(Left) Patrick Wilson directs and stars in ‘Insidious: The Red Door.’ (Right) Jason Ritter Promoting Netflix’s ‘Raising Dion’ Season 2.
Preview:
Jason Ritter and Patrick Wilson will appear in ‘The Last of Us’ Season 3.
Ariela Barer, Tati Gabrielle and Spencer Lord are all becoming regulars.
Bella Ramsey and Isabela Merced are among those returning.While the second season of post-apocalyptic video game adaptation ‘The Last of Us’ proved to be a more divisive run of episodes, it certainly still saw big viewership for HBO.
And trivia note: this actually marks Ritter’s second turn on the show: he previously had an uncredited role of a Clicker (the nickname for those infected with the mutated cordyceps fungus) on two episodes of Season 1, appearing alongside his wife, Melanie Lynskey.
(L to R) Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey in ‘The Last of Us’ season 1. Photo: Liane Hentscher/HBO.
Adapting the hugely successful Naughty Dog video game title, ‘The Last of Us’ takes place 20 years after modern civilization has been destroyed by a fungal outbreak that mutates its victims.
Joel, played by Pedro Pascal, a hardened survivor, is hired to smuggle Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a 14-year-old girl, out of an oppressive quarantine zone. What starts as a small job soon becomes a brutal and heartbreaking journey as they both must traverse the U.S. and depend on each other for survival.
Season 2, set five years after the events of the first, brought even more dramatic events into the lives of our heroes. And while Season 3 has yet to offer an official plotline, it’ll reportedly show several of the second season’s events from the perspective of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever).
When will ‘The Last of Us’ Season 3 be on screens?
HBO has yet to announce a date for the new season, though 2027 seems likely given the time needed to shoot and put the episodes through post-production.
Kaitlyn Dever in ‘The Last of Us’ Season 2. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO.
Danielle Deadwyler in ’40 Acres’, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
‘40 Acres’ receives 8.5 out of 10 stars.
Opening in theaters on July 2nd is ‘40 Acres’, which sees a family battling to survive in a post-apocalyptic Canada where roving bands of raiders threaten their precious farm land.
(L to R) Kataem O’Connor and Michael Greyeyes in ’40 Acres’, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
If you were surprised to learn that the movie ‘40 Acres’ exists, you’re probably not alone –– it was seemingly pushed into theaters in limited release against the hugely-promoted ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ following a festival run.
Yet despite seemingly appearing with little fanfare, R.T. Thorne’s movie proves to be an unexpected treat; a tense, impressively shot and acted thriller that follows some familiar narrative paths but does so with imagination and emotion.
Script and Direction
R. T. Thorne, director of ’40 Acres’, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Randall Thorne has mostly worked in TV on the likes of ‘Kung Fu’, ‘Utopia Falls’ and ‘The Porter’. He’s also been honing his cinematic skills via short films and now brings them fully to bear on ‘40 Acres’, which proves to be an impressive debut.
Writing the script with Glenn Taylor from a story he created alongside Lora Campbell, Thorne here wades into the sort of post-apocalyptic themes that have been well used by many titles in the past, not the least of which are ‘The Walking Dead’ and ‘The Last of Us’ on TV.
What makes ‘40 Acres’ truly work is that Thorne and his co-writer didn’t skimp on building solid characters to populate this story. Hailey Freeman and her small but mighty brood are a winning combination of intensely focused survivors and loving family unit.
Danielle Deadwyler in ’40 Acres’, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
The focus might be on the likes of Danielle Deadwyler’s Hailey and Kataem O’Connor’s Emanuel to drive the plot, the others aren’t simply ciphers.
And while the threats to the family are by their very nature more loosely sketched, there is enough about them and the wider community that the Freemans interact with to make the world come alive (even as people are dying all over the place).
Thorne’s directorial efforts here are well-used, as he’s made a stylish, effective thriller that doesn’t pull its punches (or shots) and posits a real threat to the Freemans from a new group of roving cannibals who are taking down farm after farm.
The action is also above par –– thanks to a committed cast and stunt team, the set-pieces feel narratively suitable rather than just thrown in for good measure.
Cast and Performances
(L to R) Danielle Deadwyler, Michael Greyeyes, Kataem O’Connor, Haile Amare and Jaeda LeBlanc in ’40 Acres’, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Danielle Deadwyler has brought her particular brand of intensity to movies including ‘Carry On’, and perhaps even more fittingly, this year’s ‘The Woman in the Yard’ where she also had to defend a rural home from a lurking threat (albeit a more supernatural one in that film’s case).
Hailey Freeman is a great fit for her –– the former soldier who brings her military training to her entire family and who will do anything to defend them brings out the best in an actor who knows how to seethe and plan without ever seeming one-dimensional. The role also gives her the chance to showcase an emotional side when dealing with her partner and the kids.
