Black Dog and De Niro
Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Cannes’ Black Dog, Robert De Niro’s reboot, and Christopher.
Let’s go!
The Forge, a new indie distributor, is positioning itself to one day become like Neon.
I sat down with the CEO and founder, Mark Sayre, who is reshaping the American cinema landscape by distributing incredibly moving and cinematic foreign films for US audiences.
This year, his company is releasing three:
Premiere: Cannes
Prize: Cannes’ Un Certain Regard
Nomination: The Gotham Awards Best Director
Nomination: Indie Spirit Award Best International Film
Premiere: SXSW
Prize: SXSW Documentary Audience Award
Features: Beastie Boys, Peter Gabriel, Fred Armisen
Premiere: Sundance
Prize: Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury Prize Dramatic
Mexico’s official Oscar submission
All three films are deep meditations on death as a force of psychic renewal on the living.
Sujo uses this bond between the living and the dead as a brooding presence over every scene. The film looks at Mexican gang violence through a Sicario’s (hit man) four-year-old son. The film weaves the stark realism of this child’s reality with marvelously realized dreamscape sequences, elevating the film into a meditation on actualizing redemption.
Sayre observed:
“The story hadn't been told from this perspective before, and [the directors] wanted to tell one that felt more human, and I think more hopeful.”
This commitment to humanistic storytelling also shapes Resynator. The film follows a daughter on a pilgrimage to understand the father she never knew—a pioneer of early synthesizers who died when she was just three months old. By piecing together his legacy, she finds meaning in loss.
Black Dog is my personal favorite of the trio. This profoundly constructed masterwork centers around a man just released from prison for manslaughter as he reintegrates into his dying town, which is overrun with stray dogs.
It is a spiritual combination of three films I hold in high regard: White God (2014), for its similar usage of stray dogs as a metaphor for the discarded in society. Paris, Texas (1984), for the bleak desert landscapes and the protagonist’s silent quest to find his purpose. And Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) for the specter of modernization.
Sayre spoke about the deepest bond in the film between the ex-convict and a black dog:
“I thought there was something very poetic and beautiful about two lonely souls finding each other in order to find purpose to continue to go on.”
With Black Dog, as with Sujo and Resynator, the quiet resilience of its character and the connections they forge amidst bleak landscapes highlight how, even in the darkest conditions, shared bonds can guide the living forward.
While it’s early days, by championing these cinematic meditations on mortality, The Forge cements itself as a vital force in independent cinema. And we can’t wait to see them expand their slate over the next couple of years.
For More:
https://www.resynator.film.fyc
We interviewed the founder and CEO of The Forge, Mark Sayre:
https://theindustry.co/p/mark-sayre-the-forge
THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Meet the Parents is getting a reboot, likely starring the original cast, including Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller. The film was the top-grossing comedy in 2000.
Sony has mercy killed their Spider-Man-less Spider-Man spin-off universe, which included Kraven and Madame Webb.
Amazon MGM Studios has acquired the global rights to the Warhammer 40,000 game from Games Workshop for Henry Cavill to star and EP in the development of the cinematic universe.
Producer Scott Glassgold (Tarot, Prospect) is launching a new production company, 12:01 Films.
Famed ICM Agent Martha Luttrell (clients: Susan Sarandon, Sam Shepard, Audrey Hepburn) has passed away at 80.
Christoph Waltz is a hit man with arthritis in Paramount’s Old Guy.
A$AP Rocky will have a lead role in Spike Lee’s new film Highest 2 Lowest,
A24 releases a new trailer for The Brutalist.
Eminem is now the third rapper to join Happy Gilmore 2.
The 2024 Blacklist is here, check out our favorites.
The Rotterdam Film Festival has picked its opening and closing film.
Screenplays for Sing Sing and The Order here.
Indie filmmaker Ti West (MaXXXine) has signed on to direct and EP a new dark comedy series, Bloodlust, created and written by singer/songwriter Halsey and developed at Amazon Prime Video.
Steven Soderbergh’s new film The Christophers seems to have hints of Ocean’s 11.
Kino Lorber picks up a Sundance documentary about hummingbirds.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Meet The Grandparents. The top-grossing comedy of 2000, Meet the Parents, starring Robert De Niro (ex-CIA operative) and Ben Stiller (hapless husband-to-be), is likely getting a reboot—with the original cast and screenwriter.
