a rebrand to the Justice League is inevitable, but at least the Justice Gang already has the right headquarters.
The group is funded by wealthy businessman Max Lord (Sean Gunn), who, in the “Justice League International” comics, was the League’s sponsor. Lord’s money means the Justice Gang has a large HQ, a whole Hall of Justice. If you’re a DC fan from the “Super Friends” days, that name probably rings a bell.
A lot of “Superman” was filmed in Cleveland, Ohio, but the crew also went to a different part of the Buckeye State. The Hall of Justice’s interior and exterior is really the Cincinnati Union Terminal, which serves the city as both a museum and train station. In operation since 1933, the building is, like Superman’s creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, an Ohio icon.
Now, in-universe, Metropolis is located in Delaware. That’s true in the comics and it appears to be the case in the DCU based on the car license plates in the city. Since Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) drives to the Hall of Justice, it’s likely the Hall isn’t supposed to be located in Cincinnati like the real building. With its enormous art deco exterior, though, the Union Terminal looks like it should host the world’s greatest heroes inside it, and James Gunn wasn’t the first person to think so.
Meanwhile, at the (real) Hall of Justice…
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In the comics, the Justice League originally operated out of “Mount Justice,” a hollowed-out mountain system. They later moved to a satellite headquarters, nowadays typically referred to as the Watchtower. But decades ago, “Super Friends” chose to give them a more public-facing base, i.e. the Hall of Justice.
The building was designed by Hanna-Barbera artist Al Gmuer, taking direct inspiration from Union Terminal. From 1966 to 1987, Hanna-Barbera (which, while most famous for “The Flintstones” and “Scooby-Doo,” also produced “Super Friends”) was owned by the Cincinnati-based media company Taft Broadcasting. That means William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were in Cincy semi-regularly and got some up close looks at Union Terminal. Gmuer complained that the building was “not easy to draw” (“I had nightmares about that damn building,” he told the Cincinnati Enquirer in 2009), but it endured as the Hall of Justice design.
As Gunn clearly realized with “Superman,” why construct a Hall of Justice set when the almost real thing is out there? “The Flash” TV series previously used stock footage of Union Terminal as the exterior of a S.T.A.R. Labs hangar, as well, another nod to the building’s place in DC history.
The Union Terminal’s ties to DC Comics continues to attract local interest from Cincinnati media, especially whenever a new “Superman” movie comes out. The city highlights the building as the real Hall of Justice for tourists; if you’re visiting, don’t expect the Justice League to be home, but you can pay a visit to the “real” Hall of Justice.
Remember that sad day back in 2023 on which is was reported that Warner Bros’ Coyote vs. Acme had been scrapped? It was definitely a gut-punch for Looney Tunes fans, to say the least. Thankfully, though, the situation turned around earlier this year when it was reported that the film had been acquired by another company. Now, the flick is set to hit the 2026 movie schedule! While CinemaBlend was in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday, the first official batch of footage was revealed, and it featured John Cena as well as a sweet Bugs Bunny tease.
To put it simply, the Coyote vs. Acme footage looks amazing! As someone who was in the panel with the Hall H crowd, I have to say, Ketchup Entertainment really brought the hype for the new movie. During the event, they company showed us six minutes from the movie (marking the first time official footage had been released). Let’s break it all down, shall we?
John Cena And Will Forte Bring The Comedy In Coyote vs. Acme Courtroom Scene
didn’t have a clear fate at the beginning of this year. That thought is even wilder now that I’ve seen the new footage, because this looks like it could easily become a blockbuster. The first look I watched in Hall H featured a scene set in a courtroom, where Wile E. Coyote is attempting to sue the Acme Corporation for all the issues he’s dealt with over the years. Will Forte plays the character’s lawyer, but he hasn’t been in court in decades and is super nervous.
Cena shared his disappointment over the film being scrapped and James Gunn even threw in his support. Needless to say, it’s wonderful that this film will not only see the light of day but looks fantastic as well.
(Image credit: Ketchup Entertainment)
I Really Loved How Bugs Bunny Is Revealed To Be In The Movie
As great as the courtroom “drama” is, there’s another bit of this footage that really works, and it’s the reveal of Bugs Bunny. I’m particularly excited about how the footage teed up his role.
The first day in court doesn’t go as planned, as one of Acme’s products that Wile E. brings as “evidence” gets unleashed in the courtroom. The next scene cuts to Wile’s stressed lawyer, who is watching the news’ coverage of the trial, when he receives a phone call. It’s clearly the voice of Bugs Bunny, who contacts him to share that he has information that could really help him with the case. They plan a rendezvous when the clip ends,
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Oh my goodness am I excited to see Bugs Bunny in this movie! Up until now, his involvement was unknown, so it’s cool that he’ll be involved in some capacity. While his presence has only been teased, it’s possible that he could be playing some kind of “deep throat” role in this story, which would be hilarious.
