Just as Will Smith staked out the Fourth of July as his self-dominated holiday at the box office, so too may Timothée Chalamet become our Christmas king. After last year’s “Wonka” hit big over the holidays and the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” opens on Christmas Day this year, A24 will release Chalamet’s next film “Marty Supreme” on Christmas 2025, the studio announced on Friday.

Directed by Josh Safdie from an original screenplay written by Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, “Marty Supreme” is described as a globetrotting adventure comedy in the vein of “Catch Me If You Can” and “Wolf of Wall Street.” While early reports pegged it as a biopic of ping pong player Marty Reisman, the film is an original story.

Production is ongoing but took a pause so Chalamet could hit the press circuit in support of his Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” which is why...

The Mummy is being unwrapped from the dead once again.

Lee Cronin is writing and directing a new take on the horror trope revolving around the ancient mummified undead for New Line, The Hollywood Reporter can reveal.

The project was previously only known as a Cronin mystery movie that had been announced earlier this year and is now set for an April 17, 2026 release.

Horror powerhouses Atomic Monster and Blumhouse, along with Cronin’s banner Doppelgängers, are producing.

Plot details are being kept in the sarcophagus but Cronin is hoping to breathe modern life into ageless evil.

“This will be unlike any Mummy movie you ever laid eyeballs on before,” he said in a statement to THR. “I’m digging deep into the earth to raise something very ancient and very frightening,”

The news was confirmed with post on Blumhouse’s Instagram account.

Atomic Monster and Blumhouse are co-financing the film.

Sony is sinking its teeth into its reimagined comedy take on Anaconda.

The studio announced Friday that filmmaker Tom Gormican’s reimagining of the 1997 snake-focused horror movie will hit theaters just in time for the holidays on Dec. 25, 2025. Paul Rudd and Jack Black star in the new feature from Columbia Pictures.

Gormican (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) helms the film from a script he co-wrote with Kevin Etten. Brad Fuller and Andrew Form produce for Fully Formed.

A video from Rudd and Black is below.

The Hollywood Reporter reported in August that the film was in development and was said to center on a group of friends who are dealing with midlife crises and decide to head to a rainforest to remake their favorite movie from growing up. Soon, they are in over their heads, with such challenges as natural disasters, violent criminals and, of course, massive snakes.

Luis Llosa directed 1997’s Anaconda,...

Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett will star opposite Anne Hathaway in Amazon MGM’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-seller Verity.

Michael Showwalter is (The Eyes of Tammy Faye) is directing the film that is planned for a theatrical release. Nick Antosca, wrote the current script following the previous work of Hoover and Lauren Levine, scribes Hillary Seitz, Angela Lamanna and the team of Will Honley and April Maguire.

Verity centers on struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh, who is hired by Jeremy Crawford to complete the remaining books in a series penned by his wife, author Verity Crawford (Hathaway), who has suffered a mysterious accident. Lowen soon learns that a secret unfinished manuscript may reveal clues about the family’s past. Amazon describes the book as a “gothic, psychosexual thriller in the vein of Rebecca and Gone Girl.”

Johnson will play Ashleigh, the writer, while Hartnett will play Jeremy, the husband.

They might not be “Wicked” and “Gladiator II,” but “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” and “Mufasa: The Lion King” will face off for another high-powered weekend at the box office.

Paramount’s “Sonic” threequel has made $6.5 million in Thursday previews at the box office. Disney’s “Lion King” prequel will report its preview grosses later this morning.

It will be a close box office battle, but “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” is expected to come out on top domestically with $55 million to $60 million this weekend. “Mufasa: The Lion King” is on track for $50 million in North America, but it will reign supreme at the international box office with an estimated $130 million overseas for a solid $180 million global launch. “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” won’t open internationally until Christmas Day.

The first “Sonic the Hedgehog” movie made $3 million in Thursday previews back in February 2020 and opened with $58 million. It ended up with $319 million globally amid the pandemic.

Oscar Isaac and Ana de Armas are set to executive produce and star in “Bananas” (working title), a new drama from David O. Russell and Fifth Season, in development at Apple TV+.

Details about the series, which is executive produced and written by Carolina Paiz, are being kept under wraps.

Isaac will executive produce through MadGene Media alongside Gena Konstantinakos. Russell will executive produce and direct the project.

On the TV side, Isaac most recently starred in Marvel and Disney+’s “Moon Knight.” He also earned a nomination for his performance as Jonathan in HBO’s “Scenes From a Marriage.” On the film side, he recently finished production on Julian Schnabel’s “Hand of Dante,” opposite Jason Momoa, and will next be seen in Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” releasing in 2025, in which he plays the titular Doctor Frankenstein.

“Bananas” would mark de Armas’ English-language series debut. She will next...

