The two actors will be joined by The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Stranger Things breakout Joseph Quinn
Marvel has announced the cast for its much-anticipated reboot of Fantastic Four: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn.
The film, about a quartet of superheroes with different powers, has been dated for 25 July 2025.
Continue reading...Shang-Chi actor says Tarantino and fellow Marvel critic Martin Scorsese ‘don’t get to point their nose at me or anyone’ in response to director’s comments
Director Quentin Tarantino has criticised Marvel films, saying the studio does not produce movie stars and Marvel films “are the only things that seem to be made”, leading to backlash from Marvel star Simu Liu.
Speaking on the 2 Bears, 1 Cave podcast, Tarantino said the decline in movie stars was attributable to the “Marvelisation of Hollywood”.
Continue reading...In their first statement since legal issues began, non-binary actor says they have begun treatment for ‘complex mental health issues’
Actor Ezra Miller has broken their silence amid a growing list of legal issues and allegations of erratic behaviour, saying they are seeking treatment for “complex mental health issues”.
In a statement provided by a representative of the actor to Variety on Tuesday, the 29-year-old non-binary actor apologised for any alarm they may have caused.
Continue reading...Official denies Marvel film is banned but says kingdom ‘still trying’ to get Disney to cut 12 seconds referring to lesbian character with two mothers
Saudi Arabia has asked Disney to cut “LGBTQ references” from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness before it can be screened in the kingdom, an official said on Monday – but denied earlier reports that the film has been banned.
Disney has so far declined the requested edits to the Doctor Strange sequel, slated for release around the world next week. The cuts amount to “barely 12 seconds” in which a lesbian character, America Chavez, played by the actor Xochitl Gomez, refers to her “two moms”, according to Nawaf Alsabhan, Saudi Arabia’s general supervisor of cinema classification.
Continue reading...The actor talks about joining the MCU, his friendships with BTS’s V and the rest of the ‘Wooga Squad’, and the social and economic issues behind his TV hits Itaewon Class and Fight for My Way
In an early scene of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, a brief conversation between rich student Min-hyuk and his friend Ki-woo proves a crucial moment in the multi-Oscar winning film. “Tutor a rich kid. It pays well,” the scooter-riding Min-hyuk tells the impoverished Ki-woo, who lives in a semi-basement home with his family. And when Min-hyuk offers Ki-woo the opportunity to take over his job as a tutor for the rich Park family, he acts as a bridge between the two worlds, and sets the plot of the film in motion.
Min-hyuk is played by Park Seo-joon, and despite the brevity of Park’s appearance in Parasite, it will have been the first time most international audiences will have got a good look at him. Park is a big name in South Korea however, thanks to a string of successful domestic TV series – mostly romantic comedies such as She Was Pretty and Fight for My Way – and the Netflix hit Itaewon Class. Now his international profile is about to be raised, after it was confirmed he will be joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe for Captain Marvel 2: The Marvels, appearing alongside Brie Larson, Iman Vellani and Zawe Ashton, making him the third South Korean actor to join the MCU.
Continue reading...Matt Reeves’ film is spectacular and well-cast but an intriguing saga of corruption devolves into a tiresome third act
That definite article means it’s the genuine article. Adding “the” to Batman’s name has become a huge part of the brand identity, a sign of how elemental and atavistic this shadowy figure is supposed to be. You can imagine some growly voice saying “the Batman” – but not Tom Holland putting on a deep baritone to say he’s “the Spider-Man”, or Henry Cavill booming he’s “the Superman” (although maybe you could have Billy Joel stride into a dark Gotham City bar to raspingly confront “the Piano Man”).
Director and co-writer Matt Reeves has created a new Batman iteration in which Robert Pattinson reinvents billionaire Bruce Wayne as an elegantly wasted rock star recluse, willowy and dandyish in his black suit with tendrils of dark hair falling over his face; but Wayne magically trebles in bulk when he reappears in costume and mask as the Dark Knight, his whole being weaponised into a slab-like impassivity. And this of course is happening in the sepulchral vastness of Gotham City, the brutal and murky world which Christopher Nolan thrillingly pioneered with his Dark Knight trilogy and made indispensable for imagining Batman on screen.
