We’ve already been waiting years for new Transformers and Star Trek movies, and now we’re going to have to wait a bit more. paramount has reportedly delayed the upcoming Transformers film, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, a whole year, from June 24, 2022 to June 9, 2023. That was the day a new Star Trek movie was set to open—but that’s now moved from June 9, 2023 to December 22, 2023.

Why the moves? Well, probably a number of reasons. Transformers has been filming for some time now but with just over six months until that initial release date, one would venture to guess it was just going to be a little too rushed. And then, once paramount moved Transformers to the weekend Star Trek was dated, it had to move Star Trek. And since Lucasfilm is now unlikely to release its upcoming Star Wars film Rogue Squadron on December 22, 2023, that probably looked like a really good place for that other major Star franchise.

There’s also just such a huge backup of movies because of, well, 2020. Since virtually no big Blockbusters were released last year, the many titles that got pushed are reconfiguring their release dates now—which will result in more moves so they don’t devour each other. This happened a few weeks ago when Disney moved all of its Marvel films. That basically started a domino effect on the schedule which impacted some other major movies, such as Indiana Jones 5. Studios don’t invest hundreds of millions of dollars on potentially multi-billion dollar products and then have their own movies competing with them a few weeks before and after.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is directed by Steven Caple Jr., and stars Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback. It’s a ‘90s-set Transformers movie which will have most of your favorite Autobots and Decepticons, but also Maximals, Predacons, and even Terrorcons. You can read a bunch more about it here. The new Star Trek is much more mysterious. We know that J.J. Abrams is once again producing and that WandaVision creator Matt Shankman is at the helm. The Hollywood Reporter says the current script by Lindsey Beer and Geneva Robertson-Dworet is being rewritten by Josh Friedman and Cameron Squires.

Are you bummed you have to wait longer for these movies? Which are you more interested in? Let us know below.

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A whirl of camera crew activity was spotted at Barrie’s waterfront on Wednesday. The crew is in town as part of production for a movie called Fallen Angels Book Club. The movie stars singer Toni Braxton.

The movie, expected to be the first of two small-screen films, is based on a series of books by the same name, written by author R. Franklin James. Braxton is not only the executive producer of the project but will also play the lead character, Hollis Morgan.

In the book series, Morgan is an ex-con turned amateur detective who sets out to investigate the murder of a member of her book club.

The Fallen Angels Book Club movie is being produced by Toronto-based Brain Power Studio. According to the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA), production is scheduled to take place until October 21, while on-location shooting at Barrie’s waterfront will wrap up as of Thursday, September 30.

The film is expected to debut in 2022.

In a surprise and sudden move, the Aretha Franklin biopic “Respect” is now available to rent at home via on video-on-demand services, just two weeks after it opened in theaters. 

The movie arrived Friday on Amazon Prime Video, where it is available to stream for $19.99. It is also available on Vudu, Google Play, YouTube and other rental services. 

Filmmakers were adamant about “Respect” being a big screen experience, releasing it exclusively in theaters rather than concurrently offering it for home streaming, a strategy employed by several studios as the pandemic continues to affect Hollywood’s bottom line.

But after opening at No. 4 on at the box office two weeks ago, pulling in $8.8 million its debut frame, it slid to No. 5 last weekend with a $3.7 million haul. It has made $17.4 million to date against a reported budget of $55 million.

The study used exclusive research to compare content popularity ratings from different distributors and commissioners. Ampere also used its proprietary Critical Rating framework score based on user reviews, and its own Popularity Score based on volume of interest, website traffic and box office income.

The bottom line was that the leading content streamer has more hits than any other platform. Netflix’s Originals account for more titles in the 20 most popular titles each month, more than those of any other streaming platform and have consistently accounted for at least 31% of the most popular titles since 2019. The streamer’s ability to create hit content—especially TV shows, which make up 79% of Netflix top placements—was seen an effective substitute for legacy franchises.

