Movies

Former James Bond femme fatale Halle Berry has strong feelings about who should play the next incarnation of the superspy.

Berry played Jinx Johnson in 2002’s “Die Another Day” opposite Pierce Brosnan.

She appeared on the “Today” show Wednesday to reveal which actors she thinks should tackle the role after Daniel Craig.

Berry first suggested that producers take a chance with the role.

“A woman!” she said, quickly adding: “No, just kidding. Queen Latifah!”

Berry then picked two other actors she thought might fit the Bond bill.

“Who should take it? I’d want to see Hugh Jackman or Idris Elba,” she said, emphasizing a preference for Elba. “I would go for him.”

Berry isn’t the only Bond alum who has expressed support for Elba.

In March, Dame Judi Dench ― who played spymaster M in a number of Bond movies until the death of her character in 2012’s “Skyfall” ― said she thought Elba would make “a brilliant Bond.”

An extended clip from Spider-Man: Far From Home reveals that the MCU is Earth-616. Marvel's been setting up the multiverse for quite some time, with a number of references in the Thor films. But it's become a lot more explicit of late, with Avengers: Endgame using the concept of time travel to create a host of alternate realities.

The Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer revealed that Mysterio claims to have come from another dimension. According to Nick Fury, the events of Avengers: Endgame - including multiple snaps, the destruction of the Infinity Stones, and a whole lot of time travel - have torn a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum. Mysterio claims to have come from another dimension - and presumably the Elemental creatures wreaking havoc across Europe are also from another reality. The jury's out as to whether or not Mysterio is telling the truth, of course; in the comics, the sorcerer pretended to be a superhero on his first appearance. Assuming he is, though, the multiverse opens up a whole host of new opportunities for the MCU.

John Wick Has a Surprising Hobby That Got Cut From the Movies, Keanu Reeves Says
When he's not killing assassins, John Wick is doing something quite lovely actually.

Keanu Reeves’ beloved assassin John Wick is a killing machine with a spot for dogs, but the one thing Wick doesn’t seem to have is a hobby. Over the course of three feature films – 2014’s “John Wick,” 2017’s “John Wick: Chapter 2,” and this summer’s “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum” – Wick has rarely been seen outside of his assassin life. During a recent interview with Uproxx, Reeves made a surprising reveal that Wick’s most passionate hobby was originally included in the first movie but was cut from the theatrical release.

“In the first script they had John Wick described as working with old leather-bound books and book restoration,” Reeves said. “We filmed it. It’s not in the movie, but we filmed it. He had a hobby and a vocation. That’s what he did. Best case, yes, his wife had passed, and that’s what he had decided to do once he got out after the impossible task, that was his vocation.”

Unfortunately for John Wick, the character’s life as an assassin came knocking and he’s spent three movies without anything to do with his secret love of old books. Perhaps the assassin will get back to his book roots in a potential fourth movie. Reeves is not ruling out another “John Wick” sequel, telling Uproxx, “Yeah, knock on wood. Fingers crossed. For me it would just be depending on the story and who’s the director. I love the role, so I’d love to play it.”

“John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum” reunites Reeves with director Chad Stahelski, who has been behind the camera for each “John Wick” installment. “Parabellum” picks up right where the first sequel left off: John Wick is on the run after breaking the assassin code by killing someone in The Continental. With a $14 million bounty on his head, John Wick is forced to go up against the world’s top killers and fight his way out of New York. Joining Reeves for the latest “John Wick” are returning cast members Ian McShane and Laurence Fishburne, plus newcomer Halle Berry as an old friend from John’s past.

Lionsgate is releasing “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum” in theaters nationwide May 17. Head over to Uproxx to read Reeves’ interview in its entirety.

Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.

THIS ARTICLE IS RELATED TO: Film and tagged John Wick, John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, Keanu Reeves

The toys are back in town this summer, and producer Jonas Rivera tells Den of Geek why Toy Story 4 will be a worthy franchise follow-up

When Woody, Buzz and co said a moving goodbye to their grown-up owner Andy and started a new life with Bonnie at the end of Toy Story 3, many felt it was a fitting end to a near-perfect movie trilogy. But for the good folk at Pixar, there was unfinished business. And so, this summer sees the release of Toy Story 4 – a sequel that's been nearly 10 years in the making, which finally shows us what happened next.

“There's a lot of pressure...in a good way,” producer Jonas Rivera tells Den Of Geek about taking the reins of such a beloved franchise. “But it was pressure on myself – I was honoured to be asked to do it.”

