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Adam Wingard to Return to MonsterVerse with SON OF KONG?

Godzilla Vs Kong director Adam Wingard is in talks with Legendary to return to the ongoing MonsterVerse for its next instalment.

According to THR, the company is in talks with the You’re Next director to helm the series’ next film, rumoured to be a new take on Son of Kong.

There was once a time when the future of the MonsterVerse seemed uncertain: though the series has its fans, 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters severely underwhelmed many critics and a sizeable portion of its audiences, and the franchise’s future was in doubt.

But then, not one month ago, along came a little movie called Godzilla Vs Kong. Blasting its way into US cinemas at the end of March after a series of delays, it roared to a pandemic-best $400m globally. It blew Christopher Nolan’s Tenet out of the water with ease, and it still has yet to open in some of the world’s largest markets.

That Legendary would want to adapt Son of Kong is an interesting choice for the studio. The idea was first put to film in 1933, only nine months after the original King Kong film debuted, and although it wasn’t hated as much as the infamous Son of Godzilla 34 years later, it wasn’t exactly well-loved.

Having said that, maybe it makes sense: Godzilla Vs Kong showed a more human side to the giant ape, and also expanded on the Hollow Earth idea first glimpsed in King of the Monsters. Maybe there is some logic here after all.

In any case, at this stage we don’t know what the film will be when it finally hits our screens – and that may not be for a while. Adam Wingard has his plate full with the live-action Thundercats movie for WB and a Face/Off sequel for Paramount. And, as THR notes, there’s no writer attached to the new MonsterVerse film at the moment.

Godzilla Vs Kong is currently available on Premium VOD in the UK, and has yet to secure an official cinema release. You can read our thoughts on it here (hint: we absolutely loved it).

JOHN WICK Prequel Series to Focus on Young Winston

The upcoming prequel series set in the John Wick universe will be set in the 1970s and will follow a young Winston, it was revealed this week.

In an interview with Deadline, Lionsgate TV boss Kevin Beggs explained that the spinoff series will follow “the young Winston and how it came to be that he and his team of confederates found their way into this hotel which we have met for the first time in the movie franchise 40 years later.”

Beggs also revealed that the series will be composed of three 90-minute instalments, rather than taking a longer dramatic form, and additionally confirmed that Keanu Reeves (who plays the titular assassin in the movie series) will not be appearing in The Continental, but is in talks to serve as an executive producer.

Realistically, this makes total sense: if we take Wick to be the same age as Reeves, he’d be a teenager in the time the series is taking place, and there’s definitely an argument to be made that this’d be much less interesting than a Winston series.

Beggs compared the new series to the upcoming Game of Thrones prequel, in that audiences will know the world of the show, but not necessarily all of the new characters.

At this point it’s unclear whether Ian McShane will appear in the new series. The actor has played Continental owner Winston in all three films so far, and is presumed to be reprising the role in the upcoming fourth and fifth instalments.

We can safely rule out de-aging for two reasons: firstly, the tech is too expensive to be done convincingly on a TV budget; and secondly, Ian McShane is 78. As much as we’d love to see him taking down punks with that classic John Wick gun-fu, the guy’s just too old for it – though he did say the other year that he could do voiceover work for the series.

The John Wick films have gone from strength to strength since the release of the first all the way back in 2014. Following a retired assassin who’s forced to take one last job after his dog is killed, they’re known for their brutal and balletic gunplay and emphasis on practical stunts.

The third film, subtitled Parabellum, was the highest-grossing of the series by a long way, and a fourth film is scheduled for release next summer. As for The Continental, that’s currently without an air date – but given that it’s still very early in production, we probably shouldn’t expect it until after John Wick Chapter 4 next year.

Winnipeg Launch 2023 WORLDCON Bid

Canadian science fiction fans have announced their intention to host 2023’s Worldcon Science Fiction event in Winnipeg Canada.

It will be in competition with two other bids; Chengdu In China and Memphis Tennessee in the United States of America. The majority of Worldcon’s have been hosted in the USA and the first ever Worldcon was hosted in the New York City back in 1939. In recent years a concerted effort to bring Worldcon to the world has been made, with Worldcon’s being hosted in Helsinki, Ireland and New Zealand.

They have been multiple attempts to bring the event to China but it has not been succesful so far as Worldcon’s tend to favour English speaking locations and a mostly North American and European following.

Worldcon is the world’s longest running science fiction convention, ran by fans for fans. Due to it’s age and pedigree it’s a strange mix of tradition, academic conference and geeky fun, with a heavy focus on books over comics, movies and other media. Previous Guests of Honour at a Worldcon have included Arthur C Clarke, Gerry Anderson and Neil Gaiman. Worldcon is also where the highly prestigious Hugo Awards are presented.