Michael Greyeyes in ’40 Acres’, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Michael Greyeyes matches her as Galen, the Native American fellow veteran who fell for Hailey and now shares the burden of keeping their family safe. He’s warm and witty when needed, but like his other half, a badass when the moment calls for it.
Kataem O’Connor’s Manny is perhaps the character who falls most into typical narrative traps as a young man pushing at the boundaries of restricted life, and who puts the group at risk because he wants to experience more. But even he’s a well-drawn character, with O’Connor giving him more than the usual sulky older teen mood.
Milcania Diaz-Rojas as Dawn, the unexpected new focus of Manny’s attention is also good, a tough yet sensitive fellow survivor who goes beyond the basic idea of a love interest where other movies stumble.
Final Thoughts
Danielle Deadwyler in ’40 Acres’, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Given how well it turned out, ‘40 Acres’ deserved much more attention upon release, and will hopefully be something of a sleeper success, even if it finds its audience on streaming or elsewhere.
Those who enjoy a well-crafted story of man’s inhumanity to man when the chips are down (and the crops are dying) should certainly track this one down.
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What’s the story of ‘40 Acres’?
After a plague eradicates all animal life, famine spreads across the globe leaving society at war and in ruins, but the Freemans are surviving — even thriving — on their ancestral farm so long as they dispatch the occasional raiding party. But what good is surviving the end of the world if it means snuffing out your own humanity?
Former soldier Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler) made that choice years ago, believing that isolation was the only way to protect her family. She and her partner Galen (Michael Greyeyes) fled the collapse along with their children, fenced them off from the world and trained them to fight.
But now Hailey’s eldest Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor) is a young man, and when he meets a young woman (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) in the forest beyond the fence, his need for human contact could place the whole family in jeopardy.
Doug Liman in developing an adaptation of ‘The Stand.’
Stephen King’s 1987 tale is considered among his best.
Paramount Pictures is backing the new movie project.
There are certain things you can count on in life. The changing of the seasons. The tides of the sea. A studio or filmmaker deciding to adapt a Stephen King story.
Paramount Pictures is, per The Hollywood Reporter, teaming up with the director to adapt the novel into a movie, bringing to the big screen something that has previously been miniseries.
The book, first published in 1978 then revised in 1990, is a bar-setting literary genre offering that has long influenced pop culture and inspired many other takes on post-apocalyptic narratives across different media.
An ambitious story of good vs. evil, it takes place in an America after a virus wipes out most of the population and follows dozens of characters in overlapping storylines running over many years. And while readers root for the characters such as the Trashcan Man and Mother Abigail, the final showdown came down to a group of survivors fighting the Antichrist-like Randall Flagg in the wasteland known as Las Vegas.
‘The Stand’ has, as mentioned above been adapted twice as a miniseries, once in 1994 and again in 2020 (pretty sure no one was really ready to watch it as Covid initially gripped the world), and as comic by Marvel Comics.
There’s a reason it has primarily been made into miniseries form: the book is King’s longest work, with a whopping page count of 1,152.
The history of people trying to adapt it into a movie is a litany of different filmmakers, none of whom got it over the finishing line: directors including George A. Romero,David Yates to Ben Affleck and Josh Boone (the latter ended up involved with the 2020 miniseries) have tried to tackle the material, and Warner Bros. and CBS Films partnered on developing it in the 2010s.
Now Paramount, working with Liman and producer Tyler Thompson of Cross Creek Pictures (who previously helped the director shoot Tom Cruise effort ‘American Made’ for Universal) are meeting with writers to develop Liman’s particular take –– described by THR’s sources as a one-movie idea rather than trying to launch a franchise –– into script form.
What else is Doug Liman developing?
(L to R) Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Hong Chau and director Doug Liman from Apple Original Films’ “The Instigators” make an appearance at View Boston. Photo: Marion Curtis / Starpix for Apple Original Films.
Liman is a real genre-hopper who hates being tied down to one sort of movie, and he has several other plates spinning right now.
Right now, he’s shooting ‘Everest’, which stars Ewan McGregor as British mountain climber George Mallory, the explorer who made multiple attempts to scale the titular peak throughout the 1920s.
And then there’s ‘Deeper’ in development, an underwater supernatural thriller that is being targeted for Cruise and Ana de Armas (because as the latest ‘Mission: Impossible’ movie can attest, Cruise loves spending time underwater).
The director keeps talking about the potential for another Cruise reunion –– a sequel to sci-fi ‘Edge of Tomorrow,’ though despite the tantalizing prospect, it remains just out of reach.
