Zazie Beetz says that Joker: Folie à Deux won’t be the sequel that fans are expecting and praises Lady Gaga.

I doubt many were suspecting that Joker would become a billion-dollar box-office smash, and it sounds like the upcoming sequel will be just as surprising, just for a different reason. While speaking with Variety at the Tribeca Film Festival, Zazie Beetz teased that the Joker sequel won’t be what fans are expecting.

“I think people will be surprised. I don’t think it’s going to be what they expect, around it being musical,” Zazie Beetz said. “We all sort of express musically and dancing in our lives day-to-day. I think it’s going to work really well.” Beetz played Sophie Dumond in the first Joker movie, a love interest for Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), and has reprised the role for Joker: Folie à Deux. Plot details for the Joker sequel are being kept under wraps, but it’s been said that much of it will take place within Arkham Asylum, which is where we left Arthur in the last film.

Lady Gaga is also starring in Joker: Folie à Deux and Zazie Beetz was full of praise for her new co-star. “She’s super warm and kind,” Beetz said. “I felt very welcome with her on set. She was doing her own character work and stuff, but she’s a very grounded person. She’s just Stefani.” The rest of the cast of the Joker sequel includes Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Jacob Lofland, and Harry Lawtey.

While Zazie Beetz did return for more Joker, she won’t be back for Deadpool 3. The actress played Domino in Deadpool 2, a mutant mercenary with the ability to manipulate luck. As much of the previous cast returned for the Deadpool sequel, it was believed that Beetz would as well. But when asked if the ongoing WGA strike was affecting Ryan Reynolds’ ability to improvise on the Deadpool 3 set, Beetz said, “Well I’m actually not in Deadpool 3, so I don’t know what they’re doing [about improvisation]. I’m assuming they’re probably taking a pause. […] I’m excited to watch it.“

Joker: Folie à Deux will hit theaters on October 4, 2024.

Bradley Cooper and Will Arnett will team up for Is This Thing On?, with Cooper directing from a script co-written by Arnett.

You learn something new every day. I had no idea that Bradley Cooper and Will Arnett were long-time friends, with Arnett even helping Cooper overcome an addiction to cocaine and alcohol twenty years ago. Deadline reports that the two friends will team up for Is This Thing On?, a new movie for Searchlight.

Will Arnett and Bradley Cooper will star in Is This Thing On?, but their involvement also goes behind the scenesl. Cooper will also direct the movie from a script Arnett wrote with Mark Chappell. A draft was turned in before the WGA strike, but Deadline says Cooper will likely want to add his own ideas but will only be able to once the strike concludes. The project is still in early development, so plot details remain under wraps. Bradley Cooper will also produce through his Lea Pictures banner, along with Will Arnett and Kris Thykier.

Bradley Cooper was recently seen reprising his role of Rocket Racoon in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and is currently in post-production on Maestro, a biopic about the life of famed conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein. Cooper also co-wrote the script with Josh Singer and stars as Bernstein. The actor looked nearly unrecognizable in the part in a series of photos released last year. The film also stars Carey Mulligan, Maya Hawke, Matt Bomer, and Sarah Silverman, and will debut on Netflix later this year.

As for Will Arnett, he will provide the voice of Sweet Tooth for Peacock’s upcoming Twisted Metal TV series based on the video game franchise. The series stars Anthony Mackie as “a motor-mouthed outsider who is offered a chance at a better life, but only if he can successfully deliver a mysterious package across a post-apocalyptic wasteland. With the help of a trigger-happy car thief, he’ll face savage marauders driving vehicles of destruction and other dangers of the open road, including a deranged clown who drives an all too familiar ice cream truck.” The series will debut on Peacock on July 27th. Arnett will also be seen in Taika Waititi’s biographical sports comedy Next Goal Wins. The film stars Michael Fassbender as a Dutch-American coach tasked with turning the infamously terrible American Samoa national team into an elite squad. The film will hit theaters on November 17th.

Blue Beetle star Xolo Maridueña says that he’s down for a sequel, but that all comes down to how well the DC movie performs.

It remains to be seen whether Blue Beetle will have a place in the new DC Universe, but star Xolo Maridueña is already prepared to return for a sequel.

While speaking with Empire, Xolo Maridueña said that Blue Beetle may not simply be a leftover of the DCEU, but that all depends on how the movie performs. “If we get one movie or a trilogy and fucking fold this into the Justice League shit, we’re ready for the whole nine,” Maridueña said. “For me and Angel [Manuel Soto, director] and the team, we kicked ass with this movie. It just depends on numbers.“

It’s hard to tell if Blue Beetle will strike enough of a chord with audiences to warrant a sequel, but it is making history by bringing a major Latino hero to the big-screen. “The goal was to create a movie for a young me and a young Angel that said, ‘Hey, man, someone who looks like you or comes from a similar background can be a superhero,’” Xolo Maridueña said. “The second thing was to open more doors for people like us. As fun as it is to get into this superhero world where everything is [dialled up to] 110 per cent, [it’s] the characters… that I’ve [most] related to.“