Fans will have to try contain their excitement until Coyote vs. Acme hits theaters on August 26, 2026. In the meantime, grab an HBO Max subscription and stream great Looney Tunes content, including the film The Day the Earth Blew Up.
Marlene Warfield, the New York actress known for her feisty turns as the prostitute ex-girlfriend of James Earl Jones’ boxer in The Great White Hope on Broadway and the big screen and as a young revolutionary in Network, has died. She was 83.
Warfield died April 6 of lung cancer at a hospital in Los Angeles, her sister, Chequita Warfield, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Warfield also recurred as Maude’s third and last regular housekeeper, the Jamaica-born Victoria Butterfield, on the sixth and final season (1977-78) of the famed Norman Lear-created CBS sitcom that starred Bea Arthur.
After appearing in the East Village at St. Mark’s Playhouse in French dramatist Jean Genet’s The Blacks — where she understudied for Cicely Tyson and also worked alongside the likes of Jones, Godfrey Cambridge and Maya Angelou — Warfield made it to Broadway in October 1968 when she was cast as Clara in The Great White Hope, written by Howard Sackler.
She received Theatre World and Clarence Derwent prizes for her powerful performance, then accompanied Tony winners Jones and Jane Alexander to Hollywood, where all three reprised their roles in the 1970 film directed by Martin Ritt at 20th Century Fox.
In Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), nominated for best picture, Warfield sparkled in a scene in which her Laureen Hobbs, an Angela Davis type, meets with Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen, a UBS executive who wants to do a weekly series revolving around the Ecumenical Liberation Army.
After Diana introduces herself as a “racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles,” Hobbs introduces herself as “a bad-ass Commie nigger.”
Marlene Warfield and James Earl Jones in the 1970 film The Great White Hope.
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The second of the three kids, Marlene Ronetta Warfield was born in Queens on June 19, 1941, and raised in Brooklyn. His father, Sidney, sold tokens for the New York City Transit Authority, and her mother, Ruth, was a homemaker.
Warfield took tap, ballet and acrobatic lessons as a kid, and while attending the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan did summer stock, appearing in a 1957 production of Take a Giant Step in the Catskills.
Later, she studied opera at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music and acting at the American Institute of Theater and TV Arts.
She replaced Thelma Oliver in The Blacks in 1962 and worked onstage in A Matter of Life and Death, Elektra, Volpone, Who’s Got His Own and The Taming of the Shrew at Lincoln Center before landing on The Great White Hope.
Around this time, she also was showing up on such TV shows as The Nurses, The Defenders, For the People and Dave Garroway’s Wide Wide World and doing commercials for Fab detergent.
Represented by pioneering Black talent agent Ernestine McClendon, Warfield moved to California in 1977 to join the cast of Maude, on which she made her first appearance late in the fifth season. She succeeded Esther Rolle (as Florida Evans) and Hermione Baddeley (as Nell Naugatuck) as maids in the suburban Findlay household.
Her Victoria Butterfield was “not stupid, she is not uneducated, she’s very ambitious and stands on her own two feet,” Warfield told Jet magazine in August 1977.
Warfield’s résumé also included the films Joe (1970), Across 110th Street (1972) and Richard Pryor’s Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986) and guest spots on such TV series as The Name of the Game, Lou Grant, The Jeffersons, Little House on the Prairie, Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, In the House, ER, The West Wing, The Shield, Law & Order and Cold Case.
In 2000, she returned to the stage in Pittsburgh for a starring role in August Wilson’s King Hedley II.
In addition to her sister, survivors include her son, Keith; her grandson, Demetrius; and a cousin, percussionist Vivian Warfield. She was married to William Horsey from 1967 until his 1993 death. Her brother, Earl, died in January 2024.
fans have zeroed in on a moment where he’s hugging his best man a little too much, and his fiancée Naomi looks on with a troubled face. I don’t know if these fans are correct in their theory, but they’re definitely picking up on one clear implication: Paul and Naomi’s marriage is way more about their social status than their genuine love for each other.
Paul and Naomi are meant to represent the natural extreme endpoint of the episode’s social rating premise. They’re two people who have so thoroughly prioritized their social ratings that every aspect of their lives feels manufactured and sanitized. There’s no passion or warmth between them; they’re simply both attractive and highly-rated, so a marriage between them makes the most sense strategically.
The Black Mirror casting directors deserve a raise
Netflix
In hindsight, the best part of this episode is when Paul tries to put an end to Lacie’s (Bryce Dallas Howard’s) horrendous wedding toast. Lacie, who is at the end of her rope at this point, panics and pulls a knife on him. The idea of Lacie threatening Jack Reacher with a knife is pretty funny, even if Alan Ritchson wasn’t quite as buff and intimidating at this point in his career.
