Weekly Round Up: Lion King, Donald Glover, Spider-Woman

3rd December 2018

Jordan Peele’s Candyman remake has just nabbed a director in the form of Nia DaCosta. DaCosta directed this year’s drama/thriller Little Woods, an indie film that tells the story of two sisters who are driven to extremes when their mother dies, leaving them with one week to pay the mortgage.

The film was a critical success, and with DaCosta in the director’s chair and Peele producing, this looks set to be an interesting project. I’m a fan of the original Candyman, it was one of the first horror films I remember watching, so I’m curious to see how this one turns out.

The Lion King teaser broke records this week when Disney dropped it online. I’ve seen a lot of people getting excited about this “live-action” remake (though, quite how it’s live-action remains a mystery given… well, those aren’t real animals), but I’m yet to be convinced. Nor can I see the point in all honesty. But Disney don’t seem to be in a hurry to slow down on these remakes.

Obviously we’ve only got the trailer to go on at this point in time, but it certainly appears, to me at least, that the new film will be following the original closely, so essentially what we seem to be getting is a remake that’s pretty much the same as the original (although no doubt they’ll pad out the runtime with some extended backstory – did anyone ever feel like we needed Lion King backstory?) but looks “glossier”?

Look, I’m all for the Disney live-action remakes (again, I am yet to see how The Lion King is live-action), this week’s announcement that none other than Tom Hanks will be playing Geppetto in their Pinocchio remake seems like interesting casting, and someone like Hanks will most certainly be bringing something different to the role when compared to the character from the original, and with Paul King in the director’s chair it should be visually engaging, but if you’re not going to come at these things with a new angle then why bother?

I’ve seen nothing about The Lion King remake thus far – and admittedly I’ve not seen a lot – that convinces me this is a venture worth taking.

Still, it’ll make loads of money and we’ll probably get a slew of sequels to boot. I mean, people loved that Jungle Book reboot and that sucked balls.

Anyway, Donald Glover has provided his voice talents to the not unimpressive cast of The Lion King, but that’s not the only movie the former Community star has coming out in 2019 (no, it’s not a Community movie, I’m sorry. I’m disappointed too. I regret making the reference to the show now, because any news I give you afterward is just going to be like “oh, well it’s not a Community movie, so why do I care?” I’ll tell you why you care, because I’ve got to make it to 750 words at least for this thing to get published and this is what they call padding).

This August is appears that Glover, along with fellow cast members Rihanna and Letitia Wright, snuck off to Cuba to shoot a secret movie, the title of which has this week been revealed to be Guava Island.

The teaser trailer doesn’t reveal much beyond some beautiful scenery and the fact that the movie is being branded as a Childish Gambino film starring Donald Glover, which is interesting. It’s directed by Hiro Murai, who was the director behind the now iconic This Is America music video, as well as several episodes of Glover’s TV show, Atlanta.

Sony are capitalising on the positive reviews for their up-coming Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse animated movie, with an announcement this week that a direct sequel is on the way, along with a spin-off focusing on Spider-Woman. These two are just the next in a long line of Marvel movies Sony plan to release, although none of them are officially linked with the MCU it appears Sony are eager to capitalise on the brands success none the less.

It appears that, despite being a God-awful piece of trash with serious tonal issues, some really poor writing and a terrible, terrible plot that bared little to no resemblance to its source material (also, Tom Hardy ain’t that good, really, is he?), enough of us went to go see Venom to convince Sony that a sequel was a grand idea, with an October 2020 release date pencilled in.

Honestly, I’m disappointed in all of us. That’s just terrible. We should all have made more of an effort to go see a better calibre of movie this year.

But still, I wouldn’t consider that the worst news of the week.

I’m beginning to feel like I’m the only person in the world who thinks Kingsman was something that only really worked the once and doesn’t particularly hold up well to repeat viewings. The sequel was dire, with some really poor filmmaking on display, including a convoluted and stupid plot that failed to capture any of the wit or satire of the genre the original had in spades.

Despite that, for some reason, we’re getting not one but two Kingsman movies filming in 2019. The first will be a direct continuation of the first two Kingsman films, currently under the working title of Kingsman 3, while the second will be a prequel telling the story of the tailor shop that serves as a front to the Kingman headquarters.

The prequel hit the news this week with the announcement that franchise director Matthew Vaughn had cast Daniel Bruhl, Charles Dance, Rhya Ifans and Ralph Fiennes in roles. I suppose we’ll have to just wait and see what it turns into but I just… I don’t care.

Did anyone see Eighth Grade this year? That movie was great. And Upgrade! Can we just have more original stuff please?

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