Will Packer, who produced the 2017 film with the movie’s director, Malcolm D. Lee, announced the news Friday on Good Morning America.
“Can’t we all use a post-pandemic trip, my friend? I think that the time is actually right, and this is something that I will tell you and break right now at GMA: the Girls Trip 2 sequel, we are underway,” Packer, who is producing the 2022 Academy Awards, told Michael Strahan. “We are absolutely in the stages, the ladies are in, I just talked to the director.”
“We are underway with Girls Trip 2, and now it’s just about what kind of trip do we take, right?” he continued. “Post-pandemic with all our favorite crazy ladies, what do we do with them? That’s what we got to figure out.”
Girls Trip, which starred Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Tiffany Haddish and Jada Pinkett Smith, told the story of four best friends who travel to the Essence Festival in New Orleans and rekindle their sisterhood after having drifted apart because of life.
The movie, which turns five this summer, was written by Black-ish creator Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver based on a story from the pair and Erica Rivinoja.
Girls Trip was a critical success, sitting at 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, as well as a financial success, earning more than $140 million worldwide on a $19 million budget.
The film received numerous accolades as well, including two Black Reel Awards, two NAACP Image Awards and an MTV Movie & TV Award.
Shore, Anderson, with producer Michael Rotenberg in 1992 — Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc
It appears comedian Louie Anderson‘s cancer battle may have taken a turn for the worse. Comedian and actor Pauly Shoretook to Twitter to call for prayers for his friend, after visiting the 68-year-old comic and Emmy-winning Baskets actor.
“I say this with a heavy heart,” Shore wrote. “[J]ust left the hospital in Las Vegas where Louie Anderson his sisters and close friend were kind enough to let me say my goodbyes.”
Shore added, “he’s still with us but keep him in your prayers.”
A rep for Anderson told ABC Audio earlier this week that the Coming to America star is battling diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, and had been “resting comfortably” in the hospital.
Shore addressed his comments to “comedians and @TheComedyStore alumni” — Shore’s mother Mitsi owned the iconic Los Angeles venue where Anderson and many famous stand-ups got their start.
Comedienne Kathy Griffin, who recently battled lung cancer herself, replied to Shore’s post, noting, “Pauly. So sorry. Thinkin about nights with Louis and Judy Toll. Cant laugh harder than that.”
Fans also responded, including one who urged Shore, “Please let him know that we love him,” to which the Encino Man star replied, “I did.”
Dr. Death star Joshua Jackson has been cast opposite Lizzy Caplan in the Paramount+ original series, Fatal Attraction, a reimagining of the classic 1980s psychosexual thriller film starring by Michael Douglas and Glenn Close. Jackson will star in Douglas’ former role of Dan Gallagher, the object of her lover’s obsession following a brief affair. Caplan will take on Close’s former role of his lover, Alex. The new series, per the streamer, “will explore fatal attraction and the timeless themes of marriage and infidelity through the lens of modern attitudes towards strong women, personality disorders and coercive control”…
Don’t Look Up filmmaker Adam McKay and The Comey Rule creator Billy Ray are teaming up for a feature film about the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to Deadline. The film, which was originally envisioned as a limited series, will take a “journalistic approach” to chronicling the deadly assault on the citadel of American democracy,” according to the outlet, which adds that the project will be shopped to studios and streamers soon. “The goal was to do a ground-level view of a momentous day,” Ray tells Deadline. “It’s about protesters who became rioters and cops who became defenders of democracy. Someone else can tell the story of the chaos at the White House on that day. I wanted to stay in the trenches”…
Let the battle begin…again! Netflix has ordered Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend, a reboot of the classic Japanese import-turned Food Network series. According to the streaming service, “Five new trailblazing Iron Chefs will welcome brave Challenger Chefs to the reimagined Kitchen Stadium, where they’ll face off and be pushed to the limits of endurance and creativity, as they cook up extraordinary culinary creations.” The competition’s most successful Challenger will return to battle in a grand finale for the chance to be named the first ever “Iron Legend.” A previous American reboot saw Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, Wolfgang Puck and Michael Symon holding the Iron Chef title…
Variety reports that season two of Mike White‘s The White Lotus will take place in Italy — Sicily, to be exact. Once again a Four Seasons Hotel will stand in for White’s fictional luxury chain of White Lotus hotels, specifically the Four Seasons San Domenico Palace in the exclusive Sicilian resort town of Taormina. A source close to the show tells Variety. Season two will star F. Murray Abraham, Adam DiMarco, Tom Hollander, Haley Lu Richardson, Aubrey Plaza and Michael Imperioli. Jennifer Coolidge will also return for season 2…
Hardy Krüger, the German actor best known for starring alongside Laurence Olivier in Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far, died “suddenly and unexpectedly” at his home in Palm Springs on Wednesday, his German agency in Hamburg said in a statement obtained by The Hollywood Reporter. He was 93. Krüger’s other credits include Howard Hawks’ Hatari!, alongside John Wayne, and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, opposite Ryan O’Neal…
A live-action adaptation of the animated classic, The Aristocats, is in early development at Disney, according to Variety. The original 1970 film follows a family of aristocratic cats who live a luxurious life in Paris until their owner’s butler finds out the cats are set to receive a massive fortune, and kidnaps them and abandons them in the country. To recover their fortune, they must befriend an alley cat named Thomas O’Malley. Phil Harris, Eva Gabor, Hermione Baddeley, Dean Clark, Sterling Holloway, Scatman Crothers and Roddy Maude-Roxby led the voice cast of the original film, which grossed $191 million worldwide. Disney is the parent company of ABC News…
The new show As We See It, debuting today on Amazon Prime Video, is very personal for creator Jason Katims, the guy behind Parenthood and Friday Night Lights.