It seems clear that nobody involved in “Nosedive” had any idea how famous Ritchson would become a few years later, but part of the charm of “Black Mirror” is that the show is filled with largely-unknown actors who would soon make it big. Season 1 featured Daniel Kaluuya before his “Get Out” rise to fame, and season 2 featured Domhnall Gleeson shortly before he starred in “About Time” and “Ex Machina.”
When these episodes first came out, the unknown quality of most of their actors helped to make the stories feel extra immersive, because viewers felt like they were watching regular everyday people deal with these sci-fi problems. In hindsight, however, it’s crazy how star-studded these early low-budget episodes now seem. “The Entire History of You” casually had the future Thirteenth Doctor as a co-lead, while future “Black Panther” star Letitia Wright co-led “Black Museum.” Though the celebrity casting in the more recent “Black Mirror” seasons is fun, it was more interesting when it felt like the show was constantly discovering new talent, not just picking faces people already know.
breakout role in Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2008 crime film “Bronson” is a perfect example. In it, Hardy portrays a fictionalized version of real-life career criminal Michael Peterson, who changed his name to Charles Bronson in 1987, and he goes fully wild. We see him dressed as half-man, half-woman (divided vertically) and also get to watch as he strips nude and slathers himself in butter before fighting a whole team of prison guards. Yet somehow, “Bronson” isn’t Hardy’s wildest role. That distinction goes to another semi-historical crime movie that’s very loosely based on a true story: Josh Trank’s 2020 thriller “Capone.”
“Capone” didn’t do particularly well with critics or audiences (despite /Film’s Chris Evangelista rightly praising Hardy’s performance and the film’s absolutely gonzo gothic horror take on gangster history), but it’s a truly unique project that deserves a little more respect and appreciation. After all, when you get an actor as intense as Hardy giving a film this bonkers some of his best work, it’s guaranteed to be fascinating.
Capone is a unique mix of gangster drama and gothic horror
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Trank had been in director jail for a few years after his 2015 “Fantastic Four” reboot was an unmitigated disaster, but with “Capone,” he was given free rein. Trank wrote, directed, and edited “Capone,” and it’s his singular vision that captures infamous gangster Al Capone (Hardy) in his final years as he’s dying from complications due to neurosyphilis. Previous presentations of the gangster best known as “Scarface” (long before the fictional Tony Montana ever had anything to do with the moniker) have mostly presented him as a nigh-infallible figure, the mob boss to end all mob bosses, but Trank’s version, which takes some liberties with the real-life events, renders him as a deeply flawed, broken man consumed by his past. “Capone” has more in common with the otherworldly dream-like storytelling of “The Sopranos” than it does with something like “The Godfather,” but that works because it’s ultimately more of a horror movie than a gangster story.
Capone won quite a few battles with other gangsters and the law in his life, but in this movie, he’s slowly losing one with his own body and mind as they deteriorate and there’s nothing he can do about it. His reality becomes the viewer’s and we see the horrific delusions he suffers, his mind torturing him as his body begins to totally fall apart. Trank doesn’t spare us the nitty-gritty of Capone’s slow death, showing a number of dignity-destroying moments, including Capone losing control of his bowels in bed. (“If you hate this movie, that’s perfectly fine because you’re reacting to something that’s pretty real,” Trank told THR. “I’ve dealt with people late in their lives in my own family, who are defecating themselves. It’s a real thing. That happens in life. Was I being exploitative about it as far how much poop I dressed onto the bed? Yeah, I went a little overboard, but that’s what I wanted to do. It’s an impressionistic film, and it’s meant to make a statement.”) It’s nasty, but it’s also an effective reminder that we’re all subject to our own mortality.
As usual, Tom Hardy understood the assignment
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“Capone” isn’t a glamorous role, and it must have been pretty unpleasant to get into the headspace of such a character, but Hardy absolutely understood the assignment. He gives his all in “Capone,” delivering a performance that’s absolutely unforgettable no matter how you end up feeling about the movie as a whole. He leans into the weirdness just as hard as he does with all of his roles, but here it’s a perfect match as he goes full method and really gets gross and unhinged. (The movie’s unsung hero, however, is an underused but truly spectacular Linda Cardellini as Capone’s sweetly suffering wife, Mae, who provides a grounding presence for Hardy to rail against.)
While some audiences were put off by the very loose interpretation of Capone’s final days and others were just simply grossed out, for anyone with the stomach, “Capone” is a must-see. Where else are you going to witness Tom Hardy singing “If I Were King of the Forest” from “The Wizard of Oz,” attack people with a gold-plated tommy gun, or chomp on carrots after his doctors take away his cigars? Hardy always swings big, but with “Capone,” he knocked it way, way out of the park.
