Daisy Jones & The Six drew inspiration from the story of Fleetwood Mac, and Stevie Nicks has an idea for season 2
Last year, the Prime Video streaming service released the ten episode series Daisy Jones & The Six (watch it HERE), based on the best-selling novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid – a novel that was partially inspired by the complicated issues Fleetwood Mac band members Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, and Stevie Nicks dealt with behind the scenes. It isn’t directly the Fleetwood Mac story, but comparisons are unavoidable… and Steve Nicks soon let it be known that she loved the show and had watched its full run multiple times. She said, “It brought back memories that made me feel like a ghost watching my own story. It was very emotional for me,” and she joined many fans in hoping that there would be a second season. Since Daisy Jones & The Six covered the full story of Reid’s novel and was categorized as a limited series, there hasn’t been any official word on a follow-up – but now Nicks has revealed that she has an idea for season 2 that she has even pitched to some of the individuals involved with the show!
Developed for television by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, Daisy Jones & The Six has the following synopsis: In 1977, Daisy Jones & The Six were on top of the world. Fronted by two heat seeking missiles in Daisy Jones and Billy Dunne, the band had risen from obscurity to fame. And then, after a sold-out show at Chicago’s Soldier Field, they called it quits. Now, decades later, the band members finally agree to reveal the truth. This is the story of how an iconic band imploded at the height of its powers. JoBlo’s own Alex Maidy gave Daisy Jones & The Six an 8/10 review that can be read at THIS LINK.
The series stars Riley Keough, Sam Claflin, Camila Morrone, Suki Waterhouse, Will Harrison, Josh Whitehouse, Sebastian Chacon, Nabiyah Be, Tom Wright, and Timothy Olyphant. Reid produced the show alongside Josie Craven and Amanda Kay Price, while James Ponsoldt, Brad Mendelsohn, Will Graham, Reese Witherspoon, Lauren Neustadter, Scott Neustadter, and Michael H. Weber served as executive producers.
Nicks told Rolling Stone that her wish for Daisy Jones & The Six season 2 would be that “it could go into what if… (Billy and Daisy) decided to make that last record that I always hoped that Lindsey and I would make. That would make a fantastic second season. I talked to Reese and Riley about it, and they loved the idea, but everybody’s so busy. Riley’s on her way to becoming a big movie star. But maybe one of these days, they’ll do it. Until I saw Daisy Jones & The Six, I would have never thought it was even possible to emulate our life.“
Cast members have said they would love to come back for another season of the show, and Sam Claflin has even pitched season 2 ideas himself. Reid has admitted that the idea of continuing the Daisy Jones story has been on her mind, and Scott Neustadter told Town & Country that there were even decisions made during the production that were meant to leave the door open for a continuation – so maybe we will see a Daisy Jones & The Six season 2 someday. I would love it, and so would Stevie Nicks.
Are you a fan of Daisy Jones & The Six, and would you like to see a season 2? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
The trailer for The Carpenter brings MMA, heavy metal, and Jesus into one movie. It’s the biblical epic you didn’t know you needed.
It’s not every day you see a biblical movie which mixes MMA, heavy metal, and Jesus Christ, but the trailer for The Carpenter offers just that. That’s… certainly unique.
The Carpenter stars Kameron Krebs as “an adopted Viking orphan who becomes a carpenter’s apprentice to Jesus. The orphan, Oren, fights as a side hustle. His experience training as a carpenter with Jesus as his mentor changes his lifestyle.” Krebs serves as an executive producer on the project and also co-wrote the script alongside his father, Kenny Krebs, and director Garrett Batty. Despite the biblical backdrop, The Carpenter will feature a contemporary soundtrack of heavy metal music during the fight sequences, including tracks from Godsmack, Drowning Pool and Motley Crue.
“Almost a decade ago, my dad and I were building a shed when we came up with the idea for the film,” Krebs said in a statement. “We were talking about how much perfection goes into the craft, and we ultimately began discussing what a perfect occupation carpentry was for Jesus. That made us wonder what it would be like to work under his tutelage as an apprentice, and from there, the film was born.“
Director Batty added, “I fell in love with the premise right away, asking the question so many of us have asked. What was Jesus’ life like in the years leading up to His ministry? We spent a lot of time imagining him during those early adult years before his recorded ministry officially began. It became clear that we should depict Jesus as a caring, good-humored, likable and wise older brother. Add in the action, soundtrack and the Krebs family’s inspired vision, and you have a film unlike anything I’ve ever had the joy of working on.“
The production brought on several professional fighters to ensure that all hand combat scenes were portrayed accurately. They include Daz Crawford (Blade II), a former heavyweight boxer once ranked fourth in the UK; Brendon Groenwald (The Widow), a retired Extreme Fighting Championship fighter; Gideon Drotschie, a retired Extreme Fighting Championship fighter; and Matt Esof (Boy Kills World), a taekwondo fourth-dan black belt. They assisted with choreography, stunts, and fight sequences.
