HBO’s darkly excellent “The Penguin” spin-off series takes this ball and runs with it, fleshing out Gotham City’s criminal underbelly to the tune of critical acclaim and 24 Emmy nominations, including a Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie nod to Farrell himself.
In hindsight, it may seem like “The Penguin” was always destined for success, considering how well Farrell portrays the character in “The Batman.” However, nothing is certain in the entertainment business. Like many other projects, “The Penguin” had to take a break from filming during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike – but more pressingly, Farrell was acutely aware of Warner Bros. perma-shelving the $90 million, Leslie Grace-starring “Batgirl” movie in 2022 due to then-new CEO David Zaslav’s changes in company strategy. In an interview with Variety, Farrell noted that this knowledge made him genuinely concerned that “The Penguin” might also never see the light of day:
“In a world where they can make a ‘Batgirl’ film and then just can it. I don’t understand it — the debits and credits and ledgers and, f******, all that stuff — but they can decide that it’s economically advantageous to just shelve a $90 million film that people have put so much effort into it. You better believe it. When we were in the middle of the strike, I remember saying to my sister, ‘I don’t know if we’re gonna go back to this. I don’t know if we’re gonna finish it.’ I did get nervous.”
Farrell was a lot more secure about The Penguin once viewer reactions rolled in
Macall Polay/HBO
It’s no wonder that the show did so well, considering the way “The Penguin” subverts classic TV tropes and how well it manages to subvert the “spin-off centering around a villain” problem — hi, Sony’s Spider-Man Universe — by deftly explaining Batman’s (Robert Pattinson) absence and allowing other characters to shine. In all fairness to Farrell, he didn’t pretend that the Emmy nomination was ultimately a huge surprise, either. As he told Variety, the show’s reception had clued him in that something like this might be coming:
“This is lovely. I mean, I can’t say it’s 100% a surprise, because of the conversations around it — I’d be disingenuous. But I’m still no less thrilled and grateful and humbled by the attention the show has got overall.”
Farrell’s gratitude about the show’s success goes far beyond the praise his own work has received. He particularly appreciates how much people like “The Penguin” because he remembers the difficult times it was made in. He described the cast and crew’s experiences and attitudes during the strike:
“We shot three months and then we stood down for six, and then we went back to shoot for three. We were trying to shoot — we weren’t writing, and all our scripts were in — but we were understandably picketed a bunch of times, and we were shut down. I remember when we had three months in the can and it was like, ‘We’re shutting down tomorrow. That’s it. Everyone’s going home.’ People were f****** scared because they were living week-to-week, check-to-check, and it was a really brutal time. So this is just cherry on the cake, man.”
The $1.3 billion success of “Deadpool & Wolverine” helped in 2024, but otherwise, the House of Ideas has been having a rough go of it lately, as 2023 was difficult sledding as well. Now, in 2025, both “Captain America: Brave New World” and “Thunderbolts*” have already fallen short of expectations. The question is, will “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” prove to be the hero the Marvel Cinematic Universe needs at this moment? The early numbers suggest that may well be the case.
Marvel Studios’ much-anticipated “Fantastic Four” reboot is currently expected to pull in between $125 and $155 million on its opening weekend domestically, per Box Office Theory. As far as recent MCU entries go, even on the low end, that would be above “Brave New World” ($88.8 million), “Thunderbolts*” ($74.3 million), “The Marvels” ($46.1 million), and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” ($106.1 million). “Quantumania,” as you may recall, also collapsed after its opening and finished with just $476 million worldwide. I only say that to point out that a big opening weekend is only part of the equation here. Legs are key.
That being the case, reviews for “First Steps” could be a crucial factor here. “Superman” was tracking in a similar range and opened to $125 million domestically, plus a $220 million global debut. That number was aided by very strong reviews, but the bigger thing is that it’s now expected to draw in audiences for weeks to come. Marvel absolutely needs that to happen here. It can’t afford a middling response, which served to kneecap both “Brave New World” and “Quantumania.” Rather, the studio needs audiences on board in a big, bad way. Gone are the days when these types of superhero movies could seemingly coast to $800 million worldwide without breaking a sweat.
In terms of more direct comparisons, this opening would put “First Steps” somewhere between the likes of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” ($118.4 million opening/$845.5 million worldwide) and “Thor: Love and Thunder” ($144.1 million opening/$760.9 million worldwide). Often with the MCU, particularly with the sci-fi heavy stuff, international ticket sales are a huge part of the equation. If that holds true for “First Steps,” then the current opening weekend projections are promising.
