Connect with us

News

Rafe Spall of ‘The Ritual’/Eleanor Tomlinson Star in ‘The War of the Worlds’ on BBC One

Published

on

Rafe Spall (The Ritual, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) will be top billing alongside Eleanor Tomlinson (Poldark, Jack the Giant Slayer) in BBC One’s The War of the Worlds. Deadline reports the adaptation will be a three-part drama produced by ITV-owned Mammoth Screen. Mammoth Screen is a television production company based in London and Belfast.

Craig Viveiros (And Then There Were None) will be directing the H.G. Wells adaptation about an alien invasion ravaging Earth. Betsan Morris Evans (The City & The City) is set to produce.

Rafe Spall has become a sort of unsung hero in the horror/thriller genres. He most recently played the tormented lead character in Netflix’s supernatural horror film The Ritual. However, he actually had several smaller roles in horror/thrillers long before his recent streaming hit.

Spall played the smart mouthed sales associate in Edgar Wright’s horror comedy Shaun of the Dead, as well as the unmotivated detective Andy Cartwright in Hot Fuzz. He even had a memorable (but unfortunate) scene as Millburn in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. If you don’t recall which character that was, he’s the biologist who died infamously trying to pet the penis snake. Not his finest film moment.

Rafe Spall in Netflix’s The Ritual (2017) via IMDB

Eleanor Tomlinson’s previous horror roles include the 2014 horror mystery Styria, and the 2015 horror comedy short film A Stranger Kind. Deadline reports “Tomlinson said she was delighted to be ‘taking on the martians’ with Spall.”

Viveiros said, “H.G. Wells’ seminal novel has been adapted for the screen many times but it’s always had a contemporary, and American, setting, this is the first version to be set in London and the Home Counties during the Edwardian period. Peter’s scripts manage to honour the source material with great skill, but we aim to provide a thoroughly modern thrill ride for the audience, delivering an alien invasion story that will shock and awe audiences across the globe.”

The last notable on-screen adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds was Steven Spielberg’s 2005 version starring Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning set in the modern U.S. The film boasted impressive set-pieces and visuals, but audience reactions were polarizing.

The BBC One adaptation of The War of the Worlds is currently in production, with no word yet on an official release date.

'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?

Click to comment

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

Movies

‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

Published

on

It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

Evil Dead Rise

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?

Continue Reading

Movies

‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

Published

on

Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

Happy Sad Confused

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?

Continue Reading

News

Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

Published

on

Jake gyllenhaal presumed innocent

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.

'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?

Continue Reading