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WIRE Buzz: Julie and the Phantoms first look. Plus, new animated sci-fi space comedy Doomstar: Janitorial
An upcoming musical Netflix show is a little more Ghostbusters than Josie and the Pussycats, — and now, audiences can get a first look at the cast of the paranormal-themed series Julie and the Phantoms.
According to a release, the show — about a girl (Madison Reyes) whose mom recently died and whose new bandmates (Charlie Gillespie, Jeremy Shada, and Owen Patrick Joyner) are ghosts from 1995 — is one based primarily on friendship and music as the high school group rocks out. Fittingly, it’s from executive producer Kenny Ortega (High School Musical).
Showrun by Dan Cross and Dave Hoge, the series released a casting video today along with a few early images from the ghostly High Ghoul Musical.
Take a look:
And a first look:
Yep, definitely ghosts.
Julie and the Phantoms — which also stars Booboo Stewart, Cheyenne Jackson, Carlos Ponce, Sonny Bustamante, Jadah Marie, Sacha Carlson, and Savannah Lee May — looks to change some (after)lives when it premieres on Sept. 10.
Next, there’s a new animated film in the works from the director behind 2005's fairy-tale-warping Hoodwinked!.
According to Deadline, Cory Edwards has been hired as writer/director on Vanguard Animation’s upcoming sci-fi/comedy Doomstar: Janitorial. Basically, it follows a similar protagonist as Star Trek: Lower Decks: A spaceship’s janitor becomes very important on one particular adventure, when his home planet is targeted and he’s got to save the day from robots and aliens.
With a reported budget of $20-25 million, Doomstar will also have the strength of Who Framed Roger Rabbit writer Peter Seaman behind it as an executive producer and story consultant. Despicable Me’s Carter Goodrich is designing the characters for this space-set romp.
"It’s really my love letter to '80s sci-fi, and pulling from touchstone comedies like Ghostbusters and Galaxy Quest," Edwards said, per Deadline. "There will be lazy robots, there will be alien karaoke, there be janitors cleaning up acid blood.”
No timeline has yet been set for Doomstar: Janitorial.
Finally, a Russian dystopian sci-fi tale is headed stateside. Coma, a film from director Nikita Argunov (who co-wrote with Aleksei Grawitski and Timofei Dekin), is about an Inception-like world where reality is constructed from comatose people’s memories. It looks like video game islands of reality floating in space, which is a prime locale for genre-filled goodness in the film’s first trailer.
Getting through this world — which the protagonist falls into after an accident that sends him, naturally, into a coma — and back to reality will take a team of like-minded rebels to combat the topsy-turvy visuals and the lurking threat of scary, hazy “reapers” haunting the land.
Check it out:
Starring Irina Starshenbaum, Rinal Mukhametov, Anton Pampushnyy, Lyubov Aksyonova, Milos Bikovic, and Konstantin Lavronenko, Coma comes with a dubbed English track and the original Russian version (with English subtitles) so fans can experience the film’s dreamy strangeness however they so choose.
Coma hits Blu-ray and DVD on Aug. 4.
