff when they’re told there’s nobody there. We want to maintain the integrity of a writers’ room that has led to all the television that people have known and loved previously.
DEADLINE: Would the WGA be willing to negotiate on minimums?
IWINSKI: We haven’t even begun negotiating because they have not responded. So my position and I think the Guild’s position would be that there’s nothing to talk about in terms of negotiating numbers because they haven’t ever responded to our initial thing. So we’re not disagreeing over what it should be. They don’t want to talk about the concept at all.
DEADLINE: There have been many themed pickets, and photos shared on social media have received some negative attention because members and supporters are having fun. How do you feel about that?
IWINSKI: I think that to be critiquing people trying to find joy in a hard situation is an incredibly privileged position to stand in. As somebody who was out marching in 2020 and had marched many times before that to ask the police to stop murdering Black men like myself, I think the idea that you cannot find joy in the solidarity of fighting for your own dignity is a position that’s out of touch with reality.
“Talking to him you feel how much he loves literature and stories,” Ms. Beer said, adding that “after reading the script together we will watch movies and he will talk about books that refer to our work.”
The 28-year-old actress, who answered questions via email while serving on a jury at Cannes, said Mr. Petzold created a “very inspiring working atmosphere” on set.
“Christian tells us his ideas about the scene, maybe other things that he was thinking of that fit to the atmosphere and situation,” she said, adding, “Every thought or idea is welcome.”
Anton Kaiser, of Schramm Film, the Berlin-based production company behind “Afire” and 12 of Mr. Petzold’s previous films, said Mr. Petzold likes to shoot in the summer and edit in the fall, which means that his films tend to be ready in time for the Berlin festival, which is held in February.
“Each film of Petzold’s is recognizable, but each new film is also a step forward,” Carlo Chatrian, the Berlin festival’s artistic director, said in a phone interview.
“They are cerebral, but they are not heavy, especially the last two,” he added, referring to “Afire” and “Undine,” both of which he programmed at the festival, as films with a note of humor that is new for the director.
“I’m happy, on one hand, to be able to support Christian Petzold as an auteur and as an artist,” Mr. Chatrian said. “At the same time, I’m happy when his films can travel, because I think it’s a pity that he is not enough known outside Germany.”
The MCU has seen mixed results in its Disney+ shows with WandaVision, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and everything in between, but Secret Invasion is already building anticipation thanks to its story and its cast.
Could Secret Invasion Set New MCU Disney+ Standard?
With all that being said, it’s time to look at a few reasons why Secret Invasion could wind up being the best MCU series to debut on Disney+ to date.
Secret Invasion Boasts Superstar Cast
Marvel Studios
While the MCU is known for having the top stars in all of Hollywood to drive its shows and movies, Secret Invasion takes that status to a level never seen in any Disney+ show before.
These actors boast a combined 23 Emmy nominations (including four wins) and five Oscar nominations (including one win), making this cast the most decorated set of actors to ever join forces in an MCU Disney+ show.
Just based on acting talent alone, the stage is set for Secret Invasion to boast some memorable MCU performances from top to bottom.
In the June 2008-January 2009 comic storyline, written by Brian Michael Bendis, Skrulls invaded Earth by shapeshifting into some of the most popular Marvel characters in existence, all in an attempt to claim Earth as a new home. But for the human residents on Earth, they are unaware of the Skrulls’ existence until it is far too late.
The Skrulls spend years replacing powerful leaders and politicians (a plot point already rumored to be included in the Disney+ series), allowing them to take over the world’s infrastructure from the inside. And safe to say, Earth is ill-equipped to fight back once the alien invaders plant their stake in the highest outlets possible.
This led to major repercussions across the entire Marvel Comics universe for years following the event, which could well be replicated in the MCU if the show plays its cards right.
The MCU’s Secret Invasion has a chance to show just how long the Skrulls have been on Earth by the time the series starts, with many fans waiting to see which of their favorite characters will be revealed as imposters.
Clearly, the potential ramifications for this series are catastrophic.
The MCU Tackles Spy Thriller Themes
Marvel Studios
While the MCU has done a top-notch job with its more cosmic stories (Thor) and its magical/Multiversal adventures (Doctor Strange), the franchise is always at the top of its game when it focuses on ground-level heroes and plotlines.
After all, fans still look at a movie like Captain America: The Winter Soldier as one of Marvel Studios’ greatest accomplishments, if not its greatest ever.
Why is that? The story becomes a full-blown political thriller as Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff learn that they can’t trust anybody within SHIELD, which was revealed to have been infiltrated by HYDRA over 70 years prior.
The intrigue and the real-world implications that come from projects like this always seem to bring viewers in more than the other-worldly plot threads, setting things down to Earth and bringing a new level of intensity.
Secret Invasion will bring those same grounded stakes with Fury and Talos always looking over their shoulders for who could be sneaking around looking like one of their closest companions.
And with six episodes centered full-time on these themes of secrecy, mystery, and intrigue, Marvel has a real shot to deliver something with emotion and consequences through the MCU’s Skrull invasion.
Isolated Story With Sparce Cosmic Teases
Marvel Studios
Just as it does with thriller-style themes, the MCU usually plays out well when dealing with more isolated stories that are contained and kept fairly separate from the greater MCU.
Because of the severity of the Skrull invasion, Nick Fury and Talos won’t have any mental capacity to deal with anything else in the wider Marvel landscape as the aliens take over the world’s infrastructure.
But the very nature of this show, along with the history of the MCU, still means that Secret Invasion will be intricately woven into the fabric of the larger MCU storyline.
Fury and Talos will reunite for the first time after Fury’s efforts in space from Spider-Man: Far From Home, tying into the cosmic side of the Marvel universe even though the plot of this series will likely take place exclusively on the MCU’s home planet.
But looking at the MCU’s future, it will also play an important role in setting up 2023’s final theatrical movie, The Marvels, with a chance that the Skrulls could even play a role in that sequel in the same way they did for the first movie.
Speaking of that first movie, Emilia Clarke’s G’iah will also provide a tie back to 2019’s Captain Marvel as she reunites with her father, Talos, with the pair tackling much more adult challenges as a rogue sect of Skrulls assert their power on Earth.
And while Secret Invasion is sure to keep fans on a singular path and focus on the Skrull invasion, there are sure to be a fair share of greater MCU connections.
Potential For Epic MCU Cameos
Marvel Studios
Due to the Skrulls’ ability to shapeshift into anybody that they see, and given the way the rogue group of aliens is set to infiltrate Earth, many fans are hoping to see some of the MCU’s biggest names replicated and simmed in Secret Invasion.
Looking at that idea realistically, it seems a bit far-fetched to expect heavy hitters like Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man) or Chris Evans (Steve Rogers) to come back, although there could be other big names on the table.
Considering how the series will dive into many of the government’s biggest secrets, SHIELD personalities like Natasha Romanoff or Clint Barton could be faces that the Skrulls go after to help gain access to certain information.
There’s also a chance that some fan-favorite characters from years past could be revealed as imposters that have been on Earth for a long time, with many believing Don Cheadle’s War Machine or Martin Freeman’s Everett Ross to be options in that regard.
Additionally, many still have hopes that Chloe Bennet will reprise her role as Daisy Johnson from Agents of SHIELD in the series, as she was a big part of the Secret Invasion story from the comics. And while Bennet has repeatedly denied being involved with the show, there’s no way to definitively count her out.
All of those don’t even count the idea of the Defenders being seen, or even some of the more unusual MCU heroes like Rocket Raccoon or Groot, which the Skrulls may use for even more discretion.
And while it will all depend on the MCU actors’ schedules and how much money Marvel was willing to shell out for cameos, the chance to see some of these stars be used in the Skrull War is too good of an opportunity not to think about.
Characters and Story Above Action/VFX
Marvel
More so than almost any Disney+ show in the MCU to date, Secret Invasion looks to focus on other storytelling devices in the MCU apart from action sequences and VFX-heavy special effects.
Of course, the series won’t be completely devoid of VFX altogether, as fans have already seen numerous instances of Skrulls shapeshifting into Earth’s natives in their quest for planetary domination. There have even been some new powers in trailers that will appear in the MCU for the very first time.
But at its core, Secret Invasion will look to focus on character development and a grounded, real-world story – very much the same way other MCU projects like the Captain America trilogy did.
Nick Fury will finally get to take a leading role in the MCU after 15 years as a supporting character, naturally leading to a more down-to-Earth story as he uses his spy knowledge to find out the truth about the Skrulls.
And while superpowers are what allow the Skrulls to change appearances, the core plot thread will focus on deciphering who’s on which side of the battle and learning why each side is doing what they’re doing.
For even as good as the MCU is at telling fantastical stories, this diversion for Secret Invasion will only help it to be one of the best stories Marvel Studios has ever told.
Director Andy Muschietti and producer Barbara Muschietti have spilled a few more details about The Flash, revealing that there are still plenty of surprises in store and declaring that the cameos were planned as a way to “honor the legacy of DC.” Speaking with Collider, the Andy Muschietti promised that, despite all the leaks, screenings, and revelations that have happened (including some from himself), there is still a lot for audiences to look forward to.
“If you see the movie on the 16th or after you’ll notice that there’s a couple of surprises there that we wanted to leave for the release of the movie, just to avoid any kind of possible leaks and stuff. So, there’s a couple more surprises there.”
The Flash will unleash the DC multiverse on the big screen, with the chaos reportedly leading to all manner of unexpected, super cameos. Producer Barbara Muschietti goes on to reveal that they got a big “yes” from every actor they turned to for a cameo role. But would have had even more had time permitted…
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAYSCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
“No, we had a yes on absolutely everybody we reached out to. The issue was time. We wanted to give each of these cameos time for people to have the time to enjoy them. So we had to cut down the list, which was very long. But everybody we approached, their estates and the living people, they were game because they understood what we wanted to do, which was to honor the legacy of DC.”
The Flash Will Offer Even More Surprises in Its Home Release
Warner Bros. Pictures
Believe it or not, The Flash will offer even more surprises when it’s released on Blu-ray, with Andy Muschietti revealing details of deleted scenes and how they strived to cut the DC outing down from a four-hour runtime due to all the improvisation.
“The first thing is, I like to shoot a lot and I like to have options, and depending on the actors I’m working with, we have more or less material. In the case of my work with Ezra, we had an impossibly long list of options because Ezra is a phenomenal actor, gives you a lot, and we did a lot of improvising that led to the scenes being longer than expected and ended up with a four-hour movie, basically.”
Thankfully, we can expect to see this material in the home release for The Flash, with the filmmaker with an excited “You will!” when asked if it would appear as deleted scenes on the eventual Blu-ray.
Worlds will collide in The Flash when the superhero uses his powers to travel back in time to change the events of the past. However, when his attempt to save his family inadvertently alters the future, he becomes trapped in a reality in which General Zod has returned, threatening annihilation. With no other superheroes to turn to, the Flash looks to coax a very different Batman out of retirement and rescue an imprisoned Kryptonian — albeit not the one he’s looking for.
Starring Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon, Ron Livingston, Maribel Verdú, Kiersey Clemons, Antje Traue, Ben Affleck, and Michael Keaton, The Flash is scheduled for release on June 16, 2023.
Warning: After the first few paragraphs, the below article contains some spoilers for the finales of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Succession, Barry, and Ted Lasso.
It’s been a hell of a week for finales on TV.
In the past six days alone, viewers have said goodbye to Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, HBO’s Succession and Barry, and maybe Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso, whose Season 3 finale aired last night. And while there’s been no official confirmation that Ted Lasso in particular is gone for good, there’s been plenty of speculation, with star and executive producer Jason Sudeikis saying in a previous interview that Season 3 is “the end of this story that we wanted to tell, that we were hoping to tell, that we loved to tell.”
Regardless, that’s a lot of closers in one week, and fans are saying goodbye to several touchstones of the current prestige TV landscape.
It’s wild to think that TV fans are about to lose The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Succession, Barry, and Ted Lasso all in the same week. pic.twitter.com/GdYmuwvdFv
these shows meant so much to me. they all aired over a pandemic where we were all traumatized in our own way and they brought us comfort and distraction. i’ll miss them all SO MUCH.
Ted Lasso, Succession, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Barry all ending at the height of the writers strike. The writers really setup a nice cliff hanger on us huh? pic.twitter.com/wKpUFqbUec
Needless to say, fans have been sharing their sentiments on the conclusions of these four beloved shows. Here’s your final spoiler warning before we delve into these series finales.
4 minutes. That’s all Midge had to launch her into stardom. The lighting change in this shot is mesmerizing. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel crew landed the plane with staggering deftness. And it’s shots like these that elevated an already great show. pic.twitter.com/TGXCLg5ws2
Prime Video released the finale of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on May 26, where Rachel Brosnahan took her final bow as the titular role. While fans enjoyed the closing scenes between such characters as Midge Maisel, Susie Myerson (Alex Borstein), and Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby), they particularly raved about Midge’s four-minute standup routine on The Gordon Ford Show.
I can’t believe The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is over — but what a satisfying (and emotional) finale! Those four minutes had me in tears.
And Barbra Streisand’s “I Stayed Too Long At the Fair” was perfect.
I’ve had mixed feelings about this whole season of #TheMarvelousMrsMaisel, finale included. That said:
-That “four minutes” set made me a little misty-eyed, can’t lie -The fortune cookie scene had me absolutely melting! -Give Rachel Brosnahan & Luke Kirby the Emmys now, please! pic.twitter.com/GnMFtxF87n
HBO, meanwhile, had an epic, action-packed Sunday night with the back-to-back series finales of Succession and Barry.
Succession delivered an operatic conclusion for the Roy family in the 90-minute finale, in which Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) was ultimately named CEO of Waystar Royco. Tom as the new CEO sparked mixed reactions on social media, with some fans comparing the choice to the Bran Stark/Daenerys Targaryen ordeal in Game of Thrones.
We just witnessed history. Not since Breaking Bad have I been this satisfied with a finale, so kudos to the masterful writing on this show. I am truly shook & absolutely astonished at how perfectly they ended this. Goodbye to one of the greatest shows ever made. #Successionpic.twitter.com/AcrdP8qvq5
The #Succession finale was perfect in that I’m seething with rage and unsatisfied as fuck and yet every decision made complete dramatic and thematic sense pic.twitter.com/Rgoy72gQ3o
Barry’s final episode also drew criticism, but most viewers expressed their admiration for the actors’ performances and Bill Hader’s directing in Season 4.
#BARRY that might’ve been the darkest yet most beautiful ending to a show I’ve ever seen. Holy fuck. Bill Hader you fucking legend how did you conceive this show. I want to study your brain for that ending. I love you. Wtf wtf. My jaw dropped, how in THE HELL. A PERFECT ENDING!! pic.twitter.com/k1bCW2FaEM
I expected Barry to have a quick, simple and anticlimactic death but that did not stop my shriek of shock when it happened #barrypic.twitter.com/9jMmtLw0HP
— max ? succ + barry spoilers (@tourmalinecrack) May 29, 2023
Whatever your thoughts on the #Succession and #Barry finales, a particular era of high-quality HBO programming ended tonight. Highly unlikely that we’ll ever see it again. ??♂️
The Season 3 finale of Ted Lasso dropped on Apple TV+ on Wednesday, and the questions still lingers if this is the last time viewers will see AFC Richmond.