More information on the Winnipeg bid can be found on their website, winnipegin2023.ca

Wyrmwood Launch DISPEL DICE Kickstarter

Wyrmwood, who make the world’s most expensive furniture for geeks have teamed up with Dispel Dice, who make the world’s prettiest dice, to launch an exciting new Kickstarter.

The range of exceptionally pretty colourway resin dice will be combined with Wyrmwood’s distinctive dice vaults. It is also a world-record attempt. For every person who pledges in the Kickstarter, Wyrmwood will add a single die to a line of dice; the world record for such a line is over 6,000 dice, so Wyrmwood & Dispel Dice hope that more than 7000 people will pledge, allowing them to claim the record.

Wyrmwood are best known for their deluxe gaming tables and gaming accessories. They supply furniture and storage to the higher end of the gaming hobby and show’s such as Critical Role have custom tables supplied by company. Dungeons and Dragons super-start Matt Mercer even has a Wyrmwood made Dungeon Master’s screen. Wyrmwood are also famous for their Reality TV style YouTube show WyrmLife, which is an addictive fly-on-the-wall show that has tracked the meteoric rise of the American furniture company.

Dispel Dice are a company that have wowed the gaming world with the quality of their dice, producing beautiful polyhedral dice sets that are as lovely a gemstones.

The new campaign features sharp-edged, luxury resin dice with shiny inclusions that make the things look like magical gemstones. The range includes dice with names such as Event Horizon, Tempest Rose, Knife Dancer and 80’s Kid. The dice vaults (which are very pretty dice boxes) are available in woods such as Macassar Ebony and Bolivian Rosewood. Options include holographic inlays or brass inlays. These are heirloom style items, intended to last more than a lifetime.

If you’re very, very keen for the biggest, baddest dice; this Kickstarter also includes a solid tungsten dice that appears to be the size of a large adult fist. It’s $2500 and we strongly advise that if you do get one, you don’t drop it on anything you want to keep.

You can find out more on the link below:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wyrmwood/wyrmwoodxdispeldice

GAME OF THRONES Prequel Officially in Production as Cast Revealed

HBO has revealed the cast for its new Game of Thrones prequel as it announced that the long-awaited show is finally in production.

The new series, entitled House of the Dragon, takes place 300 years before the original Thrones series and tells the story of House Targaryen, the final descendant of whom (Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys) was a major player in the original series. It’s also an adaptation of George RR Martin’s novel Fire & Blood, though it’s unclear as yet how faithful it will be to the source material.

With the new show comes a totally new cast and mostly new crew: Ryan Condal (Rampage) will serve as co-creator with Martin, while Condal and Miguel Sapochnik (who directed several episodes of the original series, including the Emmy-winning ‘Battle of the Bastards’) will be the showrunners. Thrones and Westworld composer Ramin Djawadi will be back to score the new series.

The main cast is about as sprawling as you’d expect from a show based in Westeros: at its core are Paddy Considine (The World’s End), Olivia Cooke (Ready Player One), Emma D’Arcy (Truth Seekers), and Matt Smith (Doctor Who). Steve Toussaint, Rhys Ifans, Eve Best, and Sonoya Mizuno have also signed on for the series.

Considine will play King Viserys Targaryen, who appears at this point to be the show’s main character – but as we saw with Ned Stark all the way back in 2011, we definitely shouldn’t trust anyone to stay alive that long. Unless they’re Jon Snow or Arya Stark and need to be kept alive for plot reasons.

Cooke will play the daughter of the Hand of the king, D’Arcy the king’s daughter, and Smith his younger brother. Toussaint is set to play Lord Velaryon, a new house we haven’t yet seen in live-action. Might that be because the Targaryens wiped them out? We’ll have to wait and see, but don’t expect the whole lot to be killed off immediately – HBO, we imagine, wants this to be an epic on par with Game of Thrones, and to do that they’ve a lot of trust to win back from their audiences.

As we all remember, Thrones went out with something of a whimper in 2019. Expectations were high for the final season of the show that had taken the world by storm, but they were… not met. That’s about all we can say without being nasty.

The choice of new showrunners is interesting, especially as Condal’s previous efforts (including two big but not well-loved Dwayne Johnson movies) haven’t exactly been awe-inspiring. Still, everyone has room for growth! And honestly, we’re just glad David Benioff and DB Weiss aren’t involved with this one.

House of the Dragon is currently in pre-production and will debut on HBO in 2022.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY HOLIDAY SPECIAL Script Ready to Go + More From the MCU!