Rose Byrne (“Bridesmaids”) and Meghann Fahy (“The White Lotus”) have taken on Peacock’s limited drama series “The Good Daughter” following Jessica Biel’s exit. The two will be the lead stars, two sisters named Samantha and Charlotte Quinn.

Byrne will executive produce the series, and Fahy will step in to play Biel’s former role as Charlotte Quinn. As TheWrap previously reported, Karin Slaughter will pen all the episodes, as well as executive produce alongside Byrne and Made Up Stories’ Bruna Papandrea, Steve Hutensky and Casey Haver.

Here’s the official description for the series: “‘The Good Daughter’ is a suspenseful crime drama where sisters Charlotte (Meghann Fahy) and Samantha (Rose Byrne) Quinn have spent the last twenty-eight years trying to piece together the lives that were fractured by a single night of violence. When another attack splinters the small town of Pikeville, Charlotte is the first witness on the scene.

Lionsgate is betting big on The Housemaid, a psychological thriller from filmmaker Paul Feig that stars Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried.

The feature film adaptation of Freida McFadden’s best-selling novel has landed a high-profile release date of Dec. 25, 2025. The year-end holidays can be one of the most lucrative corridors of the year in terms of being able to support multiple movies in the marketplace if a title clicks with its target audience.

Next year will put that theory to the test in a major way considering that James Cameron returns to theaters with threequel Avatar: Fire and Ash (Disney). There’s also the family pic The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants (Paramount). Both of those films open on Dec. 19.

The Housemaid is an ideal property when it comes to providing something for female moviegoers.

Feig is directing from an adapted script by Rebecca Sonnenshine.

The Housemaid centers on Millie...

Sony Pictures will release “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” on Jan. 16, 2026, MLK weekend, the studio announced on Thursday.

The film is directed by Nia DaCosta with a screenplay written by Alex Garland. Producers are Danny Boyle, Andrew Macdonald, Peter Rice, Bernard Bellew and Garland. Original star Cillian Murphy is executive producing.

“28 Years Later” is the first in a new trilogy of films that landed at Sony after Boyle and Garland developed the projects independently and shopped for a distributor. A bidding war ignited, and the next film has already been shot by DaCosta.

Per the official synopsis, “28 Years Later” concerns one group of survivors that lives on a small island connected to the mainland by a single, heavily-defended causeway. When one of the group leaves the island on a mission into the dark heart of the mainland, “he discovers secrets, wonders and horrors that have mutated not only...

Taylor Sheridan's Travis Wheatley has been accused of ruining "Yellowstone" season 5. The criticism stems from the fact he spent most of the penultimate episode, "Give the World Away," playing strip poker with supermodels and showing off his horse riding skills before selling some steeds to bag the Dutton family a few million bucks. Sheridan arguably made himself the hero in his own story, but "Yellowstone" producer Christina Voros claims that he wanted to make people laugh.

In an interview with Variety, Voros noted that humor has always been a key component of "Yellowstone." However, it wasn't common in season 5 as the show's characters were dealing with the death of Kevin Costner's John Dutton and other traumatic events:

"That's always been part of the DNA of the show. So I think people were so wrapped up in the tragedy of this final season that some folks forgot that there's...

Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner's "Stargate Sg-1" had a great run. The Syfy show ran for 10 seasons between 1997 and 2007 and chronciled the adventures of the titular S-1 special operations team, which used a Stargate device (an intergalactic portal of sorts) to travel to alien worlds. The show had no shortage of material to draw from in its earliest seasons either; it incorporated aspects of everything from Arthurian legend to Norse mythology, spinning fantastical yet grounded stories along the way.

However, by the time the sixth season rolled around, the "Sg-1" writers had begun worrying about the show's longevity. For starters, its episodic themes had started to feel stale. Moreover, the series' tight budget severely limited options for filming locations, which were mostly confined to the woods of British Columbia. Given the futuristic nature of the show, it became increasingly difficult for "Sg-1" to dress up places on Earth...

In the last seven years, there has been a positive glut of "Star Trek" introduced into the world. Just as the Upn launched with the debut of "Star Trek: Voyager in 1995," so did the new streaming service CBS All Access launch with the debut of "Star Trek: Discovery" in 2017. This was the first "Star Trek" TV series on the airwaves since the cancelation of "Star Trek: Enterprise" in 2005, and many Trekkies were eager to see if the franchise could be restarted. An entirely new creative team had taken over "Star Trek," and they sought to update the decades-old series for a streaming audience.

"Discovery," we would later learn, was only one of many "Star Trek" projects that would debut on CBS All Access — later renamed Paramount+ — over the next few years. To keep people subscribed, Paramount produced "Short Treks." As a hook for fans of "Star Trek: The Next Generation,...