The Ted Lasso ending was so meta. “Change the title. It’s not about me. It never was.” The door is wide open for a reincarnation,m and a Season 4 under a new title: Well played. #TedLasso#TedLassoFinale#Believepic.twitter.com/dLI6IguyMd
— JennyisaHeartie ?????? (@GryffindorJenny) May 31, 2023
“It’s just likely the end of this story because we always saw it as a three-part thing,” Hunt continued. “We never even knew for sure we’d be able to tell all three parts—and suddenly, here we are. So, there will be some type of closure to this beat but closure is not necessarily the end.”
It’s safe to say, though, that Jason Sudeikis is parting ways with his role as the titular “country bumpkin” coach.
How do you create a period dramedy about Catherine the Great? Producer Marian Macgowan tells us.
Behind every successful television series is a world of intricate collaboration, refined creativity, and dedicated visionaries who bring captivating and diverse stories to life. One of those visionaries is producer Marian Macgowan, the executive producer behind the critically acclaimed series The Great on Hulu.
With three seasons under her belt, Macgowan has played a key role in crafting a show that’s already been nominated for six Emmy Awards, including nominations for its lead performers, Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult. In the colorful, wacky, sexy world woven by the exceptional writing of Tony McNamara, Russian royalty engages in hijinks and intrigue ranging from war to murder to horse breeding. You’ll just have to watch season three to see how all that intertwines.
In the meantime, you can read about Macgowan’s experiences working alongside McNamara, her approach to selecting projects, and her invaluable tips on the art of pitching. Huzzah!
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
No Film School: I love the show. I have loved it since it started.
Marian Macgowan: A die-hard fan.
NFS: I remember watching the trailer early on before it was released, and thinking it was the perfect show for me. I love period pieces and I love that sense of humor merged with the drama … What got you excited about The Great, and what got you on board?
Macgowan: It was originally a play, which was put on by the Sydney Theatre Company, and when I saw it, what I liked about it was that it was a great role for a woman. It’s sort of the idea that it’s a woman who positively affects the world around her, and that’s an—you don’t get a lot of those stories around, and here it was in a sort of fully formed play form. So, it was something that I could option. So, I optioned it, and working with Tony [McNamara], we developed it originally into a screenplay, which went through a number of incarnations as these things do.
The thing that was interesting about adapting plays is that it’s not necessarily as straightforward as it seems. Certainly, not to cinema. I think they possibly adapt themselves more readily to television than they do to cinema. Oh, that was interesting. The reason I’m hesitating is I was just thinking about The Whale, a Brendan Fraser film, which clearly is a play and feels like a play when you’re watching. But anyway, we did. We went through… The thing that was interesting about the play was it was bifurcated, so the first half of the play was her as a young girl, and the second half of the play was her as an older woman dealing with the repercussions of her decisions. The play used the same actors in both halves in different roles, so we had to resolve that problem. But the thing that drew it to me initially was that sense of female agency.
‘The Great’Credit: Gareth Gatrell/Hulu
NFS: Why do you feel like plays are more a fit for TV rather than a feature film?
Macgowan: It’s the dialogue. It’s the dialogue. I mean, plays tell their story very much. It’s very much a dialectic. Not wishing to get too intellectual about it, but it’s a dialectic. One character presents one point of view. The other character presents another point of view, and they tussle on the stage using dialogue primarily, and I think television is much more dialogue-driven. Certainly, the television that we’ve made is much more dialogue-driven. It’s less visually driven in that regard.
NFS: What are the challenges of doing a period show?
Macgowan: Ugh, numerous. So many. In fact, the irony of your opening comments about the period thing is that Tony hates period stories.
NFS: That’s very surprising.
Macgowan: The irony is that he’s done The Favourite and The Great. It’s not lost on him. It’s not lost on him. Period shows, I think, if you’re … It depends on your approach to the period. Are you going to tell a historically accurate period story or are you going to use the period to tell a story based on a theme and a character? That was our approach.
The other big choice I think you make in period stories, and I think it’s true in science fiction stories as well, is how much of the past and present is in any scene. I mean, one of the great things … I remember thinking about Blade Runnerand the original movie was that there were vestiges of the 20th century in that story, so you could see where the world had come from. Equally, in a period story, you have to acknowledge that there would be things from two centuries ago or a century ago or two decades ago or whatever it might be, so that’s another choice you have to make.
We were very much looking for a frat boy house when we did the first season. Peter’s world was a frat boy house. They had parties. Things got trashed. Things got burnt. And then, the world that she then takes over becomes more a world of enlightenment and more sort of harmonious interiors. Costumes equally change for that reason. But I mean, it’s a big narrative hurdle in some ways, period, because you’ve got wigs. You’ve got corsets. You’ve got complicated outfits. The decoration and the interiors of the world, there are no cars. There are no phones. There are just carriages and horses. You have to be careful not to let that obscure your characters at the same time.
‘The Great’Credit: Christian Black/Hulu
NFS: I think one thing that resonates so much with viewers of this show is that while it’s a period piece, the stories and characters feel very modern still. I’m interested in how you achieve that as a team.
Macgowan: The primary thing is the anachronistic dialogue, essentially. That’s where it sits, but it’s also that [Catherine] … I mean, at its core, it’s a story about a girl who married the wrong man, and whatever the events that might occur, it always pivots on that relationship and how she is or isn’t managing or it is or isn’t resolving itself. So, I think it’s partly that their relationship with each other is that of a contemporary 20-something, but it’s also primarily the dialogue, and also, I suppose the way in which we interpret contemporary ideas like contraception in sort of 18th-century ways, lemon tops and things like that. So, it’s a contemporary idea, but it’s manifesting in a sort of 18th-century way.
NFS: Like I said, I love the mix of drama with almost manic humor, at times. It feels like a knife edge, and it’s been maintained over the course of several seasons now. How do you do that?
Macgowan: Mostly, we just get Tony to write it. It’s mostly what we do. The other secret to it, just his writing as it is to quite a number of other people I’ve worked with writing, is speed. I mean, the actors do an extraordinary job remembering all that dialogue, but then we very much rely upon the speed with which it’s delivered. That and the other critical aspect of it is the rhythm. So, those elements definitely contribute to sustaining the comic pathos tone.
I suppose the other thing that we do very much is the classic thing. It’s a narrative drama at its core, and if you play it like a narrative drama and let the characters and the dialogue do their job, that seems to us to have worked out to be the best way to keep that tone consistent. Well, every now and then, we realize that it’s not working, and that’s sometimes what doesn’t end up in the cut, and things like that.
‘The Great’Credit: Hulu
NFS: Not to focus on what doesn’t work, but are there discussions about reworking things? Or is it that everyone has a sense this is not fitting what we want to do?
Macgowan: We do reshoot things sometimes and we do pick-up shots, like anybody does, I suspect. I think Tony and I understand and are timely and consistent about the show, that we know instantly if it’s not right. Everything from a cast decision or a cast thought to a costumed thought, we are both instinctively very clear about when that’s right and when that’s not, but I think it’s because we’ve lived with it. I mean, I’ve been working with Tony for 30 years, so we’ve made films together and TV shows together, so I think there’s just an understanding of what’s going to work and what isn’t.
NFS: Obviously, seeing Tony’s work, I’m sure that sparked something, but what are you looking for when you want to option a project or speak with a writer?
Macgowan: I think I’m looking for something that I believe audiences are interested in at the time, a sort of zeitgeist idea, definitely. Then, I’m looking for an original voice because I mean, you put your finger on it in a sense in your opening remarks. The thing that made The Great very hard to get up in the first place, but also makes it successful, is it’s completely unique. There isn’t anything like it. You can’t go and say, “Oh, it’s like that.” So, when you’re sitting in that pitch session going, “Well, you need to make this film because it’s like ‘blah,'” we just didn’t have that, and we had, when it was a film, a lot of concerns, a lot of responses along the lines of, “We love the script, but it’s so execution dependent. We can’t see what it’s going to look like. We don’t know what it’s going to look like.”
So, for me, an original voice is very important combined with, as I say, an idea that I think has its moment now or is something that we’re consciously or unconsciously thinking about or considering or wondering about. Yeah, they’re probably the two main things.
‘The Great’Credit: Hulu
NFS: You mentioned pitching. I know it’s such a big topic and situation-dependent based on which rooms you’re going into, but do you have any general advice you would give to someone going into a pitch?
Macgowan: I think the thing that I always rely upon at the end of the day after many, many pitches is to try and let the people you are talking to understand why you love this. If you can communicate that passion, then I think you get a real chance of communicating why your idea is a good idea and why they should do it. I think when you can get that authenticity, then I think you have a real chance, and that’s really just about understanding why you love it.
What do you think about it? What is it about this idea that makes it so exciting to you and why you can see it on the screen? That’s the thing I hang onto and I don’t know. When I’m sitting there and everyone’s staring blankly at me, I just think, “Okay, why do I love this? What is it? How do I let them understand how I feel about this and communicate my passion?”
NFS: Any other advice for aspiring showrunners?
Macgowan: I think, speak up. Just hang on to your idea as tightly as you can because there are a lot of forces that just don’t understand where you’d understand it and you need to stay firm to that. So, if the director is pushing back on something, understand why they’re pushing back. If the studio or the network, whoever it is who’s also of the cast, just be clear that everybody’s on the same page. It’s the age-old advice about “Just be sure you’re all making the same show,” and hang on to it. It never hurts to say, “You know what? I’m not sure that’s right.” It might turn out to be right, but it never hurts to question it.
May thy knife chip and shatter. The sci-fi fantasy series known as Dune has long been a staple in sci-fi culture with many screen adaptations being made over the decades. But in 2021, Dennis Villeneuve set the bar sky-high for Dune: Part 2 with the first movie, which astounded audiences the world over. The sci-fi world taking place millennia into the future centers around the concept of a highly valuable drug/substance called Spice and the Atreides family that has been sent to oversee the planet that produces it (more specifically, the boy known as Paul Atreides). Paul was meant to be a girl and the messiah of his people, but his birth as a boy gave him and his family many enemies, thus sending the entire sci-fi universe into a spiral.
The first film, which released back in 2021 on Max (formally HBO Max), should have been the tentpole film of the year had it not been for the lasting effects of the pandemic on movie theaters. However, the film was still epic enough to easily warrant a sequel that has had fans hyped since its announcement. So, with the sequel finally set to hit theaters at the end of this year, let’s take a look at everything we know about Dune: Part II.
Plot
The number one thing that fans will probably be most hyped about for Dune: Part II is the fact that the first film firmly established the ‘world’ that the characters inhabit. I.e. the culture, the technology, the politics between the multitude of families, and the lore itself has been addressed enough that audiences can feel immersed in the universe. So, that leaves the plot of the movie will be the most important focus of the film (which is still technically true of the first, but a lot of the information given was for learning purposes rather than just to push the story forward).
That said, fans have already been given a little bit of information about what to expect for the plot of the sequel. Audiences already know that Dune: PartI ended on the cliffhanger of the Atreides family being betrayed and in shambles with Paul and his mother escaping to the Fremen to live among the natives of Arrakis. Dune 2 will directly follow these events, honing in on Paul’s journey as the protagonist to fulfilling his destiny of uniting the natives and his own people.
The direct synopsis for the film is as follows: Dune: Part II will explore the mystic journey of Paul Atreides as he unites with Chani and the Fremen while on a warpath of revenge against the conspirators who destroyed his family. Facing a choice between the love of his life and the fate of the known universe, he endeavors to prevent a terrible future only he can forsee.
While the description doesn’t give any hints to minor details, it assures audiences that they can expect a truly heroic tale to play out on screen – one that Villeneuve has promised will focus more on both Paul and Chani and the journey that they take together, rather than just trying to make Paul the sole hero.
Cast
Just like it’s predecessor, Dune: Part II has an exemplary cast with no less than half a dozen household names, as well as several other notable actors and actresses to round out the entire cast. It was never in question, but both Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya will be reprising their roles as Paul Atreides and Chani, the two characters whom the true story of Dune revolves around. Not only will Chalamet and Zendaya be returning from the first film, but so will Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck, Dave Bautista as Glossu Rabban Harkonnen, Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica Atreides, Stellan Skarsgard as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, Javier Bardem as Stilgar, and Charlotte Rampling as Reverend Mother Mohiam. As of this writing, no other characters from the original movie are confirmed to be appearing in the sequel.
Sadly, two majors A-listers from the prior film in Oscar Isaac and Jason Momoa (reportedly) will not be returning for the sequel. Audiences will remember that both Isaac and Momoa, who respectively played Duke Lero Atreides and Duncan Idaho, tragically lost their lives in the first installment. However, fans of the Dune book series know full well that it’s possible to ‘resurrect’ characters in their universe via an advanced technological cloning method called ghola. This particular technology would make it very easy to bring back either Momoa or Isaac as their respected characters, but neither character does so in the first Dune book so there would have to be an adjustment to the story.
Despite losing two major Hollywood names, Dune: Part II wasted no time in finding other prominent stars to fill in the gaps. Florence Pugh continues her reign of stardom by taking on the role of Princess Irulan Corrino, the daughter of Emperor Shaddam IV who will be played by none other than Christopher Walken. Adding to the star power is recent Oscar-nominee Austin Butler who will be playing the character Feud-Rautha. In addition, Lea Seydoux has been cast as Lady Margot, Souheila Yacoub has been cast as Shishaki (a Fremen leader), and it’s also been reported that Tim Blake Nelson has been cast in an undisclosed role.
Even though the franchise has already lost Oscar Isaac and Jason Momoa (two of the current most marketable actors in Hollywood) Villeneuve stepped right up and created another all-star cast, and it’s one that fans will assuredly be blown away by.
Everything Else
As the film is set to be one of the biggest of the year (arguably the biggest) it’s understandable that a lot of what’s going on with the movie is being kept under wraps. That said, fans have been given a few tidbits of information to hold them over until the movie hits theaters. It’s a given, but Dennis Villeneuve is returning to direct the sequel, and it should be noted that he wrote the movie along with fellow screenwriter Jon Spaihts. Another piece of information to note is that writer Eric Roth was credited with helping write Dune: Part I but apparently does not seem to have had a hand in writing the sequel.
Another given (but still worth mentioning for those who may still not know) but the film is based off of the sci-fi book of the same name that was written by Frank Herbert back in 1965. The franchise has had multiple media adaptations with Villeneuve’s vision being the most recent rendition and choosing to split the single book into two separate movies. It is worth mentioning that the book has a direct sequel, Dune Messiah, and Villeneuve has talked about possibly adapting the sequel into further movies, but has also been careful to solely focus on doing the first two movies properly before committing to ones down the line.
After the success of the first Dune film, the production crew began filming the sequel roughly a year later beginning on July 18, 2022. The filming itself reportedly took place in Jordan, Abu Dhabi, Budapest, and additionally Italy before finally concluding in December.
An important piece of information that fans need to be aware of is actually the release date of the movie (especially since it’s changed a few times). The current release date for the film is November 3rd, 2023 and has settled on that date after originally being set for October and then being pushed further back to November 17th. While the release date seems to finally be set in stone, audiences have to be aware that releasing in November gives Dune: Part II some serious competition.
By releasing November, the film will have to go up against other tentpole movies like The Marvels from the MCU as well as the Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. If those two juggernauts weren’t enough, the movie will also have to compete against Trolls Band Together, the third film in the trolls franchise, as well as the animated Disney film Wish. While capable of holding its own, and not necessarily pertaining to the same demographic of viewers, releasing next to three majorly established franchises as well as an animated Disney movie will assuredly pull some audience-goers away in following weeks.
