(Left) McKenna Grace in Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group’s ‘Scream 7.’ (Right) Sarah Michelle Gellar, Linda Cardellini, and Matthew Lillard in ‘Scooby-Doo’. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures.
Preview:
McKenna Grace will play a young Daphne in a new ‘Scooby-Doo’ series.
Netflix is producing the live-action show.
It’ll be a prequel re-imagining of the cartoon series.
Nervy, snack-loving hound Scooby-Doo and the human characters with whom he often solves mysteries has been brought to the screen many times, in animated and live-action form.
Netflix is the latest company to try its hand at a Scooby show, greenlighting a live-action take on the animated adventures back in March 2025.
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And the first cast member has been hired for the show, as McKenna Grace will play a young take on Daphne Blake.
She’s no stranger to the role, having voiced Daphne in 2020 animated movie ‘Scoob!’ and also working on follow-up ‘Scoob!: Holiday Haunt’ before Warner Bros. unceremoniously scrapped the finished film.
1969’s ‘Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!’ Photo: Hanna-Barbera.
Written by Josh Appelbaum & Scott Rosenberg and based on characters created by Hanna-Barbera, the to-be titled Scooby series crafts an origin story of how the Mystery Inc. group got together and first teamed up to crack the haunting case that started it all.
During their final summer at camp, old friends Shaggy and Daphne (Grace) get embroiled in a haunting mystery surrounding a lonely lost Great Dane puppy that may have been a witness to a supernatural murder.
Together with the pragmatic and scientific townie, Velma, and the strange, but ever so handsome new kid, Freddy, they set out to solve the case that is pulling each of them into a creepy nightmare that threatens to expose all of their secrets.
Prolific TV producer Greg Berlanti is also involved via his Berlanti Productions company. Netflix has handed out an eight-episode initial order and the show should kick off shooting soon. Zoinks!
Where else can we see McKenna Grace?
(L to R) Celeste O’Connor and McKenna Grace star in Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group’s ‘Scream 7.’
(L to R) Joseph Zada as Haymitch Abernathy and McKenna Grace as Maysilee Donner in ‘The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping’. Photo Credit: Murray Close.
List of Movies & TV Shows Featuring McKenna Grace:
Colman Domingo in ‘Dead Man’s Wire.’ Photo: Row K Entertainment.
The thriller, which has seen script work from Michael Mohan, Marc Guggenheim, and most recently Carly Wray, concerns a high-powered D.C. couple who draw a young, ambitious woman into a dangerous world of sex, power and murder.
Netflix has yet to fully announce when the new thriller will hit its servers, but we’d imagine it’ll be at some time in 2027.
Kerry Washington speaks onstage during Netflix TUDUM 2025: The Live Event at The Kia Forum on May 31, 2025 in Inglewood, California. Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Netflix.
(L to R) Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum in ‘Fly Me to the Moon’. Photo: Columbia Pictures.
‘Fly Me to the Moon’ has ambitions almost as large as that of the men and women of NASA who are trying in the film to land a human being on the Moon. It wants to be a rom-com. It wants to be a screwball comedy. It’s kind of a conspiracy thriller. And it’s a sweeping historical drama about the effort to send the Apollo 11 mission into space – and it’s that last version of the film that works best, when it gets its turn onscreen.
The problem with this enjoyable but uneven movie from director Greg Berlanti (perhaps best known as the architect of the now-defunct Arrowverse) is that it never fully decides what it wants to be, and its best parts battle for space with the parts that don’t work as well. Yet it’s still fun in a lot of spots, with great work from Scarlett Johansson and scene-stealing performances from Woody Harrelson, Jim Rash, and the second plucky cat we’ve seen in a major summer movie following the debut of Frodo in ‘A Quiet Place: Day One.’
Story and Direction
(L to R) Scarlett Johansson, Woody Harrelson, director Greg Berlanti and Channing Tatum on the set of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’. Photo: Columbia Pictures.
It’s the 1960s (Shane Valentino’s production design is spot-on) and NASA has been having trouble getting it up – a rocket into orbit, that is. The Soviet Union is beating the U.S. in the space race and the government (transitioning from Lyndon B. Johnson to Richard M. Nixon) is desperate to show up the Russians even as Congress is threatening to defund the space agency. The Apollo 11 mission to send three astronauts to the Moon is a last, best hope, and no one is more acutely aware of this than stiff-necked, square-jawed launch director Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), who is racked with guilt over the deaths of the Apollo 1 crew years earlier.
