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Tag: lionsgate

  • Halle Berry Battles Evil Spirit in ‘Never Let Go’ Horror-Thriller Trailer

    Halle Berry Battles Evil Spirit in ‘Never Let Go’ Horror-Thriller Trailer

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    Halle Berry plays a mother with twin sons battling an evil spirit closing in on their wilderness home after a world-ending event in the trailer for Lionsgate‘s Never Let Go, which dropped on Thursday.

    Director Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, Crawl) in the horror-thriller has their remote house in the woods fitted with a long ropes to enable mother and sons to remain connected at all times as unseen dangers approach.

    “The evil out there is clever. One touch without a rope is all it takes,” Berry’s character tells her sons at one point in the trailer, as they commit to keep tethered to the ropes for safety and connection. But as demonic forces engulf their off-the-grid house, one of the twins questions whether evil exists.

    And that breaks the family bond and triggers an all-out battle for survival. “That rope is your lifeline. Never let go. Say it,” a terror-stricken Berry, brandishing a long knife, at one point warns her sons.

    Earlier, Berry touted Never Let Go at CinemaCon.

    Berry said she took the role because she’s a “bona fide adrenaline junkie” who has always loved these kinds of movies. “These boys have never left the house that they were born in for 10 years,” Berry continued. “Right away, it was a creepy environment. I was challenged to bring reality to what that would be like. What does mothering look like in a house in the woods with no one around?”

    For the part, she learned survival skills and said there was “a little bit of Method acting” going on. “There was no electricity, no lights, my character skinning squirrels, and they’re eating bugs and frogs — raw frogs — in the woods,” Berry said,. “I had to really skin a squirrel. These things wildly challenged me to create some reality within this world that felt so foreign.”

    And she said she pulled from her own life as a mother of two to inform her performance: “Since I became a mother 16 years ago, playing these kinds of roles has wildly excited me. With this movie, it reminded me how I would protect my children with my life. We often say, ‘I would take a bullet for my kids.’ Would you take a knife for your kids?”

    Anthony B. Jenkins, Percy Daggs, Matthew Kevin Anderson, Christin Park and Stephanie Lavigne also star.

    Never Let Go, from the producers of Stranger Things and Arrival, is set for a theatrical release on Sept. 27. Lionsgate is releasing the horror thriller, in association with Media Capital Technologies.

    Aja directed the horror pic from a script by Kevin Coughlin and Ryan Grassby. He also produced alongside Dan Cohen, Dan Levine and Shawn Levy, with Berry, Dan Clarke, Connor DiGregorio, Holly Jeter, Emily Morris and Christopher Woodrow serving as executive producers.

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    Etan Vlessing

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  • John Wick Heads to Vegas For an Interactive Attraction

    John Wick Heads to Vegas For an Interactive Attraction

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    Image: Lionsgate

    If you’ve ever wanted to become fully immersed in the world of John Wick, Lionsgate has got you covered. Later this year, the action franchise is getting an “immersive and interactive” tourist attraction in Las Vegas.

    Grace Byers on Horror and Comedy in The Blackening

    Per the press release, the John Wick Experience was made in collaboration with series director Chad Stahelski and his production company 87Eleven. The i12,000 square ft. exhibit on the city’s AREA15 campus have visitors “navigate a high stakes adventure as well as visit a themed bar and retail shop open to the general public.” Guests will be given specific missions that involve characters and iconography from the films. They’ll also brush shoulders with Continental staff, crime bosses, and other assassins who (presumably) didn’t get on Wick’s bad side at any point in the films, all in the name of getting access to private Continental areas and learning juicy secrets.

    Jenefer Brown, Lionsgate’s executive VP for global products, said a Wick experience felt like a natural move for a series built on “a whole world of alliances and vengeance hiding in plain sight. […] This experience draws fans into that world like never before, and AREA15 is an ideal place for fans to live out the fantasy, action and danger portrayed in the films.”

    In 2018, Lionsgate launched a Saw-themed escape room in Vegas, and one for Blair Witch in 2021. The studio has experience with theme park attractions, and Wick is an admitted fit for the ever-expanding concept. And it also helps keep the franchise in folks’ minds as Lionsgate tries to whip up a future for the larger franchise, including a potential fifth mainline movie and a video game.