One last piece of information we have is that the Dune franchise is nowhere near over. Despite Villeneuve making no confirmations of a sequel, it’s already been reported that a spin-off television show is in the works at Max. However, this spin-off won’t involve any of the characters from the current Dune movies and will shift the focus thousands of years in the past, serving as a prequel.
Dune: Part I may not have made the societal impact that some other recent sci-fi/fantasy franchises have (such as The Lord of the Rings or the MCU) but with the pandemic died down and audiences returning to theaters in droves, it’s safe to say that Dune: Part II will be one of the biggest cinematic releases of the year.
Oscar Isaac knows exactly who he wants to star as a character and voice in the next Spider-Verse film.
When asked during a recent interview with British GQ who he would love to see join the cast for the next movie, the actor said that while production is “brilliant at finding the right person for the right character,” he would suggest his friend and The Last of Us star Pedro Pascal.
“Let’s find something for him,” Isaac added, who voices Miguel O’Hara in the latest animated film in the franchise, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. “He should be a Spider-Person, like a cranky, old Spider-Person.”
Earlier this year, Pascal told Wired that he met Isaac when they were doing a play together in 2005. He added, “An off-Broadway show where we were getting $500 a week, before taxes.”
The two have been friends ever since, even starring in 2019’s Triple Frontier together. The Mandalorian actor recalled one of his favorite memories throughout their friendship during the January interview, saying, “There’s so many. He’s so naughty.”
He continued, “His level of naughtiness onstage during that play, for example. He played a ghost, which meant that the living characters in the story could not see him. I had to do my scenes, and he would physically be there, but because my character couldn’t see him, he could fuck with me, all in front of live audiences, as much as he wanted, trying to get me to crack up or forget my lines. The memory is simultaneously dark and wonderful.”
Pascal also previously told Esquire that the duo initially bonded because “we have very similar backgrounds.”
“We’re both children of Latin immigrants, so there’s sort of a cultural familiarity, then at the same time we’re both actors,” he said during the April 2022 interview. “We have the same dreams.”
The nominations for the Emmys are still weeks away. But there’s growing excitement in the Latino community as multiple lead actors continue to look well-positioned to receive deserved recognition.
Two of the top contenders in the lead drama actor race — Pedro Pascal as the hardened survivor Joel from HBO’s apocalyptic video game adaptation “The Last of Us” and Diego Luna as the rebel hero Cassian in the “Star Wars” prequel series “Andor” from Disney+ — are Latino and star in buzzy sci-fi and fantasy series.
Only one Latino actor has been recognized in the lead drama actor category in the past: From 1995-1999, Jimmy Smits received five consecutive noms for his role as Det. Bobby Simone on ABC’s “NYPD Blue.” Coincidentally, Pascal appeared as a guest on a 2001 episode.
Jumping seamlessly between film and television, the Chilean actor has become a household name thanks to TV stints on “Game of Thrones” and “Narcos” and movies such as “Wonder Woman 1984” (2021) and “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” (2022). He only added to his fame when he took on the man under the helmet in another “Star Wars” spin-off series, “The Mandalorian. ” In February, he did a stellar job as host of “Saturday Night Live.” It’s impossible to ignore the obvious tagline for this Emmy FYC season: “Vote for Pedro.”
Luna’s return to a beloved character in “Andor” has also been welcomed. The Mexican actor, who made his U.S. breakout performance in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2001 film “Y tu mamá también,” has been applauded for his internalized, central, moving performance. The show also received some of the best reviews for any “Star Wars” series, thanks to the guidance of director-producer Tony Gilroy.
In the actress categories, both Selena Gomez, who portrays the dry-witted Mabel in Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building,” and Jenna Ortega, who stars as the deadpan teenager on Netflix’s “Wednesday,” are front-runners.
Actress America Ferrera of “Ugly Betty” poses in the press room at the 59th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy at the Shrine Auditorium on September 16, 2007 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Albert L. Ortega/WireImage)
WireImage
It could be the first time two Latinas have been recognized in the same acting category and only the third occurrence in any acting category. Only two Latina actresses have ever been nominated in the lead comedy actress category in Emmy history — Rita Moreno (“9 to 5” in 1983) and America Ferrera (“Ugly Betty” in 2007 and 2008). Ferrera is the only winner for her first season.
Gomez, a superstar on the mystery romp, was omitted from the category last year but is even better in the second season. And Ortega’s star has skyrocketed with viral moments and dance crazes from the “Addams Family” spinoff.
While her brutally honest interviews about editing “Wednesday” scripts could put some voters off, there’s no denying she’s the breakout of the year. Her appearance in box office smash “Scream 6” may also make her an easy selection for not-so media plugged-in voters.
The limited acting categories have fewer “slam-dunk” contenders than the comedy and drama races. While Zoe Saldaña delivers a decisive turn in Netflix’s “From Scratch,” she faces a bunch of big names from more notable series. The same goes for Amber Midthunder, the kick-ass indigenous actress from Hulu’s action-packed TV movie “Prey.” For lead actor (limited), all hopes rest on the shoulders of Andy Garcia in the HBO Max remake of “Father of the Bride,” which received decent reviews but has been muted on the circuit.
Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish composer who was brought up in the male-dominated world of high modernism and who forged an artistic identity wholly her own as she rose to the top ranks of contemporary classical music, died on Friday at her home in Paris. She was 70.
The cause was brain cancer, said her publisher, Chester Music. Her final piece, a trumpet concerto, will premiere in August with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Susanna Mälkki, a leading interpreter of Ms. Saariaho’s music.
Ms. Saariaho was always “upset by being called a female composer,” the director Peter Sellars said, but her work “has such deep meaning for so many people who did not hear their voices in classical music.”
Mr. Sellars, a longtime collaborator who is staging her 2006 opera, “Adriana Mater,” at the San Francisco Symphony next week, added: “It’s a feminine voice that we never had before. Kaija literally opened the other half of the world to classical music.”
Her style could be difficult to categorize. What evolved, through experiments with timbre and electronics, was a galaxy of singular sound worlds both vivid and mysterious, with appeal for connoisseurs and newcomers alike.
“She managed to do what many composers of her generation were unsuccessful at doing,” said Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager. “The work she created was entirely original andaccessible.”
Throughout her career, Ms. Saariaho didn’t work in explicitly traditional forms, but she wrote for many musical configurations: solo instrument and chamber ensemble, symphony orchestra and opera. And while composing, she told the biographer Pirkko Moisala, she viewed herself as a socially conscious organic farmer.
“The task of today’s artist is to nurture with spiritually rich art,” she said. “To provide new spiritual dimensions. To express with greater richness, which does not always mean more complexity but with greater delicacy.”
Kaija Anneli Saariaho was born on Oct. 14, 1952, in Helsinki, the eldest of three children of Launo Laakkonen, an entrepreneur, and Tuovi Laakkonen. Her family was not musical, but she began to study violin at 6 and piano at 8; her mother later told her that at night she would ask for someone to “turn the pillow off” because she could hear so much music coming from it that she couldn’t sleep.
At 10 she began to compose, but in secret — because in her mind, composers were men. She was totally unlike what she thought a composer should be, she told Mr. Moisala, “both externally and internally.”
“The things you read about great composers as a child — and, in addition, the image one has about Sibelius,” she said, referring to Finland’s most treasured composer. “These were the thoughts which paralyzed me.”
After completing her secondary education at the Rudolf Steiner School in Helsinki, she enrolled at the Helsinki Conservatory of Music, as well as the Institute of Industrial Arts, where she was a graphic design student.
She married Markku Saariaho, but divorce followed quickly, and in 1972 she moved in with a new partner, the visual artist Olli Lyytikäinen. They lived together for seven years, during which their Helsinki apartment became a gathering place for young, like-minded people.
Eventually, Ms. Saariaho left the graphic design program to study composition with Paavo Heininen at the storied Sibelius Academy. There, her social circle included musicians who are now luminaries, including Magnus Lindberg and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Together, they formed the group Korvat Auki! (Ears Open!) to disseminate modern music. “We did concerts in schools and hospitals and so on — outside gas stations in the middle of nowhere, in snowbanks,” Mr. Salonen said.
Ms. Saariaho continued her studies at the Freiburg Conservatory of Music in Germany, while also taking summer courses in the modernist hotbed of Darmstadt. When she finished, in 1982, she left for Paris, where she took courses at IRCAM, the avant-garde institute founded by Pierre Boulez.
Ms. Saariaho’s generation of composers, raised on Boulez’s brand of modernism, was also seeking a way out of it. In Darmstadt, she was attracted to spectralism — which departed from serialism by approaching composition with a focus on the nature of sound, rather than on mathematical systems — and learned the music of Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail.
Ms. Saariaho’s earliest published music reflects her education and interests, like “Verblendungen” (1984), a work of rich, shifting colors in which a live ensemble and tape begin in timbral conflict with each other before shaping a new, distinct sound together.
Her aesthetic of this era, Mr. Salonen said, has a “very particular kind of magical beauty and kind of emotional language which conveys very deep, very strong emotions.” He added that she “brought elements back to contemporary music that had been, if not missing, at least hidden.”
“She brought back deep emotion and immediate emotion to Western art music without cheapening anything,” Mr. Salonen said.
In 1984, Ms. Saariaho married the French composer Jean-Baptiste Barrière, who survives her, along with their two children, the writer-director Aleksi Barrière and the musician Aliisa Neige Barrière. Ms. Saariaho settled in Paris, though she maintained a hold on her Finnish identity, describing herself as a Finn living in France.
“Living and composing in a city which constantly remains strange to me,” she told Mr. Moisala, “is the key to an existence which allows me to detach myself from the reality and get into the abstract language of music.”
Ms. Saariaho was in a constant state of change and development as an artist. She tinkered with the possibilities of electronics and computers and brought an explorer’s spirit to testing the different worlds of instrumental timbres. She adored the human voice, she once said in an interview with her publisher, calling it “the richest form of expression.” But early in her career she struggled to find what exactly she wanted to do with it.
Her preferred instruments were the most human: the flute and the cello. Ms. Saariaho often collaborated with the flutist Camilla Hoitenga, on works including “NoaNoa” (1992), which featured electronics, and the poetic concerto “L’Aile du Songe” (2001). The cellist Anssi Karttunen premiered Ms. Saariaho’s well-traveled concerto “Notes on Light” (2007), as well as the evocative solo “Sept Papillons” (2000).
Ms. Saariaho, who hadn’t had the desire to write an opera, changed her mind after seeing Mr. Sellars’s 1992 staging of Messiaen’s “St. Francois d’Assise” at the Salzburg Festival in Austria. That experience, Ms. Saariaho told her publisher, “opened my mind to what can be done by telling a story with music,” and led to a series of collaborations with the soprano Dawn Upshaw, one of its stars.
And so Ms. Saariaho entered the 21st century with the premiere of her first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” which was widely celebrated as a masterpiece and considerably raised her international profile. A dreamy, quietly immense retelling of the medieval troubadour Jaufré Rudel’s “La Vida Breve,” it featured a libretto by Amin Maalouf and brought back some of that “St. Francois d’Assise” team, including Mr. Sellars and Ms. Upshaw. Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times described it as “an often transfixing and utterly distinguished work.”
In later years, she synthesized her earlier developments, deploying elements of her style to judicious, seemingly inevitable effect. Her output, Mr. Salonen said, “can be seen as a vast forest where all these plants and trees grow, and they’re in sort of a symbiotic relationship with each other. But it’s the same forest.”
She wrote works that could broadly be described as symphonies or concertos. But she repeatedly said that in her scores she was trying to find an organic meeting place between material and form. “Every piece of music,” she once told her publisher, “must live its own life because each one is utterly its own.”
In Finland, where composers are held in high regard, Ms. Saariaho was “somebody who would be recognized on the streets,” Mr. Salonen said.
“People would go and talk to her and thank her for the music,” he added. “And taxi drivers would tell her that they loved her opera. It was on that level.”
With arched eyebrows and a mane of red hair, Ms. Saariaho was easy to spot. On visits to New York, she could be seen speaking with fans who had stopped her in the lobby or the aisles of the Met, where “L’Amour de Loin” was directed by Robert Lepage in 2016, only the second opera by a female composer to be staged there, and the first since 1903.
It became the best known of her dramatic works, but more followed, each distinct from its predecessor. “Adriana Mater,” with a libretto by Mr. Maalouf, was ripped from the headlines, evoking the Bosnian war of the 1990s; “Only the Sound Remains,” from 2015, was smaller in scale, inspired by Ezra Pound and Noh theater. A piece about the philosopher Simone Weil, the 2006 oratorio “La Passion de Simone,” was in the vein of Bach’s famous Passions.
“I think both Bach and Kaija were creating music that is about light that shines out of darkness,” said Mr. Sellars, who staged “Passion.” “The music understands the darkness, and at the same time the darkness makes you begin to understand and recognize the light.”
Ms. Saariaho’s greatest triumph since “L’Amour” came in 2021, with the premiere of “Innocence” at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France. The piece was one of her most ambitious, a mosaiclike thriller of trauma and memory scored for a full orchestra, a chorus and a cast of 13 performers, with a smooth blend of styles like elevated, quasi-musical speech and folk.
“This,” Zachary Woolfe wrote of that opera in The Times, “is undoubtedly the work of a mature master, in such full command of her resources that she can focus simply on telling a story and illuminating characters.”
“Innocence” will travel to the Met in the 2025-26 season — at which point Ms. Saariaho will become the rare contemporary composer, and the only woman, to have more than one work staged there. And, in a testament to the staying power of her music, other directors have taken up her older operas.
“You don’t finish with these works,” said Mr. Sellars, who is revisiting “Adriana Mater.” “That’s the way it is with the works of the great composers. You return to them all your life, and these pieces just get more relevant and more necessary as time goes by.”
Director Margaux Susi’s The Sperm Bank is a comedic short based on the true story of writer and star Rob Scerbo. He went through a fight with stage-4 testicular cancer. But, before starting treatment, Rob’s doctor (Parvesh Cheena) advises him to get a healthy sperm sample set aside for when he’s ready to have children in the future.
The Sperm Bank documents Rob’s journey to get that sperm sample with the help of his emotional support buddies Andy (Jeremy Culhane) and Dave (Aman Adumer). The snag comes from Rob having problems getting in the right frame of mind to obtain said sample. This is made worse due the clinic’s porn is not helping.
“…Rob’s journey to get that sperm sample with the help of his emotional support buddies…”
Directed by Margaux Susi, the short film moves us effortlessly from a late-night comedy sketch about “tugging one out” in unconformable and public ways. The jokes come easy, starting with Nurse Kirby (Sophia Ali), who’s seen and experienced everything, to the hot women living in Rob’s mind. But the film immediately grounds us when Rob is immediately pulled into the reality of his cancer diagnosis and the long road ahead treatment-wise.
What The Sperm Bank shows is that when bad things happen in life, the best thing to do is find the comedy to turn it around. As they say, laughter is the best medicine.
Jennifer Aniston, 54, paid tribute to her beloved late dog Dolly on Saturday. The actress took to Instagram to share two makeup-free photos of herself snuggling the adorable white pooch as well as a touching video of wind chimes hanging and making noise outside. “In memory of Dolly” could be seen on the center triangle section that held the chimes together.