With its stationary long-shots of domestic life, “Family Time” is like the “Paranormal Activity” of dysfunctional-holiday-gathering movies: There’s a sense of spying on people who don’t realize they’re under a microscope. Of course, Tia Kouvo’s debut feature is duly scripted, directed and professionally acted. But her approach is so effectively low-key, you might occasionally forget you’re watching a staged fiction.

There’s no new ground broken by this seriocomedy of three generations in one ordinary clan enduring each other over Christmas, then glimpsed in their separate lives afterward. Yet the canny level of observation — at once casual, caustic and empathetic — makes for a film that adds up to considerably more than the sum of its seemingly offhand parts. Finland’s Oscar submission won Jussi Awards for best film, direction and screenplay, and while it seems unlikely to make a splash internationally, it marks Kouvo as a promising talent.

What is a place if it’s not on a map? What is a people if they’re not recognized? Felipe Holguín Caro’s “La Suprema” asks these questions within an intimate drama set in a remote Caribbean town in Colombia. La Suprema exists on no map and its Afro-Colombian population feels similarly erased. Modest in its ambitions yet brimming with a real sense of place, this lush drama about a boxing match is a quiet revelation. It serves as a vivid portrait of a community aching for glory and, perhaps more importantly, for the dignity they’ve long deserved.

Everyone in La Suprema knows of Anastasio Páez. He’s a boxer who’s making a name for himself on the world stage. His niece Laureana (Elizabeth Martínez) admires him from afar. It’s been a while since he left the town for good but his boxing skills still inspire Laureana,...

On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.

For December 2024, we’re celebrating the end of the year with a stocking full of Strange Holiday TV Specials and Seasonal Midnight Movies.

First, read the Bait: a weird and wonderful pick from any time in film. Then, try the Bite: a breakdown of the movie’s ending, impact, and any other spoilers you’d want.

The Bait: “Blade Runner” Meets “Die Hard” Meets Ancestry.com

Let’s stop asking if “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie — and start asking how many other holiday cult classics we’re missing out on with such narrow-minded nonsense. In “Trancers,” a hyper-stylish pursuit through a spunky sci-fi world sees Trooper Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) travel from the 23rd century to 1984 while hunting down his arch-nemesis, Martin Whistler (Michael Stefani).

Also known as “Future Cop,” this...

Tosca Musk loves love. So much so that, in 2016, she co-founded Passionflix, a niche streaming service dedicated entirely to romance.

Since its inception, Passionflix has produced 28 original movies, four series and 11 short films, all adapted from romantic fiction by female authors. Subscriptions (aptly priced at $69 yearly) are available in over 150 countries, giving audiences access to Passionflix’s growing collection of content, ranging in tone from vanilla puppy love to toe-curling smut.

“Stories for women should be told by women. That’s what we do,” Musk, who serves as a director and producer on Passionflix projects, says. “I want to make sure that that the stories are told for the female gaze. There is a delicate touch that I want to see in our movies, and I want women to tell those stories.”

Musk adds that the streaming service predominantly attracts female subscribers, with a growing contingency of men joining their ranks as of late.

“Sing Sing” is a scripted narrative feature based on the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison. Starring Colman Domingo, the film tells the story of the incarcerated men who took part in the theater program, and the ensemble includes graduates, including Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, who brought their real-life experiences to the film.

“The movie is built on these people sharing their stories and baring their souls,” said co-writer/producer Clint Bentley. “It only follows that they should have equity in the movie and have ownership over their own stories.”

This philosophy toward storytelling, both in terms of who gets paid for it and owns a stake in it, is one Bentley and director Greg Kwedar wrestled with long before “Sing Sing.” It’s a philosophy they believe needs to be rooted in creating an “ownership mentality” for the entire cast and crew, who...

Spoiler Alert: This article contains major spoilers about the ending and post-credits scene in “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” now playing in theaters.

Just like the ending of the first two “Sonic the Hedgehog” movies, the third installment sets up the fourth movie — coming to theaters in 2027 — with a surprise cameo.

After Team Sonic saves the world from Dr. Ivo Robotnik and his grandfather Gerald Robotnik (both played by Jim Carrey), Sonic (Ben Schwartz) finishes his race with Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessey) and Knuckles (Idris Elba) to find out who’s the fastest. The blue hedgehog easily wins the race as he speeds far ahead of his buddies and finds himself lost in the dark woods. Things quickly take a turn when Sonic finds himself surrounded by a squad of robots that look exactly like him. The robots’ designs are based on Metal Sonic, an evil android created by Dr. Robotnik in the video games.

Timothée Chalamet is 28 years old and just landed the fourth Golden Globe nomination of his career. He’s in contention for the best actor in a motion picture drama prize at the 2025 ceremony thanks to his acclaimed performance as Bob Dylan in the biographical music drama “A Complete Unknown.” Chalamet’s last three nominations did not end in victory; he recently told SiriusXM there’s nothing funnier than ripping up your acceptance speech after losing.