    [via The Hollywood Reporter]

    Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

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    Justin Carter

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  • Showbiz Stocks 2023: Tech Surges, Big Media Companies Weather Strikes And Streaming Gets A Reboot

    Showbiz Stocks 2023: Tech Surges, Big Media Companies Weather Strikes And Streaming Gets A Reboot

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    Roku was a champ. Lionsgate surged and Netflix jumped. Tech shares went bananas in 2023. Big media stocks had a mixed year of transition dominated by Hollywood strikes with linear television declines and streaming losses.

    Paramount fell. Disney and Fox were basically flat on the year. Giants Comcast and Sony, which both have other businesses like broadband or games and music, both had nice runs. Warner Bros Discovery gained a bit. All are pushing for profitability in streaming and progress there will influence how the stocks perform in 2024.

    Relatively speaking, 2023 was a real bonanza compared with a truly dismal 2022 when only two – that’s two – media stocks rose for the year: WWE (now part of TKO Group) and Nexstar.

    It was a surprisingly good 2023 for stocks overall with the S&P 500 closing up more than 24% for the year. Investors shrugged off high interest rates and inflation, recession fears, threats of a government shutdown, a brief banking crisis and international strife, turning around a year initially expected to be rather glum for markets.

    Tech in particular brought the heat, fueled in large part by an AI frenzy. The famous FAANG group of stocks — Facebook (now Meta), Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google (now Alphabet) — has morphed into The Magnificent Seven. Newly coined this year by an analyst (from the movie), it’s Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Invidia and Tesla. This gang contributed significantly to overall gains. Shares of adjacent tech from Snap to Spotify also rallied.

    Exhibitors were split to lower amid angst at 2024’s box office prospects. Broadcast stocks fell, with advertising soft but set for a political tsunami.

    And the year year wrapped with a flourish of M&A chatter that hasn’t yet but could also buoy shares in 2024. It doesn’t hurt that the Federal Reserve indicated it may finally cut interest rates in 2024 after 11 hikes over the last two years.

    A Closer Look

    Roku was king of media in 2023, up 119%.

    Remember back in March when the company worriedly announced that it had a quarter of its cash at Silicon Valley Bank, which wiped out in the biggest bank collapse since 2008. Disaster was averted when the FDIC agreed to fully guarantee all deposits and Roku took it from there. The business is benefitting as television ad dollars shift from linear to digital, as it expands overseas and as it sells lots of branded Smart TVs. May be a potential takeover target.

    Disney, the only showbiz stock in the 30-member DJIA, nosed up slightly for the year. That’s well off its high for the year of $110 in January, when the market was flushed with enthusiasm at CEO Bob Iger’s return. But these are complicated times with linear television in steady decline, streaming still in the red and Disney facing a string of box office underachievers.

    Iger notably acquired the rest of Hulu from Comcast, paying a previously agreed upon $8.6 billion minimum. It may owe more as both sides have teams working to establish a valuation. He’s waffled a bit on entertaining offers for ABC and linear networks and is looking for a strategic partner for ESPN ahead of an eventual streaming launch. Disney is reportedly doing a deal with Reliance for its assets in India.

    Wall Streeters hope the new year will bring an update on succession planning, and perhaps on an NBA contract renewal. One analyst says he’s been getting lots of client calls on Disney recently. “They’ll say things like, ‘I used to own Disney. I just feel like it could be an interesting stock. There are so many moving parts right now, could you just get me up to speed?’”

    It looks like the company will enter 2024 facing a proxy fight with activist investor Nelson Peltz, who wants two seats on the board — for himself and former Disney CFO Jay Rasulo. Peltz launched a similar adversarial campaign last year but backed off in February before a showdown at the annual meeting.

    Warner Bros Discovery is up about 10% but off its high and from the $24 it traded at when Discovery and Warner Media merged in April 2022. CEO David Zaslav is focused on boosting cash flow and paying down the company’s massive debt, which stood at $45.3 billion at the end of the September quarter. Investors did not love that quarter, spooked in particular by a glum advertising outlook.