In the two cute snapshots, the beauty wore a blue tank top and had her hair down. She was showing off a slight smile as she held the sweet pet close. She also wore gold dangling earrings. “Dolly forever ❤️,” she lovingly captioned the post.
Once it was published, it didn’t take long for her fans to share comments of condolences and support. “So sorry for your loss. I love the wind chime idea. Every time you hear it, you’ll think of her,” one fan wrote, while another shared, “I’m so sorry for your loss.. your beautiful dolly has her wings and will always watch over you. Sending hugs❤️.” Others left just heart emojis to signify their love.
Jennifer at a previous event. (Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency / SplashNews.com)
This isn’t the first time Jennifer has shared an emotional post about pet loss. The dog-lover has had many animals over the years and she also shared a tribute to her dog Dolly, whom she shared with ex Justin Theroux, after her passing in 2019. They both shared photos of the heartbreaking yet beautiful moment they were by Dolly’s side as she passed underneath the sunset.
“Tonight, at sunset, after a heroic struggle… our most loyal family member and protector, Dolly A. laid down her sword and shield,” Justin captioned the sweet post. “?? She was surrounded by her entire family. ‘The one that never deserts, the one that never proves ungrateful… is the dog— faithful and true, even in death.’ -George Vest — Rest In Peace Dolly #adoptdontshop #rescuedog.”
In addition to Dolly, Jennifer has posted photos of her other precious dogs. One post showed two of them laying on a couch with her as she rocked a blue cozy robe. “Morning,” she captioned it along with an emoji face surrounded by hearts.
The comedy series Uncoupled is one of the latest television shows to be impacted by the writers strike.
Neil Patrick Harris, who plays Michael in the series, revealed on Friday’s episode of The Viewthat filming for season two has been delayed. The Hollywood Reporter reported earlier this year that Showtime picked up the show after Netflix canceled it following its first season.
“We were going to start filming it in the beginning of July but the writers strike is happening,” the How I Met Your Mother actor said. “So, everything is sort of on pause – go writers, writers strong.”
Harris didn’t confirm when production would resume, but added that “we’re just going to wait until that [writers strike] plays itself out.”
He continued, “Hopefully we’ll be able to start filming in warm weather. We filmed season one in cold weather and it’s less fun to have like dating shows where you’re walking down Central Park and like freezing and shivering. [It’s] more fun in a tank top.”
The Darren Star-created series follows Harris’ Michael as he tries to rebuild his life after his long-time boyfriend (Tuc Watkins) suddenly moves out and he’s left to navigate the dating scene in his mid-40s.
Uncoupled joins a running list of TV shows and movies that have been impacted by the strike. The Writers Guild has been picketing since the beginning of May after the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers failed to reach a deal on contract negotiations.
With the Cannes Film Festival in the rearview, the summer movie season has begun. Yes, “The Little Mermaid” and “Fast X” are already out, but this week, two more releases add another variable to the theatrical calendar: Oscar potential.
With the release of “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the long-awaited sequel to the animated sensation that became the first (and so far only) superhero movie to win an Oscar has landed. Critical acclaim proves that the lengthy delay wasn’t in vain. As IndieWire’s Kate Erbland writes in her review: “In a genre built on the literally super and special, these films are unafraid to stand out and do something truly different, something that pushes the limits, to show the genuine range available to this subset of stories and feel damn good in the process (and look, dare we say, even better).”
The movie is poised to perform well commercially and follow its predecessor into awards season, but moviegoers looking for a quieter option this weekend don’t have to stay home, as A24’s Sundance hit “Past Lives” hits theaters as well. The acclaim debut from playwright Celine Song is an autobiographical riff on her own experiences as a Korean immigrant reconciling with a companion from her past. As IndieWire’s Anne Thompson wrote earlier this week, the great surprise of the movie is that Song proves she’s just as talented at filmmaking as she is with the stage.
In this week’s episode of Screen Talk, Thompson and Eric Kohn reunite to discuss these new films and why they inject fresh energy into the release calendar. They also look ahead to the release of Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City,” and touch on several other highlights from Cannes this month, including Palme d’Or winner “Anatomy of a Fall” and Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” both of which have awards prospects of their own.
Watch the full episode above or listen to it below.
Screen Talk is produced by Azwan Badruzaman and available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify, and hosted by Megaphone. Browse previous installments here, subscribe here, and be sure to let us know if you’d like to hear the hosts address specific issues in upcoming editions of Screen Talk.
With a few mystifying teasers and less than two months until the premiere of the live-action “Barbie” film, audiences still don’t know exactly how the film will unfold. But the production team has started to reveal insight into the film — including how they caused an international pink paint shortage.
In a recent Architectural Digest profile with production designer Sarah Greenwood, set decorator Katie Spencer and director Greta Gerwig, the group explain that they set out “to capture what was so ridiculously fun” about Barbie’s world, but especially that of Architectural Digest’s subject: Barbie’s Dreamhouse.
“I wanted the pinks to be very bright, and everything to be almost too much,” Gerwig stated. She shared that “the ‘kid-ness’ was paramount” — evoking the feeling of never forgetting “what made [her] love Barbie” as a young girl.
“Why walk down stairs when you can slide into your pool? Why trudge up stairs when you take an elevator that matches your dress?” said Gerwig.
To achieve that whimsy, Barbie’s world needed to become just that — Barbie’s world. The only way the production team believed they could achieve the task was to create a world of pink props, sets, clothes and anything that was placed within the film’s frame.
That’s when Greenwood knew she needed to obtain that signature shade from the company Rosco until there was nothing left. “The world ran out of pink,” said the production designer.
Before running Rosco out of pink paint, Greenwood, Gerwig and the team builta set on the Warner Bros. lot in London,pulling inspiration from the Palm Springs’ Kaufmann House, San Francisco Queen Anne Victorian manse, Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings, as well as film history’s “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and Gene Kelly’s “An American in Paris.”
Soon after the conversation with Gerwig, Spencer and Greenwood, the Los Angeles Times inquired about the shortage and turned to, Lauren Proud, VP of global marketing at Rosco, who confirmed, “They did clean us out on paint.”
“There was this shortage,” Proud added, “and then we gave them everything we could.”
Fans will be able to immerse themselves in Barbie’s pink world on July 21.
7 “Sex And The City” Moments That Were Ahead Of Their Time And 6 That Aged Poorly
THE Samantha Jones is heading back to our screens (briefly), as Kim Cattrall is reprising the role in a cameo appearance in the next season of And Just Like That:
Samantha was known for being the most sexually liberated and open-minded among the iconic foursome, but she still occasionally had some…bad takes:
Let’s take a walk down memory lane to the moments when Samantha Jones was ahead of her time, but also the moments that I wish never existed?:
1.
Ahead of Her Time: When Samantha was propositioned by a gay male couple to have a threesome, and she explained why she was considering it.
2.
Aged Poorly: When Samantha complained about the Black trans sex workers outside her apartment building and called them a derogatory term.
3.
Ahead of Her Time: When Charlotte freaked out about her boyfriend asking her to have anal sex, and Samantha gave her some advice.
4.
Aged Poorly: When she shamed Miranda for not waxing.
5.
Ahead of Her Time: When Miranda and Carrie thought that oral-anal contact was weird but Samantha felt the opposite.
6.
Aged Poorly: When she dated a Black man and made racist comments about their interracial relationship.
7.
Ahead of Her Time: When she was open-minded enough to explore her attraction to another woman.
8.
Aged Poorly: When Samantha broke up with Maria because they talked about their feelings too much, which perpetuated the stereotype about romantic relationships between women.
9.
Ahead of Her Time: When Carrie wasn’t sure she wanted to date a bisexual man, and Samantha told her it shouldn’t be an issue.
10.
Aged Poorly: When Samantha went to Abu Dhabi and disrespected their culture by pushing her Westernized ideas on them and implied that their culture was backward.
11.
Ahead of Her Time: When Samantha tried getting a position working for a hotel tycoon who rarely hired women, and she called out this double standard.
12.
Aged Poorly: When Samantha called her boyfriend’s sister racialized insults because she didn’t want him dating a white woman.
13.
And lastly, Ahead of Her Time: When Samantha broke up with Smith because she was losing her identity in their relationship and loved herself more than she loved him.
Tennis star Naomi Osaka and rapper Cordae revealed the gender of their first child together.
It’s a baby girl!
In an Instagram post Friday, Osaka posed in a Nike shirt and white cargo pants in front of a backdrop adorned with pastel pink and purple balloons, flowers, butterflies and a stuffed mushroom. The wall read, “A little princess in on the way.”
Cordae, in his Burberry baby shower shirt, reposted the image of him kissing the 25-year-old’s pregnant belly to his Instagram story, saying “#GirlDad.”
Osaka received an outpouring of congratulations from the tennis world and beyond in the comments section.
The Billie Jean King Cup, in addition to tennis players Gaël Monfils, Coco Gauff and Ons Jabeur, extended congratulations to the couple. So did swim star Michael Phelps.
Nike wrote “Congratulations,” with accompanying baby bottle and tennis ball emoji.
Actors Taraji P. Henson, Lena Waithe and Kate Hudson also shared their congratulations.
In January, Osaka announced she was expecting with her boyfriend of four years by sharing a sonogram photo on social media.
“One thing I’m looking forward to is for my kid to watch one of my matches and tell someone, ‘That’s my mom,’ haha,” she wrote in a Notes app statement at the time.
Osaka is a four-time Grand Slam champion. She hasn’t played a match since September 2022 and withdrew from this year’s Australia Open.
“2023 will be a year that’ll be full of lessons for me, and I hope I’ll see you all in the start of the next of one cause I’ll be at Aus 2024,” she said in January. “I don’t think there’s a perfect correct path to take in life, but I always felt that if you move forward with good intentions you’ll find your way eventually.”
Since then, Renner has been focused on his recovery and has seen remarkable progress that fans have seen through posts on his social media accounts.
Jeremy Renner Talks His Post-Injury Marvel Future
Marvel
Jeremy Renner appeared as a guest at the Phoenix Fan Fusion convention in Arizona on Friday, June 2, and spoke about his future career post his operation.
As per @LegionofSand on Twitter, the actor said he’d be there “in a heartbeat” if Marvel called him:
“If Marvel wants me back, I’ll do it in a heartbeat.”
According to @ParksAndCons, Renner prefaced this by saying he “isn’t going anywhere” and plans to continue acting, depending on what his family allows.
Where Could Jeremy Renner Return in The MCU?
The world was shocked after Renner’s accident, but now that the actor appears to be well on the road to recovery, the question remains when and where could he appear in the MCU next.
The ending of Hawkeye was certainly open-ended enough to allow for more episodes, however, no word has been given on whether another season is in the works. To date the only MCU Disney+ series to go beyond one season are Loki and What If…?.
Should a second season of Hawkeye happen, that seems like the most likely place for Renner to return in the MCU. Although, as one of the surviving original team members, it remains possible he could receive the call for Avengers: The Kang Dynasty as well.
In the past three years, Miller was arrested for numerous crimes, including assault and harassment, leaving many to wonder if this would impact the actor’s movie appearances as well as those movies’ chances at success.
The Flash 2 Gets Update Amid Controversy With Ezra Miller
DC Studios
Variety revealed new information about a sequel to DC Studios’ The Flash, which is said to feature a couple of major DC heroes alongside Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen.
Back in October 2022, The Hollywood Reporter shared the news that the script for The Flash 2 was completed, having been penned by Aquamanwriter David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick. It’s still unclear how it will fit into the changing DC landscape now that DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn has creative control of the new DCU.
Johnson-McGoldrick’s script for The Flash 2 is said to heavily feature Michael Keaton’sBatman and Sasha Calle’sSupergirl as guest stars, although it doesn’t give an update on Miller’s status as The Flash.
Will The Flash 2 Move Forward With Ezra Miller?
Along with the controversy surrounding Ezra Miller, there are still a number of questions regarding how The Flash will fit in with James Gunn’s new slate of projects that will take the DCU in a new direction.
Gunn and Safran have even commented on Miller’s status, with Safran explaining that the actor is “fully committed to the recovery right now” as their first DC solo movie preps to release.
While there are no signs pointing to what the story would be in The Flash 2, it seems clear that DC has big plans for both Calle and Keaton, even while other reports indicated that a Keaton-centric solo movie was canceled in the changeover.
Even just a few years ago, many of us naively believed that streaming services would act as constantly-growing libraries of content that we could return to whenever to watch shows at will. Then, last year, Warner Bros. Discovery fired the first big shot in The Great Write-Down. Disney followed suit last month and now says there’s more to come, Variety reports.
Following the removal of shows and movies like Willow, Y: The Last Man, Dollface, and the Mysterious Benedict Society, Disney is expected to incur a content impairment charge of $1.5 billion, meaning that the company can remove that much from its tax sheet. That’s an impossible number to ignore–that’s savings equivalent to a handful of Marvel movies. As a result, Disney is reportedly continuing to review content on both Disney+ and Hulu, and “currently anticipates additional produced content will be removed from its DTC and other platforms, largely during the remainder of its third fiscal quarter.” That will likely equate to about $400 million more in impairment charges related to produced content (primarily meaning scripted television and film).
Since the early days of Netflix creating streaming content for its platform, streaming services have been growing and growing their libraries. So many people have joined streaming services, though, that growth is slowing significantly; there just aren’t as many new customers as there used to be. It’s about retaining existing users and bringing back others that have switched to other services.
A more reliable way to help widen the gap between spend and revenue is to focus on finding ways to reduce costs on the backend. Shelving content that Disney feels costs more than it’s worth means that the company doesn’t have to shell out for residual payments to actors and writers (the latter of whom are currently striking for better pay among other things), and doesn’t have to pay licensing fees to external parties.
Disney CEO Bob Iger said on Disney’s most recent earnings call that he was “confident that we’re on the right path for streaming’s long-term profitability,” and that the company would be “rationalizing the volume of the content we make and what we’re spending.” Iger also expects that Disney will raise the price of its Disney+ service “to better reflect the value of our content offerings.”
We can likely expect more of this type of news coming not just from Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney, but companies like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, followed by newer options like Peacock and Paramount+ in the coming years as they seek sustainable profit in the face of slowing growth.
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Aputure is finally giving us the power that productions need. But is it enough to usurp the throne of output?
Lighting has evolved so much in the last few years. However, many of the awesome innovations have been seen in compact lighting solutions. For massive output, HMI still remained king.
In this quest to change that, Aputure has unveiled the Electro Storm XT26, a beefy 2600W fixture that it hopes will change our reliance on HMIs. Packed with a nice set of features, will this point-source LED fixture revolutionize how we use potent lights?
Unleashing The Power
At the heart of the Electro Storm XT26 lies a 2600W high-output LED engine. Aputure claims this will approach industry-standard 12,000W tungsten Fresnels and 4,000W HMIs but with LEDs. This would make the fixture a true powerhouse, capable of illuminating large sets without the massive heat output.
With these lights on set, we can be safe in saying goodbye to traditional tungsten lights.
But what about HMIs? If the power output, color accuracy, and features set are anything to go by, Aputure is slowly ushering HMI out the door. More on that later.
A massive light for massive output. XT26 3D renderCredit: Aputure
Dynamic White CCT and Tint Control
To maintain accurate color rendition, the Electro Storm XT26 features a powerful chipset that produces precise color throughout its CCT range from 2,700K to 6,500K.
With SSI (Daylight) [74+] and SSI (Tungsten) [85+] scores, Aputure delivers impressive color accuracy for an LED fixture.