Looking at the drivers for this surge in popularity, Ampere noted that Netflix has aggressively ramping up its Originals content production since 2015, rising from 124 titles to over 2,000 as of 2020. Netflix has joined media giants Disney and WarnerMedia in creating content that will last. The analyst predicted that the streamer’s series The Crown and Stranger Things will likely stand the test of time alongside many individual titles from Disney’s Marvel and Star Wars universes and from WarnerMedia’s DC and Harry Potter stables.

Competition in the SVOD market has intensified with studio-backed new entrants producing their own Originals (a number of which are based on existing, popular IP) and reclaiming titles licensed to Netflix for their own platforms,” commented Ampere analyst Rahul Patel. “But as the dominant commissioner of popular SVOD Originals and with an increasingly large release slate, Netflix has established a production brand to an extent unrivalled by any other SVOD platform.”

MAA elections are no longer an affair limited to the film actors and actresses. They have assumed political overtones with political parties getting involved in the elections. Mega family’s open backing of Prakash Raj as the MAA president has opened a Pandora’s box. Though the YSRCP has clarified that it has no interest in the MAA elections, several of its leaders are said to be working openly against the Prakash Raj panel.

If sources are to be believed, the RSS too is said to be involved in the campaign. Sources say that RSS has no interest whatsoever in the MAA elections, but is hell-bent on defeating Prakash Raj, who is a well-known Modi baiter. The RSS feels that she should be defeated and sent packing for his anti-Hindu comments. Hence, the RSS, which has contacts with several film actors, producers and technicians, is leveraging its contacts to meet the MAA voters. An all-India level leader with wide contacts in the film industry is said to be personally monitoring the campaign by the RSS workers. At least 11 film personalities, including a young politician who has produced films with Nithin, are involved in contacting the voters. They are trying to influence the voters by ‘exposing’ Prakash Raj. Film personalities like Narasimha Rao and Kota Srinivas Rao too came out openly against Prakash Raj only and not against the other members of his panels.

Interestingly, Manchu Lakshmi and Mohan Babu hosted Modi’s meeting with the film industry ahead of the 2014 elections. Kota Srinivasa Rao had contested and won as an MLA on behalf of the BJP from Vijayawada. Only recently, top RSS leaders had met top film producers, actors and directors in connection with the fund raising for the Ram temple construction in Ayodhya.

The assistant director on “Rust” who handed Alec Baldwin the gun that fired the fatal shot acknowledged to investigators that he did not check all the rounds loaded in the weapon prior to the lethal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, a detective wrote in a search warrant affidavit made public Wednesday.

Detective Alexandria Hancock described her interviews with first assistant director David Halls and armorer Hannah Gutierrez.

An earlier affidavit stated Halls shouted “cold gun” (meaning the gun did not have a blank or a live round that contained gunpowder that could explode), before handing it to Baldwin.

Investigators added the request to search the van after interviewing several members of the movie crew, including Gutierrez, who told investigators the weapons used in filming were stored in a safe inside the van or “prop truck” to which only a few people had access and the combination.

Santa Fe Sheriff Adan Mendoza said Wednesday a suspected live round killed Hutchins and wounded director Joel Souza. Yet in the warrant, Hancock says Gutierrez told investigators, “No live ammo is ever kept on set.”

More context: According to the affidavit, a van used to store weapons and props on the Santa Fe set of “Rust” was searched for evidence prompted by interviews from the film crew. The van was searched for firearms, ammunition, a gun safe, fingerprints, bodily fluids, and residue, the detective said.

“Hannah advised on the day of the incident, she checked the ‘dummies’ and ensured they were no ‘hot’ rounds,” the warrant states about the ammo used on set. While the firearms were secured inside the van, “ammo was left on a cart on the set, not secured,” Gutierrez told investigators.

The grey, two-tier cart also contained a western-style belt and other prop-ammunition.

Gutierrez told investigators she handed the gun to Baldwin a couple of times during the day’s filming, and also handed it to Halls.

Reid Russell, a cameraman standing next to Hutchins and Souza, also told deputies everyone seemed to be getting along, despite an earlier walkout of some crew members the previous day. He told deputies he had stepped out of the immediate area for about five minutes and was not sure whether the weapon was checked during his absence.

