Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson cast as dark guru in new thriller
The WWE legend turned Hollywood megastar is continuing his working relationship with A24 after MMA drama 'The Smashing Machine' with another new project.
As reported by Deadline, Johnson has been cast in a new phycological thriller penned by up-and-coming writer Zeke Goodman.
The film will be set in Southern California at the turn of the millennium, with an alienated young man finding himself being influenced by a motivational guru, played by The Rock.
The guru is charming, but it's simply a front to hide his "manipulation" and "concealed darkness".
While Johnson is said to have been cast, the lead character and other supporting roles are yet to be decided.
A24 withh produce and finance the movie, along with Stacey Sher's Shiny Penny Productions, and Johnson's own Seven Bucks Productions.
Writer Goodman rose to fame in Amazon's 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' and 'Cruel Intentions' reboots, while a director is yet to be attached.
Although 'The Smashing Machine' and 'Breakthrough' mark a departure for Johnson, he previously admitted voicing demi-god Maui in Disney's 'Moana' film series was "life changing".
Asked what Maui means to him, he told Britain's HELLO! magazine: 'So much. Getting to play Maui has been life changing for me.
'The experience over these two movies goes way deeper than any other character I've played
'This is my culture. He is part of me.
'The character of Maui is actually inspired by grandfather, who was High Chief Peter Maivia. It means so much to me.'
And the former wrestler finds fans often want to talk to him about the Disney saga – and try and persuade him to sing his signature song from 'Moana'.
He said: 'You might not see my face, but there is something about this character that connects with people.
'I'm grateful to have been part of some big projects over the years, but I can honestly say that, more than 'Jumanji', more than 'Rampage' or 'Jungle Cruise', any of those, the one thing that blows people's minds is that I'm the guy who sings 'You're Welcome'.
'I've been asked to sing that song in all kinds of places.'
Dwayne will also play Maui in a live-action remake of 'Moana' and he is very 'excited' about the film.
He said: 'I'm so excited about it. It's the 'Moana' story we all love, but it's live-action this time.
'I can't say too much, but we have the amazing Tommy Kail directing and it's the music of Lin-Manuel Miranda.
'It's a very special celebration of an incredible story that resonates with everybody around the world.'
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The Advertiser
6 hours ago
- The Advertiser
Bambi in the public domain: A smart and bloody take on a childhood favourite
There's been an exciting trend in low-budget horror movies recently when iconic intellectual property, usually the ones associated with sweetness, hits that magic number where it enters into the public domain. Like the 2023 film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, where Christopher Robin has neglected his animal friends after leaving for college and so they go on a killing rampage. These twisted Winnie films - there's been a bunch of spin-offs and also-rans in the past two years - arrived on the scene just as AA Milne's original book, published in 1926, passed the 95-year mark required for the US public domain. The juggernaut that is Disney couldn't stop enterprising filmmakers jumping on this adaptation bandwagon when Steamboat Willie, the first on-screen appearance of Mickey Mouse, entered public domain in 2014, with recent horror films like Mickey's Slayhouse and Mouseboat Massacre hitting - well, they're not hitting cinemas, they're mostly appearing on horror streaming services like Shudder. Even my childhood favourite TV show characters The Banana Splits went on a malfunctioning animatronic killing spree in 2019's The Banana Splits Movie. Bambi: The Reckoning takes, yes, your sweet childhood memory, though for legal reasons, it draws from author Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi: A Life in the Woods, and not the Disney adaptation that they still very much hold all rights for. Director Dan Allen starts the film with a rustic animation that certainly nods towards the Disney drawings, showing over the title credits a young fawn losing his mother and growing up into a giant buck. Except this deer, with his enormous antlers, lives in a woods being poisoned by men dumping green carcinogens in the water, the same men running over the buck and his mate with their trucks as they leave. We'll come back to that buck in a moment, but in Rhys Warrington's screenplay, we also have a young mum caring for her child. It is Xana (Roxanne McKee), mum to the bookish Benji (Tom Mulheron), who has just been let down once again by Benji's dad Simon (Alex Cooke), who had promised to take his son to a weekend with Simon's relatives in the country. Rather than disappointing her son, Xana packs Benji into a taxi and head off into the deep forrest home that grandmother Mary (Nicola Wright) lives in. It seems that Simon isn't the only disappointment in the family, as granny's home is full of Benji's awful relatives, like his obnoxious cousin Harrison (Joseph Greenwood) and Harrison's uncaring step-mother