Editorial Staff
You’ll have heard by now that Mark Wahlberg was paid an additional $1.5 million for reshoots on “All the Money in the World”, a sum not offered to his co-star Michelle Williams. Disgusting. Many are understandably fuming over the situation. There’s more embarrassment for the movie too, with an L.A theater reportedly playing the wrong trailer for the film this week – instead of showing the recut trailer with Christopher Plummer in the Getty role, they screened the first one, when Kevin Spacey was still the film’s star.
Fox has cancelled James Mangold’s Patty Hearst biopic “American Heiress” after Hearst criticized author Jeffrey Toobin, whose book was to be the basis for the film. The book “romanticizes my rape and torture and calls my abduction a ‘rollicking adventure”, Heart said in a statement, adding that she was “saddened and appalled that Fox 2000 agreed to finance and produce a movie based on Toobin’s book (with a similarly themed screenplay, also written by men) and that CNN has agreed to continue to perpetuate a one-sided dialogue romanticizing my torture and rape by hosting a podcast and docuseries through Toobin’s distorted lens. I refuse to give Jeffrey Toobin, 21st Century Fox, CNN or anyone else involved in these projects about my life the power to make me a victim again, or the power to provide a platform where victim blaming is OK.”
John Singleton is attached to direct Taraji P.Henson in a movie about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black teenager and Chicago native who was abducted and brutally killed by two white men while on a trip to Mississippi in 1955. The “Proud Mary” star will play Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who decided to make her son’s funeral open casket, though Till’s body was mutilated in the fatal encounter. An all-white jury acquitted Till’s killers in 1955, though the pair later admitted to the homicide.
Noah Hawley will direct Natalie Portman in “Pale Blue Dot”, a Fox Searchlight-housed prod about a married astronaut who returns to Earth after a mission and begins an affair with a fellow astronaut. She heads into a downward spiral as she loses her connection to her family — a condition that can afflict those who spend a long time in space — and when her lover begins another affair with an astronaut trainee, the bottom drops out.
Bob Odenkirk will co-produce and star in “Nobody”, a revenge thriller from STXfilms. The “Better Call Saul” star will play a man who rescues a woman pursued by thugs, only to find one of them is the brother of a drug lord.
John Malkovich will star in “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile” opposite Zac Efron and Lily Collins. The movie fixes on Ted Bundy (Efron) with Collins playing longtime girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer and Malkovich as Judge Edward Cowart, who presided over the serial killer’s 1979 trial, sentencing him to death. Joe Berlinger directs.
HBO president Casey Bloys says the “Deadwood” movie could go before the cameras sometime this year. “Assuming that we could get all the actors back together, I think this is something we would do possibly next fall, fall 2018,” he told Deadline at the TCA’s. As for the script, “I’m waiting for a rewrite,” Bloys said, “and we have to get the numbers right, but, assuming we can get everybody back together, I’m feeling optimistic about it.”
Lili Taylor (“The Conjuring”) has come aboard Ciaran Foy’s “Eli”, a horror film based on David Chirchirillo’s 2015 Black List script about a young boy who undergoes treatment for his rare disease in a secluded clinic, which becomes a haunted prison. Taylor will play Dr. Isabella Horn, the “immunologist”.
Michael De Luca has come aboard to supervise “Suicide Squad 2”.
Nancy Travis has been cast opposite Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin in “The Kominsky Method”, a 10-episode single camera series from “Two-and-a-Half Men” creator Chuck Lorre. Travis, most recently on “Last man Standing”, is also set to heavily recur on A&T’s “Mrs. Mercedes” throughout it’s sophomore season.
