Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Keanu Reeves Time Travel, Jake Gyllenhaal Play by Play, and Annapurna’s Rebirth.
Let’s go!
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Keanu Reeves can’t escape time-traveling.
Whether it’s on a quest for the ultimate school history report in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) or to find true love in The Lake House (2006), he seems to have a knack for getting stuck in temporal predicaments.
Now he will star in a new time loop film: Warner Bros.’ Shiver, directed by Tim Miller (Terminator: Dark Fate).
He plays a smuggler on the Caribbean Sea, who gets double-crossed and lands in a time loop filled with dead bodies, pirates and sharks.
The premise is comedic. But this is supposed to be an action, sci-fi, thriller so I’ll take it at face value.
And that’s great because Reeves is best when overwhelmed by metaphysical elements. The moment he wakes up in The Matrix and pops after learning the truth is a defining moment in the series.
And the director Tim Miller is well studied in the art of time travel. His Terminator: Dark Fate is the best post-Cameron film in the series. Although it got a lot of hate, it smartly reinforced the idea that our actions can actively write our destiny.
So we’ll see if the same internal logic is used in Shiver’s time loop. Even better if Reeves is able to avoid emotional degradation and learn something new about himself like in Groundhog Day.
The film begins shooting this week.
For More:
Want a breakdown on the best and worst time loop films? Look no further than this handy time travel essay: https://theindustry.co/p/a-brief-history-of-time-travel-films (scroll down for the appropriate “time loop” section).
THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Amazon MGM teams up with Jake Gyllenhaal for sports film Play By Play.
DreamWorks hires Netflix's Nimona directors for The Wild Robot sequel.
Netflix greenlights Jacob Tierney’s (creator: Heated Rivalry) Alexander series.
AMC develops Southern drama The New Gothic.
Paramount+ develops dating series Making Love.
Sandy Wernick, Adam Sandler’s longtime manager, dies at 86.
Daisy Edgar-Jones stars in Paramount’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.
Kayo Martin (The Plague) joins Netflix comedy series I Suck at Girls.
Vincent Cassel joins The White Lotus S4.
Gillian Jacobs cast in Hulu’s Chad Powers S2.
Jacki Weaver cast in NBC’s reboot of The Rockford Files.
Peter Jackson will receive an honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Netflix acquires Ben Affleck’s filmmaking AI company InterPositive.
Annapurna is relaunching!
Dark creators Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar set new HBO series Struwwelpeter.
Amazon MGM Studios taps WBD and Hulu vet Buddy Marini to head Japan.
Yesterday’s correct answer: Frank Sinatra played Danny Ocean in Ocean’s 11 (1960).
75% got it right.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Let’s go psycho.
The new trailer for Netflix’s Beef Season 2 is ultra-short on plot, but what we can see it is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf-esque.
Oscar Isaac + Carey Mulligan and Cailee Spaeny + Charles Melton go head to head as their own beefs are exposed and intertwined through the luxury resort where they cohabitate.
The first season was a manifestation of primal anger via a sublime cause-and-effect chain that caused Ali Wong and Steven Yeun to war against each other with such rancor that it took on something canonical, like Shakespeare.
We don’t know how that will play out in Beef Season 2, but with this level of actors, we can’t wait to see what they tear apart.
Amazon MGM tees up its next Gyllenhaal project:
Play By Play
Cast/Prod: Gyllenhaal
Wri: Chris McCoy (Paramount’s Hit the Gas)
Prod Co: Religion of Sports (Tom Brady’s company)
Genre: Sports
That’s all we know but Gyllenhaal was a fierce competitor in Prime’s Road House. Maybe he’ll have a similar vibe in this new pic.
We’re getting a sequel to The Wild Robot. And that checks as the first film made $334.5M WW and was Oscar-nominated for Best Animated Feature. From DreamWorks Animation, The Wild Robot Escapes has brought on the directors Nick Bruno and Troy Quane. They’re best known for Netflix’s Nimona, which at its essence, was about not feeling safe about who you are. It used a shapeshifting animated character to capture the idea of body dysmorphia.
