Yet Another Superhero Movie Reaches the Top
Proving that the audiences just can’t get enough of superheroes, Venom arrived in cinemas and scored over $80 million in its opening weekend. Directed by Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer and featuring performances by Academy Award nominees Tom Hardy (Dunkirk) and Michelle Williams (Manchester by the Sea), Venom is based on a Spider-Man villain/anti-hero first introduced in comic books in 1984. With Halloween just behind the corner, Venom’s unsettling visage obviously resonated with the audience.
Musical melodrama A Star Is Born also opened last weekend, grossing $42,9 million and reaching the second place in the Box Office Mojo’s weekend box office list. Directed by Academy Award nominee Bradley Cooper (who also stars in the film), A Star Is Born is a timeless story about a self-destructive, alcoholic artist falling in love with a younger singer (played by Lady Gaga). As he helps her reach fame, he grows increasingly self-destructive. Animated film Smallfoot is in the third place with $14,4 million. In the fourth place is the comedy Night School with $12,5 million. Eli Roth’s The House with a Clock In Its Walls closes off the top five list of the weekend’s box office winners with $7,3 million.
Netflix Reveals the Cast of The Witcher
Netflix just announced the cast of its series The Witcher. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Freya Allan (Into the Badlands) will portray Geralt of Rivia’s young protege Princess Ciri and Anya Chalotra (The ABC Murders) will play the role of Geralt’s love interest Yennefer of Vengerberg. British actress Jodhi May (Game of Thrones, Last of the Mohicans) will portray Queen Calanthe while Björn Hlynur Haraldsson (Fortitude) will play her husband, knight Eist. The rest of the cast includes Millie Brady (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) as the exiled Princess Renfri, MyAnna Buring (Kill List, Doomsday, The Descent) as Tissaia, Adam Levy (Rome) as the druid Mousesack as well as Mimi Ndiweni (Rellik, Doctor Who) and Therica Wilson-Read (Suicide Club).
Early in September Netflix announced that the titular role of The Witcher series will be played by Henry Cavill, best known for his role of Superman in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. Until then, little was known about the production of the show. While Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher novels became bestsellers in his native Poland, it was a series of computer games developed by the Polish studio CD Project Red that turned it into a worldwide phenomenon. Originally, production company Platige Image aimed to produce a big-budget movie adaptation of the novels, but then it wisely struck a deal with Netflix to turn The Witcher into a TV series instead.
World War Z Sequel Still Happening
Five years after the first World War Z movie, the shooting of its sequel will probably, possibly, hopefully, finally begin next summer, says Collider. Recently, Variety caught up with the movie’s producers Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner who confirmed that the project is scheduled to begin filming in June 2019 with actor Brad Pitt and director David Fincher still attached.
Based on a 2006 novel by Max Brooks, World War Z had a troubled production. Its première was postponed for six months due to its entire third act being rewritten and reshot. Its original budget of $125 million ballooned to $190 million. And yet, when World War Z finally came out in June 2013, it grossed over half a billion dollars worldwide. However, even though talks about its sequel began almost immediately, the project ended up in a development hell for the next half decade, mostly due to scheduling conflicts. Currently, Gardner and Kleiner are working on the sequel’s script together with Dennis Kelly, British screenwriter and a creator of a cult TV series Utopia. While filming of World War Z sequel was originally scheduled for this year, it had to be postponed – again – due to Pitt working on Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Fincher producing the second season of his Netflix series Mindhunter.
