Be one of the first to see the next chapter in The Conjuring universe as Bloody Disgusting invites you to several advanced screenings of Annabelle: Creationthis coming Wednesday, July 27th, all taking place @ 7:30 PM.
In Annabelle: Creation, which opens in theaters August 11th: “Several years after the tragic death of their little girl, a dollmaker and his wife welcome a nun and several girls from a shuttered orphanage into their home, soon becoming the target of the dollmaker’s possessed creation, Annabelle.”
The full cast includes Stephanie Sigman (Spectre), Talitha Bateman (The 5th Wave), Lulu Wilson (Ouija 2), Philippa Anne Coulthard (After the Dark), Grace Fulton (Badland), Lou Lou Safran (The Choice), Samara Lee (The Last Witch Hunter), Tayler Buck, Anthony LaPaglia (TV’s Without a Trace) and Miranda Otto (The Lord of the Rings Trilogy). Sandberg directed from a screenplay by Gary Dauberman, who also wrote Annabelle.
On the same day Warner Bros. wowed fans with trailers for “Justice League” and “Ready Player One” at Comic-Con, “Wonder Woman” passed “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” to become the highest domestic-grossing film of the summer.
In addition, the estimated $50.5 million opening for Christopher Nolan’s WWII film “Dunkirk” has pushed WB past the $1 billion domestic mark for the 17th consecutive year, a streak longer than any other in Hollywood.
“Wonder Woman” grossed an estimated $4.6 million in its eighth weekend in theaters, bringing its domestic total to $389 million. “Wonder Woman” has shown incredible staying power, currently holding a 3.77x multiple after its $103 million opening. With a worldwide total of $779 million, it has already passed the global run of “Suicide Squad” and the domestic run of “Batman v Superman.” When compared to Marvel movies, “Wonder Woman” ranks sixth domestically between the $387.2 million of “GotG Vol. 2” and the $403 million of the original “Spider-Man.”
Meanwhile, the opening for “Dunkirk” has made WB the third studio in 2017 to cross the $1 billion domestic mark, joining Disney and Universal. According to Box Office Mojo, WB stands in third among all studios this year with a 15.2 percent market share. While the studio suffered a bomb with “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword,” which grossed $39.1 million stateside against a $175 million budget, its domestic totals have been lifted thanks to three big hits.
In addition to “Wonder Woman,” “The Lego Batman Movie” won over comic book fans and family audiences with $175.7 million from its February release, while Legendary’s “Kong: Skull Island” beat expectations with $168 million. “Dunkirk” is likely to continue to boost WB’s stateside numbers, as previous Nolan-directed films like “Interstellar” and “Inception” have posted high multiples.
Next on WB’s slate are two horror films from New Line Cinema: “Annabelle: Creation,” which comes out Aug. 11, and a remake of Stephen King’s “It,” due out Sept. 8. Following that is “Blade Runner 2049” in October and the big DC crossover “Justice League” in November.
One of Gadot’s “Justice League” co-stars joined in.
“You’re a warrior,” said Ezra Miller, who plays the Flash in an upcoming film. “Your ability to cry is what makes you such a warrior. Come join the Justice League whenever you get ready.”
Keller, author of “The Adventures of Danica Dreamer,” said the encounter had a big impact on her little girl.
“These characters matter and can have a huge influence on young people,” Keller wrote on her “Danica Dreamer” Facebook page. “What a great role model and genuine, nice person. My daughter will always remember this moment for the rest of her life.”
It wasn’t just Wonder Woman making an impression. The same footage also briefly showed an excited little boy with tears in his eyes as he met Ben Affleck, current star of the “Batman” franchise as well as “Justice League.”
American Horror Story has its title for season seven which debuts in September.
On Thursday creator Ryan Murphy tweeted it out when he was attending the San Diego, California, Comic-Con convention.
The next installment of the FX anthology series will be American Horror Story: Cult. Previous seasons have been titled Murder House (2011), Asylum (2012), Coven (2013), Freak Show (2014), Hotel (2015) and Roanoke (2016).
