Newsbites: Clarence filming! Chosen extended! Narnia coming? The Almighty sequel that never happened!
Newsbites: Clarence filming! Chosen extended! Narnia coming? The Almighty sequel that never happened!
A few quick items on films at various stages of existence, from a sequel pitch that went nowhere to a theatrical release that's getting some unexpected praise.
Pins and Needles (formerly The Book of Clarence) now filming in Italy
The Book of Clarence, the biblical comedy starring LaKeith Stanfield and Omar Sy, has started shooting in Italy—but the film has a new title. Variety reports that the movie, which reunites Stanfield and The Harder They Fall director Jeymes Samuel, is now known as Pins and Needles, which… is not the most obvious title for a biblical comedy, but anyhoo. The film is currently being shot in Matera, which has been the location for many Bible-movies going back to 1964’s The Gospel According to St Matthew—it is also where the car chase at the beginning of the last James Bond movie takes place—and Variety says the film will “make use of more than 2,000 mostly Black extras, roughly 200 of whom have been selected by the film’s production from immigrant refugee centers situated in the surrounding Basilicata region.” This reminds me, I still haven’t gotten around to writing up my thoughts on The New Gospel, a hybrid film—part documentary, part Passion play—that was also filmed in Matera and features migrant workers and activists from Africa as Jesus and his disciples.
The Chosen gets a theatrical extension and a Last Temptation fan
The Chosen’s opening-weekend gross turned out to be a little bigger than the estimates we got on Sunday—$8.8 million—which was almost enough to make it the top new movie of the week, but The Menu did slightly eclipse it with $9 million. No matter: the box-office success was enough to get The Chosen Season 3 a nine-day extension, and it is now going to play in theatres at least until December 1. The first season of the series was also released on Netflix this week. Meanwhile, The Last Temptation of Christ screenwriter Paul Schrader praised The Chosen on his Facebook page, and if you scroll through the comments you’ll see replies from series creator Dallas Jenkins and a couple of the show’s actors. This reminds me, what ever happened to that series about the apostles that Schrader was developing with Martin Scorsese last year?
Finally, some news on the Netflix Narnia movie front?
It has been four years since Netflix bought the rights to The Chronicles of Narnia. Now there is finally a rumour, at least, as to what they might do with those rights. The Netflix fansite What’s on Netflix says the streaming service is looking at making two films in the series, and they may get Greta Gerwig—the Oscar-nominated director of Lady Bird, Little Women, and the upcoming Barbie—to direct them. This news, such as it is, comes just a few weeks after NarniaWeb posted an item looking at how the streaming wars in general, and Netflix in particular, have changed since Netflix first got the rights to Narnia, and how those changes may have affected their plans.
The Bruce Almighty sequel that never was
It’s been almost 20 years since Bruce Almighty came out and surprised people with its fusion of PG-13 hijinks and some fairly decent pop theology. The movie starred Jim Carrey as a guy who is given the powers of God, and last week two of the film’s writers, Steve Koren and Mark O’Keefe, revealed that they pitched the studio a sequel that would have seen the Carrey character get the powers of Satan after his wife (the Jennifer Aniston character) dies. “It was going to be the Trials of Job, essentially,” O’Keefe told SyFy Wire. The sequel never happened, of course, partly because the studio was “scared” by the pitch, according to Koren, and partly because the sequel that was made—Evan Almighty, which turned the Steve Carell character from the original film into a modern-day Noah figure—did so poorly at the box office. (I was on the junket for that film, incidentally: see the interviews here, here, and here.)