GEARS OF WAR HEADS TO NETFLIX, ANIMATED SPONGEBOB AND AVATAR HEAD TO THEATERS, SNOOP DOGG GETS A BIOPIC, AND NEW ROLES FOR DANIEL KALUUYA, ANNE HATHAWAY, SALMA HAYEK, AND NICOLAS CAGE.
This week’s Ketchup brings you more headlines from the world of film development news, covering such titles as Avatar 4, Ballerina, and Gears of War.
The original 2014 Keanu Reeves-starring revenge action thriller John Wick (Certified Fresh at 86%) was not a box office blockbuster ($86 million worldwide), but Lionsgate pushed ahead with a sequel called John Wick: Chapter 2 (Certified Fresh at 89%) anyway, which almost doubled ($171 million worldwide) the first film’s total, and an action franchise was born. Almost four movies in (John Wick: Chapter 4 comes out on March 4, 2023), Lionsgate has now started filming the first John Wick spinoff called Ballerina, with Blonde (Rotten at 42%) star Ana de Armas in the title role. De Armas was first announced for Ballerina over a year ago, but the start of filming also brought news of two John Wick stars who will be reprising their roles.
The first was the most obvious, which is that Keanu Reeves is already in Prague to co-star in Ballerina as John Wick (the setting of Ballerina is unclear, so Keanu’s scenes might predate John Wick itself). The other franchise star who will be reprising his role in Ballerina is Ian McShane, who has played Winston, the manager of the assassin-friendly Continental hotel, in the first three John Wick films. As for whether there will be a John Wick Chapter 5, director Chad Stahelski said in August that the decision remains in Lionsgate’s corporate hands, although at one point, the fifth film was expected to film back to back with Chapter 4.
The animated sequel Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (6/2/2023) is less than seven months away, but Sony Pictures has mostly kept the film’s new characters unpublicized (Oscar Isaac’s Spider-Man 2099 is in the first trailer). Having said that, if you read columns like this one, you might already know that other new characters will include Jessica Drew (aka the original Spider-Woman, to be played by Issa Rae), The Vulture (Jorma Taccone), and The Spot (Jason Schwartzman)/
Those last two are villains, but in the same way that Into the Spider-Verse (Certified Fresh at 97%) introduced Spider variants like Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage) and Spider-Ham (John Mulaney), we can expect new Spider variants in this sequel. One of them will be Spider-Punk, who we now know will be voiced by Daniel Kaluuya. Sony also did a pretty good job with the first film at keeping some of the surprises secret, so we can probably expect other characters won’t be revealed until Across the Spider-Verse opens on June 2, 2023. That film will then be followed by the third animated Miles Morales movie, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, on March 29, 2024.
0 Comments