Nintendo has learned a thing or two about making movies. Its first outing back in 1993 was somewhat absolutely a disaster. A confusing live-action flick starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo was so, so bad. But thirty year later in 2023, Nintendo tried again. And boy did they have success. So much so that its other tentpole franchise is heading toward the big screen. Yuri Kageyama at the AP has more. Nintendo is developing a live-action film based on its hit video game “The Legend of Zelda.” The film, with financing from Sony Pictures Entertainment as well as its own…
Tag: movies
Every movie needs “stuff” to tell its story. Actors convey the lines and the crew films it, but the “stuff” is what everyone interacts with. Of course, we know them as props, and some are quite famous. Adam Savage, best known for Mythbusters, filmed a visit to The Earl Hayes Press, which is a shop that has been printing props for over a hundred years. Alone, that is a really cool place, but kicking things up a notch is his interview with Michael Corrie, who’s an archivist at the shop. Corrie details how some valuable and one-of-a-kind items were found…
We can joke around that modern movies using 80s pop culture properties have not usually worked out: Battleship and GI Joe are two examples. If it hadn’t been milked to death, Transformers would’ve broken that trend. Now we get a drama coming soon that looks to actually do what Transformers could not. And that property is Tetris. It may sound laughable, but the story behind Tetris is fascinating for many reasons. First, the Soviet Union owned all intellectual property and that meant Tetris never belonged to creator Alexey Pajitnov. Second, Atari was thought to own the rights to the game…
With the incredible computing power we all possess these days, it is infinitely fascinating to see how people can remaster, edit, and recut classic cinema into something more interesting and enthralling. From Thundercats to Terminator 2, there have always been great fan edits put out there. Now comes this 6-minute video from Scene 38 that reimagines the iconic Obi-Wan Kenobi vs Darth Vader lightsaber fight in Star Wars – Episode IV – A New Hope. Here’s what they have to say about this incredible video: “Scene 38 ReImagined” is about the final confrontation between Ben Kenobi & Darth Vader in…
There are few movie stars that have endured and worked as hard as Sylvester Stallone. The man we all know as Rocky and Rambo has never left the business of entertaining us. It also seems the man who seems like a tough-guy action star has a great sense of humor. This clip from the Jonathan Ross show where they interview Sly shows his good-natured way of handling show business. It’s a short clip, but a fun one to have a few laughs.
Interesting documentaries can always be a fun time. I’ve seen numerous movies about cool subjects, such as Class Action Park and Off The Rails. Now a new one is getting funded on Kickstarter that’s all about famous houses from movies and TV shows. Germain Lussier at Gizmodo has more on this cool idea. The film is called The House From and it takes fans not just to the outside of famous houses from movies and TV shows like Full House, Golden Girls, Friday, Twilight, and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, but beyond. More than just a tour, it’s an exploration of the people who live or have…
In all the years of Star Wars movies and television shows, one thing has remained a constant: James Earl Jones. The actor who has appeared in countless movies throughout his career is the defining voice of Darth Vader. At age 91, Jones has agreed to call it quits. It makes sense that would want to hang up his Vader mask. But who will replace him? A computer, of course. [Lucasfilm] has enlisted the assistance of Respeecher, a Ukrainian startup that uses AI technology to craft new conversations from revitalized old voice recordings. Respeecher’s relationship with Lucasfilm began with the Disney+…
Star Wars has always been a cash cow. However, in the Disney-ownership era, there’s been hits and misses. An early risk they took with their newly-purchased franchise was Rogue One. This was going to be a non-Skywalker side story. Nobody knew what to expect, but it turned out to be fantastic. On the heels of the Andor TV show releasing on Disney+ tomorrow, Shirley Li at The Atlantic looks back on this odd duck of a Star Wars movie. It primarily follows an ensemble of new characters, none of them named Skywalker, Solo, or Palpatine. The Force is mentioned but…
You can’t keep a good classic down. Leave it to the Spielberg movie that made everyone afraid of the water to make big bucks in a limited return to theaters. Recently national theater chains held a National Cinema Day event and movie tickets were a cool $3 to see a movie. Jaws ended up being a big draw. David Pierce at The Verge has more. Playing in theaters around the country, the movie made about $2.6 million over the three-day weekend. That put it 10th for the weekend. On a per-theater basis, Jaws actually outperformed every other movie in theaters…
If there is one subset of PC hobbyists that can simultaneously become a rabbit hole and an obsession, it’s those who are enamored with mechanical keyboards. These fans create custom keyboards, cobbled together from bespoke keycaps and individually suited switches in order to make their perfect input device. It is a fun hobby and can be an expensive one. For those looking to level up, Scharon Harding at Ars Technica has the story of an awesome keyboard in Elvish, the fictional language from Lord of the Rings. The Drop + The Lord of the Rings Dwarvish and Elvish Keyboards ($169) are the first to gain official Lord…
