Claire Foy in ‘The Crown’ season 2. Photo: Stuart Hendry / Netflix.
Preview:
Claire Foy is the latest addition to Danny Boyle’s next movie.
The ‘28 Years Later’ director is preparing a film about Rupert Murdoch.
‘Ink’ adapts James Graham’s play.
We previously brought word of ’28 Years Later’ director Danny Boyle’s next planned movie, this time a dip back into familiar territory for him –– a drama based on real events.
‘Ink’ will chronicle Rupert Murdoch’s efforts to save one of his newspapers as his media empire began to build in the UK.
Claire Foy stars in director Sarah Polley’s ‘Women Talking.’
‘Ink’, which playwright James Graham is adapting from his stage work, follows a group of visionaries and misfits who had an idea for a new kind of news –– one that would give the people what they want and would change the face of the world we live in today.
Specifically, it’ll chronicle Murdoch’s struggling newspaper, The Sun, as he intends to make it a must-read news source and hires Larry Lamb (O’Connell) to run the paper. The purchase of the paper would start a long-standing rivalry between The Sun and The Mirror, leading to the rise of the British tabloids as we know them.
Foy will play an ambitious editor who works with Lamb.
She’s also the lead in ‘H is for Hawk,’ about a woman who woman who is grieving her beloved father and finds unlikely friendship with a stubborn hawk named Mabel. The movie was picked up by Roadside Attractions for release in the US, but it has yet to lock in a date.
When will ‘Ink’ be on screens?
StudioCanal is fully backing the new movie and has a host of territories under its distribution deal, but has yet to announce a date and is still figuring out a partner to handle it in the US.
Danny Boyle (director, ’28 Years Later’) at CinemaCon 2025 for Sony Pictures at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace on March 31, 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo by Stewart Cook/Sony Pictures via Getty Images.
Guy Pearce and Jack O’Connell are in talks for Danny Boyle’s next movie.
The ‘28 Years Later’ director is preparing a film about Rupert Murdoch.
‘Ink’ adapts James Graham’s play.
Filmmaker Danny Boyle is no stranger to true-life tales of powerful figures, especially his unconventional 2015 biopic ‘Steve Jobs’.
So it’s perhaps not surprising that he’s targeting an even more infamous figure for new movie ‘Ink’, which will chart a pivotal time in the life and career of Fox company owner and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
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Boyle is developing the film and Deadline reports that he has two actors in talks to play main roles –– ‘The Brutalist’s Guy Pearce is circling the role of Murdoch, while Jack O’Connell is locking down a deal to play a newspaper editor.
Director Danny Boyle for Columbia Pictures’ ’28 Years Later’. Photo: Anthony Ghnassia.
‘Ink’, which playwright James Graham is adapting from his stage work, follows a group of visionaries and misfits who had an idea for a new kind of news –– one that would give the people what they want and would change the face of the world we live in today.
Specifically, it’ll chronicle Murdoch’s struggling UK newspaper, The Sun, as he intends to make it a must-read news source and hires Larry Lamb (O’Connell) to run the paper. The purchase of the paper would start a long-standing rivalry between The Sun and The Mirror, leading to the rise of the British tabloids as we know them.
Boyle aims to have the cameras rolling in October.
Where else can we see Guy Pearce and Jack O’Connell?
O’Connell, who was a charismatic vampire in ‘Sinners’, also appeared in Boyle’s ‘28 Years Later’ and will be even more part of follow-up ‘The Bone Temple’, which has been directed by Nia DaCosta and is due out on January 16th, 2026.
StudioCanal is fully backing the new movie and has a host of territories under its distribution deal, but has yet to announce a date and is still figuring out a partner to handle it in the US.
Jack O’Connell at the ‘Sinners’ London photocall. Photo: Warner Bros.
(L to R) Vincent Cassel and Sandrine Holt in ‘The Shrouds’. Photo: Sideshow and Janus Films 5.
Just as his 1979 horror classic ‘The Brood’ was partially the director’s outpouring of anger and frustration over a bitter divorce and custody battle, David Cronenberg’s latest movie, ‘The Shrouds,’ unleashes a torrent of grief – well, sort of — over the death of Cronenberg’s second wife, Carolyn Zeifman, who died in 2017 after 38 years of marriage. But while ‘The Brood’ embodied Cronenberg’s rage in the form of mutant children borne from a psychologically unstable spouse, ‘The Shrouds’ finds Cronenberg getting more personal than usual as only he can: with a chilly, dry-humored, eerie, and occasionally cringe-inducing meditation on death, loss, and, as one character says, “money, technology, politics, and religion.”