The pressure is on for The Fantastic Four: First Steps to deliver
Marvel Studios
“The Fantastic Four: First Steps” is directed by Matt Shakman of “WandaVision” fame and takes place against the backdrop of a 1960s-inspired, retro-futuristic world. Its story, of course, centers on Marvel’s so-called first family — Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm/Invisible Woman (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm/Human Torch (Joseph Quinn), and Ben Grimm/The Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) — as they face their most daunting challenge yet … namely, the planet-eating villain Galactus (Ralph Ineson).
For Marvel Studios, there’s no question the pressure is on this movie to deliver. One of the key talking points when Disney purchased Fox in 2019 for $71.3 billion was that Marvel would get the “X-Men” and “Fantastic Four” rights. While 2015’s “Fantastic Four” was a disaster, making just $167.8 million worldwide against a $120 million budget, the belief was that, in Marvel Studios’ hands, it could be a massive property.
Now though, the MCU has hit a bit of a low point, with only the biggest slam dunks breaking through in meaningful ways. “Brave New World” grossed just $415 million worldwide, with “Thunderbolts*” tapping out at $382 million. Both carried $180 million budgets. That math doesn’t check out for Disney, particularly because the MCU was once the studio’s cash cow. Yet, it’s now suffered major misfires such as “The Marvels” ($199.7 million worldwide), the lowest-grossing MCU movie to date, and, to a lesser degree, a title like “Eternals.”
The hope is that the name recognition of “Fantastic Four,” along with an impressive cast and (hopefully) strong reviews, will help set this film up for success where other recent MCU entries have failed. The bigger hope is that the budget is closer to $180 million than $250 million, but if international audiences turn out and if it can hold strong throughout August, Marvel can end 2025 on a high note.
“The Fantastic Four: First Steps” hits theaters on July 27, 2025.
Hoult got the DCU Lex Luthor right the way other Superman movies haven’t by stripping every ounce of comic relief from the character and focusing on a particular DC comic book line as Luthor’s mantra. Meanwhile, O’Connell’s performance gives the “Sinners” villain a unique combination of human longing and vampiric thirst that makes his Remmick the “I Am Legend” villain we never had.
Still, there’s no denying that being able to hone their craft on “Skins” has helped both men on their way. After all, the sheer number of “Skins” actors who have gone on to craft great and memorable characters in other projects speaks volumes of the show’s impact (not to mention the quality of its casting department).
Apart from O’Connell and Hoult, familiar folks like “Get Out” and “Nope” star Daniel Kaluuya, Dev Patel of “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Monkey Man” fame, “Game of Thrones” alums Joe Dempsie and Hannah Murray, “What We Do in the Shadows” star Kayvan Novak, and many others have shined in various “Skins” roles. Judging by how far the aforementioned names have come, there’s every reason to believe that other actors with “Skins” roles in their résumé will climb the Hollywood ladder in the future, as well.
Filmmaker Mark Jenkin likes to keep it surprising – and Cornish. His 2022 psychological horror drama Enys Men focused on a wildlife volunteer living on an island off the coast of Cornwall, whose observations of a rare flower take a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical. And his 2019 feature debut Bait explored the tensions between locals and tourists in a Cornish fishing village.
At the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), which wrapped on Saturday, Jenkin world premiered a 17-minute film diary short with a title that may make you sit up and rub your eyes for a moment before re-reading it: I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash.
“I love films that foreground the fact that you are watching film,” the KVIFF website quoted Jenkin as saying in a synopsis for the short. “The series of Super 8 shots taken from his travels and the comprehensive voice-overs make for a fascinating mosaic of encounters, observations, formative quotations from cinematic and other works, and also possible fantasies. Here, Jenkin demonstrates his ability to give his films an appealing timeless quality and to connect the familiar with the curiously enigmatic. One hundred and one interesting facts from the filmmaker’s diary.”
At Karlovy Vary, Jenkin talked to THR about his Cornish identity, his creative process, facts and truth in the age of Donald Trump, and his next feature film, Rose of Nevada, starring George MacKay and Callum Turner.
“I was brought up with a sense of being Cornish and that Cornish was a separate ancient nation within Britain,” the filmmaker shared in the interview. “But it isn’t recognized in a lot of people’s eyes. So, you have to be overtly Cornish. If you’re Welsh or Scottish or Irish, it kind of takes care of itself. There’s a built-in separation, and not a separation in a negative way, but a unique identity that marks you out. But with the Cornish, you have to work a little bit harder, and you have to be a little bit more vocal about it.”
