News Around the Net!

I must admit, this first trailer for the Beetlejuice sequel made me very happy:

I love this trailer for The Penguin, a TV show on MAX spinning out of The Batman.  I hope this is good!!

Also from the world of DC/Warner Brothers comes this intriguing first trailer for Joker: Folie a Deux:

I enjoyed the first Joker (even while I recognize it’s very derivative of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy), and I’m intrigued to see what they’ve cooked up for the sequel.  Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn is an inspired idea.  Is the whole film a musical?  I can’t wait to see this.

Bring on the next season of Tales of The Jedi animated shorts, now called Tales of the Empire!!!  This trailer is awesome!!

I LOVED the first Tales of the Jedi season, which beautifully told (in six shorts) the story of the rise of Ahsoka Tano and the fall of Count Dooku.  (They depicted Dooku’s fall to the Dark Side better in those three shorts than George Lucas did Anakin’s story in three feature-length films!)  This new Tales of the Empire season bowled me over with its deep cut main characters: first off is an exploration of Morgan Elsbeth, who we met on The Mandalorian and saw on the Ahsoka show.  I love seeing how she met Thrawn!  I love the allusions to her Nightsisters heritage!  And then there is Barriss Offee, an important but minor character from the animated Clone Wars series, a Jedi padawan who fell to the dark side and whose actions were tied up in why Ahsoka left the Jedi order.  I love seeing Grievous, the Grand Inquisitor (from Rebels and the Obi-Wan Kenobi show), and even the mysterious, masked zombie Inquisitor from Ahsoka, Marrok!  I can’t wait for this!!!

This is cool — they’ve released two different trailers for the second season of House of the Dragon, each focusing on a different side of the civil war, Black and Green:

I’m a fan of Neil Gaiman’s Dead Boy Detectives characters (who originated in his classic Sandman comic book series), and I’m excited to see them brought to life (sort-of!) in this new Netflix series:

I’ve been hearing rumors for years that Jerry Seinfeld was making a Pop-Tart movie… looks like it’s actually a reality!  Will this be good?  Hard to say, but you can bet I’ll be watching this:

In my last News Around the Net post I shared a trailer for Hacks season three.  Click here for an in-depth interview with several of the show’s key creative people, discussing the series’ long journey to returning for a third season.  I really enjoyed the first two seasons of the show, and I’m interested to see what they have planned for season three.  (Seeing as I thought the season two finale was the show’s end-point, I’m intrigued to read they’re hoping the show will run for five seasons!)

I’m excited to watch this new animated Spider-Man short, set in the world of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse!

This is wild: though his show Bupkis was renewed for a second season, Pete Davidson has decided he doesn’t want to make it and is ending the show.  Wow!  I wonder what the story is here?

I’ve really enjoyed the first few episodes of X-Men ’97 — click here for an in-depth article on the show’s return!

I can’t wait to watch this documentary Mike Mignola: Drawing Monsters!  Mr. Mignola created Hellboy, and he’s one of my all-time favorite comic book creators.

There have been rumors of a new Highlander movie for years… now it sounds like Henry Cavill is involved… I’d be interested to see if this ever actually happens!

That mention of Henry Cavill weirdly connects to this article about Aziz Ansari’s new film, starring Seth Rogen and Keanu Reeves… I’m excited to see that!

I’m always interested to see what Kevin Smith is working on… his new film The 4:30 Movie sounds interesting.  (Though it has the same name as a great podcast! I bet they were both inspired by the same thing, which I too remember from growing up.)

I enjoyed Paul Feig’s movie A Simple Favor.  I never expected we’d get a sequel!!  Crazy.  But I’m curious to see what Mr. Feig has cooked up.

I’m intrigued by the casting of Julia Garner as the Silver Surfer in Marvel’s new Fantastic Four film.  In general I’m open to gender-flipping characters.  (One recent example that comes to mind: I’m not a fan of Apple TV+’s Foundation series, but I applauded their making the two main characters female on the show.)  But after so many mediocre-to-bad FF films over the years, I’m really hoping to finally get a faithful FF film now that they’re a part of the MCU.  And so it’s somewhat disappointing to me that we won’t get the classic male Norrin Radd version of the character.  I suspect that Marvel felt this character had already been done (he was the one successful element, in my opinion, of 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer), and also with only one main female character on the team, I can understand why they wanted another female character among the supporting cast.  Julia Garner is a great actress (she was impressive on The Americans), so I’m interested to see how this goes.  (Plus, I’m disgusted by the way online trolls have been attacking Marvel for casting a Jewish actress, so now I’m all in on camp Garner!)

I’ll leave you with this: a wonderful article from Rolling Stone listing 50 terrible movies by great directors.  This was a fun read!

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