All four of those come into play over the course of Cronenberg’s slow-burn, almost excessively talky, but still provocative new film (his 23rd). While ‘The Shrouds’ offers up a late-career remix of a number of Cronenberg’s greatest hits – body horror, paranoia, the fusion of technology and flesh, and soulless corporate greed – it does so through a more intimate lens than usual. And even if it doesn’t all add up in the end, ‘The Shrouds’ is still an occasionally heady meditation on how we deal with mortality — and how we decide not to deal with it.
Story and Direction
‘The Shrouds’ director David Cronenberg. Photo: Caitlin Cronenberg.
With his spiky white hair, craggy face, and black sunglasses, Vincent Cassel’s Karsh Relikh (continuing a long tradition of Cronenberg protagonists with weird names) is a – pardon the expression – dead ringer for the director himself, making the film’s unsettling blurring of reality and fantasy even more obscured. A producer of “industrial videos” based in Toronto, Karsh is also the founder and owner of GraveTech, a new technology which allows the living to watch the decomposing bodies of their loved ones via a live feed from the radioactive wrapping (the “shroud”) placed around the body in its grave.
One can watch this decidedly morbid display on either the handy phone app or via a screen mounted directly on the deceased’s headstone in Karsh’s special cemetery, which is located directly behind an austere restaurant he also owns. For Karsh, GraveTech is more than a business: he has a feed directly into the grave of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger), watching her skeletal remains four years after her death even as she comes into him in dreams, pieces of her body missing from the cancer that ravaged her body.
Things begin to go off the rails for Karsh when the GraveTech cemetery is vandalized – including the grave of his wife – just as he is formulating plans to expand the franchise with an enigmatic European investor and his equally mysterious but alluring wife (Sandrine Holt). At the same time, Karsh engages in a dangerous sexual relationship with his wife’s twin sister, Terry (also Kruger), even as Terry’s ex-husband, the nerdy, unstable Maury (Guy Pearce) tries to help him figure out who’s hacking into GraveTech and who attacked the cemetery.
‘The Shrouds’. Photo: Sideshow and Janus Films 5.
Set in a slightly surreal world that’s just a few minutes in the future from ours (with self-driving cars and A.I. assistants a prominent but accepted part of everyday life), ‘The Shrouds’ follows a very Cronenbergian template of presenting the viewer with several puzzling questions that are not necessarily answered by the end of the film. This – and the movie’s somewhat emotionally removed, cerebral, dialogue-heavy script – can be off-putting to novice viewers but are familiar aspects to longtime fans of this one-of-a-kind filmmaker.
Yet Cronenberg possibly takes it a step further this time: as his mental state seems to crumble and the lines of reality blur, the movie itself almost seems to decompose along with the bodies of the dead that Karsh’s GraveTech allows us to view. The structure of the film decays just like a corpse, leaving Karsh on a voyage to destinations unknown by the time the film ends.
All this is done with Cronenberg’s typical precision and flair, with not a shot or composition wasted and the stark world of the movie painted in lustrous black, gray, and chocolate tones. Although minimal compared to much of his early work, the traces of body horror here are as always uncomfortable and unsettling. If we had to quibble with anything, it’s a little disappointing that the images delivered via GraveTech seem more digital in nature than realistic – the corpses look more like AI-generated images than actual bodies.
Cast and Performances
(L to R) Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger in ‘The Shrouds’. Photo: Sideshow and Janus Films 5.
Vincent Cassel has always been more of a character actor than a leading man, but he acquits himself well here as Karsh, a man with the financial and technological means to assuage his grief but not the emotional or psychological tools. His reserved demeanor makes Karsh difficult to access at first, but Cassel eventually and subtly expresses his anguish even if his methods of expressing it – like having sex with his dead wife’s sister – aren’t exactly empathetic.
Equally knotty is Guy Pearce as the sister’s ex-wife, Maury, who lives inside his own head when he’s not buried in a laptop screen. Maury is hopelessly awkward, socially inept, and both smart enough to connect certain dots yet naïve enough to allow himself to be played.