Jenkin had to leave to fully realize that. “When I lived in Cornwall, I never thought about being Cornish. And as soon as I left Cornwall, crossed the border and went to college in England, suddenly I was the most Cornish person in the world, and when I moved home, I kept that with me,” he told THR. “Also, I think in the type of work I do, this short film, for instance, is so apparently random and fragmented. So, there needs to be something that anchors the whole thing. And the easiest thing is home.”
How does one best define Cornishness? “You could define it by bloodlines, but then you get into very dangerous territories, and it’s awful, because then where’s anybody really from?” Jenkin pointed out. “So I think it’s a kind of cultural thing. This will be controversial, because some people say you’ve got to be born in Cornwall to be Cornish, or your parents, your grandparents, your great grandparents, everybody’s got to be Cornish for you to be truly Cornish. I don’t believe in that. I think it’s a state of mind. There are people who have chosen to live there and adopted that place as their home, because they’re attracted to it and because they understand it, and because they have this positivity around the history and the culture and the language.”
One key element of this Cornish culture is how the community relates to the rest of the U.K. “There’s a fierce independence,” Jenkin explained. “And paradoxically, there’s a very strong community. There’s a strong identity around the word Cornish. With Cornwall, we’ve got an -ish, like Scottish, like Irish, like English, like Welsh, although the -ish of Welsh is contracted. Overall, I think there’s a healthy disrespect for authority.”
This comes with pros and cons, according to the creative. “That fierce individualism sometimes holds us back. We’ve never had a history of progressive organization, for example, there’s never been a really strong union movement in Cornwall,” Jenkin highlighted. “We’ve gone, historically, from a sort of state of blind acceptance where everybody says, ‘Oh yeah, we don’t need much. We’re fine.’ And we get along. And when we get pushed to a certain point, then it’s riot. And there’s nothing constructive in between.”
Mark Jenkin, courtesy of KVIFF
But there is also much pride. “There’s a real pride in the history of Cornwall and our role in the industrialization of the world, although there are obvious negatives about what happened there,” explained Jenkin. “But Cornwall was the heart of the industrial world for a period of time. So, there’s great pride in that. And I think a lot of it is a reaction against how Cornwall’s perceived now, which is as a holiday resort with nice beaches and coastline, pasties and cream teas and all of that kind of stuff that’s very easy to articulate and to brand and to market to other people. But actually, Cornwall is a much more complex, ancient place than the way it’s promoted now. So I think a lot of what I do in my work is just to try and bring a bit of balance into the picture.”
Jenkin’s new short shares a kaleidoscopic, mosaic-like look at places that he has visited. What went into it? “The film’s made out of about 11 or 12 rolls of Super 8 film. And everything on the rolls is in the film. I don’t take anything out,” he shared about his process. “I have a Super 8 camera that I take everywhere with me, and it’s in the hotel room here in Karlovy Vary right now. I’ve also been filming here. I filmed yesterday, and I’m going to film again this afternoon when the sun goes round over there and goes low, and you have these two hours of evening atmosphere where the light here is amazing and coming through the trees. I’ve been up in the forest, and I got lost up there. As soon as I got here, I put my trainers on and just went for a run, which is always a really good thing to do to explore.”
Each roll of Super 8 film is two and a half minutes long, which is why Jenkin looks around places to see what catches his eye before filming. “I’ll go and film the bits that I like,” he explained his approach to recording and editing. “So I’ve already edited in my head what I want to shoot.” But he doesn’t know until later when and how he will use the footage.
For I Saw the Face of God, he used material he filmed in Dublin in 2000, the Isle of Man in around 2016, three different trips to Brittany over various years, and a couple of rolls from Los Angeles in 2023. “I thought I could make three separate films,” Jenkin recalled. “But then I thought, actually, they’ll be stronger if they’re together and they have a kind of enigmatic framework to them. The idea when I started editing it was a caption at the beginning which said it was three random chapters from my as yet unwritten autobiography. So that’s why you see random chapter [numbers in the short]. So the stuff I’m filming here will probably end up becoming part of another chapter of that book. But where it fits in, I’m not sure.”