Moreover, the latest-generation dynamic white chipset introduces green-magenta color correction with +/- .050dUV shift between 3,000K to 6,000K, which Aputure claims will allow creatives to better match their lighting sources.
Versatility and Control
But all the power and color won’t do you any good if the light is clunky to use. That’s a big issue with HMIs. They can be big and hot.
One of the standout features of the Electro Storm XT26 is its dual accessory mount system. Combining the universal Bowens Mount and the all-new electronic A-Mount compatibility, Aputure has created a fixture that adapts to any lighting setup.
The electronic A-Mount not only enhances stability and durability but also allows for optimized color accuracy and motorized focus control. Furthermore, with the universal Bowens Mount, filmmakers will have access to a wide range of third-party modifiers and accessories.
Electronic yokeCredit: Aputure
For connectivity, the Electro Storm XT26 comes equipped with Sidus Link app control, wireless DMX via the latest LumenRadio TimoTwo CRMX chipset, Art-net & sACN via etherCON, and 16-bit 5-Pin DMX512 In & Out. This is a nice touch if you’re not in the Aputure ecosystem and want other connectivity options.
Aputure also claims that the Electro Storm XT26 will have an IP65 rating, which means it can withstand dust and low-pressure water jets from any direction, making it a reliable tool even in harsh filming environments. Just don’t go dunking it in water just yet.
So, Will It Replace HMIs?
Will this replace HMIs? Maybe? While the Electro Storm XT26 is positioned as a powerful point-source LED fixture, it’s worth exploring how it compares to the traditional HMI lights that have long been a staple in the film industry.
The power output of the Electro Storm XT26 is impressive, but Aputure still has a way to go to meet the output of 6K, 12K, or even 18K HMI lights. However, the real benefit of switching to LED comes from the power consumption. So it’ll all depend on what your budget and set will allow.
Both the Electro Storm XT26 and HMI lights are designed to produce accurate color rendition. However, the Electro Storm XT26 goes a step further with the dynamic white chipset that includes green-magenta color correction. This allows for greater control over the color temperature and tint, ensuring color accuracy throughout the CCT range.
M-Series HMICredit: ARRI
Heat and portability will always be a winner for some sets and filmmakers. HMI lights are notorious for generating significant heat during operation, which can be a concern at best and dangerous at worst, especially in confined spaces.
The Electro Storm XT26 addresses this issue by using liquid-cooling technology, which should keep it humming throughout the day. I guess we have gaming PCs to thank for that one.
The power supply. (vertical photo extended with Photoshop AI Generative Fill)Credit: Aputure
HMI lights also typically require bulky external ballasts to operate, adding to the overall size and weight of the lighting setup. In contrast, the Electro Storm XT26 is designed with a more compact form factor and integrated power supply, allowing for easier portability and quicker setup times. Additionally, the XT26 supports battery operation, providing greater flexibility for shooting in remote locations or situations where access to power sources is limited. I can already feel the generator manufacturers sweating.
Finally, HMI lights rely on gas-filled bulbs that have a limited lifespan and require periodic replacement. In contrast, the Electro Storm XT26 utilizes LED technology known for its long lifespan and low maintenance requirements. LEDs also have a significantly longer operational life, reducing the need for frequent bulb changes and the associated downtime.
Having said all that, it’s important to note that HMI lights still have their strengths and are widely used in the film industry. They offer a long-established lighting solution with a proven track record, meaning Aputure still has a long way to go to win over favor. But it’s still an exciting alternative with its powerful output, robust feature set, versatility, and energy efficiency.
Is This Light For You?
With its 2600W power output, dynamic white CCT and tint control, versatile accessory mounts, professional connectivity options, and rugged construction, the Electro Storm XT26 is a force to be reckoned with.
As we eagerly await its availability in Q4 2023, I’m excited about how this new tech will redefine sets around the world.
But what do you think? Let us know in the comments!
A group of high-profile writers including Julie Plec and new Station 19showrunner Zoanne Clack opened up about the WGA strike and the main issues surrounding the walkout at the ATX Television Festival.
“We’re mad,” said the The Vampire Diaries co-creator, who was speaking at the panel session alongside Clack, Greg Iwinski, who has written on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and moderator Beau Willimon, who developed Netflix’s House of Cards. Damon Lindelof was originally intended to be on the panel but was a no-show.
“The lack of care for the artists and content creators has reached a breaking point. Before we didn’t have the support of other unions but now everyone is as mad as we are. We have this community of raw anger, there’s an enemy in this and it’s not us. The second thing is god bless them, millennials and Gen Z, a community of folks who have seen the shit hit them… everything in this generation is about taking the fight to the streets. There’s an energy of activism, this is how they’re wired and how they breathe,” Plec added. “We have the spirit of grassroots revolution.”
Plec, who has Girls on the Bus coming to Max and We Were Liars at Amazon, said she was lucky to reap the benefits in her career but is striking to protect those who come next. “I have friends who have worked 15 years straight who don’t have jobs today and those that do are taking the jobs at 30%, 40%, 50% and 60% less pay,” she added.
Iwinski, who is also on the WGA East’s Negotiating Committee highlighted the fact that many writers have to live in LA and New York to do their jobs, which “are not cheap”. “Having to do that in a situation where now you can be someone who writes on a hit television show and makes $80,000 a year and has to be on food stamps, even though your show is being nominated for awards that the studio is happy to take credit for,” he said.
She also addressed one of the main issues for writers – being on set during production. “You have to be on set. You have to learn these things, you have to learn to edit. You have to learn all of it, in order to get to the next stage and to be a showrunner that can do the job,” she said. “There’s also this culture of very young people coming in and not being in the writers room and not being on shows and being made showrunners. Sometimes that works out fine, but sometimes they need a lot of help. It’s also just degrading to yourself if you have now been handed this million dollar industry to manage… and you don’t have the skills.”
It was also pointed out that negotiations with the AMPTP and the WGA consisted largely on labor lawyers and business affairs execs rather than the heads of the studios. “I like to think that if Donna Langley or Susan Rovner or Pearlena Igbokwe were all in the room making these decisions, this would be a much easier conversation,” said Plec. “I don’t know who’s at the top.”
Iwinski used an NBA analogy when discussing the issue of mini-rooms. “What if we just had like two all-stars and they did the whole game?”, he said. “They’ll just have the ball they can pass to each other and everyone else is going what is happening. That’s what’s happening with staff size is they’re going well what if these two all-star writers just write all the episodes. If you’re a really important white dude, you can go yeah, whatever or no, I want six writers. If you’re a lower level or mid level writer or a woman or person of color or a woman of color, and you go actually they need six writers, they’ll just say no, because the white guy didn’t need them so you don’t need them. That is why we are fighting to the death for [room sizes].”
Iwinski also talked about AI. He said some execs are “very susceptible to vaporware”. “There is some element of AI that is going to be people promising the moon and delivering a mountain,” he said. “The real issue here is what you’re seeing with the studios is what if it doesn’t matter that it’s good.”
How do you even begin to reboot something as iconic as “Grease”? It’s no easy task, but “Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies” proves that it’s certainly possible.
The hit Paramount+ series takes audiences back to the 1950s — even further back than the original 1978 film did. Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson fell in love in the summer of 1958, but “Rise of the Pink Ladies” begins in 1954 as the girl gang that Bettie Rizzo would eventually rule is attempting to reverse their fortunes and rise to prominence in the halls of Rydell High School. The series expands on the lore that made “Grease” so beloved, and adds origin stories for several of the film’s most popular songs — while introducing a new set of tunes that are modern classics in their own right.
Attendees at IndieWire’s Consider This Event in Los Angeles on Saturday were treated to a panel featuring “Rise of the Pink Ladies” director and executive producer Alethea Jones, choreographer Jamal Sims, costume designer Samantha Hawkins, and hair department head Jaala Leis Wanless. The biggest difference in presenting the 1950s the team wanted to convey? Just how diverse the ’50s was.
“Over the pandemic I watched a lot of Technicolor musicals [from the ’50s],” Jones said. “I think they’re amazing and spectacular, but they’re incredibly white and straight. And there were way more than just white people in the ‘50s. Diversity was there then, it just wasn’t represented.”
LA’s Jefferson High School was where much of 1978’s “Grease” was shot, and series creator Annabel Oakes discovered something unique about it. “The yearbook was from 1954,” Jones said. “And there were a lot of Black kids, Latinx kids, Japanese-American kids too, and ultimately it reflected something that was not in the 1978 movie.”
Choreographer Jamal Sims related his mom’s experience to the work he contributed to “Rise of the Pink Ladies” to bring a more diverse vision to the “Grease” prequel. “My mom was in the homecoming court and she was the only Black woman on that stage,” he said. “Everyone else was white. When looking at those photos I thought, wow, how brave she was.”
The original “Grease” was based on co-writer Jim Jacobs’ own ’50s high school experience, and the thing Sims loved the most was discovering that there in fact had been a real girl-gang at that school: one that directly inspired the Pink Ladies.
For Hawkins and Wanless, the challenge to give a new dimension to the “Grease” lore was daunting. But they were inspired by how they could show a different side to the ’50s.
“Dressing greasers who were from the Latinx community, and Nancy [Tricia Fukuhara] is Japanese, was so meaningful because they were there in the ‘50s and part of this culture, but you to have dig deeper to find them because they weren’t depicted,” Hawkins said.
“Annabel Oakes did an amazing job of talking to people who lived in that era and had been part of this kind of environment,” Wanless said. “I then looked at old issues of Jet and researched doo-wop culture. We wanted it to be historically accurate but through a modern-day lens.”
Your weekly horoscope is here. Love takes a dramatic leap into the flames of desire, so go with over-the-top sentiment and bold declarations. This season, compliments and grand gestures really do get you everywhere! Balcony scenes like Romeo and Juliet? No problem. Sending flowers? Yes Ma’am! Have fun and be playful while also protecting your heart. Playing it safe? Discover your creative side and make a new friend while unleashing your inner Davinci.
Read on to discover your weekly horoscope and what’s in store for your sign during the week of June 4 through June 10, 2023.
Aries
The planet of love, beauty, and desire sashays into your zone of dating and leisure right through to October. So dust off your drum kit or whatever you’ve got going on and get creative. Self-expression and fame through personal interest and talent come under the auspices of this fiery alignment, so less work and more play. Better yet, do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life, as the saying goes. Swipe right, fill your dance card, and win or break hearts; you have four months to refine a talent or search for love. Sign up for a dating show; why not?! Or take time out to work on your vitamin D levels by a pool and relax.
Taurus
Pleasure and beauty are found in domesticity, or at least in giving your nest a bit of va va voom. As your ruling planet, Venus is signing on for an extended stay in this zone, you may as well do her bidding. Associated with relationship harmony, the way to your or someone else’s heart is through hosting grammable experiences and bringing the party home. Even if it’s a soft glow-up, fluff the cushions, paint a wall, and make your space reflect your creative personality. This is your canvas; you can make it anything you want. In a rental? Pick up a vintage coffee table and paint the surface, try your hand at mosaic or tile, then start again if you don’t like it. Set up a drawing space if that’s more of your jam. This is the time to test drive your creative side without the pressure of presenting it to the world.
NOW IN THEATERS! The sign of a good romance is just how emotionally wrecked you feel by the end. Writer-director Celine Song’s Past Lives hits all the right emotional chords for an intelligent tale about love and past/passed opportunities. We begin with two smitten teens, Nora (Moon Seung-ah) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). Both are high school students in South Korea, but Nora’s family is about to move to Canada. Seeing that Nora is sad about leaving, her mother takes the two on a date to the park as a gift in some strange way.
Years later, Nora (Greta Lee) is in a writer’s graduate program, and Hae is just starting his professional career. He has been searching social media for her whereabouts. Nora accepts Hae’s friend request, and the two pick up their friendship right where they left off. However, when the two realize their paths are going in two very different directions, Nora says she needs a break and cuts off communication with Hae. Another time jump and Nora is married to Arthur (John Magaro) and living in New York. Hae decides that he needs to fly to New York to confess his feelings of love for Nora that have built up over the decades.
Past Lives is one of the most clever and thoughtful romances that I’ve seen in a long time. It’s very much a romance in that we have two soulmates who have been separated by fate and now circumstance and explore their unresolved feelings. After recently breaking up with his girlfriend, Hae is ready to pursue the love he’s felt since his youth. But Nora is now married, out of convenience, to Arthur, which makes the situation much more complicated than you’d imagine.
“…ready to pursue the love he’s felt since his youth. But Nora is now married…”
One of the most unique elements of this love triangle is that Hae does not speak English, and Arthur knows very little Korean. So now Nora has to play an intermediary to this awkward new “friendship” as she becomes privy to both Hae and Arthur’s feelings about the situation.
I used “clever” to describe Past Lives, and I’m specifically referring to the precision of words, dialogue, and performances. Everything on screen serves a purpose in telling Song’s story so that the actor’s portrayal of their characters never has to state how they feel. We see it on their faces. Also, as I started asking questions about the love triangle, particularly Arthur’s feelings about the situation, the filmmaker swoops in with the answer. On top of it, she masters the art of cinema in this film.
In the end, Past Lives plays with your brain and heart. It’s one of those films that leaves you thinking about and yearning for what might have been. I sat there in my head and in my heart, thinking about what I just saw, and that’s what makes a good romance. Also, how in the hell is this Greta Song’s first movie? There is more work put into this film than your typical veteran director.
Another northern Quebec town was evacuated due to an out of control wildfire on Saturday as the federal government confirmed that Canadian Forces personnel would be deployed to help combat forest fires in the province.
About 2,000 residents of Lebel-sur-Quevillon were the latest to receive a mandatory evacuation notice on Friday evening due to forest fires.
The municipality, about 620 kilometres northwest of Montreal, recommended those who couldn’t stay with relatives should leave with an emergency kit and head to Senneterre, about 90 kilometres south of the community.
Lebel-sur-Quevillon officials issued a social media update on Saturday saying the fire continued to threaten the municipality even though its spread had slowed overnight. There was heavy smoke throughout the town and forest fire prevention teams were doing trenchwork in the area to protect it.
We have now approved this request. @CanadianForces will provide firefighting resources and assist with planning and coordination to support the wildfire response in the province. https://t.co/9j0M7EWo19
In the North Shore community of Sept-Iles, where a state of emergency was declared Friday morning, an evacuation order for residents of certain sectors of town remained in place. It was the same story in the nearby Innu community of Mani-Utenam, where 1,500 residents belonging to the Uashat Mak Mani-utenam First Nation have been relocated.
The wildfires remained largely stable in the area, not having progressed much overnight. Sept-Iles Mayor Steeve Beaupré said no new evacuations were planned, but residents of one sector remained on alert in case the situation changed. About 5,000 people were forced from their homes as a precaution in the city about 890 kilometres northeast of Montreal.
Quebec forest fire prevention organization SOPFEU reports there are 136 active fires in the province, including about 20 that are priorities because they threaten residences or infrastructure.
J’ai parlé à @JustinTrudeau aujourd’hui concernant les feux de forêt. Tout le monde met le maximum d’efforts et est mobilisé. Merci à tous les gens déployés sur le terrain. Courage aux populations touchées.
— François Legault (@francoislegault) June 3, 2023
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Federal Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair confirmed Saturday the federal government had approved a request from Quebec seeking military assistance, and Canadian Forces troops will be providing firefighting resources and help with wildfire response planning and coordination.