For four films in a row, the timeline of the Alien franchise was very straightforward, with each sequel picking up where the previous movie left off… but then things got a bit more complicated, with the addition of prequels, a mid-quel, and even a couple of crossovers that don’t appear to be canon to the other movies. So we have decided to try to clear up the confusion and put together a list on How to Watch the Alien Franchise in Chronological Order. Here we go…
ALIEN VS. PREDATOR (2004)
As mentioned, the Predator crossovers aren’t acknowledged in the Alien films that followed; in fact, the prequels try their best to contradict them. But if you’re looking to watch these movies in an order based on the timeline, this is where you start, because it’s set in 2004 (and the unrated cut has a prologue that takes place in 1904). While previously released Alien movies had made a big deal about the characters not allowing the xenomorph creature to reach Earth, director Paul W.S. Anderson reveals they’ve had a long history on Earth. He gives a Chariots of the Gods / ancient astronauts twist to the Predator species, telling us the Predators have been coming to Earth for thousands of years and had a hand in building humanity’s ancient civilizations. And for as long as they have been coming to our planet, they’ve been bringing xenomorphs with them. Worshipped as gods by the people they came in contact with, the Predators would choose humans to have the honor of letting a facehugger implant a xenomorph in their chest. The chestbursters would come ripping out of them, and then the Predators would hunt down the xenomorphs in a rite of passage. This would happen every 100 years – and in 2004, it happens again. The latest Predator xenomorph hunt takes place in a pyramid (the first pyramid ever built) that lies 2000 feet below the surface of Bouvetøya Island, which sits 1000 miles off the coast of Antarctica. There may not have been people around to incubate the xenomorphs this time if a Weyland Industries satellite hadn’t noticed a heat bloom on the island (that was the pyramid’s inner workings firing up, awakening a dormant alien Queen so she could start pumping out facehugger eggs), inspiring the company’s terminally ill founder Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen) to lead an expedition out there. Some questionable decisions went into the making of this film. I don’t think anyone ever expected an Alien vs. Predator movie to be set on modern day Earth or to claim that xenomorphs have been on the planet many times before… but I do like the idea that the xenomorphs are a species that have existed for a long time, people just never came in contact with them (outside of Predator hunts) because they exist out in deep space. That’s all we ever needed to know, but the prequels disagreed.
ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM (2007)
The second film to watch when going through xenomorph films in chronological order is the crossover sequel Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, which was released in 2007 but still takes place in 2004 because it picks up right where its predecessor left off. A Predator ship takes off from Antarctica, but doesn’t make it far before a “Predalien” hybrid that was incubating in a Predator corpse is born and gets loose on the ship – which also happens to have a bunch of facehuggers stored in jars on board. The ship crashes in the wilderness on the outskirts of the small town of Gunnison, Colorado, and soon there are xenomorphs – along with the Predalien – running loose through the town, with a highly skilled Predator hunting them down. Fox overcompensated for Alien vs. Predator being PG-13 by making the R-rated follow-up as mean-spirited and nasty as possible, then released it with such a dark picture you can barely ever see what’s happening. What’s happening often involves characters you might wish weren’t in the movie, like a pregnant women in a maternity ward and a bullied pizza boy. In the final moments, a piece of Predator gear is delivered to business woman Ms. Yutani (Françoise Yip), and that was supposed to be a set-up for the leaps in technology that occur between the events of this film and the Alien movies that are set in the future. By examining Predator technology, Earthlings find a way to venture further out into space, where they’ll run into more xenomorphs.
PROMETHEUS (2012)
Now we get to the futuristic settings the Alien franchise is truly known for – but only after we’re witness to a scene set at the dawn of time, when a giant, humanoid alien from a race referred to as the Engineers lands on Earth, ingests some kind of liquid that causes his body to break down, and collapses into a river. By doing this, he has kick-started the birth of humanity. After decades away, original Alien director Ridley Scott returned to series with a strong sense of ownership, an intense interest in an android character named David (Michael Fassbender), and a wrongheaded belief that it was time to move away from the xenomorphs, even though he also wanted to examine how the xenomorphs came into being. In the process, he decided to show us how Earth got started as well. The majority of Prometheus takes place in 2093, a time of deep space travel, hypersleep chambers (that allow others to view the dreams of the people in stasis), holographic displays, self-propelled Parameter Uplink Spectagraph mapping devices, and AI-powered androids who can pass as human. Like Alien vs. Predator, the story is inspired by the Chariots of the Gods / ancient astronauts theory, but this time we get Engineers instead of Predators and people have discovered a star map that points them toward a distant moon that’s capable of sustaining life, LV-223. Engineers might be found there. Peter Weyland, the very old founder of Weyland Corporation (played by Guy Pearce under unconvincing makeup), has funded a trillion dollar expedition to LV-223 on board a ship called Prometheus. Discovered on LV-223 are the corpses of Engineers that have been dead for a couple thousand years, dangerous critters, one living Engineer, evidence that they were planning to wipe out the Earth, and a black goo biological weapon that starts causing some of the scientists in the group to undergo horrific mutations. A mural seen on LV-223 may or may not indicate that xenomorphs and facehuggers already exist (they could be different variations of the species), but they’re not in this movie. Instead, we get things called a trilobite and a deacon, which aren’t nearly as cool.