In Jenkin’s shorts, it isn’t always clear what is real and what is fictional, and that is also by design. “It might be that the footage I shoot here, I will use and write something that maybe is true, for example about how I came here to the festival, or it may be a fabricated chapter about how I came here on holiday when I was seven years old, even though I’ve never been here before,” he told THR. “Some of it is true, some of it is completely untrue, some of it is exaggeration. Some of it is resurfaced.”
How does this type of cinematic storytelling fit into the post-truth age? “What you record are facts, and after that is truth,” Jenkin offered. “The truth is subjective, and the facts are objective. And I know: facts don’t really count for anything anymore, do they? But I like to hold on to the fact that you can have a subjective truth that maybe contradicts some of the facts, which might sound a bit Trumpian. But the facts are the facts, the truth you can kind of change.”
‘I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash’
His next project’s title has a similar background. “My new feature film that I’ve just delivered is called Rose of Nevada, and that is, again, another free hit because the title doesn’t mean anything,” Jenkin told THR. “It’s the name of a fishing boat. And the film is about a fishing boat. Or the narrative motor is the fishing boat in the film. So when I was thinking about a title for the film, I thought this could be anything, because it just has to be the name of the fishing boat. So I can be as enigmatic as I want it to be. It’s so rare that you can do that. So I do that whenever I get the opportunity.”
How did Jenkin come up with the title I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash? “I was on an airplane flying to Ireland a few years ago, when I was promoting my feature film Bait,” he recalled. yes. “And I was just trying to write a stream of consciousness in a notebook. I was looking out the window, and one of the phrases I came up with was ‘I saw the face of god in the jet wash.’ And I thought, oh, that makes a good title. And I thought if this is a film that is like an unpublished autobiography, it’s a free hit with the title.”
Isn’t there also a boat on the horizon in I Saw the Face of God, and Jenkin as the narrator mentions he was thinking about a possible film? “That part was made up. This footage was shot years before I came up with the idea of Rose of Nevada. I had seen and filmed that shot of a red boat because something had caught my eye, and I zoomed in on it with a slow, kind of ominous zoom,” Jenkin told THR. “But when I was putting this film together, I realized that I’d seen this shore. And when I was looking at the footage, I was thinking: Oh, wow, this is the fact versus truth thing. Maybe the truth is that when I saw that, that’s when I first subconsciously or unconsciously had the idea for Rose of Nevada. But it meant that when I was making I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash, I could just say that this was when I came up with the idea for that film.”
Concluded Jenkin: “I’m out and about with this short before Rose of Nevada. I thought it would be interesting if anybody picked up on it, so I’m glad you did.”
Jenkin won’t share much about Rose of Nevada yet beyond saying that more cast members will be unveiled in the basics: “It’s a ghost boat time travel film,” he told THR. “George and Callum are known cast members, and more cast will be announced soon.”
one of the most perfect movies of all time with “Jurassic Park” in 1993, the franchise has never managed to achieve anything but increasingly diminishing returns. Sure, the first two sequels at least presented cool ideas and incredible set pieces that are still fondly remembered today — The raptors in the tall grass? The Pteranodon jump scare? — but the “Jurassic World” movies have just been a series of cool ideas immediately tossed aside and ignored.
“Jurassic World Dominion” was obviously the movie most guilty of this, as it somehow ignored the idea of dinosaurs roaming the Earth freely and instead dedicated its plot to a nonsensical story involving prehistoric bugs. Now, “Jurassic World Rebirth” tries to course correct by going back to basics and just pitting humans against dinosaurs on a tropical island. The plot involves a group of mercenaries (which kind of betrays the core message of the franchise by asking the audience to root for mercenaries) hired by a pharmaceutical rep to steal dinosaur DNA to provide data for a medical treatment that would cure all heart disease forever.
“Jurassic World Rebirth” does some things right, mostly by ignoring almost everything that the “Jurassic World” trilogy did wrong. It also ignores the one big, bonkers, game-changing idea from “Fallen Kingdom” that could render the entire plot of this movie moot — the existence of human cloning.
Human cloning changes everything for the Jurassic franchise
Universal Pictures
In case you have (very understandably) forgotten about the most ludicrous part of an already ludicrous movie, let me refresh your memory. In “Fallen Kingdom,” Isla Nublar was destroyed after a volcano erupted on the island, killing all dinosaurs except for a few dozen that were smuggled out. These dinosaurs were to be sold to billionaires in an underground auction led by the aide of John Hammond’s former business partner, Sir Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell). Throughout the movie, we also catch glimpses of Lockwood’s granddaughter, Maisie (Isabella Sermon), just your typical “Jurassic” franchise child protagonist who is there to be endangered, chased by dinosaurs, and saved by a guy in a hat (or a vest in the case of Chris Pratt’s Owen Grady).
