Of the sadly many dwindling artforms whose slow (or rapid) declines we’ve been mourning over the years, the original musical is high on my list of sorrows. Broadway struggles to launch successful new works — meaning, ones not based on a movie we’re nostalgic for, or built around the jukebox catalog of a beloved artist — and they’re practically non-existent on film, save for some arthouse stuff like Leos Carax’s Annette or Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End. We’re starved for new stories set to new songs.
Culture has also been doing some fretting about the state of the movie star, as one class ages into their golden years and not terribly many actors seem poised to replace them. In that regard, I’ve long been invested in Jodie Comer, a Brit who burst onto the scene in the television series Killing Eve. Following that show’s success, Comer delivered a series of film performances that, in combination with her boggling stage work in the awards-bedecked Prima Facie, had me boldly considering a possibility reserved for a precious few performers: Could she be the heir apparent to Meryl Streep?
Stuffed
The Bottom Line
A gnarly romance set to even gnarlier songs.
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Discovery) Cast: Jodie Comer, Harry Melling Director: Theo Rhys Writers: Theo Rhys, Joss Holden-Rea
1 hour 57 minutes
She’s just so captivating and chameleonic, so different in The Bikeriders from how she is in The Last Duel, finding such distinction between one post-apocalypse movie (The End We Start From) and another (28 Years Later). There’s a determination in her eyes, a fiercely committed fire to her choices, that makes me think of a young and hungry Streep in her wild run in the late 1970s and 1980s. The trouble is, Streep first found her footing in a very different kind of Hollywood, one that, amid a lot of junk, made enough films to showcase her prodigious talent. Comer, on the other hand, has arrived in a much more uncertain time in the industry. Good roles are scarcer, financial success has been tethered to franchise output. She has not gotten the roles she deserves, I don’t think, the ones that could finally, for all to see, confirm her as a next great hope.
With those two concerns in mind — a longing for original musicals and a wary optimism about Comer’s best-of-a-generation prowess — I went into Comer’s new movie-musical Stuffed wanting it to be a smash. Though it is based on a short film, Stuffed is really a new thing altogether, conceived by director Theo Rhys and his co-writer Joss Holden-Rea, who also wrote the music. Maybe the film could serve a noble double purpose, putting Comer on the right career track and giving a jolt of energy to a languishing medium.
Alas, the film is instead a discouraging slog, a mess of cheap shocks and painful lyrics. It seems inspired by some mix of Sweeney Todd and the dreadful true-crime case of the German guys who set up a date so one of them could eat the other. It’s an icky musical, but one that endeavors to find the sweetness — the romance, even — in the muck. To admit to some bias, that particular genre has never really been my cup of tea. But Stuffed serves up an especially acrid brew, plodding along unmelodiously until its foregone conclusion.
Comer plays Araminta, a bizarre loner who lives in what could be called, by many standards, a house of horrors, full of taxidermied animals and body parts in jars of vinegar. She’s feared and loathed by the locals, who think she ate her mother’s corpse after she died, and is fixated on her dream of turning a human being into one of the stuffed creatures that keep her company. She puts feelers out online, but it’s mostly fetishists and trolls who reach out to her.
Across town, there’s lonely sad-sack Bernie (Harry Melling), a loveless young man who works at a food processing plant and drops in for visits to his dementia-addled mother, with whom he used to be inseparable. He desperately longs to be special, to be remembered, to make an impact on the world somehow. Understandably then (I guess), he’s intrigued by Araminta’s pitch to make him something of a pioneer — the first person to live forever. (In Araminta’s notion of life, anyway.)
And thus the two meet creepy-cute, embarking on preparations for Bernie’s great transition and occasionally singing bland and repetitive songs. While Holden-Rea’s core melodies can be pretty, his lyrics are woefully simplistic, as if they were churned out by a rhyming dictionary bot that traffics in the broadest, most generic of sentiments. It’s one thing to hear a character clunkily sing their motivation once, it’s another to hear it time and time again, with so many of the same rhymes.
The film is also far less risqué than it perhaps thinks it is. Much of the humor relies on the audience chuckling at the discordancy of sweet music scoring talk of death and guts and tissue, amused by the idea these two freaks living in such an ugly and forbidding place could see any of it, or each other, as beautiful. But we’ve been down that juxtaposition road before, in Sweeney Todd, in Tim Burton films, in Urinetown, in Tim Burton’s film version of Sweeney Todd. Disappointingly, Stuffed is not guided by much fresh perspective or narrative ingenuity; a mere oddball premise is not enough on which to hang a whole film. It all wears pretty thin, pretty quickly, and then there’s another hour to go.