    The ad market seems to have entered a new phase not beneficial for legacy media, which is the loss of pricing power, says one analyst. “Historically, as linear TV audiences shrunk, big companies could offset that by raising the prices they charged advertisers for the remaining viewers. In the last year, that game seems to have failed,” unless it’s sports.

    With the April 8 two-year anniversary of the Discovery-Warner Media merger, WBD can explore deals without a big tax penalty. Zaslav has had conversations with Paramount’s controlling shareholder Shari Redstone and CEO Bob Bakish about a possible deal. Warners could also be a seller but that’s hard too, in part due to its huge stable of legacy cable networks.

    Warner Bros Studio and HBO “are good businesses with solid creative trajectories, and, to us, the heart of the company,” said one analyst.

    Paramount Global, meanwhile, fell 17%. It’s financially squeezed so seen as likeliest to do a deal sooner rather than later. Conversations with Zaslav as well as with Skydance Media CEO David Ellison have touched on both an outright sale as well as the possibility of Redstone selling her interest in NAI, the family holding company that houses her Paramount stock. Regular Paramount shareholders would not be getting any premium for their shares in that scenario, maybe one reason deal talk has not moved the needle on the stock. Skydance would not face regulatory hurdles.

    Among big cap entertainment stocks, Netflix gained 63%. Studios are newly willing to license shows. It has stronger balance sheet than most of big media and a larger backlog of unreleased content of anyone but Disney, all of it dedicated to streaming. It has added an advertising tier and is seeing upside from a crackdown on password sharing.

    Smaller Lionsgate had a fantastic run, up a whopping 88% as it ended the year closing the acquisition of eOne from Hasbro and announcing plans to combine the studio with a SPAC early next year in a separation from Starz that it hopes will unlock value.

    Fox is still well liked by some analysts — no streaming losses and a focus on live sports and news. But investors like growth and some wonder about the end game. “It just is what it is,” said one. With linear television shrinking and the cost of sports rights rising, “What’s the narrative?”

    Fox is facing a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit by a second voting machine company, Smartmatic. Earlier this year, it agreed to an $800 million settlement just before trial in a first suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems.

    In exhibition, the movie theater gig is still a tough one and the strikes disrupted production, pushing some big films back, which will slow the pace of new release in 2024. Cinema stocks ended the year mixed, with Cinemark – the No. 3 chain — showing sharp gains. The worlds’ biggest exhibitor AMC Entertainment plunged, but analysts don’t mind. It’s “finally trading roughly in line with its pre-meme historical multiple,” said one.

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    jillg366

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  • Saw XI Producers Drop Possible Details About Horror Sequel's Story

    Saw XI Producers Drop Possible Details About Horror Sequel's Story

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    Things are moving swiftly with Saw XI. Not only was it announced hot on the heels of Saw X’s success. but its release date comes in under a year after its predecessor. But what we didn’t know was what Saw XI would be about? Another prequel? A sequel to the last prequel? Another reboot? Well, the answer may be a little clearer after the film’s producers recent discussions with SFX magazine.

    Saw XI Story: Back to the Past or Back Into a Spiral?

    Producer Oren Koules revealed some big ideas for the sequel, with a potential focus on continuing the story of Saw X. Some spoilers for that film follow.

    “Cecilia is still alive, and Tobin and Shawnee are in a foreign country still. So that, to me, would be the natural place to take at least the next one.”

    For those who’ve watched Saw X, Cecilia is the main antagonist of John Kramer’s prequel story, set between the first two movies in the series, as her fraudulent cancer cure angers the dying Jigsaw, who deals out deadly punishment in his signature gruesome way.

    If Tobin Bell is to be involved heavily in a Saw story, another prequel makes sense, as canonically, his character John Kramer dies in Saw 3 so there’s not much room to wriggle out of narrative-wise (even if they kept him around via flashbacks in other entries).

    A continuation seems even more likely when you take into consideration what fellow producer Mark Burg had to say about a potential Spiral: The Book of Saw follow up.