Continue reading...Bringing Spideys old and new together was a masterclass in giving audiences what they want, and points to what Batman v Superman got so wrong
Fan service has come a long way since 2006, when studio New Line allowed its audience to basically crowd-think the entirety of Samuel L Jackson action epic Snakes on a Plane. Back then, somebody high up thought it would be a really good idea to start borrowing lines for Jackson to say (while fighting off those airborne reptiles) from a hyped-up geek community who had been spending most of their spare time discussing the unreleased movie on fan forums and blogs. The best/worst of them ended up being the legendary (for all the wrong reasons) line: “Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!” Up there with Jackson’s famous Ezekiel 25:17 speech about the path of the righteous man it really wasn’t.
This week Marvel and Sony have shown how to do fan service properly. And all it took was a staged meme featuring all three webslingers from global megasmash Spider-Man: No Way Home pointing at each other. The image recalls a famous still from episode 19 of the 1967-1970 animated Spider-Man show, in which a Spidey-impostor – clue, he’s really a criminal – tries to impersonate the masked wallcrawler. It’s since been used millions of times in social media posts, often to illustrate moments when celebrities meet each other (according to the Know Your Meme website).
Continue reading...Did Dark Reign foresee Trump? Was Iron Man about US military might? Who was Unbeatable Squirrel Girl – and was her superpower really non-violent conflict resolution? Only one man knows …
This should not be too hard, I thought, as long as I stay disciplined. All I have to do is read 27,000 comic books, then write about them. I had just signed a contract to write All of the Marvels, a book about reading every superhero story Marvel has published since 1961 as one single gigantic narrative. The Marvel story is omnipresent – its characters are everywhere, in movies, on television, even gracing shampoo bottles and bags of salad – yet also unknowable. It purports to be one big story: any episode can refer to, and be compatible with, any earlier one. But not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing. That’s not how it was meant to be experienced.
I did not, however, read six decades of stories in order. That would have been unbearable – and it is one of the two mistakes Marvel-curious readers often make. It is a surefire route to boredom and frustration as the fun lies in following your whims. The other error is trying to cherrypick the greatest hits, the pivotal single issues. Taken in isolation, these are peaks without mountain ranges. Their dramatic power comes from their context.
Continue reading...They’re big business … in Hollywood. But did you know Australia also has a small but rich seam of compelling and bizarre superhero movies?
The phrase “nobody makes superhero movies like Australia” has, I dare say, never before been written. Our humble government-subsidised film and TV industry is no more than a lemonade stand in the shadow of Hollywood’s arena spectacular, unable to compete budget-wise with the deep pockets of Tinseltown or produce bombast on the scale of American studios.
But scratch the surface of Australian film and TV history and you will find a small but rich vein of super strange locally made superhero productions with their own – forgive me – true blue je ne sais quoi. Their eclecticism and off-kilter energy provides a refreshing counterpoint to the risk-averse kind falling off the Hollywood assembly line.
Continue reading...Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn is a good directorial fit for the humour and freaky violence of DC’s bad-guy jamboree
DC’s new Suicide Squad movie announces itself as different from the coolly received first film from 2016 simply by adding “The” to the title, maybe sneakily trying for an unacknowledged rebrand or reboot. James Gunn, also in charge of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, is brought on board as director and co-writer. This second Squad outing (if you don’t count last year’s standalone Harley Quinn adventure Birds of Prey) is a long, loud, often enjoyable and amusing film that blitzes your eyeballs and eardrums and covers all the bases. There is Guardians-style comedy mixing humans and talking animals, there is freaky violence – including what I have to say is a gruesomely impressive interior-anatomical shot, showing a knife plunging into the still-beating heart – and there is colossal CGI spectacle for the final act in which a giant thing runs rampant in a city, while the gang look up at it; a trope that has become almost legally mandatory for superhero movies.
