Movie News

Mattel Films and Universal Pictures are developing a live-action movie based on the hit ’90s TV series “Wishbone,” about a Jack Russell Terrier.

“Wishbone” is the first theatrical film collaboration between Mattel and Universal Pictures, and the ninth Mattel Films project in the works.

Mattel Films will produce “Wishbone” alongside Academy Award winner Peter Farrelly. Roy Parker will write the script. Executive producer Robbie Brenner and supervising producer Kevin McKeon will lead the project for Mattel Films, and director of development Lexi Barta will oversee the pic for Universal.

“Wishbone,” which aired on PBS from 1996 through 2001, followed the eponymous dog as he performed famous literary moments. Mattel Films will be rebooting the property into a modern, family-friendly comedy.

“Our deep library of iconic franchises continues to offer cinematic storytelling opportunities,” Brenner said. “We’re thrilled to be working with Peter Farrelly, Roy Parker and Universal to take the beloved dog

There may be another “Dirty Dancing” movie in the works.

Original star Jennifer Grey is collaborating with Lionsgate on an untitled dance movie in which she will star and executive produce.

The studio refuses to comment on whether the project, set in the 1990s, will bring back Grey’s Frances “Baby” Houseman character. “Dirty Dancing” starred Patrick Swayze as Grey’s dance instructor and romantic interest, along with Jerry Orbach and Kelly Bishop as Grey’s parents. The original film was set in 1963 at a Catskills resort.

Megamix’s Jonathan Levine and Gillian Bohrer are shepherding the untitled project with a screenplay by the team of Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis, whose credits include “Five Feet Apart” and “The Curse of La Llorona.”

The original “Dirty Dancing” was released in 1987 by Vestron. It grossed $217 million at the worldwide box office and sold more than 1 million home video units. The song

“Kidding” starring Jim Carrey has been canceled at Showtime. The show aired its second season earlier this year on the premium cabler.

“After two seasons, ‘Kidding’ has concluded its run on Showtime,” the network said in a statement. “We are very proud to have aired this imaginative, critically-acclaimed and rewarding series, and we would like to thank Jim Carrey, Dave Holstein, Michael Aguilar, Michel Gondry and the entire cast and crew for their brilliant and tireless work.”

Carrey starred in the dramedy as iconic children’s television host, Jeff Pickles. While he is famous the world over for his kind and gentle ways with children,

NBCUniversal has upped the amount of content to be available in Peacock for the U.S. national launch on Wednesday, July 15, in both its free and paid tiers. But the fledgling streamer will not be on Roku or Amazon Fire TV in its first nationwide flight.

Starting Wednesday, Peacock will be available in two main tiers: Peacock Premium, with more than 20,000 hours of programming, and Peacock Free, which will include a subset of that with over 13,000 hours.

Click here for highlights of what content is available on Peacock Free and Peacock Premium, as well as what originals and other TV shows,

Did you hear Watchmen is getting a spin-off comic focusing on Rorschach? When can players who pre-ordered The Avengers video game start playing the beta? Why didn’t Cottonmouth appear beyond the first season of Luke Cage? Would you believe there was a Batman Begins TV spot featuring Nickelback music? Will The Eternals introduce Atlantis to the […]

The post Superhero Bits: Rorschach Getting a ‘Watchmen’ Spin-Off Comic, ‘The Avengers’ Video Game Beta Release & More appeared first on /Film.

Mike Gribble, co-founder of Spike & Mike’s Festival of Animation, was just 42 years old when he passed away from pancreatic cancer in 1994 — an awful case of a larger-than-life film-world figure dying before his work was done. That probably would have been the perfect time for Kat Alioshin’s short, oh-so-adulatory “Animation Outlaws,” which plays more like a pop-art tribute video than a well-rounded documentary about Gribble and marginally less eccentric accomplice Craig Decker (aka “Spike”).

As it is, the film arrives well after the world of animation has been permanently reconfigured, thanks to a rebellious CG venture known as “Toy Story” and a little innovation called the internet. Today, it could be difficult to convince college kids — who grew up on Cartoon Network/Adult Swim, and for whom Japanese anime has moved mainstream — that there was a time just a few decades back Disney was practically the only game in town.

