As SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP resume contract negotiations today, let’s look at some of the news from around Hollywood over the past few days.
Lionsgate is back in the Guy Ritchie business, having picked up the rights to his recently-wrapped unnamed action movie, starring Henry Cavill, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Eiza González, all of whom have appeared in other films by Ritchie. (Cavill and González star in Ritchie’s WWII movie, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which also had its domestic rights picked up by Lionsgate.) Earlier this year, Lionsgate released Ritchie’s Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, starring Jason Statham, but it was an unmitigated bomb.
The untitled movie filmed in Spain under a SAG-AFTRA interim agreement with the plot being kept under wraps. Ritchie produced it with his regular producing partner, Ivan Atkinson and Black Bear’s John Friedberg, who also produced The Covenant, with Black Bear handling worldwide sales.
Also, among the cast are Spanish actor Carlos Bardem (Assassin’s Creed, Goya’s Ghosts), and Fisher Stevens from Succession, who also directed the recent Netflix docuseries, Beckham.
Although mega media mogul Tyler Perry signed a deal with Amazon Studios to write, direct, and produce four features for Prime Video less than a year ago, he looks to be returning to Netflix, having just signed a new multi-year first-look deal with the streaming competition. Perry’s new deal will have him writing, directing, and producing features for Netflix.
The four movies Perry has committed to Amazon will include Six Triple Eight and Mea Culpa. Six Triple Eight stars and is exec. produced by Kerry Washington, telling the true story of the first and only Women’s Army Corp of color to be stationed overseas. Kelly Rowland and Trevante Rhodes star in Mea Culpa, revolving around a criminal defense attorney, who takes on the case of an artist accused of murdering his girlfriend.
Past Perry films for Netflix included the prize-winning A Jazzman’s Blues, which premiered at TIFF; A Madea Homecoming, Perry’s 12th movie in the Madea franchise; and the thriller Fall from Grace, starring Crystal Fox.
A new documentary telling Tyler Perry’s personal story called Maxine’s Baby: The Tyler Perry Story, directed for Amazon and Bekele Films by Gelila Bekele and Armani Ortiz, will premiere at AFI Fest as its centerpiece film this coming weekend.
Perry is repped by WME and Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole.
Speaking of Netflix, and with his adaptation of Edgar Alan Poe‘s The Fall of the House of Usher recently hitting the streamer, Director Mike Flanagan has already begun production on his next film adaptation of a Stephen King story, this one being The Life of Chuck, based on three interconnected short stories from King’s If It Bleeds novella.
With an interim agreement from SAG-AFTRA, the production has begun in Alabama with stars Tom Hiddleston and Mark Hamill being joined by Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, and Jacob Tremblay. At least two of the latter have worked with Flanagan before, with Gillan starring in Oculus in 2013, and Tremblay starring in Flanagan’s Before I Wake in 2018. The latter was hit by problems finding distribution until Netflix eventually picked it up, just as Flanagan began directing a number of horror-related mini-series for the streamer, including The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass.
Written and directed by Flanagan, the independently-financed feature has a major equity investment from QWGmire (Agnes, Lovely, Dark and Deep.)
There’s also been a bit of a movie release date shuffle over the past few days, with Paramount completely reworking its film release schedule for the next two years.
If you were anxious to see Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 2 after the summer’s first installment, you’ll just have to wait even longer, since it’s now delayed until May 23, 2025, Memorial Day weekend. Early word has it that it might be changing its subtitle, even though anyone who saw Part 1 this summer will know that movie ends on a definite cliffhanger. Moving the film to that date should also guarantee Cruise to get the three weekends in IMAX that he wasn’t able to get for Part 1 due to Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer.
A Quiet Place: Day One, the prequel to John Krasinski‘s blockbuster sci-fi thrillers, has also been delayed from March to a summer release on June 28, Mission: Impossible‘s old date.
Krasinski’s own next movie as a director, IF – formerly Imaginary Friends – starring Ryan Reynolds, has moved up to May 17, 2024, while the next SpongeBob SquarePants movie, The SpongeBob Movie 4: Search for SquarePants, has been pushed all the way back until Dec. 19, 2025. (That will open against James Cameron‘s third Avatar film.)
Sony also announced that the threequel, Paddington in Peru, would not be released until January 17, 2025, which would be seven years after Warner Bros released Paddington 2.
We’ll leave you with the first trailer for Leave the World Behind, the new movie from Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot), starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, Myha’la, and Kevin Bacon. It will stream on Netflix starring on Dec. 8, but first, it will have its world premiere at this week’s AFI Fest in Los Angeles.
Deadline provided additional reporting on some of these stories.
