British Films

Angels in the Asylum, a British indie film starring Simon Pegg and Katherine Waterston, has stopped shooting indefinitely after running out of cash midway through production, Deadline can reveal.

Angels in the Asylum was mounted without its financing fully in place and had to halt filming in February, 15 days into a month-long shoot. There is no clarity on when the £5M ($6.4M) production might restart as producers scramble to bring in new finance.

Angels in the Asylum set out to tell an important story about women incarcerated against their wishes, but has created a messy legacy in which crew members are said to be owed at least £600,000 in wages. Cast pay was ringfenced in an escrow account under Equity union agreements.

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The reasons for the financial strife are disputed. The position of Sorrenti and Greenwood is that funding under an arrangement with distributor Parkland Pictures has not materialized. In a statement, they said it was “devastating” that Angels in the Asylum did not have the funds to carry on shooting. They are in talks with other financiers in a bid to resurrect the movie and “remain determined to find a solution.”

Parkland CEO John Cairns told Deadline that his company had no agreement to finance Angels in the Asylum beyond its work as a sales agent. He added that proposed tax credit funding through Parkland Film Capital was not finalized and, even if it was, there would still be a “very large gap” in the budget.

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Angels in the Asylum was able to begin production with funding from other investors, while Sorrenti and Greenwood also put cash into the project. Around 150 people were left out of work when the film went on hiatus, with crew members being owed at least three weeks’ wages, expenses, and holiday pay. Suppliers are also said to be significantly out of pocket.

Some crew members said they had been left in financial jeopardy amid precarious conditions in the UK film and TV production industry. A small number of people are pursuing legal claims in an effort to recover the money they are owed. Bectu and Equity are supporting members impacted by the hiatus.

Those caught up in the collapse are furious, with some complaining that the issues have been compounded by poor communication and false hope from those running the production. When filming paused in February, producers said they hoped it would be a week before production could resume. “We have been strung along, it’s unbelievable,” said one person. Another source added: “The producers were in over their heads.”

The position of the producers is that they have been working tirelessly to resolve the funding gap. Sorrenti and Greenwood said they have also not been paid and are working to resuscitate the film without remuneration. They are said to be heartbroken about what has taken place.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/26208354

A few weeks ago, a source inside of Amazon/MGM was telling Jeff Sneider that rumored Bond producer David Heyman was potentially eyeing Alfonso Cuarón to direct the next 007 instalment.

Matt Belloni is now saying on The Town podcast that he’s also heard Cuarón could direct Bond 26, adding that the filmmaker has met with Amazon and has a new “take” for how the next one would look like.

Amazon wants to move quickly and have a team ready once the $1 billion rights deal is closed with Barbara Broccoli. Yesterday, I reported that writers have already been hired for Bond 26; it makes sense that a director is now being eyed as well.

What this Cuarón rumor seems to imply is that Amazon/MGM are not willing to wait another 18 months for Christopher Nolan to complete and release “The Odyssey.” Hey, the studio spent over $1 billion to toss Broccoli aside, it’s no wonder they want to get this next Bond off the ground ASAP.

Amazon is lining up Harry Potter’s David Heyman and Spider-Man’s Amy Pascal to oversee the James Bond franchise for its studio MGM.

In news first reported by Puck, the two heavyweight producers are said to be the choice of senior Amazon-MGM executives Mike Hopkins, Jen Salke, and Courtenay Valenti and the studio is now negotiating deals with the pair.

Heyman is the British producer who acquired the film rights to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter book series, and produced all eight subsequent film adaptations as well as the three Fantastic Beasts films. Other high-profile credits to his name include the Noah Baumbach-directed Marriage Story and White Noise, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.

Pascal was chair of Sony’s film division until 2015, where she oversaw Bond films including Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall. She was forced to leave in the aftermath of the studio’s infamous email hack after leaked messages suggested she had made racist jokes at the expense of Barack Obama. Since leaving Sony, Pascal has produced the Tom Holland Spider-Man films as well as the animated Spider-Verse spin-offs, and is now working on Gerwig’s Narnia film.

Amazon has paid more than $1bn for “creative control” of the James Bond franchise, the Guardian understands, in a deal that has met with a mixed response from stars of the films.

Amazon MGM Studios said on Thursday that it had struck a deal with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, the British-American heirs to the film producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and longtime stewards of the Bond films.