Harriet (Samira Mighty). But, as in all good fairy tales, the taxi ride to Granny's house is interrupted, not by a wolf, but by an enormous set of antlers smashing into the taxi head-on. The taxi driver is killed as the giant deer, feral with razor sharp teeth that drip blood, stomps the car's cabin, and Xana and Benji escape, running to Granny's house. But Granny has dementia and in her vague moments, seems to be psychically linked to the deer, and it turns out there's a strong family link to the beast and the reason it is haunting the woods and the humans, any humans, it sees as being destroyers. Dan Allen and Rhys Warrington's film is fun, if you like horror, but it's not the tongue-in-cheek horror that usually hits the multiplex cinemas. Bambi doesn't throw off witty one-liners as he despatches his prey, it is kill-and-move-on. The film's technical team is a small crew, the end credits were mercifully short, but they achieve good believable work with their CGI, keeping their scenes dark, only revealing the horror creatures when they need to. Perhaps the small tech crew and judicious withholding is the secret to good CGI, I thought as I recalled how many thousands of names were in the technical credits to the second Wonder Woman or The Flash movies, and remember how butchered and rushed those film's CGI looked. There's been an exciting trend in low-budget horror movies recently when iconic intellectual property, usually the ones associated with sweetness, hits that magic number where it enters into the public domain. Like the 2023 film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, where Christopher Robin has neglected his animal friends after leaving for college and so they go on a killing rampage. These twisted Winnie films - there's been a bunch of spin-offs and also-rans in the past two years - arrived on the scene just as AA Milne's original book, published in 1926, passed the 95-year mark required for the US public domain. The juggernaut that is Disney couldn't stop enterprising filmmakers jumping on this adaptation bandwagon when Steamboat Willie, the first on-screen appearance of Mickey Mouse, entered public domain in 2014, with recent horror films like Mickey's Slayhouse and Mouseboat Massacre hitting - well, they're not hitting cinemas, they're mostly appearing on horror streaming services like Shudder. Even my childhood favourite TV show characters The Banana Splits went on a malfunctioning animatronic killing spree in 2019's The Banana Splits Movie. Bambi: The Reckoning takes, yes, your sweet childhood memory, though for legal reasons, it draws from author Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi: A Life in the Woods, and not the Disney adaptation that they still very much hold all rights for. Director Dan Allen starts the film with a rustic animation that certainly nods towards the Disney drawings, showing over the title credits a young fawn losing his mother and growing up into a giant buck. Except this deer, with his enormous antlers, lives in a woods being poisoned by men dumping green carcinogens in the water, the same men running over the buck and his mate with their trucks as they leave. We'll come back to that buck in a moment, but in Rhys Warrington's screenplay, we also have a young mum caring for her child. It is Xana (Roxanne McKee), mum to the bookish Benji (Tom Mulheron), who has just been let down once again by Benji's dad Simon (Alex Cooke), who had promised to take his son to a weekend with Simon's relatives in the country. Rather than disappointing her son, Xana packs Benji into a taxi and head off into the deep forrest home that grandmother Mary (Nicola Wright) lives in. It seems that Simon isn't the only disappointment in the family, as granny's home is full of Benji's awful relatives, like his obnoxious cousin Harrison (Joseph Greenwood) and Harrison's uncaring step-mother Harriet (Samira Mighty). But, as in all good fairy tales, the taxi ride to Granny's house is interrupted, not by a wolf, but by an enormous set of antlers smashing into the taxi head-on. The taxi driver is killed as the giant deer, feral with razor sharp teeth that drip blood, stomps the car's cabin, and Xana and Benji escape, running to Granny's house. But Granny has dementia and in her vague moments, seems to be psychically linked to the deer, and it turns out there's a strong family link to the beast and the reason it is haunting the woods and the humans, any humans, it sees as being destroyers. Dan Allen and Rhys Warrington's film is fun, if you like horror, but it's not the tongue-in-cheek horror that usually hits the multiplex cinemas. Bambi doesn't throw off witty one-liners as he despatches his prey, it is kill-and-move-on. The film's technical team is a small crew, the end credits were mercifully short, but they achieve good believable work with their CGI, keeping their scenes dark, only revealing the horror creatures when they need to. Perhaps the small tech crew and judicious withholding is the secret to good CGI, I thought as I recalled how many thousands of names were in the technical credits to the second Wonder Woman or The Flash movies, and remember how butchered and rushed those film's CGI looked. There's been an exciting trend in low-budget horror movies recently when iconic intellectual property, usually