That feels particularly suited for the 2nd Wild Robot film, based on the 2nd book in the Peter Brown trilogy. In it, Roz is helping run a dairy farm, attempting to act like the robot she is, but really misses her animal friends.
We can’t wait to see what they do with the film.
Tidbits:
From the hockey rink to Ancient Greece. Heated Rivalry show creator Jacob Tierney gets a straight to series order by Netflix for his next project, Alexander. Based on the 2009 novel The Golden Mean, the series will follow the teen years of Alexander the Great and the friendships and mentorships he forms. Like Heated Rivalry, Tierney will write and direct with Jason Bateman’s Aggregate Films, a frequent Netflix partner, also onboard as a producer.
AMC is developing The New Gothic, a Southern drama from actress-producer Hilarie Burton Morgan (One Tree Hill). Burton Morgan will write the series and produce through her Mischief Farm Banner alongside her husband The Walking Dead actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan. The show will follow the collapse of a wealthy family’s influence, due to the rise of the Mississippi Mafia.
Mini Tidbits:
David Ellison has said that WBD’s CNN will maintain “editorial independence.” The big fear is that he smashes it together with PSKY’s CBS and then tilts it to be more sympathetic to whatever administration is in charge.
Paramount+ is getting into the reality TV dating space. Making Love is the new relationship dating series being developed by Paramount+ and Kinetic Content (prod. Netflix’s Love Is Blind). It is the first unscripted series to be greenlit for the streamer post Skydance merger.
FX’s Love Story hits 25M viewing hours for the first 5 episodes since its release three weeks ago. This is FX’s most-watched Disney+/Hulu series ever.
CBS welcomes back Eric Guggenheim (Magnum P.I.) as he is joining the procedural drama Fire Country as a showrunner and EP for its upcoming fifth season. The Jerry Bruckheimer produced series was recently renewed through 2026-27.
Trailers:
Prime’s The Boys (Final Season)
Release: April 8
Sony Pictures Classics’ I Swear
Release: April 24
Focus Features’ Lorne
Dir: Morgan Neville (Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain)
Release: April 17
Apple TV’s Twisted Yoga
Trailer - looks like the next The Vow
Release: March 13
Hulu’s The Testaments (The Handmaid’s Tale sequel series)
Release: April 8
Renewals:
ABC’s High Potential (for S3)
ABC’s 9-1-1 (for S10)
ABC’s 9-1-1 Nashville (for S2)
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Daisy Edgar-Jones has quietly built a niche as one of Hollywood’s go-to actors for literary heroines. She is now set to lead Paramount’s feature adaptation of Gabrielle Zevin’s cult favorite coming-of-age novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.
Edgar-Jones will play the brilliant but guarded Sadie Green, an impressive video game developer whose love of games becomes the foundation of her longest-lasting friendship and future professional partnership.
Edgar-Jones is clearly drawn to introspective literary protagonists, like Hulu and BBC Three’s adaptation of Normal People (2020, scene), a limited series that shot to popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a breakout role opposite Paul Mescal, she plays Marianne, a shy, intellectually gifted outsider who experiences romantic firsts.
Edgar-Jones also starred as the yearning Kya in Hulu’s book-to-screen adaptation of Where the Crawdads Sing (2022, trailer).
Like Marianne or Kya, her new character has to navigate nuanced character dynamics while living heavily in her own mind. Yet rather than being defined by her romantic pursuits, Sadie is shaped by creative ambition and artistic rivalry.
Oscar-winning CODA writer-director Siân Heder is directing and writing the screenplay.
Tidbits:
Kayo Martin sucks at girls. If you saw Kayo Martin in The Plague (trailer), it was a treat; he played the hyper-confident, sadistic ringleader of a group of boys who psychologically torment the weakest member of their water polo group. Well he’s just been cast in Netflix’s new series I Suck at Girls, a comedy from Abbott Elementary co-showrunners Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker, Bill Lawrence’s Doozer Productions (Ted Lasso), and Warner Bros. TV. Based on Halpern’s book of the same name, the series revolves around three pubescent seniors trying to survive the world of messy teenage drama. With this role in place, it’ll show he’s got a ton of range now playing someone awkward. Shooting this summer.