For over a year the production of Back To The Future: The Musical has been running in London’s West End. The production, which was written and handled by Bob Gale, has won awards and overall praise from people who have watched the show. Now, the DeLorean is flying across the pond to New York. Back To The Future: The Musical will be on Broadway in 2023. Jeremy Mathai at SlashFilm has more. The hit time travel movie, starring the unparalleled Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, has been turned into a musical before, as we previously wrote about here. That…
Last week was a rough week for Netflix. The company that basically invented modern-day streaming, binge-watching, and kicked off the endless rebooting of shows, is in a world of hurt. Last week Netflix officially let go 150 employees. On the surface, this may seem like no big deal. Netflix is a giant company with many thousands of employees. The company is losing hundreds of thousands of subscribers. They’re seeing their stock slide on all this news. However, there’s more to it than that. This is the culmination of a company whose MO led them to catch lightning in a bottle…
Vanity Fair’s Anthony Breznican has a huge writeup about the current state of Star Wars, Lucasfilm, and the upcoming Obi Wan Kenobi show on Disney+. It’s a lengthy writeup featuring interviews with many castmembers of various shows. However, this quote from Kathleen Kennedy of Lucasfilm misses the mark. The 2018 movie Solo explored Han Solo’s younger years, with Alden Ehrenreich taking on the role of the smuggler originated by Harrison Ford. The film has its admirers, but it made less at the box office than any other live-action Star Wars movie. Solo’s swagger may be too singular for another actor to replicate. “There should…
For all the pomp and circumstance film franchises get, nothing is ever a sure bet. Many films that had humongous budgets flopped while other movies were sleeper hits. Then you get into an interesting realm: movies that were supposed to become franchises but did not pan out. The Divergent film is a good example where a movie studio worked to bring a book series to the big screen and burned a ton of money in the process. In the end, even with a massive budget and marketing push, it became nothing. A breakdown of some of the more-promoted fizzled franchises…
Leave it to SNL to more succinctly get their point across than I can. You may remember back in February when I talked about movies being too long. It’s a problem that isn’t getting talked about nearly enough. Movies are easily coming in at two and a half hours, three hours, or even longer. Pete Davidson, with the help of some others, put up a fun skit on the latest episode of SNL. He just wants to watch a short movie. Plain and simple. It’s a humorous way to explain that movies are too damn long! One great thing about…
Sunday night’s Oscars were… memorable for a big reason. But I’m not here to talk about THAT. Instead, I want to mention CODA. This movie has been on the radar since it debuted on Apple TV+. And in a first, this film took the award for Best Picture when it was only on a streaming service. Owen Gleiberman over at Variety has more. …just as “CODA’s” Oscar triumph signifies that we’re in a whole new ballgame of an era, where streaming is the paradigmatic new normal (which potentially scrambles the very metaphysic of “movies,” since that word no longer means…
A sequel to look forward to. That’s what I’ve been calling the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 movie. This was the last movie I saw in theaters and was only a short time before COVID lockdowns began. Now at a lull in the pandemic, we get the sequel. And, oh man, it looks great. The trailer looks to have a lot of faithful lifts from Sonic 2 and Sonic 3. Chaos Emeralds, Knuckles, snowboarding, red biplanes, and, of course, Miles “Tales” Prower. Luckily enough we don’t need to worry about Paramount retooling Sonic’s look this time after their disastrous Sonic look…
Brian Stauffer reported for Variety on something I’ve surely noticed a lot lately: movies are really freaking long now. So many movies clock in at two and a half or even nearly three hours, lately. For me, it seems to be a detrimental factor each and every time I think about watching a film. Even when watching at home, the long runtime means you can’t just pop a movie on after dinner, especially when you need to be up for work the next day. Stauffer talks to a number of industry people about this and how all that extra footage…
Over on Den of Geek, they asked their staff to rank the best sci-fi films of the past 15-years. They also asked their readers to get in on the action as well. I may have to hand in my Nerd Card because there’s a lot on here that I haven’t seen. Colossal, The Endless, and Annihilation all flew under my radar. Some notable movies I have actually seen are higher up on the list. One that I really loved is Interstellar. Finishing higher on this sort of list than many might have expected in 2014, there’s a strange haunting quality…
Back in 2018, MoviePass was a big deal with people who wanted to go to the movies. The small startup was flowing with VC money and posing an impossible deal: subscribe for $10 per month and see unlimited movies in theaters. Of course, this was unrealistic. The cost for a monthly subscription didn’t even cover the cost of a single ticket and MoviePass was losing money like crazy. It didn’t take long for MoviePass to crater and die in a spectacular blaze. This past week Stacy Spikes, the original founder of MoviePass pre-VC money, held a presentation announcing he purchased…
