Wait…did I like ‘A Minecraft Movie’??
It’s a big week of movie news.
As we hit the fifth week of Lent, I’ll admit it’s been nice to get a bit of a break from the fast pace I usually try to set with this newsletter. Doing one post a week as opposed to three or four definitely is less stressful, although I’ll admit I’m starting to get antsy. There were so many times over the past week where I wanted to write about some bit of movie news or talk about something I’d just watched, and I remembered I’m on a break. As I begin to think about what this newsletter looks like when I come back, I’m starting to plan what kind of content I want to focus on but also a change to the rhythm. I’m not sure whether getting back to three pieces a week is always feasible, and some pieces may go behind paywalls. But I definitely know just once a week probably won’t work for me; I need to be writing.
It’s also been nice to take a few weeks to write about some more personal matters or delve deeply into some piece of media that has affected me deeply, as I did with Adolescence last week. But I’ll be honest…sometimes I just want to spend some time in the trivial and geeky. Which is what we’re going to be doing with this week’s entry.
There was a LOT of movie news this week, largely because of Cinemacon in Las Vegas, when the studios present their upcoming slate to exhibitors. But there were also several new trailers, the death of an ‘80s and ‘90s icon, and some really head-scratching movie news. But first, some mini-reviews!
My wife was out of town this weekend, so I spent Saturday hanging out with the kids, and we decided to check out A Minecraft Movie. I’ve never played the game, but my kids both love it; they’re also big Jason Momoa and Jack Black fans (School of Rock is a frequent watch here). Truthfully, I was dreading the movie. The trailers had been shrill and off-putting, and I’ve never wrapped my brain around just what the game is about (it wasn’t until yesterday that I learned you didn’t just build houses. There’s apparently an entire quest and mythology around this).
So, I was quite surprised to find that I enjoyed Minecraft. I’m not quite saying it’s “good.” To be honest, for long stretches of the movie, I didn’t understand what was going on, why there were so many pigs and ducks outside of a Muppet movie, and why the audience was bursting into applause every five minutes1. But I have to admit that I laughed several times. Jared Hess, the director of Napoleon Dynamite, is at the helm, and it’s the rare IP play in which the director’s voice isn’t lost. For the first 15 minutes, before the characters are sucked into the Overworld, this is a goofy, on-point Hess comedy with all its surreal dialogue and digs at machismo. Jennifer Coolidge has a subplot in which her every line made me laugh very hard. The videogame aesthetic is colorful and fun, and there’s some Lego Movie subversiveness running through. And if you’re going to pitch a movie straight at kids, having Jack Black play this right at their level of enthusiasm is always a win. Does the story make any sense if you haven’t played the game? Absolutely not. Was I emotionally invested? No way. But I laughed, it moves quickly, and I think the movie’s playful approach is much more interesting than the slavish devotion of The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
The movie made $157 million at the box office this weekend – the highest-grossing video game movie opening ever. And while I’d much rather Hollywood be broken of its IP dependency, this is one of the more successful ways to do it.
Because I needed to justify my cinema nerd bona fides after shelling out for Minecraft, I caught up with the two latest Steven Soderbergh movies. I’m planning to talk about them in more depth with Perry this week for an episode of We’re Watching Here, but I thought I’d mention them real quick. Presence, released in January, is Soderbergh’s attempt to tell a ghost story from the POV of the ghost, with a roving camera following a family in a haunted house. Black Bag, released just a month later, is a thriller starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as married spies – one of whom might have committed treason. Like I said, we’ll have more on this later this week, but I enjoyed both of these. Presence isn’t scary, but it’s an interesting formal exercise that allows Soderbergh to play with perspective, and it has some good turns, even if David Koepp’s script feels half-baked, particularly in the last 10 minutes. Black Bag, also coming from a Koepp script, is a fun, twisty, tense ride bookended by two gripping dinner sequences, and it makes marriage look sexy as hell. I look forward to talking about these a bit more with Perry, and I can’t wait to share that conversation with you!
Val Kilmer died this week at the age of 65. You can’t grow up on a diet of ‘80s and ‘90s movies without being familiar with his work. Top Secret! is an underrated comedy gem – and he’s so assured playing with the Zucker/Abrams/Zucker dynamic that it’s shocking to learn its Kilmer’s first film. Top Gun, of course, made him an icon, and his Doc Holliday is the best thing about the very good Western, Tombstone. He’s a crucial part of Michael Mann’s immortal actioner, Heat. Like any other actor of his time, he had his part in junk (I had free tickets to Red Planet and wanted my money back, and, I’m sorry, but Batman Forever is trash). But for every bad movie, he’d pop up and co-headline something like the great Kiss Kiss Bang Bang or go toe-to-toe with Will Forte in MacGruber. By all accounts, he was a class act and truly seemed to love the work, and it’s sad to see him pass on so young.
I mentioned Top Secret! and the ZAZ team, which means my thoughts turn quickly to The Naked Gun, a movie that I’d put up there with the five funniest I’ve ever seen. I watch it at least once a year, and it gets funnier each time. Whether watching Leslie Nielsen take a leak at the worst time or commit violence to the National Anthem in the name of Enrico Pallazzo, its brand of silliness is right up my alley. So the idea of rebooting the franchise makes me really nervous, especially with Seth MacFarlane’s name attached as a producer. But director Akiva Schaffer is one-third of Lonely Island, and has helmed the classics Hot Rod, Popstar, and Chip N’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, and he understands how to play this stuff. The trailer for the reboot – which hits theaters this summer – landed this week, and it made me laugh. Liam Neeson is the type of serious actor who can play this straight and get big laughs, and I chuckled several times during the one-minute teaser. And that final O.J. Simpson gag? Perfect.