Then we have the big maybes, such as a movie that could be shot on the International Space Station, starring –– you guessed it! –– one Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, a new movie adaptation of ‘The Saint’ TV show and a variety of others.
That’s not even getting into his list as a producer, but to document all of those would take probably about the same word count as ‘The Stand’.
When will ‘The Stand’ be on screens?
While Liman is a director who can get movies made, even the fact that it has a studio attached is no guarantee that this will either move quickly or even reach screens.
Add to that the fact that the movie doesn’t have a writer aboard yet, let alone a cast, and we’d expect to be waiting a couple of years for this one. So, er, stand still for now?
Moviefone recently had the pleasure of speaking with Michael Shannon about his work in the film, in which he plays the patriarch of a well-off family who have retreated to a luxurious underground bunker after climate change has brought about the end of human civilization.
Shannon’s character, simply known as ‘Father,’ may have contributed to the collapse of the Earth’s ecosystem as head of a fossil fuel conglomerate. Despite its bleak subject matter, ‘The End’ is a full-blown musical featuring 13 original songs all performed by the members of the cast.
You can read the full interview below or click on the video player above to watch our interview with Michael Shannon.
Michael Shannon talks ‘The End’. Photo: Mubi.
Moviefone: Had you seen Joshua’s two documentaries [‘The Act of Killing’ and ‘The Look of Silence,’ both about the mass murder of Indonesian citizens by a brutal far-right regime in the mid-1960s] and having seen those, was finding out what he wanted to do with this kind of a curveball in a way?
Michael Shannon: When I first met with Josh, I had not seen the documentaries. I had heard about them, they’re rather legendary, but I hadn’t actually seen them. So I had a pretty fresh palette going into it. All I had to go on was our conversation and then reading the script. But after I signed on, I watched both of the films, and found them exquisite and painful and all the things that everybody else probably has, and I didn’t really find it to be a curveball. Josh talks about these three films, ‘The Act of Killing,’ ‘Look of Silence,’ and ‘The End’ as being a triptych. He actually got the idea to make ‘The End’ based on the time that he spent in Southeast Asia and meeting a wealthy entrepreneur who was building an underground bunker. So I guess he could have made a documentary about that guy, I don’t know. But he decided instead to make his first narrative film.
MF: What was your reaction reading the script and learning that it was a musical combined with a post-apocalyptic drama?
MS: I was thrilled. I am really disinterested in doing something that’s been done before. I think there’s probably too many movies and TV shows in general, and that people spend too much time watching them. But if you’re going to go through the trouble of making something — and it is trouble, trust me, because he devoted years of his life to making this movie. It wasn’t easy, and it took a small village to get the thing financed. But if you’re going to go through all that, then you better make something that’s unique, and I definitely feel like he’s accomplished that.
Tilda Swinton in ‘The End’. Photo: Mubi.
MF: When you do look at a script, do you have an immediate reaction? Do you have to keep turning the pages, and become aware that you want to be involved in it, or on the other hand, do you read 10 pages and are like, “No, this is not for me”?
MS: Yeah, it’s pretty quick. I don’t like reading screenplays anyway. I don’t know when that happened — it used to be that when anybody thought to send me a screenplay, I was overwhelmingly excited to see it. But I guess just through the years as you read stacks and stacks of them, they become less and less appealing. But yeah, you usually know pretty quick. But this film is about things that are really important to me, and I could tell that basically from the get-go. So this was a very easy script for me to get through.
MF: Do you see a parallel with the story in ‘The End’ to the political moment that we’re in now?
MS: A parallel? Well, it’s interesting, because I guess that’s where your mind is inclined to head, but it’s important to remember that this problem existed before Trump was elected. Even if Kamala Harris got elected or Jill Stein or whoever, it’s been a problem. It’s been a problem since the ‘60s, we’ve known about this for decades and we haven’t done enough to fix it or solve it because, frankly, we’re delusional. Not everybody on an individual basis is delusional. There are a lot of people that are aware of the problem and want to do something about it as individuals, but as a society, I feel like within the United States, there are all different kinds of people obviously, but the United States of America as a country, as a collective country, is mentally ill. It’s like a crazy person that needs treatment, and I don’t know who’s going to give us this treatment. I’m pretty sure it won’t be Donald Trump, but we need some serious time away in a clinic somewhere with a bunch of people saying, “Let’s get to the bottom of this, because you’re clearly very dysfunctional.”
(L to R) Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon in ‘The End’. Photo: Mubi.
MF: Father starts off as kind of empathetic and congenial, and then you learn more about him and his dark side starts to come out. What was your approach to playing him?
