Weekly Round Up: LeBron James, George Miller, Pirates

29th October 2018

So, Halloween. Not the holiday, the movie. No, not the 1979 John Carpenter movie. And no, not that Rob Zombie one either (shhh, that one doesn’t exist). No, the other one. Halloween II. But not Halloween II the original sequel, and not the one that’s a sequel to the Rob Zombie one either (shhh, that one still doesn’t exist). No, Halloween 2018, which is sort of Halloween II, but also a reboot, kind of, but mainly a straight sequel. That’s the one we’re talking about. Got it? Okay.

So, Halloween. It’s done pretty well at the box office, if anyone is that surprised (personally I thought it was only okay, but whatever). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its success, we’ve seen movement on another slasher movie reboot, one for another slasher icon.

Yeah, so it looks like we could be seeing a return to Camp Crystal Lake fairly soon. Now, all the news is purely speculative at this point, but the rumour mill started turning when LeBron James (I know this is super random, it’s a random piece of news, but this is the world we live in now, it’s unpredictable, what you gonna do?), basketball star, posted an image of himself wearing Jason Voorhees iconic hockey mask.

It seems LeBron is interested in potentially producing a new Friday the 13^th movie, and the possibility of this happening looks all the more likely now with the fact that, coupled with Halloween 2018’s sudden success, original Friday the 13^th screenwriter Victor Miller won a lawsuit against the series’ producer, Sean Cunningham. Although the rights issue has still be described as “murky”, chances are this will have cleared some of the confusion up.

Speaking of lawsuits, George Miller, writer/director of all the Mad Max films, is still involved in one with Warner Bros. regarding Fury Road, meaning we may not be seeing another Mad Max movie for a little while. So, in the meantime he’s decided to move onto other projects, the first of which looks likely to be a fantasy epic based on his own screenplay entitled Three Thousand Years of Longing.

The premise is being kept tightly underwraps, but we do know that Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba have both signed on to star, and that the movie promises to be “unlike anything the filmmaker has done before”, which, given Miller’s filmography includes movies as varied as Mad Max, The Witches of Eastwick and… Babe, is a rather tantalising prospect.

Maybe he’s actually working on the Friday the 13^th reboot, but it’s actually a direct sequel to Jason X, the one in space, because we all know that movie is secretly awesome. Right? Right…? I’m sure Blumhouse would be down for it, Blumhouse seem determined to become the home of horror across the Atlantic, they’re constantly after more content.

Netflix, meanwhile, have also been busy collecting content. News broke this week that they will be producing Guillermo Del Toro’s new Pinocchio movie, which is set to be a stop motion animation musical made in conjunction with The Jim Henson Company, based in Italy in the 1930s under the fascist rule of Benito Mussolini. If that sounds oddly un-Pinocchio, just remember fascist rule is all the rage these days (yes, I made it political! Donald Trump sucks).

Someone who’s just finished working on a film for Netflix is Martin Scorsese, who’s movie The Irishman wrapped production earlier this year (and I’m pretty excited about it). Scorsese is now confirmed to be working on his next movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, a film adaptation of the bestselling non-fiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.

Telling the true story of the investigation into a series of murders in Oklahoma in the early 1920s, DiCaprio is likely going to play one of the top FBI agents, although the most interesting aspect of all of this is the possibility that Robert De Niro might also co-star, although his name wasn’t mentioned in this week’s announcement.

For some reason Disney have decided that they’re not going to just let things die anymore, and instead of kicking the rotting carcass that is the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise to the curb like any good person would, they’re actually going to… ugh… REBOOT!!!

So, here we are with a Pirates of the Caribbean reboot nobody is asking for. Still, at least there’s something slightly interesting here. Disney may have hired Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, writers of Deadpool, to potentially write the script for the Pirate reboot.

Reese and Wenick also wrote the screenplay for Zombieland, the excellent zombie-comedy starring Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Woody Harrelson, so what this might mean for the swashbuckling franchise is anyone’s guess. Although it has been suggested that the studio are not ruling out the possibility of bringing back Johnny Depp, because if there’s one thing we all know about Disney it’s that decades old tweets are grounds for dismissal, but beating up your wife is fine so long as you bring in the monies, am I right?

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