Studio Coffee Run 11/8/19: More JURASSIC WORLD 3 cast returns, more Taika Waititi, the death of a Superman and more!

Before we get to this week’s Friday edition of “Studio Coffee Run,” I want to offer a hearty congratulations to Aquaman and The Conjuring director James Wan, who got married last weekend. His new wife Ingrid got herself one of the good ones, and I can’t wait until they start cranking out little(r) Wans!

I know that Disney+ launches next Tuesday, just four days away, but at this point, I’m just a little talked out about it. I’m sure I’ll have more to say once I see some of their initial offerings. There’s plenty of stuff to see in movie theaters this weekend in case you want to get out of the house one last time before Tuesday.

In Case You Missed It…

 The new trailer for Pixar’s SOUL…

•  If there’s any doubt that Pixar Animation is lining up their 10^th Oscar in the animated category, then check out the trailer for Pete Docter’s next movie Soul, featuring the voice of Jamie Foxx as a frustrated jazz musician who needs to get the help of an infant soul (voiced by Tina Fey) to be transported back into his body after his soul is separated. Docter previously directed Upand Inside Out, both netting him Oscars. His earlier movie Monsters, Inc. was nominated the first year of the Oscar animated feature category but lost to Shrek. Soulis co-written and co-directed by Kemp Powers, who oddly, was also a staff writer for the first season of Star Trek: Discovery.

Matt Reeves’ THE BATMAN continues to cast up…

• Don’t have much to add to the story linked above, but the casting of Andy Serkis as Alfred and Colin Farrell as The Penguin – both “in talks” currently—is further proof that director Matt Reeves is definitely thinking outside the box. I guess we’ll know in a couple years if it paid off or not.

A few quick bits…

• Undaunted by their back-to-back bombs Gemini Man and Terminator Dark Fate, Paramount Pictures has set a March 19, 2021 date for the next “Paranormal Activity” movie – hey, those movies don’t cost very much to make and even when they bomb, they still make money – and a September 24, 2021 date for… wait for it… My Little Pony Movie. No word on whether the latter is an animated film or if they’ll actually doll up real horses (or CG ones) with colorful hair, but they have two years to figure that out.
• Related, at least to the first bit above, Bloody-Disgusting has revealed that Gary Barber’s Spyglass Media is hoping to bring back the Scream franchise with Wes Craven’s horror icon Ghostface, but without Craven (who is dead) or original writer Kevin Williamson.

Justice Smith and Daniella Pineda back for JURASSIC WORLD 3

Just to insure that Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World 3 – will it really be called that or are they waiting to spring a silly subtitle on us still? – is going to be the Jurassiciest “Jurassic Park” movie yet, Collider learned that Justice Smith and Daniella Pineda, who were introduced in 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdoms, will also be returning for next year’s threequel… or six-quel if you include the original three movies.  (I’m sorry, but I’m totally blaming George Lucas and Lucasfilm for this. If they hadn’t done an original “Star Wars” trilogy and then a second trilogy prequel and then J.J. Abrams’s third trilogy, we wouldn’t be having all of these interrelated trilogies.) But enough about “Star Wars,” which will be all the talk in December, and let’s get back to Jurassic World 3, which isn’t due out until June 11, 2022. Smith will be back as Franklin Webb, while Pineda will return as Zia Rodriguez, which just confirms that “If you’re not killed in a Jurassic Park movie, you might still have a future in the franchise.” The publicist from Trevorrow’s original Jurassic World movie? Still dead.

SHAZAM’s David F. Sandberg directing another comic book movie

Following the success of Shazam! earlier this year, director David F. Sandberg is attached to another comic book movie, although this one will be for Netflix, who won a bidding war for The Unsound, based on the BOOM! Studios graphic novel by Cullen Bunn and Jack T. Cole. The comic is being adapted by Skylar James, whose screenplay 29 Mole Street landed atop the BloodList and Hit List screenplay competitions, but it will also return Sandberg to straight-up horror after making Lights Out and directing Annabelle: Creation.

Taika Waititi is Everywhere Chapter 532

Oh, you thought that Taika Waititi was done adding projects to his slate now that his latest movie Jojo Rabbit has been expanded nationwide as of tomorrow, did you? I mean, we know he is busy developing Thor: Lord and Thunder for its November 4, 2021 debut. He also has taken a small role in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, plus he’s going to go into production soon on Next Goal Wins. Surely that’s enough for one man, right? According to Discussing Film, it isn’t. They’re reporting that Mr. Waititi will also write, direct and executive produce the new FX limited series Reservation Dogs. It’s about four teenagers living in a housing project in Oklahama for Native Americans who commit crimes, and it will start filming in Oklahoma in February?!  I don’t really know Discussing Filmb ut that’s a lot of details on a project that Waititi is going to have to somehow squeeze in above and he can always do post on that while filming something else. But when is the man going to sleep!?

