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WIRE Buzz: Abominable trailer; AMC A-List on top; Hulu zombie comedy
Following in the rather large footsteps of Warner Bros.' Smallfoot, DreamWorks will be releasing its own Yeti-based adventure in the fall with Abominable. Named after the snowman of cryptozoological lore, the film dropped its official trailer today, promising a heartfelt story between a young girl and her magical monster.
In the same vein of Spielberg's E.T., the movie stars Chloe Bennett (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) as Yi, the aforementioned young girl who helps a Yeti (one she cutely names "Everest") evade the government and get back to his snowy mountain home.
Watch the second trailer below:
“We didn’t want this to just be a typical yeti or bigfoot where they’re walking on two legs like a man in a suit,” writer/director Jill Culton told EW. “We wanted him to be able to walk on twos, but mostly walk on fours, and for him to be able to do things like roll up in a giant ball like a snowball.”
The new poster (below) is trying very hard to reinforce the similarities between its smash hit, How to Train Your Dragon by recreating the side view of Hiccup and Toothless with Yi and Everest.
Abominable opens in theaters Sep. 27. The voices of Albert Tsai, Tenzing Norgay Trainor, Eddie Izzard, Sarah Paulson, and Tsai Chin are also featured in the film.
Hulu (now fully owned by Disney) and ITV have given the greenlight to Zomboat!, an undead comedy show about a group of British citizens sailing down a canal in the wake of a zombie apocalypse.
"As they journey along the canal in their tightly packed living quarters, friendships develop, alliances form, arguments occur and romance blossoms. Along the way, they realize there is no escaping the problems of everyday life, even in a zombie apocalypse," reads the official description of the series.
Leah Brotherhead (White Gold), Hamza Jeetooa (Doctor Who), Ryan McKen (White Dragon), and Cara Theobold (Downton Abbey) all star in Zomboat, which will premiere on ITV2 in the fall before debuting on Hulu.
Adam Miller (The Windsors) and Will Hartley (Tracey Ullman’s Show) co-created the project.
“ITV2 is committed to comedy for younger audiences and we’re delighted to partner with Hulu and Noho Productions to add this fantastically high-concept, home-grown comedy adventure series to our slate,” said ITV's Paul Mortimer, head of digital channels and acquisitions, in a statement published by Variety.
AMC Theaters' Stubs A-List rewards program just reached 800,000 subscribers, which makes it the "No. 1 subscription moviegoing service in North America," the company announced this week. For context, 200,000 additional members alone were added since the start of 2019.
Stubs A-List is less than a year old (it launched last June), but is already well above AMC's expectations, whose estimates hovered around 500,000 for the one-year mark. Subscribers can enjoy three movies a week in addition to discounts on tickets and concession stand snacks.
“With AMC Stubs A-List, we believe we’ve cracked the code to make this concept successful for AMC, our shareholders, our studio partners and most importantly, our guests,” CEO Adam Aron said in a statement “While others have tried and failed in this space, A-List is only getting stronger. Members are seeing many more movies than they did before A-List was created, they are seeing movies more than once and they’re bringing their friends and family members along, who are paying for their tickets at full price."
Aron's allusion to competitors like MoviePass is pretty thinly-veiled, but that company's fall from grace was pretty catastrophic. After MoviePass began to lose steam last year (its parent company was taken off the NASDAQ and the New York attorney general opened up an investigation), AMC sought to raise the price of its Stubs subscription.
