News

Sets Based on Third Season of Arrow and Second Seasons of Gotham, The Flash, and Outlander Among Those to Be Shown at Annual Trade Conference

Mark Strong is set to star in espionage thriller Deep State, Fox Networks Group’s first regional scripted commission for Europe and Africa. The eight-episode hourlong original series (which previously was announced under the working title The Nine) is written by Matthew Parkhill (Rogue), Simon Maxwell (American Odyssey) and Steve Thompson (Sherlock, Dr Who) and will air in more than 50 countries via Fox.

The intense, character-driven espionage thriller is set in Britain, the U.S., Iran, Lebanon and France and shows the merciless reality of the world of espionage in which an increasingly rare conscience can get you, and the ones you love, killed.

Strong will play Max Easton, a man caught between two versions of himself — the past and the present. An ex-spy, Max is brought back into the game to avenge the death of his son, only to find himself at the heart of a covert intelligence war and a conspiracy to profit from the spread of chaos throughout the Middle East.

Alongside Strong, breakthrough talent Karima McAdams (Fearless, Vikings) has joined to play Leyla Toumi, a smart and uncompromising elite intelligence operative.

Robert Connolly, the helmer behind ABC-BBC miniseries The Slap, will direct Episodes 1-4. Connolly recently directed Sam Worthington and Deborah Mailman starrer Paper Planes as well as political thriller Balibo, starring Oscar Isaac and Anthony LaPaglia.

Parkhill has written the pilot and will serve as showrunner. He also will direct four of the eight episodes and exec produce. Co-creator Maxwell will write and exec produce with Tom Nash producing for Endor Productions. Khadija Alami (Homeland, The Night Manager) produces for Moroccan-based K-Films. Hilary Bevan Jones, Alan Greenspan of 6 Degree Media and Helen Flint of Little Island Productions serve as exec producers alongside FNG’s Jeff Ford and Sara Johnson.

“Every now and again a script comes along that you just can’t put down, and Deep State is exactly that – a great example of the best kind of writing,” said Strong. “I’m incredibly proud to be working with FNG on their first regional scripted commission. They have put together an excellent team, and I’m very much looking forward to collaborating with Robert Connolly, Matthew Parkhill, Hilary Bevan Jones. With scripts from Matthew, Simon Maxwell and Steve Thompson, producers Tom Nash and Khadija Alami and with David Higgs as DoP and Pat Campbell designing, it makes this for me an unmissable opportunity to return to television.”

Deep State will begin shooting in May. Fox Networks Group Content Distribution holds exclusive global rights for the series, working in partnership with FNG Europe & Africa.

Source : Deadline Hollywood

New Line released the trailer for the Andres Muschietti-directed horror film in English along with 30 localized versions starting at 9 AM Wednesday (watch it here). Of its 197M global views, more than 81M views and over 1.8M shares are from the U.S. Facebook instances alone. Within hours after its release, the It trailer became a viral sensation, trending across Facebook and Twitter and rising to the top of the Reddit Homepage with 30K-plus “up” votes in four hours. The video quickly rose to the No. 1 position on YouTube’s trending videos and remained there throughout the day. 

The trailer helped It trend globally on Twitter with trends for It, It Movie, Pennywise and the Red Balloon Emoji all appearing.

Based on the 1986 novel by King, It follows seven children who are terrorized by the eponymous being, who exploits the fears and phobias of its victims in order to disguise itself while hunting its prey. It generally appears as a clown, Pennywise, in order to lure young children.

It opens on September 8, the weekend after Labor Day — which has been a hotbed for Warner Bros in the past with the opening of Clint Eastwood’s Sully ($35M) and the Steven Soderbergh thriller Contagion ($22.4M). The pic starring Bill Skarsgård is produced by Dan Lin, Roy Lee, David Katzenberg, Seth Grahame-Smith and Barbara Muschietti.

Here is a chart of the top movie trailers ranked by their 24-hour global traffic: 

Source : Deadline Hollywood...

20th Century Fox dropped a trailer for Red Sparrow, the movie that reteams Jennifer Lawrence with her Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence. Deadline broke the story about this pic, based on Jason Matthews’ novel about a Russian ballerina-turned-spy seductress, or Red Sparrow. Her target? A CIA guy played by Joel Edgerton.

Rich in gold, red and fall tones, we see Lawrence’s Dominika Egorova weathering a severe leg injury onstage. She recovers and is given the chance in a lush hotel bar “to become special again” by a Russian intel officer. Charlotte Rampling’s voice-over carries the rest of the trailer as we see shots of the snow, and the French-designed estates of Russia.

