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Hayden Panettiere is making the rounds in a number of intense films. Firstly, she starred in the recent film Amber Alert, with Abbot Elementary‘s Tyler James Williams, and is about a game of cat and mouse with a car suspected to be involved in an Amber Alert. Next, Panettiere joined the killer dog film, A Breed Apart, which is directed by siblings Nathan and Griff Furst and produced through their company, Curmudgeon Films. Deadline now reports that the former Heroes star recently wrapped filming the psychological thriller Sleepwalker.

The new film comes from Verdi Productions and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions. The synopsis, per Deadline, reads, “Panettiere portrays Sarah, a grieving mother who is haunted by the tragic loss of her daughter in a car accident that left her abusive husband in a coma. As she battles a surreal descent into darkness, her sleepwalking episodes intensify. Plagued by...

Hayden Panettiere landed a starring role in a new movie!

The 35-year-old actress joined an ensemble cast in the new survival movie A Breed Apart from directors Griff and Nathan Furst.

The new movie will serve as a sequel to Wes Craven‘s 2006 horror movie The Breed and is set in the same world.

Keep reading to find out more…

Deadline broke the news of Hayden‘s casting, noting that she will share the screen with Virginia Gardner, Grace Caroline Currey, Joey Bragg, Troy Gentile, Riel Downs and Page Kennedy. It is not yet clear what role she will play.

Here’s a synopsis of the plot: The movie “sees a pack of dogs escape during the making of a fictional The Breed 2 movie during filming on a remote island. Years later, a group of YouTubers are drawn to the island to try and find the canines in a project...

Back in June 2024, we learned that Fall stars Virginia Gardner and Grace Caroline Currey would be starring in an upcoming remake of the natural horror film The Breed. Well, guess who just joined the cast? Scream star Hayden Panettiere! She, along with several others, will be starring alongside Gardner and Currey in the new horror film.

Wait! We need to clear some things up about this movie first. It's not actually a remake. It was initially believed to be one, but instead, it's a sequel to The Breed. It's also been given an official title, A Breed Apart.

While it's still unclear who is writing the script for the film, filmmaking brothers Nathan and Griff Furst (Nightmare Shark) will be directing and producing via their Curmudgeon Films production company. In addition, Daro Film Distribution is signed on to co-produce and will be financing the movie as well.

A Breed Apart...

Brat summer architect and influencer of foreign elections Charli xcx is expanding her resumé. Charli has joined the cast of Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, which just this week added Cooper Hoffman to its roster as the subject of Olivia Wilde’s sexual fascination. The pop star’s...

Back in 2006, the late, great Wes Craven produced a killer dog movie called The Breed (watch it Here), which was directed by Nicholas Mastandrea from a screenplay by Robert Conte and Peter Martin Wortmann and starred Michelle Rodriguez, Oliver Hudson, Taryn Manning, Eric Lively, Hill Harper, Nick Boraine, and Lisa-Marie Schneider. Now a remake of The Breed is in the works, going by the title A Breed Apart, and Deadline reports that Hayden Panettiere, who worked with Craven on Scream 4, has joined the cast!

Brothers Nathan and Griff Furst are directing A Breed Apart, and are also producing it hrough their Curmudgeon Films shingle. The Fursts are no strangers to killer animal movies, as Griff’s previous directing credits include Trailer Park Shark, Ghost Shark, Swamp Shark, Lake Placid 3, Alligator Alley, and Arachnoquake. The brothers teamed up to direct the 2018 movie Nightmare Shark.

We’ve previously heard that...

Exclusive: Hayden Panettiere will star in A Breed Apart. Known for playing Claire Bennet in Heroes, Kirby Reed in slasher franchise Scream and Juliette Barnes in Nashville, Panettiere will take an as yet unspecified role in the film, which uses Wes Craven’s cult 2006 picture The Breed as a jump-off point.

In addition to Panettiere signing on, Deadline can also reveal the film has rounded out its ensemble cast.

Joey Bragg, Troy Gentile, Riele Downs and Page Kennedy will all appear. They join the previously announced Virginia Gardner and Grace Caroline Currey, who were seen together in vertigo-inducing Netflix movie Fall.

Billed as a reimagining of Wes Craven-produced and Nicholas Mastandrea-directed The Breed, the upcoming movie is more accurately a sequel of sorts and is set after events of the first film. The new picture originally bore the same name, but the title has now been tweaked.

The plot...

When you’re an independent filmmaker, there are a few different ways of working within the TV/streaming space. You could be a TV repairman (of any gender!) or work for the cable company. Those are pretty good. But! If you’re reading this blog, chances are your ambitions run a little more toward creating the content actually populating these devices and platforms. In that case, you could A) create a brand-new series and become its ruthless, dictatorial showrunner, or B) step into an already-existing series as the director of an individual episode.

For the former, there’s always our Episodic Lab. But for the latter, there’s the Film Independent Episodic Directing Intensive–where in just three whirlwind days, a diverse cross-section of veteran directors, showrunners, actors, executives and cinematographers provide a heavy-duty brain dump to six up-and-coming filmmakers, sharing their experiences and knowledge of the episodic directing landscape.

