News Shotgun 7/3/21
- Lovecraft Country Canceled: HBO has canceled Lovecraft Country and the series will not get a second season. The first season aired almost a year ago in August of 2020 and the show was nominated for a Golden Globe and would be eligible for the next Emmy Awards.
- Blumhouse making a new Exorcist movie: Blumhouse CEO Jason Blum confirmed that the studio is working on a reboot of The Exorcist with Halloween/Halloween Kills director David Gordon Green in talks to direct. It sounds like it may be a similar situation to Halloween where the new movie would be a direct sequel to the original film and skip all the sequels and the TV series that aired on Fox.
- Dracula cast for Last Voyage of the Demeter: One of many takes on Dracula hitting theaters in the near future, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is based on a segment of Bram Stoker’s novel where Dracula travels from Transylvania to England on board a ship called Demeter and comes out at night to stalk and feast on the crew. By the time the boat reached England, the entire crew was dead and the captain was dead and lashed to the wheel. Javier Botet has been cast as Dracula and he’s an expert at creepy monsters, portraying creatures in movies like IT, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Mama, and The Conjuring 2. David Dastmalchian also joined the cast along with Liam Cunningham and the previously cast actors include Corey Hawkins, Jon Jon Briones, Aisling Franciosi, Stefan Kapicic, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Martin Furulund, and Chris Walley. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark director André Øvredal is directing.
- Scott Adkins joins John Wick 4: As if the previous casting of Donnie Yen and Hiroyuki Sanada wasn’t cool enough, Scott Adkins has now also joined the cast of John Wick 4, presumably to face off against Keanu Reeves. Adkins’s role is unknown, as are the roles of most of the new cast members. Shooting for the movie started recently with Chad Stahelski back behind the camera. The movie has a May 27th, 2022 release date.
- Good Omens renewed for Season 2: Amazon has renewed their Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett adaptation Good Omens for a second season. The new season will expand things beyond the scope of the book, which was first published in 1990 and David Tennant and Michael Sheen are returning as a mismatched demon and angel duo that have to save the world from the apocalypse. The first season dropped in May 2019, so this is a pretty delayed renewal announcement.
- Netflix thriller Havoc adds cast members: Netflix has added cast members for the upcoming thriller Havoc. Tom Hardy and Forest Whitaker were previously announced to co-star but the movie has added Timothy Olyphant, Justin Cornwell, Jessie Mei Li, and Yeo Yann Yann. The movie is written and directed by The Raid director Gareth Evans and follows, “a bruised detective who must fight his way through a criminal underworld to rescue a politician’s estranged son while unraveling a deep web of corruption and conspiracy that ensnares his entire city”.
- Ron Perlman voicing Optimus Primal: A week after the big announcement of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Ron Perlman has been cast as the leader of the Maximals, Optimus Primal. Garry Chalk played the character on the Beast Wars animated series. Steven Caple Jr. is directing the movie, which will follow in the heels of Bumblebee and be set in 1994 as Optimus Prime, voiced by Peter Cullen, encounters the Maximals and the Predacons while also facing the threat of the Terrorcons, Decepticons made from dead Transformers. The movie is out on June 24th next summer.
- Max Brooks’ Devolution getting a movie: Max Brooks’ big follow-up to his novel World War Z was Devolution, which took a similar “oral history” structure but detailed the fictional “Rainier Sasquatch Massacre” from journals left by a woman who was living in a “tech-focused green community” that cut itself off from the outside world but things go bad and she’s left in the woods with a pack of Sasquatch going on a rampage. Legendary is making the movie and James Ashcroft and Eli Kent are writing the script. The book was originally pitched as a movie to Legendary by Brooks but he decided to write the novel first instead.