In a world… in which movies are just as much products as they are art, studios need to sell the latest releases to the broadest possible audiences. That means that they not only need to craft trailers promoting the films, but they need to misrepresent what films are really about. On a certain level, that tendency toward misrepresentation makes sense. Trailers only have a couple of minutes to get people interested in the film, and complex works of art don’t lend themselves to such simplicities. That said, it’s hard to see a masterpiece reduced to just a few sizzle moments,…

The latest trailer for Kraven the Hunter features a long-awaited character from the Spider-Man mythos. No, not Spider-Man. Of course it’s not Spider-Man. Kraven is the latest in latest in Sony‘s attempts to build a cinematic universe based on Spider-Man characters, but without using Spider-Man. No, the newest character is Aleksei Sytsevich, better known as the Rhino. We’ve seen clips of Aleksei in his civilian form, played by Alessandro Nivola. But this latest trailer is the first time he’s appeared in his Rhino form and it is… different. The trailer shows Aleksei transforming into a type of human/rhino hybrid, a…

“What’s in the box?” The very fact that you just heard Brad Pitt‘s unique delivery in your head demonstrates how iconic that line has become. The question and reveal brought David Fincher‘s unrelentingly bleak crime thriller, Seven, to a head (sorry) and confirmed a hopelessly despairing worldview. The box, of course, contained the severed head of Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), the sweet wife to Pitt’s detective David. The disembodying is the final move by the serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey), who based his crimes on Catholicism’s Seven Deadly Sins. Doe killed Tracy out of Envy, driving David to kill him…

What sort of car does Marty McFly drive back to the future?DeLoreanFord PrefectVolkswagen BeetleFiat XI/9Which of these historical figures do NOT feature in Bill & Ted’s history report?Queen VictoriaSocratesBilly the KidSigmund FreudLa Jetée inspired which time travel movie?12 MonkeysThe TerminatorTime BanditsTime CopIn Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), to what year are the characters transported by the eponymous time machine?1986198419851987How many Star Trek movies feature time travel?FourOneThreeSixWhich 19th century villain must HG Wells attempt to thwart in 1979 movie Time After Time, feat. Malcolm McDowell?Jack the RipperMoriartySweeney ToddJohn Wilkes BoothWhat is the name of the time-travelling police force in 1994 Jean-Claude…

Release the Schumacher Cut! Okay, that nerdy battle cry maybe hasn’t caught on like the demands for David Ayer’s darker cut of Suicide Squad or another, longer cut of whatever Zack Snyder is making. But the Schumacher Cut of Batman Forever is a thing, a longer and darker version of the 1995 sequel based on director Joel Schumacher‘s original intentions, and according to Akiva Goldsman, who co-wrote the script with Lee Batchler and Janet Scott Batchler, the Schumacher Cut almost saw the light of day. Speaking with Collider at SDCC 2024, Goldsman revealed that the Schumacher Cut does exist and…

This article contains spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine. Do you know what happens to a movie star when they’re not asked to be in your movie? Same thing that happens to everything else. Or, to put it another way, you gotta ask actors to be in your films. That’s the lesson that Ryan Reynolds might be learning, at least according to Halle Berry. In conversation with ComicBook.com, Berry explained the absence of her X-Men character Storm in Deadpool & Wolverine. “Blake [Lively] asked me one time,” Berry recalled in the interview. “I ran into her at a Marc Jacobs fashion…

They might have played brothers almost 30 years ago on the set of From Dusk Till Dawn, but it’s fair to say the sun has gone down on George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino’s camaraderie. Clooney’s shots across Tarantino’s bow are making the rounds, too, after the actor sat down with his frequent co-star Brad Pitt for a GQ cover story interview. During the careers-spanning conversation, the subject of actors and auteurs came up, including how each leading man has enjoyed long-lasting relationships with some of the greatest auteurs of their generation. For Clooney that can include Steven Soderbergh and the…

Following the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, Wesley Snipes is rightfully getting some late recognition for his work in the Y2K era Blade films, but there’s another early-2000s Marvel pioneer who deserves some praise as well. Thomas Jane, who portrayed the title character in 2004’s The Punisher, was part of the same generation of early Marvel films that showed there was a massive market for superhero properties. Along with Jane’s Punisher – X-Men (2000), Elektra (2005), and yes even Ben Affleck’s Daredevil (2003) walked so the juggernaut known as the MCU could run only a few years later.  While promoting…

Forty years ago this summer, a perfect storm of moviemaking elements came together with almost supernatural precision: SNL alums like Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray at the height of their popularity; director Ivan Reitman and co-writer Harold Ramis at the peak of their creativity; unexpectedly innovative and convincing VFX developed by Richard Edlund on a budget because ILM was too busy; and a weathered and weary New York City that, still a decade out from “urban renewal,” proved a perfect backdrop for a comedy about working stiffs going into business. All these elements and more seemed to capture lightning in…

David Lynch has been making movies since the 1960s, when he was an art student who wanted to see his paintings move. Since then, he’s become one of the most recognizable and beloved auteurs in cinema history, a filmmaker who enjoys remarkable success, given his idiosyncratic work. Because Lynch’s work is so personal, it has long been difficult for critics and fans to reach a consensus regarding which is his very best work. Every single one of his movies and TV series has value, and each one strikes different people in different ways. Indeed, even this writer finds himself changing…