“This is my fourth Golden Globe nomination,” Chalamet said. “Look, I’ll just say this… There’s nothing more uniquely hilarious and something you cannot share with anyone when you get home and you tear up the little thing that you never had to use and you think to yourself, ‘You narcissistic arrogant prick. On what planet did you think you were gonna use this?'”

Chalamet was previously nominated at the Golden Globes for...

The live-action introduction to the new DC Universe got off to a massive start, according to James Gunn. The filmmaker announced on his social media platforms Friday that the “Superman” teaser trailer was viewed over 250 million times in its first day.

“Krypto really did take us home: With over 250 million views and a million social posts, ‘Superman’ is officially the most viewed and the most talked about trailer in the history of both DC and Warner Bros,” Gunn wrote. “This is because of all of you: thank you! We’re incredibly grateful and, most of all, excited to share this movie with you in July. Happy Holidays!”

According to Gunn, the Superman teaser views blew many of this year’s studio tentpoles out of the water. The first “Joker: Folie à Deux” trailer launched with 167 million views in its first 24 hours, for instance, while “Inside Out 2,” the highest-grossing movie...

"Marvel's What If...?" has been a part of the Disney+ Marvel Cinematic Universe umbrella since very near the beginning. It was the fourth official Marvel Studios show to launch on the then-burgeoning streaming platform back in 2021, following up "WandaVision," "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier," and "Loki" Season 1. The animated anthology series' third and final season premieres on December 22, 2024, mimicking the holiday release window for "What If...?" season 2 in 2023.

Through its run, "What If...?" has tried to strike a tricky balance between presenting true one-off alternate universe stories and tying into the larger "Multiverse Saga" of the MCU. There have been recurring characters and steady storylines, even while the episode to episode arcs remain relatively hypothetical and self-contained. In the end, it seems that the show's connective tissue to the grand MCU plot may have been the reason for its end after three seasons, at least according to Marvel TV head Brad Winderbaum.

Pedro Almodóvar is nobody’s idea of a conventional, throwback director in most ways. But among top international directors over the last 40 years, he stands if not alone but at least above anyone else until now in gaining prominence in the U.S. with subtitled films — without ever making an English-language one.

Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, all of whom saw consistent success in U.S. arthouses, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, made either just one or no films outside their native languages. From the 1980s, it became common for the most successful European and Latin American directors to pursue projects in English, sometimes never returning to their native tongues. Many others, like Bong Joon Ho, Alfonso Cuarón, and Guillermo del Toro, have leapfrogged to English-language scripts and actors after their initial successes.

Not Almodóvar, until now. With “The Room Next Door” (Sony Pictures Classics), he...

Barack Obama has shared his favorite movies of the year, continuing what has become an annual list-making tradition from the former President.

“Here are a few movies I’d recommend checking out this year,” Obama wrote in a briefer than usual caption on social media for this year’s list.

The full line-up, listed in no established order by Obama, includes “All We Imagine as Light,” “Conclave,” “The Piano Lesson,” “The Promised Land,” “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” “Dune: Part Two,” “Anora,” “Dìdi (弟弟),” “Sugarcane” and “A Complete Unknown.”

Several titles on the former President’s list have featured heavily in awards conversations, with “Anora,” “Conclave” and the Timothée Chalamet-led duo of “A Complete Unknown” and “Dune: Part Two” being widely projected to land nods in the Oscars’ best picture category. The Tehran-set “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is also Germany’s official submission for the best international feature film category.

By the power of Grayskull, Jared Leto will become a jacked-up, cranially exposed supervillain!

The Oscar-winning star of “House of Gucci” and “Dallas Buyers Club” is joining Amazon MGM’s upcoming live-action film “Masters of the Universe” as Skeletor, the skull-faced archenemy of Eternia’s greatest warrior, He-Man (Nicholas Galitzine).

Director Travis Knight (“Bumblebee”) has also cast at least some of Skeletor’s coterie of henchmen. Sam C. Wilson (“House of the Dragon”) will play Trap Jaw; Kojo Attah (“The Beekeeper”) will play Tri-Klops; and Hafthor Bjornsson (“Game of Thrones”) will play Goat Man.

They’ll join the previously cast Alison Brie (“Promising Young Woman”) as Skeletor’s lieutenant, Evil-Lyn; Camila Mendes (“Riverdale”) as He-Man’s trusted compatriot, Teela; and Idris Elba (“Hijack”) as Teela’s father, Man-at-Arms.

Chris Butler (“ParaNorman”) — who worked with Knight on Laika’s upcoming stop-motion animated feature “Wildwood” — wrote the latest draft of the screenplay,...

Christopher Nolan's movies have a very particular aesthetic. Though he works in genres where loads of computer-generated imagery are the norm, he values location shooting, practically staged action, and, of course, the kind of rich, tactile visuals that only film — not digital — can give you (at a reel length of 11 miles). There's a reason many cinephiles travel great distances to see his movies projected on 70mm IMAX, and never walk away disappointed.