On the Comer front, at least, the news is better. She finds a way to distinguish Araminta from myriad other weirdos we’ve seen in similarly-hued films, and keenly locates the actual person under all the mannered characterization of the script. She sings quite well too, working hard (and sometimes successfully!) to elevate the banal lyrics to something like poetry. She’s well matched by Melling, who has a voice like an angel, though were I on his management team I might advise him to seek out some more varied roles going forward. Too often in Stuffed, it feels like we’re watching Melling’s character from Pillion unravel after his breakup with Alexander Skarsgard. (And I wouldn’t blame him one bit.)
The film is to be commended for building itself from the ground up, but the work is dismayingly slapdash. Rhys creates some nice images and certainly knows his way around a sequence; if only he had stronger material to support all that visual panache. He certainly had a tremendous collaborative asset in Comer, though; she carries the carcass of the film — its inert mass of canned provocation — as far as humanly possible. We leave Stuffed hungry only for more of her.
“Everything that follows is true. Exactly as we dreamed it,” reads the opening title of “Burgundy,” from award-winning documentary duo Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, with an almost legible wink. It’s a sweet start to a sweet movie, but in retrospect it sounds a little defensive, as though the pair are aware that, especially compared to their last two lovely films — 2020’s “The Truffle Hunters” and 2024’s “Gaucho Gaucho” — “Burgundy” feels less like an incisive portrait of a particular arcane lifestyle than a rambling reverie about it. Amiably riffing on the viticultural tradition of the eponymous winemaking region of eastern-central France, “Burgundy” has more fragrance than substance and even then, too quickly loses its bouquet.
If dream it is, however, it’s a pleasant one — no night terrors in these terroirs — especially given that the directors, who are also responsible for the scrumptious cinematography, find so much material for their trademark, eye-catchingly pictorialist visuals. As perky ’60s pop songs play, perfectly composed chateaux-tableaux that are so crowded with billiard tables, oil paintings and antique tchotchkesthey feel like slightly sardonic wealth critique, we are first introduced to Bertrand Devillard, patriarch of a winemaking estate that dates back 160 years. Bertrand is a hands-on boss, and even when relaxing by the pool or doing a little skeet shooting, a worried one. His grandson Melchior is more interested in the world of high finance than in taking over the family business that would naturally be his inheritance.
That there would be plenty of people from outside the clan willing to step into that breach is proven by Enzo, a handsome young man with the throwback good looks of a midcentury matinee idol (he self-consciously models himself after his hero, Jean Gabin) whose ambition is one day to run his own vineyard. For the time being he comes to work on Bertrand’s estate, learning the ropes from the bottom up — cleaning the massive vats, stomping the season’s harvest, sampling wines he could never otherwise afford in an effort to educate his palate. Amusingly sketch-like intros then round out the rest of the cast, which includes Enzo’s eventual girlfriend, Céleste, a trainee sommelier; Patrick, the maitre’d of a nearby 3-Michelin-Star restaurant; and Guillaume, a recently separated wine critic whose adventures in dating, therapy and physio (for RSI due to lifting 100 glasses a day) make him the droll comic relief in a film whose tone is rarely serious enough to need relieving.
As in their other feature docs, Dweck and Kershaw’s craftsmanship is superb — they’re at least as meticulous and detail-oriented as their proudly finicky subjects. And the deliberately stilted restaging of interactions that likely originally happened in a much less picturesque manner is an inextricable part of their approach. So too are editor Pauline Gaillard’s sharp cuts, which are often timed exactly to coincide with the moment that someone lost in faraway thought finishes swirling their mouthful of Pinot Noir and hocks it unceremoniously into a nearby receptacle.
Less successfully, this time out the directors further break strict documentary protocol by including some whimsical 8mm footage, usually of Enzo and Céleste’s burgeoning relationship, which is again nicely shot but feels reversed in, as though it was only included as filler when the actual storylines were found to be getting bit sparse. An entire sequence in which the pair go to the movies to watch “Bonnie and Clyde” and then enact their own heist as pastiche versions of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, is just a bit too cute and a digression too far from the film’s ostensible topic.
“The Truffle Hunters” followed several leathery Piedmontese old-timers and their absurdly touching relationships with their truffle-snuffling dogs. “Burgundy,” by contrast, has no natural source of such effortless, warm-hearted charm and without it, the portraiture sometimes veers closer to caricature. Perhaps for the first time, the limitations of Dweck and Kershaw’s deliberate, constructed style make themselves felt: when messy real life intrudes, the film rather flounders. Enzo abruptly goes off-script, so to speak, and quits the Devillard estate to try his hand at mussel farming and pouf! The narrative of a dedicated striver following his long-cherished dream evaporates at the revelation that maybe his lifelong fascination with viticulture was not so lifelong after all.
The filmmakers hastily shift course and retool the final third of “Burgundy” as a kind of star cross’d lovers romance, when Céleste also quits her apprenticeship and moves to Paris, and the young, sundered couple can be portrayed as pining for one another. Not only is this pivot a little hard to invest in, given we’ve been burned before, more grievously, it takes the main focus of the action away from the very region and wine culture the film is purportedly celebrating.