    “Maybe one day we’ll come back to doing a sequel,” Burg said later in the same interview. “Chris Rock would love to do one, but our focus, because of the success and the response to Saw X, is Saw XI.”

    At this time, it’s unknown if Tobin Bell is returning for Saw XI, but these words from the producers and the fast-approaching release date would suggest a decision has already been made there on the direction for the next entry.

    Saw XI will be without the writing team for the last few films, as Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger recently confirmed they would not be returning for Saw XI.

    Saw XI will head into theaters on September 27, 2024.

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    Neil Bolt

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  • ‘Saw XI’ Announced By Lionsgate Along With 2024 Release Date

    ‘Saw XI’ Announced By Lionsgate Along With 2024 Release Date

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    “The game continues.”

    So reads a post to the official Lionsgate and Saw social media pages this afternoon. Along with it, the date 9.27.24 was posted which, one presumes, is the release date for the 11th film in Lionsgate’s durable franchise. That’s roughly the same window in which Saw X debuted this year.

    The tenth installment of the franchise will chronologically take place between Saw I and Saw II. No official word on whether 81-year-old Tobin Bell will be back as the Jigsaw killer, though after 10 installments, it’s likely a safe bet.

    Saw X opened to $18 million domestically, which rebounded the franchise greatly. That was up +106% over Spiral‘s $8.75M.

    The Saw X opening was just under that of the original movie back in 2004, which was $18.2M. Given the tenth installment’s $13M production cost, it was likely clear to Lionsgate execs that there’s still life in the torture genre franchise.

    For trivia purposes: Saw III repped the highest opening for a Saw pic at $33.6M back in 2006. The average domestic opening for a Saw movie through nine pictures is $23M.

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    tomt

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  • Dewayne Perkins Is Breaking New Ground With ‘The Blackening’

    Dewayne Perkins Is Breaking New Ground With ‘The Blackening’

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    The first time Dewayne Perkins watched Candyman with his family as a child in Chicago, the power went out. “My father, being a big Black man, was standing in the hallway with just his silhouette,” Perkins tells me while sipping a watermelon margarita at the 1 Hotel Central Park. “I was like, “Oh, it’s Candyman. This is the end for all. Thank you so much, family. It’s been a good time, my eight years of life.”

    But what might have been a traumatic experience for an average eight-year-old gave Perkins a lifelong love of the genre, a love that’s currently paying dividends. Currently playing in theaters, his first feature film, The Blackening, finds a group of Black friends beset by a Saw-style killer as they celebrate Juneteenth in a cabin in the woods. Perkins cowrote the film with Girls Trip scribe Tracy Oliver and stars in the **Tim Story–**directed film based on a sketch that he wrote in Chicago in 2016 for a show called “Afrofuturism” at Second City.

    “I was part of an all-Black sketch group, and we needed an opener scene,” he says. “I was like, Okay, I really want to write something that speaks to Blackness and this cast is all Black, but I really want to speak to the diversity within Blackness.” He landed on the well-worn trope of the Black person always getting killed off first in horror movies, like The Shining, Scream 2, and, as it turns out, Candyman. The premise revealed itself at once: If everyone is Black, who dies first?

    “We’d have to have some kind of system to dictate who’s the first to go, and how will we quantify Blackness,” Perkins says. “But I wanted to do it by forcing the Black people to say what they think is not Black in order to show that, Oh, no matter what we do, you’re Black no matter what. That’s the whole point.”

    That point clearly resonated with audiences as Perkins’s idea grew from a Second City sketch into a theatrical production at DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theater, into a viral Comedy Central sketch via Perkins’s improv group, 3Peat. “It was put on World Star Hip Hop, and I was like, Oh, no, what is this going to be?,” Perkins says. “Then, I looked at the comments because I’m a masochist, and there was this one comment that was like, ‘These f—–s are funny.’ And I was like, We won!”