Nolan's aesthetic preferences were challenged like never before when he took on "Interstellar." The deep space exploration film, based on the brilliant work of astrophysicist Kip Thorne, promised to be a brainy piece of science fiction in the vein of classics like "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Solaris" (Tarkovsky's or Soderbergh's). "Interstellar" wound up calling those films to mind here and there, but, really, it was singularly Nolan in its attempt to realistically depict what getting stuck...

In Hollywood, the Nolan name is synonymous with a commitment to producing cinematic spectacle at the highest possible level. Christopher Nolan’s obsession with shooting on celluloid film, using IMAX cameras, and staging everything from military battles and zero gravity sequences to atomic bomb tests with as many practical effects as possible is well documented. And his brother and frequent collaborator Jonathan Nolan employs a similar approach on his shows like “Westworld” and “Fallout.”

Jonathan Nolan recently sat down with “Westworld” star Aaron Paul for a career-spanning Q&a hosted by American Cinematheque, where he reflected on his commitment to producing TV shows with an unrivaled attention to detail.

Nolan recalled his first experience with shooting on film during the production of “Westworld” after previously shooting “Person of Interest” digitally — and the moment he knew he could never go back.

“’Westworld’ just kind of felt like you’re trying to evoke the Westerns,...

No filmmaker wants to be told what to do. Figuring out how to nab a decent budget while not selling your soul is always the challenge.

Robert Eggers has managed this feat, partly by forging relationships with distributors A24 (“The Witch” and “The Lighthouse”) and Universal subsidiary Focus Features, first with his gorgeous and violent Viking epic “The Northman” (2022), starring Alexander Skarsgård, and “The Witch,” star Anya Taylor-Joy, which cost $70-90 million, and now less costly Gothic vampire remake “Nosferatu” (December 25), starring Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, Nicholas Hoult as her feckless husband, Willem Dafoe as an expert in the occult, and Alexander’s brother, Bill Skarsgård, as the decrepit and passionately obsessed Count Orlok, played by Max Schreck in the F.W. Murnau original.

While the scary genre thriller may not look like an Oscar contender on its face, the well-reviewed “Nosferatu” is such an impeccably wrought 1830s period drama...

More than three years after it took the world by storm, Hwang Dong-hyuk’s “Squid Game” returns to Netflix this holiday season.

A lot can happen in three years — for the characters, but also for those of us outside who have had so much time to forget. For many of you, hearing “Squid Game” probably elicits emotion — excitement, dread, etc. — but the details of what made you feel that way are a little hazy.

So in case you haven’t made the time to re-binge all eight episodes of Season 1 (or even if you have!), here’s a refresher on what happened in “Squid Game” Season 1 and what might be critical to Season 2. Sadly, most of the characters from Season 1 are dead, but the Games themselves are very much alive…

Players Can Terminate the Games

After the horror of Red Light, Green Light, Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) and the other surviving...

Victoria Preminger, daughter of director Otto Preminger, died Feb. 7 in Studio City, Calif. following a fall at home. She was 63.

Her mother was actress Hope Bryce Preminger and her uncle was film producer Ingo Preminger, the literary agent who represented clients such as Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner, who were both blacklisted throughout the McCarthy period.

Born in New York in 1960, Preminger studied at the Lycée Français de New York and later graduated with honors from Smith College. During her undergraduate career, she starred in a number of television soap operas as well as the 1988 feature “Spike of Bensonhurst,” which was directed by Paul Morrissey.

Four years later, she graduated from Pepperdine University School of Law. She spent the following six years producing audiobooks in Beverly Hills, Calif. for Dove Audio, one of the premier audio book companies nationally. She went on to produce, edit and lead celebrities including Glenda Jackson,...

Eugene Jarecki has withdrawn his anticipated Julian Assange documentary The Six Billion Dollar Man from the upcoming Sundance Film Festival due to “unexpected developments”.

In a statement issued on Friday morning (December 20), Jarecki said, “The truth is, significant recent and unexpected developments have emerged at the heart of the story which, if not incorporated in the version for Sundance, would not represent a finished film. Sundance has shaped my career and been a cornerstone of my journey – only something of this magnitude could make me withdraw.”

The film had ben scheduled to premiere as a Special Screening. Sundance announced its...

James Gunn's "Superman" is absolutely stacked with characters, and the Daily Planet newsroom is no different. Metropolis' newspaper will be staffed by Rachel Brosnahan as Clark Kent's fellow reporter and love interest Lois Lane, while Wendell Pierce of "The Wire" fame will portray editor-in-chief Perry White. We'll also see Beck Bennet as sports reporter Steve Lombard and Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher, but surely one of the most intriguing characters is Skyler Gisondo's Jimmy Olsen.