But the MVP of the film is without a doubt Diane Kruger, in not one, two, but three roles: she plays Becca, Karsh’s late wife, who’s glimpsed in flashbacks and dreams as cancer and surgery ravage and take apart her body; she’s also Terry, Becca’s more neurotic sister, who gets enmeshed in a strange, powerful attraction with Karsh that turns physical and blurs the lines of identity; and finally she is the voice of Hunny, Karsh’s initially helpful A.I. assistant who slowly turns more controlling and malevolent as Karsh’s paranoia becomes more entrenched. Kruger has been rather underrated throughout her career, but here she plays three distinct personalities in three very different forms of existence, yet somehow manages to make a psychological throughline for all three.
Final Thoughts
Vincent Cassel in ‘The Shrouds’. Photo: Sideshow and Janus Films 5.
Despite its morbid subject matter, ‘The Shrouds’ is not a return to the all-out horror assault of early Cronenberg classics like ‘Shivers,’ ‘Scanners,’ or ‘The Fly.’ But it shares many themes that manifest through all of the director’s work, and in many ways should be catnip to his most devout fans. The limitations of the flesh, the creeping grip of technology over our lives and even souls, the hint of vast conspiracies happening just beyond our range of vision – they’re all here, filtered through a more personal lens than usual, yet suffused with Cronenberg’s trademark sense of mounting unease and seasoned with his deadpan humor, dry as the dust inside a coffin.
It doesn’t always make sense, and it may not end up in a place that feels completely satisfying, but ‘The Shrouds’ is still a thoughtful if sometimes ponderous examination of grief and paranoia in which you’re never quite sure what’s about to happen next…which sounds a lot like life itself.
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What is the plot of ‘The Shrouds’?
Following the death of his wife, a tech entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) develops a technology that allows people to view the bodies of their departed loved ones as they decay in their graves. But Karsh’s plans for expansion are challenged by personal demons, vandalism, and a possible conspiracy.
Who is in the cast of ‘The Shrouds’?
Vincent Cassel as Karsh Relikh
Diane Kruger as Becca / Terry / Hunny
Guy Pearce as Maury
Sandrine Holt as Soo-Min Szabo
Elizabeth Saunders as Gray Foner
Jennifer Dale as Myrna Slotnik
Eric Weinthal as Dr. Hofstra
Jeff Yung as Dr. Rory Zhao
‘The Shrouds’ opens in theaters on April 18th. Photo: Sideshow and Janus Films 5.
Margaret Qualley, Josh Brolin And Guy Pearce are joining ‘The Dog Stars.’
They’ll appear alongside Jacob Elordi.
Ridley Scott is in the director’s chair.
Ridley Scott has had something of a good news, bad news situation when it comes to working with actor Paul Mescal. On the good news front, ‘Gladiator II,’ which starred Mescal as Lucius, has become one of the biggest grossing films in the director’s career, with a worldwide total just shy of $500 million.
Yet on the bad news front, he’s had to find a replacement for Mescal on his next project, dystopian sci-fi drama ‘The Dog Stars.’ He has since locked in ‘Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi to lead that movie and is now bulking up the supporting cast.
Elordi plays Hig, a crop duster pilot living on an abandoned Colorado airfield isolated in the foothills of a mountain range and the Great Plains and long deserted farm land and small towns. We discover that society has changed profoundly thanks to a ravaging virus. Whoever has survived strives to exist within these tragic circumstances.
Hig shares the spartan amenities of the base with a “Ranger” called Bangley, played by Brolin. They are obliged to tolerate each other in sharing and navigating this dangerous and uncompromising new world.
Daily but systematically, Hig pilots his 50 year old Cessna with his only friend, an elderly beloved dog named Jasper, his cockpit companion. Searching in ever widening diameters to find and replenish diminishing supplies, but most importantly “his quest” in believing in his question that there must be a world out there.
On his last and deepest “search,” he is obliged to crash land on a small ranch where he meets Cima, played by Qualley, an intern doctor, the daughter of a protective world-weary rancher, played by Pearce who fiercely guards his kin and “fortress.” This encounter evolves into a possible and intelligent future for all.