Souza, who sustained a gunshot wound to his shoulder in the incident, told law enforcement, “as far as he knows, no one gets checked for live ammunition on their person prior and after the scenes are being filmed.”

Halls and Gutierrez have not responded to CNN’s requests for comment.

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Nicolas Cage instinctively knew how to play Rob, the melancholic truffle forager at the center of “Pig.” The indie film explores Rob’s connection to his pet pig and his tortured relationship with his past celebrity as a renowned chef. Cage, one of the top action stars of the late 1990s and early aughts, related to Rob’s complicated feelings about fame and shared a desire to live off the grid.

“I do feel that I’ve gone into my own wilderness and that I’ve left the small town that is Hollywood,” Cage says. “I don’t know exactly why Rob left his stardom. It’s never fully explained, and I like that about the movie. But as for me, I don’t know if I’d want to go back. I don’t know if I’d want to go and make another Disney movie. It would be terrifying. It’s a whole different climate. There’s a lot of fear there.”

Cage is no longer the box office draw he was when headlined comic book films like 2007’s “Ghost Rider” and Jerry Bruckheimer blow ’em ups like 1996’s “The Rock” and 1997’s “Con Air.” He’s spent the last decade or so popping up in low-budget fare, some of it forgettable (“Kill Chain,” anyone?), some criminally under-seen, as was the case with his tender turn in David Gordon Green’s “Joe.” But Cage says even when he was riding high he sometimes bristled at the commercial constraints that were imposed on his performances.

Nicolas Cage said he’s eager to take independent films because they provide more freedom.
(Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images for NEON)

“When I was making Jerry Bruckheimer movies back-to-back, that was just a high-pressure game. There were a lot of fun moments, but at the same time, there was also ‘We wrote this line. It has to be said this way,'” Cage remembers. “They’d put a camera on you and photograph you, and order you: ‘Now say the roller skate training wheels line.’ I’d say, ‘I’ll do that but I’d also like to try it this way.’  On independent movies, you have more freedom to experiment and be fluid. There’s less pressure and there’s more oxygen in the room.”

“Pig” was an opportunity for Cage to remind movie-watchers that he is capable of doing subtle work after a stretch of scaling operatic heights in films such as “Mandy” and “Prisoners of the Ghostland,” the latter of which had him acting out what it would be like to have a testicle blown off.

“I wanted to remind myself and also remind some folks perhaps in the audience or in the media that I could also apply myself to a much more quiet and measured performance style,” Cage says. “I had gone on this tear, mission almost, to kind of break form with film performance and what was considered good performance by being naturalistic or photo-realistic or minimalistic.”

For a film like “Prisoners of the Ghostland,” Cage says he choreographs each beat of his performance and applies a style of acting that he labels “western Kabuki theater,” one that draws on off-beat vocalizations, German expressionism and unbridled intensity to create a style all its own. Memes, scores of them, have been devoted to the scenery-chewing results. It’s also inspired a devoted following, with no less an expert than Ethan Hawke praising Cage as “the only actor since Marlon Brando that’s actually done anything new with the art of acting.”

Nicolas Cage is starring in an indie film titled ‘Pig.’
(Getty Images)

“It created a kind of culture of what has been labeled ‘Cage rage,'” Cage says. “I’m glad it landed. I’m glad it communicated. I’m glad there was an id there that I shared with other folks in cinema that were interested.”

With “Pig,” he opted to do something different.

“I just wanted to show up on set, walk into a room and carry whatever my life experiences, whatever my memories were, whatever my bad dreams last night were, and just tell the story,” Cage says. “I wanted to get back to a much more haiku, for lack of a better word, style of performance. When I say that I mean it quite literally. Haiku is five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables, and it’s really the quiet spaces that you’re led to contemplate that are inspired by the words and the syllables. That’s what this film is like.”

“Pig” isn’t just a character study. The film also examines the intense bonds that can develop between humans and animals. In Rob’s case, his truffle-hunting pig is his best friend and sole source of unconditional love. For Cage, there’s a similar bond with his cat, Merlin.