Well, isn’t this a bumper day for the MCU? Not only is the incredible finale of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier now available on Disney+ (read our thoughts here), but we’ve got a bucketload of Marvel news coming your way too.

First up is the news that Disney and Sony have reached a huge agreement about the streaming exclusivity of Sony movies. The new deal means that Sony’s film slate all the way through to 2026 will eventually be available to stream on Disney+ – after their run on Netflix, as was announced last week.

Not only does this cover Sony’s future films, including any and all Spider-Man-related projects, but it also includes their wide-ranging back catalogue – some of which is expected to be added to the streaming service as soon as June.

However, as Variety notes, the deal as it stands only includes the US, so those of us outside the States will have to wait and see what the conglomerates have planned for us.

Elsewhere in the MCU, director James Gunn announced yesterday that the script for the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special is now complete, writing on Twitter: “This is the wrapping. The present is inside.”

This is the wrapping. The present is inside. #GotGHS 🎅🏽🚀💜 pic.twitter.com/NqDw5s6ed8

— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) April 22, 2021

Gunn, who is currently hard at work on his Peacemaker TV series for DC ahead of the release of The Suicide Squad this summer, also revealed that the special is set after Thor: Love and Thunder, in which several of the Guardians are set to appear, and before the upcoming third Guardians movie, which is set to film later this year. The new special will air on Disney+ next Christmas, and will hopefully be better than the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special that inspired it.

Speaking of the Norse god, Man of Steel’s Russell Crowe revealed that he’s set to play Zeus in the upcoming film from Taika Waititi. How the Greek god will interact with the Norse ones remains to be seen, but with the additions of Natalie Portman as Jane Foster’s incarnation of Thor and Christian Bale as the villainous Gorr the God Butcher, Waititi’s movie is set to be a cracker.

And finally for now, the MCU’s resident archer Jeremy Renner took to Instagram to announce that the Disney+ series Hawkeye has completed filming.

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A post shared by Jeremy Renner (@jeremyrenner)

The series, which is expected to drop on Disney+ later this year, will follow Clint Barton’s mentorship of Kate Bishop, who, it was revealed last year, will be portrayed by Bumblebee’s Hailee Steinfeld.

Whew, what a day for MCU content! Are you tired? We’re tired. Maybe it’s time we took a leaf out of Drax’s book and just stopped paying attention for a bit.

Ah, who are we kidding? We can’t wait for the next wave of MCU content to feast on – and that starts with the long-awaited Loki series on June 11.

Manchester’s HOME Plans REVERSE GAZE Season

As we eagerly await the return to physical cinema screenings, HOME, the Manchester culture venue, has announced a season that includes several films that will be of interest to STARBURST readers.

The Reverse Gaze: Filmmaking on Screen is a 13-film collection that focuses on the art of making movies, ‘from the power struggles and self-doubt via dark secrets and chaos to artistic triumph’.

Titles that stand out as must-sees for us are Mank, a rare chance to see David Fincher’s film of development of the screenplay for Citizan Kane on the big screen; Michael Powell’s fabulous Peeping Tom, which caused outrage when it was released in 1960 and essentially ended the famous director’s career. Still chilling to this day, it’s a masterpiece of voyeuristic cinema. François Truffaut’s classic Day for Night stars the director himself, having trouble with his cast while filming a melodrama. Eddie Murphy plays cult star Rudy Ray Moore in Dolemite is My Name, another movie we can’t wait to see again in a cinema setting. Hugely successful on the festival circuit, Shinichiró Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead is destined to wow audiences once more.

The climax of the season sees a preview screening of Prano Bailey-Bond’s highly anticipated Censor, which is set in 1985, during the ‘video nasty’ scare. Prano will in attendance and will be taking part in a Q&A following the film.

For more information of the season and booking tickets, head over to homemcr.org.

47 RONIN Sequel is a Go at Netflix

In news that’s both surprising and baffling in equal measure, we’ve gotten word that a sequel to 2013’s 47 Ronin is heading to Netflix.

According to Deadline, the new film is being penned by Lucifer star Aimee Garcia and best-selling author AJ Mendez, and will see Mulan’s Ron Yuan occupy the director’s chair, replacing the first film’s Carl Rinsch.

The original 2013 movie starred Keanu Reeves (John Wick) and Hiroyuki Sanada (Mortal Kombat), and followed the titular 47 ronin. It told a fictionalised version of the real ronin, a group of masterless samurai in 18^th century Japan who set out to avenge their master’s death. To put it nicely, the film was not well received. It was universally panned by almost all who saw it, and failed to make back its estimated $200m budget (which, let’s be honest, is way too much for a movie like this).