It is possible that true wine experts will respond to those parts of “Burgundy” that unabashedly ennoble the various different disciplines within the wine arts. Film lovers, on the other hand might be left unsatisfied by an approach that strains the limits of documentary realism to no particular end, save to further mythologize an already singularly rarefied sphere. And even if “Burgundy” is for oenophiles rather than cinephiles, presumably they too will be a little let down by a vintage that is fruity and full of promise at the first sip, but that loses its complexity — if not its easy drinkability — long before the last.
When The Hollywood Reporter first caught up with writer-director Zach Cregger in the lead-up to Barbarian’s 2022 release, he detailed the struggles he faced in getting the inventive horror movie off the ground. The film was part of a larger effort to reboot his career after, by his own admission, he wasn’t particularly proud of his previous co-directorial work in the 2010s comedy space.
Since then, Cregger has gone on one of the most charmed runs of any filmmaker in town. He followed Barbarian’s critically acclaimed, highly profitable release with Weapons, another well-regarded genre film that grossed $270 million against a $38 million budget and featured an Oscar-winning performance from Amy Madigan as Aunt Gladys. A prequel about Madigan’s character is now deep into development.
Like Weapons, Cregger’s current film, Resident Evil, and his upcoming Steven Spielberg-produced sci-fi picture, The Flood, were each the subject of furious bidding wars. That kind of demand cements a remarkable career turnaround for a filmmaker who had to scratch and claw to get Barbarian financed just five years ago. But it’s also a subject that Cregger is reluctant to dwell on, given how “here today, gone today” the entertainment industry can be.
“If there’s one thing that is the law of Hollywood, it’s that what goes up must come down,” Cregger tells THR in support of Resident Evil’s Sept. 18 theatrical release. “These things are very, very temporary, and while it’s very, very flattering, I don’t have any illusions that this is my permanent place. I am not Martin Scorsese. I am just me.”
During his professional whirlwind the last handful of years, Cregger often decompresses with video games, and the Resident Evil franchise, particularly Resident Evil 4, has been one of his go-tos. Thus, when it came time to pitch his take on a Resident Evil movie, he aimed to capture his love of the gameplay experience on the big screen. And instead of adapting an existing game narrative, he chose to tell a new, original story about a medical courier named Bryan (played by Cregger’s Weapons actor, Austin Abrams), whose attempt to deliver precious, time-sensitive cargo to Raccoon City General Hospital collides with the franchise’s inciting T-virus outbreak.
Similar to The Odyssey and Lanterns’ brain trusts, Cregger has received no shortage of guff from the Resident Evil faithful for utilizing artistic license in his adaptation. He knew that this type of criticism is part and parcel with major IP, but he’s said elsewhere that he “underestimated” just how much appetite there is for legacy character stories, particularly one involving Leon S. Kennedy. The backlash has even prompted Cregger to previously say that Resident Evil will be the first and last franchise he tackles.
“I cannot be worried about whether I am pleasing enough of every spectrum of fandom. If I tried to please everybody, I’d end up pleasing nobody. That much is obvious,” Cregger says. “I just have to be okay with people voicing their opinion. I’m a grown-up. When I took this on, I understood what I was walking into. So it would be weird for me to act surprised or bent out of shape that the thing that was obviously going to happen is now happening.”
Barbarian and Weapons both succeeded in their masterful ability to strike a balance between horror and comedy without allowing either element to detract from the other. However, test screenings for Resident Evil made Cregger aware that the ratio was more lopsided than expected.
“I learned that people really liked the movie, but they thought it was too funny. So over the course of my testing, I stripped out as much of the jokes as possible,” Cregger shares. “I then found that not only did the audience enjoy the movie more, but I also liked the movie a lot more. A little bit of humor goes a long way in a horror movie, and there’s not a single joke I took out of this movie that I miss.”
Below, during a conversation with THR, Cregger also discusses the personal reasons why Resident Evil was his most challenging shoot yet, before teasing the impactful ending that has been highly protected thus far.
***
Director Zach Cregger (right) on the set of Resident Evil
Dušan Martinček/Sony Pictures
I know I just introduced myself, but I have to point out that it’s Brian with an i, the proper spelling of the name Brian.
I like that you’re starting there. My assistant’s name is Zac with just a c, and I can’t wrap my head around it, man.
That’s unacceptable.
Yeah, I think so.
You remain the belle of the ball. Every week, it seems like there’s a new bidding war involving you and massive sums of money. You’ve also written and directed an Oscar-winning role. And, most notably of course, THR just named you the top genre filmmaker working today. How do you not let all this go to your head?