Enter marketing genius Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson), who we first meet as she shows up a roomful of auto execs with both her knowledge of their vehicles and the way to sell them – all doing this while wearing a fake baby bump no less. Kelly, it seems, is okay with bending the truth to get her message across – a skill that has come to the attention of the government in the person of Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), a clandestine fixer-type who, on the orders of the president, wants Kelly to take over public relations for NASA and Apollo 11.
She dutifully heads down to Florida, where she first encounters Cole in a meet-cute in a bar, neither knowing who the other one is until she turns up the next morning at NASA, ready to work. And work she does, nabbing brand sponsorships for the mission from the Tang juice drink (which was actually on Mercury and Gemini missions) and Omega watches, while getting Congressional money flowing again.
She also hires actors to do TV interviews pretending to be the more camera-shy and awkward NASA employees, including Cole’s right hand man Henry Smalls (Ray Romano) and Cole himself. Cole is opposed to all this, of course (“I’m not letting this mission be turned into a commercial”), but eventually comes to admire Kelly’s abilities to get the public’s interest in the mission reignited, while admiring Kelly herself.
(L to R) Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson in ‘Fly Me to the Moon’. Photo: Columbia Pictures.
Their flirtation – and everything else about their relationship and the mission – is put to the test, however, when Moe gives Kelly new orders: as a backup plan in case the landing goes awry, she is to produce a staged fake landing. Although she’s dubious, Moe has enough leverage over her about her past that she has to move forward, hiring the director she uses for ads (Jim Rash, doing a kind of Stanley Tucci-on-steroids from ‘The Devil Wears Prada’) and recruiting Moe’s government spooks as actors. Cole is kept completely in the dark – especially when Moe commands that the fake landing will be what the public sees whether the real one is successful or not.
The mechanics of how this will work or not (“I should have hired Kubrick,” says Kelly at one point, a knowing in-joke about the legendary director’s alleged participation in just such a scam) make up both the screwball and conspiracy thriller portions of the film, swinging wildly in tone but perhaps offering up the funniest material. Then there’s the rom-com aspects, which don’t provide Johansson and Tatum with enough room to build any real chemistry, pushing them together more because the script demands it.
Finally, there’s the historical drama. A lot of this film stretches what little truth is in it to the breaking point, but it still feels like the story Berlanti really wants to tell. The pressure, determination, and sheer scale of the Apollo 11 mission are well-captured, along with sweeping, even awe-inspiring shots of the rocket and the launch gantry both before and after the powerful launch sequence.
This is the part of the film that works best, that we wanted more of. But ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ is programmed very much to entertain us from all angles, and the script by Rose Gilroy shoves four different movies into the film’s (far too long) 132 minutes even if the other narratives are not as solidly satisfying. It’s a lot of movie, and we can feel it trying to be greater than it is, but it doesn’t always get there.
The Cast
(L to R) Woody Harrelson, Scarlett Johansson and Jim Rash in ‘Fly Me to the Moon’. Photo: Columbia Pictures.
Scarlett Johansson cuts a ravishing, commanding figure in her tight skirts and ‘60s hair, and her Kelly Jones is a more complex character than the movie initially allows her to be. But she successfully pulls back Kelly’s layers, showing us both her fearlessness and agency, while also hinting at a darker past that has blurred the lines between truth and fiction both in real life and in what she does for a living. She has the most resonant emotional arc and it looks like the actor is having a ball throughout the film.
We wish we could say the same about Channing Tatum, but we don’t know if it’s the way his Cole Davis is scripted or that he might not be the best fit for the part. For reasons unexplained, Davis is the only NASA employee who doesn’t wear a button-down shirt and tie; even though he’s supposed to be kind of a nerdy, socially awkward scientist, he’s still in the body of hunky Channing Tatum. The character either comes off as brooding or pissed-off; we don’t remember seeing him crack more than a hairline smile. The initial parallel between Cole and Kelly – both of them loners who live for their work – is nicely handled, but he doesn’t develop the spark from there to match Johansson’s natural allure.
