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HomeColumnsEnd of Week Production NotesEnd of Week Production Notes 10/30/20: Marvel's Shang-Chi Wraps, Patrick Wilson Directs...

End of Week Production Notes 10/30/20: Marvel’s Shang-Chi Wraps, Patrick Wilson Directs and More

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It’s Halloween weekend, and it’s been a relatively busy week in the world of television and film production, but that also means it’s the end of October, and there are only two months left to 2020 with no clear signs we may getting over the ongoing pandemic anytime soon.

Simu Liu
Simu Liu (Source: Instagram)

With that in mind, we’ll begin with some good news from Marvel Studios that its third release for 2021, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has wrapped filming, as celebrated by director Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12) and star Simu Liu via Instagram. (See below.)

In one of his posts, Liu congratulated the team making the movie, Our crew came to get it DONE! This shoot was a marathon like no other, broken up by a massive four-month hiatus during which the world completely and irrevocably changed. We finally returned to principal photography in July with a promise that we were going to do it right, emphasizing the health and safety of our hundreds of crew members. Through the thirteen-odd weeks back we made on-set safety an absolute priority, starting from masks and frequent sanitization to rapid testing and pod systems. Everyone sacrificed, and in the end? Over 40,000 CoVID tests without a SINGLE positive.”

View this post on Instagram

WE. ARE. WRAPPED!

A post shared by Destin Yori Daniel Cretton (@destindaniel) on

View this post on Instagram

We made a baby!!! We can’t wait to introduce him to the world in 9 months… #WRAPPED

A post shared by Simu Liu (刘思慕) (@simuliu) on

As mentioned earlier in the week, Sony Pictures’ long-in-development Uncharted was making pretty decent headways as far as its own production, and they’ve actually finished filming, as well.


Some articles of interest from other places:

We’ve been covering production resuming in Vancouver for a few months, but The Hollywood Reporter posted a fairly comprehensive piece on the ups and downs of one of the busier cities for production amid the pandemic. Vancouver Film Commissioner David Shepheard told the trade, “The encouraging position for us is since the restart happened, the amount of production is at a higher peak than any period we saw in 2019. We’ve been extremely fortunate in B.C. not to have the same sort of issues that other places have had in the U.S. The industry has been looking at British Columbia to see how to manage its way and those studios that are eager to get into production have been looking all around the world to where they can get into production quickly.”

Shepheard also told THR that the testing bottleneck the region experienced a few months back has been overcome.

Anyone currently in production or that has been following the changes made due to the COVID-19 pandemic may have heard the term “Compliance Supervisor,” and the L.A. Times had an intriguing report on what that job exactly means and why they’re important for production to resume safely. In fact, having a Compliance Supervisor on every set was part of the deal made between the unions and the alliance of producers signed last month.


Crown
Photo: Netflix

Netflix has teamed with the Brooklyn Museum in New York to create The Queen and the Crown: A Virtual Exhibition, and it’s a pretty amazing display of the costumes from Netflix’s newest limited series, The Queen’s Gambit, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, and from the fourth season of the streaming network’s Golden Globe-winning series, The Crown. Mathew Yokobosky, the museum’s Senior Curator of Fashion and Material Culture, curated the exhibit that includes costumes designed by Queen’s Gambit Costume Designer Gabriele Binder and The Crown‘s Emmy-winning Costume Designer Amy Roberts.

The Brooklyn Museum is an amazing space, and while other museums are open to the public, being able to do this exhibit virtually means that people from all over the world can admire the amazing costume work from these shows without leaving their homes. Wouldn’t it be nice to have access to these costumes for the Halloween parties that won’t be happening this year?


Australia-based FX house Rising Sun Pictures is looking to fill a number of positions at its Adelaide facilities, as posted on its Twitter feed this past week. Some of the positions include Artist Manager, VFX Production Manager, Compositor, Head of Production and more, which you can learn more about on its Job Listings page.


Ted Lasso
Ted Lasso (Photo: Apple TV+)

Some television news this past week, included Apple TV+ announcing that they’ve greenlit a third season of its hit comedy, Ted Lasso, starring Jason Sudeikis, and that’s even before a second season has gone into production! Obviously, the reaction to the first season which debuted in August and was generally praised.

Undaunted by the poor showing for the 2016 feature film starring Michael Fassbender, video game makers Ubisoft are teaming with Netflix for a live action Assassin’s Creed series for the streamer. Ubisoft’s Film & Television team of Jason Altman and Danielle Kreinik will serve as Executive Producers.Things are still early in development to the point where they don’t even have showrunner yet, but someone did take the time to post a logo teaser on Twitter.


There’s been a lot of theatrical releases being moved and movies being sold to streaming networks just to get product out there, but one of the more surprising moves was MGM‘s decision to move the Aretha Franklin biopic Respect, starring Jennifer Hudson — presumed to be a shoe-in for another Oscar nomination — completely out of the Oscar race. Originally, it was supposed to be released in January which would have been a part of this year’s extended awards season — most of the awards are accepting film releases up until Feb. 28, 2021 — but now, it will be released in August, 2021. It’s particularly interesting when you consider all of the recent rumors that MGM is trying to sell the latest James Bond movie, No Time to Die, to one of the streamers, but a few of them have already turned down the kind of money MGM wants for that anticipated franchise movie, the last one starring Daniel Craig as Bond.


Some casting announcements and attachments. Actor Oscar Isaac is the latest to join the Marvel Universe as he’s been cast to play the superhero Moon Knight for an upcoming Disney+ series that will presumably bring him into the movies down the road.

Filmmaker David Leitch (John Wick, Deadpool 2) is gearing up production on his Sony action-thriller Bullet Train, which already stars Brad Pitt and Joey King. In the past week, the cast has been joined by Golden Globe winner Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Bryan Tyree Henry (Widows). Supposedly, it started filming in L.A. this week, and you can read more about the project at our subscription-only Production Listings.

Patrick Wilson
Patrick Wilson in Insidious (Film District)

Some terrific news this week about a great actor going behind the camera to direct, as Patrick Wilson will be making his directorial debut on a fifth Insidious movie after starring in the first two installments of the James Wan and Leigh Whannell-created horror franchise. Blumhouse will be producing but this one will be released by Sony Pictures, as the franchise returns to the studio that initially bought the first movie out of the Toronto International Film Festival.


We’ll wrap things up with a few trailers, since this is the first End of Week Production Notes in a couple weeks.

First up is the new collaboration between Tom Hanks and Oscar-nominated Director Paul Greengrass, the Western, News of the World, which Universal should be releasing on Christmas Day. Below that is the new Netflix movie The Midnight Sky, directed by and starring the one and only George Clooney. Last but not least is the first trailer for David Fincher‘s Mank, written by his late father, Jack Fincher, which follows the life of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, as played by Oscar winner Gary Oldman, as he works on the script for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane in 1940. Fincher’s latest will debut on Netflix on December 4 after opening in select theaters on November 13, and with those three movies, we could be looking at three of the big players during the upcoming awards season. You should be writing more about all three over the coming months.

Edward Douglas
Edward Douglas
Edward Douglas has written about movies for print and the internet for over 20 years, specializing in box office analysis, reviews, and interviews. Currently, he writes features for Below the Line and Above the Line, acting as Associate Editor for the former and Interim Editor for the latter.
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