I don’t know, man. I try not to put too much brain power into it. If there’s one thing that is the law of Hollywood, it’s that what goes up must come down. These things are very, very temporary, and while it’s very, very flattering, I don’t have any illusions that this is my permanent place. I am not Martin Scorsese. I am just me. It’s a fickle industry. and it would be foolish to think of it any other way. So I’m honored, but I have to only give it so much attention.
That being said, I’ve also felt a great deal of sympathy for you this year.
(Laughs.)
You, Christopher Nolan and the Lanterns team have all endured an extraordinary amount of bellyaching over the creative license you’ve taken with your respective adaptations. This isn’t anything new, but why do you think it feels particularly extreme this year?
I can’t speak to what the other guys are going through, but in this case, there are different kinds of Resident Evil fans. There are fans like me who love the experience of playing the games and think there’s never been a movie that has represented what it feels like to play ResidentEvil. That’s how I categorize myself as a fan.
Then there are fans of the games who specifically love the lore and the characters and the nitty-gritty details of the backstory. But my movie is not spending a lot of currency on those things. I’m not putting any of the legacy characters into this movie. So if that is what you love about these games, then you’re going to feel a certain way about it. Here comes yet another Hollywood movie, and they’re once again not doing Leon and all the characters I was hoping they were going to do.
I understand that perspective, but at the same time, I can’t let that affect my output. I have to make the best version of this movie that I’m capable of making and devote myself entirely to it. I cannot be worried about whether I am pleasing enough of every spectrum of fandom. If I tried to please everybody, I’d end up pleasing nobody. That much is obvious.
I just have to be okay with people voicing their opinion. I’m a grown-up. When I took this on, I understood what I was walking into. So it would be weird for me to act surprised or bent out of shape that the thing that was obviously going to happen is now happening.
I don’t know about you, but the pandemic reset my priorities. Seeing how fragile this house of cards is — the industry and country alike — I just can’t imagine ever getting worked up over details like you deciding to have snowy streets instead of rainy streets.
When I read the news and see the insane things that the people in power are doing in this country, it is honestly terrifying. That makes me really put things in perspective when somebody is mad at me for the weather in my ResidentEvil movie. I’m like, Alright, dude. Let’s just adjust our priorities a little bit.
Austin Abrams stars as Bryan in Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil
Dušan Martinček/Sony Pictures
People also took issue with you using iPhones?
Yeah, because it’s set in 2026. I’m sorry I’m not making a period piece. I’m taking a liberty.
When you listen to a cover of a well-known song, you want to hear the band or artist’s spin on the material. Nobody criticized Johnny Cash for turning Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” into a gothic country ballad. So I just don’t understand why movies or series are expected to be carbon copies of their source material.
That’s an excellent point — and well made.
Thanks, Zach.
(Laughs.) No, thank you. This is a really fun interview for me.
Your relationship with Brian Duffield, who also spells his first name correctly, is largely built around sharing memes together.
That’s not accurate. (Laughs.)
I was just making a Siren Head joke.
Got it!
Have you guys had a chance to discuss who made Austin Abrams suffer the most last year?
Wow, great question. We have not had that conversation yet, but I would love to get Austin in a room with me and Brian. I would have him tally up the points because I think we both gave him a real run for his money.
You previously said that a falling blood bag nearly killed Austin on the Resident Evil set, so I wonder if Brian has his own death-defying moment on the Whalefall set.
I don’t know if he does or doesn’t. After I started telling that story about how Austin almost got killed by a blood bag, I very quickly was like, I don’t feel great about that. I’m not stoked that somebody who worked on my movie was in harm’s way. But also, he wasn’t. He was in line. It was just a little too close for comfort, and we’re being a little dramatic. But I’m glad he’s fine. I’m glad he was unscathed. I’ll just leave it at that.
Austin Abrams stars in Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil
Courtesy of Sony Pictures
Austin’s character, Bryan with a y …
Now I see what we’re doing here! I’m just now realizing “Brian with an i” was aimed at me. (Laughs.)
Yes, you set Bryan up to have questionable morals, but then he does something to help someone else that quickly reversed my initial impression of him.
Yeah, he’s a rascal, but he’s a good person.
Austin does a type of, dare I say, feminine scream in certain moments.
(Laughs.) Yes, he does.
Did you hear it one day and urge him to double down on it?
I never urged him. He was in the zone and doing it. I probably laughed really loud, and laughter is the way Austin and I communicate a lot of the time. So I probably encouraged him in that way. But it’s such a wonderful aspect of his character. There is no machismo here. He is just a dude who is embarrassingly panicking his way through the apocalypse, and I think that’s great.
His character works for Lightfoot Medical Transport. What is Lightfoot a reference to, if anything?
We just had to put something on his vest. We were in prep, and they were like, “Come up with five different medical courier company names so we can see if one of them passes legal.” So I wrote a handful of names, and I’m sure it was in a moment of like, “What do I have to do? Really? Fine. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Then they came back and were like, “Lightfoot is legal.” And I was like, “Great, put it on the vest.” There was no more thought to it than that.