When it came to editing Hulu’s “Palm Springs,” the key to cutting for editor Matthew Friedman (“The Farewell”) was not to make scenes repetitive. The film stars Andy Samberg plays Nyles, a wedding guest stuck in a time loop. Soon, he’s joined by Sarah, played by Cristin Millioti, and together they relive the same day over and over.

Friedman breaks down the key to cutting comedy and frames two key scenes from the movie: the pool scene loop and the montage sequence for “Palm Springs.”

Editing Comedy

The key thing in the cutting room was not to let the audience get ahead of the story, and that’s one of the core principles of cutting comedy. The key to cutting comedies is all about timing and to give the audience just enough time to form incorrect expectations. If you subvert it too fast, it’s not going to be funny,

Netflix has acquired the international distribution rights for the latest “SpongeBob” film, insiders familiar with the deal told Variety.

The streaming giant picked up the foreign rights for ” SpongeBob: Sponge on the Run,” the twice-delayed Paramount Animation title from Viacom. The film is one of many theatrical releases thwarted by the coronavirus pandemic this year.

The deal excludes China, where Netflix has no presence, one source said. Paramount also has plans to release the film in Canada at some point, added another individual, after which Netflix will stream the film in that territory.

Representatives for Netflix and Viacom had no immediate comment.

The international release date for the third film in the “SpongeBob” franchise is not set, but Netflix is not beholden to the 2021 domestic debut before offering the film to its customers abroad.

Paramount announced in late June that “Sponge on the Run” would forgo theaters entirely and debut

The Old Guard director Gina Prince-Bythewood has an exciting project on the horizon. Prince-Bythewood will direct Viola Davis in The Woman King, about a female general leading an all-female military unit in Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries. The film is inspired by true events, and at one point, Lupita Nyong’o was attached to the project playing the […]

The post ‘The Woman King’, Starring Viola Davis, Will Be Directed by ‘The Old Guard’ Filmmaker Gina Prince-Bythewood appeared first on /Film.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical movie Almost Famous. To celebrate the milestone, James Andrew Miller is delivering a limited podcast series called Origins: Almost Famous Turns Twenty, and it’s already yielding some interesting tidbits looking back at the film. Almost Famous features Patrick Fugit as William Miller, a young aspiring journalist […]

The post ‘Almost Famous’ Could Have Starred Brad Pitt, Natalie Portman, and Meryl Streep appeared first on /Film.

Ad Astra, the epic sci-fi drama starring Brad Pitt as an astronaut searching the edge of the solar system for his missing father, faced an unusual amount of criticism for its many scientific inaccuracies. However, as director James Gray recently explained in an Instagram live interview with his Ad Astra producer Rodrigo Teixeira, realism was never the film’s goal. If you’ve not seen the film, I won’t spoil it for you, except to say that the movie is very internal and almost dream-like. There’s action scenes and sequences of extreme space peril, but it’…

I suspect that for a lot of people, Fisher Stevens is still best known as the white guy who wore brownface to portray an Indian character in the Short Circuit movies. But while he’s still acting (you may have seen him recently on Succession or The Blacklist), he’s also an Oscar-winning filmmaker who has produced and/or […]

The post ‘Palmer’, a Fisher Stevens Film Starring Justin Timberlake, Heads to AppleTV+ appeared first on /Film.

The critical acclaim for Relic signaled the arrival of a promising new horror director with Natalie Erika James, whose debut feature is receiving all kinds of raves for its depiction of the horrors of dementia. And she’s already got several intriguing follow-up projects in the works, all of which will deal with the subgenre of personal horror, with […]

The post ‘Relic’ Director Natalie Erika James’ Next Project is a Folk Horror Movie About Motherhood appeared first on /Film.

Kate James, Amber Heard’s former personal assistant, alleged that Heard had appropriated her story of being a “sexual violence survivor,” giving evidence at London’s Royal Courts of Justice on the seventh day of Johnny Depp’s libel trial against the publisher of The Sun newspaper.

