Author: Empire

We’ve had the Murder Mysterenaissance, the Brendanaissance, and the Cageaissance, but now it is time for the main event: McConaissance 2.0. Yes, after six years away from the movies (beyond some voicework here and there), Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey has not one but two films heading our way this year. One is The Vast Of Night filmmaker Andrew Patterson’s sophomore effort, crime thriller The Rivals Of Amziah King. The other — whose first trailer just dropped — is The Lost Bus, an Apple TV+ bound feature from Paul Greengrass based on Paradise, journalist Lizzie Johnson’s first-hand account of 2018’s deadly…

To say that the first part of Jon M. Chu’s blockbuster take on Broadway smash Wicked went down well with fans and critics alike would be something of an understatement. The filmmaker’s Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo starring Wizard Of Oz prequel wasn’t just popular — it was a box-office record breaker. Now Chu just has the unenviable task of, er, sticking the landing on his wildly ambitious Wicked Witch Of The West origin story with Wicked: For Good. Luckily, if the spellbinding first trailer for our return to Oz is anything to go by, it looks like we’re in…

Since making her major big screen breakthrough in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria back in 2018, Mia Goth has marked herself out as one of the most otherworldly talents in Hollywood today, putting in singular performances in everything from High Life to Emma to Infinity Pool to Ti West’s X trilogy. Now, per THR’s reporting, it looks like Goth is set to go from the otherworldly to the quite-literally-out-of-this-worldly with her first blockbuster booking. The movie? Shawn Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter. The role? Lead villain. Yes, despite recent whisperings that Mikey Madison had been offered the villainous lead opposite star Ryan Gosling…

This week’s episode of the freshly award-losing Empire Film Podcast finds the podteam lick their wounds after a demoralising defeat in the Best Podcast (Consumer) category at the BSMEs earlier in the week. How do they do this? Why, by talking about movies of course! Yes, undeterred by their unwinning streak, Chris Hewitt is joined in the podbooth by James Dyer and Helen O’Hara for another chaotic episode in which the team discuss the week’s movie news (including trailers for *deep breath* Wicked: For Good, Alien: Earth, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, Wake Up Dead…

It’s been almost four years since the words ‘James Bond Will Return’ flashed up on cinema screens at the end of No Time To Die — a head scratching promise after the movie’s, er, explosive finale. And yet, while MI6’s finest may not be ready to make his big screen comeback just yet as Amazon MGM Studios acclimatises to being the franchise’s new custodians, James Bond is returning — in a new AAA video game, no less. Hailing from stealth specialist Hitman developers IO Interactive, 007 First Light is set to offer a fresh take on Bond’s origin story, following…

The 21st century has birthed some truly remarkable horror icons. Jigsaw in Saw, Art the Clown in Terrifier, Esther in Orphan, Annabelle in The Conjuring, M3GAN in, er, M3GAN — you get the idea. But there is no modern movie monster quite like Octavia Spencer’s Sue Ann, the titular teen-killing veterinarian assistant at the centre of Tate Taylor’s Ma. Such is the love fans have for Spencer’s unhinged spinster, who never drinks alone, that Blumhouse has used its inaugural Business of Fear event to officially confirm that after keeping us waiting for six years, Ma 2 is coming. “Ma has proven…

There is an argument to be made that Blumhouse is one of the busiest production companies around right now. This year alone, the horror juggernaut has already helped shepherd Wolf Man, Drop, and The Woman In The Yard into cinemas, and it will have added M3GAN 2.0, Black Phone 2, and a Five Nights At Freddy’s sequel to its expansive canon before 2025 is through. Now, at the company’s first The Business Of Fear event in Hollywood, Blumhouse has announced it’s teaming up with James Wan’s Atomic Monster and Kinetic Games to bring paranormal survival horror hit Phasmophobia to the…

We may still be six months out from the release of James Cameron’s epic sci-fi threequel Avatar: Fire And Ash, but that isn’t stopping the iconic filmmaker from lining up more sure-to-be-box-office-smashing ducks on the horizon. Yesterday, the Terminator creator confirmed via his official social media accounts that after his latest check-in with the Na’vi, his production company Lightstorm will be shifting focus to work on an adaptation of Joe Abercrombie’s dark fantasy tome The Devils. And, what’s more, Cameron himself will co-write the movie with the book’s author. Released just last month, The Devils — a sort-of fantastical riff…

Ask anyone who watched Barbarian in cinemas, and they’ll tell you the same thing: they never knew quite what was coming next. Zach Cregger’s 2022 horror was full of thrilling narrative hairpin turns, twisting in wildly unexpected ways as it unspooled its loopy story. And by the sounds of things, he’s only just getting started. The writer-director is back this summer with the highly-anticipated Weapons, another horror original, with an almightily creepy premise. The gist is this: in the middle of the night (2:17am, to be exact), an entire class of children (except for one) wakes up, and disappears into…

In the annals of cinema history, there have been many movies inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 1818 Gothic masterwork Frankenstein. To name but a few, James Whale did it in 1931, and repeated the trick with The Bride Of Frankenstein in 1935; Mel Brooks turned the Promethean tale into the stuff of farcical gold with Young Frankenstein; and Robert De Niro channelled his inner creature to memorable effect in Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, heading to Netflix this November after a hard-fought 17 year journey to the screen, could well top them all — at…