What about the picture of Bryan’s girlfriend Michelle on his iPhone? Is that a random Czech actor?
No, that’s one of Austin’s friends. Austin was like, “Could it be her?” And I was like, “Yeah!”
The film is often shot in the style of third-person gameplay. Admittedly, when I first heard you were going for a gamer POV, I worried that Resident might be another HardcoreHenry. While technically impressive, I thought that movie’s first-person perspective limited the narrative. That’s not the case here, but did you have any rules for when you’d break your gameplay approach?
No rules. I went moment by moment, and I tried to pick the angle that is going to honor the moment. That is the beginning and the end of my concern. I tend to think that the third-person perspective that the games utilize is wildly effective, and so that ended up being the movie’s predominant visual language. The movie is stronger for it. But it’s only inspired by the games; there wasn’t any sort of rule. So I jumped from third person to first person to objective all the time, and it’s a blend. It’s a moment-by-moment thing. You saw the first half hour, so did it feel gimmicky?
Not at all. It felt thoughtful and considered.
That’s good to hear. And that’s how it is for the rest of the movie. It lives in that ratio for the duration. I remember seeing the trailer for Doom, and there was a first-person-shooter shot. And I remember thinking, Dude, I wish they did that for the whole movie. That would be so cool. And I also remember when HardcoreHenry came out and being like, If they pulled this off, that would be so cool.
But when it was time for me to make ResidentEvil, there was never even a consideration that I would be adherent to a video game style all the way through. I just knew that I would be failing in many, many moments. So I’m still hoping for a movie that does [third-person for the entirety], but I’m not the guy to do it.
I love when horror movies light a number of fuses that could detonate at any moment, and you’ve done that here with various elements, such as the hour timer on the package.
I agree with you. It’s Hitchcock’s bomb-under-the-table analogy. So I was like, Let’s put a lot of bombs under the table and let’s show all of them. It can only help.
A couple guys named Bill Hader and David Fincher gave you great notes throughout Weapons. Did they contribute to this one?
Dave has been making his own movie, and so we have not had the same idea exchange. Bill read the script, and while he was very complimentary, he was also in the throes of making his own movie. So we didn’t work on anything together. This one has been more straightforward.
No one new entered your orbit with some brilliant piece of advice?
I would love that, but no.
Since I’ve only seen Resident’s first 30 minutes, can you describe the last 30 minutes in a word?
In a word, bigger. But I want to say so much more. I also think it’s surprising. I love the ending, and I’m very excited for people to see the ending. It’s so hard for me not to talk about it. The ending packs a punch. I’m really proud of it.
Will it make sense why the studio is withholding the ending as long as possible?
(Cregger responds without hesitation.) Yes.
On the Weapons set, the few days devoted to the kids tearing Gladys apart also tore you apart. You felt like you’d lost control of the wheel. Did you avoid that feeling on Resident?
Yes, I did. However, on this one, I had pneumonia for the first half, and I had Campylobacter jejuni for the back half. So I was very, very ill for the whole production, and everything felt so barely in control because my body was failing me. But I had wonderful, talented department heads, and I had a single actor who is one of the most can-do, positive people I’ve ever met. I was spoiled by the people around me.
What was hard about this one wasn’t the chaos of the children, but the chaos of the weather and being nocturnal for however many months. We froze our asses off in the north of the Czech Republic. And when you walk in snow, you’ve walked in snow, so how are we going to do take two [without seeing those previous footprints]? Those sorts of things were a whole new flavor of crazy-making, but that’s every movie. Every movie that’s ever been made is kind of crazy-making. So at this point, I just have to say it goes with the territory.
Director Zach Cregger on the set of Resident Evil
Dušan Martinček/Sony Pictures
What did you learn and apply from test screenings?
I learned that people really liked the movie, but they thought it was too funny. So over the course of my testing, I stripped out as much of the jokes as possible. I then found that not only did the audience enjoy the movie more, but I also liked the movie a lot more. A little bit of humor goes a long way in a horror movie, and there’s not a single joke I took out of this movie that I miss. So that perspective was really helpful.
I thought the first 30 minutes had an optimal ratio of laughs to scares.
There you go. That’s a testimony to the effectiveness of the feedback.
Between Shay Hatten co-writing Resident Evil and Zach Shields writing the Aunt Gladys prequel, is this your way of shortening the turnaround time between movies? Or is it your way of saying you can’t do it all anymore?
I can’t do it all myself. I’m already starting on my next movie [The Flood], and my workload has to be somewhat reasonable so I can devote the appropriate amount of energy to one thing at a time. And I love those guys. They’re talented writers. I’m picking people that I think are up to the task. So, as much as I would love to just go off and be nothing but a writer, I want to be the director. I want to make the movies, and that’s just incredibly time-consuming.
