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WIRE Buzz: IT director sniffs out Howling remake; Fear The Walking Dead to mess with time; more
After the success of his two It films at Warner Bros., director Andy Muschietti is heading to Netflix to remake another classic horror property: Joe Dante's The Howling. The filmmaker, who is also helming Ezra Miller's standalone Flash movie, confirmed this news to The Hashtag Show.
Released in 1981, The Howling is about a newswoman (E.T.'s Dee Wallace) who travels to a mountain retreat populated by bloodthirsty werewolves. The groundbreaking visual effects were designed by none other than Rob Bottin (the genius behind the alien visuals seen in John Carpenter's The Thing the very next year) and helped cement the film as one of the most beloved horror flicks of the 1980s.
John Landis' An American Werewolf in London hit theaters a few months later and became another instant classic of the lupine transformation genre, thanks to more terrifyingly convincing VFX designed by the legendary Rick Baker.
During his chat with The Hashtag Show, Muschietti also took the time to tease out his Flash-related project for WB, which won't be a direct adaptation of Geoff Johns' iconic Flashpoint storyline, as we long presumed. The director reportedly described it as a "different version of Flashpoint than you’re expecting."
This week has been flush with updates from The Walking Dead universe. Courtesy of several interviews Entertainment Weekly has conducted with Scott M. Gimple, we've learned a ton of stuff about AMC's undead franchise based on Robert Kirkman's Skybound comics of the same name.
In yet another Q&A, Gimple (who currently serves as chief content officer of the network's Walking Dead franchise) teased Season 6 of Fear the Walking Dead and how it'll get all freaky-deaky with the time-space continuum.
"That is something we’re playing around with for the future, and time is actually going to be played around with on this season of Fear the Walking Dead," he said when asked if a time jump would be employed on FTWD, which is technically a prequel, in order to line it up with the main series that is further along in the post-apocalyptic timeline. "Yeah, who knows? I would love to get to be like Crisis on Infinite Earths. That would be super cool, but that’s way down the line."
When asked to elaborate on how time will be played with, Gimple added: "We’re going to see a lot of time pass. There is a lot of time that can pass, yeah."
In a later question, Gimple revealed that part of the goal of Fear is to explain in the backstories of characters we've seen on The Walking Dead.
"That’s exactly what we’re doing," he finished. "I mean, it isn’t the only thing we’re doing. It’s not like everything is like Gotham, but that’s one of the sort of three kind of categories that we’re tackling. It’s awesome. It’s awesome to be able to play with characters that we’ve lost, and it’s awesome to fill in some of the blanks."
Season 6 will most likely premiere this summer.
At SDCC 2019, Marvel Studios announced that Mahershala Ali (Cottonmouth in Season 1 of Luke Cage) would be starring in a Disney-produced reboot of the Blade cinematic franchise.
Wesley Snipes, aka the OG Eric Brooks, already gave his blessing to Ali, and now another member of the original cast is voicing their approval for the casting choice.
"I saw him after it was announced [at Comic-Con 2019] and I'm happy for him. I think he'll do a great job with Blade and reinventing the franchise," Stephen Dorff, who played the vampiric antagonist Deacon Frost in 1998's Blade, told Entertainment Tonight. "It probably should've been done a while ago, but I think it's good for him ... I love the guy. I'm sure he'll do it justice. To have such a great actor in the part of Blade for this new generation, it'll be great."
More recently, Dorff starred alongside Ali in Season 3 of HBO's True Detective as Ronald West.
"We talked about doing a Deacon Frost movie on its own at one point, me and the director of the original Blade, who is just a genius, Stephen Norrington, and it never really happened because Marvel was a new entity and Kevin Feige was kind of building this whole new universe he's built successfully," continued the actor. "They weren't really interested in the dark Marvel movie but maybe after Joker and all this stuff, maybe it'll start to be trendy."
He followed that up with:
"I definitely would love to reinvent that character because that character's someone who really stands [the test of time]. I still talk about [him] 20-something years later. I'm still signing Deacon Frost pictures out front today, so we'll see where it goes."