the ones associated with sweetness, hits that magic number where it enters into the public domain. Like the 2023 film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, where Christopher Robin has neglected his animal friends after leaving for college and so they go on a killing rampage. These twisted Winnie films - there's been a bunch of spin-offs and also-rans in the past two years - arrived on the scene just as AA Milne's original book, published in 1926, passed the 95-year mark required for the US public domain. The juggernaut that is Disney couldn't stop enterprising filmmakers jumping on this adaptation bandwagon when Steamboat Willie, the first on-screen appearance of Mickey Mouse, entered public domain in 2014, with recent horror films like Mickey's Slayhouse and Mouseboat Massacre hitting - well, they're not hitting cinemas, they're mostly appearing on horror streaming services like Shudder. Even my childhood favourite TV show characters The Banana Splits went on a malfunctioning animatronic killing spree in 2019's The Banana Splits Movie. Bambi: The Reckoning takes, yes, your sweet childhood memory, though for legal reasons, it draws from author Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi: A Life in the Woods, and not the Disney adaptation that they still very much hold all rights for. Director Dan Allen starts the film with a rustic animation that certainly nods towards the Disney drawings, showing over the title credits a young fawn losing his mother and growing up into a giant buck. Except this deer, with his enormous antlers, lives in a woods being poisoned by men dumping green carcinogens in the water, the same men running over the buck and his mate with their trucks as they leave. We'll come back to that buck in a moment, but in Rhys Warrington's screenplay, we also have a young mum caring for her child. It is Xana (Roxanne McKee), mum to the bookish Benji (Tom Mulheron), who has just been let down once again by Benji's dad Simon (Alex Cooke), who had promised to take his son to a weekend with Simon's relatives in the country. Rather than disappointing her son, Xana packs Benji into a taxi and head off into the deep forrest home that grandmother Mary (Nicola Wright) lives in. It seems that Simon isn't the only disappointment in the family, as granny's home is full of Benji's awful relatives, like his obnoxious cousin Harrison (Joseph Greenwood) and Harrison's uncaring step-mother Harriet (Samira Mighty). But, as in all good fairy tales, the taxi ride to Granny's house is interrupted, not by a wolf, but by an enormous set of antlers smashing into the taxi head-on. The taxi driver is killed as the giant deer, feral with razor sharp teeth that drip blood, stomps the car's cabin, and Xana and Benji escape, running to Granny's house. But Granny has dementia and in her vague moments, seems to be psychically linked to the deer, and it turns out there's a strong family link to the beast and the reason it is haunting the woods and the humans, any humans, it sees as being destroyers. Dan Allen and Rhys Warrington's film is fun, if you like horror, but it's not the tongue-in-cheek horror that usually hits the multiplex cinemas. Bambi doesn't throw off witty one-liners as he despatches his prey, it is kill-and-move-on. The film's technical team is a small crew, the end credits were mercifully short, but they achieve good believable work with their CGI, keeping their scenes dark, only revealing the horror creatures when they need to. Perhaps the small tech crew and judicious withholding is the secret to good CGI, I thought as I recalled how many thousands of names were in the technical credits to the second Wonder Woman or The Flash movies, and remember how butchered and rushed those film's CGI looked. There's been an exciting trend in low-budget horror movies recently when iconic intellectual property, usually the ones associated with sweetness, hits that magic number where it enters into the public domain. Like the 2023 film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, where Christopher Robin has neglected his animal friends after leaving for college and so they go on a killing rampage. These twisted Winnie films - there's been a bunch of spin-offs and also-rans in the past two years - arrived on the scene just as AA Milne's original book, published in 1926, passed the 95-year mark required for the US public domain. The juggernaut that is Disney couldn't stop enterprising filmmakers jumping on this adaptation bandwagon when Steamboat Willie, the first on-screen appearance of Mickey Mouse, entered public domain in 2014, with recent horror films like Mickey's Slayhouse and Mouseboat Massacre hitting - well, they're not hitting cinemas, they're mostly appearing on horror streaming services like Shudder. Even my childhood favourite TV show characters The Banana Splits went on a malfunctioning animatronic killing spree in 2019's The Banana Splits Movie. Bambi: The Reckoning takes, yes, your sweet childhood memory, though for legal reasons, it draws from author Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi: A Life in the Woods, and not the Disney adaptation that they still very much hold all rights for. Director Dan Allen starts the film with a rustic animation that certainly nods towards the Disney