Tidbits:
Our favorite Frenchman, Vincent Cassel is cast in The White Lotus S4. It’s looking like he’ll play a hotel staff member, but really this man could play anything. He’s smoldering on screen, but can also go to wacky extremes like playing an out of control DJ (trailer).
Reservation Dogs creator Sterlin Harjo’s FX series The Lowdown adds Betty Gilpin (GLOW) for its second season. The Emmy-nominated actress will play a character named Ginger, alongside Ethan Hawke’s reckless citizen journalist Lee. The Western drama was renewed for a season two last month, with shooting beginning this spring in Oklahoma.
Mini Tidbits:
The Boys: Gen V actor Asa Germann is cast in Frisco King, the newest Taylor Sheridan Tulsa King spinoff series. Germann will play a savvy college dropout joining the lead actor and an EP Samuel L. Jackson. Filming is set to begin this month in Texas.
Strong supporting actor Josh Segarra is joining Amazon MGM’s untitled romcom with Cameron Diaz. Best known for recurring roles in comedies like ABC’s Abbott Elementary and Fox’s Best Medicine, his new part is unknown but it’s a strong return for Diaz, with the quirky Stephen Merchant (wri. The Office) is directing so the potential is strong.
Jacki Weaver joins NBC’s reboot of The Rockford Files. She’ll play an tough as nails think tank analyst living in a trailer park.
Gillian Jacobs joins the cast of Hulu’s Chad Powers S2. She will play a conspiracy theorist.
FESTIVALS
Match Factory (Sales rep: The Substance) makes a major fleet of sales for their Berlinale winners:
Rose
Berlinale’s Best Leading Performance
Cast: Sandra Hüller
Sold to 21 territories including France and Spain
Synopsis:
In the early 17th century, a soldier arrives at an isolated Protestant village in Germany claiming to be the heir to an abandoned farmstead. Even though he proves to be a good man, the villagers’ suspicions about his identity grow and they force a reckoning.
Queen at Sea
Cast: Juliette Binoche
Dir/Wri: Lance Hammer (Ballast)
Prod. Co: The Bureau (A Little Chaos)
Sold to 11 territories including UK for Curzon
Synopsis:
As advanced dementia erodes an older woman’s ability to communicate her inner life, her husband and daughter struggle to act in her best interests, navigating love and the fragile boundaries between care, protection and autonomy.
Mini Tidbit:
Peter Jackson will receive an honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes. Read more about how he changed cinema here.
TECH SECTION
Netflix just acquired Ben Affleck’s filmmaking AI company InterPositive.
The tool is designed to be trained on your film after you make it. So it’s not trying to replace scriptwriting or production.
Affleck sat down with Netflix Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria to do a breakdown (video), which we’ve cued up to the exact things their AI tool will do:
Remove wires
Reframe a shot
Get a shot you missed
Shape the lighting
Enhance the background
It sounds like a souped-up “fix it in post” tool.
In one way, one would hope this will give higher-level access to sophisticated VFX to the filmmaker who doesn’t have a 7-figure+ VFX budget.
But also seems like it threatens to have studio executives demand shorter production schedules because this tool will allow you to “get that shot you missed.”
Part of filmmaking is the on-set discovery process. And if you know you have a tool to get something after the fact, then you’re outsourcing the main creative engine of your film to a machine.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
Annapurna Rebirth. Megan Ellison the producer whose indie studio was behind every great auteur indie film in the early and mid 2010s IS NOW BACK. Check out Annapurna’s credit list:
The Master (2012)
Spring Breakers (2012)
Her (2013)
Foxcatcher (2014)
Sausage Party (2016)
The top executives from the company are coming back: Chelsea Barnard and Matthew Budman. Annapurna went bankrupt in 2019, but with Larry Ellison now backing David’s acquisition to the tune of $47bn, maybe he’s tossed Megan some money to shower on indie filmmakers.
Look if this is about being a patron of art and putting iconic films into the culture we’re all for it. And no one did it better than Annapurna during those years.
Hulu is bringing back Fox competition reality circa 2004. Hulu has ordered a documentary film looking at the controversial Fox one-seasoner The Swan.
The series, over the course of three months, followed women undergoing an extreme…
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