Viola Davis once again brings a touch of class to the Suicide Squad franchise as the chillingly manipulative security chief Amanda Waller who now springs supervillain Bloodsport (Idris Elba) from jail so that he can head up an elite new crew of misfits, desperadoes and undesirables. These include Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), the ironically belligerent Peacemaker (John Cena), King Shark – a great big talking shark in Hulk-ish stretchy shorts – voiced by Sylvester Stallone, Ratcatcher II (Daniela Melchior), who commands an army of rats wherever she goes, and Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), who fires molten polka-dots at the enemy, revving himself up for the task by imagining that this is his overbearing mother. There is also a kind of B-team of Squadders whose job is to be hilariously expendable.
Continue reading...Superman, Lethal Weapon, The Omen, Scrooged – the movie director’s CV tracked Hollywood’s most bankable genres from the 80s onwards
Richard Donner was the classic studio director and an action blockbuster maestro, the Michael Curtiz of the VHS age; he was the great inventor, or reinventor, of so many Hollywood genres and styles. When Hollywood invented the “franchise property”, Donner was at the centre of things. His macho Lethal Weapon movies with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover were far from enlightened on sexual politics. But they gave a black man equal billing with a white man in a top-flight Hollywood movie: rare in 1987 and rare even now.
Related: Richard Donner, director of Superman and The Goonies, dies aged 91
Continue reading...Great fun is had in giving us the backstory to the assassin’s place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
The sensuous cough-syrup purr of Scarlett Johansson’s voice is something I’ve missed in lockdown; now it’s back with a throaty vengeance in the highly enjoyable standalone episode for which her character Black Widow was well overdue. It is co-written by WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer and directed with gusto by Cate Shortland, with touches of Terminator 2 and Mission: Impossible but undoubtedly keeping the tonal consistency of a typical MCU melodrama.
This movie gives us the backstory to Black Widow’s presence in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, involving an origin-myth tale of family trauma, identity crisis and sibling rivalry with a pugnacious kid sister, Yelena, entertainingly played by Florence Pugh. Yelena can’t help mocking – but also maybe envying – Black Widow’s balletic fight stance which involves absurd posing and resembles the mane-tossing antics of a woman in a shampoo advert.
Continue reading...From Superman’s Y-fronts to Hulk’s tattered shorts, superheroes have made their fair share of fashion faux pas – but whose outfit actually works?
In the Guide’s weekly Solved! column, we look into a crucial pop-culture question you’ve been burning to know the answer to – and settle it, once and for all
When saving the planet, it’s important to dress the part. This isn’t like taking the bins out. You can’t hang off a chopper in a slanket and Crocs. Superheroes understand this. Unlike James Bond – who is permanently tuxed up as if he’s about to host a pharmaceutical industry awards bash – the offspring of Marvel and DC Comics have brought spandex, codpieces and vulcanised rubber out of the niche-interest sex-toy trade and into the multiplex. But which superhero has the best costume?
Continue reading...Daniel Craig hands in his licence to kill, Frances McDormand delivers her best ever performance, Carey Mulligan unsettles in a rape-revenge drama and Tom Cruise reaches for the skies … this year’s must-see films
Paul Greengrass’s latest film is based on the western novel by Paulette Jiles, about a girl returning to her family in 1860s Texas after being kidnapped by the Kiowa tribe. Helena Zengel plays the girl, Johanna, and Tom Hanks plays the man who must look after her: Captain Kidd, an ex-army veteran who makes a living reading aloud from newspapers to illiterate townsfolk, and who is now in the middle of a very big news story.
• Released in the UK on 1 January
Gal Gadot does battle with supervillains and everyday sexism in DC’s cliche-clobbering sequel. Is it a sign of the genre’s future?
There’s a scene in Wonder Woman 1984 where the luminous Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) glides into a crowded party. Everyone is staring at her – but this is no Cinderella moment, with admiring glances and a collective gasp. It’s an exposé of sexual harassment. The camera switches to Diana’s POV, and we experience a series of persistent, entitled men cracking on to a woman who is clearly not interested. It’s a rare case of a superhero movie showing everyday sexism from the woman’s point of view.