Gisondo will portray the cub reporter in what is likely to be one of the character's most prominent big-screen appearances in a while. Why? Because Zack Snyder decided it was best to take this beloved "Superman" character and turn him into a CIA operative (played by Michael Cassidy) who is almost immediately killed off in "Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice." Following that unceremonious DC Extended Universe appearance, Jimmy will return, as embodied by Gisondo,...

As we wind down the year with holiday cheer and comfort viewing, IndieWire’s craft team picks the best TV cinematography of 2024. We weren’t seeking the slickest-looking eye candy, nor even the most elegantly shot series (although many of these projects are striking), but instead sought titles in which the cinematography was integral to the vision of its creator and elevated the storytelling of some of the year’s best shows.

While the long and repeated grind of television production can make the art of cinematography more of a team sport working under the umbrella of a series’ visual bible, in the age of limited series, there were a number cinematographers on this list who shot a vast majority, if not the entire series, and this list features a number of director/cinematographer combinations whose collaboration is more commonly associated with feature film production. Which also might explain the...

“September 5” feels as much like a time capsule as a pressure cooker of a film, as an ABC Sports crew doing cutting-edge live broadcasting of the 1972 Munich Olympics ends up covering much more than that.

In its most compelling moments, the Tim Fehlbaum film shows the audience the gulf between the journalists making decisions with imperfect information and the implications of those decisions — the characters’ goal may be “to follow the story,” but real life never abides by the rules of journalistic objectivity. To create this tension throughout the film, production designer Julian R. Wagner needed to craft sets that felt as grounded, authentic, and (sometimes) claustrophobic as possible.

So Wagner and his production design team made their lives a lot more difficult in service of giving “September 5” as honest a depiction as possible of what it would’ve been like to walk the halls of that Munich studio in the summer of ‘72. “Normally,...

The Robbie Williams song ‘Forbidden Road’ has beendisqualified from the Oscar shortlist because it was deemed to incorporate material from an existing song not written for Better Man.

Following a determination by the Academy’s music branch executive committee, the original song shortlist will be reduced to 14 entries and there will not be a replacement.

According to Academy Rule 18 Section 1-b, original songs must be written specifically for the film in question. The branch determined Forbidden Road contained elements from a song not written for Better Man.

Michael Gracey’s Williams biopic uses a CGI monkey to portray the British...

James Gunn's hotly anticipated "Superman" (watch the first trailer) is still well over six months away from hitting theaters. That means we're currently at the stage where, as with any major summer movie tentpole this far out from arriving, studios tend to tease rather than give much of anything substantial away. Right now, you just want to get the film on moviegoers' radars with some eye-catching imagery, maybe a villain reveal, and then save the much more revealing official trailer for March or April.

Gunn's "Superman" ain't playin' that, though. I don't know if it's because Warner Bros. and DC Studios have been mostly taking it on the chin since Christopher Nolan concluded his Batman trilogy, or the fact that the last two standalone Superman movies -- "Superman Returns" and, to a lesser degree, "Man of Steel" -- have been commercial disappointments, but the two companies are in hard-sell mode eight months out.

As much as Jurnee Smollett is an actor, she could also be considered an archivist — given how much of her 38-year career she’s spent capturing elements of untold history.

Smollett has been in front of the camera since she was 10 months old, but began acting in earnest when she was 5, appearing on sitcoms like “Full House” and “Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper.” Since then, Smollett played Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Smallest Freedom Fighter” (8-year-old Sheyann Webb) in the 1999 TV movie “Selma, Lord Selma”; the sole female debater at a historically Black college in 1935 Texas in 2007’s “The Great Debaters”; a woman who escapes slavery in the 2016 series “Underground”; and a fiery Civil Rights activist fighting both societal and supernatural monsters in 2020’s “Lovecraft Country,” HBO’s acclaimed sci-fi drama for which Smollett earned her first Emmy nomination.

In her latest film, “The Order,” Smollett plays an FBI agent (a...

Oscar-winning filmmaker Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson is really having a moment and cooking with a lot of cinema at the moment. Thompson, one of the leaders of the hip hop band The Roots and a Best Documentary Academy Award-winner for the music doc, “Summer Of Soul,” has much in the works. Yesterday, it was announced that Thompson would direct a “Saturday Night Live” music documentary for NBC—titled, “Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music,” about all the iconic musical guests and performances that have occurred on the show over the years And today production company Onyx Collective announced a first look and release date of his upcoming documentary, “Sly Lives!

Continue reading ‘Sly Lives!’ Teaser Trailer: Questlove’s ‘Burden Of Black Genius’ Doc About Sly & The Family Stone Hits Hulu In Feb at The Playlist.