The world’s second largest corporation by revenue confirmed it had formed a joint venture with the duo to house the James Bond intellectual property with Amazon assuming “creative control”.

Amazon said the financial terms were for its eyes only, but it is understood that control of 007 was ceded for about $1bn (£790m), a figure first reported by the US Hollywood news oulet Deadline.

Daniel Craig, the most recent actor to play Bond, offered his congratulations to Broccoli and Wilson on Friday. Craig, who first appeared in Casino Royale in 2006, said: “My respect, admiration and love for Barbara and Michael remain constant and undiminished.

“I wish Michael a long, relaxing (and well-deserved) retirement, and whatever ventures Barbara goes on to do, I know they will be spectacular and I hope I can be part of them.”

The actor Valerie Leon, however, a former “Bond girl”, raised concerns that 007 would not be British any more if Amazon was calling the shots.

Leon, 81, featured in the films The Spy Who Loved Me and Never Say Never Again, alongside Roger Moore and Sean Connery. She told ITV’s Good Morning Britain that it does not worry her because “life changes and everything moves on and changes”.

“The Bond franchise was very British and it won’t be any more,” she said. “And obviously, if they make films they won’t go into the cinema … everything is so changed now, it just won’t be the same and I’m very old-fashioned anyway.”

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/24475507

Amazon MGM Studios is set to take creative control of the James Bond franchise.

The shock announcement — which is sure to shake and, indeed, stir the industry — was made Thursday, alongside the news that long-time producers and custodians of 007, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, would be stepping back.

As per details of the arrangement, Amazon MGM Studios, Wilson and Broccoli have formed a new joint venture to house the James Bond intellectual property rights. The three parties will remain co-owners of the iconic franchise but Amazon MGM will have creative control.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/24148722

Hammer Films, arguably the biggest name in British genre filmmaking, is busy making a new horror feature – its first since 2023’s Doctor Jekyll. Called Ithaqua, it’s a period piece with a solid cast including Luke Hemsworth and Kevin Durand.

Shooting is currently underway in Canada, with the iconic studio releasing a number of behind-the-scenes images from the production on its Instagram feed.

Rather disappointingly, however, a separate post includes a teaser poster which bears all the hallmarks of being generated using a piece of AI software like Midjourney. We’ve contacted Hammer Films to find out whether or not it is indeed AI-generated and will update this post if and when we get a response.

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As for the film itself, it stars Luke Hemsworth, Kevin Durand, Craig Lauzon and Michael Pitt and is co-written, directed and produced by Casey Walker. If the synopsis is anything to go by, it sounds like we’re in for something harsh and gritty, like The Revenant but with a supernatural creature in the place of a hungry bear. Here’s the official description:

Set in the brutal wilderness of 1800s Canada, the fur trade is in decline and a remote outpost is starving. A mercenary fights to unite the survivors against the cold, the hunger… and something far worse. A dark force is watching. Waiting. And those who fall into its grasp are cursed with an insatiable hunger for flesh.

Last month, Boyle told Empire that he was going to be directing the trilogy capper, and claimed that it wouldn’t be shot “until audiences respond to the first film.” Judging by the record-breaking reaction to the trailer, I don’t believe Boyle/Garland will have much of a problem completing their trilogy.

In fact, it actually looks like it’s now on the fast track as a recent listing has “28 Years Later: Part 3” starting production on March 31, 2025. The entire trilogy will have been shot and completed by the time Boyle starts to do press on the first one in June.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/23914079

On Avenue Mews in the leafy North London suburb of Muswell Hill, long-term friends Ruth (Ruth Syratt) and Megan (Megan Stevenson) run Cha Cha Cha together from rented premises. There they sell vintage goods – “anything we can get our hands on that’s from the past”, as Ruth puts it. They do not, however, sell the old dodgem car – with flashing lights and lo-fi control boards attached – which they find abandoned by the bins outside their shop, but instead, upon discovering that it is a time machine, use it to gather genuine antiques from different places and eras.

Six years later, business is booming, but strange meteorological phenomena suggest that something is amiss in the space-time continuum. A secret club of local eccentric inventors known as the Technology Engineering Scientific Thought and Innovation Society, or ’T.E.S.T.I.S’ (it will later be renamed B.R.E.S.T.S., in part to reflect the shifting gender balance of its membership), realises what is happening, and recruits the two women to their group.