Was there a specific tipping point when you realized this?
Yeah, there was. I was going into production on a movie, and I had an outstanding script assignment. I’m not going to name it, but it’s a script I’m not going to make. So I found myself in a situation where I was not doing a good job on this script, and it was stressing me out. I was already prepping a movie, which is exhausting and totally overwhelming, and then I would come home and feel like I was alsobehind on my homework. So I was like, This is a way to burn out. This is not a way to do good work, and I’m going to make both things worse if I continue this way. I have to recognize the limits of my abilities and my time.
The Flood is your next film, and you’ve described it as the “last film of this chapter of your life.”
Yes.
Are you suggesting that you’re leaving genre right after THR named you the top genre filmmaker working today?
(Laughs.) No, I’m not suggesting that. I’m just saying that Weapons, Resident Evil and Flood came out of a single burst. I wrote these three scripts after Barbarian in one kind of prolonged chapter of my life. I love them all. And by the time I finish making Flood, years will have passed since I wrote those scripts. So I will be a different person when I sit down to write whatever is going to come next.
Henchman is a DC-related script of yours that you wrote before Barbarian. Is there still no action on that?
No, none. Believe me, I love Henchman. My love of that script persists, but there’s been no action.
Well, congratulations on the best short film of the year. I can’t wait to see the feature adaptation soon.
Thank you, Brian with an i.
*** Resident Evil opens September 18 in movie theaters nationwide.
The Heated Rivalry breakout is set to take on the roles of both Henry and Logan in the half-hour mystery thriller, the Canadian streamer said on social media Thursday. “Seeing double? You should be,” the post read, adding a side-eye emoji. “Hudson Williams takes on TWO roles in #YAGA. Meet Henry and Logan. Coming this October on @cravecanada.”
Yaga, which is set to air on AMC+ in the U.S., stars Carrie-Anne Moss, Noah Reid, Clark Backo and Williams. The show premiered its first look and teaser this summer at a San Diego Comic-Con panel. It premieres in October.
Yaga is based on the play by Sandler, who serves as the show’s writer and showrunner, and reimagines the myth of Baba Yaga in a coastal town. Crave dubbed the series “not your grandmother’s Baba Yaga” in a recent Instagram post.
The show follows private investigator Rapp, played by Reid, as he heads to a small coastal town to investigate the disappearance of Henry Park, played by Williams, the young heir to a powerful fishery. The show’s synopsis reads, “[Rapp] finds himself at odds with an apprehensive local detective, Carson (Backo), a charismatic university professor with a taste for younger men, Katherine (Moss) and a labyrinth of enigmatic suspects, secret lives and ancient magic.”
Sadler said in an initial release that the series has evolved from “myth to stage” to her first greenlit series, “reclaiming the wicked witch and reshaping her as an incendiary feminist antihero for our time.” She continued, “It reflects the kind of storytelling I love: propulsive, accessible, dark, funny and unapologetically bold.”
Sheila McCarthy, Megan Follows, Ezra Franky, Patrick Gilmore, Katharine Isabelle and Hiro Kanagawa also star in the series, along with Emilija Baranac, Georgia Acken, Anisa Harris and Sam Krochmal.
Yaga is produced by Front Street Pictures and Blink49 Studios. Mackenzie Donaldson, Andrew Miller and Moss serve as executive producers, and Charles Cooper serves as a producer. Sandler is showrunning the series, with David Frazee and Rachel Talalay directing.
So much so that Daniels once wanted Carell to play his dad Aaron in a biopic he wrote about him almost 20 years ago.
“He’s a very colorful person and he actually was in the Olympics in 1968, and I wrote a movie for Steve to play him, like on spec during the writers strike of 2008,” Daniels told me at his Hollywood Walk of Fame star unveiling on Thursday morning. (Writers were allowed to write uncommissioned spec scripts during the 2008 strike.)
What was his sport?
“He had a very rare sport. That’s how he was able to do it,” Daniels explained. “It was the demonstration sport of Mexico, basically like jai alai but with paddles and so he managed to wrangle his way in with some friends.”
The elder Daniels competed as an amateur athlete in the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.
“The Office” creator Greg Daniels reveals Steve Carell almost played his dad in a biopic Daniels wrote nearly 20 years ago:
“He’s a very colorful person and he actually was in the Olympics in 1968, and I wrote a movie for Steve to play him, like on spec during the writers… pic.twitter.com/BrEQsBC3Rx
Carell, along with Conan O’Brien, spoke at the star unveiling. “Everyone told me not to do ‘The Office,’” Carell said. “[They said] it will not work. The original is too good. It is a waste of time. And mostly, it is just going to stink. And then a crazy thing happened. It didn’t stink because of Greg Daniels.”
