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Shane Black Explains Why 1980s Nostalgia Inspired ‘The Predator’

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Shane Black was only twenty-five when he arrived in Mexico in the summer of 1986 to act in the first Predator film. Black was given the dubious honor of playing Rick Hawkins, a Special Forces soldier who ends up becoming the first victim in the Predator film series.

More than thirty years later, Black looks back fondly on the making of Predator, a film that Black considers to be one of the greatest genre films ever made. “I think Predator is the ultimate genre film,” says Black. “It was a zeitgeist film. It combined the alien film craze, which was born out of James Cameron’s Aliens, and the Rambo war movie craze. It had mystery and tension, and it was pure pulp entertainment.”

It seems like yesterday when Black took Hollywood by storm with his screenplays for the action films The Last Boy Scout and Lethal Weapon. Now fifty-six years old, Black is at a loss to explain where the time has gone. “I feel old,” says Black. “I didn’t see the time pass. What the hell happened? I remember being a student in UCLA, and then there was Lethal Weapon, and The Monster Squad, and Predator. I really miss those days.”

This wave of nostalgia is precisely what inspired Black to want to return to the Predator film series, as a filmmaker, after more than thirty years. “I wanted to go back in time with this film,” Black, explaining the origins of The Predator screenplay, which Black co-wrote with longtime friend Fred Dekker. “With The Predator, I approached the film as if it was being made back in the 1980s. I wanted to make a 1980s war film and then add in the FX shots later.”

After five Predator films (including the spin-offs Alien vs. Predator and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem), does the Predator film series still have the ability to generate mystery and suspense? Black believes that there are still many interesting questions to answer within the series. “The second film happened, and the other films happened, and now, in 2020, Earth has taken notice that all of these things have happened,” says Black of the film’s premise. “The intelligence community has created a division that’s devoted to responding to predator incursions.”

With The Predator, Black also wanted to further explore the origins of the predator species and the question of why the predators have been visiting Earth. “The predators have been visiting Earth for a long time, possibly since ancient times, and I wanted to explain why,” says Black. “The predators are obviously hunters, warriors, but they also have amazing technology, so the predator planet must be populated by scientists and warriors. We don’t have the ability to build interstellar spaceships, so the predator planet must contain some kind of think tank. From Earth’s perspective, there are technological opportunities.”

Black says that the predators in the film are also motivated by revenge. “There’s a rogue faction within the predator race, and some of them are angry because of what happened in the previous films,” says Black. “They’re angry because, time and time again, the predator warriors have been bested by humanity’s best champions, starting with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in Predator. They want to punch back.”

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

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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.

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

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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.

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Trailer for ‘The Exorcism’ Has Russell Crowe Possessed

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The latest exorcism movie is about to drop this summer. It’s aptly titled The Exorcism and it stars Academy Award winner turned B-movie savant Russell Crowe. The trailer dropped today and by the looks of it, we are getting a possession movie that takes place on a movie set.

Just like this year’s recent demon-in-media-space film Late Night With the Devil, The Exorcism happens during a production. Although the former takes place on a live network talk show, the latter is on an active sound stage. Hopefully, it won’t be entirely serious and we’ll get some meta chuckles out of it.

The film will open in theaters on June 7, but since Shudder also acquired it, it probably won’t be long after that until it finds a home on the streaming service.

Crowe plays, “Anthony Miller, a troubled actor who begins to unravel while shooting a supernatural horror film. His estranged daughter, Lee (Ryan Simpkins), wonders if he’s slipping back into his past addictions or if there’s something more sinister at play. The film also stars Sam Worthington, Chloe Bailey, Adam Goldberg and David Hyde Pierce.”

Crowe did see some success in last year’s The Pope’s Exorcist mostly because his character was so over-the-top and infused with such comical hubris it bordered on parody. We will see if that is the route actor-turned-director Joshua John Miller takes with The Exorcism.

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