Qualley is coming off her critically acclaimed role in the Oscar-nominated horror thriller ‘The Substance.’ While she may not have been Academy nominated herself, she’s scored plenty of attention for her role as “Sue,” the more youthful alternate wrenched from the body of Demi Moore’s Elisabeth.
(L to R) Guy Pearce and Joe Alwyn in ‘The Brutalist’. Photo: A24.
Pearce has also been doing the awards rounds this year, as he’s Oscar nominated as Supporting Actor for hotly-tipped epic ‘The Brutalist.’
He has a few movies coming up, including horror thriller ‘The Woman in Cabin 10,’ psychological thriller ‘Killing Faith’ and mystery thriller ‘Blurred.’
There has also been persistent chatter about his returning for the sequel to 1994 Australian musical comedy ‘Priscilla Queen of the Desert.’
While the closest he’s gotten to awards season is his role as Gurney Halleck in ‘Dune: Part Two,’ Brolin has been plenty busy. He’ll next show up in ‘The Running Man,’ the new take on the Stephen King tale, this time directed by Edgar Wright.
And finally, 2026 will see him appearing in ‘Weapons,’ the mysterious new horror from ‘Barbarian’ director Zach Cregger.
What else is Ridley Scott working on?
(L to R) Pedro Pascal, Director Ridley Scott and Paul Mescal on the set of ‘Gladiator II’ from Paramount Pictures.
‘The Dog Stars’ ramping up as the next movie that Scott will shoot (and it’s also listed as in pre-production on the IMDb.).
Yet he’s also got plan to make a Bee Gees biopic, something he has had sitting on his To Do list for a while now. And while there had been the chance that the biopic could leapfrog ‘The Dog Stars,’ more recent stories pointed to creative differences between the director and studio backers Paramount, leading to Scott kicking the idea lower down his schedule.
The Bee Gees film would re-team Scott with one of his collaborators on the original ‘Gladiator,’ writer John Logan.
And it’s far from the only movie the busy director has on his potential projects list –– there is a wealth of others, before we even mention the long batch of TV series on which he’s listed as producer. It’s a wonder the man ever sleeps.
When will ‘The Dog Stars’ land in theaters?
That’s a big question at this point. Since Scott has yet to fully start on either ‘The Dog Stars’ or his Bee Gees project, there is no telling when either might be released.
Still, given the prolific nature of the (checks notes) 87-year-old director, we wouldn’t be too shocked if at least one was ready for some point in 2026. Let’s not forget: this is the same filmmaker who has brought us three movies across the last four years.
Director Ridley Scott and Paul Mescal on the set of ‘Gladiator II’ from Paramount Pictures.
Premiering on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ throughout the world on May 24th is the new Australian TV series entitled ‘The Clearing,’ which was directed by Jeffrey Walker and Gracie Otto.
What is the plot of ‘The Clearing?’
‘The Clearing’ is an eight-part psychological thriller based on the best-selling crime thriller ‘In The Clearing’ by author J.P. Pomare, inspired by the darkness of real-life cults in Australia and around the world. The series follows a woman (Teresa Palmer) who’s forced to face the demons from her past in order to stop the kidnapping and coercion of innocent children in the future. The series burrows under the skin and inside the mind, blurring the lines between past and present, reality and nightmare in a truly unnerving way.
Moviefone recently had the pleasure of speaking with Teresa Palmer and Miranda Otto about their work on ‘The Clearing,’ their approach to their characters and their unusual relationship, the show’s use of flashbacks, Adrienne’s power over the children, what kind of mother Freya is, and what it was like for Otto to be directed by her sister.
(L to R) Teresa Palmer and Miranda Otto star in Hulu’s ‘The Clearing.’
You can read the full interview below or click on the video player above to watch our interviews with Palmer, Otto, and Guy Pearce.
Moviefone: To begin with, Teresa, your character has experienced a lot of trauma throughout her life. Can you talk about the challenges of playing a character like that?
Teresa Palmer: I have to say I was very immersed in a dark place throughout the four months, but really it was only reserved for when I was filming because I have four children at home. So I’d have to come to work, get into the head space, and then leave it at the door, so I could go home and show up and be with my kids. But a lot of it was researching. I did so much research. I read journals. I watched documentaries on different cults around the world, and I wanted to get beneath the fabric of who this person was and why she is making the choices she’s making in her life. So it was a dark head space to be in. It was pretty harrowing, but certainly it was needed.