“You will be schooled in psychological manipulation. Every human is a puzzle of need. You will be trained to determine target’s weakness and exploit that weakness through seduction. From this moment forward you will become sparrows, weapons of Russia.”

Then Rampling tells Lawrence’s protag, “If you can’t be of service to the state, I’m to put a bullet through your head.” The movie can’t get here soon enough. The last part of the title card flashes “Now in production.”

Source : Deadline Hollywood

Would you wanna see Brad Pitt as Cable? Well there’s a rumor going around he might be up for it. We’ve also got word that the Hardys have officially been offered contracts by WWE, and a certain hairy mutant might be returning to Marvel this summer! Check out the links below for the full stories!. 

Deadpool 2: New Rumor Suggests Brad Pitt Could Play Cable

Matt and Jeff Hardy Officially Offered New WWE Contracts

Marvel Teases Possible Wolverine Return?

Keep it locked into Asylum Kollectibles .com for all the breaking news as it happens and have a great day!

SOURCE : Comicbook.com 

Bernie Wrightson, legendary horror comics artist, past away last night after a long battle with brain cancer. He was 68.

Wrightson is known as the co-creator oder DC....

He began his career as an artist at The Baltimore Sun newspaper and was inspired by a meeting with Frank Frazetta to begin creating his own stories.

Wrightson made his professional comics debut with the story "The Man Who Murdered Himself" in DC Comics' House of Mystery #179. He continued working on DC Comics' and Marvel Comics horror anthology titles for several years.

In 1971, Wrightson and writer Len Wein created Swamp Thing in House of Secrets #92, and in 1972 he and Marv Wolfman created Destiny in Weird Mystery Tales #1, a character that would feature prominently in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series.

In 1972, Wrightson returned to Swamp Thing for the character's ongoing series. Wrightson drew the first 10 issues of the series, co-creating Abigail Arcane and much of the Swamp Thing mythology.

In 1974, Wrightson left mainstream comics to work at Warren Studios, where he adapted the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe. In 1975, he formed The Studio with Barry Windsor-Smith and Michael Kaluta, and Jeff Jones to pursue work outside of comics.

Later in his career, Wrightson produced work for Heavy Metal magazine, including the Freakshow serialized graphic novel with writer Bruce Jones. He adapted Stephen King's Creepshow horror movie into a graphic novel, the first of several collaborations with King. He also helped design the Reavers for Serenity, and in 2012 he published Frankenstein Alive, Alive! with Steve Niles at IDW Publishing.

The comics community has been mourning Wrightson's passing. Some of their reactions, which often include some of Wrightson's beautiful artwork, have been included int he following pages.

Source : CBR

 This July, “Spider-Man: Homecoming” will get a whole new lease on life. Thanks to a deal between Sony and Marvel Studios, Spidey has joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it looks as though he didn’t come alone. Sony has a “Venom” film in the works with a projected release date of October 5, 2018.

Fox’s untitled Marvel series is getting underway, with the cast assembling to do their first table read. On Friday night, producer Laura Shuler Donner tweeted the first photo of the new mutants, which also featured a special guest.

Early morning industry estimates are confirming what we saw late last night: Warner Bros./Legendary monster movie is poised to pull in between $60M-$61M after a $24M Saturday that was +19% from Friday’s $20.2M. And Warner Bros. is reporting Kong: Skull Island at $61M as well. On the high end, that’s a 35% improvement on the pic’s projections four weeks ago, and $11M higher from where we originally thought Kong would land. Imax brought in $7.6M at 382 auditorium repping 12.5% of the weekend. Eight of Kong‘s 10 top-grossing locations included Imax bookings. In total, the global opening for Kong: Skull Island stands at $142.6M which is ahead of the $135M we forecasted.

Regarding Kong‘s rebound, Jeff Goldstein, Warner Bros. domestic distribution president said, “I think the marketing sold the movie perfectly heading into the weekend. This is a great weekend for the industry overall and all of our exhibition partners. The industry is up 24% from a year ago.” In fact for the period of Jan. 1-March 12, the total domestic B.O. is at $2.18 billion according to ComScore which is currently flat with the same frame a year ago. That’s good news as 2017 tickets sales were lagging for a few weekends there.

On social media, you can also feel the warmth for Kong: RelishMix reports that hashtag activity for the Jordan Vogt-Roberts-directed movie has tripled since Thursday at 5.2K unique hashtags combined across Instagram and Twitter to 17.3K on Saturday. #KongSkullIsland hashtags are at 61.4K over four weeks with 21.5K for #Kong and 17.8K for #KingKong. Social gender activity is 60.8% male and 39.1% female while age is slicing 78% over 25 and 21.7% under 25. Since the Mexico premiere, Tom Hiddleston’s Instagram popped heavily with 254K likes on March 6th.

