Saying that the Hollywood adaptation of the Halo video game series has been stuck in “development hell” is a vast understatement. It is a hell even more hellish than actual hell—an unending rash of mishaps and disappointments, false starts and near-successes. It is a hell that periodically gives you hope of escape, only for that hope to be snatched from your weakened hands every time.
This is the first entry in Quartz’s Weird Oscars series, honoring the moments, characters, and performances of the year’s film and television that the actual Oscars (and Emmys) are not cool enough to award. Check back later for many more categories, including “Best Movie Dog,” “Best Jump Scare,” and “Best Dance Sequence.” (For a full list, scroll to the bottom of this post.) All the Weird Oscars announced so far can be found here.
Though business may be booming, Jon Stewart wants to make one thing clear: He’s out of the turd business, and he doesn’t seem too interested in getting back into it right now.
A scientist in China has dominated headlines this week with the claim that his research team has successfully created the world’s first genetically-edited babies. If true, the experiment raises a lot of difficult ethical questions—ones that mainstream films and TV shows have been exploring for decades.
Last week, Disney released the first teaser trailer for The Lion King, a “photorealistic” remake of its beloved 1994 animated film of the same name. More than 224 million people watched the clip in the first 24 hours—the most viewers ever for a Disney movie trailer.
Robin Hood famously “stole from the rich to give to the poor.” Odd, since that’s pretty much the inverse of what Hollywood’s many adaptations of the Robin Hood legend have done: take moviegoers’ hard-earned cash every few years, and in exchange give us very bad Robin Hood movies. The rich get richer; the rest of us get “Robin Hood, but hip.”
Over the course of eight consecutive nights in January 1977, Roots captivated a country. Alex Haley’s miniseries about the black experience in America was watched by 51% of American TV homes, making it one of the most successful television productions in the history of the medium. It was a bona fide event, a relic from an era when nightly appointment TV was commonplace.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the new six-part Western anthology film by the Coen brothers released on Netflix yesterday, is essentially the film equivalent of a music album. And that album is about death.
Most people knew William Goldman as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, and The Princess Bride. That level of achievement alone is more than most writers could ever dream of, enough to cement Goldman’s status as one of Hollywood’s all-time great wordsmiths. But Goldman also had a hugely successful second career in the movie business—one he received far less credit for (literally).
I’ll take “Things we desperately hope are true” for $1,200, Alex.
Stan Lee, the legendary Marvel writer and publisher who helped created countless superheroes, has died. He was 95.
At what point does a spork become a toy?
2018 has been a strong, diverse, and appealingly weird year for movie and TV music. Three film soundtracks—A Star Is Born, The Greatest Showman, and Black Panther—have topped the Billboard 200 charts this year. A creepy sci-fi earworm from Annihilation became one of the sounds of spring. Bohemian Rhapsody came out this month, and while the film Bohemian Rhapsody itself couldn’t live up to Freddie Mercury’s extraordinary talent, it did remind us that Queen can still bring the house down in 2018.
Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan is making a movie that takes place in the same fictional universe as his beloved AMC crime series, Deadline reported yesterday (Nov. 6). It marks the second extension of the Breaking Bad story after the critically-acclaimed prequel series, Better Call Saul, which Gilligan also co-created and produces.
On the eve of election day in the US, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog showed up on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show to report on the hotly contested Texas senate race. What followed will soon become the stuff of legend.
After months of hyping “the final episodes of Rick Grimes,” AMC aired the last Walking Dead episode with its star last night (Nov. 4), closing the chapter on the zombie drama’s main character. But if we know anything about this TV show, it’s that there’s always another chapter. Always.
An upcoming romantic drama about two young people with cystic fibrosis is angering some in the community. Though the film aims to raise awareness of the life-shortening genetic disease, a number of advocates say it could do more harm than good.
BBC News reported on Nov. 1 that, according to documentation it observed, the four planned Avatar sequels may be titled as follows:
In a parody of Fox News’ fear-mongering over the migrant caravan heading toward the US, Saturday Night Live joked that the group includes “several Babadooks,” “hella Aladdins,” and Thanos, the villain of Avengers: Infinity War. That’s almost as nonsensical as what Fox News is actually peddling.
A day after Entertainment Weekly publicized that the producers of Game of Thrones once envisioned the show’s final season as a three-part series of two-hour movies, the release of Amazon’s Homecoming proved you can make a TV drama with episodes every bit as fulfilling as the hit HBO fantasy series’ elongated installments in a fraction of the time.
Bohemian Rhapsody is fine. It’s perfectly watchable, sometimes entertaining, occasionally funny. It’s cautious and inoffensive. And that’s exactly why it’s so disappointing. The Freddie Mercury biopic is the antithesis of its subject’s abundant energy, his fearless artistry.
Orson Welles made a film in the 1970s called The Other Side of the Wind. Tomorrow (Nov. 2), Netflix will release the film to the public for the first time. But that doesn’t tell the half of it.
The thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock have been emulated for decades, with varying levels of success. But a new Amazon series debuting Nov. 2, Homecoming, is an exceedingly rare thing: a Hitchcock homage that actually improves on the master of suspense’s oeuvre. It’s a Hitchcockian thriller that Hitchcock himself probably couldn’t have made.
James “Whitey” Bulger is dead, but the notorious crime boss will live on in the popular imagination and on the screen.