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Narrated by Stephen Fry, Time Travel Is Dangerous is a very English kind of sci-fi comedy, with very little actual science, but plenty of absurdist emphasis on the schlubbish, amateurish, no-budget side of invention – and indeed of inventive filmmaking. It is an endearing, surreal and funny portrait of friendship lasting across time.

Trailer

Middle-aged Jack, arrested for drugs, strives in 6 weeks to repair marriage, curb bullying in-law, and guide stepbrother Kenny Boy, but his efforts fail as life spirals out of control.

IMDb

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/23605030

Studiocanal will re-release actor and comedian Tony Hancock’s feature films, The Rebel and The Punch and Judy Man on Blu-ray and DVD next month.

The Rebel:

Blu-ray Extras include “An Irrepressible Streak “ – comedian Paul Merton on The Rebel; “A Definitive Comedian – Diane Morgan on Tony Hancock; plus commentary with comedian Paul Merton and screenwriters Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, a Behind the Scenes Stills Gallery, and the film’s theatrical trailer.

The Punch and Judy Man:

Blu-ray Extras: “Hard Knocks” – Paul Merton on The Punch and Judy Man; an excerpt from the ABC Series, Hancock; a BEHP Audio interview extract with Jeremy Summers; an episode of The Blackpool Show: Season 1 Episode 7 (1966), compèred by Hancock; a Behind the Scenes Stills Gallery, and Theatrical trailer.

Also:

Hancock: The Lad Himself by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page is still available direct from B7 Media, a smashing 290-page hardback graphic novel telling the story of the much-loved actor and comedian, currently on offer for £24.95.

It's been tricky catching this, until now.

Trailer

This brings us to Bond jokes. Starting with Sean Connery's Bond in 1962, the suave secret agent often accompanied his punches with a punny punchline. In Goldfinger (1964), after electrocuting a would-be assassin in a bathtub, Bond says, "Shocking. Positively shocking." And now, according to some rumors, the next round of James Bond films will bring back these puns in a big way. But, honestly, have they ever really left?

According to a lengthy report in The Times, and reported by other outlets like MovieWeb, insiders suggest that the next installment in the franchise will "return to a Bond of quips and camp, a shift away from the Shakespearean heft of Craig. More traditional yet easier to sell via memes to Amazon’s younger demographic."

MovieWeb notes that this news "is sure to send a shiver down the spines of many a Bond fan." While Screenrant declares that this move would "would be a mistake." While there is some truth that the Daniel Craig era, beginning in 2006 with Casino Royale, was a fresh start, it's not that James Bond should be taken too seriously in general. Even the Ian Fleming novels have a certain flair for self-parody. In 1961, Bond can be found making jokes in pages of Thunderball, saying: "I'm the world's authority on giving up smoking. I do it constantly." Even the somber Daniel Craig swansong, No Time To Die, had Bond making a joke about an exploding electronic eyeball, telling Q that his watch, which caused the explosion, "really blew their mind."

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Plus, there's nothing wrong with Bond rebooting with a slightly more lighthearted feeling. Most agree that in 1995, Pierce Brosnan's first outing as 007 basically saved the franchise with GoldeneEye. But, this film was decidedly funnier than its 1989 predecessor, Timothy Dalton's brooding second mission in Licence to Kill. In GoldenEye, Bond is joking around constantly, noting that Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen) "always did enjoy a good squeeze." This is funny because she kills people with her thighs. Get it?

If GoldenEye or Goldfinger or Live and Let Die are somehow lesser Bond movies because they're not as serious as some of the Craig films, then it seems like we'd have to get rid of more than half the Bond canon. If EON and Amazon are really conspiring to make future James Bond movies funnier, then all they're really doing is returning to a formula that already works. Like a silver DB5 or a vodka martini, shaken, not stirred, there's nothing more classically James Bond than a bunch of silly jokes.

Close up on an undiluted bowl of water sitting centre stage. Slowly, droplets of thick, red blood fall, blotching the crystal-clear liquid – order turning into crimson chaos.

These are the opening shots in the morose, sparse vision for Shakespeare’s Scotland presented by director Max Webster, first seen at the London’s producing powerhouse the Donmar Warehouse in 2023 before hopping across to the West End last autumn.

Led by David Tennant and Cush Jumbo as the cursed couple who dabble in a spot of regicide, Webster’s revival involved audiences donning headphones, lines being whispered into microphones and given skin-crawling intensity even at the back of the auditorium.

