Netflix announces fourth annual Geeked Week coming in September
Netflix has just announced it is holding its fourth annual Geeked Week, starting Sept. 16 and “culminating with a live, in-person fan event” in Atlanta on the evening of Sept. 19.
The streaming giant notes it will be the first time its celebration of nerd-friendly titles — from live-action shows like Squid Game, Stranger Things, Wednesday and Avatar: The Last Airbender to anime titles including Cowboy Bebop and Neon Genesis Evangelion — will be live.
More details on the week of programming will be released in the coming weeks, but last year’s celebration saw the streaming service debut a slew of new trailers, teases for video games and celebrity interviews.
Francis Ford Coppola‘s anticipated, mostly self-funded Megalopolis will screen as part of the upcoming Toronto Film Festival.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker’s star-packed movie, which boasts a cast featuring Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman and more, will play the evening of Monday, Sept. 9, at the Festival’s Roy Thomson Hall. It will also screen the following evening at Scotiabank Theatre Toronto.
Megalopolis made its festival premiere on May 16 at the 77th annual Cannes Film Festival.
Lionsgate will release the film in theaters on Sept. 27.
While its Rotten Tomatoes Critics Score has risen — from zero to 7% — some of those behind the video game adaptation Borderlands are hoping moviegoers “give it a chance.”
InUSA Today, Cate Blanchett explained she was pulling double duty making the critically panned action comedy in 2021 — ironically alongside an Oscar-nominated film, Tár.
She said, “Sometimes the films we hold up as the greatest of all time were not financial or audience successes, yet they’ve become classics.”
The actress continues, “I’m not saying Borderlands is a classic! It’s fun, fun, fun, but it’s not Citizen Kane!”
“I mean, it’s not The Grapes of Wrath. It’s not Blade Runner. It’s its own strange, weird thing, and when you look at the casting, there’s a motley quality to it,” she noted.
The movie also stars Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Hart, Gina Gershon and Ahsoka‘s Ariana Greenblatt.
Cate adds, “I don’t think anyone would call Borderlands art, but it’s fun.”
Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take Two Software, which acquired Borderlands‘ video game producer Gearbox and co-produced the film, took a similar tack.
He said on an earnings call, “Let’s give the film a chance.”
“A lot of people worked really hard on it. The underlying intellectual property is phenomenal, the cast is amazing, I think the look and feel is really terrific. So let’s see what audiences have to say,” he said, according to IGN.
In a chat on the Club Shay Shay podcast, Marlon Wayans went off on Harvey Weinstein and his “evil, ugly brother Bob,” who were producers on the Wayans family’s Scary Movie franchise via their Miramax company.
Further, he suggested to host Shannon Sharpe that Weinstein’s downfall — and eventual imprisonment on sex charges — was “God’s revenge.”
The horror spoof franchise started with 2000’s original Scary Movie, for which they were given a “crappy deal” by the company.
“We opened at $42 million,” noting it was the biggest opening for “any” comedy at the time, not just “for a Black director,” which is how it was spun.
He said his director brother Keenan Ivory Wayans said, “No, no, no, don’t you try to marginalize me … with that label … there’s no such a thing as ‘Black success,’ just success.”
After the “huge” first film, “We got a good deal for the second one,” but then “Miramax did what they did.”
What the studio did was “stole” the franchise from the Wayans family, he says.
“I always say they didn’t just rape and molest women, they raped n***** too and molested us with them deals,” Marlon said. “They were terrible people.”
“They took it from us,” he insisted, and they paid for it at the box office. “You can’t do Wayans s*** without the Wayans. You can try, but … [what] we do is special. We have 200 years of comedy between me, Shawn and Keenan. Damon, Kim. We have a lot of years of excellence of what we do.”
Ultimately, Marlon adds, “God comes for you. All the toxic things you did to me and my family, you took the franchise from us. Vengeance is mine.”
“Sometimes you ain’t gotta do nothing because God’s gonna do it all — God’s revenge,” Marlon says.