Greta Gerwig is coming off the megahit Barbie and launching straight into Netflix’s adaptations of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. According to the most recent reports, she’s not starting with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and is, instead, starting with The Magician’s Nephew, which isn’t the first book published, but does tell the origins of Narnia. Daniel Craig is rumored to be playing the titular Magician, and several people were aghast – aghast! – when it was reported that Meryl Streep is in talks to play Aslan, the lion at the heart of the series (tying this together with my previous bullet point, Liam Neeson played Aslan in prior adaptations). Of course, at issue, is that Aslan is an allegory for Jesus, and how dare a woman portray Jesus (no one seems to consider that it’s probably a bigger problem to portray Jesus as a lion than as a woman, as Jesus needed to be human but didn’t really need to be male). But of course, we live in the age of anti-woke, fragile masculinity, so it’s not really surprising that a bunch of manly men are crying about the casting of a magic lion. I find it more notable that they’re turning to an American actress to play the most important role in a series based on literature that is extremely British; even the Harry Potter movies got away without any Yankees. Honestly, I have no opinion. Gerwig hasn’t missed yet, and we’ve yet to see a Lewis adaptation that is better than “fine.” I’m hopeful this will be good, but I wish we weren’t anchoring one of our most interesting filmmakers to another sprawling bit of IP.
HBO released a trailer for season two of The Rehearsal, the Nathan Fielder reality (?) series that will begin airing on April 20. It looks like this season, Fielder is addressing the FAA and the flight industry. I’m rabidly curious/scared. Fielder is the king of comedic discomfort, and I think Nathan for You and the first season of The Rehearsal are queasy masterpieces that also brush up against some serious ethical dilemmas (the entire final entry involving a young boy who believes Fielder is a father figure was the stuff of a million think pieces). I have no clue how this shakes out, except I’m positive I will be laughing and very uncomfortable throughout.
I’m probably burying the most surprising and shocking movie news of the week, mainly because I have no idea how to feel. It was reported that a sequel to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood is in the works, but without Tarantino behind the camera. Instead, David Fincher will step in for QT, working from a script that is believed to be the one intended for QT’s 10th and supposedly final film, which was to be titled The Movie Critic. Brad Pitt will return as stuntman Cliff Booth; no word yet as to whether we'll see Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton show up. I really liked OUTIH, and I’m eager to see more of Booth’s adventures in Hollywood. I was really bummed when Tarantino scrapped The Movie Critic – the synopsis we heard, which seemed to draw on ideas from Tarantino’s (fantastic) book Cinema Speculation, made me really curious. But as this article in The Ringer notes, there’s probably a good chance this doesn’t happen. Tarantino is notably finicky about others adapting his scripts, and I can’t imagine he’s cool with the idea of a QT-adjacent film heading to Netflix, where Fincher’s films go. And while Fincher is another of our great auteurs, he works in a completely different style and tone from Tarantino. If this happens, I’ll be first in line to see it (or, I mean, sitting up at midnight the night of its Netflix release), but I’m not holding my breath.
Yeah, I’m thinkin’ he’s back…from the dead. At Cinemacon, it was announced we’ll be getting a lot more John Wick, even following this summer’s Ana de Armas spinoff, Ballerina. The biggest news is that Keanu Reeves is set to return as the titular assassin in John Wick 5, despite having seemingly died at the end of the last film. We’re also getting a spinoff about Donnie Yen’s blind assassin from John Wick Chapter 4, directed by Yen, as well as an anime prequel story for John Wick. And while sequels grow interminable after awhile, I have no problem with returning to the Wick world, which is just an excuse to create a labyrinthine mythology for which to weave epic stunts out of. John Wick Chapter 4 wasn’t just the best film of the series; it was one of the best films of last year, and Yen was maybe even more of a standout than Reeves in that one. If they want to keep giving these two excuses to kick, punch and shoot their way through a line of bad guys, I’ll keep showing up.
At Cinemacon, Sony Pictures also finally announced a release date for the latest animated Spidey flick. Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse will thwip into theaters on June 4, 2027…four years after we got the last Miles Morales adventure. On the one hand, that’s entirely too long. These are the best superhero movies and the best animated movies being made right now, and I really don’t like knowing I’ll be pushing 50 by the time we find out what happens after the last film’s “to be continued…” entry. But we did have nearly five years between the first and second films, and the animators for Into the Spider-Verse were notoriously overworked. So I’d rather they take the time to do this right, do this without pushing their crew to the brink, and bring this story in for a landing. Besides, there’s a live-action Spidey movie coming in 2026, so it’s not like the web-slinger’s going to be missing from our screens.
Finally, it was announced (also at Cinemacon) that Sam Mendes’ four Beatles biopics will all hit theaters in April of 2028. Each film will focus on one member of the Fab Four, with Paul Mesal as Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr. It’s kind of a pop music version of Avengers – I’d love it if we got a surprise fifth film that was just The Beatles. This attempt to make “binge-able cinema” is a big swing; I knew we were getting all four films in one year, but in one month is a huge gamble. I’m curious how the movie theaters feel about this. One the one hand, this could be huge, and encourage people to do full-day cinema trips. On the other hand, I imagine they would have loved this event to be spread out over a year. This is a really interesting play by Mendes, and I’m really curious how this turns out.
And that’s it! We’ll be back next week! – CW
Matt Singer at Screencrush has a great explanation for that.