The Oscar-winning producer of Up and Inside Out, Rivera has a personal connection with Toy Story – he started his career at Pixar as a production intern during the making of the first film back in 1994. “As originals, [Up and Inside Out] brought their own challenges – they were both pretty esoteric, hard films to pitch,” he explains. “But there were no expectations; we got to sneak them up on people. And this is not that. Everyone has a little bit of, ‘Don't mess it up!’ And I understand it because I love it so much. I took my family to Disneyland in Paris and the first character I saw was Woody, and all the kids were hugging him. And it kind of really hit me. It was like, ‘Yeah, this is important.’”

Picking up sometime after the third movie, with the toys now settled in their new home, Toy Story 4 sees Woody (Tom Hanks) and the gang on a mission to reunite Bonnie with her runaway DIY-creation, Forky – a recently brought to life craft project-turned-toy that could prove key to helping an apprehensive Bonnie cope with a life-changing event: starting school.

Taking place during a family summer holiday, the film is something of a road trip for the gang, during which they encounter a circus, a host of new toys (some good, some not-so-much) and their long-lost pal, Bo Peep. Bo’s absence from the third movie is quickly explained in the film’s emotional prologue – a moving but not-quite-finished piece of footage that Rivera showed off at a preview event last month. Afterwards, we caught up with the producer to ask about what we can expect from the upcoming fourth instalment.

1. It’s not a sequel for sequel’s sake

“As much as we all love these characters, I'm not interested in unnecessary sequels to things,” says Rivera. “All of us at Pixar feel like we don't do anything unless we have something to say. Toy Story 3 did feel like an end, and we didn’t want to hide from that. But like [co-writer] Andrew Stanton said, ‘It’s a great ending, but it’s not the end.’"

The producer calls the third film the end of Andy’s story, but points out that Woody is the protagonist – and his new life with Bonnie brings new challenges for the duty-bound cowboy. “It was interesting to us to ask: what happens next?” Rivera reveals. “What if, as a toy, you got a second chance? There's no way it's going to be the same. Woody’s a sense-of-duty guy, but what if he’s not first chair? Does he change? Who is he?”

2. It’s got the Tom Hanks seal of approval

Hollywood nice guy Tom Hanks has been the voice of Woody ever since the 1995 original and has become something of a custodian for the franchise. Luckily for Rivera and his team, he was on board from the off. “Tom Hanks is Woody,” the producer says. “I mean, he's effortlessly Woody – he can take a fragment of a line and craft it into something that is just pinpoint accurate to that character. He came in and said, ‘I trust you guys – if you guys are doing this, then there's something there.’ And he immediately engaged at a deep level. He was not there – and never has been – just to do the lines. He knows Woody – he was asking questions and had opinions and was completely committed.”

Hanks was so committed, in fact, that he would turn around in the booth while doing his lines – away from the window through to where the filmmakers were recording. “He said: ‘It’s not about anything other than I want to be Woody; I want nothing in my peripheral vision,’” recalls Rivera. “That was really cool to hear because it kind of told me like, ‘Oh, he cares. He’s dialed in.’ And it was an indicator to me that there was a depth to the story.”

3. Bo Peep is back...but she’s different

She may have been conspicuously absent from Toy Story 3, but porcelain figure Bo Peep (voiced once again by Ghostbusters’ Annie Potts) and her three ovine pals return to the franchise in the fourth instalment. She’s not quite the same though – she's sporting a new look and a worldly-wise attitude, having been out on her own for years. “I’ve always loved Bo,” says Rivera. “She's absent in the third movie, obviously, and we just felt like there was rich story territory there. Woody has always prided himself on keeping this group together, but it's not always 100 per cent possible – kids grow up, things happen. So she was the poster child for that. We thought there was an opportunity narratively to not only show what happened to her, but more importantly to show how that would affect everyone else, specifically Woody.

“We wanted to bring her back in a way you wouldn’t expect,” Rivera continues. “I love the idea of meeting a character who you’ve actually met before, and you think you know, but you don’t. In many ways she’s the driver of this movie; she's the one that comes in and moves the needle. We wanted to make her strong and individual and nuanced and experienced. She's seen things the other toys haven’t.”

4. It looks amazing...but not too amazing

With Toy Story 4 arriving almost a decade after its predecessor, there has naturally been a huge improvement in the tools available to the animators. But even though technology has moved forward, it wasn’t as straightforward as just throwing all the latest bells and whistles at the screen. “There almost seems to be nothing we can't do now,” says Rivera. “And I don't mean that in a braggy way. It's that computer graphics have always been a bit of a medium of limitations; rendering things like water and reflections on glass are hard, but now that’s less so – you can kind of do anything you want. But Toy Story has a look to it. So in a weird way, the challenge was pulling things back so that you didn't make a movie that looked completely unrelated to the first, second and third films.”