Michael Schowalter‘s next pic with Anne Hathaway at Amazon MGM just got a couple of notable cast additions. Deadline reports that Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett will also star in “Verity,” a gothic literary thriller based on Colleen Hoover‘s bestselling 2018 novel of the same name. Nick Antosca currently adapts Hoover’s novel for the big screen.

Continue reading ‘Verity’: Dakota Johnson & Josh Hartnett Join Anne Hathaway On Amazon MGM’s Upcoming Gothic Literary Thriller at The Playlist.

If you're looking for a high-concept, mysterious sci-fi show in the vein of "Under the Dome," "From," or "Manifest," Stephen King has a recommendation for you. The master of horror has always loved sharing recommendations for spooky genre offerings on social media, and this week he took to Threads (he left the cesspool formerly known as Twitter in November) to highlight the UK-made series "The Midwich Cuckoos."

"The Midwich Cuckoos (Amazon): Surprised there hasn't been more talk about this," King recently posted on Threads. "It's a brilliant re-imagining of John Wyndham's classic sci-fi/horror novel." The title of one of Wyndam's best-known novels may not sound familiar to you, but the name of its earlier film adaptation might: "The Midwich Cuckoos" became "Village of the Damned" when Wolf Rilla adapted it in 1960. That version of the story is considered an all-time-great horror movie, alternately dubbed as an "excellent...

There was never any question about what format director Brady Corbet would shoot “The Brutalist” on. Cinematographer Lol Crawley says, “We’ve always shot on film.”

“The Brutalist” tells the story of Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody. He escapes the Holocaust and moves to the U.S., where he gets a taste of the American dream after meeting a wealthy industrialist who changes his life.

Brady and Crawley researched architecture photography and examined how it had been photographed. Speaking with Variety’s Inside the Frame, Crawley says, “One thing that came across in photographing any sort of architecture, you tend to want to have minimal distortion from the lenses. You may want to use rectilinear lenses so that you don’t get the same sort of distortion when you shoot a wide-angle lens.”

The idea led Brady to choose the rarely used VistaVision film, a large...

Nominations voting is from January 8-12, 2025, with official Oscar nominations announced January 17, 2025. Final voting is February 11-18, 2025. And finally, the 97th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 2 and air live on ABC at 7 p.m. Et/ 4 p.m. Pt. We update our picks through awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2025 Oscar predictions.

The State of the Race

DreamWorks’ “The Wild Robot” (Universal) has Oscar momentum, thanks to 10 Annie nominations. This follows the four Golden Globe nominations for Best Animated Feature, Best Original Song (“Kiss the Sky”), Best Original Score for Bowers, and Cinematic and Box Office Achievement.

Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” (Disney), which collected seven Annie noms (including Best Feature), is still very much in the Oscar race, as is critics’ favorite “Flow” (Sideshow/Janus Films), which earned three Annie noms. The Latvian film won Best Animated Feature from both the New York Film...

Nearly six months after its final episode aired on Disney+, many fans are still mourning the cancellation of "Star Wars: The Acolyte" (read /Film's review). While the High Republic series certainly had its flaws, it was something distinctly different from the other fare that Lucasfilm has put up on the streaming platform -- a mystical, Jedi-centric story from an era never seen before in live-action. It also featured some of the best lightsaber choreography the franchise has had in years, but that wasn't enough to prevent Disney from giving "The Acolyte" the chop after just one season.

In an interview with Vulture, Disney Entertainment co-chair Alan Bergman discussed the official reasoning behind Disney cancelling "The Acolyte," and unsurprisingly, it came down to money. "As it relates to 'Acolyte,' we were happy with our performance," Bergman said, referring to the show's strong critical reviews and high ratings early on. "But...

Despite starring in “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” together, Ben Schwartz had never met Keanu Reeves or Idris Elba in person until the London premiere.

The trio spent all their time in voiceover booths recording lines for their adorable, yet powerful, video game characters. Schwartz has played Sonic, the blue, speedy hedgehog, since the original 2020 movie; Idris came on board as the super-strong Knuckles, a red echidna, in the 2022 sequel; and now action icon Reeves is Shadow, an evil, black hedgehog, in the third installment.

Shadow was first teased in the post-credits scene of “Sonic 2,” just like how Sonic’s flying fox buddy Tails (voiced by Colleen O’Shaughnessey) was hinted at in the first movie’s stinger. The foil to Sonic’s childlike, happy-go-lucky character, Shadow is dark, brooding and up to no good. The evil hedgehog teams up with Jim Carrey’s Dr. Ivo Robotnik and his grandfather Gerald Robotnik,...

Look up! It's not a bird or a plane, but a brand-new "Superman" trailer absolutely jam-packed with details and Easter eggs that fans will be spending the rest of 2024 (and beyond) obsessing over. Make no mistake, the footage still managed to strike a fresh tone that establishes our main trio of David Corenswet's Man of Steel, Rachel Brosnahan's Lois Lane, and Nicholas Hoult's downright James Bondian Lex Luthor. But there's no way to miss the implication that this movie seems to be a true ensemble piece, with the appearance of several major and minor DC heroes proving that James Gunn is clearly setting up his larger DC Universe.