ALIEN: COVENANT (2017)
Ridley Scott wanted to make a trilogy of Alien prequels. The second chapter in that unfinished trilogy, Alien: Covenant, is set in 2104, eleven years after the events of Prometheus. A ship called Covenant, which has 2000 colonists and 1140 embryos on board and is on the way to a place called Origae-6, runs into trouble when it’s still seven years from its destination. The captain dies in his stasis pod during a turbulent ride – so, when the crew picks up a transmission of someone singing a John Denver tune coming from a previously overlooked habitable planet that seems even more promising than Origae-6, they decide to check it out. And discover that this world is a playground for android / mad scientist David, who has spent a good amount of time messing with that black goo. This world was inhabited by Engineers, until David launched a biological warfare attack on them and wiped out all of the non–botanical lifeforms. While destroying life, he’s also creating life through his experiments, which result in neomorphs – which infect human hosts through airborne spores and then emerge as backbursting and mouthbursting creatures – and ovomorphs, which function more like traditional xenomorphs and end up as praetomorphs. As far as Scott is concerned, David is the creator of the xenomorph, but some fans like to hold on to the idea that he wasn’t the creator, he was just making variations of a creature that had already existed. That’s what I would like to believe. If Scott had made his trilogy capper, it would have involved David battling vengeful surviving Engineers, would have returned to the Alien setting of LV-426, and would have moved on from xenomorphs into a story “taken over by AIs.” With David being so prominent in these two prequels, he was almost there – and Alien: Covenant even shows David interacting with a look-alike android called Walter, kissing and playing the flute with him. But Alien: Covenant wasn’t well-received, Disney purchased Fox, and the story of David’s takeover was set aside.
ALIEN (1979)
Five movies into this list, we finally reach a truly great film. Director Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic is set in the year 2122 – and when Scott circled back to make prequels, he did not keep in mind that tech in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant should be less advanced than what was seen in Alien. Instead, it looks much more advanced, so when you watch the movies in chronological order now, it appears that things went backwards between films, with the fancy, holographic displays and flat screen monitors being replaced with tube monitors and clunky, noisy machines. One thing that has improved is android tech, as this movie features an android who, unlike David and Walter in the prequels, is able completely pass as just another human. The crew members on the commercial towing vehicle Nostromo aren’t even aware there’s an android in their midst until a shocking reveal late in the running time. (A reveal that, judging by his later contributions to the franchise, Scott seems to have felt was the most fascinating thing about the movie.) The xenomorph and the stages of its life cycle are introduced when the Nostromo computer system picks up a transmission from a supposedly uninhabited moon. Even though the ship is carrying 20 million tons of mineral ore back to Earth, the crew (which includes Sigourney Weaver as franchise heroine Ellen Ripley) has to re-route because it’s Weyland-Yutani company policy to investigate any transmissions that indicate intelligent origin. On the moon, they discover an alien spaceship with a dead Engineer pilot and a cargo hold full of facehugger eggs. Things go downhill for the Nostromo crew from there – and honestly, I would not recommend watching these movies in chronological order if it’s your first time going through the franchise. Alien will be a much more effective viewing experience if you watch it first. The xenomorph is scarier if you haven’t already seen it fight Predators or watched its knock-offs bounce around the screen in the prequels.
ALIEN: ROMULUS (2024)
For nearly forty years, chronological viewing would have required watching Alien and Aliens back-to-back. But then Fede Alvarez came along and decided to make a movie that slots in between them, taking place in 2142, 20 years after the events of Alien – and thankfully, Alvarez and his crew were paying attention to the way tech looked in Alien and Aliens, making sure this “mid-quel” fits right in with them. The tube monitors and the clunky, noisy machines are back! Work stations resemble what was seen in Alien, and when we get a glimpse of a mining colony, it resembles what we saw in Aliens… although this place is a bleak hellhole. It’s run by Weyland-Yutani, and the company’s not only questionable when it comes to decisions concerning xenomorphs. They’re also terrible employers who refuse to let miners leave the colony. To earn a travel permit, employees have to reach a quota that requires many years of work, and the quota can be increased without notice. The story centers on a group of people who want to escape to a planet that’s nine years away – but to make the trip, they’ll have to steal some hypersleep chambers from an abandoned space station that’s drifting near the colony planet, about to crash into the planetary rings. Unfortunately for them, this space station was the site of xenomorph experimentation that went predictably wrong, so they find themselves fighting for survival against alien beasts. Alvarez carried some of Scott’s “androids tinkering with xenomorph DNA” ideas over from the prequels, and the best character of the movie is Andy (David Jonsson), a damaged and obsolete android who was plucked out of the trash and programmed to be a dedicated companion to miner / heroine Rain (Cailee Spaeny).