Here’s the lineup:
In talks, OG cast: Robert De Niro, Ben Stiller, Teri Pol, and Blythe Danner
Writer: John Hamburg (writer: Zoolander, Meet the Parents)
Prod: Jane Rosenthal, De Niro (Tribeca Productions)
Prod: Jay Roach (dir: Meet the Parents)
Prod: Stiller and John Lesher (Red Hour Films)
Studio: Universal Pictures
I have a feeling this is going to be a smash hit. The combo of taking that generation’s highest-profile comedy actor (Stiller) and pitting him against Mean Streets De Niro was a theatrical goldmine:
Meet the Parents (2000)
$55 M budget
$330.4 M total box office
Top-grossing comedy of the year
Meet the Fockers (2004)
$80 M budget
$522.7 M total box office
Top-grossing comedy of the year
Little Fockers (2010)
$100 M budget
$310.7 M total box office
No plot details yet, but it’ll be great to see this back in action after so long. Remember the best scene?
Sony has mercy killed The Spider-Man less Spider-Man experiment, a gamble that brought us some of the worst superhero movies ever made in Madame Webb and Morbius. It looks like Sony saw the writing on the wall with its latest Kraven paltry estimated box office coming in at $13 - $15 M for the opening weekend, which is a shame because it seems like it might have heart.
We knew things were dire when Sony released 8 minutes of Kraven last week. But by all assumptions, it looks like they were really riding on Kraven, taking them out of their self-inflicted wounds.
But now it seems it’s a done deal, and Sony has announced that they will not go forward with any projects in the Spider-Man universe without Spider-Man without SPIDER-MAN, which writing down just seems insane, right?
Multiple millions of dollars, probably near billions, on a dumb little way to subvert Marvel's domination of the superhero genre.
Tidbits:
Henry Cavill’s video game obsession is really paying off! Amazon MGM Studios has acquired the global rights to the Warhammer 40,000 game from Games Workshop for Henry Cavill to star and EP in the development of the cinematic universe. Warhammer 40,000 is set in the far future, where humanity stands at the edge of what might be its brightest future or its darkest age. The Superman actor’s passion project was first partnered with Vertigo Entertainment before landing at the streamer.
Producer Scott Glassgold is launching a new production company, 12:01 Films, aiming on identifying, growing, and producing creator-driven IP through short stories. While most of these stories skew towards horror, Glassgold shared:
“12:01 intends to be agnostic to the genre, focusing on pursuing fresh and original stories regardless of subject matter.”
Glassgold has produced this year’s Sony slasher horror Tarot (2024) and the sci-fi Pedro Pascal-led film Prospect (2018).
Famed ICM Agent Martha Luttrell has passed away at 80. She spent a quarter century at ICM where she eventually made partner. Over her career, she repped:
Susan Sarandon
Martin Campbell
Sam Shepard
Carol Burnett
Audrey Hepburn
She started as an assistant to Mike Nichols (dir: The Graduate) and will be greatly missed.
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Christoph Waltz is a hit man with arthritis in Paramount’s Old Guy. That may sound like a riot but there’s something quite milquetoast about the trailer which feels like all the wonderful acerbicness that Waltz is capable of (see his Oscar-winning performance as Hans Landa) has been gutted.
Still, the co-stars are fantastic:
Lucy Liu plays a spunky club manager
Cooper Hoffman (Licorice Pizza) plays a prodigy assassin with a bad attitude
Maybe moving to the studio system wasn’t such a good idea, but we can’t fault him for grabbing that paycheck and top billing. Here’s to Waltz, and hopefully, I’m proven wrong. At least next up, he’s set to play Billy Wilder.
In theaters and digital Feb 21st.
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Tidbit:
A$AP Rocky will have a lead role in Spike Lee’s new film Highest 2 Lowest, a reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s film High & Low. You may have caught A$AP Rocky in Dope (2015), the Sundance darling, where he co-starred as a drug dealer who was after Zoe Kravitz’s heart (trailer) or in Monster (2018). He has a gravitas while also being wonderfully mischievous.
No word on who he’ll be playing in the Lee joint, but he’ll be across from Denzel, who is said to have the main role.
