The Shrek spinoff Donkey gets a release date. Brad Bird says “no” to Ratatouille 2. Willa Fitzgerald and Ione Skye join Brie Larson in Skeletons. Robert Englund’s Jiminy Cricket lives inside Pinocchio’s head in Pinocchio: Unstrung. Let your conscience be your guide, it’s Morning Spoilers!
Skeletons
Deadline reports Willa Fitzgerald, Ione Skye, and Daithí Ó Haragáin have joined the cast of Skeletons. Directed by J.T. Mollner and starring Kyle Gallner and Brie Larson, the story is (so far) only said to be told “from the perspective of a young boy who slowly begins to discover that his beloved parents are hiding a disturbing secret about his mother’s true nature.”
Specimen
Deadline also has word John Herzfeld (Tales from the Crypt) is attached to direct Specimen, a film with a remarkably similar premise to the recently cancelled NBC series The Killing Party. Based on a script by Chase Vergari, “an elite team is hired to deliver the world’s worst serial killers to a secret research facility run by a visionary neuroscientist obsessed with curing evil. When his groundbreaking experiment succeeds, he unleashes something far more dangerous than the killers he has imprisoned.”
Donkey
Deadline also reports Donkey, the Shrek spinoff starring Eddie Murphy’s eponymous character, is now slated for a summer 2028 release.
Ratatouille 2
However, Brad Bird recently told Collider there are no plans for a sequel to Ratatouille despite mild pressuring from Disney.
No. I don’t. They’ve made little feints towards that to see how I would react. They’ll, like, crack a joke, but the joke will be a little bit serious, like, ‘Would you?’ And I’m like, ‘No, we told that story.’ Any time you do something that ends up connecting with people, they automatically think, ‘How about another?’ People have mentioned it about The Iron Giant, which is hilarious to me because the film didn’t succeed at all in its initial release. It’s caught up in time, but what would you do to follow that up? He’s lumbering around, still undiscovered? In other words, to me, that story is told.
Pinocchio Unstrung
Robert Englund’s affably nihilist Jiminy Cricket (who lives in a hollow space inside Pinocchio’s head) argues the fastest way to become a real human boy is to harvest your enemies’ organs in a new clip from Pinocchio Unstrung.
Evil Dead Burn
The final trailer for Evil Dead Burn reminds you tickets are on sale now.
Aquamarine: The Series
According to Deadline, a pilot for a potential TV series based on Aquamarine, the 2006 teen fantasy rom-com about mermaids starring Emma Roberts and Sara Paxton, is now in development at Disney+. Produced by original director Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum alongside Roberts, the series—which will see the latter reprise her role as Claire Brown in a guest-starring capacity—follows Coral, a teenager who “moves to a dreamy seaside town” and “begins unraveling the truth behind her mother’s disappearance—and discovers her mother was a mermaid, awakening magical powers in Coral just as secrets beneath the waves threaten to surface.”
Ghostbusters: Night Shift
Speaking with Deadline, Ghostbusters: Night Shift executive producer Amie Karp stated she was “struck by the question” of whether it was possible to “make an animated series that is in canon” with existing franchise lore—seemingly referring to the similar-sounding Extreme Ghostbusters set in 1997.
Noting Ghostbusters: Night Shift is set in 1994, co-producer Ivan Reitman stated the new series the will try to recapture the look and feel of the outlandish ghosts designed by Fil Barlow and Everett Peck for the 1980’s Real Ghostbusters cartoon.
They were highly inventive, they were strange and they felt this freedom to be odder, funnier and scarier in many ways than the ghosts in the actual films. [Co-showrunner] Ben’s [Hibon] first iterations of the concept of the ghosts showed how scary it can be when you use the wilder side of imagination that we don’t see in live action. Remember the amount of drugs the originators were on when they created this.
In the same article, Hibon goes on to state the ghosts of Night Shift will be “inventive, fleshy and ethereal” while also “lean[ing] into body horror.”
X-Men ’97
In conversation with The Direct, producer Larry Houston promised there’ll be less waiting time between future seasons of X-Men ’97 as the production team have “learned their lessons.”
Luckily, the production problems won’t occur again. There was a huge gap of time between [season] one and two. They’ve learned their lessons, so with [seasons] three and four, that won’t happen again… that was a one-off.
Rick and Morty
Finally, Adult Swim has released an expanded clip from this Sunday’s new episode of Rick and Morty.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