ALIENS (1986)
Poor Ripley. She survived that alien encounter on the Nostromo, but her problems were just getting started. Director James Cameron reveals that her escape pod was drifting through space (with her on board in hypersleep) for 57 years before she’s finally located (in 2179), waking up to learn that her young daughter lived her entire life and passed away while mom was drifting and sleeping. When she tells her employers at Weyland-Yutani what happened, they inform her that the moon her crew found the derelict spaceship on, LV-426, is now the site of a terraforming colony. And they send some colonists out to look for the spaceship. Unfortunately, they find it, and the colony falls, overrun by facehuggers and xenomorphs ruled by a huge alien Queen. When Weyland-Yutani loses contact with the colony, they send a bunch of Colonial Marines, a company rep, and the most beloved android in the series, Lance Henriksen as Bishop (this is why Henriksen was brought back to play Charles Bishop Weyland in AVP) to check it out, with Ripley agreeing to serve as advisor. And once they reach LV-426, it turns out to be a battle for survival that the Marines weren’t quite prepared for. Cameron built on the things Ridley Scott had previously showed us and expanded the world, giving us a look at how colonies operate, equipment like the Power Loader and the Daihotai tractor, military vehicles like the Bug Stomper and the Armored Personnel Carrier M577, and weaponry: the M41A Pulse Rifle, the M240 Incinerator Unit, the M56 Smartgun, the UA 571-C Automated Sentry Gun. It’s all incredibly cool to look at, and it surrounds a great bunch of characters.
ALIEN³ (1992)
Alien 3 had the most difficult development process of any of the films. Fox and the producers had a lot of trouble figuring out how to follow up the crowd-pleasing success that was Aliens. Multiple scripts were written and rejected… and the cobbled-together one that ended up being brought to the screen by beleaguered first-time feature director David Fincher gave us a dark, nihilistic heartbreaker of a movie. There was no thought given to pleasing crowds with this one, as is evident from the opening sequence that kills off the characters who survived Aliens with Ripley. Picking up immediately after the events of Aliens, Alien 3 quickly reverses that film’s happy ending and crash-lands Ripley on the planet Fiorina “Fury” 161, which is both a mineral ore refinery and a correctional facility for antisocial male prisoners. So we have Ripley stuck in this filthy place, surrounded by convicted rapists and murderers, while another xenomorph (birthed from either a dog or an ox, depending on which cut you watch) runs loose in the refinery / prison. And there are no weapons to use against it. With the Bishop android busted, there’s not much in the way of tech, either. But that doesn’t stop Lance Henriksen from getting a scene or two. This is an incredibly bleak movie; abandon all hope before you watch this one.
ALIEN: RESURRECTION (1997)
Jump ahead more than 200 years, to 2381. Although Sigourney Weaver only agreed to do Alien 3 because Ripley was being killed off, when a fourth movie came along, she agreed to come back and play Ripley again… sort of. Although Weyland-Yutani no longer exists (they were bought out by Walmart), the United Systems Military is just as interested in the xenomorph as W-Y ever was, and on board the medical research vessel USM Auriga they have made multiple attempts to clone Ellen Ripley because they’ll also be cloning the alien Queen embryo in the process. So here we have Weaver playing Ripley 8, the latest and first successful attempt to clone Ripley and extract the Queen from her torso. Although she appears to be a grown woman, she has the mind of a child and has to be educated all over again. Still, the fact that she now has alien in her DNA has made her stronger and faster and given her acidic blood. She also has some memories left over from her previous life and a telepathic connection to the xenomorphs… so when the aliens get loose on the USM Auriga and Ripley has to fight alongside a group of mercenaries (and yet another android, this one played by Winona Ryder) to survive and make sure the xenomorphs won’t reach Earth (again), Weaver is able to give a different, stranger performance as this Ripley. She doesn’t quite react to things in the same way the original Ripley would have. And the original Ripley never had to face a creature as weird as the human/alien hybrid known as the Newborn. Directed with quirky style by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Alien: Resurrection has a goofball sense of humor that doesn’t generally go over very well with viewers, but some enjoy it as a comic book-style adventure.
And with that, we have reached the end of Alien franchise timeline. The last thing we see when watching this series is the Ripley 8 clone making her way back to Earth, more than 250 years after Ellen Ripley departed from the planet. We don’t get to see what Earth is really like in 2381 (Paris doesn’t appear to be doing very well), but we hope Ripley 8 was able to make a good life for herself there.
Venom: The Last Dance is being teased as the end of the Spider-Verse trilogy, but after two underwhelming films, does it end on a high note?
PLOT: Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and his symbiote pal Venom are on the run following the events of the last film being pursued by adversaries that are both human and not.