New: Season seven of American Horror Story will be called Cult, creator Ryan Murphy (pictured in March) tweeted on Thursday
His big news announcement: Murphy kept it short and sweet with his tweet
The next season will star Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Billie Lourd, Billy Eichner, Cheyenne Jackson, Alison Pill and Colton Haynes.
Earlier this week it was announced Lena Dunham of Girls fame would be joining the cast.
After Ryan tweeted Cult, Paulson tweeted: 'Here we go: AHS7 CULT. Sh-t goes down. Woof.'
Jackson added: '#Scerred.'
Also at the Comic-Con event a video of scary clowns were seen. They were marching together. The clip was tagged AHS7.com.
New look: Here is the logo and a look at the scary clowns in the new video
Spooky stuff: After Ryan tweeted Cult, Paulson tweeted: 'Here we go: AHS7 CULT. Sh-t goes down. Woof'
American Horror Story: Cult debuts on FX on Tuesday, September 5.
American Horror Story is an American anthology horror series created and produced by Murphy and Brad Falchuk (who dated Gwyneth Paltrow).
Each season is conceived as a self-contained miniseries, following a disparate set of characters and settings, and a storyline with its own 'beginning, middle, and end.'
Some plot elements of each season are loosely inspired by true events.
New gig: Earlier this week it was announced Lena Dunham of Girls fame would be joining the cast; seen in May
More ladies: Billie Lourd, left, is also in the cast with Paulson, right
The response to Jodie Whittaker’s casting has been overwhelming. For a series that regularly switches out its central, quasi-immortal character for a new leading actor every few years or so, a certain amount of fandom ferocity was expected. But Whittaker’s announcement was different, because come December, she will be the 50-year-old franchise’s first female lead.
As expected, a certain amount of “furious sexist backlash” greeted Whittaker’s casting, as some uneasy fans balked at the prospect of a long-running male hero suddenly becoming a female one. (Never mind that the Doctor protagonist has switched physical identities a dozen times before this, or that the show itself reflects a fantasy, alien world with far more unbelievable scenarios.) Louder than the detractors, though, was a flood of genuinely ecstatic fans overjoyed by the series’ decision to shunt the usual casting type in favor of a bolder, history-defining decision. Videos of young girls screaming with joy upon seeing Whittaker’s face in BBC promos quickly went viral.
And it wasn’t just young girls who seemed genuinely enlivened by the announcement. Overall, “Doctor Who” ratings had been slipping under star Peter Capaldi, the 12th white man to take on the decades-old hero. A jolt of electricity had seemed necessary for some time. The best way to create one was to introduce something new into the “Who” series ― something guaranteed to satisfy a horde of followers waiting on the edge of their seats for a new anything to complicate their vastly interconnected sci-fi universe. But those young girls’ reactions bottled up the purest kind of response to Whittaker’s casting: After over 800 episodes filled with a male Doctor saving the world, we’re finally going to see a woman ― hailed as more clever than any being in existence, heretofore undefeated against all adversaries, infused with a kind of confidence that only comes with lifetimes of experience ― reigning supreme on the BBC.
We’re mesmerized by stories of limitless imagination, by the notion that anything is possible, but we’re often tethered to them by their characters, especially the ones that remind us of ourselves and our place in the world.
When Rey (Daisy Ridley) first grabbed a lightsaber in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” unabashedly charging at Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) with a weapon viewers had seen only in the hands of men for years, fans watching felt similarly. When Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) catapulted herself through a glass window having just finished cleaning up an entire fight scene on her own, superhero fans used to seeing men commanding battles felt similarly.
When ghostbuster Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) licked her gun before literally whipping a crowd of destructive ghosts into submission, fans felt similarly. Science fiction and fantasy are built on these kinds of fan reflexes: immersed in a story so far-fetched and extraordinary, we explode with goosebumps, butterflies and tears when moments of unmistakable humanity appear abruptly before us. We’re mesmerized by stories of limitless imagination, by the notion that anything is possible, but we’re often tethered to them by their characters, especially the ones that remind us of ourselves and our place in the world.