MF: Miranda, you play your character at different points of her life, did it feel at times like you were playing different characters and what was your approach to playing Adrienne?
Miranda Otto: Well, that’s a tricky one because we’re trying not to give away too much because there are so many reveals as the show goes on throughout the eight episodes. But yes, I’m definitely playing Adrienne over a breadth of time and it was challenging to keep coming up with the different ways she was at different times. It really was like a massive jigsaw puzzle. I mean, at one stage I think we were shooting six episodes at once. That’s just how it turned out because of people’s availability. So we were shooting six episodes and you’re trying to piece all the little fragments of the story together and remember exactly what happened where. It’s just so intricate this script, that was a big part of the puzzle for me. I really could have had a full-time assistant helping me with that, but I did not have that. It was me trying to put the pages together and work it all out. But I have to say, costume, hair and makeup were amazingly helpful, and I always feel like once you’re dressed and everything’s all done, it’s sort of like the character kind of begins to reveal itself to you.
Miranda Otto stars in Hulu’s ‘The Clearing.’
MF: Teresa, the series features flashback scenes to when your character was younger, that you do not physically appear in. How did reading those scenes about Freya’s past help inform your performance in the present day scenes?
TP: I think it very much does. I get to have a little look into the history of my character, how she was in the past and the choices that she made. I also took another step further and I asked to see some of the scenes that Julia Savage had filmed. Julia is the young actress who played the younger version of me in the show. She was so beautifully nuanced and there was such a fragility, bravery and strength, and all these wonderful colors that she was able to show. But I was like, “Okay, A, I’ve got to bring it. And B, I was looking for these specific things that she did with her hands, with her face and what were her mannerisms that I could sort of bring into the later ages where we see my character. So it’s complicated when it turns out that way, but I really enjoyed the process. It was just an extra little challenge.
MF: Miranda, can you talk about the power that Adrienne has over the children and especially with Freya?
MO: She’s definitely a hugely powerful figure in the series with the children. I think her power is very much about withholding from them, giving to them as a special moment and telling them how special and important they are when she wants something from them or she needs them to behave in a certain way, but then completely cutting off from them once that’s complete. It’s very transactional for her. She gives certain things to get things, and then she cuts off from them entirely. She seems to see them more as a photograph than actual real human beings. There’s sort of a definite lack of empathy.
Teresa Palmer stars in Hulu’s ‘The Clearing.’
MF: Teresa, having grown up with Adrienne, what is Freya’s relationship like with her children now and what type of mother is she?
TP: I think Freya really wants to give her children opportunities that she was never afforded as a child herself. So a lot of her parenting is reactionary because she’s in a place now where she’s able to love on that child as much as she can and give them so much. But also, her past manifests itself in being a little bit overbearing. She is a little bit paranoid, she’s a little bit controlling, and she feels safer when she can isolate herself. So I think she’s doing the very best that she can with what she knows and what her experiences are. But of course, when I have a look at her, I realize that probably Billy, her young son, is being negatively impacted because Freya is sitting in such a fear-induced place.
MF: Miranda, what has it been like for you to work on this series and create the complex relationship between Adrienne and Freya with Teresa?
MO: It was fantastic. I really enjoyed this shoot so much. Also, my sister was a director on it, so that was a heap of fun, and who’s also a friend of Teresa, so that was really nice. But I just enjoyed working with Teresa so much. She made it look so easy, and I thought when I read it, “Wow, that is a very complicated, heavy role to kind of carry through the whole thing.” But Teresa is such a light and effervescent person on set, and that was such a lovely thing because you could end up in a very dark place playing that role. So it was an absolute joy.
Miranda Otto stars in Hulu’s ‘The Clearing.’
MF: Teresa, what was it like for you working with Miranda on this project?
TP: I feel like in every interview, all I’ve been saying is this is a performance of a lifetime for Miranda. It’s unbelievable to have to hold the performance of someone from age 30 all the way up to their 80s. She did it so beautifully, and it was so nuanced. I’ve said this before, but I felt like we really trusted each other. So we were in a scene together and she would give me something and I would give her something, and it was like this beautiful dance, and each take would be so different and have its own colors. So it just felt like we were able to play and we were also given the freedom to do that by the writers and also the wonderful directors, including Gracie Otto, Miranda’s sister. So it was wonderful.