About 100 soldiers were expected Saturday in the region, according to Employment Minister Kateri Champagne Jourdain, who is also the minister responsible for the Cote-Nord region. Another 100 soldiers were expected on Sunday, she told a briefing.
Meanwhile there was good news for the residents of Chapais, another northern Quebec town, where the local mayor said residents can return home later after being forced to evacuate on Wednesday evening.
Isabelle Lessard’s announcement was met with applause from residents of the town about 715 kilometres northeast of Montreal.
“The fact that the fire has not gotten bigger also shows that what has been done (to stop spread) is effective,” Lessard said, but added residents shouldn’t let their guard down and must abide by provincial notices.
This week, the province asked people to stay out of forests and banned open fires in or near forests across the province.
–with files from Alessia Simona Maratta, Global News
“I mean, yeah, if they don’t pay them properly, but I have no idea,” the 32-year-old Bravo personality — who married cast member Scheana Shay in August 2022 — exclusively quipped to Us Weekly on Friday, June 2, while promoting his Homebody fitness program. “That’s not my world, honestly. I learned very quickly after season 9. I think my best place is by Scheana’s side, not in front of her, [but] by her side and [supporting] her. However, that means going through filming and going through all of this, and I think that’s the same for all the cast.”
The Australia native further added that he will follow “whatever” production — and Shay, 38 — chooses to do. “My position is next to Scheana,” he told Us. “I support that because it’s not worth going up to my wife and having an opinion about this when I don’t need to have an opinion. It’s up to them.”
“I have no idea what it is,” Davies said on Friday. “I mean, honestly, no one really saw any of this coming, so no one really knows what’s coming, so it’s gonna be a surprise to everybody. We haven’t even seen the next episode. They’re holding it for everybody to see worldwide or everyone’s see it at the same time.”
“It’s exciting. It’s something that we’ve working towards,” he told Us of Homebody’s next step. “We didn’t know what the vision was [when] we came together. We knew what we wanted to do, which was help creators, and then along that journey with Sophia and Nicole, we really started building momentum and then really leveraging everything we had and putting our effort into this first time around as a startup. To come out the other end with an acquisition is [the] ultimate goal. A lot of startups don’t even make it off the ground. So that we got off the ground [and] we got to where we’re [at is] just pretty cool. It speaks for itself, really.”
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Mark Zuckerberg embraced a digital world known as the metaverse when he said in November 2021 that he was changing his company’s name from Facebook to Meta.
A month later, Bill Gates, a founder of Microsoft, wrote that within two or three years, he believed most virtual meetings would transition from two-dimensional grids of video “to the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars.”
Soon after, Microsoft announced that it would spend $70 billion to buy the video game giant Activision Blizzard and said the deal would “provide building blocks for the metaverse.”
But since then, interest in the metaverse has stalled. Technology investors have moved on to new trends like artificial intelligence. And some metaverse projects have been shuttered at companies like Disney and Microsoft, despite that burst of enthusiasm.
Enter Apple. At its Worldwide Developers Conference starting on Monday, the tech giant is expected to debut its virtual reality hardware product: high-tech goggles that blend together the digital and physical worlds.
The company is betting that it can tempt consumers with mixed reality products better than Meta, whose high-end Quest Pro headsets have not sold well, and that it can ignite mainstream interest in virtual reality in a way that other companies have not. The Apple headset is expected to cost about $3,000 and will look like ski goggles, according to current and former employees familiar with its development.
Apple has done this before. Eventual hits like the iPod, iPhone and Apple Watch started in niche markets that grew into big businesses. But even Apple executives have been skeptical about the company’s prospects in virtual reality, which, they say, may still not be ready for its mainstream moment.
Apple declined to comment.
The idea of an immersive, all-encompassing online universe made more sense to many investors when people weren’t leaving their homes during the height of the pandemic. Metaverse-related start-ups raised about $664 million in venture capital in the first five months of 2023, a drastic drop from the more than $2.93 billion they raised in the same period in 2022, according to data compiled by PitchBook. That drop-off cuts recent metaverse start-up investment to about a quarter of its peak in the first half of 2022, PitchBook said.
“The metaverse investment fad — it came and went, and now people are focused on A.I.,” said Doug Creutz, an analyst at Cowen & Company. “The people who were hopping on it because it was a sexy thing to talk about have hopped back off.”
This year, Microsoft shuttered a virtual reality world, called AltspaceVR, that it acquired in 2017. The company also laid off some employees working on its HoloLens mixed reality headset and eliminated or reassigned teams that had been working on metaverse projects, according to a person familiar with the changes.
In a statement, Microsoft said it was still committed to the metaverse and pointed to the news that it was rolling out three-dimensional avatars for Microsoft Teams meetings.
Disney also laid off about 50 employees who had been working on metaverse projects, according to a person familiar with the cuts. News about Microsoft’s and Disney’s cuts was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.
At Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan to restructure the company around metaverse-centric technologies has been costly. Meta’s hardware unit, Reality Labs, which includes its Oculus headsets, is responsible for a significant part of Meta’s recent big increase in spending. That division lost about $4 billion in the first three months of this year.
Mr. Zuckerberg cautioned that building the metaverse would be a money-losing proposition with little promise of early returns. Still, it has taken much longer than he anticipated. In recent months, Mr. Zuckerberg and his lieutenants have spent more time talking up Meta’s expertise in A.I., though he has bristled at the notion that the metaverse is no longer his focus.
“A narrative has developed that we’re somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse vision,” he said in a call with investors in April. “So I just want to say upfront that that’s not accurate. We’ve been focusing on both A.I. and the metaverse for years now, and we will continue to focus on both.”
A Meta spokeswoman, Ashley Zandy, said: “We’ve always been clear that our metaverse vision is a long-term one, and nothing about that has changed. We are committed to our metaverse vision, and we’re seeing good momentum.”
On Thursday, Mr. Zuckerberg teased a version of the Meta Quest 3, the company’s latest VR headset, which will cost $499 and may come this year. Consumers have spent more than $1.5 billion on apps and games in Meta’s Quest app store to date.
For Apple, its new headset could be the beginning of a long-term plan that eventually leads to a more popular virtual reality product, like a lightweight pair of glasses.
Some analysts have suggested the company could take an experimental approach, gauging how early adopters use it and then making changes before marketing a future version to a broader audience. That would be similar to what it did with the Apple Watch. It was initially marketed as a general purpose companion to the iPhone but was later reframed as a fitness gadget.
Despite the decline in interest, many argue it’s far too soon to write off the idea of the metaverse. Companies that had been preaching the metaverse well before Meta popularized it, like Roblox and Epic Games, are still committed to their long-term visions.
Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist who has written a book about the metaverse, said the mainstream attention to the concept after Facebook changed its name had spurred outlandish predictions about how soon people would be spending their time in immersive online worlds.
“This was more about timeline mismanagement,” Mr. Ball said. “The intense focus on the metaverse within a short period of time, with some arguing it was here now or was about to be, was bound to disappoint many.”
With their tens of millions of participants, user-generated content and digital economies, Roblox and Epic Games, which produces the battle royale game Fortnite, could provide a more compelling vision of a metaverse.
Roblox, a platform with millions of games often aimed at children, had 66.1 million daily users in the first quarter of 2023, a 22 percent jump from a year earlier. Craig Donato, the company’s chief business officer, said that Roblox was working on expanding into other immersive online experiences, but that a full-fledged metaverse was still far away.
“We’re very much in the first or second inning,” Mr. Donato said.
In March, Epic Games released new tools designed to help Fortnite players create and make money from their own games on the company’s platform, spurring the creation of an online economy in Fortnite — a cornerstone of the vision of the metaverse preached by Tim Sweeney, the company’s chief executive. Mr. Sweeney said mainstream interest for the metaverse attracted people who weren’t really invested in the space.
“Unfortunately, a lot of people tried to attach themselves to that trend without really delivering the goods,” he said. “But if you look at the trend, it’s continuing to grow, and it continues to look like exponential growth.”
Brian X. Chen and Karen Weise contributed reporting.
Walt Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios cut 75 positions last week, including two executives who worked on the financial disappointment “Lightyear,” Reuters reported Saturday.
Angus MacLane, director of the “Toy Story” spinoff and a 26-year animation veteran, and Gayln Susman, producer on the film, were among those removed from their roles.
Amazon originals like Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, I’m A Virgo and Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets are just some of the titles hitting Prime Video this June.
Blockbusters like M3GAN, Creed and Creed II, TÁR, Armageddon Time, 12 Years a Slave, Brokeback Mountain, Happy Gilmore, Silver Linings Playbook and What to Expect When You’re Expecting will also be coming to the streamer this month.
Charmed, Everybody Hates Chris, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and The Brady Bunch are among the classic TV shows that will be available to stream on Prime Video, with new seasons of With Love and The Lake.
The fourth and final season ofTom Clancy’s Jack Ryan will see the titular character, played by John Krasinski, on his most dangerous mission yet, against a foreign and domestic enemy. According to the streamer, Jack Ryan uncovers a series of suspicious black ops that could expose the vulnerability of the country.
Boots Riley’s I’m A Virgo follows Cootie (Jharrel Jerome), a 13-foot young Black man in Oakland, California, who has grown up hidden away from the outside world until he escapes and experiences friendship and love and encounters his idol, a superhero played by Walton Goggins.
Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets exposes the truth beneath the Americana surface of mega-family the Duggars, and the controversial organization behind them, the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP). In the docuseries, “a number of ex-IBLP survivors come forward and reveal the abusive practices that kept them in a living nightmare,” Prime Video explains.
Below, check out the complete list of titles coming to Prime Video in June.
June 1
1984 12 Years a Slave 2 Days in New York 2 Days In The Valley 3:10 To Yuma A Woman Possessed Above the Rim All The Queen’s Men Season 1 Arrival Assault on Precinct 13 Baby Boy Bad Teacher Bananas Barnaby Jones Seasons 1-8 Billy Madison Black Dynamite Blankman Blazing Saddles Boyz N the Hood Breakin’ All The Rules Brokeback Mountain Bull Seasons 1-6 Charmed Seasons 1-8 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Clockstoppers Code of Silence Concussion Creed Creed II Cry Freedom Daddy Day Camp Dangerous Exile Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection Devil In A Blue Dress Dog Day Afternoon Eraser Evening Shade Seasons 1-4 Everybody Hates Chris Seasons 1-4 Exodus Flawless Getting Even With Dad Ghost Of Dragstrip Hollow Glory Gone in Sixty Seconds Green Zone Guess Who Happy Anniversary Happy Days Seasons 1-3 Happy Gilmore He Who Must Die Henry V Higher Learning Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Hot Cars Hot Fuzz Hot Rod Gang How Stella Got Her Groove Back Huk! I Am Ali I Am Bolt I’m Gonna Git You Sucka In My Country In Time Intersection It’s A Pleasure Jungle Heat The Kids Are All Right Kingdom of Heaven Lady Of Vengeance Laverne & Shirley Seasons 1-4 League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen Little Women (1949) Live and Let Die Lone Wolf McQuade Look Who’s Talking Lost Lagoon Love, Rosie MacArthur Machete Man In The Net Mannix Seasons 1-7 MasterChef Mexico All Stars Megamind Miles Ahead Mirai Mississippi Burning Mo’ Money Money Train Mork & Mindy Seasons 1-2 Muscle Shoals No Escape Notorious On Her Majesty’s Secret Service One Way Out Open Range Over The Top Pariah Peanuts: Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown Petticoat Junction Seasons 1-5 Philadelphia Purple Rain Reign of Fire Rejoice and Shout Rent Repo Men Riders To The Stars River’s Edge Robocop Run For The Sun Saved! School Daze Sea Fury Self/less Shadow of Suspicion Shaun of the Dead She Hate Me Shoot First Silver Linings Playbook Sliver Soul Food South Central Stargate Stomp The Yard: Homecoming Survivor Seasons 17-25 Switchback Ten Days To Tulara The Apartment The Brady Bunch Seasons 1-5 The Call The Color Purple (1986) The Danish Girl The Day the Earth Stood Still The Four Feathers The French Lieutenant’s Woman The Gift The Gospel According to Andre The Hot Chick The Longshots The Love Letter The Malta Story The Missing Lady The Neighborhood Seasons 1-4 The One That Got Away The Rabbit Trap The Relic The Return of the Living Dead The Scarf The Spanish Gardener The Time Machine The Transporter The War of the Worlds The Wild Wild West The World’s End The Young Doctors Things We Lost in the Fire Three Can Play That Game Timbuktu To Sir, With Love To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am Too Many Crooks Top Of The World Transamerica Transporter 2 Triple Deception True Lies Two Can Play That Game Tyson UFO Uncommon Valor Van Wilder 2: The Rise Of Taj Venus and Serena Vice Walking Tall: The Payback Walking Target Webster Seasons 1-4 What to Expect When You’re Expecting Wings Seasons 1-8 Without a Paddle: Nature’s Calling World’s Greatest Dad Wuthering Heights You Got Served You Have to Run Fast Yours, Mine & Ours
June 2
An Unforgettable Year – Summer Deadloch Medellin Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets With Love Season 2
June 6
Crazy Rich Asians Sully TÁR
June 8
My Fault
June 9
An Unforgettable Year – Autumn The Lake Season 2
June 11
Interstellar
June 16
An Unforgettable Year – Winter Ender’s Game Spoiler Alert The Grand Tour: Eurocrash There’s Something Wrong With The Children
June 20
Armageddon Time Selma
June 21
American Sniper
June 22
That Peter Crouch Film
June 23
An Unforgettable Year – Spring I’m A Virgo
June 26
Project Almanac
June 27
M3GAN The Gambler
June 30
Hot Tub Time Machine 2 Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan Season 4 The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water What If
May 1
A Beautiful Mind Amistad Babe Babe: Pig In The City Babel Beavis and Butt-Head Do America Biker Boyz Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure Blue Crush Blue Crush 2 Bound Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason Bridget Jones’s Baby Carrie Coneheads Dallas Buyers Club Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood: You Are Special, Daniel Tiger! Daniel Visits A New Neighborhood Darkest Hour Dinner for Schmucks Drillbit Taylor Europa Report Failure to Launch Fatal Attraction Fletch Fletch Lives Forgetting Sarah Marshall Get Him to the Greek Ghost Town Gunfight at the O.K. Corral Hamburger Hill Hard Eight Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle Howard the Duck I Am Not Your Negro Identity Thief Invasion of the Body Snatchers Kung Fu Hustle Leap Year Madagascar Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted Mamma Mia! MasterChef Mexico Seasons 1-4 Meet Joe Black Memoirs of a Geisha Moonrise Kingdom Nutty Professor II: The Klumps Patriot Games Reminiscence Rise: Blood Hunter Rumble In The Bronx Safe House Saving Face Shutter Island Space Jam The Adventures of Tintin The Black Stallion The Doors The Front Page The Heartbreak Kid The Nutty Professor The Quiet Man The Rundown The Shootist The Terminal The Wiz Thelma & Louise They Might Be Giants Three Days of the Condor True Grit Virtuosity We Were Soldiers
¡Hasta la Madre! del día de las madres Tommy Little: Pretty Fly for a Dickhead
May 9
Till
May 10
La Vida Despues del Reality
May 11
Academy of Country Music Awards
May 16
Zarna Garg: One in a Billion Comedy Special
May 18
The Ferragnez – The Series Season 2 The Three Drinkers In Cognac Season 3
May 19
She Said
May 23
Three Thousand Years of Longing
May 26
Hohlbeins’ – The Gryphon Violent Night
May 28
Top Five
May 29
Hot Pursuit
April 1
American Gigolo At the Gate of the Ghost Bend It Like Beckham Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 Couples Retreat Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Death Wish 2 Death Wish 3 Death Wish 4: The Crackdown Dirty Pretty Things Face/Off Fast Times At Ridgemont High Fighting with My Family Forrest Gump Jesse Stone: Benefit of the Doubt Jesse Stone: Innocents Lost Jesse Stone: Lost in Paradise Jesse Stone: No Remorse Jesse Stone: Thin Ice Jet Li’s Fearless Jigsaw Jumping the Broom Keeping the Faith Liar Liar Life of Pi Lifeguard Mary and The Witch’s Flower Max Payne McLintock Moonlight and Valentino Morning Glory My Cousin Vinny Ong Bak Philomena Racing with the Moon Ray School Ties Shanghai Knights Shanghai Noon Shrek Forever After Small Soldiers Soul Surfer Speed Staying Alive Tales From the Darkside: The Movie Terminator Genisys The Aviator The Big Lebowski The Breakfast Club The Descendants The Joy Luck Club The Longest Yard The Mechanic The Medallion The Sisters Brothers The Two Faces of January The Young Messiah Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Titanic To the Wonder Top Gun Vanilla Sky We’re No Angels Whiplash Young Sherlock Holmes
April 4
Bros Redefined: J.R. Smith
April 6
Lizzy Hoo: Hoo Cares!?