The scene-stealers are Woody Harrelson as Moe Berkus and Jim Rash as director Lance Vespertine. Harrelson plays Berkus with both an air of menace and his own personal brand of kooky conspiracy-theorist energy; when Kelly asks Moe if aliens have landed on Earth (after he hints at such), he intones ominously, “They walk among us.” As for Rash, his Lance fires off demands, insults, and biting observations at a steady, sarcastic clip, treating everyone as his subjects despite his lack of any notable filmmaking credits. When one fake astronaut blows a rehearsal and dangles helplessly from a wire, Lance scolds hilariously, “I’m just going to leave you there to think about what you did.” Rash and Harrelson easily get the biggest laughs — along with the cat, whose part in all this we’ll leave undisclosed.
Final Thoughts
(L to R) Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum in ‘Fly Me to the Moon’. Photo: Columbia Pictures.
It seems to us that the marketing for ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ has been somewhat misleading, emphasizing the rom-com aspects of the movie over the more compelling space-race drama and the funnier (if way more far-fetched and barely believable) conspiracy hijinks.
Moviegoers coming to see a snappy, sexy romantic joust between Johansson and Tatum may be a bit disappointed – although they may also be pleasantly surprised by just how gripping the space drama can be. ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ does feel too long at times and doesn’t always juggle its many narrative strands well, but it does do its best to entertain – and when it works, it lifts off and soars.
‘Fly Me to the Moon’ receives 6.5 out of 10 stars.
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What is the plot of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’?
As the U.S. races to get to the Moon before the Russians in the 1960s, marketing specialist Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) clashes with Apollo 11 mission director Cole Davis (Channing Tatum) over how to rebuild the space agency’s image. As a romance also sparks between the two, the government secretly tasks Jones with staging a fake “Moon landing” in case the real one fails.
Who is in the cast of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’?
Scarlett Johansson as Kelly Jones
Channing Tatum as Cole Davis
Jim Rash as Lance Vespertine
Anna Garcia as Ruby
Ray Romano as Henry Smalls
Woody Harrelson as Moe Berkus
(L to R) Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum in ‘Fly Me to the Moon’. Photo: Columbia Pictures.
Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps from DC Comics. Photo courtesy of DC.Fandom.com.
It’s (almost) all change for the DC Comics-based ‘Green Lantern’ show that had been moving forward at HBO Max. Though it had gotten to the point of casting Jeremy Irvine and Finn Wittrock in the lead roles, the series is headed back to the drawing board with a new take.
Back in 2020, ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ Seth Grahame-Smith hopped aboard to write and run what HBO Max was picturing its most expensive series to date, a space-set ‘Green Lantern’ drama whose focus would be the Alan Scott and Guy Gardner iterations of the character among the first and most popular versions.
It also represented movement on representation, with Scott, whose comic book character is openly gay these days bringing that across to the show.
The concept of the ‘Green Lantern’ comics is that of a super-powered, police force, battling evil doers with rings that allow them to channel energy into different forms. There are many Lanterns, who patrol the known and unknown universe.
Greg Berlanti, who has had a hand in pretty much every DC TV series (and a whole host of others) – and who was one of the writers on the 2011 Ryan Reynolds-starring movie – was producing the show via his Berlanti Productions.
While Berlanti is staying aboard, the changes mean that Grahame-Smith is departing the show, despite having written eight scripts already and overseen the casting process for Wittrock and Irvine.
No new creative team has been appointed for the series, but the budget will apparently be less and the focus will instead be on John Stewart, the first Black iteration of the Lantern character. His version was introduced in the 1970s and used Sidney Poitier as its inspiration.
The history of the Lantern on screen has been seriously mixed. Though different takes on the character have flourished in animated movies and series, their live-action counterparts have had less luck. The Reynolds movie didn’t triumph at the box office, and there have been fleeting glimpses on the small screen.
Even Zack Snyder didn’t manage to realize his chosen Lantern – John Stewart – in his mammoth Snyder Cut of ‘Justice League’. Despite shooting a cameo with Wayne T. Carr as Stewart, Warners asked him to remove the character because of the studio’s own plans. In the end, Snyder swapped in Martian Manhunter.