Related: Wonder Woman 1984 review – queenly Gal Gadot disarms the competition
Continue reading...Gadot is terrifically imposing, while Kristen Wiig is the scene-stealing antagonist in Patty Jenkins’ epically brash sequel
Here is an enjoyable Amazonian incursion into Reagan’s America – but the real wonder is Kristen Wiig, playing the warrior queen’s resentful and emotionally wounded antagonist, Barbara Minerva.
It is 1984, that pre-Covid utopian era of big hair, rolled-up jacket sleeves and imminent nuclear war, and Diana of Themyscira is getting her second superheroic adventure in a world dominated by over-promoted mortal males. The first time we saw this mythical warrior queen, played as here by Gal Gadot, and with outrageously gorgeous outfits, she had just surreally shown up in the middle of the first world war. Now Diana Prince (she is never called Wonder Woman, even obliquely) is living discreetly as a civilian in the Washington of Ronald Reagan – or as discreetly as someone so resplendent can.
Prince works as a demure archaeologist at the Smithsonian museum, and it is here that Diana examines an ancient stone that has the magical power to grant any person one wish. Poor, lonely Diana silently wishes to be reunited with Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) the dashing airman with whom she was once very much in love. But her nerdy colleague, maladroit gemologist Minerva, who has a beta-stalkerish fascination with the impossibly gorgeous Diana, wishes to be every bit as strong as her. And there is a third wisher: megalomaniac oil entrepreneur and museum donor Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), who wants more than one wish, so he sneakily wishes to be turned into the stone, to become a human wishing stone, so that he can persuade any individual he meets to wish for something beneficial to his interests. Could it be that Maxwell Lord is a version of Norman Vincent Peale, the positive-thinking guru who was such an influence on presidents Nixon and Trump?
Continue reading...Hayden Christensen returns as Darth Vader in the Obi-Wan Kenobi mini-series, while Chadwick Boseman won’t be replaced for Black Panther sequel
Disney has unveiled a huge slew of new projects for the next decade at an investor event.
Speaking on Thursday, Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy announced that the new Star Wars film, Rogue Squadron, will be directed by Wonder Woman’s Patty Jenkins – the first time a female director has taken charge of one of the franchise films.
Continue reading...Mank director rails at the risk-averse production strategy of major Hollywood studios
Mank director David Fincher has described Todd Phillips’ Oscar-winning Joker as “a betrayal” of mentally ill people.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Fincher was reflecting on Joker’s surprise success at the box office in a wide-ranging attack on the risk-averse production strategy of the major Hollywood studios. Saying that studios “don’t want to make anything that can’t make them a billion dollars”, he also suggested that occasionally “challenging” material can get support, if there is solid previous evidence of commercial potential.
Continue reading...Actor will reportedly self-isolate as Warner Bros halts UK production of The Batman
The actor Robert Pattinson has tested positive for Covid-19, according to US media reports, halting production of the film The Batman just days after it resumed following lockdown.
A spokesperson for Warner Bros, the Hollywood studio behind the film, said: “A member of The Batman production has tested positive for Covid-19, and is isolating in accordance with established protocols. Filming is temporarily paused.”
Continue reading...They’ve conquered the box office. Now it’s payback time. As they are attacked by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, are TV and movie superheroes fighting a losing battle against reality?
Alan Moore’s celebrated 1986 series Watchmen revolved around a conspiracy to kill off masked vigilantes, and in effect that’s what it did in real life. Compared with the complex, mature, literary nature of Watchmen, most other comic-book titles looked juvenile and two-dimensional. This was at a time when “comic-book movies” meant Christopher Reeve’s wholesome Superman series, and when the only inhabitant of the Marvel movie universe was Howard the Duck. The entire industry had to up its game, and a new era of mature “graphic novels” was born.
Now we appear to have come full circle – which is fitting for a story so heavy with clock symbolism. With uncanny timing, HBO’s lavish new Watchmen series arrives at a moment when comic-book movies are again in what you might call a decadent phase of the cycle. They have decisively conquered our screens and our box offices, with ever grander and more improbable forms of spectacle, to the extent that we’re now beginning to question how much more of them we need. Could Watchmen kill off the superheroes once again?
Continue reading...