April 7
On a Wing and a Prayer Gangs of Lagos
April 11
Ticket to Paradise
April 12
Alter Ego Big Bad Wolves Herbie Hancock: Possibilities Kill Me Three Times Life Itself The Quest of Alain Ducasse Whose Streets?
April 14
Greek Salad
April 19
Bigger, Stronger, Faster Chai Lai Angels: Dangerous Flowers Demon Warriors Happy Happy I Melt With You Magic Trip Playback Vanishing on 7th Street
April 21
Dead Ringers Judy Blume Forever
April 26
Crazy Love Syrup
April 28
Citadel
March 1
12 Angry Men A Fish Called Wanda Akeelah and The Bee American Gangster Barbershop Barefoot in the Park Being John Malkovich Big Daddy Capote Carrie Carrie Cinderella Man Cloverfield Contraband Courageous Creed Creed II Dazed and Confused Def Comedy Jam Seasons 1-7 Detroit Duck Soup Elizabeth Elizabeth: The Golden Age Eye for an Eye Flesh and Bone Good Will Hunting Imagine That Internal Affairs Jonah: A VeggieTales Movies Kevin Hart: Laugh At My Pain Leaving Las Vegas Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels Lost in Translation Margin Call Midnight Cowboy Minnie and Moskowitz Nerve Nowitzki: The Perfect Shot Once Upon a Time in the West Ordinary People Paths of Glory Pulp Fiction RBG Red River Rocky Rocky Balboa Rocky II Rocky III Rocky IV Rocky V Sahara Scent of a Woman Shine A Light Sterile Cuckoo Street Smart Super 8 The Apartment The Babysitter The Dead Zone The Defiant Ones The Expendables 2 The Expendables 3 The Frozen Ground The Hunted The Hunter The Last Temptation of Christ The Machinist The Manchurian Candidate The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie The Presidio The Virgin Suicides Unlocked Vanilla Sky Vanity Fair VeggieTales: An Easter Carol VeggieTales: Lord of the Beans VeggieTales: Noah’s Ark VeggieTales: ‘Twas The Night Before Easter Witness For the Protection Your Highness
March 3
Daisy Jones & The Six The Pimp – No F***ing Fairytale
March 6
The Magnificent Seven
March 7
Secret Headquarters The Silent Twins The Visitor
March 10
Jackass Forever This Is Christmas
March 11
La Guzman Season 1
March 12
Men, Women & Children
March 14
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
March 17
Angel Flight Boy and the World Class of ‘07 Dom Swarm
March 21
Nope
March 22
Sanandresito
March 24
Reggie Top Gun: Maverick
March 28
Big Trip 2: Special Delivery
March 29
American Renegades Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
March 31
Boss Season 1-2 But I’m a Cheerleader Enemies Closer Siberia The Power Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor Zeros and Ones
Feb. 1
A Night at the Roxbury Alex Cross Almost Famous Are We There Yet? A.I. Artificial Intelligence The Best Man The Breadwinner The Call Chaplin Children of Heaven Devil in a Blue Dress The Dilemma Downhill Racer Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room Exposed Food, Inc Four Brothers French Postcards From Justin to Kelly G.I. Joe: Retaliation The Glass Shield Heaven Can Wait The Help The Hustle I, Robot Inside Man Invasion of the Body Snatchers Jacob’s Ladder Kevin Hart Let Me Explain King Kong The Last Song Life Partners Madea’s Witness Protection Nacho Libre Never Been Kissed P.S. I Love You Prophecy Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown Rambo Rambo: Last Blood Rambo: Last Blood (Extended Cut) Sarafina! Scary Movie 4 Seabiscuit Shaft Shrek Shrek 2 Something Wild Soul Food Southside With You Sugar The Talented Mr. Ripley Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am Tsotsi Turbulence Tyson Underclassman Venus and Serena White House Down Who’s Your Caddy?
Feb. 3
Harlem Season 2 Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank
Feb. 7 Beast Brian and Charles
Feb. 8 Are We Done Yet?
Feb. 9 Crank
Feb. 10 Somebody I Used to Know
Feb. 11 If I Stay
Feb. 14
Halloween Ends
Feb. 17 Carnival Row Season 2 The Head of Joaquín Murrieta Three Thousand Years of Longing
Feb. 19 A Simple Favor
Feb. 21 Smile
Feb. 22 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)
Feb. 24 The Consultant Die Hart
Jan. 1 50/50 A.I. Artificial Intelligence After Earth Akeelah And The Bee Ali Antwone Fisher Are We There Yet? Baby Boy Barbershop 2: Back in Business Beauty Shop Black Dynamite Blankman Blue Chips Breakdown Breakin’ All The Rules Broken City Brown Sugar Clue Despicable Me Despicable Me 2 Dharma & Greg Seasons 1-5 Downsizing El Dorado El Mariachi Election Employee Of The Month Europa Report Failure to Launch Forces Of Nature Frankie & Alice Friday the 13th Gamer God’s Not Dead Guess Who Harold and Maude Higher Learning Home for the Holidays I Am Not Your Negro If Beale Street Could Talk In My Country In The Heat Of The Night Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Invader Zim Jesse Stone: Death in Paradise Jesse Stone: Night Passage Jesse Stone: Sea Change Jesse Stone: Stone Cold Juliet, Naked Just Wright Love the Coopers Mad Love Mean Creek Mission: Impossible Mission: Impossible II Mission: Impossible III Mission: Impossible IV – Ghost Protocol Mississippi Burning Mo’ Money Money Train Mr. 3000 Muscle Shoals Nella the Princess Knight O Brother, Where Art Thou? Paranormal Activity 2 Paranormal Activity 3 Paranormal Activity 4 Paycheck Poetic Justice Private Parts Rec Rec 2 Rec 3: Genesis Red Dawn Rejoice and Shout Rosemary’s Baby School Daze Serpico She Hate Me Shimmer and Shine Six Degrees of Separation Sorry To Bother You Tangerine The Amityville Horror The Big Wedding The Brady Bunch Movie The Butler The Devil’s Backbone The Duchess The Foot Fist Way The Gospel According To Andre The Love Guru The Peacemaker The Running Man The Sons of Katie Elder The Two Jakes Three Can Play That Game To Sir, With Love True Grit 12 O’Clock High Seasons 1-3 Walking Tall Welcome to Flatch Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Witness You Got Served
Jan. 3 Endeavour Season 8 Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul.
Jan. 6 Jurassic World Dominion Cosmic Love France The Rig
Jan. 8 The Winter Palace
Jan. 10 Snitch
Jan. 13 Hunters Season 2 The Test Season 2
Jan. 15 An Officer and a Gentleman Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Road Trip The Steve Harvey Show Seasons 1-6
Jan. 17 Vengeance
Jan. 20 The Legend of Vox Machina Season 2
Jan. 21 Hercules (2014)
Jan. 27 The King’s Speech Shotgun Wedding
Jan. 31 Orphan: First Kill Nate Bargatze: Hello World
Salman Khan, Allu Arjun and others poured their condolences amid Orrisa train accident. Shah Rukh Khan cheered for son Aryan Khan on the sets of his debut show.
Celebs from all over the country reacted to the horrific train accident in Orrisa. Shah Rukh Khan cheered for Aryan Khan on the sets of his debut show.
On Saturday, several film celebrities took to their respective social media handles to express grief and mourn the loss of those who passed away in the train accident. Salman Khan sent his prayers to the victims and tweeted, “Really saddened to hear abt the accident, May God rest the souls of the deceased in peace, Protect n give strength to the families n the injured from this unfortunate accident.”
The entertainment portal claimed that Aryan Khan was shooting in Worli, Mumbai for his debut show on Friday (June 2) when his father, Shah Rukh Khan also paid him a surprise visit. Reportedly, King Khan cheered his son – who reached on sets much before the call time i.e. 7 am.
In a post credit scene of Yash Raj Films’ blockbuster movie Pathaan, Bollywood’s two iconic stars, Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan, contemplate retirement. And while it’s Pathaan and Tiger talking in the scene, digging deeper into the metaphor, it becomes clear to see that their conversation is not about retiring from their spy roles as Pathaan and Tiger, but handing over the reins of the Hindi cinema to someone from the younger acting lot.
Standup comedian Zakir Khan recently took to social media and urged filmmakers to not force themselves from translating dialogues. He explained that if something is said or conveyed in English, it maybe difficult to translate it to another language ‘word to word’. Khan asked filmmakers to ‘relax’ and went on to say that there is no need to translate every word.
Vicky Kaushal and Sara Ali Khan starrer Zara Hatke Zara Bachke finally hit theatres on June 2 and registered decent numbers at the box office on its opening day. As reported by trade analyst Taran Adarsh, Zara Hatke Zara Bachke collected Rs 5.49 crores on Friday.
Yatamanyu is a multi-disciplinary Journalist & Photographer who dabbles in Films, Poetry, Music, Politics, Pop-Culture and everything in between. …Read More
During her Chicago stop of her Eras Tour on Friday evening, Taylor Swift took a moment to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community at the start of Pride Month, speaking out against America’s growing wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation.
“I wish that every place was safe and beautiful for people in the LGBTQ community,” said Swift. The singer-songwriter continued by sharing that she notices fans who are living “authentically and beautifully” and wants them to know that her shows are a “safe, celebratory space” for them.
Swift’s speech took place after her performance of “You Need to Calm Down,” with the singer thanking the arena of fans who passionately sang along to the song’s pro-LGBTQ lyrics.
While Swift celebrated the community, she reminded the concert-goers, “We can’t talk about pride without talking about pain.”
“Right now and in recent years, there have been so many harmful pieces of legislation that have put people in the LGBTQ and queer community at risk. It’s painful for everyone. Every ally, every loved one, every person in these communities,” said Swift.
Swift reminded the arena that these issues motivate her to stay vocal during election cycles. “That’s why I’m always posting, ‘This is when the midterms are’ and ‘This is when these important key primaries are.’” Swift then proposed her fans ask candidates, “‘Are they advocates? Are they allies? Are they protectors of equality? Do I want to vote for them?’” before heading to the ballot box.
Swift then concluded her speech telling the crowd, “I love you guys so much and happy Pride Month.”
See below for one concert-goer’s video of Swift’s full speech.
The animated Spider-Verse 2 is the latest movie to feature the Marvel web-slinger since 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, which also just so happened to deal with the concept of the Multiverse.
It’s safe to say expectations for the sequel to the Oscar-winning Into the Spider-Verse have been high, but it seems fans’ faith has not been misplaced.
Across the Spider-Verse Breaks IMDB Record
Marvel
Barely a day after its release, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse climbed its way to the top of IMDb’s user ratings.
Spider-Verse 2 currently holds a 9.1 rating, making it the highest user-rated superhero movie on IMDb, ranking above its predecessor Into the Spider-Verse and even Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.
The list of top-rated superhero movies on IMDb is as follows:
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – 9.1/10
The Dark Knight – 9.0/10
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – 8.4/10
Avengers: Endgame – 8.4/10
Avengers: Infinity War – 8.4/10
The Dark Knight Rises – 8.4/10
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 – 8.2/10
Spider-Man: No Way Home – 8.2/10
It’s worth noting that, at the time of writing, Across the Spider-Verse is ranked number 1 based on 19,000 user votes, whereas other films on the list, such as The Dark Knight, have over 2 million votes.
Spider-Verse 2 Swings To the Top
While it’s early, it’s still a huge achievement for Across the Spider-Verse to rank as the best superhero film on IMDB, beating out competitors like The Dark Knight and Avengers: Endgame.
Spider-Verse 2 has received rave reviews from critics since its release and audiences are clearly responding in a similar way. Many have praised the film’s emotional story, its talented cast, and the ways in which it builds on the franchise’s unique art style, which are likely all contributing factors to its favorable reviews.
It also belongs to what is considered one of the best superhero franchises in history. When Into the Spider-Verse was released in 2018 it became beloved as one of the best animated films ever made – with an Academy Award to prove it. Tom Holland even named it as his personal favorite Spider-Man film.
For Across the Spider-Verse to not only match but exceed that high bar is a huge accomplishment, but this IMDB score is a testament to that fact.
Now all that remains to be seen is whether Beyond the Spider-Verse can continue to raise the bar when it releases next year.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is now playing in theaters.
Embattled actor Ezra Miller will be making a public appearance this month in support of The Flash. Though Miller is the star of the superhero movie, the actor has not been taking part in any of the press coverage. That was expected, as there has been a lot of controversy attached to Miller over the past year due to the various criminal charges and serious allegations made against them (Miller uses they/them pronouns). Last summer, Miller announced that they had sought professional help for their mental health struggles. The director and producers of The Flash have stood by Miller throughout the ordeal.
Though Miller has kept a very low profile since making that announcement, Variety reports that the actor will be in attendance at the Los Angeles premiere of The Flash on June 12. But while they’ll be on the red carpet to pose for photos, Miller won’t be participating in any interviews with press at the event. Michael Keaton, who co-stars in the film alongside Miller, won’t be attending as he is currently working on a project in London. Director Andy Muschietti will be present alongside The Flash stars Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon, and Ben Affleck.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAYSCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
While very unusual for a tentpole movie’s lead star to skip the promotional blitz leading up to release, it was certainly no surprise in this case, given the controversy and Miller’s continued mental health treatment. Some may be more surprised to learn that Miller will still be making an appearance at the L.A. premiere. It was explained that Miller wanted to avoid doing interviews as that may take the focus away from the movie itself.
“Ezra wants the movie to open and the conversation to be about the movie and not about Ezra,” Variety quotes a source close to Miller as saying. “They are focused on their mental health and don’t want it to be transactional.”
The film is tracking to be a huge success at the box office, and if that holds out, it would seem that the controversy attached to Miller isn’t enough to derail The Flash. While there are still people out there swearing off the film due to Miller’s involvement, there’s a good chance that a sequel could happen if the movie is as much of a blockbuster as expected. There’s even a finished screenplay that’s ready to go, and Muschietti has promised that Barry Allen will not be recast if a sequel gets greenlit by the studio.
