Jon Kasdan talks about the importance of the Willow RPG and Ghostbusters 2 to the new series. Jeffrey Dean Morgan teases his arrival on The Boys. Plus, Terry Matalas talks about making Picard’s final season feel even more like Star Trek: The Next Generation. To me, my spoilers!
Indiana Jones 5
Antonio Banderas revealed to Collider his role in Indiana Jones 5 is “almost a cameo.”
My character is very little; it’s almost a cameo. He’s just a friend of Indiana’s character, and he’s looking for him because he needs something from his friend. But he just takes up very little time of the movie, but very happy to be part of a saga that is of the history of motion pictures, obviously.
Violent Night
Speaking with /Film, director Tommy Wirkola promised each henchman in Violent Night receives their own “moment to shine.”
I feel like action movies in the ‘80s and ‘90s, every character had a great moment or a moment to shine and a great line, or a henchman had a great — nowadays, I feel a lot of the movies have about three or four main characters and that’s it. The rest are just thrown away, in a way. I always love movies where you have tiny arcs for side characters or a great moment for the henchmen or a great scene. So we really actually put a lot of thought in that and try to make it feel like those movies that we all loved growing up.
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Awaken the Reaper
Deadline has our first look at Lance Henriksen in Awaken the Reaper, a new horror film in which “a troubled drifter returns home to begin therapy” after seeing visions of “a hooded skeletal figure” brandishing a scythe.
Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again
Disney+ has released a trailer for next month’s animated Night at the Museum movie starring the voices of Joshua Bassett, Jamie Demetriou, Alice Isaaz, Gillian Jacobs, Joseph Kamal, Thomas Lennon, Zachary Levi, Akmal Saleh, Kieran Sequoia, Jack Whitehall, Bowen Yang, and Steve Zahn.
Willow
In conversation with /Film, writer/producer Jon Kasdan revealed “the plot” of Ghostbusters II was “so instructive” to the Willow series, it became a “point of reference” for him and producer Max Taylor in nearly “every element” of the show.
I had a producer named Max Taylor who I worked with pretty much every day on the show. And I don’t think one of those days went by where we didn’t reference Ghostbusters II as a stalwart.
Kasdan additionally revealed he did not feel “the burden” to stay faithful to Chris Claremont’s controversial trilogy of Willow novels, instead looking to Allen Varney and Eric Goldberg’s RPG guide, The Willow Sourcebook, for inspiration.
[Lucasfilm lore advisor Pablo Hidalgo] relieved me of the burden of feeling like I needed to be beholden to those novels. At that point, I felt like we weren’t. But beyond that one thing, we tried to stay very faithful to everything that was written around Willow. We treated all that very seriously and we needed to be loyal to those elements of the story.
The Willow novels had their fans, but if they have a loyal audience that will only enjoy the new series if it faithfully follows their storyline, I haven’t come across them yet.
Star Trek: Picard
During a recent interview with Den of Geek, showrunner Terry Matalas revealed he pulled out all the stops to make the third season of Picard look and sound like Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I love the old Next Gen font. I’ve missed titles on episodes and seeing them and going, ‘hmm, I wonder what that means…?’ And the music was extraordinarily important to me. If we were going to say this is the last Star Trek: The Next Generation film, or 10 of the last Star Trek: The Next Generation movies—because all the episodes are very different—then it needed to sound like that, too. And that required [composer] Stephen Barton. Then, later in the season, the score gets so massive as the story grows that we had to bring in some help from Frederik Wiedmann, who’s a brilliant composer as well. I grew up with legends [like] Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner. Not to mention Dennis McCarthy and Cliff Eidelman. All those Trek composers have nods.
Star Trek: Prodigy
Meanwhile, Starfleet looks for dirt on the Protostar crew in the synopsis for “Preludes,” this Thursday’s episode of Star Trek: Prodigy.
A Starfleet Admiral digs into the past of the Protostar crew. Meanwhile, the Diviner recalls his life’s mission.
Written By: S1 Writers Room (Kevin & Dan Hageman, Julie Benson, Shawna Benson, Lisa Schultz Boyd, Nikhil S. Jayaram, Diandra Pendleton-Thompson, Chad Quandt, Aaron J. Waltke)
Directed By: Steve In Chang Ahn & Sung Shin
The Winchesters
ComicBook has our first look at Tom Welling as Samuel Campbell, a role originally played by Mitch Pileggi in Supernatural. Click through for more photos.
The Boys
Jeffrey Dean Morgan stated he’s “ready” to play his currently undisclosed role on The Boys in a recent Instagram post.
Oh OhOh @theboystv. Hope you ready for me… cuz I sure as shit ready for you! Memorizing as I run the fence line. A damn fine day… at least until I find the broken fence.
National Treasure: Edge of History
Finally, the cast of the National Treasure series needs your help solving a riddle discovered at the Library of Congress in a new promotional video.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water.