In case you thought all those Disney+ Marvel shows would truly be “standalone”

 We probably already knew this was going to be the case, and it was probably cliched when Kevin Feige was promoted to Marvel Chief Creative Officer, but it’s now been confirmed. In a Bloomberg profile of Disney head Bob Iger (spotted by the eagle-eyed Slashfilm), there were a few tidbits about Disney+….yes, I LIED in my intro above!!! We’ve already known that Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda/Scarlet Witch would be appearing in 2021’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, thereby making the Disney+ series WandaVisiona tie-in, but it came out in that profile that the planned Loki series will ALSO tie-into the Doctor Strange movie. As stated in that Bloomberg profile:

If you want to understand everything in future Marvel movies, he says, you’ll probably need a Disney+ subscription, because events from the new shows will factor into forthcoming films such as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The Scarlet Witch will be a key character in that movie, and Feige points out that the Loki series will tie in, too. “I’m not sure we’ve actually acknowledged that before,” he says. “But it does.”

 

Iger also mentioned that Jeremy Renner was originally going to get his own Hawkeyemovie, but then Disney and Marvel decided to change gears and turn it into a series that will presumably include Haillee Steinfeld as Kate Bishop. There have also been rumors circulating that Marvel may want to recast Hawkeye due to the problems surrounding Renner in his impending divorce, which would be a shame, since the character really hasn’t been given a chance to shine in the movies anywhere near as in the comics.

There it is. One more reason why millions will feel the need to subscribe to Disney+, although those first Marvel series won’t even debut until sometime in early 2021, probably in the months before Doctor Strange’s May 7, 2021 release date.

The Death of a Hollywood Superman

I’m a New Yorker born and bred, so I probably don’t understand the Hollywood Boulevard mentality of those who dress up as superheroes and other characters to take pictures with tourists. We have something similar in Times Square, but it’s a lot more skeevy as there are a lot of struggling immigrants just trying to make a buck by dressing up as Minnie Mouse and the like. The character players in Hollywood are held to such a higher standard that the death of one such man, Christopher Dennis, at the young age of 52, made it into the trades. Dennis was also a popular guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

RIP #christopherdennis #hollywoodsuperman pic.twitter.com/2RrSM8wQTE

— Super Museum (@supermanmuseum) November 6, 2019

Casting Tidbits…

• 

  This is probably about as far away from the geek aspect of The Beat that you can get but former Kingpin (at least on Marvel’s Daredevil) Vincent D’Onofrio  has been cast as Jerry Falwell in Fox Searchlight’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye as production begins in Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s the new movie from former The State member and The Big Sick director Michael Showalter, and it stars Andrew Garfield as televangelist Jim Bakker and Jessica Chastain in the title role of his wife, famous for the visual of her heavy make-up running down her tear-filled face, one of the defining moments of the ‘80s. The movie also stars Surrogates’ Gabriel Olds (as Pat Robertson),  Sam Jaeger, Mark Wystrach, Cherry Jones, Chandler Head and more.

• 

  

  Diehard horror fans are already familiar with the work of Israeli filmmaker Aharon Keshales (Big Bad Wolves), but he seems to have found two great leads for his English language debut, the thriller Till Death, as Jason Sudeikis and Evangeline Lilly have both signed onto the project, according to Deadline.

Trailers! Trailers! Trailers!

• One of the 2020 movies I’m really looking forward to is Universal Pictures’ new take on The Invisible Man, directed by Leigh Whannell (Insidious, Saw, Upgrade), mainly cause it stars the wondrous Elisabeth Moss (The Handmaid’s Tale) as a woman who is terrorized by her ex, believed dead, who is trying to make others believe she’s insane. Check out the trailer below. February 28 (in a Leap Year, no less!) can’t come soon enough.

 

• It’s just as hard to believe that it’s been 16 years since Michael Bay’s Bad Boys II, the hugely successful sequel to the first team-up between Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. Although Smith’s most recent movie Gemini Man has been dying a quick death at the box office, the idea of Smith returning to one of his earliest characters will certainly be appealing, which is why his January 17 movie Bad Boys for Lifeis going to be a big deal. The threequel is also going to be a big break for Belgian filmmakers Adil El Arbi and Billal Fallah, who directed last year’s Gangsta and one of a half dozen movies called simply Black.

 

• I’ve been hearing a lot of great things from my horror fan friends about Hardware director Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space, one of those great “asteroid lands in rural area” sci-fi thrillers, this one starring the one and only Nicolas Cage. The movie, which premiered in Toronto as part of TIFF’s “Midnight Madness” section is also based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft! RLJE Films has released the first trailer for the movie which will finally hit theaters and On Demand on January 24, 2020. 

• Lastly, IFC Midnight released the first trailer for Jennifer Reeder’s horror/thriller Knives and Skin, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year. The movie definitely has a bit of a modern-day River’s Edge feel. It will be in theaters and On Demand on December 6.

That’s it for this chapter of Studio Coffee Run Friday Edition. Josh Hilgenberg is back on Tuesday with more of his wonderfulness… that is, unless he starts going down the Disney+ wormhole once it launches. No, I’m pretty sure he’ll write his Tuesday Edition first.