The MCU is a star maker. Thor changed Chris Hemsworth from a guy with one outstanding scene at the start of Star Trek to an A-lister. Guardians of the Galaxy transformed Chris Pratt from the goofy guy on Parks & Recreation to an A-list action hero. All actors know that, so it’s no surprise that someone like Kit Harington would go from saying “I don’t want it” over and over in Game of Thrones to “I do want it” as Dane Whitman, looking at the Ebony Blade in the post-credit sequence of Eternals. In a career retrospective with British GQ,…

Although the next Star Wars movie has only just kicked off production, Lucasfilm wasted no time giving fans and journalists a first look at The Mandalorian & Grogu at this year’s D23. The first Star Wars film since 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker is a continuation of the Disney+ series and picks up after the end of The Mandalorian season 3, which ended with Din and Grogu settling down on Nevarro. But from the looks of the teaser footage shown at D23, the vacation is over and our beloved bounty hunting duo is back on the road. Den of Geek…

The Fantastic Four: First Steps came to Disney’s D23 movie and TV preview at Anaheim’s cavernous Honda Center with just a little bit more than they showed at San Diego Comic-Con two weeks earlier. With the movie now two weeks into filming and the cast working in London, Marvel’s First Family—Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards), Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm), Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm), and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm)—delivered a video greeting to the 12,000 fans in the arena. The four were seated around what could have been the gang’s kitchen table, but what drew the most attention, of course, was that…

As part of a brand-new trailer for Captain America: Brave New World premiering at Disney’s D23 fan event in Anaheim, California this week, the thousands on hand at the Honda Center arena got their first full-on look at the movie’s Red Hulk (following an indirect glimpse in the first trailer), the anger-fueled alter ego of President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford). Ross’s transformation into the big red guy comes at the end of the clip (shown exclusively to the D23 audience), as he is speaking to a gathering of some kind outside the White House. Ross is overcome with a…

At its D23 fan event in Anaheim, California on Friday night, Walt Disney Studios unveiled a first, exclusive look at footage from Tron: Ares, the third entry in what is now officially the Tron film franchise—which wasn’t a foregone conclusion after Tron: Legacy underperformed back in 2010. Following up on the ending of that film, in which the AI character Quorra (Olivia Wilde) escaped from the Grid into the real world with Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), Tron: Ares is leaning fully in that direction with the Grid itself invading our world through the machinations of the malevolent program known as…

This Deadpool & Wolverine article contains spoilers. Deadpool & Wolverine wastes no time connecting Wade Wilson to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as an early scene finds Deadpool interviewing for a Stark Industries job with Happy Hogan. It’s a funny moment, but screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick at one point wanted to assemble an even more impressive MCU veteran lineup for the scene. “[T]here was a version of that scene very, very early on that wasn’t written, but was conceived, that had all the Avengers in the room,” Wernick told IndieWire. “And Wade was rejected and then he dressed all…

Film historians agree that computer-generated imagery (CGI) was first used in a motion picture as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), which utilized abstract computer animation under its opening credits. Of course that’s not immediately what comes to mind when we think of CGI (or just plain CG) today: the earliest, crude instances of the kind of CG that dominates modern filmmaking were first seen in Westworld (1973), Star Wars (aka A New Hope, 1977), Looker (1981), the groundbreaking Tron (1982), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), and The Last Starfighter (1984). But the first genuine leap…

“Whoever wins, we lose,” read the famous tagline for Alien vs. Predator. Ask most critics in 2004, and they would insist that we did indeed lose. “The title alone betrays an entire Hollywood mindset of rehash, reheat, recombine. Re-please,” wrote Jessica Winter of Time Out. “A movie based on a video game based on two entirely separate sci-fi horror series—so whatever was interesting in the originals has long been bred out, like double-jointedness,” lamented Ty Burr of the Boston Globe. These samples captured the general tenor of the critical response, which decried AvP as an unholy diluting of two venerable…

When asked to describe his take on one of the most well-known comic book characters ever, Hellboy: The Crooked Man star Jack Kesy has a simple answer: “I enjoy to smoke and Hellboy enjoys to smoke.” To some movie fans, Kesy’s statement may sound flippant. After all, Kesy is stepping into some big shoes. Ron Perlman knocked it out of the park in the two much-loved Hellboy movies directed by Guillermo del Toro. Neil Marshall’s 2019 Hellboy reboot has lots of problems, but none of them involve star David Harbour, who had his own likable energy. But to those who…

The 25th anniversary of Deep Blue Sea is generally not seen as a significant cultural event. In the grand context of a world spinning wildly off its axis, finding time to remember that movie where scientists use shark brains to cure Alzheimer’s can be difficult.  Yet Deep Blue Sea deserves to be remembered. Not for the events of the film itself—though it is, remarkably, still one of the best shark movies ever made—but rather for the incredible original rap song that plays over its end credits, “Deepest Bluest (Shark’s Fin).” In that rousing ballad, rapper and Deep Blue Sea co-star…