MF: Finally, Miranda, what was it like being directed by your sister? Had you ever worked with her before?
MO: It was great, actually. We’ve never worked together before. She’s worked with my dad, my husband and my daughter. It was fantastic because we got to spend a lot of time on weekends talking about what she wanted to do and how she was going to set up the shots. So it felt like I had an in insider lane into knowing ahead of time what she was hoping to get, and it just made working together really fast.
(L to R) Scot Williams and Liam Neeson in director Martin Campbell’s ‘Memory,’ an Open Road Films / Briarcliff Entertainment release. Photo: Rico Torres | Open Road Films / Briarcliff Entertainment.
The movie stars Liam Neeson (‘Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace’) as Alex Lewis, an expert assassin who refuses to complete a job for a dangerous criminal organization and becomes a target for their revenge. With his expert skills, Alex is able to stay one step ahead, except he is struggling with severe memory loss, which is affecting his every move.
Moviefone recently had the pleasure of speaking with Liam Neeson about his work on ‘Memory.’
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You can read our full interview with Liam Neeson about ‘Memory’ below or watch our interviews with Neeson and Monica Bellucci by clicking on the video player above.
Moviefone: To begin with, while this character is similar to roles you’ve played in the past, he’s also dealing with memory loss. Is that why you wanted to play the part, because its different than your other roles yet in the same wheelhouse?
Liam Neeson: Yeah, I’ve done quite a few action films, as you may know. This one was special because it deals with very sensitive and horrendous crimes, especially those of child prostitution. I’m a Goodwill UNICEF Ambassador and have been for a number of years, and I do get access to material if a tragedy happens in some country. UNICEF are usually always one of the first groups of people there in order to protect children from sex traffickers, so I’m acutely aware of it.
I thought, it’s the basis of our story. My character, who is an assassin and has been for 40 years, knows he’s dying and wants to redeem himself in some way by finding the culprits in this ring of child prostitution. It was very interesting to do research, especially on the Alzheimer’s dementia aspect. It was a character that I just find very rich to delve into and enjoyed it immensely.
MF: Can you talk about how you prepared to play a character with Alzheimer’s?
LN: Gosh, it’s hard to describe. Obviously, there’s various documentaries I’ve watched on it, several books I’ve read on it, and I guess just my own actor’s experience. I’m not blowing smoke up my ass, but I’ve made a hundred films as of last Christmas, so I have a certain amount of experience.
I tried to work very closely with Martin Campbell, the director, to find little moments where I could introduce aspects of this Alzheimer’s or dementia, without getting in the way of the thrust of the story in the film. It is an action thriller, but it has these layers of moral ambiguity. Let’s put it that way. Every day, going to work was interesting. I’m getting a chance to work with Guy Pearce and Monica Bellucci. I was like a kid in a candy store, I’ll be very honest with you.
MF: Finally, your character is a self-described “bad guy,” but he also has a moral compass. Can you talk about that?
LN: It comes out in the story. I don’t know if you remember but when the police are sharing information, they know that he and his brother were abused as kids by their father. That is discussed. He comes from a battered family, an abused family, he and his elder brother, and so that has helped form a moral code for him, that absolutely no child should be touched or harmed in any way.
‘Memory’ opens in theaters on April 29th.
Liam Neeson promoting ‘Memory,’ an Open Road Films/Briarcliff Entertainment release.
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Ten years ago, “The Hurt Locker” arrived in theaters and established itself as one of the definitive movies about the Iraq War. Amid the rave reviews, it propelled director Kathryn Bigelow to become the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director. Celebrate this major movie milestone by learning more about the origins and the making of “The Hurt Locker.”
1. Screenwriter Mark Boal based the script on his own experiences as a freelance journalist embedded with an EOD Army unit in Iraq.
2. Bigelow was convinced by ex-husband James Cameron to take on the project. Cameron may have come to regret that decision, as “Avatar” wound up losing the Academy Award for Best Picture to “The Hurt Locker” in 2010.
20th Century Fox
3. Even without accounting for inflation, “The Hurt Locker” became the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner in history. Its theatrical run had already completed by the time the Oscar nominations were revealed.
4. Bigelow wanted to shoot the film as close to Iraq as possible for the sake of authenticity, so much of filming took place in Jordan mere miles from the border with Iraq. Experts had to consulted to make sure the sites chosen were safe from Iraqi snipers.
