Solo Surges Forward, Stumbles
Solo: A Star Wars Story arrived in cinemas and, although it landed in the first place of the last weekend’s box office, nevertheless failed to perform up to expectations. According to the Box Office Mojo, Disney executives projected the movie’s performance throughout the four-day weekend at $130 – 150 million. Instead, Solo: A Star Wars Story earned a bit over $103 million, posing valid questions about how wise was it to release a new Star Wars movie mere five months after the last one.
The second place of the last weekend’s box office belongs to Deadpool 2. Still going strong in its second weekend, crazy adventures of a seemingly insane superhero grossed almost $54 million domestically. In the third place is yet another superhero blockbuster, Avengers: Infinity War – now in its fifth week in cinemas – with $22,5 million. Romantic comedy Book Club is in the fourth place with $13 million while Life of the Party, another comedy, concludes the top five list with $6,8 million.
Boba Fett Movie In Works
Ready to milk that Star Wars cow for all it’s worth, Disney is planning a standalone Star Wars movie about the bounty hunter Boba Fett, reports Variety. The movie will be directed by James Mangold, a filmmaker who directed everything from highly successful superhero movies (Logan, The Wolverine) to westerns (remake of 3:10 to Yuma) and comedies (Kate and Leopold, Knight and Day). It was his screenplay for Logan that earned Mangold a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Boba Fett became immensely popular among the fans of the franchise, despite first appearing in an animated segment in the notorious Star Wars Holiday Special that featured such beloved Star Wars characters as Malla, Lumpy, Itchy and Bea Arthur. Boba Fett also appears in the movies Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi as a silent badass portrayed by the English actor Jeremy Bulloch.
Boba Fett movie joins the growing list of standalone Star Wars movies that, so far, includes Solo: A Star Wars Story and 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Last year, Disney also discussed a standalone movie about Obi-Wan Kenobi with Stephen Daldry, Academy Award-nominated director of movies such as Billy Elliot, The Hours, The Reader and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.
Is Third Time a Charm For Locke & Key?
There might be hope yet for that Locke & Key adaptation, says The Hollywood Reporter. Streaming service Netflix is in talks about ordering an adaptation of this Eisner Award-winning comic book series developed for TV by the producer Carlton Cuse and the comic book’s writer Joe Hill, son of bestselling horror writer Stephen King and an accomplished novelist in his own right.
Written by Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez, Locke & Key tells a horror story about a widow who moves with her children into a mysterious and seemingly haunted New England manor after her husband gets brutally murdered. Despite being popular with readers and reviewers alike, Locke & Key has so far had a really bad luck when it comes to adaptations. In 2010 Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, who worked together on the TV show Fringe, produced a pilot episode of Locke & Key for Fox that featured Miranda Otto (Lord of the Rings), Sarah Bolger (The Tudors) and Nick Stahl (Sin City). The network chose to pass the pilot.
Seven years later, streaming service Hulu ordered a new pilot. Sets were built and seven scripts written before Hulu pulled the plug on the production this March. Will third time really be a charm for Locke & Key adaptation? We’ll just have to wait and see.
