Chris Pine is quite widely liked as an actor amongst both critics and audiences, but his feature directorial debut with “Poolman” didn’t exactly go over well with reviewers. Dubbed “Big Lebowski meets Chinatown,” Pine directed, co-wrote and starred in the film as Darren Barrenman, a hapless dreamer who maintains the pool of a Tiki-themed L.A. apartment block. When he uncovers the greatest water heist in LA history, he makes uneasy alliances with a beautiful and connected femme fatale while following every lead he can with corrupt city officials, burned-out Hollywood types, and mysterious benef ..read more

Amazon MGM Studios has greenlit development of a sequel to last year’s successful film adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s bestseller “Red, White & Royal Blue”. The film follows Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez), son of newly elected United States President Ellen Claremont (Uma Thurman) and the young millennial face of the White House. That is until he has to interact with his UK counterpart and rival Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), causing a major uproar at a wedding. The two are forced to play up their non-existent friendship with a goodwill visit to the UK. Forced friendship give ..read more

Netflix is reportedly preparing a new reality competition series based on Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” novel and more specifically the character of Willy Wonka. Gene Wilder, Johnny Depp and more recently Timothée Chalamet have played the character on screen but Netflix, who acquired the Roald Dahl Story Company in 2021, has yet to really do anything with the property. Netflix reportedly went out to a number of production companies to try and get them onboard with Fremantle (“American Idol”) and Wall to Wall (“Who Do You Think You Are?”) said to be battling it out for the gi ..read more

Chris Hemsworth’s little brother and former “The Hunger Games” star Liam Hemsworth takes over the role of monster-hunter Geralt of Rivia in the upcoming fourth season of Netflix’s “The Witcher”. It’s expected the Aussie actor will film his scenes as Geralt throughout much of the year as the show’s fourth and already confirmed final fifth season are tipped to be shot back-to-back. He’s also caught in the unenviable position of having scored the part after the exit of Henry Cavill at the end of the third season. Cavill’s involvement was the biggest draw for many to the series, and the show’s fan ..read more

“Loki” star Tom Hiddleston is set to play New Zealand-born Sir Edmund Hillary alongside a newcomer to take on the role of legendary Nepalese-Indian mountaineer Tenzing Norgay in the upcoming biopic “Tenzing” at See-Saw Films. A search is underway to cast the lead role of Norgay, whilst Willem Dafoe will play English expedition leader Colonel John Hunt in the film. Norgay and Hillary summited Mount Everest in 1953, becoming the first men to stand on the top of the world. The project hails from filmmaker Jennifer Peedom (“Solo,” “Sherpa,” “Mountain”) who has the exclusive rights to tell Tenzing ..read more

The “Scream VI” and “Ready or Not” team of Radio Silence, aka directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, have revealed they are no longer involved in the upcoming new “Escape from New York” film. John Carpenter’s classic 1981 dystopian feature was set in a future where the U.S. had become a totalitarian theocratic police state and the island of Manhattan is now a walled-off maximum security prison. Imprisoned former Special Forces officer Robert ‘Snake’ Plissken (Kurt Russell) has twenty-four hours to go in, rescue the U.S. President who is being held by the city prison’s most dangerou ..read more

Ben Stiller and Colin Farrell are set to star in “All of Us Strangers” director Andrew Haigh’s true crime story “Belly of the Beast”. Haigh will direct the film using a script he and Alexis Jolly adapted from Jerome Loving’s nonfiction book “Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s ‘The Executioner’s Song'”. The film deals with the unlikely friendship between notorious literary titan Norman Mailer (Stiller) and his protege, Jack Henry Abbott (Farrell) in 1980s New York. Under Mailer’s mentorship, Abbott is paroled after nearly a decade in prison and gains insta ..read more

They flood your e-mail inbox and call your mobile phone every day of the week, but now scammers have become the target of a new enemy – veteran Oscar-nominee June Squibb. Magnolia Pictures has released the trailer for “Thelma,” an action comedy in which Squibb stars as a 93-year-old grandmother who gets conned by a phone scammer that impersonates her beloved grandson (Fred Hechinger). When she finds out she’s been scammed; she sets out on a treacherous quest across Los Angeles on a motorized scooter to reclaim what was taken from her. Squibb did most of her own stunts in the film which was wri ..read more

Veteran British actor Ralph Ineson has scored the key role of Marvel universe villain Galactus in the upcoming “The Fantastic Four” film at Marvel Studios. In the comics, Galactus is a planet-devouring force of nature and is depicted as a gigantic humanoid with signature purple armor and helmet. He was previously seen on the big screen in “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer,” albeit only shown in the form of a gigantic spatial cloud. In the comics the character is a cosmic entity who consumes planets to sustain his life force – operating without regard to the morality or judgments of mo ..read more

Netflix has premiered the full-length trailer for “Exploding Kittens,” their upcoming animated series based on the famed tabletop card, which will see “Lucifer” star Tom Ellis voice the role of God Cat. The series follows the eternal conflict between heaven and hell as it reaches epic proportions when both God and the devil are sent to Earth – in the bodies of chunky house cats. Abraham Lim, Lucy Liu, Ally Maki, Mark Proksch and Sasheer Zamata also lend their voices to the project which hails from Mike Judge and Greg Daniels’ animation company Bandera Entertainment. Netflix launched a mobile g ..read more