Warner Bros. Discovery has been on a cost-cutting binge of late, cancelling movies and in-the-works TV series all over the place, including ‘Batgirl’ and ‘Wonder Twins’. Since the merger with Discovery, new company chief David Zaslav has announced it is taking billions in tax write-downs as it reduces budgets and reverses decisions.
‘Green Lantern’ will now be a much smaller and cheaper series, which and though it was supposed to shoot last year, is now back in development and much further from any eventual release date.
The Green Lantern Corps from DC Comics. Photo courtesy of DC.com.
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‘Project Artemis’ is one of those movies that, despite initially attracting big-name stars and filmmaking talent, has had a few struggles on its voyage to screens.
Yet the space movie’s fortunes appear to be shifting for the better as Channing Tatum is making a deal to co-star alongside Scarlett Johansson, and Greg Berlanti has locked in to direct.
Let’s explore the history a little, shall we? This movie was developed by Johansson alongside her These Pictures company partners Jonathan Lia and Keenan Flynn. Rose Gilroy wrote the script, and the concept clearly excited Apple, which splashed out more than $100 million to pick it up.
Chris Evans quickly boarded the film to co-star alongside Johansson, and Jason Bateman – who has so far made a couple of smaller, character-based movies since kicking off his directorial career – agreed to call the shots.
All seemed to be flying smoothly until creative differences reared their head between Bateman and the studio, and he left the director’s chair.
Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson. Photo by Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.
That, in turn, created a domino effect as Evans had to vacate his lead role, since the delayed production schedule created a clash with his future plans – the actor also has Netflix’s ‘Pain Hustlers’ opposite Emily Blunt and Amazon’s ‘Red One’ with Dwayne Johnson on his to-do list.
With Tatum aboard (assuming his deal closes), that should help boost the movie into the next stage and kick off pre-production.
“We are thrilled to welcome Greg Berlanti and Channing Tatum to ‘Project Artemis,’” says Lia. “Greg’s passion for character and storytelling has driven his decades-long career in film & TV. We couldn’t be more excited for him to lead our team on this journey. We have been huge fans of Channing’s for a long time and are so honored to finally have the opportunity to work with him.”
Still a mystery at this point is the actual plot for the movie, which is rumored to revolve around the Space Race and the moon landings in the 1960s (the current title, which might change, certainly points to that, since Artemis is a lunar goddess). NASA’s current efforts to return humans to the lunar surface is, not-so-coincidentally, named the Artemis Program.
As for Berlanti, he might be better known as a busy producer of TV series – his company oversees a variety of shows at the CW, HBO and elsewhere – but he has movies such as ‘The Broken Hearts Club’, ‘Life as We Know It’ and ‘Love, Simon’ on his directing resume.
And though that, like Bateman, points to more experience with smaller character dramas and comedies, his roster of superhero TV means he’s had plenty of experience with effects work, and that will come in handy for a movie about the space race.
A biopic about closeted ’50s movie star Rock Hudson is moving ahead at Universal.
Greg Berlanti, who gave us one of the first-ever mainstream gay teen romances, “Love, Simon,” is attached to direct.
Oscar-nominated Richard LaGravenese (“The Fisher King“) is in talks to adapt, based on based on “All That Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson,” by Mark Griffin.
Hudson was one of the popular actors of the ’50s and ’60s, starring in films including the romantic comedies “Pillow Talk” and “Send Me Now Flowers” with Doris Day and the epic western “Giant,” for which he received his only Oscar nomination.
He remained discreet about his sexual orientation throughout his life and died of complications from AIDS in 1985, shortly after his guest stint on “Dynasty.”
The biography takes its title from the 1955 film “All That Heaven Allows” directed by Douglas Sirk, about a romance between a wealthy widow Jane Wyman) and a much younger gardener (Hudson).
Todd Haynes cited it as a reference for his ’50s period film “Far From Heaven,” in which a housewife (Julianne Moore) falls for her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert) after learning her husband (Dennis Quaid) is gay.
Hudson was the first major celebrity to be diagnosed with AIDS. Elizabeth Taylor (his costar in “Giant”) went on to found the American Foundation for AIDS Research at a time when there was no government funding for the disease.
No one has yet been cast as Hudson. The film will surely also have to cast someone as Day (who’s still with us at age 96), Taylor and costars including James Dean.
