Indie News

While “The Lion King” dominates the larger world of studio releases, A24’s “The Farewell” is king of the indie jungle. Lulu Wang’s acclaimed story of a granddaughter’s return to China for a special event expanded on its second weekend as impressively as an award-season prime-time contender. Commanding that response in July suggests a not only a huge interest in its subject, but a hunger from the arthouse audience for a film to support. None of this was guaranteed, or even likely, after nabbing major acclaim at Sundance.

Once again, a documentary leads the new films as “David Crosby: Remember My Name” (Sony Pictures Classics) topped seven non-fiction titles that add up to about half of the leading grosses among specialized releases.

Opening

David Crosby: Remember My Name (Sony Pictures Classics) – Metacritic: 81; Festivals include: Sundance, South by Southwest, Seattle 2019

$41,050 in 4 theaters; PTA (per theater average): $10,263

With

With her last film, the critically-acclaimed “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” Marielle Heller accepted the grueling challenge of painting an odious misanthrope in a positive light. And dang, she pulled it off with aplomb, Melissa McCarthy and screenwriters Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty helping the director make notorious bunco writer Lee Israel not only excusable but utterly endearing (read our review here).

Read More: The Best Films Of 2019… So Far

Heller clearly isn’t tempted by an easy life, her upcoming feature “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” entailing molding Tom Hanks into the iconic Mr.

Continue reading ‘A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood’ Trailer: Tom Hanks Is Born To Play Mr. Rogers at The Playlist.

The idea of Tom Hanks playing American television icon Fred Rogers sounds like a perfect match on paper, and it truly is a dream come true in the first trailer for Sony’s fall awards hopeful “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” The biographical drama is the latest from Marielle Heller, the indie wunderkind behind “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” and “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”

“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” written by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, centers on the unexpected (and true) friendship between Rogers and the award-winning journalist Lloyd Vogel (“The Americans” Emmy winner Matthew Rhys). The cynical writer is forced to take an assignment from Esquire to write a profile on Rogers, but the job turns out to be a surprising one as Rogers’ perspective on life begins to change Vogel. The supporting cast includes Chris Cooper, Susan Kelechi Watson, Enrico Colantoni, Maryann Plunkett,

Ten years ago, it seemed like we all had a pretty solid idea of movies — what they can do, who they’re for, and where they’re watched. That idea was inflexible, and supported by a century of precedent. It came with the added benefit of making the people in charge comfortable with the idea that cinema’s future wouldn’t look all that different from its past. DVD sales were strong, Netflix was still just a sad little envelope at the bottom of your mailbox, and China was starting to give studios the biggest safety net it ever had. Perhaps the arrival of James Cameron’s “Avatar” in the waning moments of 2009 could have been seen as a harbinger of strange things to come, but no one in Hollywood has ever lost sleep over a movie that grossed nearly $3 billion.

Things have changed. Cinema is in a constant state of flux,

The 2019 Venice Film Festival has an opener in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “The Truth.” We won’t learn what the rest of this year’s competition slate is until later this week, but today we learned what will close the festival, Giuseppe Capotondi’s “The Burnt Orange Heresy.”

Adapted from Charles Willeford’s 1971 novel, the feature stars Claes Bang, Elizabeth Debicki, Mick Jagger and Donald Sutherland. The screenplay is by Scott Smith who is best known for his 1993 novel “A Simple Plan” which was adapted into an acclaimed 1998 film directed by Sam Raimi.

Continue reading ‘The Burnt Orange Heresy’ With Elizabeth Debicki & Mick Jagger Will Close 2019 Venice Film Festival at The Playlist.

[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “Big Little Lies” Season 2, Episode 7, “I Want to Know,” including the ending of the Season 2 finale.]

When HBO ran the preview for the “Big Little Lies” Season 2 finale, there was a juicy little line at the start: “The lie is the friendship.” In that context-free clip, it sounded like Celeste was implying the friendship itself is a lie, but midway through Episode 7, when she says it to Madeline while trying to assuage her guilt, the line indicates these friendships were built on the lie, for better or worse; that this makeshift group of friends only really exists because they lied to cover up manslaughter.

This sort of switcheroo happens all the time — trailers tease a troubling scenario to build up anticipation, and then the final product isn’t quite what you expect — but the telling point about this pivotal moment, which sets up the group turning themselves in as the season comes to a close,

“Booksmart” director/writer duo Olivia Wilde and Katie Silberman will team up again for a comedy at Universal Pictures. The studio recently won rights to the project in a heated bidding war between six studios, according to Deadline. Universal nabbed the untitled holiday comedy based on an original pitch from Wilde and Silberman, with Wilde attached to direct and Silberman (co-writer on “Booksmart”) slated to write the screenplay. Both women will produce.