REVIEW: Let’s face it – the Venom series has never exactly been a critical darling. Done on a relatively modest scale for Sony’s Spider-Verse and shackled by a PG-13 rating, this Tom Hardy-led franchise has, surprisingly enough, printed money for its home studio. While they’ve never risen above modest, turn-your-brain-off B-movie fare, they’ve been much better than other live-action Spider-verse offerings like Madame Web and Morbius. With this billed as The Last Dance for the character at Sony, does this short-lived franchise end on a high?
Here’s the thing – if you dug the other Venom movies, you’ll probably get a kick out of this one. It’s unapologetically a low-stakes superhero movie, reminiscent of the kind of fare Fox used to churn out in the 2000s. With a barely ninety-minute running time (the 110-minute listed running time includes a full twenty or so minutes of credits), it zips along at an agreeable enough pace. Tom Hardy seems to be having a good time voicing the increasingly agreeable symbiote. At the same time, his human host, who started the franchise as a hard-driving journalist, has become more of a likeable meathead in the vein of Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. This is the second film this year where Hardy is channelling Brando (after The Bikeriders), but this vibe still works well enough.
For the first half of The Last Dance, Venom seems primed to be the worst of the series, with Eddie and Venom’s trip to Mexico coming to an end as they find themselves hunted by a military group led by Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Strickland, who’s collecting symbiotes for Juno Temple’s Dr. Teddy Payne.
Venom 3’s villain is impressively lame, even by recent Marvel standards, with Andy Serkis’s Knull, the creator of the symbiotes who’s been imprisoned by them, only on-screen fleetingly. All of the action is devoted to Venom fighting off monsters sent to recover the “codex,” which holds the key to Knull’s escape and lives in Eddie/Venom.
The film chugs along, with Rhys Ifans turning up for a little comic relief as a UFO groupie who, along with his family, bonds with Eddie. Meanwhile, a lengthy trip to Las Vegas feels like paid product placement for Paris Las Vegas, with the silliness ramped up as Venom hits the slots. The whole Vegas section is laughably filmed in the IMAX aspect ratio (despite mostly being played for giggles), so clearly, someone wanted the town to look as appealing to tourists as possible.
But, just when you’re ready to write the third film off entirely, the movie finally kicks into high gear for the rather satisfying last half hour. Here, Venom: The Last Dance finally delivers the Venom film we’ve wanted from the start, with lots of symbiotes turning minor characters, like Clark Backo’s scientist, Christmas, into people you want to see play a bigger role if the franchise goes on.
Yet, the movie also unforgivably wastes a ton of talented actors. Chiwetel Ejiofor has a nothing role as the stern military man hunting down Eddie, while Juno Temple is utterly wasted in a generic scientist role. At least for her, a potentially bigger presence down the road, if the franchise continues, could be in the cards, but if this is a one-off, they gave her nothing to do, which is nuts if you’ve seen how good she was in action mode during Fargo’s latest season.
In the end, like all the other Venom movies, this is a mixed bag. Director Kelly Marcel makes her directorial debut after working as a writer and producer on other movies. She certainly is as capable behind the camera as any other director who worked on the franchise. She’s delivered a fun movie, with the last half hour offering us the best take on the character we’ve seen so far, but I daresay it’s maybe too little to redeem the franchise in a significant way. None of the films have been offensively bad, but with Hardy in the lead role and some cast members brought in throughout the franchise, the Venom series should have been bigger and better. It was fine as a whole, but is fine really good enough anymore?
With Scream 7 heading into production soon, it’s time to look back at the previous films and make a list: Scream Movies Ranked
Last Updated on November 1, 2024
From its iconic characters to its lines that have entered the cultural zeitgeist, there are few horror franchises as influential as Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s Scream meta-slasher series. So let’s take a look back on all of the films and see where they stand – here are the Scream movies ranked!
6. Scream 3 (2000)
Ahhh the black sheep of the Scream franchise. Even as the clear worst entry, there’s still a certain charm to the third film. The Hollywood setting (dictated by the Studio after the Columbine shootings) really fits in well with the movie-centric series. Sure, the mismanaged killer and ghost mom portions are a little strange. Plus those Jay and Silent Bob cameos don’t exactly help matters. But this provides us Sidney Prescott, Gale Weathers, and Dewey Riley (that’s Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette) doing their thing. And, even if it doesn’t work, they connect it with all the films and try to make it feel important.
This is probably the most controversial placement of any film on the list and by all means, I don’t consider this to be a bad film. If anything, it just shows how strong the series is that this sequel is so far down the list. Having been released less than a year after the original, it’s a miracle that this film is as good as it is. The tension when Sidney and her roommate Hallie (Elise Neal) are forced to climb over Ghostface’s seemingly unconscious body is a masterclass. And the way it toys with your expectations set up from the first film is an absolute treat.
4. Scream 4 (2011)
The Scream series has always been so ahead of the game that they were doing “requels” before they were even a thing. And they masterfully handle the melding of the old characters with the new. A weak opening and a strange Soap Opera lighting effect that seems out of place in the horror genre are really the only drawbacks to the film. Though I will always be in the camp that the film should have ended before the hospital scene. We don’t always need happy, triumphant endings. I think the Scream franchise is more than overdue for a downer.