The series is about three adults with Autism, and the various challenges they face trying to navigate work and love and life — a situation, Katims tells ABC Audio, that his own son experienced not too long ago.
“I have a son on the spectrum, and a few years ago, he was just getting to that age of being a young adult,” he explains. “And I realized, well, you know, there’s a lot that you see about and hear and read about children on the spectrum, less so about what the experience is really like for an adult on the spectrum. So it was a subject matter that was very personal to me that I was learning about. And that’s always a good thing to write about.”
Likewise, Katims, made sure the actors — Rick Glassman, Albert Rutecki and Sue Ann Pien — had a personal connection with the subject matter, which he accomplished by “casting the three leads who all identified themselves as being on the spectrum” so they could “make it feel as real and authentic as possible.”
“By making those choices,” he says, “not only is it real and authentic, but it’s also incredibly delightful to watch.”
And just like his other shows, As We See It will make you laugh and make you cry, a track record that Katims sometimes finds a little “weird.”
“I don’t know what I feel about it. I think that, though, the thing that nobody ever talks about is in order to have your emotions available to cry, you have to first laugh.”
Apple TV+ has announced that it’s launching a live-action TV series based on Godzilla and his other giant monster friends and frenemies, the Titans.
The untitled series will be backed by Star Trek: Enterprise‘s Chris Black and Matt Fraction, whose Marvel Comics’ Hawkeye run is a fan favorite — and was a major inspiration for the just-wrapped Disney+ series of the same name.
The recent so-called Monsterverse movies began with the stand-alone 2014 film Godzilla. That movie was followed up by 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, which hinted at an expanded universe of other Titans.
2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters was next, followed by 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong. The films earned more than $2 billion bucks worldwide.
Incidentally, those movies were co-produced by Warner Bros. with Legendary Pictures, so it’s curious that the Monsterverse series will stream on Apple TV+ instead of WB’s corporate sibling HBO Max, where the movies can currently be seen.
Jeannie Mai revealed the name of her first baby with husband Jeezy on Thursday
In a video posted on her Hello Hunnay YouTube channel, The Real co-host announced that the baby’s name is Monaco.
“I thought Baby J’s name should be a J name because obviously Jeannie and Jeezy, makes sense, but that wasn’t the name that came to us,” Jeannie explained. “What really came to us was how baby J came to fruition for us when we were dating.”
She recalled a trip to the European city-state of Monaco that she and Jeezy took where they talked about their goals for the future.
Then Mai pointed to a wall where Monaco’s name was printed and said that the nursery is themed after the moniker.
“That’s really the theme of the nursery: what Monaco is about. Family, moments, traveling, discussions, important key points in my life and Jeezy’s life that brought Monaco here,” she added.
On Thursday’s episode of The Real, the co-hosts also revealed the name, clarifying that the sex of the baby will be announced at a later date.
“Today is an extra exciting day because, guess what…we have a Baby J update,” Adrienne Bailon said. Then she pulled out an envelope and announced the name, reading, “Three years ago, Jeezy and Jeannie were talking on a bridge in France, talking about what it meant to do life together. Here they decided to grow and raise a family together. Hence, they named their child after the city that changed their lives forever: Monaco Mai Jenkins.
The run time for The Batman, director Matt Reeves‘ forthcoming take on the Caped Crusader, has been revealed.
The movie will run two hours and 47 minutes without credits, according to The Hollywood Reporter, making it one of the longest superhero movies ever released. The film, starring Robert Pattinson, Paul Dano, Zoe Kravitz, Colin Farrell and Jeffrey Wright, will be five minutes short of three hours with credits — and presumably will include a customary comic book movie end-credits scene.
That will make The Batman the third-longest superhero movie ever, behind only Zack Snyder‘s Justice League opus, which ran 242 minutes, and the 181-minutes-long Avengers: Endgame.