drawings, showing over the title credits a young fawn losing his mother and growing up into a giant buck. Except this deer, with his enormous antlers, lives in a woods being poisoned by men dumping green carcinogens in the water, the same men running over the buck and his mate with their trucks as they leave. We'll come back to that buck in a moment, but in Rhys Warrington's screenplay, we also have a young mum caring for her child. It is Xana (Roxanne McKee), mum to the bookish Benji (Tom Mulheron), who has just been let down once again by Benji's dad Simon (Alex Cooke), who had promised to take his son to a weekend with Simon's relatives in the country. Rather than disappointing her son, Xana packs Benji into a taxi and head off into the deep forrest home that grandmother Mary (Nicola Wright) lives in. It seems that Simon isn't the only disappointment in the family, as granny's home is full of Benji's awful relatives, like his obnoxious cousin Harrison (Joseph Greenwood) and Harrison's uncaring step-mother Harriet (Samira Mighty). But, as in all good fairy tales, the taxi ride to Granny's house is interrupted, not by a wolf, but by an enormous set of antlers smashing into the taxi head-on. The taxi driver is killed as the giant deer, feral with razor sharp teeth that drip blood, stomps the car's cabin, and Xana and Benji escape, running to Granny's house. But Granny has dementia and in her vague moments, seems to be psychically linked to the deer, and it turns out there's a strong family link to the beast and the reason it is haunting the woods and the humans, any humans, it sees as being destroyers. Dan Allen and Rhys Warrington's film is fun, if you like horror, but it's not the tongue-in-cheek horror that usually hits the multiplex cinemas. Bambi doesn't throw off witty one-liners as he despatches his prey, it is kill-and-move-on. The film's technical team is a small crew, the end credits were mercifully short, but they achieve good believable work with their CGI, keeping their scenes dark, only revealing the horror creatures when they need to. Perhaps the small tech crew and judicious withholding is the secret to good CGI, I thought as I recalled how many thousands of names were in the technical credits to the second Wonder Woman or The Flash movies, and remember how butchered and rushed those film's CGI looked.
News.com.au
a day ago
- News.com.au
‘In pieces': Hulk Hogan's wife shares heartbreaking post after wrestling legend's death
The heartbroken wife of the late Hulk Hogan has spoken out following the wrestling legend's shocking death at the age of 71. Sky Daily, who married Hogan in 2023, said her 'heart is in pieces' in a gut-wrenching Instagram post. 'I wasn't ready for this … and my heart is in pieces,' she began. 'He had been dealing with some health issues, but I truly believed we would overcome them. I had so much faith in his strength. I thought we still had more time.' Hogan was pronounced dead shortly after 11am Thursday morning (US time). Medics were dispatched to the WWE Hall of Famer's Clearwater, Florida home before 10am following a 'cardiac arrest' call. Speculation about Hogan's health had percolated in the weeks leading up to his passing. In June, Bubba the Love Sponge, the host of a titular Tampa-based radio program, reported Hogan wasn't doing well. 'Allegedly Hogan is in the hospital and I've heard people say that he might not make it,' he claimed. A rep for Hogan addressed the allegations, telling TMZ in June that 'he's just dealing with more of the same ailments he's had for years.' Daily, who married Hogan in 2023, also hit back at rumours her husband was in poor health. 'No, he's definitely not in a coma! His heart is strong, and there was never any lack of oxygen or brain damage … none of those rumours are true,' Sky wrote,' she wrote in an Instagram Story earlier this month. ' … We've been in and out of the hospital to support that recovery. So truly, there's no need for the drama or panic some people try to stir up. He's healing, and we're taking it one day at a time with love, strength, and patience.' Daily added Friday that Hogan, 'despite growing physical discomfort,' wanted to always 'show up' for his loyal supporters. 'Hulk loved his fans so much and despite his growing physical discomfort, he did everything he could to show up, sign autographs, take photos, and connect with the people who supported him through it all. You meant everything to him,' she wrote on Instagram. 'He was a believer in Christ, and I take comfort knowing his soul is at peace and he's been welcomed home. 'Please keep his family and all of us who loved him in your prayers as we try to navigate this new reality.' Hogan, whose real name was Terry Bollea, married three times. Prior to his union with Daily, Hogan wed his first wife, Linda, in 1983. The couple, who shared daughter Brooke, 37, and son Nick, 34, finalised their divorce in 2009. Hogan later moved on with Jennifer McDaniel in 2010. They divorced in 2022. He and Daily were baptised together 18 months before Hogan's death.
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a day ago
- West Australian
Disney's Beauty And The Beast touring to Crown Theatre Perth with Jayde Westaby as Mrs Potts
Disney's Beauty And The Beast touring to Crown Theatre Perth with Jayde Westaby as Mrs Potts
