Author: Empire

There’s a reason Marlon Brando ranks as one of the all-time-great actors. Across his career, he embodied so many legendary characters – sometimes he disappeared into them, other times the characters seemed to mould themselves over Brando’s own physicality and persona. You never knew quite what you’d get from him; his presence and his voice work always gave his performances a dimension of the unexpected. It’s a lot, then, for another actor to try and get under Brando’s skin – which was the task of Billy Zane, who looks near-indistinguishable from the man himself in Waltzing With Brando. The film,…

Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos have proven themselves to be a cinematic powerhouse pairing. After first working together on 2018’s wonderfully weird The Favourite, they reunited for the multiple award-winning Poor Things, and again for last year’s bleakly brilliant triptych Kinds Of Kindness. Now there’s a fourth collaboration on the way, as they team up again for Bugonia, an English-language reimagining of Korean cult classic Save The Green Planet. After dropping a teaser in June, we now have a full trailer to sink our teeth into – and it has all the signs of a classically bizarre (complimentary) Lanthimos…

Trainers on, people! The Running Man is fast approaching, teaming Glen Powell up with director Edgar Wright for an explosive new take on Stephen King’s dystopian thriller. But before the bloodbath begins, you can read all about it in the new issue of Empire – on sale Thursday 28 August. (You can order one online here.) Ahead of the issue hitting shelves, here’s a sneak peek inside its pages. The Running Man Ready… set… go! Empire goes on set of The Running Man with Edgar Wright and Glen Powell, getting up to speed on a more faithful adaptation of the…

Inner turmoil is something of a Safdie Brothers specialty. In Good Time, they depicted a brotherly relationship bubbling over with anxiety, protectiveness, emotional vulnerability. In Uncut Gems, we saw how Howard Ratner’s reckless bravado masked a gaping void threatening to swallow him whole. And so, while The Smashing Machine is a solo Benny Safdie venture (his brother Josh is behind the upcoming Marty Supreme), there’s still that same DNA there – his UFC movie, about the life of Mark Kerr (played here by Dwayne Johnson), is its own exploration of a disparity between a surface appearance and what’s happening beneath.…

No gameshow achieves notoriety without a stellar host. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire blossomed under the anchorage of Chris Tarrant. American institution Jeopardy! has had multiple iconic answer-givers (technically, the answers are the questions) over the decades. And what would The Chase be without Bradley Walsh? In The Running Man, the titular gameshow – a brutal human-hunting nightmare, where you survive 30 days to win a shedload of cash – has its own MC, Bobby T, played in Edgar Wright’s new adaptation by the legendary Colman Domingo. And in the film’s first trailer, he proved a bombastic presence, barking,…

When Wicked arrived at the tail end of 2024, audiences made a real song and dance about it – it pulled in over $750 million at the box office, earned Oscar nominations, and rave reviews to boot. But how do you move past ‘Defying Gravity’? The first film saw director Jon M. Chu adapt act one of the hit stage musical – telling a very different backstory for the witches of Oz, aka Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba and Ariana Grande’s G(a)linda – closing out on the ultimate Elphabanger. But fear not. Act two, adapted into Wicked: For Good, still has plenty…

The biggest rule of a Knives Out mystery is, don’t expect the same thing as the last Knives Out mystery. The sun-soaked Glass Onion was a tonal switch-up from the autumnal family affair of Knives Out. And so, the upcoming Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery will mark a similarly significant pivot from Rian Johnson’s last outing – a darker, Gothic-toned tale nodding to Edgar Allan Poe and Washington Irving, swapping the private Greek island setting for a pastoral New England town, where everyone’s faith is about to be tested. Into it all enters Daniel Craig’s detective Benoit…

Ostensibly, Avatar: The Way Of Water was the story of Jake and Neytiri’s Na’vi family. Of the return of baddie Miles Quaritch, now himself a Na’vi ‘recom’. Of old wounds, fresh conflicts, and shaky alliances playing out across Pandora. But alongside all of that, another thread captured audiences’ imaginations: the plight of Payakan, the mighty Tulkun space-whale who bonded with Jake’s wayward son Lo’ak, and made a human nemesis in Brendan Cowell’s Mick Scoresby, a maniacal mariner making a fortune from hunting down Tulkun and draining their ultra-valuable brain juices. Last time, a showdown between Scoresby and Payakan saw Scoresby…

Glen Powell is no stranger to action. He was, after all, a standout in Top Gun: Maverick, where he learned the secrets of high-flying setpieces under the wing of Tom Cruise. And he was a pure adrenaline junkie in Twisters as ‘tornado wrangler’ Tyler Owens, putting pedal to metal as he chased wild weather events for kicks. But The Running Man is different. In Edgar Wright’s fresh adaptation of the Stephen King novel, Powell’s Ben Richards will be… well, running, and fighting, and leaping into action, evading bullets, dodging killers, and scrambling for his life as he battles to win…

Earlier this year, Danny Boyle returned to the big screen with 28 Years Later, a horrifying examination of the dark side of humanity, the insidious capacity of the media to shape society in its image, and — basically — where it all went wrong for us Homo sapiens. Continuing in that vein then, Boyle’s next movie will be Ink, which is set to detail media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s rise to power in the late 1960s. And, according to THR, The Brutalist Oscar nominee Guy Pearce is currently in talks to play the mega-rich magnate. Per THR’s reporting, negotiations are ongoing…