And that’s why news of a sequel is so surprising: does anyone actually want to see this? People were hardly clamouring for it like they were Zack Snyder’s Justice League, so what’s the point?

Well, there could actually be a very good reason for it: given that the original is liked by precisely no one, it seems fairly likely that this new film will be a sequel in name only, and Garcia and Mendez do seem excited about it.

Garcia described it as a “diverse and inclusive action film,” while Mendez said the pair were “honoured to be part of a modern, multicultural story with powerful female leads.” All thoughts about the original aside, a diverse action movie written by two extremely capable women that promises to blend martial arts, horror, cyberpunk, and action? Now that’s something we can get on board with.

The untitled 47 Ronin sequel does not currently have a release date.

BASIC INSTINCT Gets a 4K Restoration

Controversial thriller Basic Instinct is heading for a restored 4K release from StudioCanal.

The well-remembered film, directed by Paul Verhoeven, stars Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone, in the role that made her famous worldwide thanks to ‘that’ scene.

The official synopsis is:

Michael Douglas stars as hardboiled San Francisco detective Nick Curran, a troubled cop with a history of trigger-happy shootings and a weakness for beautiful women and dangerous relationships. Sharon Stone is Catherine Tramell, a stunning, enigmatic novelist with a talent for seduction and a history of relationships that end in death. The death of a former rock star sends Nick into the orbit of the victim’s lover, Catherine, who immediately becomes prime suspect in the murder. Catherine ignites Nick’s suspicions and his passion, and he soon becomes involved in his most dangerous liaison yet.

StudioCanal has given us detailed information about the restoration:

The aim was to create an image just as crisp as audiences had enjoyed in 1992. The first step was to scan the 35MM image negative of the film in 4K DPX LOG 16 bits on Scanity – but the restoration team at Hiventy Laboratory in Joinville-le-Pont noticed a problem with the negative. STUDIOCANAL project manager, Sophie Boyer, explains – “we quickly realised that the negatives corresponded to the short version of the film. In addition, some shots from the most erotic scenes were censored in the United States. We went looking for these cuts: their negatives had disappeared, but we found them in the internegative. Thanks to this, we were able to restore the full-length version of the film, the only version that Paul Verhoeven wanted to have restored.”

All damages on the negatives were identified: stains, scratches, dusty shots and instabilities. DIAMANT film software was used to remove these defects. The laboratory undertook over 100 hours of manual removal of the dark stains. Light filtering was applied to remove the superficial defects, with particular care taken to retain the grain and the texture of the original image. The film was colour graded for theatrical, home entertainment and 4K HDR release using previous digital releases and 35MM prints as a reference. The colour-grading required a painstaking homogenization between the different versions (the European cut vs. censored versions). The sound was similarly restored – the dynamic of the mixes was improved and the sync checked throughout, with corrections made using Protools plug-ins for a 5.1 + 2.0 version, from sources 3324.

The special features available on Ultra HD, Blu-Ray, DVD and Steelbook are:

New documentary – Basic Instinct: Sex, Death & Stone
New featurette – An unending story – Scoring Basic Instinct
New – Trailer
Making of featurette – Blonde Poison
Cast & Crew interviews featurette
Storyboard comparisons
Screen tests
Audio commentary by Paul Verhoeven & Jan de Bont
Audio commentary by Camille Paglia

The 4K UHD Collector’s Edition will be in stores on June 14th, and you can pre-order the release now. The 4K Steelbook edition is available for pre-sale on Zavvi.

Emilia Clarke Infiltrates the MCU for SECRET INVASION

Following on from yesterday’s news that the award-winning Olivia Colman has joined the cast of the MCU’s upcoming TV series Secret Invasion, comes word via Variety that fellow Brit Emilia Clarke is also set to star.

Clarke will be most familiar to us for portraying such major genre characters as Sarah Connor in Terminator: Genysis, Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, and the double-crossing Qi’ra in Solo, a role that she is almost certainly destined to reprise in one of the hundred-or-so Star Wars shows Disney+ has in production. Given that Clarke also managed to win us over in that super-sappy Holiday-themed tear-jerker Last Christmas a few years back, consider us very happy with this new development!

With Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn reprising their roles as Nick Fury and Skrull leader Talos respectively, and Watchmen’s Kingsley Ben-Adir locked as a key villain, Secret Invasion is shaping up to be one of the most exciting projects Marvel Studios have got lined up.

That unfathomably awesome roster, while we’re on the subject, currently looks like this:

2021