    A queer comedian who’s written for a number of series including Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the critically beloved Saved by the Bell reboot, and The Amber Ruffin Show, Perkins intentionally used familiar archetypes—the party girl, the reformed thug, the gay best friend—in creating the seven friends, played by Perkins, X Mayo, Melvin Gregg, Grace Byers, Antoinette Robertson, Sinqua Walls, and Jermaine Fowler. “At the beginning of the film, you’re like, Oh, these are tropes. Each of these characters are not real. They are a version of a character that we’ve seen in movies,” he says. “The whole film is breaking away the perception of who we think these people are. By the end of the film, we’re like, These are not tropes. These are people. We just have not allowed these people to have the space to be real, to get to know them, because they are usually used to amplify someone else’s narrative or as a joke.”

    Take the character Perkins wrote for himself, also named Dewayne, the gay best friend of Robertson’s Lisa. “That is a trope, and I wanted to give space to that person,” Perkins says. “A gay best friend—that’s a person. I’m many people’s gay best friend. That relationship is worth space in the plot. It should not be a side plot.” Perkins says the fictional Dewayne “is the manifestation of the version of representation I wanted when I was younger,” but is quick to point out the differences between himself and his fictional counterpart. “I’m more chill generally than the character,” he says. “But I very consciously wanted to give the character the space to just exist fully, and really just speak to and prioritize his feelings.”

    Another difference between real Dewayne and The Blackening’s Dewayne? “I’m not going to no cabin,” Perkins quips.

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  • The Blackening’s X Mayo Does Not Mess With Demons

    The Blackening’s X Mayo Does Not Mess With Demons

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    So I did that, and then we had a callback, and at the callback I killed and it was on Zoom. And then I hit up Dewayne. I had hit him on Instagram and I was like, “Bitch, oh my God, I’m Shanika.” And he was like, “You playing with me, bitch? You know they don’t tell me nothing.” So I sent him the screenshot of the deal, that it was closed. I was like, “Boo, it’s me.” And he was like, “Oh, my God.” And we were so excited because Dewayne is my baby. So to go into this unique experience with him was really exciting.

    It’s so rare to see a horror film with an all-Black cast. I loved the diverse array of Black characters that were allowed to exist on screen. Normally in horror movies, there’s one Black person, and they get killed first.

    Yes, and it’s one trope of a Black person even then. Although we have seven archetypes of Black people [in The Blackening], we still didn’t represent all of us. There’s too many motherfuckers, right? There’s too many nuances.

    I said this before, and I’ll say it again: the writing would not be as strong had it not been written by a Black queer man and a Black woman. We are the leaders of the pack of every fucking march—it don’t have nothing to do with us. Child, it could be eczema. We’re like, “Guys, we got to get new cream. Everybody’s peeling. What is happening?” [laughs].

    You have a pretty harrowing night swimming scene in the film. What was it like to shoot it?

    Baby, I was on my cycle at 4:00 AM in the lake. And you know why I did it? Because I feel sometimes when you see certain stunts, and you know that’s not the person, that takes you out of it. And I know how to swim. I just was like, ‘No, we’re going to dispel that fucking myth. Fuck you. I’m going to fucking swim.’ They had a whole thing of fresh, alkaline water in a separate trailer so that I could shower right after. It was a man-made lake near Dodger Stadium. It was green. was just treading, going scene after scene after scene. That water was so heavy.

    But I wanted to. I was like, this is for the Black girls who swim. And also to dispel the myth. Like, fuck that: No, we are in the water. We’re swimming. Dewayne asked me today, he was like, “Did Shanika know how to swim?” I said, “No, it’s instinctual.” She’s like, “Bitch, we gotta get out.”

    Were you a horror movie person growing up?

    No. Don’t play with demons. No, I don’t like it. And it really fucks with my brain. And you would think because of that I don’t fuck with true crime, but I’m obsessed. But yeah, I did not fuck with horror.

    What do you want people to take from The Blackening?

    What I want people to take from this is that they had a good-ass time. They laughed their ass off and they saw themselves on screen, or an archetype of themselves on screen. And that they realize how essential it is to support Black art. Because there is something called symbolic annihilation. If we don’t see ourselves, we don’t see the value in ourselves. And if you are white, please, please, if you want to support us, give up power. Because it’s systemic. It’s as simple as that.

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    Chris Murphy

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