Author: Empire

SPOILER ALERT: Don’t get stung — this article contains signposted spoilers for The Beekeeper. Some buzzy news for your Friday morning! Following the global box office success of last year’s David Ayer and Jason Statham action thriller The Beekeeper, The Stath’s assassin-turned-apiarist-turned-assassin-again Adam Clay is set to make a busy (probably murderous) bee of himself once again in Miramax’s The Beekeeper 2. And what’s more, per Deadline’s reporting, Indonesian action filmmaker Timo Tjahjanto (Nobody 2, The Shadow Strays) is making a beeline for the director’s hotseat and will be the man calling the shots on the upcoming sequel. We know…

The latest episode of the Empire Podcast is brought to you on a challenging week, one in which we have sadly had to bid farewell to some incredibly talented souls — Buffy The Vampire Slayer star Michelle Trachtenberg, Star Trek producer Roberto Orci, and the great Gene Hackman, who passed away at the age of 95 along with his wife, Betsy Arakawa, and their family dog. Chris Hewitt, James Dyer, Alex Godfrey, and Helen O’Hara take a moment to discuss these monumental losses in this week’s episode, but will convene to pay more in-depth tribute to Hackman in particular on…

Having burst onto the scene as resistance fighter Rose Tico in Star Wars sequels The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, and then followed that straight up with a starring role in 2021’s Raya And The Last Dragon, Kelly Marie Tran has been scratching her acting itch in a variety of indie and lower key projects over the last few years. In her next movie, Shai Ngo’s Hulu bound horror joint Control Freak, Tran will be scratching a far more literal itch — or at least trying to — as Val, a motivational speaker who finds her bonce being…

Legendary American actor and two-time Oscar winner Gene Hackman has died at the age of 95, it has been confirmed. The screen veteran, star of such films as The French Connection, Unforgiven, The Royal Tenenbaums, and the original Superman, was found dead alongside his 63-year-old wife Betsy Arakawa and the couple’s dog at the couple’s Santa Fe home late on Wednesday afternoon, per The New York Post. A character actor in the mould of Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and James Cagney, Hackman — over the course of an acting career spanning five decades, 85 movies, and dozens more plays and…

Ready to take another walk on the Shadyside? Four years after Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street trilogy (1994, 1978, 1666), based on R. L. Stine’s young adult horror books, weekly dropped on Netflix, the streamer is gearing up for another round of genre homaging goodness with 80s set slasher Fear Street: Prom Queen. Helmed by Matt Palmer, the latest instalment in the franchise is — you guessed it! — a prom night chiller, and one that’s set to see a new era of horror begin as a cloaked figure stalks the corridors of Shadyside High School in 1988. Check out the…

Time flies when you’re having fun — and when you’re trying to build a cinematic universe, too. Somehow, it’s already been two years since DC Studios head honchos James Gunn and Peter Safran revealed the roadmap for their newly christened DCU, announcing a wildly ambitious “Gods And Monsters” first phase comprising 10 projects. Now, as the first major movie from that slate, Gunn’s own Superman, gets ready to take flight this July, Gunn and Safran have taken some time to give fans an update on their ever-evolving future plans — including Batman: The Brave And The Bold, a proposed live-action…

There’s a changing of the guards at MI6. Or at least, in James Bond HQ. And while this is very much inside industry news, it’s a major change: the 007 franchise, long overseen by producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, is facing a change in creative control. As such, Broccoli and Wilson are stepping away from the series they’ve shepherded for several decades, with the future of Bond now in the hands of Amazon MGM. As Variety reports, a new joint venture will see Bond remain owned by Broccoli, Wilson and Amazon MGM, but that the latter will take…

It’s been two months since we first shared the very exciting news that modern master of horror Mike Flanagan is writing Clayface, a DCU movie based on the classic Batman baddie, for James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Studios. But while the man behind Haunting Of Hill House and Midnight Mass is on script duty for the malleable miscreant’s big-screen debut, it won’t be Flanagan calling the shots on this one. As THR reports, that honour will be going to James Watkins, the director behind last year’s terrifying English-language remake of Speak No Evil, Daniel Radcliffe starrer The Woman In…

After the veritable guestapaloozas The Empire Film Podcast has been bringing you in recent weeks, we’ve only got one guest gracing your ears on our latest episode. But if we are only bringing in one guest this week, then what a guest it is, as we are delighted to be joined by the great Tatiana Maslany, star of Osgood Perkins’ bonkers new Stephen King adaptation The Monkey. In a wide-ranging, twenty(ish) minute long chat with our very own Chris Hewitt, Maslany pops up on Zoom to talk death, directions, Bob Monkhouse, her own riotous podcast Comedy Bang Bang, and The…

At the ripe old age of 82, Martin Scorsese could be forgiven for slowing things down a little, for taking some time out to watch Captain America: Brave New World or binge a bit of Daredevil: Born Again perhaps. But vacation is evidently not a word in the octogenarian auteur’s vocabulary, as just weeks after we learned that Scorsese’s set to reteam with his Killers Of The Flower Moon lead Leonardo DiCaprio on The Devil In The White City, the octogenarian auteur is already lining up another tantalising new project. According to Deadline, Leo and Marty are shopping a Hawaii…