Warner Bros.

Reviewers already knew Kong: Skull Island was a fun ride different from other Kongs, and for moviegoers to believe it, they simply needed to experience the movie. Kong could capitalize on another recent B.O. trend: Well-reviewed movies like Universal/Blumhouse’s Get Out and 20th Century Fox’s Logan have experienced decent first Sunday holds (both those titles dipped 22% from Saturday). Given that, there might be a chance that Kong bests what’s expected to be a -30% decline.

True, a $60M-plus No. 1 opening in March is noteworthy, and we’ve seen other movies like Divergent 1 & 2 open to $52M-plus during this month, but damn, Kong: Skull Island is bloody expensive at $185M along with an estimated global P&A of $136M putting a cloud over its profitability. And it’s that high cost that deflates the celebration of Kong‘s No. 1 win. Kong will get dinged around the world when Disney’s Beauty and the Beast opens next weekend, but WB is hoping to make good at the B.O. during that six-week play period stateside leading up to Easter when kids are rotating on spring break.

Overseas is at $81.6M in 65 markets, which is alright, though financiers have told us that $120M would have been a better start. WB/Legendary’s Godzilla after ancillaries yielded a profit off a $529M global haul. Does Kong get there? Japan and China open later this month, and despite the latter country’s Tencent Pictures being involved in Kong: Skull Island, the movie isn’t a Chinese co-production, therefore it’s subjected to the typical rental for U.S. pics that’s between 25%-27%. We deconstructed Kong: Skull Island on Friday, and aside from Logan and Get Out stealing the monkey’s money this weekend, the biggest challenge for the latest iteration of this classic Hollywood brand is King Kong himself.   

Warner Bros.

It wasn’t too long ago that Warner Bros. over-indexed on another dusty, expensive Hollywood property during its opening weekend run: the July 4th weekend opener The Legend of Tarzan. It too arrived in theaters with a huge $180M production cost (just $5M shy of Kong: Skull Island‘s). The Village Roadshow co-production was expected to post a low $30M four-day take, but WB pushed it to $46.6M. Critics didn’t love Tarzan as much as Kong: Skull Island, 36% Rotten to 78% Certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Both Kong and Tarzan earned very good CinemaScores (Tarzan an A-, Kong with various demos awarding it A or A-). Tarzan legged out to a 3.2 multiple off its 3-day of $38.5M to $126.6M, and Kong could generate a similar multiple with an end result well north of $150M stateside (Beauty and the Beast will definitely take a bite out of his legs next weekend all around the world). But again, in light of Tarzan‘s budget, it was very hard to get excited about the movie’s overperformance: Film finance sources inform us that Tarzan was definitely below breakeven after all ancillaries despite making $356.7M at the worldwide B.O.

Universal

When Peter Jackson’s King Kong opened in December 2005, that beast too was slow out of the gate, minting a $50M FSS and $66M five-day. It’s clear that Kong: Skull Island will be well ahead of that amount on Tuesday, especially with schools and colleges off. Jackson’s King Kong posted a 4.36 multiple off its FSS and finaled domestic at $218M off an A- CinemaScore, but that movie had holiday foot-traffic on its side, which always carries uber-high multiples with it.

In regards to Kong: Skull Island‘s marketing campaign, WB’s campaign aimed to introduce the origin story of how Kong became King with a heavy social media push. Stars Hiddleston, Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson, Marc Evan Jackson and other stars reached in excess of 53M followers.

Google Maps had their first custom program with Kong bringing the first fictional location to Google Maps. Kong: Skull Island Local is now officially on Google Maps, where users can leave ratings and browse photographs of the monster-ridden island. There were was an Alamo Drafthouse screening program in 20 theaters nationwide with talent Q&A broadcasted on Facebook Live. WB partnered with Machinima to bring the multiplayer gaming tournament Kong of the Hill whereby eight of Machinima’s top gaming influencers and network talent faced off during the Livestream hosted on Machinima’s Facebook and YouTube channels. There was also a #WeLOVEKong advance screening program asking each city to take to social media and profess their excitement to see the film through dedicated city specific hashtags, IE: #LALovesKONG, #PhillyLovesKONG, #LondonLovesKONG, #RioLovesKONG, #ParisLovesKONG etc. This program was tied to footprints Across LA – Large footprints appeared daily from LAX leading up to the Kong Premiere at Hollywood and Highland. Activity was covered and shared with #LALOVESKong.

Source : Deadline Hollywood