“That’s a lesson that I did not understand until it happened,” Chu said. “I was like, ‘This is a book that exists and I’m making this book into a movie.’ I can’t add a new character into this book.” Chu pointed to one scene in which Rachel (Constance Wu) and Peik Lin (Awkwafina) get lost on their way to a party, only to find themselves surrounded by armed guards sporting large rifles....
I started writing this weekly column in January to address challenges and deficiencies in the film community that could be addressed with constructive solutions. Halfway through the year, it has become increasingly clear that many of the problems facing the fragile culture of making movies are unique to the frailties of U.S. society. In a country where the government barely supports the arts, studios don’t invest in emerging storytellers, and creative freedom is non-existent, it might seem futile to even bother thinking about how America can improve its ecosystem for creators when so much of it is far behind the rest of the world....
Per an official synopsis, “while vacationing at a remote cabin, a young girl and her parents are taken hostage by four armed strangers who demand that the family make an unthinkable choice to avert the apocalypse. With limited access to the outside world, the family must decide what they believe before all is lost.” Those parents are played by Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge, and those strangers are played by Dave Bautista, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rupert Grint, and Abby Quinn....
Larry Wilmore, host of Peacock’s “Wilmore,” puts it bluntly. “You’ve had your hosts like Arsenio [Hall], or some other Black hosts who did more entertainment-style shows,” he said, “but you didn’t have a show with a Black cast that competed in the John Oliver-type [space] where it’s supposed to be a smart take on the news.” “Wilmore,” which debuted September 18, is similar to his Comedy Central series “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore,” which launched in January 2015 and ran until August 2016, a few months before Trump’s election....
“Arcane” is developed and produced by Riot Games in partnership with Fortiche Productions, the Paris-based animation studio that was behind several of Riot Games’ most popular music videos, game cinematics, and other “League of Legends” advertisements. “Arcane” marks Riot’s first foray into television. Per Netflix, the show is set in the utopian region of Piltover and the oppressed underground of Zaun, the story follows the origins of two iconic League champions-and the power that will tear them apart....
To create an intriguing, if imperfect, ending for an MCU TV show, all Marvel had to do was not end anything at all. On a big-picture level, that makes sense. Not ending things is what the superhero storytellers do best, even if “Loki” marks the first time one of their series embraced its own never-ending timeline. With “WandaVision,” the first episodic MCU narrative to premiere on Disney+, the finale struggled to live up to expectations in part because it was billed as a limited series, yet never fully functioned as a standalone arc (to say nothing of its issues delaying and addressing Wanda’s trauma)....
The Internet is always a tough crowd, but in this case it’s right. The Meta CEO released a digital selfie from Horizon Worlds, his company’s metaverse social platform, to announce its launch in Spain and France and the results were painful. A few days later, he acknowledged that the graphics looked “pretty basic” and promised an update soon, but the damage was done: The billionaire’s robotic avatar against the backdrop of what looked like Eiffel Tower clip art contributed to the mounting sense that this metaverse thing is teed up to become a business snafu of even greater proportans than Qwikster and Quibi combined....
