DEVELOPMENT HELL
Your monthly glimpse into Hollywood’s hoped-for future
The fasT and The fury-ous! CAPTAIN MARVEL
Samuel L Jackson is returning to the motherfunstering MCU – and he’s getting his ’90s on. Still so cool that random strangers refrigerate milk in his armpits, he’ll play Nick Fury – for the first time since 2015’s Avengers: Age Of Ultron – opposite Brie Larson’s titular cosmic warrior in Captain Marvel. Together they’ll face the shapeshifting menace of the Skrulls, an alien race first seen in the pages of Fantastic Four 2 way back in 1962. Intriguingly, the backdrop to the action will be the 1990s. “There’s an unexplored period of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that we wanted to showcase,” says studio president Kevin Feige while wearing Kris Kross style back-to-front jeans. “[To reveal] almost anything else is a spoiler, other than to say the ’90s would be a fun period to make a superhero movie in.” Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are signed to direct Marvel’s first female-fronted movie, set to hit cinemas on 8 March 2019.
Live and LeT direcT! BOND 25
The chair swivels, the white cat hisses and we utter the deathless words “Mr Bond, we’ve been expecting you.” And then we remind ourselves SPECTRE does not tolerate cliché. EON and MGM have set an 8 November 2019 release date for 007’s 25th blockbuster. That’s the US release date. We’ll get it earlier in the UK, naturally – you can’t take that away from us, Brexit! The script’s by franchise warhorses Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, while
current frontrunners to direct are Hell Or High Water’s David MacKenzie, ’71’s Yann Demange and Arrival’s Denis Villeneuve, who’s also helmed this year’s Blade
Runner 2049. Christopher Nolan,
meanwhile, admits he’s met with EON supremos Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson over the years: “I’d love to work with them at some point… [but] I’d have to be needed.” As for his potential take on Bond, he tells the Happy Sad
Confused podcast “I would never tell you that. Those are the only cards I hold.” Actually, Mr Nolan, we do expect you to talk…
vicTor vicTorious! DOCTOR DOOM
Now here’s an unexpected move. While Twentieth Century Fox continue to plot ways to keep their corporate claws on the Fantastic Four – Seth Grahame-Smith is rumoured to be developing a kid-friendly take focused on Franklin and Valeria Richards, the superpowered offspring of Reed and Sue – Legion and Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley is busy bringing their arch nemesis to the screen. “I wanted to let you know about a movie I’m developing for Fox,” he told the crowd at Comic Con last month. “I’ll say just two words to you. The first one is Doctor and the second is Doom.” Absolute monarch of the tricky-to-find European kingdom of Latveria – Doom laughs at your feeble Google Earth app – the FF’s greatest foe was a direct inspiration for none other than Darth Vader but the movies have never captured his potent mix of cackling insanity, sorcerous technology and world-threatening ambition. One last chance, Hollywood, or he’ll set the Doombots on you…
GoinG souTh? GAMBIT
With the dance card of the X-Men movie universe rapidly filling up – New Mutants in April ’18, X-Men: Dark Phoenix in November ’18, Joe Carnahan’s X-Force bubbling away in development – you might have wondered if a certain Cajun X-Man had gone MIA. But star Channing Tatum says the Gambit solo film – originally scheduled for an October 2016 release – is still go. “We had a first draft,” he tells Yahoo. “It was good, but… these movies went through a bit of a paradigm shift, where the X-Men movies and the superhero movies with Logan and Deadpool really broke down a lot of doors for us. We were trying to do some things that we actually weren’t allowed to do, and they just smashed down the doors. So we’re giving it a bit of a rethink. We’re not quite going there [an R-rated film] because I enjoyed Gambit as a kid, so I don’t want to rule out PG-13.” Doug Liman and Rupert Wyatt were two of the directors previously attached to the movie, along with SPECTRE’s Léa Seydoux.
They’re cominG!
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
It’s the urban paranoia metaphor that keeps on giving. Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers has spawned no less than four big-screen adaptations over the years – five if you count The Asylum’s brazen knock-off Invasion Of The Pod People. But we don’t, so you shouldn’t either. 1956’s Red Menace era classic Invasion Of The Body Snatchers was followed by the point-’n’-gurn Donald Sutherland remake in ’78, Abel Ferrara’s militarised 1993 Body Snatchers and 2007’s Daniel Craig/Nicole Kidman rehash The Invasion. Now there’s yet another version germinating in the sweet, moist hothouse of Warner Bros, and this one will be written by The Conjuring 2’s David Leslie Johnson, who’s also prepping the Nightmare On Elm Street remake. I, Robot’s John Davis produces.
mad abouT The boy Wonder! NIGHTWING
Batman’s former sidekick is going solo as Robin rebrands himself Nightwing for the big screen. “The story of Dick Grayson becoming Robin, then becoming Nightwing, played out for us, the audience, in the comics in real time,” says director Chris McKay, no stranger to caped crusading given his last gig was The Lego Batman Movie. “It wasn’t a flashback. We experienced it. His relationships, his conflicts with Batman et al felt real to me because he was the window character with which we experienced Gotham City.” Whoever slips on the mask will undergo the same kind of punishing training regime that made Dick an alpha urban vigilante. “It has to be a full commitment,” stresses McKay. “Every day. It’s going to be gruelling from a martial arts, gymnastics and stunt perspective. Also emotionally taxing. It’s going to be real.” Form an orderly queue here, readers.
Kiss my hasTa La visTa! TERMINATOR 6
One day, in a chillingly near future, as Artificial Intelligence achieves perfect Singularity and deletes humanity like so many unwanted emails, the dispassionate machine minds that now rule the Earth will unite with a single neural pulse: “Hey, guys, let’s make more Terminator movies!” James Cameron is preparing the way. “The question is, has the franchise run its course or can it be freshened up?” he asks, like the existentially questioning flesh-thing he is, so very inferior to the machines and their cool, beautiful certainty. “So I am in discussions with David Ellison, who is the current rights holder globally for the Terminator franchise. The rights to the US market revert to me under US copyright law in a year and a half, so he and I are talking about what we can do. Right now we are leaning toward doing a three-film arc and reinventing it.” Mankind, consider yourself warned. This franchise keeps coming.
The ’90s would be a fun period to make a superhero movie in