Released in late May, “Booksmart” earned rave reviews from critics and has earned over $22 million in box office returns thus far. The raunchy teen girl comedy stars Beanie Feldstein (“Lady Bird”) and Kaitlyn Dever (“Justified”) as strait-laced best friends who go to great lengths to finally let loose on their last night of high school.

In his rave review of the film out of this year’s SXSW Film Festival, IndieWire’s Eric Kohn wrote: “The best comedy of its kind since “Superbad,

“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” production designer Barbara Ling shared gorgeous behind-the-scenes photos, and revealed how Quentin Tarantino’s personal collections inspired the look of the film. In an interview with Architectural Digest, the designer said she took a lot of material from the filmmaker’s wealth of posters, 1960s cinema, and old-school Los Angeles restaurant connections. Loosely based around the Charles Manson/Sharon Tate murders, the movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and Al Pacino, among others, and is set in 1960s Los Angeles.

“It’s Quentin’s love letter to the city he grew up in,” said Ling, a fellow L.A.-native and longtime production designer, whose credits include 1991’s “Fried Green Tomatoes” and “The Doors”, as well as both Joel Shumacher Batman films from the mid-’90s; “Batman Forever” and “Batman & Robin.”

Ling visited Tarantino’s personal cinema once a week, where

This is what movies look like in summer 2019: This weekend, 87% of the box office went to films from Disney plus a non-Disney Marvel release. About 90% went to franchises, sequels, or remakes. And, they made a lot of money.

That’s good news for exhibitors, and for studios that provided the films. The message from audiences is loud and clear: Ignore naysayers who pounded on “The Lion King” for its high craft and low originality; give us more like this.

With “The Lion King” bringing 73% of the gross, this weekend brought in about $75 million more than the same period last year. That brought down the 2019 shortfall to just over $500 million, a bit over 7%. That’s a strong boost, which should continue with Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

The bulk of the credit, of course, goes to “The Lion King,” with an assist from the heat wave covering much of the country.

The Mouse House is having a hell of a weekend. After Saturday’s massive Marvel Studios panel at San Diego Comic-Con, where the studio announced almost a dozen projects over the next two years, Disney went ahead and earned the top 3 spots at the domestic box office, led by an absolutely huge debut from Jon Favreau’s “The Lion King.”

Before ‘Lion King,’ the best opening ever for July occurred back in 2011 when “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” debuted with a domestic total of $169 million.

Continue reading ‘Lion King’ Shatters The July Record On Its Way To A $531 Million Total [Box Office] at The Playlist.

Well, it’s official, and the timing seemed kind of dubiously suspect given that Kevin Feige was able to announce it on stage at Hall H in San Diego, at Comic-Con, but “Avengers: Endgame” has officially surpassed “Avatar” at the box office and is now the highest-grossing film of all time.

Read More: ‘Fantastic Four’: Kevin Feige Says Marvel Studios Is Currently Developing A New Film

After 13 weeks in theaters, and with a bonus-scene added to theaters to help the movie get over the hump, ‘Endgame’ now stands at $2,790.2 billion.

Continue reading Snap: ‘Avengers Endgame’ Surpasses ‘Avatar’ To Become The Highest Grossing Film Of All Time Worldwide at The Playlist.

If you thought Robert Durst was scary, wait until you meet the townspeople of Skidmore, Missouri. “I was glad he was dead. Killing him was the only way it was gonna stop,” sounds a woman’s voice in the first trailer for “No One Saw a Thing,” a new documentary crime series heading to SundanceTV in August, produced by Blumhouse.

Per the official synopsis: “A new six-episode true crime documentary series from Blumhouse Television and Delirio Films, ‘No One Saw A Thing’ examines an unsolved murder in the American Heartland and the corrosive effects of vigilantism in small town America. The case garnered international attention in the early 1980s after a so-called ‘town bully’ was shot dead in front of almost 60 townspeople in tiny Skidmore, Missouri. These witnesses deny having seen anything, to this very day.”

“That was the one mistake that they made, was that they didn’t kill his wife.

It’s official: Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie will be Marvel’s first openly Lgbtq+ superhero. Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige recently confirmed that the character will have an explicitly queer relationship of some kind in Marvel’s forthcoming “Thor: Love and Thunder,” the fourth McU movie centered around the hammer-wielding superhero played by Chris Hemsworth. Many have been wondering when the blockbuster franchise would introduce an Lgbtq character, including Thompson herself. The announcement is all the more significant because Thompson is openly bisexual.