MS: Of course he’s congenial, that’s how he got through life. I don’t think many people get to be CEOs or run corporate entities by being complete dickheads. Charm is the name of the game. Is he a sociopath? I don’t know. Sociopaths are very charming. I do believe that he does have a sense of morality ultimately, that he’s not a sociopath per se. But I thought about it, the potential or the possibility for it. But I think ultimately he’s just a man dealing with a profound amount of guilt, which I can relate to. I think guilt is a pretty universal feeling, I would hope. I don’t want people to be afflicted by it, but there are some things, like I mentioned earlier, that perhaps people should have a small amount of guilty feelings about. But I think what you see in the process of the film and the process of the story is a reawakening in him. It starts with Son inspiring him to really try and remember how he and Mother met, and it’s like a thawing of sorts. Like in order to cope with this experience that they’re having, he’s created this persona that he’s perpetuating just out of survival mode, but it’s not actually who he is if he really stops to think about it. But that’s the thing, in the aquarium that they’re all stuck in, self-examination can be a very dangerous thing. You would think, “Oh, I have all this time now, I am just going to get to know myself, and journal and all these things.” But that can lead you to some dark corners or some questions that you don’t know how to answer, and I feel like that’s what happens to Father in the movie.
MF: You’ve sang onstage in a band, but this is the first time that you’ve sang on film, correct?
MS: Well, I did a miniseries called ‘George and Tammy,’ where I played George Jones, and I sang quite a bit in that. But in terms of cinema, yeah, it’s been a long road, but yes, I don’t think I’ve sang in a movie before.
(L to R) Michael Shannon, George MacKay and Tilda Swinton in ‘The End’. Photo: Mubi.
MF: The cast sang mostly live on set. Was that a challenge in any way?
MS: Well, we rehearsed quite a bit before we started filming, we had three weeks of intensive singing rehearsals and a little bit of dancing rehearsals, and also table work with the script, blocking the scenes. The challenging part about a lot of the musical numbers that involved the whole group is that Josh had something very specific in mind about how he wanted it to move and flow and look. It’s always hard when you’ve got an ensemble of people all in frame at the same time and camera movement and all that. Some of those shots took a lot of takes to get them just the way that Josh saw them in his head.
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What is the plot of ‘The End’?
A wealthy family has lived in a vast underground bunker for 20 years while the world above has become uninhabitable and humankind has all but gone extinct. Their carefully controlled life and routines are disrupted by the arrival of a young woman from above who leads them to question everything.
Even though there had been talk of follow-up movies in the past, we’re not sure we would have predicted today as the date that a sequel to 2007 post-apocalyptic thriller ‘I am Legend’ would be announced.
‘I am Legend’, in case it has slipped into the cloudy recesses of your memory, saw writers Akiva Goldsman and Mark Protosevich adapting Richard Matheson’s much-praised 1954 novel, which posited a world where a devastating virus (far-fetched, we know) had wiped out almost all of humanity and turned the rest into vampire-like mutants who roam the world looking for victims.
Robert Neville, the focus of the story, goes on a mission to find the scientific basis for the pandemic that caused all this, and chronicles his increasingly stressed encounters with his fellow former humans.
The book was adapted several times into movies, including 1964’s ‘The Last Man on Earth’, 1971’s ‘The Omega Man’ and then the 2007 movie.
In that adaptation, directed by ‘Constantine’s Francis Lawrence, Smith plays Neville, who is an army virologist surviving in a ruined New York and looking to find a cure for the virus that caused all the trouble – which was originally a mutated measles strain intended to cure cancer. His wife and daughter died in a helicopter crash as they attempted to flee a quarantine of Manhattan and Neville has company in the shape of his German Shepherd dog Sam.
Will Smith in 2007’s ‘I Am Legend.’
And so as to avoid spoilers for the film (even if it is 14 years old now), we’ll just say that things don’t go so well for Neville.
Which poses something of a quandary that the new movie would have to address – how does Smith fit into the storyline here? While the movie suggests that Neville’s heroic actions have given new meaning to the title, there’s a chance we’ll see him in flashback to fill in other details of his life before the pandemic and before he confronts his foes.
As for who Jordan might play? He’s not the right fit to be a younger Smith, so perhaps the story will be told from the perspective of a later survivor as the world struggles to get back to normal? What if he was a mutant who was ultimately cured, but must wrangle with what he did in the past?
However it works out, that’s an issue for Goldsman to solve, as he’s back to write the sequel. No director is attached yet.
And Smith posted a teasing image about the project to his Instagram page…
Smith is currently enjoying plenty of Oscar buzz and award wins for his role in ‘King Richard’ and will next be seen in Antoine Fuqua’s ‘Emancipation’. Jordan, meanwhile, is making his directorial debut while also staying in the lead role for ‘Creed III’.
Given that the ‘I Am Legend’ sequel is still at a relatively early stage, there’s no sign of when it might hit theaters.
