Of course, the big news today is that it’s Oscar morning!
This morning has already delivered the anticipated announcement of the 93rd Annual Academy Award nominations, which you can peruse right here. Otherwise, much of the celebrating over the weekend was within the music business with the Grammy Awards, which had been delayed from January.
Bearing in mind that many Below the Line readers, especially on the West Coast, may be up way too early celebrating or reeling from the Oscar nominations, we’ll try to keep things light today.
As far as production, it looks like Director Matt Reeves‘ The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson, which seemingly suffered through some of the biggest issues from the COVID shutdown in 2020, has finally wrapped. Reeves posted a celebratory Tweet that was mirrored by actor Jeffrey Wright, who plays the new James Gordon, who took to Instagram to share the sentiment. This is likely to be a very big movie when it’s released on March 4, 2022.
#LastDay #TheBatman cc: @GreigfraserD pic.twitter.com/0AkcqlX1QY
— Matt Reeves (@mattreevesLA) March 13, 2021
Production has already begun in Toronto on the latest Paramount+ Star Trek spin-off series, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, with five actors joining the previously-announced Ethan Peck, Anson Mount and Rebbeca Romijn from Star Trek: Discovery Season 2. Those actors are Babs Olusanmokun (Black Mirror, Dune), Christina Chong (Tom and Jerry, Black Mirror), Celia Rose Gooding (Jagged Little Pill), Jess Bush (Skinford, Les Norton) and Melissa Navia (Dietland, Billions). The series with a pilot written by Akiva Goldsman (Star Trek: Picard) will be based on the years that Mount’s Captain Pike helmed the U.S.S. Enterprise.
We’ve heard most of the nominations already but now the winners have begun being handed out with the first one following the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards being the 33rd Annual USC Libraries Scripter Award given to a screenwriter and original author for material adapted from a printed work. This year’s winners in film was Chloé Zhao for her adaptation of Jessica Bruder‘s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, while the television winner was Netflix‘s limited series, The Queen’s Gambit, adapted by Scott Frank from Walter Tevis‘ novel.
Not too much to talk about casting-wise, although actor Dakota Fanning is joining the Showtime scripted anthology drama Ripley, opposite Fleabag star Andrew Scott. The show comes from Oscar-winning and Emmy-nominated screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, HBO‘s The Night Of), and is based on the hugely popular Ripley books by Patricia Highsmith that previously produced films like, The Talented Mr. Ripley. Scott will play Tom Ripley, “a grifter scraping by in early 1960s New York, who is hired by a wealthy man to try to convince his vagabond son, Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn), who is living a comfortable, trust-funded ex-pat life in Italy, to return home. Tom’s acceptance of the job is the first step into a complex life of deceit, fraud and murder.” Fanning will play Marge Sherwood, “an American living in Italy who suspects darker motives underlie the affability of Tom Ripley.”
Actor Dev Patel’s directorial debut Monkey Man was picked up by Netflix for distribution for a reported $30 million for distribution worldwide except for in territories where other deals have already been made. Patel stars in the India-set movie, which he co-wrote with Paul Angunawela and Hotel Mumbai writer, John Collee. Patel plays a man released from prison who takes “on a world enmeshed in corporate greed and eroding spiritual values, seeking revenge from those who took everything from him many years ago.” For $30 million, Netflix might be seeing Monkey Man as an Oscar contender ala Patel’s early film, Slumdog Millionaire or Ramin Bahrani‘s adaptation of The White Tiger, which just received an Oscar nomination. The film co-stars Sharlto Copley (District 9) and Sobhita Dhulipala.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Heat Vision reported on Friday that The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb will be directing the first two episodes of a new Disney+ horror anthology series based on R.L. Stine‘s graphic novel Just Beyond, which was published by Boom! Studios. Seth Grahame-Smith will write and act as showrunner for the eight-episode series, which is currently in production on its first installment in Atlanta.
Speaking of Disney+, the debut episode of Marvel Studios latest series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, starring Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan will debut on Friday, so the streamer has released another full length trailer for the show:
Also, Warner Bros. has released TWO new trailers for Jon M. Chu‘s musical In the Heights, based on the Lin-Manuel Miranda stage musical, which is due to hit theaters and stream on HBO Max starting June 18. The theatrical trailer is dubbed “Washington Heights” while the streaming-targeted one is called “Powerful.”
