From Imagine and Lucasfilm and Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, director Lawrence Kasdan will be taking TV audiences behind the curtains of Industrial Light & Magic, the legendary visual effects, animation, and virtual production division of Lucasfilm. Light & Magic, a six-part docu-series is coming this month to Disney+. What inspired filmmakers in Hollywood from George Lucas to nearly every other name in blockbuster films to bring the impossible onto the screen? This series features interviews and imagery to get to that answer.
The next locked-room mystery in the spirit of Clue/Cluedo is arriving in late summer. It’s called See How They Run, a British whodunnit about a Hollywood film producer who finds members of his latest production are getting murdered one by one. When two local coppers come to investigate, the result looks like an Agatha Christie caper with some extra melodrama, looking similar to 1980s John Landis’s madcap movie Clue. Add the clue from “Three Blind Mice” in the title and a mix of American and British actors, including Adrien Brody and Sam Rockwell from west of the pond, Ruth Wilson, Saoirse Ronan, Shirley Henderson, and David Oyelowo from across the ocean, and you have the first trailer for See How They Run:
A new coming of age movie is heading to Paramount Plus later this month featuring some familiar genre favorites. Christopher Mintz-Plasse has come a long way from earning a police ride from a fake ID as McLovin in Superbad and starring as the angry young villain of the Kick-Ass movie series. Or has he? In Honor Society, he’s now a high school teacher although his style makes him seem like a grown-up incarnation of his Superbad teen. But the lead of the story is Aussie actress Angourie Rice, co-star of the MCU’s Spider-Man movies and The Nice Guys, breaking the fourth wall and taking charge in a very Clueless/Emma fashion as a senior trying to manipulate everyone around her to get an easy path into Harvard next term, despite already being one of the smartest students in her high school. Part of her plan is taking out (in both uses of the term) a fellow smart student played by Stranger Things’Gaten Matarazzo.
If you like coming of age flicks like Orange County, which also focused on a teen trying to get into college, this may be something you’ll want to check out. Here’s the first trailer for Honor Society:
It’s probably the single most aired holiday movie every year, showing on networks like ABC Family, Freeform, and Disney daily or more every October. Thirty Halloweens since they first saw the family friendly Hocus Pocus, fans of the perennial witch tale get their chance to find out what the three Salem sisters have been up to. And they don’t need to pay theater ticket prices. Disney+ will be streaming the movie, Hocus Pocus 2, with Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy all back again. The movie will also feature Star Trek Discovery and The Shape of Water actor Doug Jones.
The first great playset from Kenner (now part of Hasbro) from the Star Wars galaxy was the Death Star, perfect for play with the toy company’s huge line of 3.75-inch action figures, and that was followed by a line of big ships, including the Millennium Falcon, the Star Destroyer, and the AT-AT. In recent years, after the acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney, Jabba’s sail barge was added to the line-up of big, high-end toys. Hasbro has now released photographs of its next big playset from the galaxy far, far, away: an expanded version of its throne room for Jabba the Hutt from Return of the Jedi. Spinning out of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett is Boba Fett’s Throne Room, an elaborate play environment with 50 accessories, and an exclusive Bib Fortuna figure.
Take a look inside and learn more about pre-orders below.
Hayao Miyazaki’s Whisper of the Heart may be the anime master’s most heart-warming story. Based on the 1989 manga by artist Aoi Hiiragi, Whisper of the Heart is a 1995 romance and drama about a teenage girl who wants to be a writer, and with the determination and self-discipline necessary, she is successful at completing her first novel. The story within a story that she writes is about an ornamental cat in a store window that she names The Baron. In a fun twist, Hiiragi wrote the girl’s story into another manga, titled The Cat’s Repayment, and that story was adapted into Studio Ghibli’s 2002 anime film The Cat Returns. “The Cat” returns to theaters today (June 26) and tomorrow (June 27) as part of the Fathom Events series to launch Studio Ghibli Fest 2022, which wraps next April with the 25th anniversary screenings of Hayao Miyazaki’s sprawling fantasy Princess Mononoke.
Director Sam Raimi was constrained by the comic books with his three Spider-Man movies, but Kevin Fiege and Marvel Studios let him unleash everything for his latest superhero movie, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The result is fantastic, the most ambitious crossover mash-up and blend of comic book characters to hit the screen since X-Men: Days of Future Past. Loki writer Michael Waldron was the right choice to create this seamless masterpiece of twisty storytelling, and adding music by Batman 1989’s Danny Elfman is the icing on a (dark, funny, horror-themed) cake.
Finally, the multitudes get to witness the madness of the multiverse for themselves–the film arrived this week on Disney+. Is it the best Marvel Studios ensemble movie yet? (spoilers ahead)
Yesterday here at borg we featured this week’s entertainment memorabilia auction by Los Angeles auction house Propstore and its big sale of an original X-Wing Fighter filming model. The auction continues through Friday, but Wednesday you may have overlooked an intriguing prop from the 2017 Academy Award-nominated superhero movie Logan (probably the best superhero film of all time, reviewed here). Comic book collecting is a major industry with every price level and niche of comics fandom having legions of collectors. A pile of comic books was featured in the groundbreaking film directed by James Mangold, but they weren’t ordinary comic books. They were made exclusively for the movie. And one of those comics sold Tuesday for $17,500 (including a 25% buyer’s premium).
Records continue to be set in the world of entertainment memorabilia, those screen-used costume, prop, and set relics costing often tens of thousands of dollars to create, sometimes appearing only moments in a film or television production, later to be sold at auction for princely sums. London and Los Angeles auction house Propstore knew it had an important prop when it took consignment of an original X-Wing Fighter model screen-matched to the original film Star Wars. The auction house even printed a separate catalog from the full auction book that showcased photographs and use of the model (no doubt the book itself will be a collectible going forward). As expected, Tuesday a new auction record for a screen-used model was set, with the X-Wing selling for a $1.9 million strike price, and with the buyer’s premium it reached the final sale price of $2.3 million. The model was built in 1976 and 1977 from finalized designs that stemmed from the concept artwork of Colin Cantwell (featured here and here at borg), who died at age 90 only a month ago. The price is an all-time high sale price for a Star Wars vehicle model. Previous sales of screen-used models included the miniature filming model of the Rebel Blockade Runner spaceship from the opening scene of the original Star Wars that sold for $465,000, and a miniature filming model of a TIE Fighter that sold for more than $400,000.
With hits Tron: Legacy, Oblivion, The Dig, Only the Brave, and Top Gun: Maverick, director Joseph Kosinski seems to be batting a thousand, and his best work may be his new science fiction movie, Spiderhead. Now streaming on Netflix, it should remind you of the days before sci-fi blockbusters, when science fiction tales by great futurists became the next amazing story you’d see on the big screen. It also has the genre world’s best actors, with Chris Hemsworth as a pharma genius slash mad scientist running a penitentiary in the vein of A Clockwork Orange, and Miles Teller as his chief inmate, test subject and guinea pig. Fresh off of The Offer, and co-starring in Top Gun: Maverick, Teller’s career trajectory seems to only be going up. Compared to the usual direct-to-Netflix fare, especially compared to its record of sci-fi genre films (basically that’s ARQ, iBOY, The Cloverfield Paradox, Extinction, I Am Mother, The Midnight Sky, and IO), Spiderhead is in a different league entirely. Think THX-1138, Minority Report, Ex Machina, and Orbiter 9—Spiderheadis a movie you’ll wish you were able to catch in the movie theater.