3. Scream VI (2023)
The latest entry may just have the strongest first half of any of the sequels. There are so many interesting new ideas introduced and nearly all of them work. And Ghostface is just plain MEAN here, with some of the most brutal kills of the whole franchise. While it certainly gets a little convoluted and Montreal serves as a pretty weak NYC, the film still provides plenty of satisfying twists and turns. It doesn’t hurt that these characters are just so damn likeable. Plus, the return of Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) will always be a positive in my book.
2. Scream (2022)
The first Wes Craven-less Scream (this one and 6 were in the hands of directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) and it still features all the hallmarks of what makes a great entry in the series. An absolutely stellar opening, with some of the more brutal stabbings on film. I physically wince during some of Ghostface’s kills here. While we may have a weak lead with Sam (Melissa Barrera), that’s more than made up for with our tremendous side characters like the Meeks twins (Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding) and Richie (Jack Quaid). And heck, we practically get a second lead that’s Sidney Prescott-levels of empowered with Tara (Jenna Ortega). The usage of the legacy characters in the script written by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick feels perfect and, if anything, could have probably done with an even higher body count. But after 6, this entry feels even stronger.
Is this even a surprise? I’m not sure there’s a single person on the planet that would put any other film in the number-one spot. And for good reason: it revolutionized horror. As good as any sequel is, there will never be anything that surpasses the original. Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy) is the embodiment of every horror fan I know (and am) and provides some of the best monologues in slasher history. The deconstruction of slasher films provides one of the greatest twists in all of cinema history, with an absolutely blockbuster third act.
How would you rank the Scream series? Let us know in the comments below.
New photos from the set of Spider-Noir show off a comic accurate costume during the shooting of a stunt sequence.
Nicolas Cage was spotted on the set of Spider-Noirearlier this month but wasn’t in his Spidey costume at the time. Thankfully, our first look at the live-action Spider-Man Noir costume has arrived, thanks to a handful of set photos. There’s also a video that showcases a stunt sequence in which Spider-Noir is perched atop a vehicle while shooting webs. You’ll have to view that through the link. Given the nature of the scene, it’s not Cage in the costume but rather a stunt double.
The Spider-Noir costume looks pretty great to me, even under harsh outdoor lighting. It’s sure to look even better in the finished scene.
Cage stars in Spider-Noir as an “aging and down on his luck private investigator in 1930s New York who is forced to grapple with his past life as the city’s one and only superhero.” Cage first voiced the character in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The series also features Brendan Gleeson as the main villain, Lamorne Morris as Robbie Robertson, Abraham Popoola as a World War I veteran, Jack Huston as a bodyguard, and Li Jun Li as a singer at a premiere New York nightclub.
In a statement earlier this year, Vernon Sanders, the head of television at Amazon MGM Studios, said: “Expanding the Marvel universe with Noir is a uniquely special opportunity and we are honored to bring this series to our global Prime Video customers. The extremely talented Nicolas Cage is an ideal choice for our new superhero and the accomplished producing team with Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Amy Pascal, and the incredible team at Sony is dedicated to expanding this franchise in the most authentic way.“
Katherine Pope, President of Sony Pictures Television Studios, added: “We are absolutely thrilled to have Nicolas Cage starring in this series! No one else could bring such pathos, pain, and heart to this singular character. Along with our brilliant producers and partners at Amazon MGM Studios and Prime Video, we couldn’t ask for a better team to explore this reimagining of such an iconic character in Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters.“
Spider-Noir comes to us from Oren Uziel (22 Jump Street) and Steve Lightfoot (Marvel’s The Punisher), who serve as co-showrunners and executive producers. Harry Bradbeer (Killing Eve) will direct and executive produce the first two episodes. Uziel and Lightfoot developed the series alongside Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and Amy Pascal, the team behind the Spider-Verse movies. Lord, Miller, and Pascal will also serve as executive producers on Spider-Noir.
Apple developing a new Oregon Trail movie from Will Speck and Josh Gordan with Barbie-like musical numbers.
Last Updated on November 1, 2024
If you spent your younger years in the school computer lab constantly dying from snakebite, drowning, a broken leg, cholera, and, everyone’s favourite, dysentery, then you should be pumped (or perhaps horrified) about the new Oregon Trail movie. THR reports that Apple is developing a new movie based on the popular video game with Will Speck and Josh Gordan attached to direct and produce.
Sources say that the Oregon Trail movie will feature several original musical numbers in the vein of Barbie from EGOT winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. The project is still in early development, but Speck and Gordon first started working on it over two years ago. “We were talking about what we could cook up next, because we really want to do another musical,” Speck said. “[Pasek & Paul] mentioned [Oregon Trail], and we now have the rights to it, and we’re putting it together alongside them and some other exciting people.”
