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Writing stories, not just jokes NBC “The English Patient” was the second “Seinfeld” episode Koren wrote after “The Abstinence.” According to Koren, “Seinfeld” writers didn’t just need a basic idea for their episode pitches. No, they needed to be sure that they could fill a half-hour-long, two-act story. Koren recalled: “Unless you could come up with a story in that two-act structure they had, you just didn’t proceed. On that show, forget the jokes, each subsequent story beat had to be funny, that was a rule....

Should Someone Else Have Won The 2007 Best Actress Oscar Over Helen Mirren? An Investigation Miramax By Mike Shutt/Nov. 8, 2022 9:00 am EST (Welcome to Did They Get It Right?, a series where we take a look at an Oscars category from yesteryear and examine whether the Academy’s winner stands the test of time.) For as silly as they might be at their core, winning an Academy Award can do a lot for a person....

So Chris Pratt’s Super Mario Bros. Voice Is Just His Chris Pratt Voice, Huh? Illumination By Erin Brady/Oct. 6, 2022 5:08 pm EST When it was first announced that Chris Pratt was going to be voicing Mario in the “Super Mario Bros.” movie, the Internet was more than a bit shocked. After all, you don’t hear the actor speak in stuff like “Parks and Recreation” and “Jurassic World” and automatically think of an Italian plumber....

Superhero Bits: The Flash 2 Already Has A Script, Marvel Zombies Will Be Short & More Marvel By Ryan Scott/Oct. 18, 2022 4:22 pm EST (Superhero Bits is a collection of stories, updates, and videos about anything and everything inspired by the comics of Marvel, DC, and more. For comic book movies, TV shows, merchandise, events, and whatever catches our eye, this is the place to find anything that falls through the cracks....

Blood Red Sky Netflix “Blood Red Sky” feels like it was made by grabbing a bunch of random concepts and mashing them together, with muddled but entertaining results. This German film follows Nadja (Peri Baumeister), a woman who boards a plane alongside her son, Elias (Carl Anton Koch). From the get-go, she’s clearly stressing over something, and carefully carrying small bottles of some undescribed medicine. When a terrorist group hijacks the plane, Nadja’s secret — not too much of a spoiler to say that it’s something bloody; this is a vampire movie — comes out, and at that point the film becomes an even more nightmarish experience....

The Art Of Star Wars: The High Republic Author Kristin Baver On Organization And Execution [Exclusive Interview] Abrams Books By Bryan Young/Dec. 7, 2022 11:45 pm EST Kristin Baver is a very public face at Lucasfilm these days. Beginning as a writer for StarWars.com, she’s worked her way up to the face of the “Star Wars” news show and has written several books about the franchise. Her first was the in-universe biography of the Skywalker family, “Star Wars: Skywalker — A Family at War....

The Creepy Little Pale Girl In Terrifier 2 Explained Cinedigm/Bloody Disgusting By Matthew Bilodeau/Oct. 25, 2022 4:59 pm EST This article contains major spoilers for “Terrifier 2.” Going into its fourth week in theaters, “Terrifier 2” continues to hold strong at the box office. The widespread reports of fainting and vomiting have only emboldened curious folks outside of the horror bubble to come and see what all of the fuss is about....

The Daily Stream: Evil Dead Is The Beautifully Gory Reboot To End All Reboots Sony Pictures Releasing By Lex Briscuso/Oct. 28, 2022 5:00 pm EST (Welcome to The Daily Stream, an ongoing series in which the /Film team shares what they’ve been watching, why it’s worth checking out, and where you can stream it.) The Movie: “Evil Dead” (2013) Where You Can Stream It: Hulu, Tubi, Pluto TV The Pitch: We all remember the original “The Evil Dead,” I’m sure, but if not, here’s a quick refresher: Five friends head out to a cabin in the woods to spend the weekend, but when they discover a cassette tape containing an ancient incantation that summons demons onto their path, one of the attendees (Bruce Campbell) must survive the onslaught of demonic possession that awaits his friends....

The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power Brings A ‘Great Wave’ Of Doom Over A Scattershot Episode Prime Video By Jeremy Mathai/Sept. 16, 2022 1:30 am EST Ensemble shows like “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” tend to come with a built-in disadvantage compared to smaller stories with less sprawling casts. With so many characters and only so much narrative real estate to go around, J....

The New Dungeons & Dragons Film Went Through Many Titles Before Honor Among Thieves Paramount Pictures By Jeremy Mathai/July 28, 2022 11:21 am EST D&D nerds, assemble! The popular and beloved fantasy game is about to receive its next major big-screen treatment (ideally, one that will actually feel worthy of the rich source material, of course) in the form of Paramount’s “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.” Hoping to take advantage of the ongoing fantasy boom, which currently includes titles like HBO’s “House of the Dragon” and Prime Video’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” this latest “Dungeons & Dragons” adaptation comes loaded with mainstream appeal....