Exclusive: Film Independent has named the six filmmakers selected for its third annual Episodic Directing Intensive: John Gutierrez, Lorena Lourenço, Alfonso Morgan-Terrero, Huriyyah Muhammad, Kelsey Taylor and So Young Shelly Yo.

A three-day program, the Intensive welcomes veteran directors, showrunners, actors, cinematographers and executives to share their experiences and knowledge of the episodic directing landscape. Notables set to appear this time around include Kyle Patrick Alvarez, Johnson Cheng, Gloria Fan, Georgina Gonzalez, Liz Kelly, Shari Page, Jeremy Podeswa, Alysia Reiner, Beth Schacter, Nancy Schreiber, ASC, Yira Vilaro, Rina Varughese and Daniel Willis, among others.

“In this ever-changing landscape, we are thrilled to support these talented directors and equip them with the knowledge to launch and sustain careers in episodic directing,” said Dea Vazquez, Associate Director of Fiction Programs.

Read more about this year’s Intensive participants below.

John Gutierrez

John Gutierrez is an award-winning Latine writer/director from California. He...

The Hollywood community is in mourning once again after another beloved performer was lost this weekend. Powers Boothe, an Emmy-winning character actor with several diverse roles to his credit, passed away at the age of 68 on Sunday. The actor's death was first announced online in a tweet from actor Beau Bridges, and was later confirmed by his rep, Karen Samfilippo. The rep confirmed that he died in his sleep from apparent natural causes.

The Entertainment Weekly report doesn't reveal if there will be an autopsy performed or not. The actor was born June 1, 1948 in Snyder, Texas, USA, the son of a sharecropper who spent his youth chopping cotton and became the first member of his family to attend a university, receiving a fellowship to Southern Methodist University to study acting, where he received a degree in Fine Arts. After performing in Oregon, Connecticut and Philadelphia, the actor arrived in New...

The year that gave us Gremlins, Ghostbusters and The Temple Of Doom also gave us these 20 underappreciated movies...

It's been said that 1984 was a vintage year for movies, and looking back, it's easy to see why. The likes of Ghostbusters and Gremlins served up comedy, action and the macabre in equal measure. James Cameron's The Terminator cemented Arnold Schwarzenegger's star status and gave us one of the greatest sci-fi action movies of the decade.

This was also the year where the Coen brothers made their screen debut with the stunning thriller Blood Simple, and when the Zucker brothers followed up Airplane! with the equally hilarious Top Secret! And we still haven't even mentioned Beverly Hills Cop, This Is Spinal Tap, The Karate Kid, Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom and the unexpectedly successful romantic comedy, Splash. Then there was Milos Forman's sumptuous period drama Amadeus, which...

As Jurassic World bites a hole in our multiplexes, we compares its events to John Sayles' Jurassic Park IV script from a decade ago...

Nb: the following contains spoilers for Jurassic World.

For Universal, the success of Jurassic World is the $500m pay-off to a story which began well over a decade ago. Work on a third Jurassic Park sequel originally began after the release of Joe Johnston’s coolly-received Jurassic Park III way back in 2001, yet the film languished in a pre-production quagmire as writer after writer seemingly struggled to crack the story.

William Monahan (The Departed, Kingdom Of Heaven) was the first screenwriter to step up to the plate, announced at a time when Keira Knightley was reportedly in the running for a major role. Around that time, Jeff Goldblum and Richard Attenborough were also thought to be returning to their respective roles of Ian Malcom and John Hammond.

Our look at underappreciated films of the 80s continues, as we head back to 1988...

Either in terms of ticket sales or critical acclaim, 1988 was dominated by the likes of Rain Man, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Coming To America. It was the year Bruce Willis made the jump from TV to action star with Die Hard, and became a star in the process.

It was the year Leslie Nielsen made his own jump from the small to silver screen with Police Squad spin-off The Naked Gun, which sparked a hugely popular franchise of its own. Elsewhere, the eccentric Tim Burton scored one of the biggest hits of the year with Beetlejuice, the success of which would result in the birth of Batman a year later. And then there was Tom Cruise, who managed to make a drama about a student-turned-barman into a $170m hit, back when $170m was still an...

Hemdale became one of the largest indie studios of the 80s with films like The Terminator and Platoon. Ryan charts its turbulent history...

When Platoon won four Oscars in 1987, it marked not only a new chapter in Oliver Stone's career as a filmmaker, but also the end of a decade-long battle. Since the 1970s, Stone had been struggling to make his harrowing account of the horrors he'd seen firsthand as a soldier in the Vietnam conflict, but was famously turned down by every major studio in Hollywood.

Platoon, and Stone, finally found sanctuary at a small independent studio with a grand-sounding name: the Hemdale Film Corporation. It was Hemdale, and its co-founder John Daly, that had taken a chance on Stone, and when Platoon came out in 1986, the gamble proved to be a shrewd one: its $6m investment was covered by the first month's ticket sales, and the film...