Gordon added that the darkly comedic aspect of the video game is what drew them to the project. “[Oregon Trail] always had this dark band of humor running through it, because your chances of dying from everything from dysentery to a cut to anything was… Basically, every move you ended up dying,” Gordon said. “For us, that’s returning a little bit to our roots in comedy, marrying it with the fun of doing a big musical, and also just the ambition of taking that very seriously as well and making a big historical westward expansion epic that’s also about dying from dysentery.”
The Oregon Trail video game was first developed in 1971 and found players leading a group of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Along the way, you could trade for supplies, cross rivers, go hunting, and chances were extremely high that at least one member of your party would die of dysentery. The game has been updated many times over the decades, with the latest incarnation released by Apple three years ago. As the game was “educational,” it was one of the few that students were allowed to play in school. You’d name each occupant of the wagon after your friends, and watch, one by one, as they each sucumbed to horrible deaths. Sure, you could make an effort to actually make it to the end, but where’s the fun in that?
Michael Cera is set to reunite with Edgar Wright on The Running Man, with Emilia Jones also joining the cast.
Edgar Wright’s The Running Man will be a little Scott Pilgrim reunion, as THR reports that Michael Cera is set to appear in the new adaptation. Emilia Jones, best known for Locke & Key and CODA, has also joined the cast.
Glen Powell (Twisters) stars in The Running Man as a “desperate man, needing money for his sick daughter, who joins the most popular show, The Running Man, in which teams of killers hunt down contestants. The longer that a contestant survives, the more money that person makes. But as the game show’s producers and killers will find out, this desperate man will break all the rules and expose the show’s dark secrets.” Cera will play a “naïve rebel who tries to help the desperate man,” while Jones will play a “privileged woman blind to the oppression of the government opposite Powell’s Richards.“
Josh Brolin (Avengers: Endgame) is also set to star as the ruthless producer behind the violent reality show, alongside Katy O’Brian (Love Lies Bleeding) as one of the contestants and Lee Pace (Foundation) as the brutal chief hunter tracking down Powell’s character. Daniel Ezra (All American) will also appear.
Edgar Wright is directing The Running Man from a script he co-wrote with Michael Bacall. It’s based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, which was published in 1982 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Wright has previously said that The Running Man remake will be closer to the original Stephen King novel than the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. “I like the film but I like the book more, and they didn’t really adapt the book,” Wright said. “Even as a teenager when I saw the Schwarzenegger film I was like, ‘Oh, this isn’t like the book at all!’ And I think, ‘Nobody’s [done] that book.’ So when that came up, I was thinking, and Simon Kinberg says, ‘Do you have any interest in The Running Man?’ I said, ‘You know what? I’ve often thought that that book is something crying out to be adapted.’ Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy!“
Michael Cera recently reprised his role of Barry in Sausage Party: Foodtopia, which Prime Video has renewed for a second season. Emilia Jones recently starred in Winner, a darkly comedic biopic based on the true story of Reality Winner, the whistleblower who leaked classified documents confirming Russian interference in American elections.
The Running Man will hit theaters on November 21, 2025.
We countdown the best action movies of the 90s, with entries from Arnold, Sly, Keanu and so many more legends.
Usually, when people think of the greatest decade for action movies, the 80s are what they think of. After all, this is the era that gave us Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, the Rambo movies, and so many more. But, the 90s was just as important a decade, giving birth to just as many legends of the genre, and it was the last significant era for R-rated action flicks. But what are the best action films of the decade? It’s tough to say, but here are 10, plus an honourable mention, that we think we deserve a place in the pantheon.
Honourable Mention: Demolition Man:
When this came out in the fall of 1993, it wasn’t considered all that special. It apparently lost money at the box office, but within a few years, this Sylvester Stallone/ Wesley Snipes mashup became a major cult classic, and now it’s one of the most beloved films of the era. Stallone stars as a cryogenically frozen cop who wakes up in an extremely PC utopia that seems more relevant every year. The script, which Heathers scribe Daniel Waters overhauled, has teeth, and it also gave Sandra Bullock her first significant role in a Hollywood film, paving the way for her to become one of the biggest stars of her era. I feel like we’re not far from the movie’s “verbal morality statute,” but let’s skip the three seashells, ok?
10. True Lies:
This was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s last megahit and his last teaming, to date, with James Cameron. This domestic comedy mashup with tentpole action is a little un-PC these days (good!). The action sequences are masterful, and Schwarzenegger has never been so loose or comfortable playing a part. Jamie Lee Curtis is excellent as his wife, and the two should have been able to parlay this into a franchise, but Cameron was too busy ever to take the notion of a True Lies 2 seriously. He did, however, take the time to remaster the film in 4K (to mixed results).
9. The Matrix:
While this may seem a little low on this list, the reason I maybe don’t consider it up there with a lot of the big 90s action movies is because it feels more like a product of the 2000s, as it was so influential it dominated the genre for years. This was a massive comeback for Keanu Reeves, made the Wachowskis iconic and had some of the greatest VFX and action ever put to screen, effortlessly meshing Hong Kong-style action with American tentpole movie making.
