News

“Who are those guys?”

Why, it’s Regé-Jean Page and Glen Powell, recent breakouts from “Bridgerton” and “Top Gun: Maverick,” and they’ve just been announced as new spins on the late 60s, anti-establishment, true Western buddy classic, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

The project was announced on Thursday as a series for Amazon Prime Video. Its official title is not yet known and the facts are few, other than that the project will be shepherded by Joe and Anthony Russo, directors of “Avengers: Endgame” and “Avengers: Infinity War,” the second and fifth biggest worldwide box office earners in history.

Initial scripts are being written by cousins Kaz and Ryan Firpo, best known for their work on Marvel’s “Eternals.” The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the project is “envisioned as a larger franchise with multiple series and spinoffs.”

George Roy Hill’s 1969 film (written by William Goldman) starring Paul Newman,...

"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" can't outrun the posse of remakes in Hollywood, where everything old is new again. The Oscar-winning 1969 Western, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, is in the National Film Registry, and the American Film Institute has recognized it as one of the 100 greatest American movies of all time. It's a bona fide classic, and at first glance, the idea of redoing it as a TV series seems as iffy as the scene in Robert Altman's industry satire "The Player," where a screenwriter pitches "The Graduate, Part II." But executive producers Joe and Anthony Russo, the duo who directed two of the top five highest-grossing films of all time ("Avengers: Endgame" and "Avengers: Infinity War"), are going to give it the old college try, anyway — and they're bringing Regé-Jean Page and Glen Powell along for the ride.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, an as-yet-untitled "Butch...

A special two-part episode. From the movie Werewolves Within, director Josh Ruben discusses a few of his favorite movies. Then, Werewolves Within writer Mishna Wolff plays a game of “find the woman” in some of her favorite movies.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode Josh Ruben:

Werewolves Within (2021)

Werewolves On Wheels (1971) – Adam Rifkin’s trailer commentary

Wrath of Man (2021)

Trapped Ashes (2006)

The ’Burbs (1989) – Ti West’s trailer commentary

The Fly (1986)

To My Great Chagrin: The Unbelievable Story of Brother Theodore (2007)

Road To Perdition (2002)

Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye (1985)

Nightmare On Elm Street Part III: Dream Warriors (1987)

Flight of the Navigator (1986)

Grease (1978)

Honey I Blew Up The Kid (1992)

Big Top Pee-Wee (1988)

A History of Violence (2005)

The Dead (1987)

The Peanut Butter Solution (1985)

Irreversible (2002)

Hunter Hunter (2020)

Man Bites Dog (1992)

The Human Centipede: The First Sequence (2009)

A Serbian Film (2010)

Planes Trains And Automobiles (1987)

Lost In Translation (2003)

JFK (1991)

Home Alone (1990)

The Second Civil War (1997) – Glenn...

Allan Burns, the Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated screenwriter and producer who co-wrote and co-created “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” died on Jan. 30, his son, Matt Burns, confirmed to Variety. He was 85.

His “Mary Tyler Moore Show” co-creator and longtime creative partner, James L. Brooks, announced Burns’ death on Twitter Sunday. “Alan Burns, my writing partner during the Mary Tyler Moore days, died yesterday. His singular writing career brought him every conceivable recognition,” Brooks wrote. “But, you had to know him to appreciate his full rarity. He was simply the finest man I have ever known. A beauty of a human.”

Alan Burns, my writing partner during the Mary Tyler Moore days, died yesterday. His singular writing career brought him every conceivable recognition. But, you had to know him to appreciate his full rarity. He was simply the finest man I have every known. A beauty of a human

— james l. brooks...

It’s finally the weekend and that means it’s time to dig into some new content. That’s right. No matter what your preferred streaming service is, there are a number of new movies/TV shows coming down the pipeline over the next few days.

Be it Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon, Hulu, HBO, or Showtime and Starz, each platform is offering a nice selection of titles this weekend. Admittedly, it’s not the meatiest time for new content that we’ve had, as the last few weeks of any given month tend to slow down a bit for fresh releases, but there’s still enough here worth getting excited about.

So, let’s dive in, shall we?

Netflix

June 19

Babies: Part 2

Father Soldier Son

Feel the Beat

Floor is Lava

Lost Bullet

Girls from Ipanema: Season 2

One Way to Tomorrow

The Politician Season 2

Rhyme Time Town

Wasp Network

June...

Make way for the parade! Featuring Brian Trenchard-Smith, Eli Roth, Katt Shea, Thomas Jane, our very own Don Barrett and Blaire Bercy from the Hollywood Food Coalition.

Please support the Hollywood Food Coalition. Text “Give” to 323.402.5704 or visit https://hofoco.org/donate!