“Recent college grad Jaime Reyes returns home full of aspirations for his future, only to find that home is not quite as he left it,” reads the official Blue Beetle synopsis. “As he searches to find his purpose in the world, fate intervenes when Jaime unexpectedly finds himself in possession of an ancient relic of alien biotechnology: the Scarab. When the Scarab suddenly chooses Jaime to be its symbiotic host, he is bestowed with an incredible suit of armor capable of extraordinary and unpredictable powers, forever changing his destiny as he becomes the Super Hero BLUE BEETLE.“

In addition to Xolo Maridueña, the Blue Beetle movie also stars George Lopez (Beverly Hills Chihuahua), Adriana Barraza (Rambo: Last Blood), Elpidia Carrillo (Predator), Damián Alcázar (Miss Bala), Belissa Escobedo (American Horror Stories), Bruna Marquezine (God Save the King), Harvey Guillén (What We Do in the Shadows), and Raoul Max Trujillo (Mayans M.C.). Susan Sarandon (Monarch) also stars as Victoria Kord, the main villain of the film. It was also announced this morning that Becky G would be providing the voice of Khaji-Da, “the being that imbues and controls the Scarab attached to Jaime’s back.” Blue Beetle will hit theaters on August 18, 2023.

Would you be down for a Blue Beetle sequel?

Christopher Nolan says that he wrote the script for the Oppenheimer movie in the first person.

In order to get into the head of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan did something he’s never done before — he wrote the script in the first person.

“I actually wrote in the first-person, which I’ve never done before,” Christopher Nolan told Empire. “I don’t know if anyone’s ever done it before. But the point of it is, with the colour sequences, which is the bulk of the film, everything is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view — you’re literally kind of looking through his eyes.” Nolan added that even the stage directions were told from the point of view of Oppenheimer, which he admits was an “odd thing to do, but it was a reminder to me of how to shoot the film. It was a reminder to everybody involved in the project, ‘Okay, this is the point of view of every scene.’“

Christopher Nolan continued, “I wanted to really go through this story with Oppenheimer; I didn’t want to sit by him and judge him. That seemed a pointless exercise. That’s more the stuff of documentary, or political theory, or history of science. This is a story that you experience with him — you don’t judge him. You are faced with these irreconcilable ethical dilemmas with him.“

Cillian Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it. As one would expect with a Christopher Nolan movie, the cast is pretty packed. In addition to Murphy, the film also stars Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Gary Oldman, Rami Maleck, Florence Pugh, Kenneth Branagh, and more. The film recently received an R-rating, making it Christopher Nolan’s first R-rated movie in over twenty years.

As the film was shot on IMAX stock, it will be screened in the biggest format across the nation, with the prints said to be 11 miles worth of film weighing in at nearly 600 pounds. The IMAX screenings will range from 70mm to IMAX Digital, 35mm, Dolby Cinema, and more. Oppenheimer will hit theaters on July 21st.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts tries to take the series into a different direction from the Michael Bay movies. Does it succeed?

PLOT: The fate of the Earth, and potentially hundreds of other planets, once again hangs in the balance when an alien beacon in NY grabs the attention of both Autobots and Decepticons to its location. The beacon can either send the Autobots to their home planet or summon the evil Unicron, and the Autobots will need the help of new human friends and the animalistic Maximals to ensure order and peace are once again restored.  

REVIEW: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is a touch better than the other Transformers movies. The headache-inducing bombast of the Michael Bay films has been lessened some by director Steven Caple, Jr., and though the narrative is still filled with contrivances and unnecessary clutter, there’s a slightly more engaging atmosphere here than in the previous entries. For the Transformers fans out there, there are still a bevy of sequences where robots smash and wrestle with each other for minutes on end, but it’s a slightly more coherent spectacle this time around. 

Perhaps getting away from the kinds of characters who populated the Bay movies is one reason Rise of the Beasts is a minor step up. Gone are the tedious leads played by Shia LaBeouf and Mark Walhberg; jettisoned too are boring army guys, shady human villains and dim-witted excuses for comic relief. Instead, our leads are two grounded New Yorkers, giving us a chance to see a different side of this world. Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) is a young man in Brooklyn struggling to get a proper job as to help out his single mother (Lauren Velez) and sick younger brother (Dean Scott Vasquez). Jilted at a job interview, Noah reluctantly turns to a local criminal who assigns him a car to boost. Wouldn’t you know it, said car turns out to be Mirage (voiced by Pete Davidson), who immediately throws Noah into the galactic civil war between the Autobots and the planet-eating Unicron (voiced by Colman Domingo). 

Noah accepts this fate relatively quickly, and soon we’re off to Peru to meet the Maximals – those are Transformers who resemble animals, for the uninitiated. The Maximals will be close allies for Noah, Optimus Prime and the rest of the gang as they square off against Unicron’s main henchman Scourge (voiced by Peter Dinklage) and his band of evil Decepticons – or Terrorcons, if you prefer. 