Nicolas Cage will soon be seen in ‘The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,’ where he will play a fictionalized version of himself.
(AP)

“I was always close with my animals,” Cage says. “I think a lot of people that are in the public eye probably feel this as well. There’s a truth there. Sometimes when you meet somebody who knows you from a movie but doesn’t know you as you, they want to undercut you in some way or see you as competition.  You don’t get that with animals, so the animal relationships become the closest to family. They become the ones that have nothing to hide and just want to share this moment together with you.”

“Pig” opens July 16, and reviewers are hailing it as a return to form for Cage, but don’t expect the actor to abandon his outré projects. Cage will soon be seen in “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” playing a fictionalized version of himself, an aging star who is enlisted to help the CIA.

“I will never see this movie,” Cage says. “I’m told it’s a good movie. I’m told people love it and are enjoying the ride, but I made that for the audience. It’s too much for me to go to the premiere and sit there with everybody. Psychologically, that’s too bizarre and whacked out for me.”

Music is powerful. It is soothing, can heal and effect a change across the world. AR Rahman, the writer and composer of 99 Songs, is living proof. Unfortunately, on the evidence of 99 Songs, writer Rahman does not yet possess the nuance required to seamlessly translate that concept to the big screen.

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99 Songs follows Jay (Ehan Bhat) — an aspiring musician, whose childhood we learn through montages and flashbacks as the story progresses. He grows up with a father who detests music, but the protagonist finds his calling anyway.

He is in love with a mute girl, Sophia Singhania (Edilsy Vargas), the daughter of a rich industrialist. He wishes to marry Sophia but we have a stereotypical dad who doesn’t believe in Jay’s dreams of becoming a musician. When Jay stands his ground, the dad lays down a challenge — compose 100 songs before he can come around asking his daughter’s hand in marriage.

And so Jay sets out on a journey that turns both his and Sophia’s worlds upside down. How the duo reunites by overcoming hardships, self-doubt and infidelity rumours form the rest of the plot.

In its visual narrative, 99 Songs is a nerd fest — especially for those who work closely with musical instruments. There are fabulous shots of the music making process that can only serve the interests of a niche community. The issue which serves as the film’s undoing is the boring, old (read as: done to death) story line, and the familiar tropes.

As someone who looks like a teenage version of Hrithik Roshan, Ehan Bhat looks ambitious — to play the part of Jay, but there is no way artistes can get a grip on their performance when the story just ambles, and that too towards a predictable end. The ambling affair is more pronounced in certain portions — like when we are introduced to a flashback sequence of Jay’s mom, the general feeling is, “Speed up things, please!”

Films like 99 Songs need not necessarily bank heavily on a unique screenplay; it is a musical, audiences walk in seeking an experience of a different kind, and which composer Rahman does provide in abundance — the Jazz club sequences in Shillong, ‘Jwalamukhi’ track and the many piano riffs are a treat to savour. However, the success of a musical also rests on tying the viewer emotionally to the conquest of the protagonist.

99 Songs essentially being a Hindi film — the dialogues are dubbed, which does make you feel like you are watching a Jackie Chan film on Star Vijay on a Sunday (90s kids will get this) — there is little of relevance to a South Indian audience, much less a Tamil audience. The protagonists are rich people — a trope very common in Bollywood but not so much in Tamil cinema, at least in the new millennium. This presents a very interesting proposition for an audience conditioned to see their protagonists as one among the masses; so at the outset it is tough to see how Jay’s pursuits would find the emotional connect with the masses for whom the film is made.

Secondly, successful musicals — for example, School of Rock, bank on an engaging screenplay. 99 Songs lacks it.

Interestingly, there is VFX in this musical whose final product seems more a misplaced idea than how it seemed when it germinated in the creator’s head. However, certain sequences do land well, like when Jay has an out-of-body experience — when he is touched, literally, by the goddess of music (or his mom) — are nuanced additions to the storytelling, but beyond that there is little else to Jay or his pursuits that keeps us invested.

At some point, Manisha Koirala’s character in the film remarks: “Music will be the last remaining magic in this world.” At least in the case of 99 Songs, it is true, and especially because good scripts and engaging screenplays are going extinct at a dangerous pace in Indian cinema.

‘99 Songs’ is currently playing in theatres