While that includes all the obvious side characters who may or may not end up in this new Justice League sometime down the line, one significant name was almost completely absent from the teaser: Angela Spica/The Engineer, played by María Gabriela de Faría.

What’s taking Amazon MGM Studios so long on a new James Bond movie? Apparently a lot, as a new Wall Street Journal piece describes trouble behind the scenes between Amazon executives and Bond producer Barbara Broccoli.

Read More: Daniel Craig On The Next James Bond: “I Don’t Care” Who Plays 007

“Nearly three years after Amazon acquired the right to release Bond movies through its $6.5 billion purchase of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio, the relationship between the family that oversees the franchise and the e-commerce giant has all but collapsed,” said WSJ. It appears there’s a standoff between the two parties. Amazon wants Broccoli to provide them with ideas for where to take Bond next, but Broccoli abhors the direction Amazon wants to take the character. And Broccoli is so enraged with Amazon’s ideas, she’s refusing to move forward with a new movie, effectively holding the franchise hostage.

In May 2020, Pixar filmmakers invited me to collaborate with them as they began their work on “Inside Out 2.” They explained that in the sequel Riley would now be a teenager, and the action would begin with her “headquarters” being crashed by four new emotions, led by Anxiety.

As a clinician focused on population-level mental health, I was intrigued by the decision to center Anxiety in the sequel, given the tremendous power of movies to shift perception and shape conversation. Watching the story develop, I came to see that the Pixar team was crafting one of the most culturally significant films of this moment. Why? Because movies matter. Movies can change the way people look at things, see things. Movies impact how we see the world, and how we see ourselves. They build for us an imagined reality into which we try to situate ourselves, sometimes for the worse (we...

Tom Holland is set to film Christopher Nolan’s new movie in 2025 alongside Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Charlize Theron and more. But the “Spider-Man” actor remains mostly out of the loop for now on what he will actually be filming. Plot details are always under lock and key for new Nolan movies — that apparently holds true for the cast as well heading into the holidays.

“To be perfectly honest, I don’t really know what it’s about,” Holland recently said on “The Dish” podcast. “I’m super excited, but it’s been pretty quiet about the project. I met with [Nolan] and it was awesome. He kind of loosely pitched what it is, and I’m sure when he’s ready he’ll announce what it’s about”

Holland told “Good Morning America” in October that he would accept an offer to star in a Nolan movie “sight unseen,...

Every Tuesday Tyler Coates publishes his new Filmmaker newsletter, Considerations, devoted to the awards race. To receive it early and in your in-box, subscribe here. It’s my last dispatch of the year—I’ll be back with another newsletter the first full week of January—as the Oscar campaigning unofficially pauses for the holidays. The last major awards event of the year will take place on Dec. 17, when the Academy announces the shortlists for 10 categories: documentary feature, international feature, animated short, documentary short, live-action short, original score, original song, makeup/hairstyling, sound and visual effects. Then, the Golden Globes on Jan. 5 […]

The post Considerations: The Best Picture Shortlist first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Everybody loves Rafiki, the wise old mandrill voiced by John Kani in the new animated musical prequel “Mufasa: The Lion King”. But not everybody — including IndieWire’s “Screen Talk” podcast hosts Anne Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio — loves Barry Jenkins’s quote-unquote photorealistic animal adventure that traces the origin stories of Mufasa (voiced by Aaron Pierre) and even Scar (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), known first as Taka.

In the movie’s commitment to realistic images, what gets lost is any sense of imagination or, even worse, fun. Jenkins himself has been candid about the virtual set as being not really his bag. We need Barry Jenkins’s voice, which is hardly here at all. Still, the kids’ movie might still end up taking in dump trucks of money over the holiday season. (Read IndieWire’s mixed review by Alison Foreman here.)

Elsewhere on this week’s episode, we take in the 2025 Academy Awards shortlists in 10 categories,...

A song from the Robbie Williams biopic “Better Man” has been disqualified from the Oscars after the song landed on the shortlist of 15 Best Original Song contenders last week.

The song, “Forbidden Road,” which was written by Williams, Sacha Skarbek, and Freddy Wexler, was found to have incorporated “material from an existing song that was not written for this film,” according to a note sent to members of the Academy’s Music Branch from the branch’s executive committee (and obtained by IndieWire).

The executive committee reviewed materials for the song and determined it doesn’t meet eligibility for this year’s Oscars and was deemed ineligible for award consideration.

An insider tells IndieWire the Academy’s decision is final without the chance for an appeal and another song will not be added on the shortlist to replace it. Voters in the category will instead choose from the remaining 14 songs...