Summit Entertainment
5. Many of the extras in the film were Iraqi refugees seeking asylum in Jordan.
8. 100 hours of film was shot for every hour of footage in the final cut, a ratio higher than even that of the notoriously troubled “Apocalypse Now.”
9. The film was the subject of a lawsuit from Master Sergeant Jeffrey Sarver, who claimed to be the creator of phrases like “the hurt locker” and “War is a drug,” and argued that Renner’s character was based on him. The lawsuit was eventually thrown out.
Summit Entertainment
10. Production company Voltage Pictures filed its own lawsuit, targeting thousands of BitTorrent users who downloaded pirated copies of the film.
11. The 2014 Broadway version of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” features several references to “The Hurt Locker.” The show features a running joke about inheriting sets and props from a short-lived stage musical version of “The Hurt Locker.”
The Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Future will be back to haunt Ebenezer Scrooge in a star-studded adaptation of “A Christmas Carol.”
FX and BBC One are teaming up to present the three-part miniseries, which will air in December.
Guy Pearce will star Ebenezer Scrooge, with Andy Serkis as the Ghost of Christmas Past. The cast also includes Rutger Hauer as the Ghost of Christmas Future, Joe Alwyn as Bob Cratchit, Stephen Graham as Jacob Marley, Charlotte Riley as Lottie, Vinette Robinson as Mary Cratchit, Kayvan Novak as Ali Baba, and Lenny Rush as Tim Cratchit.
Described as a “unique and original take” on Charles Dickens’ classic Christmas tale, the miniseries comes from writer Steven Knight (“Taboo”) and director Nick Murphy (“The Awakening”).
Ridley Scott’s Scott Free and Tom Hardy’s Hardy Son & Baker are on board to produce.
The long-delayed movie has experienced some bumps in its road to theaters, with the director himself saying he wasn’t sure it would ever get release.
Well, it is and there’s a trailer to prove it! “Game of Thrones” star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau plays a Copenhagen cop seeking justice for his partner’s murder by an ISIS member. Then, he is unwittingly caught in a cat and mouse chase with a duplicitous CIA agent (Guy Pearce) who is using the killer as a pawn to trap other ISIS members.
Coster-Waldau’s fellow “Game of Thrones” cast member Carice van Houten also appears in the movie.
While the thriller has political overtones, “It is the revenge story,” De Palma has said. “The whole political aspect will be very little exploited, the film was more for me a new opportunity to explore a visual narrative. In the film, terrorists are obsessed with the idea that their actions are instantly visible live on the Internet or on TV.”
Is Netflix backing away from the term it made famous?
The Netflix streaming model popularized watching a series in one giant gasp, launching the next episode right after the previous one finished.
But now, thanks to a report by “The Innocents” star Guy Pearce, it sound like Netflix doesn’t want to play up its main feature.
IndieWire relayed a conversation between Guy Pearce and the Empire Film Podcast. Empire asked if viewers would binge-watch his new show “The Innocents,” and that’s when Pearce surprised with this tidbit:
“I don’t think Netflix likes the term ‘binge.’ When we did the promotion for [‘The Innocents’] in the [United States], we were strictly sort of instructed beforehand not to talk about ‘binge-watching.’”
OK. Is Netflix just getting sensitive about the word “binge” because of a binge-eating or binge-drinking connotation? Or — as some conspiracy theorists now wonder — is Netflix preparing to back away from its own binge-watch model? Will it soon do what, say, Hulu and regular cable/network TV do and release new episodes each week instead of all at once? Are they going to go Old School?
Fans noticed that Netflix is testing out promos between episodes, which some fans have viewed as adding commercials. And there have been reports that Netflix’s latest price hike has lost the steamer some lower-income customers. So what if they are getting ready to shift gears in this super-competitive content market, as an attempt to keep costs down and subscribers up?
That’s pure speculation, but Guy Pearce was told what he was told for some reason. It’s hard to imagine Netflix would suddenly — after years — shy away from the word “binge” when they certainly haven’t shied away from controversy. If anything, they court it — from “13 Reasons Why” to “Insatiable” and beyond.
Either way, Netflix can’t be too happy with Guy Pearce for not only talking about binge-watching, but getting it in so many headlines. But we love him for his candor!