In fact, the new film, which debuts March 4 in theaters and on HBO Max, is longer than what many Bat-fans see as a franchise high-water mark, Christopher Nolan‘s 165-minute The Dark Knight, starring Christian Bale and for which Heath Ledger won a posthumous Best Actor Oscar for playing The Joker.
Angela Bassett and husband Courtney B. Vance are serving as executive producers of the docuseries One Thousand Years of Slavery, which will premiere on the Smithsonian Channel during Black History Month on Monday, February 7 at 8 p.m. ET/PT.
Debbie Allen, Lorraine Toussaint, Soledad O’Brien, CCH Pounder, and Dulé Hill are among the personalities featured in the four-part series, which explores slavery’s legacy.
“One Thousand Years of Slavery stretches the canvas beyond the 400 years we’ve traditionally learned about, and I’m thrilled to bring this storytelling to life with Smithsonian Channel,” Bassett said in a statement. Vance added, “We are incredibly proud to be part of this journey.”
In other news, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier star Anthony Mackie will make his directorial debut with Spark, a true story about Claudette Colvin, an unsung pioneer of the Civil Rights era, Deadline reports. Saniyya Sidney who portrayed Venus Williams in King Richard, will star as Colvin.
“It’s great to be a superhero in movies, but she’s a real live one living amongst us, and I’m honored to tell her story,” Mackie said in a statement.
Finally, grown-ish has dropped the trailer for the second half of its fourth season, which premieres January 27 on Freeform. In the clip, Zoey, portrayed by Yara Shahidi, is faced with choosing between love or her career as graduation approaches.
Specifically, Zoey must decide whether to pursue a fashion career in New York City with her ex-boyfriend, Luca, played by Luka Sabbat, or to accept the invitation from her current boyfriend Aaron, portrayed Trevor Jackson, to accompany him to South Africa, where he’s received a grant from the University of Johannesburg.
Christopher Polk/Getty Images for Critics’ Choice Television Awards
Bill Paxton‘s untimely death in 2017 was at the center of a Los Angeles’ judge’s decision on Wednesday.
Deadline reports Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Steven J. Kleifield is allowing the actor’s widow, Louise Paxton, and the couple’s children, James and Lydia Paxton, to sue Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for punitive damages in connection with actor’s death.
The Twister and True Lies star’s cause of death was officially listed as a stroke, which he suffered 11 days after surgery to replace a heart valve and repair aorta damage. He was 61.
However, according to the family’s lawsuit, reports Deadline, surgeon Dr. Ali Khoynezhad — who no longer works for Cedars — “was known prior to the Paxton death to practice what has been testified to by the hospital staff as ‘cowboy medicine’…In Khoynezhad’s quest to generate more surgeries and higher numbers, he continued to push the envelope and pushed to do surgeries on cases that were marginal at best.”
After the actor’s death, the family’s suit alleges, “The heart surgery recommended to Bill Paxton was not indicated” in his cause of death, and continues, “Mr. Paxton did not meet even Khoynezhad’s own criteria for such a surgery.”
What’s more, the family claims Cedars-Sinai and Dr. Khoynezhad, “intentionally interfered with and thwarted their request for an autopsy to cover up the cause of Paxton’s death,” Deadline reports.
Further, Paxton’s relatives say that had they known that their requests for an autopsy would be denied, they would have made “alternative arrangements” to have one done before he was cremated.
A trial date for the punitive damages was also rescheduled from March to September 19.
It has just been revealed where Tom Cruise‘s movie in outer space will be shot. U.K.-based Space Entertainment Enterprise (SEE) has announced that it’s co-producing the hush-hush film project for Cruise’s Day After Tomorrow director Doug Liman in SEE-1, the first dedicated movie studio in space.
Scheduled for completion in 2024, Axiom Space’s SEE-1 will be a fully functioning TV, film and streaming-content studio, which will couple with Axiom Station, a commercial space station that is scheduled to blast off on February 28.
The Axiom Station mission alone is another first: It will be the first fully commercial crew to join the astronauts at the International Space Station (ISS).
Axiom will first link to the International Space Station; the company says SEE-1 will join them in late 2024.
According to the company, the SEE-1 module “will allow artists, producers, and creatives to develop, produce, record, and live stream content which maximizes the Space Station’s low-orbit micro-gravity environment, including films, television, music and sports events.”
S.E.E.’s COO Richard Johnston said in the announcement, “From Jules Verne to Star Trek, science fiction entertainment has inspired millions of people around the world to dream about what the future might bring. Creating a next generation entertainment venue in space opens countless doors to create incredible new content and make these dreams a reality.”
As reported, while Cruise’s film will be the first Hollywood production to be shot in space, it won’t be the first movie to do so: In October, Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, actress star Yulia Peresild and director Kim Shipenko blasted off to the ISS to shoot The Challenge, a film about a mission to send a doctor into space to save the life of a cosmonaut.