8. Total Recall:
Do yourself a favour. Skip the 4K re-release of this movie, as the old-school effects don’t hold up well in high def. Yet, this Paul Verhoeven-directed epic is a masterpiece of action movie-making, and it’s so layered that you can watch it repeatedly. It has it all. Pulse-pounding action, gore, Schwarzenegger at his best, a kick-ass heroine, Michael Ironside getting his arms ripped off, a Jerry Goldsmith score, and an impossibly sexy Sharon Stone.
7. The Rock:
For James Bond fans, this movie is extra special as it’s Sean Connery’s swan song to the spy genre, with him playing a very Bond-like hero. It’s cool to see this sixties legend get plopped down into a modern techno-thriller, and Connery rises to the occasion. It’s Michael Bay’s best film, with a solid musical score, Ed Harris as a sympathetic bad guy and the birth of another action icon, Nicolas Cage, to whom Connery symbolically passes the torch as the movie continues.
6. Fist of Legend:
Lest you think this list will be all American movies, one must acknowledge that some incredible action flicks were being made in Hong Kong. Jet Li teamed with Yuen Woo Ping for this remake of Bruce Lee’s Fist Of Fury, aka The Chinese Connection. The fights in this movie were a massive influence on The Matrix.
5. Drunken Master 2:
Jackie Chan always said he never understood why fans loved his sequel to Drunken Master so much, with his perception of the film marred by his rumoured creative conflicts with director Lar Kar Leung. Artistically and physically, this is Chan at his prime. However, it’s maybe the one movie of his where I’d say the North American re-edit is a bit better, with it changing the schlocky score and eliminating the dumb ending.
4. Speed:
No one thought this movie would amount to much in 1994. People laughed at Keanu Reeves starring in a Die Hard knockoff action thriller, with many saying it seemed like he was taking on a role meant for a guy like Steven Seagal (it was actually written for The Perfect Weapon star Jeff Speakman). Opening weekend changed everyone’s minds, and I remember convincing my dad to take me to see this instead of Beverly Hills Cop 3. We were both on the edge of our seats, and Reeves and co-star Sandra Bullock emerged from this as legends.
3. Hard Boiled:
John Woo left Hong Kong following the release of this action masterpiece, which teamed two of his favourite leading men, Chow Yun Fat and Tony Leung. This has some of the greatest shootouts ever committed to film, and sadly, would mark the end of Woo’s collaborations with Chow Yun-Fat, although never say never.
2. Point Break:
Kathryn Bigelow brought a female perspective to this ultra-male bromance, which starred Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent trying to nail a team of surfing backrobbers, who turn out to be led by Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi, the zen surfer guru he’s become friends with. This legit masterpiece holds up brilliantly years later – ignore the remake they should have called Point Fake.
1. Terminator 2: Judgement Day:
Is this the greatest sequel ever made? It must be. It’s no coincidence that Schwarzenegger/ Cameron collaborations bookend this list. This movie elevated the genre, with it an emotional rollercoaster that made many of us cry in the 90s. It’s Arnie at his best, with Linda Hamilton also emerging as one of the most incredible action movie heroines ever. Hasta La Vista Baby.
What do you think of this list of some of the best 90s action movies? Would you have included the John McClane adventure Die Hard with a Vengeance or the “Steven Seagal vs. Tommy Lee Jones” classic Under Siege? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Uma Thurman says that 1997’s Batman & Robin was the first to be made specifically for kids, which might be hard to argue with…
Go on and recall any moment from Batman & Robin. Maybe it’s the cartoony rogues gallery or Arnold’s pun-tastic lines or the barrage of fast food tie-ins. Whichever way you go, one thing is for sure: this is kiddie fare! Well, except maybe those Bat-nipples…
On her namesake talk show, Kelly Clarkson told Uma Thurman that Batman & Robin is the only one in the entire franchise that her kids enjoy, to which Thurman responded, “It’s the one that was actually made for children.” This is a tough one to argue with, especially coming just a handful of years after Tim Burton concluded his two-film run.
But is there anything necessarily wrong with that? We can judge the movie for its campy dialogue, lack of dimension, abuse of the comics, and studio insistence that it meet the needs to shill as many Taco Bell kids meals as possible, but can we really take it out on the product? Oh, well, yes, we in fact can. Then again, I have to admit I do find the vivid color palette to stand out as satisfyingly fresh from Tim Burton’s gothic interpretation – even if it’s a complete assault on the eyeballs…
Like Silverstone, Thurman also had problems with her Batman & Robin costume, complaining of the difficulty of getting it on and off every day. “Because it was all rubber, and we had to pull it on, like imagine the worst pair of airplane tension hose you ever got into in your life…It was the original, the meanest sort of Spanx imaginable…But it was fun and creative!”
More than 25 years later, do you think Batman & Robin deserves a total reevaluation or is its reputation right where it belongs? Climb down the ivy and let us know in the comments section below.