The director of Saw II, Saw III, Saw IV, and Spiral returns with a sports-horror thriller set in the competitive world of figure skating. Clayface‘s uncertain future in the DCU remains a point of contention. And Nikolaj Coster-Waldau gets a new co-star in The Black Tapes. It’s the American pastime and there’s a thunderstorm coming… it’s the only time we can play. Krakakoooom! It’s Morning Spoilers!
Man of Tomorrow
Matthew Lillard appeared to suggest he’s playing an original character in Man of Steel during a recent interview with The Direct.
It’s a very James Gunn moment. So, I wouldn’t worry too much about finding him in the comics.
Serpentine
Deadline reports Darren Lynn Bousman (Repo! The Genetic Opera, Saw II-IV, Spiral) is attached to direct Serpentine, a new thriller set in the “competitive world of figure skating.” According to the synopsis, “Serpentine is set in a seemingly quiet New England town where organized crime, crooked cops, buried secrets, and the intensely competitive world of figure skating begin to collide. At the center of the film is a woman who believes she has found a way out of a dangerous life, only to discover that escape comes with consequences. What begins as an attempt to disappear quickly pulls her into a strange web of criminals, local power players, and people with their own reasons for keeping the past buried.”
Red Rising
Director Francis Lawrence provided IGN with an update on the long-gestating Red Rising movie and the failed TV series that preceded it.
I have been attached to Red Rising for about eight years, and Pierce [Brown] and I have become friends. The books were actually brought to me by my producing partner, Cam [MacConomy], who’s a producer on this movie and has worked with me since 2010. He found the books and brought [them] to me, and I fell in love with them, and Cam is in love with them. We met with Pierce and we brought it out to market and went to Netflix. We were going to do it as a series, originally. Unfortunately, our experience at Netflix — we had two amazing pilots written, but regimes kept changing and they kept creating these departments of ‘tentpole, now it’s YA, back to tentpole again.’ It was getting bounced around, and it’s not a cheap [project] to make and to do it right. They never got the guts to pull the trigger on it. And so, the rights reverted back to Pierce. Pierce then went to Paramount, which I was happy about, because I actually prefer the theatrical approach for Red Rising rather than streaming, because I think it’s a series that’s definitely deserving of a theatrical experience and IMAX and the whole thing. I’m very, very excited about that. We have a writer that we like, who is now starting work on a script, and hopefully that’s something that we will put together quite quickly. It seems to be a priority at Paramount, which is great. Super, super, super excited about that. But I love the books and I love Pierce and I’m really, really excited.
The DCU/Clayface 2
James Gunn confirmed everything is going according to plan in a recent Threads post following the release of Clayface.
You can look at my quotes from January ’23 when we started and I said we were going to do exactly what we’re doing. I said some stories would be standalone like the Guardians movies were (which is what Clayface is) and some stories would have part of a larger narrative structure, which is what the Superman Saga is. All that said, each piece of the larger story should work on its own with or without having to see everything else.
That said, director James Watkins told Variety he isn’t certain the character is set to make a comeback anytime soon.
That’s a question for James Gunn. I liked the standalone nature of it. I liked how it felt like it introduced a character. But I wasn’t trying to introduce the character to go, ‘Okay, what next?’ I was trying to introduce the character as a full meal in itself.
The Black Tapes
Deadline reports Sosie Bacon will star alongside Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in the upcoming Black Tapes television series at MGM+. The official synopsis reads: “Dr. Richard Strand (Coster-Waldau), a brilliant psychiatrist with a mysterious past, teams with the obsessed, methodical physicist Alex Reagan (Bacon) to debunk paranormal cases of hauntings, possessions, disappearances, and sinister legends—the infamous black tapes. But as Strand and Reagan unravel the secrets of these events, they uncover a hidden occult world behind our own and must unravel a centuries-old apocalyptic conspiracy.”
Cupertino
Spoiler TV has a synopsis for “Harper,” the sixth episode of Cupertino. Click through for images.
When Christy’s roommate is denied a transplant due to an AI algorithm swapping the order of the list to put a wealthy man above her, Michael and Olivia race to get a judge on board to stop the surgery.
Dig
Finally, archeologist Amy Poehler makes a history-changing discovery at a Grecian dig site in the trailer for Dig, a TV series adapting Kate Myers’ Excavations co-starring Hugh Laurie.
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