During our chat, Daniels put the kibosh on fans’ hopes for any sort of “Office” revival or reboot. “I don’t think we need to find out what all the characters are doing so much because of the way the show ended,” he said. “It seemed like people liked the ending and you’re just sort of risking a lot to open it up again.”
“The Office” creator Greg Daniels doesn’t think the show should get a reboot.
“We don’t need to find out what all the characters are doing… It seemed like people liked the ending, and you’re just risking a lot by opening it up again.”
Peter Berg is directing the show opens for all four of Netflix‘s NFL gameday livestreams this season — and for the first one, debuting Thursday, he drafted Kyle Chandler, star of the “Friday Night Lights” TV series, for an assist on the play.
Berg directed the 2004 movie “Friday Night Lights,” about a high school football team in Texas, and Chandler portrayed Coach Taylor in the TV series adaptation that first aired on NBC.
The first of Berg’s NFL pregame teasers debuts Sept. 10 during Netflix’s broadcast from Melbourne, Australia, featuring the Los Angeles Rams vs. the San Francisco 49ers (coverage begins at 3:30 p.m. PT). He’ll also direct openers for Netflix’s other NFL gamedays (Green Bay Packers vs. Rams on Thanksgiving Eve; Packers vs. Chicago Bears and Buffalo Bills vs. Denver Broncos on Christmas Day; and a Week 18 game on Jan. 9, 2027, with the teams TBA).
Berg’s Sept. 10 opener, “For the Love of Football,” runs 2 minutes and intercuts scenes of kids’ football teams (and their coaches) with footage from NFL games — giving it an overt “Friday Night Lights” vibe.
“And so it begins. Right here, right now. Today,” Chandler says at the beginning of the clip. “You are going to win. You’ll use your eyes to win. Your eyes will show you the truth. You’ll recognize it whether you like it or not.”
Later, Chandler says in the voiceover, “You’ll play with your eyes clear and your heart full. If you can do that and then do it again and again, I assure you, you cannot lose… Clear eyes, full hearts. Can’t lose.”
Apart from the NFL gameday teasers, Berg was already in business with Netflix. He directed, wrote and produced the movie “The Mosquito Bowl,” bowing in theaters on Oct. 30 ahead of its Nov. 25 release on Netflix. The sports drama is based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Pulitzer Prize winner Buzz Bissinger, based on the true story of four top American top college football stars who set aside their fame to enlist in the Marines following the attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II.
Watch Berg’s “For the Love of Football,” which opens the Rams-49ers game on Sept. 10:
The producers of the documentary series “Quiet on Set” have prevailed in a lawsuit brought by former Nickelodeon showrunner Dan Schneider, who claimed that the show implied that he was a child sex abuser.
Schneider sued for defamation in 2024, alleging that the series had falsely portrayed him as being responsible for or having facilitated sex abuse committed by others. He won the first round in court, as a judge found enough merit in the claims to deny the defendants’ motion to throw out the case.
But the defendants — Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony and producers Mary Robertson and Emma Schwartz — filed an appeal, and on Thursday a three-judge panel ruled unanimously in their favor. The judges found that while the show does depict Schneider as a bad boss, it does not cross the line to a defamatory implication of child sex abuse.
“The documentary clearly distinguishes between the lamentable conduct that its participants attribute to Schneider — gender discrimination, harassment, toxic workplace behavior, and inappropriate sexual innuendo — and the child sexual abuse explicitly attributed to three named individuals, two of whom are discussed at length,” wrote Judge Melanie Ochoa, for the panel. “‘Quiet on Set’ also affirmatively states that Schneider’s employer investigated his conduct and, while it confirmed some inappropriate behavior, it found no evidence of child sexual abuse. Schneider’s attempt to find an alternative meaning than what is expressly stated in the documentary is unavailing.”
Schneider was responsible for creating a series of hit shows on Nickelodeon, including “The Amanda Show,” “Drake & Josh,” “Zoey 101,” “iCarly,” and “Victorious.” Amid allegations of abusive conduct, Nickelodeon cut ties with him in 2018.
The series, “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV,” ran on Investigation Discovery in March 2024. Schneider posted a video apology shortly afterward, saying he was “embarrassed” by his past behaviors.
In the lawsuit, Schneider’s attorneys argued that while the show did not come out and directly accuse Schneider of sex abuse, it did juxtapose accusations of “inappropriate behavior” with pictures of Schneider with his arm around child actresses.
The show also delved into the cases of Brian Peck, a dialogue coach who was arrested for child sex abuse, and Jason Michael Handy, a production assistant who was also accused of sending an explicit photo to a child actress.
Schneider argued that he had nothing to do with those cases, and that the series created a false impression by linking him to them.
But the panel ruled that it could not go along with that argument, given that “the only such abuse discussed is explicitly attributed to named perpetrators and the documentary expressly states that an investigation into Schneider found no evidence of abuse.”