Now in cinemas from 5 February, headphones are out and a newly rendered soundscape is in: it would be logistically impossible to give every cinema-goer a headset after all. Filmed during the Donmar run (so losing some of the refinements present during the follow-up West End season), the sound mix flits between the extreme proximity and wider audio capture, thrusting spectators in and out of characters minds, see-sawing between soliloquy and wider spectacle.

Capture director Tim Van Someren is unafraid to lean into the flexibility the screen format provides: Tennant washing his blood-stained hands in ethereal slow motion, while brooding close-ups give an immediacy unavailable to a live audience. The occasional crane shot, sometimes fluttering overhead, provides a swooping sense of foreboding.

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For the most part, however, this is a fairly unobtrusive capture – the edit bounces between locked wide shots and gimbal mid-shots, occasionally having to resort to fish-eye lenses to capture the expanse of Rosanna Vize’s flat, unfussy white canvas set. It’s left to the warmths and pale iciness of Bruno Poet’s lighting to demarcate scene changes and shifts in tone – as effective here as they were in the theatre. The greatest moments of visual richness therefore come during the red-daubed Witches’ vision in act four, Macbeth descending into a sea of horror, conjured largely through the ensemble’s movement.

As it was in person, the acting is sublime – the endless malleability of Tennant’s expression is even more arresting when shown in close-up, while the scheming of Jumbo’s Lady M is presented with painstaking clarity. Webster makes the smart move to give Jumbo more to do in act four, scene two, amplifying the tragedy of the Macduff family’s murder.

On British telly in half an hour.

The US subtitles are indeed a thing:

Sparrows Can’t Sing attempts to represent the diversity of characters and cultures that were prevalent in the East End during the early 1960s, including those typically found in the local pub, as well as local tarts, Jewish tradesmen and spivs. Consequently the dialogue became a mix of rhyming slang, London Yiddish and thieves cant. It is no surprise that it became the first English language film to be released in the US with subtitles.

Also on the Internet Archive.

A24 and Alex Garland hit a home run with Civil War earlier this year. The film had pretty good reviews but did exceptionally well at the box office. There was doing well and then there were the numbers that this movie managed to pull in. If it was one of the bigger studios, they would have looked at that $124 million worldwide and probably fired someone, but for A24, that is a win. So, it's not surprising to hear that Garland and A24 are teaming up for another war-based project. This one is just called Warfare and was written and directed by Garland and Ray Mendoza, an Iraq war veteran. Whenever a movie based on modern-day warfare comes out, you always see veterans reacting to the film and talking about what aspects of the film are accurate and what aspects aren't. This time, the team for this film appears to be trying to stop that before the film even comes out by having a veteran behind the camera. It's one thing to have someone on set as a consultant; it's another to have them behind the camera and helping direct a scene. The first trailer and poster were released earlier this month, and the film will be released sometime next year, maybe in April, if they want to try and make that Civil War lighting strike twice.

Trailer

In the hit 1990 film The Krays, the East End gangsters were portrayed as “identical twins who rose from poverty to power”, “from obscurity to fame” and “from the back streets to the attention of the world”. They were “special” boys, the film claimed, who loved their mother.

But the producer now says he regrets glamorising them and is making another film that will portray the mobsters as they really were.

Ray Burdis said he wants to put the record straight: “They weren’t folk heroes. They were just a pair of cowardly psychopathic bullies, who terrorised the East End of London in the 1960s.”

He said that films such as The Godfather, the Marlon Brando classic about the mafia, had made it fashionable to idolise gangsters.

The Krays, which starred brothers Gary and Martin Kemp in critically acclaimed performances, was a huge box-office success, taking more than £100m globally.

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The new film, which he is writing and directing, is titled Last Kings of London. It will be much darker, depicting swinging 1960s London, “where corruption plagued the police force and crime families ruled the streets”, he said.

28 Years Later, the hot package from director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, has landed at Sony.

The Culver City-based studio has come out on top after a protracted bidding war to win the rights to the sequel package to the 2002 horror classic 28 Days Later.

Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland have reunited to write and direct the sequel, which also comes with a Part 2, to be written by Garland. Boyle would only direct the first project, with the sequel’s director to be determined at a later stage. Cillian Murphy, whose career was launched thanks to the original movie, is also returning, as an executive producer. The Oppenheimer star could also possibly act in the project, although details are being quarantined.