IT PAYS TO BE BAD

RETELLING FAMILIAR children’s stories from the perspective of their resident baddies has proven to be box-office gold, with the stage musical Wicked (soon to be a movie) raking in more than $1.2 billion on Broadway and the 2014 film Maleficent and its 2019 sequel, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, also earning more than $1.2 billion. Now, Disney is making a prequel about Cruella de Vil – the cigarette-smoking, fur-loving villainess from One Hundred and One Dalmatians – set in 1970s London. Cruella stars Oscar-winner Emma Stone as de

Vil, a young, aspiring, haute couture designer who embraces the dark side after working under fashion legend Baroness von Hellman, played by fellow Oscar-winner Emma Thompson, 62.

Speaking of baddies, Helen Mirren, 75, told Zoomer in 2019 she hoped for her own car-chase scene in a future Fast & Furious film, and she got her wish in F9. The trailer broke the internet when a clip of her chuckling, after an emergency-brake slide, went viral.

Meanwhile, Sylvester Stallone, 74, plays the good guy in Samaritan, a film about a young boy who sets out to find an aging superhero who is believed to be dead.

And in Old, M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller based on the graphic novel Sandcastle, a family on holiday visits a beach where they start to age rapidly, going through their entire life in a matter of hours.