“The answer is yes,” Feige told i09 of Valkyrie having an Lgbtq storyline. “How that impacts the story remains to be seen with that level of representation you’ll see across our films, not in just Thor 4.”

Feige confirmed what Thompson herself had teased during Marvel’s “Thor: Love and Thunder” unveiling at Comic-Con Saturday. “As new king, she needs to find her queen,” Thompson told fans

It turns out the climactic battle scene in “Avengers: Endgame” could have been even more disturbing. Speaking to EW during Comic-Con Friday, “Endgame” directors Joe and Anthony Russo discussed a discarded concept that even they found too morose. The scene was set to take place towards the end of the movie, and would have seen time-traveling Thanos (Josh Brolin) throwing the decapitated head of past-Captain America (Chris Evans) at the feet of the rest of the Avengers. The Russos conceded that the concept, though enticing, was just too dark — even for Thanos.

“We clung to that story line for so long just for that moment of Thanos walking through a portal and dropping Captain America’s severed head,” director Anthony Russo told EW about the potential idea.

“We had most of the script working except for the third act, because Anthony and I were clinging to this concept that we

Marvel Studios brought the house down Saturday Night during their Hall H panel at Comic-Con. Aside from a diverse slate of Phase 4 films and television limited series ranging from “Shang-Chi” to “Hawkeye” and the bombshell that was the announcement of a “Blade” film starring Mahershala Ali, Hall H was privy to a first look at the new “Black Widow” movie set to hit theaters May 1, 2020.

Continue reading ‘Black Widow’: Marvel Reveals The Taskmaster, Iron Maiden, An Unexpected Prequel Timeline & More [Comic-Con Recap] at The Playlist.

Whatever your thoughts on 2019’s movies, the tail-end of this year continues to look like it will offer an impressive mix of high-concept genre fare, long-awaited auteur experiments and your typical period movies whose sole purpose, it seems, is to rack up as many Oscar nominations as possible. But make sure to leave room in your calendar for “Uncut Gems,” which now has a set release date of December 13, at least, according to the director’s Elara Pictures production company who tweeted out the date this weekend.

Continue reading ‘Uncut Gems’: Safdie Brothers Production Co. Say Adam Sandler Drama Comes Out This December at The Playlist.

It is difficult to suppress traumatic events in life, something that could be scarring for life, as “Daniel Isn’t Real” explores in this horror thriller.

Read More: The Best Films Of 2019… So Far

Based on the novel “In This Way I Was Saved” by Brian DeLeeuw, the film sees Miles Robbins (“Blockers”) bring deceased friend Patrick Schwarzenegger (“Midnight Sun”) back from the dead in order to cope with a traumatic event.

Continue reading ‘Daniel Isn’t Real’ Teaser Trailer: Adam Egypt Mortimer’s Horror Thriller Showcases Troubled Teens Mental Health at The Playlist.

Marvel has stolen the show at Comic-Con before, but never, ever, ever like this before. Tonight in Hall H, Kevin Feige and several members of the Marvel team thundered down and dominated with a gigantic roar, revealing 11 new projects, ten that are part of the upcoming Phase 4 plan.

Read More: After The ‘Endgame’: Here’s Where The Phase 4 Future Of The Marvel Cinematic Universe Goes

While much of it was expected, much of it was a surprise as well.

Continue reading ‘What If…?’ Animated Series Comes Summer 2021 To Disney+; Jeffrey Wright Will Voice The Watcher at The Playlist.

Sorry, ‘X-Men’ fans. Yes, Marvel Studios gained control of the Fox properties in March when the Disney buyout became finalized. But at San Diego Comic-Con, the merry mutants were not revealed to be part of Kevin Feige’s Phase 4 plans. However, their Fox brethren, the “Fantastic Four” franchise, was part of the unveiling (via Variety), as it was revealed that a new film is currently in development.

Continue reading ‘Fantastic Four’: Kevin Feige Says Marvel Studios Is Currently Developing A New Film at The Playlist.

Chris Evans and Robert Downey, Jr. are both officially out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But their original ‘Avengers’ buddies are going to have plenty of time to shine in the upcoming Phase 4. Today, at San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel Studios officially unveiled its lineup for the next two years, and it includes projects from the original six, including the films “Eternals,” “Black Widow” and “Thor: Love and Thunder.” And not to be left out, Jeremy Renner takes center stage in “Hawkeye,” a new streaming series for Disney+.

Continue reading Marvel Studios’ ‘Hawkeye’ Streaming Series Will Debut In Fall 2021 & Introduce Kate Bishop at The Playlist.