Do the intricacies of the plot matter? Not at all. As with the other films in the series, there’s a MacGuffin everyone’s trying to get to that will decide Earth’s fate, this one being an alien beacon that calls forth both good and bad Transformers. For a movie with five credited writers, it’s not unreasonable to say much of Rise of the Beasts feels like it could have been written by A.I., especially the humdrum, by-the-numbers dialogue.  Again, I’m fully aware that we don’t expect Eugene O’Neill from these movies, but I’d point to something like Across the Spider-Verse as an example of a film that manages to be smart and creative while having an equally outlandish storyline. Just because the plot is inherently silly doesn’t mean the end result has to be dumbed down. 

But as far as these things go, Rise of the Beasts is not the numbing experience its predecessors were. Caple Jr. keeps things moving at a fairly solid pace, though the film’s first act might be a little on the slow side and light on Transformers action for some. What’s encouraging is that the movie takes a little time getting to know its human protagonists, as opposed to instantly throwing us into the clanking, blasting maelstrom of Transformer-on-Transformer violence. That said, there’s plenty of that to be found in the film’s second half, even though at this point if you’ve seen one fight between an Autobot and a Decepticon, you’ve seen them all. The Maximals bring the slightest bit of uniqueness to the proceedings, but the reality is there is very little novelty left in these beings. However, if the sight of a robot gorilla furiously chasing a robot eagle through the mountains of Peru is your kind of thing, then there’s no reason not to sit down for Rise of the Beasts. 

Solid too is the voice cast. Much to my surprise, Pete Davidson makes for a moderately amusing sidekick who doesn’t wear out his welcome. Dinklage’s voice is a natural fit for a fearsome villain, and other highlights include Michelle Yeoh and Ron Perlman as soulful Maximals. Bumblebee is back doing his schtick as well, though he’s interestingly sidelined for a chunk of the picture, and often overshadowed by the bevy of new Autobots. 

Ramos and Dominque Fishback (as a researcher who stumbles upon the alien beacon that helps summon Unicron) have a natural chemistry and end up being fairly effective leads. As mentioned, there’s a refreshingly low amount of human characters in this installment, with Ramos and Fishback being the only two notable flesh-and-blood people on board. Most importantly, the two actors look appropriately convincing while talking to their intergalactic companions. 

The finale is predictably explosive and epic in scope, and more or less effective in execution. It’s actually nice that we’re not once again relying on the destruction of major cities to get a rise out of the audience, and on a purely visual level the conclusion boasts some attention-grabbing VFX. And the very end of the movie teases an interesting new direction for the series (it will probably be spoiled for you by the time this review is published), so maybe there’s hope yet that the franchise is willing to embrace new adventures. As far as Transformers movies go, Rise of the Beasts is an acceptable new start. 

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Michael Keaton has revealed the method behind his Batman voice, saying that the character’s “controlled psychosis” inspired the trademark.

As Michael Keaton gets ready to suit up as Batman once again in this month’s The Flash, many will be looking – and listening – for so much of what makes him the quintessential Caped Crusader for a generation. And yes, that includes the voice, which the trailer promised Michael Keaton will be bringing back when he returns as Batman.

Speaking with Empire, Michael Keaton said his Batman voice, which proved one of the defining characteristics of his interpretation, served a genuine function in differentiating the man and the bat. “He’s got two personalities. The guy is not psychotic but not far from it. Controlled psychosis…In order for me to justify all this, I can’t be changing the oil on the Batmobile and then saying, ‘well, I have to kill some people’ so he probably ends up going into some deep, deep trance, which is a scene that I don’t think ever made it in. How do you justify the voice? It’s cheesy but I figured once he’s in the trance, he doesn’t think like he does like Bruce Wayne, doesn’t act like he does. So the voice came out of that, it was a really practical thing.”

Whenever a new Bruce Wayne/Batman is cast, fans immediately want to know what the batsuit will look like. After that, surely they want to know what Batman will sound like, especially after Keaton redefined the voice in 1989. From there – and without going into everyone who portrayed him (with due respect to Val Kilmer and George Clooney) – Christian Bale took it to an easily mocked max, Ben Affleck got some aid from a voice modulator and Robert Pattinson attempted to be as unique as possible on the set of The Batman…which didn’t exactly work out. “Everyone does this kind of gruff, gravelly thing, and I’m like, ‘I’m going to do the opposite — I’m gonna go really whispery.’ And I tried to do it for the first two weeks, and it just looked absolutely atrocious, and they told me to stop doing it.” He would agree with Keaton, however, that the Batsuit does something to Bruce Wayne. “You can feel when it feels right…You put the suit on, and you have to speak in a certain way.”

Although Keaton’s hiring was initially far from a hit with fans (something that actually later inspired Mark Hamill to step out of his comfort zone when deciding to voice The Joker), he still remains to so many – myself included – the Batman.

Where does Michael Keaton’s Batman voice rank? Who did the animated voice the best? Let us know in the comments below!