Depp is suing News Group Newspapers and journalist Dan Wootton for an article on The Sun website that described him as a “wife beater.” Depp denies that he was violent toward Heard, to whom he was married from 2015 to 2017.

James, who was Heard’s personal assistant between 2012 and 2015, was giving her evidence by video link from Los Angeles.

Defense attorney Sasha Wass asked if James had been “influenced by Mr. Depp and his associates who have encouraged you to give this vicious evidence against her [Heard].”

“Absolutely not,” James said.

She added, “I’m here for my own reasons … I’m a sexual violence survivor and that’s very,

Netflix has been notoriously stingy when it comes to releasing viewership data, but for the first time, the streaming service has revealed a list of its 10 most popular original movies. The Chris Hemsworth-led action movie Extraction still reigns supreme, but find out where the Sandra Bullock thriller Bird Box, the David Spade comedy The Wrong Missy (yep, […]

The post Netflix Reveals Its 10 Most Popular Original Movies, and ‘Extraction’ is Still Number One appeared first on /Film.

The 30 Rock reunion special is finally happening this Thursday July 16th, and as with virtually every piece of content in the streaming era, it’s not quite as easy as turning on the TV. Actually, technically it is, but there are a few different ways you can check it out in case you’re not able to watch it live. [caption id="attachment_780391" align="alignright" width="360"] Image via NBC/caption] The hour-long commercial free event will air July 16th on NBC at 8/7c, unless of course you’re in an area where the local NBC affiliate …

Nia Long is following in the footsteps of Thandie Newton by calling out the problematic casting process for the 2000 action movie “Charlie’s Angels.” In a new interview with Insider, Long revealed that her agent notified her that she wouldn’t be getting the part of Alex Munday in “Charlie’s Angels” because she “looked too old” to star opposite costar Drew Barrymore. Long said she believed the rejection had racist undertones.

“I was like, “What?” Long said. “I love Drew Barrymore, I think she’s amazing, but I think that was just a nice way to say you’re a little too Black. Personally, that’s what I think. Because if you notice there were no brown skin [actors]. I mean, honestly, I would have been the blackest thing in the film.”

“The feedback that I received from my agent was, ‘She just looked too old and sophisticated to be next to Drew Barrymore,

The latest TV cancelation is no joke, despite the show’s title. Showtime has canceled Dave Holstein‘s dark comedy Kidding after two seasons at the network, four months after the Jim Carrey-starring series ended its eight-episode second season. Showtime has decided not to renew Kidding for a third season, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The network has canceled the comedy-drama series […]

The post Jim Carrey’s ‘Kidding’ Canceled After Two Seasons at Showtime appeared first on /Film.

If you’re a movie fan with a lot of money, you might want to talk to your accountant. On August 26th and 27th, Prop Store - one of the world’s leading film and TV memorabilia companies – will be auctioning off over eight-hundred and fifty rare items during their live auction in Los Angeles and some of the things for sale are incredible. Not only can you purchase Alfred Hitchcock’s Vista Vision motion picture camera from Vertigo, you can own the actual 11-foot Nostromo model miniature from Ridley Scott’s Alien! And that’s just the tip …

Sadistic Nazis, Ptsd-afflicted Allied soldiers, angry spirits and creepy dolls make for an already-formidable pile of scare factors in “Ghosts of War,” which then topples the stack by loading too many additional elements in the final stretch. This second feature from “The Butterfly Effect” co-director Eric Bress likewise has a trickily structured take on reality. But in this case, it’s closer to the realm of “The Cabin in the Woods” in that the initial, fairly straightforward horror tale is eventually reframed as part of something larger.

It’s the kind of narrative leap that can make or break a film. But here it . Beautifully atmospheric to a point, handsomely produced, “Ghosts” gradually disappoints because its thematic ambitions add more clutter than depth to a story that’s most effective at its simplest. Vertical Entertainment is releasing to U.S. virtual cinemas, on demand and digital July 17, after being available