Three Thousand Years of Longing is a tricky flick to describe. The latest movie from the multifaceted George Miller — whose previous films improbably include the Mad Max series and Babe: Pig in the City — is a fantasy. It’s a fairy tale for grown-ups. It’s a romance (a surprisingly swoony one) and a fable, and a gorgeously loving tribute to millennia of storytellers. It’s a lot of things. And mostly, it’s just a lots.

The film — which stars Tilda Swinton as a mousy, lonely “narratologist” who accidentally lets loose an ancient djinn (Idris Elba) — is the kind of no-holds-barred storytelling you might expect from Miller. It runs down rabbit trails and twists in unexpected directions and beckons you to come along for the ride. Most of all, it creates a world where every sense is heightened, where you can almost smell the spices and feel the textures.

This week’s Ketchup brings you more headlines from the world of film development news, covering such titles as The Batman 2, BioShock, Fantastic Fourand the next Planet of the Apes.

This WEEK’S TOP STORY

GOLD RUSH GAMES VIDEOS – BIOSHOCK, DAYS GONEAND MORE

(Photo by 2K Games)

Ever since the critical and box office successes of Pokemon Detective Pikachu (Fresh at 68%), Sonic the Hedgehog (Fresh at 63%), and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Fresh at 69%), there has been a resurgence of video game adaptation movie projects akin to the comic book gold rush of the 2000s. This renewed interest is even resurrecting BioShockwhich was almost produced in the late 2000s. The award-winning 2007 retrofuturistic first-person-shooter is now being developed by Netflix with Francis Lawrence attached to direct at some point after he wraps up filming the prequel The Hunger Games: The Ballad

Netflix doesn’t have a massive collection of fantasy flicks, but you can find several charming (and eclectic) gems. Many combine the fantastical with real-world struggles, including the remarkable Closet Monster. Or dive right into the high fantasy realm with The Golden Compass, based on Philip Pullman’s classic novels.

Hopefully you’ll find an inspiring gem below.

Strand Releasing/YouTube/Screenshot

Unlocking multiple genres, Closet Monster uses its fantasy elements to open the door to a fresh and moving coming-of-age tale. Scarred by witnessing a homophobic attack, closed and imaginative teenager Oscar must grapple with his feelings for Wilder. Be warned, Closet Monster splices David Cronenberg levels of body horror into its bigger picture about internalized homophobia. Capped by Connor Jessup’s superb performance, Closet Monster an indie gem.

Netflix

Co-produced by Sam Raimi, this dark fantasy is inscribed with top horror credentials. Still at younger viewers, Nightbooks leaves through a mystery about a young

Disney+ had a strong August. The month is welcomed in Tatiana Maslany’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law to the MCU, as well as five small shorts following little baby Groot. There was also the streaming debut of Pixar’s Lightyear, not to mention Sing-Alongs for both Beauty and the Beast and Tangled. But what might September bring?

well, She-Hulk will obviously be continuing to air episodes weekly, and Star Wars will be entering the pop culture conversation again as Star Wars: Andor finally drops.

Then there’s the fact that Disney+ day is right around the corner on September 8. Fans already know Thor: Love and Thunder will be dropping then, but the streaming service almost certainly has surprises across many brands for its audiences.

Now, the company has released an entire list of all the content set to hit the service next month—pending any unforeseen D23 surprisesof course.

Disney+ Movies

This month’s list of streaming departures includes some old classics, new favorites, and some underseen gems in between.

To start things off, Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy leaves HBO Max — it’s a good time to catch up with those movies again (unless you are one of the few people who haven’t seen them, in which case I have good news — you get to watch the Ocean’s movies for the first time!).

There’s also Spike Lee’s masterful Do the Right Thingthe classic mystery thriller Kluteand a legal thriller from the showrunner of Andoras well as an action-horror DTV master class and so much more.

Let’s get into it.

Do the Right Thing

Image: Universal Pictures

Set over the course of a swelteringly hot day in Bed-Stuy, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is a masterful drama that traces the simmering racial tensions between a local Italian American

Marvel and DC both have demonstrated insanely high output of theatrical releases in recent years, and 2023 will be no exception, with seven movies coming between the two – on top of five Disney+ series from the MCU. The upcoming year will be packed with sequels for iconic heroes, debut flicks for popular characters, and long-awaited ensemble events.

Despite having spent years trying to catch up to the MCU, DC has continually struggled to live up to its comic book competition when it comes to interest, awareness, and box office success. These areas are all tracked within both Disney and Warner Bros. in the run-up to releases in order to properly target their marketing campaigns.

Now, a third-party study has revealed new data to the public that offers a gauge of what movies audiences are most anticipating in the year ahead, including going into the final months of 2022 and

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos by Universal Pictures/YouTube and Zero Media/YouTube

The first John Wick snack on you. It remains the lowest-grossing film in the franchise, the sort of movie that looked like a million other actioners until you actually saw it. Once you did, though, two things were clear: There were going to be a lot more John Wick movies coming, and there were going to be a whole lot of movies trying to be John Wick.

Finding the next John Wick has been a cottage Hollywood industry for nearly a decade now, to little success. (Netflix basically can’t stop churning out copycats.) But the franchise has been perhaps most imaginingly the launch point for the three primary people behind the first film (and, to varying degrees, the sequels): writer Derek Kolstad and co-directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch (who was uncredited on the first film and, also, no relation).

It’s 2022 and the DC universe isn’t getting any more coherent. After failing to leverage the popularity of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy with two wildly different and equally division Superman movies, Warners launched the first of two 10-year plans to make a Marvel Studios happen. Unfortunately, after last week’s shakeupthat plan is still evolving (read: they’re starting from scratch, again).

However, before Warner Bros. Discovery can continue banishing what’s left of the SnyderVerse to the Phantom Zone, they still have a couple of movies to unload. The first is Black Adam, one of the more confusing additions. Years after Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson announced he would be playing Black Adam before teasing that he would be playing Shazam, he re-announced on Twitter that was Black Adam, Shazam’s nemesis, who has a similar power set

US if. While the ’90s may still be linked with a wide variety of dubious holdovers — including curious slang, questionable fashion choices, and sinister political agendas — many of the decade’s cultural contributions have cast an outsized shadow on the first stretch of the 21st century. Nowhere is that phenomenon more obvious or explicable than it is at the movies.

The ’90s began with a revolution against the kind of bland Hollywood product that people might kill to see in theaters today, creaking open a small window of time in which a more commercially viable American independent cinema began seeing into mainstream fare. Young and exciting directors, many of whom are now major auteurs and perennial IndieWire favorites, were given the resources to

“The Gray Man” has notched a spot in the top five of Netflix’s all-time list of most popular films.

According to Netflix’s Top 10 stats for the week of Aug. 8 through Aug. 14, the film netted 21.16 million viewing hours in its fourth week on the streamer, landing it in the No. 4 spots in the rankings with 245.0 hours viewed.

“The Gray Man” edged the Ryan Reynolds film “The Adam Project,” bumping it into fifth place. “Red Notice,” “Don’t Look Up” and “Bird Box” led the list as the top three.

JJ Perry’s “Day Shift” starring Jamie Foxx and Dave Franco leads the movies for the past week. The vampire comedy was No. 1 on the English Films List with 56.51M hours viewed and was on the Top 10 in 93 countries. “Purple Hearts” continued to give viewers all the feels as the film came in No. 2