Over at Thrillist, Dan Jackson and Matt Patches went through 32 of Steven Speilberg’s films and ranked them. The list does the usual worst-to-best reverse order and, spoiler, Crystal Skull takes the crown for worst of the worst. Coming in at 32, this dud of a stinker is the epitome of why some movie franchises should leave good enough alone. The action-adventure revival rolled into fans’ lives like an 8-ton boulder booby trap. There are spurts of Spielberg-patented, high-flying fun—the opening shootout in Area 51 and a chase across Professor Jones’ university campus summon the angular thrills of Raiders of the…
The past few weeks have been a culling of well-loved celebs. At the too-young age of 74, Meat Loaf passed away. He was in a ton of movies and wrote epic-level, theatric songs & albums. Born Marvin Lee Aday, the rock musician’s career spanned six decades across the music and film industries. He was beloved by fans and soared to unlikely rock stardom with theatrical, dark-hearted anthems and an iconic long-haired look. NBC News His best-known album, Bat Out of Hell, is one of the biggest-selling albums in US history. Talk about staying power. That album came out in 1977 and can…
A common theme lately is the fight between streaming services and movie theaters. COVID changed a lot with films coming out on Day 1 as a movie in the theatre. Over on VOX’s YouTube channel, they have an interesting explainer as to why theaters are still a viable business. Vox does a good job of explaining the release window. This is an exclusive time a movie is in theaters before it goes onto be available elsewhere. This exclusive time period is essential for the theater to make money. Studios make money still from theaters and also gain some ground by…
Earlier this past week Epic dropped a ten minute demo of the upcoming game The Matrix Awakens. This uses the latest Unreal engine to render the gameplay on Xbox Series X and PS5. I could keep talking about it, but you need to see just how incredible this game looks. Epic says, and it all looks incredibly real – there will be moments in which you won’t be able to discern whether you’re watching a real-life movie or a game. The environment in which the action is happening is an open-world city, full of AI-controlled characters and vehicles which make…
Storytelling for movies have come a long way over the decades. Specifically when you see movie trailers, you can tell how a studio’s methods change when enticing you to see a film. Some movies that stand the test of time would benefit from a modern take on their trailer. That’s exactly what Michael Edwards has done with Terminator 2: Judgement Day. He’s taken this classic sci-fi action-drama and cut a trailer worthy of the modern era. It’s gorgeous and looks pro AF. Have a look for yourself: Two things strike me as excellent attention to detail. First, the omission of…
After the immense success of Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse in 2018, it was inevitable that Sony would produce a sequel. Now Sony has finally released the first trailer for the film. Even more of a surprise is this will be told in two parts. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part One) has the same amazing mixed animation style as the first movie. Even more interesting is they pulled a trick from Back to the Future. This movie start at the same point where the prior one ended. Shameik Moore and Hailee Steinfeld reprise their roles for the movie and it looks…
Christmas movies are always tough to nail right. Sometimes they’re too cheesy or too serious. The timeless ones are timeless for unknown reasons because they can still be too serious or too cheesy. A Christmas Story was basically unknown until TBS decided to run it endlessly on Christmas, turning it into a modern classic. A new challenger has entered the arena this year: 8-Bit Christmas. I checked it out this past weekend and this will be my spoiler-free thoughts. This movie stars Neil-Patrick Harris narrating a story to his daughter about his adventures in 1987 to get a Nintendo (which…
Leave it to the old vanguard of Hollywood to blame their failures on anyone else but themselves. This time around it’s Ridley Scott, mastermind of amazing movies, who’s looking for a scapegoat because his latest film, The Last Duel has bombed. “I think what it boils down to — what we’ve got today [are] the audiences who were brought up on these fucking cellphones. The millennian [sic] do not ever want to be taught anything unless you’re told it on a cellphone,” Scott said. Old Guy Complaining About Crap The Last Duel hit theaters exclusively on October 20th and earned…
Origin stories are a roll of the dice. They’re usually movies we never ask for. Some are innovative. Some are completely unnecessary. Today Disney released the trailer for Lightyear, an origin story for Buzz Lightyear. I was instantly skeptical, especially after reading that Buzz would not be voiced by Tim Allen. Then I watched the trailer. Chris Evans, from the tiny dialogue we get, sounds good as Buzz. Even further, I like the darker look of the film. It seems like it may be more gritty, which would add some nice color to the character. Lastly I think this can…
Variety reports Scarlett Johansson and Disney have settled their lawsuit wherein Johansson claimed she was not being paid properly. The suit began with Black Widow’s simultaneous release on Disney+ and theaters. Johansson had accused Disney of reneging on its promise to do a traditional theatrical release for “Black Widow,” in favor of a simultaneous release on Disney Plus. The suit alleged that Johansson lost out on tens of millions of dollars in box office bonuses. Variety This lawsuit was an omission to September 2nd’s Longform article wherein I talked about theatrical releases and Day One streaming of the same movie.…