Time Wasn’t On Sally Hawkins’ Side While Learning ASL For The Shape Of Water Guillermo del Toro has always had a soft spot for the misunderstood, and his 2017 masterpiece “The Shape of Water” is perhaps one of his biggest explorations of the relationship between two individuals existing in a world that does not understand them. “The Shape of Water” often feels like a modern re-telling of director Jack Arnold’s 1954 monster movie, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon....

Titanic Turned Kate Winslet Off Working With James Cameron Paramount Pictures/20th Century Fox/Lightstorm Entertainment By Lee Adams/July 23, 2022 9:00 pm EST I was a heavy Titanic nerd as a teen; if you ever needed to know how many rivets held the ill-fated ship together, I was your guy. I read Walter Lord’s “A Night to Remember” over and over, and I spent many hours poring over those haunting images of the wreck in Robert Ballard’s “The Discovery of the Titanic....

The making of Alfie Netflix “The Tom Hardy thing was mad,” McCarthy shared in response to a question about getting the “Mad Max: Fury Road” actor on board. “I remember we were on the tech recces [pre-production tech scouting] and I was wandering around the graveyard…Tom was thinking about doing it and he’d had a look at it and he wanted to kind of chat to me about what he was thinking of doing....

Lucasfilm/Disney+ By Cameron Roy Hall/Dec. 5, 2022 12:12 pm EST 2022 saw the return of deep magic. George R. R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones” universe made its way back to the small screen with “House of the Dragon” while J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth was re-imagined for the series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.” Never to be outdone, Lucasfilm drew George Lucas’ high fantasy (no, not that one) “Willow” out of memory for a sequel series....

Request denied? Warner Brothers In a recent interview to discuss the September-released biopic about his life, the comedian-singer told The Hollywood Reporter what happened when he wrote to Warner Bros. asking permission to caricature Rowling’s series: “Whenever it was, about a decade or two ago, I approached the movie company just to get a general blessing like, ‘Hey, I’d like to do a Harry Potter parody.’ And I think they said no, or they never responded or whatever....

What Was Syril Karn Thinking During That Awkward Moment With Dedra In Andor? [Exclusive] Lucasfilm By Tyler Llewyn Taing/Nov. 3, 2022 8:32 pm EST In “Andor,” the shadow of the Imperial Empire looms over the galaxy. Entire planets are under their occupation. Their influence is silently felt across the galactic senate. Though “Star Wars” has never been a stranger to political themes, we’ve never quite seen daily life in this universe seem so bleak....

Leave ’em screaming MGM According to Savini, the dream sequence at the end of “Friday the 13th” was initially just a throwaway scene. But what worked for “Carrie” would surely work for his film as well. As he told The New York Daily News, “[W]e thought that we need a ‘chair jumper’ like that, and I said, ‘Let’s bring in Jason.’” Obviously, the likelihood of Jason Voorhees stirring to life to take revenge on the camp counselor who just killed his mother, after chilling for 20-plus years at the bottom of Camp Crystal Lake, is exactly nil....

Winning An Oscar Wasn’t Exactly A Career Boost For Dianne Wiest Miramax By Travis Yates/Sept. 23, 2022 9:34 am EST Sometimes even when you win, you lose. For Dianne Wiest, that might just be the case. The Academy Award-winning actor says that winning an Oscar wasn’t the career boon she thought it would be. Despite flashing impressive range in roles that netted three Best Supporting Actress nominations and two wins, Wiest says she’s been boxed in by playing the same character in nearly every movie she’s offered....

George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Touchstone Pictures The handsomest man in the land’s “numbskull trilogy” with the Coens (it’s actually four movies) got off to a raucous start with his energetic portrayal of Ulysses Everett McGill, a kind-hearted Southern man given to sin, for which he’s been remanded to a chain gang. This loose adaptation of Homer’s “The Odyssey” documents Everett’s escape, along with equally hapless compatriots Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), and it literally sings on account of Clooney’s unabashedly cartoonish mugging and gesturing, under which lies the soul of a good man and a devoted husband....

Murphy’s back for a Netflix sequel A24 Still, talk of a fourth installment has lingered for decades, with a Brett Ratner-helmed version in the works back in 2008, and a legacy sequel series about Axel’s son planned at CBS in 2013. The latter was eventually shelved when, according to Murphy, the studio passed on the pilot after realizing Murphy wouldn’t be a recurring guest star. “It tested where they have these knobs [that you] turn if you like it,” Murphy told IndieWire, “And whenever I came on the screen, Axel Foley would come on the screen, they turned it so they literally broke the knobs on the thing....