For decades, it’s been easier for straight, white men to find those characters, as Lukes and Captain Americas and Peter Venkmans stood at the center of profound scenes. When Whittaker brought down her hood to reveal the new face of “Doctor Who,” some women experienced that connection, too. Sci-fi and fantasy have surely had their fair shares of female characters before them (from “Alien” to “X-Files” to “Star Trek” to “Buffy”), but TV shows and movies like “Doctor Who,” “Star Wars,” “Wonder Women” and “Ghostbusters” are lately giving us something relatively new, if not under-explored until now: women-led sci-fi franchises.
When the trailer for Ava DuVernay’s “A Wrinkle in Time” debuted ― the same weekend as Whittaker’s casting announcement ― women, particularly women of color, had another reason to scream for joy. DuVernay took a familiar story, Madeleine L’Engle’s 1960s book about a young girl on an interplanetary adventure, and cast characters coded white in the source material as women of color ― Oprah Winfrey, Mindy Kaling, Storm Reid. “My whole process with this film was, what if?” the director told EW. “With these women, I wondered, could we make them women of different ages, body types, races? Could we bring in culture, bring in history in their costumes? And in the women themselves, could we just reflect a fuller breadth of femininity?” She has, if the movie turns into a franchise, four more adaptable L’Engle books in the series to explore this goal.DuVernay’s focus on “what if” embraces so perfectly the potential for innovation built right into fantasy. It’s one of the elements that drives fans back to the genre, this idea that a boundless universe can help us explore questions reality has yet to answer. (One need only look at how effective Hulu’s women-led “Handmaid’s Tale” has been at driving the concept “what if” closer to the concept of “what now.”) But beyond that, DuVernay recognizes the power of humanity. She recognizes that representation ― the simple idea that every fan deserves to see themselves in characters on screen ― only deepens the connections people form with stories, which make up the very foundation upon which fandom is built.
Calls for expanded representation (including those for queer, trans, disabled people) are, in the end, just appeals to the boundaries of fandom: Let us in. We’ve been watching from the edges for a while now, but we’d like to fall into a world, headfirst and headstrong, the way you can. What you see as a continuity error, a divergence from canon that quakes your understanding of a fictional world, we see as a doorway in, something that you’ve had access to for years.
Whittaker’s casting, like Reid’s and Ridley’s and Gadot’s and McKinnon’s, is a doorway in. There should be more.
We’ll finally see Dumbledore and Grindelwald together.
Warner Bros.
When we last left the world of “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” the Magical Congress of the United States of America was imprisoning Gellert Grindelwald, who’d been lurking around disguised as Percival Graves (Colin Farrell). Next year’s “Fantastic Beasts” sequel will pick up months later, after Grindelwald has escaped and begun recruiting Dark Magic disciples.
Warner Bros. revealed the plot Monday, in conjunction with the start of production. The still-untitled “Harry Potter” spinoff will revolve around a young Dumbledore (Jude Law) recruiting his former student Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) to stop onetime BFF/crush Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) from “gathering more followers to his cause — elevating wizards above all non-magical beings.” In a loyalty-testing mission surrounded by “an increasingly dangerous and divided wizarding world,” Newt reunites with Tina (Katherine Waterston), her sister Queenie (Alison Sudol) and the non-magical baker Jacob (Dan Fogler).
Moving the action from New York to Paris, the 1920s-set sequel will also feature Credence Barebone, the brooding teenager played by Ezra Miller, whose fate is unknown. Zoë Kravitz, seen briefly in a photo in “Fantastic Beasts,” is joining the cast as Leta Lestrange, who had a close relationship with Newt during their time together at Hogwarts. (Her relationship to Bellatrix Lestrange is unclear.) “Avengers: Age of Ultron” and “The Dark Tower” actress Claudia Kim will play a circus performer, while Callum Turner joins the spell-casting as Newt’s brother. Kevin Guthrie is reprising his role as Magical Congress honcho Abernathy.
David Yates, who directed “Fantastic Beasts” and the final four “Harry Potter” movies, is at the reins again, working off a screenplay written by J.K. Rowling. (Yates is slated to helm all five installments in the “Beasts” franchise.) Filming is taking place at Leavesden, the Warner Bros. studio complex outside London where all the “Potter” movies were shot.
It’s time to protect your movie-buying funds from those sneaky Nifflers: The next chapter of “Fantastic Beasts” will open in theaters Nov. 16, 2018.
