‘The New Mutants’ Film Scares Up its First Poster

This spring will see the debut of a new group of superheroes who are mutants, but not part of the X-Men, and their movie aims to be nothing like the complicated long-running franchise featuring their elders.

Today’s release of the creepy first poster for The New Mutants confirms that director Josh Boone is going all-in on something totally new: a superhero horror movie.

“We are making a full-fledged horror movie set within the X-Men universe,” Boone (The Fault in our Stars) said. “There are no costumes. There are no supervillains. We’re trying to do something very, very different.”

Debuting back in the 1980s, The New Mutants (created by writer Chris Claremont and artist Bob McLeod)  comic book series featured a handful of youngsters gathered by X-Men mentor Professor Xavier, who intended to teach them how to control their powers, but not for the purpose of being superheroes. However, events conspired to force the fledgling team into battle.

Jennifer Lawrence Is Back in a New Thriller!

After a long absence – has it really been since last December’s Passengers?– Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar-winning actress and America’s Sweetheart, is returning to screens this fall in a psychological thriller/horror movie called Mother! (yes, the exclamation point is part of the title).

It’s written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, who did the masterful Black Swan, so we should expect lots of mind games from the script. Let’s take a look at the excellent, intriguing trailer:

My first impression is that the trailer is very tense, aided immeasurably by the music, which I don’t recognize. (This is a major plus, as modern trailers all seem to use the same five or so musical selections; boring.) Is it from the film? I hope so!

Meet the Crew of ‘Alien: Covenant’

In Alien: Covenant, the colony ship Covenant is loaded with colonists on a mission to establish human colony on another planet. The crew of the ship is made up of couples, and to introduce fans to the main cast, Luke Scott, the son of director Ridley Scott, has made a short film dubbed Prologue: Last Supper.

This is not footage from the movie itself, but rather an original piece designed to show how the crew relate to each other — and a rare chance to see characters in an Alien film happy!

‘Alien Covenant’ Trailer: Meet the Monsters

 The release of the latest movie in the Alien franchise is creeping up on us fast, so we should be hearing/seeing a lot more about Alien: Covenant in the coming weeks. In that spirit, 20th Century Fox has released a second trailer for the flick — and this one is packed with action and Xenomorphs!

Yes, this is technically a sequel to the uneven Prometheus, but the trailer makes it feel more like another part of the “real” alien series, with an emphasis on eggs, facehuggers and the xenomorphs rather than the mysterious Engineers.

In fact, the trailer makes only vague references to Prometheus, in the form of that horseshoe spacecraft and Walter, the synthetic person who looks exactly like David (both played, of course, by Michael Fassbender).

Doug Jones Reveals Secret of Guillermo del Toro’s Next Movie

Doug Jones is one of those actors everyone have seen in big-budget hit movies, but no one has any idea what he looks like. That’s because Jones specializes in full-body creature costumes and motion-capture work. If anyone can be said to rival the great Andy Serkis at portraying animated characters, it’s Jones.

Jones has played everything from the Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer to Abe Sapien in the Hellboy movies to the horned faun in Pan’s Labyrinth. He often features in movies for director Guillermo del Toro, and that is once again the case with The Shape of Water.

Since it’s a del Toro-Jones collaboration, you don’t even need to be told the flick will be weird; but Jones told Collider what it’s about:

It’s not a sci-fi [film], it’s not a genre film, but I am a creature in it. I’m a fish man that’s kind of a one-off. I’m an enigma, nobody knows where I came from; I’m the last of my species so I’m like a natural anomaly. And I’m being studied and tested in a U.S. government facility in 1963, so the Russian Cold War is on, the race for space is on, so there’s all that backdrop and that undercurrent. I’m being tested for how can they use me for advantages in military or space travel, or my technology—can we make this usable for humans? So they’re trying to keep me a secret from the Russians.

Watch the R-rated Trailer for ‘Alien: Covenant’

I thought I would start 2017 with this terrific trailer for one of the movies I am most looking forward to seeing this year: Alien: Covenant, directed by Ridley Scott, who helmed the original Alien.

This is a red-band trailer, meaning it features grown-up language and some blood and body horror.

This is how the studio describes the story: The crew of the colony ship Covenant, bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world. When they uncover a threat beyond their imagination, they must attempt a harrowing escape.

The movie stars: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Amy Seimetz, Jussie Smollett, Callie Hernandez, Nathaniel Dean, Alexander England, Benjamin Rigby.

Alien: Covenant opens on May 19.

Tom Cruise’s ‘The Mummy’ Trailer Looks Like Garbage!

 

Universal Pictures has released the first trailer for its new version of The Mummy, this one starring Tom Cruise and designed as the second part of its revitalized “Universal Monsters” universe, and I have to say it looks much too much like yet another Mission: Impossible flick.

In it, we see Tom and Annabelle Wallis thrown around the interior of a crashing plane. The sequence seems to go on forever in this trailer, so it’s bound to be a major set piece in the movie, taking up tons of screen time. And we already know how it ends: with Tom’s character dying. Bravo. So that will be a huge waste of the movie’s running time.

“Pirates of the Caribbean” Franchise is Not Dead Yet

Disney began cranking up the publicity machine for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales by releasing the first advance poster and a teaser trailer for the fifth installment of the adventures of Capt. Jack Sparrow.

Interestingly, franchise star Johnny Depp is nowhere to be seen in either. Perhaps the studio’s marketing people (wisely) assume that everyone has a very clear image of Jack Sparrow already, and what they need to do is start introducing the new elements.

The clip focuses on this installment’s new villain, Captain Salazar, played by the wonderful Javier Bardem (SkyFall), who always place a brilliant baddie — and even won an Oscar for playing one in No Country for Old Men. Check it out:

‘The Shallows’ Trailer Dives Deep

Every once in a while a trailer comes along that spells out the entire movie, plot beat by plot beat, thus saving you the trouble of going to see the actual film.

The second trailer for The Shallows is one of those clips. It not only spells out the premise (beauty v. beast), it shows us out the film plays out, from beginning to end. Watch:

There, now you know everything that happens, in order, in this movie.

Now, I’m not suggesting anyone should skip two hours of Blake Lively in a swimsuit, but in case you have something better to do on June 29, you won’t have to feel guilty about  missing it.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan cast as WALKING DEAD’s Negan!

If you’re familiar with the Walking Dead comic book, there’s one name that fills your heart with dread more than any other — and makes the Governor look like a grumpy local functionary: Negan.

Genre veteran Jeffrey Dean Morgan, known for playing the Comedian in the Watchmen movie and John Winchester on SUPERNATURAL, has won the villainous role that has long been anticipated by fans of the show. Negan is expected to debut in the sixth-season finale and become the Big Bad for season seven.

In the comics, Negan is the leader of a gang called The Saviors who purport to offer protection from walkers, but they’re really more about extort food and supplies from other, less-violent groups. Negan rules with an iron fist — and baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire that he nicknamed “Lucille.”

There’s a ginormous !SPOILER WARNING! attached to this character, which I will hold until after the cut… If you make the jump, you have been warned!