The challenge Rivera set his team was making Woody’s world feel real without looking too real. “We obviously wanted it to look great and to celebrate the fidelity of the render, but we had to remind ourselves of our core visual ingredients,” he says. “Our production designer Bob Pauley, who worked on the first film, said that Toy Story was about three things: caricatured shapes, realistic textures and theatrical lighting. It's always a little...amplified.”

5. It doesn’t support the Pixar theory – but there are Easter eggs

As you might expect, there are a few fun studio Easter eggs in Toy Story 4, but Rivera is quick to debunk the ‘Pixar theory’ that places all the films in some kind of shared universe. “We think it’s funny – I love it that people have dug that deep. But, I mean this is probably bad to say, we're not that smart – we didn't line that stuff up,” he laughs.

“I mean it’s true that we put all these things in these movies – and there are little things you’ll see in Toy Story 4. But the truth of why that started though is so much less fun – it started because we didn't have enough budget to build all the models we needed for A Bug's Life, so we were stealing things from the Toy Story digital backlot, so to speak. So now we just play with it.”

Star Wars has finally explained Count Dooku's fall to the dark side - and it's very similar to Darth Vader. Introduced in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones played by Christopher Lee, Count Dooku has become one of the franchise's most imposing villains. The second Sith Apprentice to Palpatine, Dooku was the mastermind behind the Clone Wars, leading the Separatists in battle against the Republic and ultimately starting the rise of the Empire.

As fascinating a character as Dooku may be, he's also long been something of an enigma. Other prequel trilogy villains have been well-explored in a range of different mediums, with both Darth Maul and General Grievous now fully-fleshed-out, three-dimensional characters. Dooku, however, has been largely relegated to the shadowy mastermind in the background, a Machiavellian schemer who was ultimately betrayed by Darth Sidious.

Lucasfilm has finally begun to correct this, with the first Star Wars audiobook exclusive, Cavan Scott's Dooku: Jedi Lost. This reveals how Dooku became a Jedi, and why a celebrated Jedi Master left the Jedi Order. The story ties in perfectly with Claudia Gray's recently-published novel, Master & Apprentice, which featured a brief cameo from Dooku and hinted he'd been trained by Palpatine before Maul was killed in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Together, these books change how fans will view Dooku going forward.

Jedi are traditionally separated from their birth family, but Dooku ended up reuniting with sister Jenza as a teenager and was repeatedly drawn back into the affairs of his homeworld of Serenno. At the same time, he grew increasingly disillusioned with the Jedi Council, believing they were bound to the politics of the Republic rather than the Force. Matters came to a head when Serenno was invaded by raiders and the Republic chose not to intervene. Dooku disobeyed orders to liberate his homeworld in spectacular fashion, controlling a Sith War Beast in a devastating attack upon the raiders. With the invaders repelled, Dooku elected to leave the Jedi and inherit the title of Count of Serenno.

That is a rather sharp divergence from Dooku's history in the old, non-canon Expanded Universe. The EU's version of Dooku's fall from grace focused on his philosophical dispute with the Jedi Council, which worsened after disastrous campaigns on the planets Galidraan and Baltizaar. This rationale never quite felt personal enough to drive a Jedi Master to the dark side, and is likely why Lucasfilm's taken their time with a do-over.

This new Star Wars backstory essentially transforms Count Dooku into something of a tragic hero, a powerful Jedi who really did want to make a difference in the galaxy, but felt unable to do so under the constraints of the Jedi Order. What's more, many of his complaints were well-founded; the close relationship between the Jedi and the Republic was indeed a major problem, one that ultimately drew the Jedi into the Clone Wars.

The parallels to Darth Vader are clear; Anakin Skywalker would similarly be drawn to Palpatine when he felt the Jedi dogma was obstructing the greater good. This highlights a recurring trait of Palpatine and makes the young Jedi's fall all-the-more inevitable.

Keanu Reeves reveals his dream ending for the John Wick franchise. Debuting in 2014, the property quickly became a nice comeback vehicle for the actor, who had previously headlined several of the 1990's most iconic action films. Through a combination of expertly choreographed set pieces and emotionally resonant storytelling, the John Wick films earned themselves a passionate fan base and viewers are excited to see more from this world. The third film, subtitled Parabellum, opens in theaters later this month. There's also a Continental TV spinoff show being planned.

When one digs beneath the surface of the stunning gun-fu sequences and brutal kills, it's apparent the John Wick films tell a story about a man yearning to leave his troubled past behind and start life anew, but keeps getting dragged back into the underworld. While the creative team always have more ideas for other followups, there will come a day when the John Wick movie series needs to end. And Reeves knows exactly what he'd like to do in order to bring the whole thing home.