“I don’t think there’s anyone that can play that character as well as they did,” Muschietti recently explained on The Discourse podcast. “The other depictions of the character are great, but this particular vision of the character, they just excelled in doing it. And, as you said, the two Barrys – it feels like a character that was made for them.”
The long-awaited Diablo 4 is nearly here, as Blizzard’s new action RPG is set to launch on June 6, 2023 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. However, prior to the release of the latest Diablo title comes the arrival of the game’s first review scores, including from Prima Games. So, what do critics think of the fourth main entry in the Diablo series? Let’s take a look, as we examine the critical consensus surrounding the newly released Diablo 4.
Diablo IV Critic Scores
According to the review aggregator Metacritic, Diablo 4 has received the following Metascores as of this writing:
88 on PC
89 on PS5
92 on Xbox Series X|S
(There are currently no review scores for the PS4 or Xbox One versions of the game)
Based on these review scores, Diablo 4 has achieved acclaim from critics, as the game currently rates 15th in the history of the PS5, as well as ranking sixth place all-time for the Xbox Series X|S. According to the aggregate ratings of critics, it appears that the decade long hiatus between series entries has been well worth the wait.
Diablo 4 vs. Diablo 3 Metascores
To compare the fourth series entry to Diablo 3, it appears that the latest title has met or exceeded its 2012 predecessor, as Diablo 3 attained the following impressive, yet mostly lower Metacritic scores at launch:
For more news, reviews, guides, and features on the Diablo series, or the world of videogames in general, Prima Games has everything you need, just a click away.
Are you a fan of free editing software and eye-catching transitions? Look no further! We are excited to introduce FILM CRUX Glitch Transitions Vol. 2, a brand new pack of 15 drag-and-drop glitch transitions designed exclusively for Adobe Premiere Pro. Whether you’re a seasoned editor or just starting out, these transitions will add a touch of visual flair to your projects.
Included in this free package are the following:
Delay Glitch
Flash Glitch
Nintendo Glitch
Resolution Glitch
RGB Glitch A
RGB Glitch B
RGB Glitch C
RGB Glitch D
Shake Glitch A
Shake Glitch B
Signal Glitch A
Signal Glitch B
Teleport Glitch
Zoom In Glitch
Zoom Out Glitch
+28 Glitch Sound Effects
How to Use Them
Just download the file, and drag it into your Premiere Pro ‘Presets’ folder on your computer.
In Adobe Premiere Pro CC, right-click ‘Presets’ in your ‘Effects’ folder and select ‘Import Presets’.
Find the FILM CRUX Glitch Transitions Vol. 2 preset files you downloaded and select them. Once imported, you will not need to import them again.
Create an adjustment layer above your footage and drag it out over the clips if you want to add a transition to.
Each transition will recommend how many frames your adjustment layer should start before the cut between your two clips.
Just drag the transition of your choice onto the adjustment layer overlapping your two clips.
Get Creative Today:
Are you ready to elevate your editing skills? Don’t miss out on this opportunity to enhance your projects with FILM CRUX Glitch Transitions Vol. 2.
Download the pack, follow a few simple steps, and let your creativity flow. Share your thoughts and experiences with us in the comments below. We can’t wait to see the incredible edits you’ll create using these dynamic glitch transitions!
Will you be downloading this transition pack? Let us know in the comments below!
Beatles or Stones? Oasis or U2? Coldplay or The Killers? Zeppelin or Floyd? People have been debating which is the best of the best since Rock & Roll became a thing and now we’re having a turn. Joined by some of our Friends of the Podcast: Juleen, Hermes and Andy Dickson) we’re setting up 32 of the best in a single knockout tournament. We’ve got massive upsets, Cinderella runs and much debate as we crown the Best Rock Band Ever.
Dominique Fishback is sitting backstage waiting to discuss her latest role, starring in Amazon Prime Video’s “Swarm,” when her ears perk up at a familiar sound: an engine revving.
On the other side of a partition, an audience watches a particularly tense scene from the show’s fourth episode, titled “Running Scared,” when Fishback’s Dre — a murderous super fan of Ni’jah, a Beyoncé-esque pop star — faces down a group of women who stand between her and attending the singer’s concert.
Fishback playfully re-enacts the scene, gripping an imaginary steering wheel and pressing her high-heeled foot down onto a pretend gas pedal that sends her speeding ahead and crashing into Dre’s latest victims. She pulls a funny face and hams it up for a rep’s cellphone camera, unknowingly demonstrating the type of darkly comedic energy that makes “Swarm” so buzzworthy.
“There’s a lot of physical comedy that [Dre] gets to do, and it wasn’t premeditated,” Fishback says, once she gets in front of the crowd for the Q&A, sharing that her love for Lucille Ball and Jim Carrey helped her prepare to play aspects of the offbeat serial killer character’s personality.
But creators Donald Glover and Janine Nabers didn’t originally picture her as Dre. They offered her the role of Marissa, the character’s sensitive sister. “I told my team, ‘Listen, tell them that I’m thankful. But I’ve got to play Dre,’” Fishback recalls.
From the moment she read the script, the character called to her. After playing charming characters in “The Deuce,” “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” “Judas and the Black Messiah” and in the upcoming “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” Fishback saw Dre as her chance to make a transformation like Charlize Theron did in “Monster” or Heath Ledger as the Joker in “The Dark Knight.”
“I just felt that in my spirit that I could,” Fishback says. “We don’t get that opportunity a lot — as Black artists, as Black women — to stretch beyond what we’ve been given the opportunity to do.”
So, she stood firm.
“I don’t want to catch up to myself as an actor,” Fishback told Glover. “What could I do next that excites me? I’m thinking about that kid that watched all these movies and said, ‘I want to do that’ and didn’t think about a box or limitations or one genre. She wanted to do everything.” His response: “If that’s the role you want, that’s the role you get. … I know you can do it.”
There was no fight, no re-auditioning. Fishback simply signed on for the part (with Marissa played by Chlöe Bailey), and then the real work began. “I’ll be honest, it was nerve-wracking. I was like, ‘Man, what’d I do? Why did I want to do this?’” Fishback says.
Playing Dre was physically and emotionally challenging. The actor usually prepares by journaling in character, but this time she wrote as herself. “I didn’t understand her psychologically,” Fishback explains. “So, I had to journal as myself to remove any fear and any judgment, because I didn’t want the camera to pick up Dom’s war with herself about playing Dre.”
She also worked with Audrey LeCrone, the dialect coach who guided Fishback’s “Judas” co-star Daniel Kaluuya to an Academy Award. Together, they transformed Fishback’s Brooklyn accent into Dre’s southern drawl, which borrowed some of its softness from “The Queen” (a.k.a. Houston-native Beyoncé).
“Everything is really slow and pretty,” Fishback says, slipping into the character’s Texan accent, then reverting to her natural speech pattern. “Every character that I play, I’m trying to eliminate the Brooklyn, just for now.”
As for the character’s arc, Fishback unpacked Dre’s journey in real time because the writers delivered scripts for future episodes while the show was in production. She realized that she didn’t “have to know Dre’s backstory specifically, because she repressed it so much that she probably repressed it for me, too.”
The seven-episode limited series chronicles a period of two years, as Dre hits the road in pursuit of her dream to meet Ni’jah. Fishback is in nearly every scene and, in most episodes, surrounded by a new cast of characters, with co-stars including Bailey, Damson Idris, Kiersey Clemons, Rory Culkin, X Mayo, Paris Jackson and Billie Eilish, in her acting debut.
“It was bittersweet sometimes, because you’d get used to Chlöe, then you get used to Paris, and get used to Billie, then everybody’s leaving. But I just decided to look at it as a gift,” she says. Getting exposed to their different energy and talents “felt almost like an actor’s bootcamp.”
Of Eilish in particular, Fishback says that the popstar is a “natural” actor. “There was no air about her. She really cared about the character. That was important to me because I’ve been giving months of this, and new actors come in and you hope everybody cares as much as you care. She really did.”
Eilish had a big job, too. Her character, Eva — the leader of a women’s cult who Dre meets on her way to a Ni’jah concert — is critical to the story. “You have to believe that Dre can fall in the influence of these women,” Fishback explains. “Billie was very intentional with her lines. It helped me be able to sell that Dre could get caught up and not just kill everybody on sight.”
Because there is quite a lot of killing on the show, Fishback, who is also a producer, requested to have a therapist on set for those intense scenes.
“You don’t know how people are going to be affected,” she says. “A lot of actors really give themselves over to their roles, and then you finish the show, and you go home and you’re by yourself. You don’t want to be left in pieces for giving yourself to a role.”
The actor’s most challenging murder came in the finale. “This was the first kill that she did with her bare hands and not an object,” Fishback notes. “It was very up close and personal, so, for me, that was really hard.”
In fact, after the scene ended, she couldn’t stop crying. “Am I portraying something bad?” Fishback says she wondered. “I had been used to playing characters that are considered likable, or easy to love, or wrap your arm around. And I wanted the challenge to play a villain or an antihero, but when I was faced with what she had to do, it was hard. But I had a really good support system.”
For as much as “Swarm” pushed Fishback’s limits as a performer, she’s hopeful that audiences’ behaviors will evolve in kind. Back in the day, she explains, if you chose to talk trash about someone, you’d have to meet at 3 o’clock in the schoolyard or parking lot to handle it. In the current social media era, people can be so cold to one another, without considering that there’s a person on the other end of that dig.
“I call [Dre] the ‘pull up queen,’” Fishback says, giggling as she makes her point. “Dre is kind of like, ‘Talk is cheap, man,’ and she pulls up to the house. I wonder if people who watch are gonna be like, “You know that thing I was gonna say on social media, I ain’t gonna say it no more.”
After the success of The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf anime, Netflix is deep in development of a new anime in the world of The Witcher. This one is called The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep and by the looks of it, it’s based on a short story that was omitted from the first season of the main show. Here’s what we know so far.
The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep is once again developed and animated by the Korean Studio Mir, who previously worked on Nightmare of the Wolf as well as The Legend of Korra. The writer and director of Sirens of the Deep is unknown at this stage, but Kwang Il Han directed Nightmare of the Wolf, so it’s possible he returned for this as well.
Composer Joseph Trapanese (The Witcher, Shadow and Bone) will do the score for The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep. The Witcher showrunner Lauren Hissrich is executive producing.
Article Continues Below…
The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep was announced back in September 2021 during Netflix’s TUDUM event. Netflix hasn’t formally announced its title, but it is already known thanks to Redanian Intelligence.
What’s the plot of Sirens of the Deep?
A Little Sacrifice artwork by Rayvell
The plot of The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep hasn’t been confirmed, but there is a very strong possibility that it will adapt author Andrzej Sapkowski’s short story A Little Sacrifice. The first season of The Witcher adapted the majority of the short stories from Sapkowski’s two collections, but left a few out. A Grain of Truth was featured in the first episode of Season 2, and now it looks like Sirens of the Deep will adapt A Little Sacrifice, still leaving a few of short stories unadapted.
A Little Sacrifice is Andrzej Sapkowski’s dark twist on The Little Mermaid. It tells the tale of star-crossed trans-species lovers: a mermaid named Sh’eenaz and a human prince named Agloval. Agloval is the proud and arrogant prince of the seaside region of Bremervoord who is hopelessly in love with the mermaid, Sh’eenaz. The story opens with Geralt having been hired by Agloval to act as a translator since he can speak the Elder Language. Agloval wants Geralt to convince Sh’eenaz to trade her fin for a pair of human legs, abandon her life in the sea, and live with him on land. However Sh’eenaz refuses, and instead insists that it’s Agloval who should instead come live with her, despite the fact that he can’t breathe underwater.
Who is cast in Sirens of the Deep?
Redanian Intelligence reveals that Christina Wren (Man of Steel, Will Trent) has been cast in The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep as the bard Essi Daven that appears in Andrzej Sapkowski’s A Little Sacrifice.
Per the short story, Joey Batey‘s Jaskier is also expected to appear as well as Geralt of Rivia. It is unclear who will voice Geralt. It could be either Henry Cavill because the anime was being developed well before his departure from The Witcher. Alternatively, it could be Liam Hemsworth, Cavill’s live-action replacement.
What’s the production status of Sirens of the Deep?
Netflix’s The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep has been in active development since early 2022. As it’s an anime, we can’t hope to get many updates regarding its progress, so we can’t really say in which state of completion it is.
What’s the Netflix release date for Sirens of the Deep?
Netflix hasn’t announced the release date for The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep. It could be anywhere between late 2023 and sometime in 2024. Watch this space for updates.
Don’t forget, we’ve got previews on all the upcoming Witcher content bound for Netflix, including the new prequel series, The Rats.
Are you looking forward to another anime entry for The Witcher coming soon to Netflix? Let us know in the comments down below.
The new film, which reunites much of the cast of 2018’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” (including Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld and Jake Johnson) with brand new characters (voiced by Jason Schwartzman, Issa Rae, Karan Soni, Daniel Kaluuya and Oscar Isaac) and an even more epic adventure, is in theaters now.
But – no spoilers! – as the credits start to roll, you might be wondering, Wait, what’s next? Because, yes, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is the second part of a trilogy. “Spider-Verse 3” is coming. And we’ve got all the details.
What is “Spider-Verse 3” called?
The third movie in the franchise is called “Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse.” Pretty cool huh?
When will it be released?
“Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse” is currently scheduled to be released on March 29, 2024.
Who is in the “Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse” cast?
Sony Pictures
Shameik Moore will be back as Miles Morales, with Hailee Steinfeld as Gwen Stacy aka Spider-Woman, plus Brian Tyree Henry as Miles’ dad, Luna Lauren Velez as Miles’ mom, and Jason Schwartzman as the new supervillain The Spot. Additionally, Issa Rae will be back as Jessica Drew, Oscar Isaac as Spider-Man 2099 and Amandla Stenberg as Spider-Byte. There might be more friends from the original movie, but to say who would constitute as a major spoiler, so we’re steering clear, at least for now.
What is “Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse” about?
We’re not entirely sure. No official synopsis has been released, there hasn’t been a trailer, and there’s not even a mid- or post-credits scene to tease the next movie. But you can be sure that your favorite Spider-characters will be, once again, bounding across dimensions in an effort to save existence from falling apart. You know, that old chestnut.
Didn’t this movie have a different name, originally?
Yes, originally the two movies were “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Part I” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Part II,” in the tradition of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” and the upcoming “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning.” But late in the process, they decided it was time for a name change. But don’t worry, you can still find merchandise with the “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Part I” name. If you find any of that merchandise, treasure it. It’s “Beyond” from here on out.
When did work begin on the “Spider-Verse” sequels?
Almost immediately after the original came out; in fact there was a script before the first movie was even finished. Wowza!
Rising Puerto Rican trap artist Young Miko has teamed up with reggaeton duo Jowell & Randy for her latest track. It’s called “ID,” and it’s produced by Caleb Calloway and Mauro. Watch the Joshua “Shot” Rivera–directed music video for “ID” below.
Young Miko made a splash earlier this year with her single “Lisa,” and she recently performed the song at the Latin American Music Awards. Miko is credited as one of the first openly queer musicians to emerge from the realm of Latin trap music. She’s been making music since she was a teenager, uploading cuts to SoundCloud and issuing her debut EP, Trap Kitty, last year.
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