Add another Stephen King adaptation to the pile. John Carpenter will return for Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends. Peter Capaldi gets ghostly in a new BBC drama. Jon Favreau teases how The Mandalorian will get its freak on. Plus, new looks at Raven in Titans, and James Wan’s mysterious horror project already has a star. Spoilers now!
Awake
Jennifer Jason Leigh, Barry Pepper, Finn Jones, Ariana Greenblatt, Frances Fisher, Shamier Anderson, Lucius Hoyos and Gil Bellows will star alongside Gina Rodriguez in Awake, an upcoming Netflix sci-fi thriller from Mark Raso in which “a sudden global event wipes out all electronics and takes away humankind’s ability to sleep.” [Variety]
Untitled James Wan Horror Film
Variety also reports Annabelle Wallis is confirmed to star in James Wan’s top-secret (between-Aquamans) horror film.
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
The late George Romero’s wife, Chris Romero, has teamed with It producer Roy Lee, Jon Berg of Vertigo Films and Ryan Silbert of Origin Story to finally produce a film adaptation of the 1999 Stephen King novel, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.
The story — which Romero had formerly been attached to direct — concerns a nine-year-old girl named Trisha McFarland who believes she’s being stalked by a mysterious entity after getting lost in the woods. Facing dehydration, hunger and exhaustion, Trisha receives moral support from a mirage of her idol, a baseball player named Tom Gordon. [THR]
Spider-Man 3
According to Deadline, it remains “an open question” whether Jon Watts will return to direct a third Spider-Man movie in light of the recent Sony imbroglio.
Halloween Kills/Halloween Ends
Comic Book reports John Carpenter is “on board” to score both Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, and all is right with the world.
Doctor Sleep
Doctor Sleep, starring Ewan McGregor, has been rated R in the U.S. (about equivalent to MA15+) for “disturbing and violent content, some bloody images, language, nudity, and drug use,” according to director Mike Flanagan on Twitter.
DOCTOR SLEEP has officially been rated R by the MPAA for “disturbing and violent content, some bloody images, language, nudity, and drug use.” Sounds about right…
— Mike Flanagan (@flanaganfilm) August 21, 2019
The Colour Out of Space
Bloody-Disgusting has two more images from The Colour Out of Space, cast in the same purple neon hue of Ghostbusters II and the 1988 remake of The Blob.
Terminator: Dark Fate
Total Film has a new image from Terminator: Dark Fate, while Coming Soon has a new poster. Both feature Arnold Schwarzenegger glowering with a gun, but only one has Linda Hamilton doing it as well!
Martin’s Close
Peter Capaldi will star in a new, half-hour adaptation of M.R. James’ short story Martin’s Close this Christmas for the BBC and writer/director Mark Gatiss. Co-starring Wilf Scolding, Simon Williams, Sara Crowe, Fisayo Akinade, James Holmes and Elliot Levey, the story concerns a man on trial for murder haunted by the ghost of a young woman with a learning disability. Capaldi will play the trial’s prosecutor, Dolben. [Radio Times]
Batwoman
Sam Littlefield has joined the cast of Batwoman as “a shady character nicknamed Mouse” who is “working for Alice and the Wonderland Gang,” according to Deadline.
Legacies
Deadline also has word Bianca Santos has joined the second season of Legacies as Maya, “a sharp-tongued and flirtatious new student at Mystic Falls High” who is also “the sister of Ethan and the daughter of Sheriff Mac.”
Fever
Screen Daily reports Sid Gentle, the production company behind Killing Eve, has bought the television rights to Deon Meyer’s post-apocalyptic novel, Fever, in which a virus has killed 97 per cent of the world’s population. Described as “a cross between Stephen King’s The Stand and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” the story follows the strained relationship between a father and son who rode out the plague in a small settlement in South Africa.
Shining Vale
Meanwhile, Starz has ordered a pilot for a half-hour horror-comedy from Divorce creator Sharon Horgan and Trial & Error co-creator Jeff Astrof in which “a dysfunctional family moves… into a house in which terrible atrocities have taken place. But no one seems to notice except for Pat, the mum, who’s convinced she’s either depressed or possessed — turns out, the symptoms are exactly the same.” [Deadline]
The Mandalorian
Jon Favreau promised The Mandalorian will explore “a darkier, freakier side of Star Wars” in a new interview with THR.
There’s a certain look that the Mandalorian lead character has, there’s a size that the spaceship is, there’s a scale that lines up with the original trilogy. I’m trying to evoke the aesthetics of not just the original trilogy [and] not just the first film, but the first act of the first film. What was it like on Tatooine? What was going on in that cantina? That has fascinated me since I was a child, and I love the idea of the darker, freakier side of Star Wars, the Mad Max aspect of Star Wars.
Arrow
The fourth episode of season eight is titled “Present Tense,” according to a new tweet from Beth Schwartz.
804 #ArrowFinalSeason pic.twitter.com/5vzmvQcwJH
— Beth Schwartz (@SchwartzApprovd) August 20, 2019
Titans
Finally, TV Line has five, mostly Raven-centric new images from Titans second season.
Banner art by Jim Cooke.