Adrien Brody stars in The Brutalist. Check out more of his performance in the new trailer. I was blown away by the film and Brody’s purist pursuit of artistic integrity in the face of brutal forces of xenophobia. I would love to see him win the Oscar.
Eminem is now the third rapper to join Happy Gilmore 2, Netflix's sequel starring Adam Sandler, with Julie Bowen and Christopher McDonald reprising their roles. The other two are Kid Cudi and Bad Bunny who all have cameos. It is expected to arrive on Netflix in July 2025.
FESTIVALS AND RESOURCES
The 2024 Blacklist is here. Curated from over 500 film executives' top ten screenplay picks of the most liked, unproduced scripts.
Here are our favorites:
https://theindustry.co/p/the-black-list-2024
Read Zach Baylin’s The Order screenplay here:
https://theindustry.co/p/prospective-best-screenplay-academy
Justin Kurzel (Nitram) directs. Jude Law stars.
Also, read the Sing Sing screenplay at the same link above + 14 more Oscar-hopeful scripts.
The Rotterdam Film Festival has picked its opener and closer.
Opener:
Dir: Michiel ten Horn
Synopsis:
Small-town criminal Jos (55) has, to his great frustration, been completely sidelined. His daughter disrespects him, his wife doesn't trust him, and his friends laugh at him openly. As he scrambles to fix a drug deal that went catastrophically wrong, he desperately searches for an answer to the question: Who or what is punishing me!?
Starring David Kross, who is remarkable as the young Ralph Fiennes in The Reader (2008).
Great first look image of a bewildered Kross with a baby (still).
Closer:
Dir: Mouly Surya
Synopsis:
A 35-year-old former fighter and violinist devises a plan to blow up a movie theater, a gathering place for British NICA officials and the Dutch.
Rotterdam kicks off Jan 30th and ends Feb 9th.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
Indie filmmaker Ti West has become a prominent horror director in recent years, garnering a cult following with his low-budget, shocking genre movies. West has signed on to direct and EP a new dark comedy series, Bloodlust, created and written by singer/songwriter Halsey and developed at Amazon Prime Video.
West and Halsey (whose given name is Ashley Frangipane) previously worked together, and the latter starred in the third film in his X film series MaXXXine, which premiered earlier this year, making $22 M worldwide. The previous two films in the franchise, Pearl and X, not only came out in the same year (2022) but West on the map as an innovative emerging filmmaker praised for his tragic cinematography and old Hollywood horror-esque storytelling.
West was also involved in V/H/S (2012) directing his own segment in the creepy found footage anthology film that was deeply loved as well as dissected in the horror community.
Mark Friedman (Severance) will serve as showrunner for the upcoming Bloodlust show, which has reportedly been in the works for some time with no plot details revealed as of yet.
Steven Soderbergh does not slow down. His new film is The Christophers. And the cast is a very interesting mix of old and new talent:
Ian McKellen
Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You)
James Corden
Here’s the reported synopsis:
Estranged children of a once-famous artist who hire a forger to complete his unfinished works so they can be discovered and sold after his death.
It’s got flavors of Soderbergh’s patented Ocean’s 11 film. But also a hint of mediation on a family being haunted by the dead, reflected more literally in his most recent film, Presence, which Neon is releasing on Jan 17th.
Filming for The Christophers kicks off in London in February.
Tidbit:
Apple, the studio behind 2022 Best Picture winner CODA, has landed feature doc Deaf President Now! from Oscar-winning documentarian Davis Guggenheim (Producer: An Inconvenient Truth) and Deaf actor and advocate Nyle DiMarco.
Official Logline:
In 1988, protests at Gallaudet University, the storied university for Deaf or Hard of Hearing students, that led to the installment of the school’s first Deaf president, Dr. I. King Jordan.
Production has officially wrapped on what is being described as the greatest civil rights movement that most people have never heard of.
Did we need a doc about Hummingbirds? Probably not, but this one, Every Little Thing, may bring a tear to your eye. It’s about a woman who helps wounded Hummingbirds as a way to self-soothe her own trauma. And if the trailer doesn’t make you swell up with tears, I’m not sure what will.
Kino Lorber releases in theaters on Jan 10th.
ON THIS DAY
1967. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner premieres in NYC (Hepburn - Academy Award for Best Actress 1968).
See you tomorrow!
Written by Gabriel Miller, Spencer Carter, and Madelyn Menapace.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
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