Except, Maisie is more than just a random rich girl. As we discover in “Fallen Kingdom,” while Hammond wanted to use the DNA genetic engineering technology to bring dinosaurs back to life, Lockwood used it to bring his dead daughter back to life by way of a clone. Maisie is actually a clone of Benjamin Lockwood’s daughter, and it is her fault that dinosaurs are unleashed upon the mainland.
That is an absurdly big revelation that took the “Jurassic” franchise closer to pure sci-fi territory than ever before, and “Dominion” expanded on this by having Biosyn spend the entire movie sending people after Maisie to study her. Turns out, Maisie is not just a clone of her mom, but was also birthed by her. Not only that, but Maisie’s genome was altered to make her immune to a disease that killed her mom/original, which can be the source for untold medical breakthroughs.
So there is an actual human clone alive and well somewhere in the world, and despite “Jurassic World Rebirth” being all about medical advancements, no one ever figures out about the clone thing? This company can spend $10 million on a team of mercenaries to sneak into an island and smuggle dinosaur DNA, but they couldn’t spend a fraction of that to learn about Maisie and just use her DNA to cure all diseases? Now, that is more unbelievable than the idea that people would simply grow bored of dinosaurs.
A new chapter is being added to Hollywood’s encyclopedia of marketing tactics, thanks to Universal and Christopher Nolan.
Exactly a year to the day of the release of Nolan’s The Odyssey, advance tickets are already on sale for Imax theaters that are equipped to screen the epic in 70mm film, the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s format of choice. The offer officially commenced Thursday at midnight EDT, according to Imax’s social feed.
By all accounts, it’s the first time in history that any tickets have gone on sale a year before a film’s release. One caveat: as of now, there are only a few dozen Imax screens in the U.S. that have the ability to play a title in 70mm film.
Nolan‘s take on the classic Greek myth — starring Matt Damon as the eternal hero Odysseus — is being shot entirely on Imax film cameras, a first for a commercial feature.
Until now, such a feat would have been impossible. But after the success of his Oscar-winning Oppenheimer, Nolan approached Imax about upgrading its cameras, including resolving issues with processing the cameras’ 70 mm film stock and the weight of the equipment.
Imax screens ponied up more than $190 million of Oppenheimer‘s total global gross of $975.8 million, or 20 percent. “Chris called me up and said, ‘If you can figure out how to solve the problems, I will make [Odyssey] 100 percent in Imax.’ And that’s what we’re doing,” Imax CEO Rich Gelfond recalled when speaking at the company’s annual press lunch at the Cannes Film Festival this past May. “He forced us to rethink that side of our business, our film recorders, our film cameras.”
The new film cameras are reserved for Nolan for now, but after he wraps The Odyssey, Imax will begin renting them out to other directors. Nolan has always been a big fan of Imax cameras, which he used when shooting Dunkirk, Interstellar, TheDark Knight movies and Tenet.
The Odyssey has a net budget of $250 million, which will make it the most expensive film of Nolan’s career. The improbable blockbuster success of the atomic energy biopic Oppeneheimer proved yet again why Nolan is one of the few directors who can reliably deliver an all-audience event film, and The Odyssey‘s epic scope and A-list cast should prove a major draw.
In addition to Damon, the film stars Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Jon Bernthal, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron and Mia Goth.
The classic story follows the king of Ithaca as he undertakes a long and perilous journey home to his wife Penelope following the Trojan War. His challenges are many as he spends years encountering a succession of mythical beings including the Cyclops Polyphemus, the Sirens, the enchantress Circe, and travels to the Underworld.
The first teaser trailer for Nolan’s event pic debuted exclusively in theaters in front of Universal’s Jurassic World Rebirth, which opened over the Fourth of July corridor to huge numbers and continues to be a major draw.
Releasing the trailer so early is a bit unusual, considering that The Odyssey is still filming, but an all-audience tentpole such as Rebirth provided an opportunity Universal and Nolan’s team couldn’t pass up, even if the teaser was leaked online. Word of the advance ticket sales were also leaked when certain theater chains jumped the gun and posted notices that tickets would go on sale for the select 70mm screenings July 17.