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Screams of a Winter Night (1979)

Goodbye Bruce Lee: His Last Game Of Death (1975)

I Think We’re Alone Now (2018)

The Rhythm Section (2020)

Atomic Blonde (2017)

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965)

The Ipcress File (1965)

Funeral In Berlin (1966)

Extraction (2020)

Kung Fu Hustle (2004)

The Mermaid (2016)

Oklahoma! (1955)

Singin’ In The Rain (1953)

Nightcrawler (2014)

I Think We’re Alone Now (2008)

Ghetto Freaks a.k.a. Sign of Aquarius (1970)

Hostel (2005)

Cabin Fever (2002)

Final Cut: Ladies And Gentlemen (2012)

The Movie Orgy (1968)

Gremlins (1984)

The Goonies (1985)

Hell of the Living Dead a.k.a. Night of the Zombies (1980)

Troll 2 (1990)

In The Land Of The Cannibals a.k.a. Land of...

Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema, which was closed in January for remodeling, is re-opening on Dec. 1 with a matinee showing of “Batman Returns.”

The New Beverly will then offer a double feature that day of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “Butch and Sundance: The Early Days.” There will also be a midnight showing of Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused.”

The 300-seat revival theater, which was opened in 1929 on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles, has been owned and operated by Tarantino since 2007. He has continued the double-feature programming format during his tenure with 35mm screenings.

The theater revealed its re-opening and December lineup on Twitter on Tuesday. Tickets are not yet on sale. There are several holiday double features including a pairing of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” with “Scrooged” and “Black Christmas” with “Silent Night, Deadly Night.”

Tarantino bought the building to save the property from...

Frank Doubleday, who played a henchman in “Escape From New York,” died on March 3, his wife and companion Christina Hart confirmed in a Facebook post. Doubleday was 73.

Doubleday is best known for playing Romero in John Carpenter’s sci-fi cult classic, which starred Kurt Russell and Lee Van Cleef. Doubleday died on March 3 of complications from esophageal cancer at his home in Los Angeles, Hart told The Hollywood Reporter.

“John gave me total creative freedom. The voice and the look were my ideas,” Doubleday said in an interview about playing Romero. “I did a lot of character work and worked on Romero through voice, costume and movement. All my behavior was improvised. Once a character is created and is in one’s skin, the behavior just comes naturally. … If the character has been internalized, it all just happens.”

Also Read: Robert Rodriguez to Direct 'Escape From New York' Remake

Doubleday...

After the runaway success of Raiders of the Lost Ark, producer George Lucas set to work on a storyline for the sequel. The problem was, he didn't want to do another movie where the Nazis were the bad guys. So he hit upon an idea: What if the second film actually came before the first one? Rather than making a traditional sequel, what if they made ... let's call it a "prequel?"

Lucas didn't invent the concept, obviously; major sections of The Godfather: Part II take place before the events of the original Godfather,...

In many viewers’ eyes, prequels are guilty until proved innocent. The Star Wars prequels satisfied few who’d gone through puberty, The Hobbit already looks to be an endless journey, and film history is littered with other excursions into fictional backstory that ultimately led nowhere. (Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, anyone?) TV has an equally poor track record: Star Trek: Enterprise; Ponderosa; the Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica; and other series traded on well-known brands’ allure without capturing their magic and were so shackled by the need to maintain continuity with future time lines that their imaginations suffered. The most satisfying television prequel might have been the eighties kids’ cartoon series Muppet Babies. Like J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek and the CW’s Sex and the City prequel, Carrie Diaries—both of which have a goofy freshness—it seemed to be unfolding in an alternate universe, one in which...

Sam Shepard excels in Mateo Gil's elegiac sequel imagining further adventures in Bolivia for the Wild Bunch leader

Back in 1969 George Roy Hill brought Paul Newman and Robert Redford together in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a self-consciously stylish western in which two notorious bandits were celebrated as forerunners of the outlaw sensibility of the 1960s. A decade later, Richard Lester, one of the film-makers credited for shaping the artistic expression of the 60s with The Knack and two Beatles films, made his only western, Butch and Sundance: The Early Days. Featuring two young actors, Tom Berenger and William Katt, with uncanny resemblances to Newman and Redford, the film took a quirky but generally realistic look at frontier life as it related to the pair's early criminal life and friendship, ending in the 1890s at the point where they were becoming aware of being legends, leaders of a gang called the Wild Bunch.

With the box office failure of Jon Favreau's Cowboys & Aliens currently causing studios to second guess the commercial appeal of westerns (and leading to the cancellation of Disney's The Lone Ranger), it may seem like the current resurgence of westerns on the big screen is about to come to to an end. But the truth is, even if a few less studio westerns are being greenlit for a while, they will never really go away. Case in point: this week Apple debuted a trailer for Blackthorn, an upcoming western from Spanish director Mateo Gil that will get a U.S. release courtesy of Magnolia Pictures this fall. The movie revisits the tale of Butch Cassidy, famously portrayed on screen by Paul Newman in George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and later by Tom Berenger in Richard Lester's Butch and Sundance: The Early Days. Some...