The defendants prevailed under California’s anti-SLAPP statute, which allows an early mechanism to strike lawsuits intended to stifle speech on matters of public interest.
Gerry Silver, Schneider’s attorney, said in a statement he was disappointed in the result.
“We are disappointed by the Court’s decision to reverse the Superior Court’s well-reasoned anti-SLAPP ruling, and we are evaluating our options for further review and appeal,” Silver said. “However, we are pleased that the Court acknowledged that the makers of ‘Quiet on Set’ presented absolutely no evidence that Dan was sexually abusive towards any of his cast members and agreed that any such allegation is provably false.”
Harry Styles‘ Together, Together Tour is getting a lot bigger, as the pop star just announced a slate of stadium dates in North America and Europe set for 2027.
The Grammy-winning artist will play 12 dates in six cities in North America next year — Phoenix, Dallas, Los Angeles, Toronto, Atlanta and Chicago. He will also play 13 dates in six European cities — Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Dublin and London. The stadium tour kicks off in Phoenix on April 2 and ends with three nights at London’s iconic Wembley Stadium in late August.
The new dates will open up Styles’ tour to a much wider swath of fans, as this year’s show dates were put on through residencies in a few markets, including his ongoing 30-show run at Madison Square Garden.
Fans had been speculating more dates in recent days as Styles’ snail mail logo had started popping up on posters around the globe, teasing the date 9.10.26. Styles sent an email to fans last night as well.
The opening acts for the new tour dates have also been revealed. Among the announced openers are Tinashe, CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso, Kylie Minogue, Lainey Wilson, Q Marsden, The Womack Sisters, Getdown Services, Caroline Polachek, Feist, LCD Soundsystem, Baby Rose and Tears for Fears. The openers will change with each new city.
Tickes for the London, Dublin, Rome, Madrid and Paris dates go on sale on Sept. 14 at 4 p.m. CEST. Tickes for the Berlin and North America dates go on sale on Sept. 16, all at 9 a.m. local times.
HARRY STYLES: TOGETHER, TOGETHER 2027 TOUR DATES:
Fri, Apr 2 — Phoenix, AZ — State Farm Stadium, supported by Tinashe
Sat, Apr 3 — Phoenix, AZ — State Farm Stadium, supported by Tinashe
National Geographic series Africa Earth’s Wild Home has captured the elusive amphibians — and other species — on camera for television for the first time ever. As gross as frogs are, the whole thing looks gorgeous.
The Hollywood Reporter can exclusively unveil the trailer for Africa Earth’s Wild Home (below) as well as its premiere date, Oct. 2 at 8 p.m. ET (on National Geographic Channel; it will be available to stream the next day on Disney+ and Hulu).
Wunmi Mosaku (Sinners, Loki, Lovecraft Country) executive produced and narrated Africa Earth’s Wild Home.
The seven-part event series, presented by Rolex, uses “cutting-edge CGI to unearth the deep history and forces that shaped Africa’s natural worlds,” Nat Geo says. Africa Earth’s Wild Home is the beginning of the cable network’s “ambitious multi-year franchise that will document our planet continent by continent, at a moment when that planet is changing faster than ever.” The series took four years to film across nearly 30 countries.
In addition to the black rain frog, Africa Earth’s Wild Home also captured hyenas in the Congo hunting elephants at night — bet you haven’t seen that before. There’s also footage of a rare wild African black panther as well as chimpanzees using unique tools to fish for algae. The monkeys sound like they’re about a decade from beginning us.
Each episode of Africa Earth’s Wild Home concludes with an “Explorer Spotlight” featuring the scientists, photographers and National Geographic Explorers behind the discoveries — among them are Rolex National Geographic Perpetual Planet Explorers Steve Boyes, Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, Matt Shirley and Ingi Agnarsson. (Nat Geo and Rolex have collabed on conservation for more than 70 years.) The event series’ finale switches focus from the wildlife to the humans fighting to protect it.
“Africa is home to some of the planet’s most spectacular wildlife and dramatic landscapes, and Africa Earth’s Wild Home captures them through breathtaking, blue-chip landmark natural history storytelling,” said Courteney Monroe, president, National Geographic. “Across seven extraordinary episodes, the series reveals never-before-seen behaviors, explores the forces that shaped the continent and celebrates the remarkable ways life adapts and thrives. It also shines a light on the National Geographic Explorers, scientists and conservationists whose groundbreaking work continues to deepen our understanding of Africa and help safeguard its wild future.”
Africa Earth’s Wild Home is produced by BBC Studios Natural History Unit for National Geographic. For BBC Studios NHU, Simon Blakeney is the executive producer. For National Geographic, Pam Caragol is the executive producer, Janet Han Vissering is senior vice president of Production and Development, and Tom McDonald is executive vice president of National Geographic Content.
