TV, Movies & Home Theatre - Page 8

If you're someone who is currently paying $11.99 per month for Netflix's cheapest ad-free tier you're going to have to find an alternative sooner rather than later. That's after the company confirmed that it plans to ditch the subscription for people who are already on it.

Netflix previously started to prevent new or returning customers from using the $11.99 per month tier in some countries last year but it had told customers who were already on it that they could continue to use it until told otherwise. Now, that's about to happen as Netflix confirms that Canada and the UK will be the first countries to see their users forced to switch. Following that, we can expect other countries to go the same way.

The move will mean that people will then have the $15.49 per month tier as the cheapest option if they don't want to watch ads, while the Premium option will remain at the very top of the pile at $22.99 per month.

Oppenheimer has taken yet another win home with Cillian Murphy winning the award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama.

The actor starred as Robert J Oppenheimer, the rightly named "Father of the atomic bomb." in the Christopher Nolan-directed historic drama biopic Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer blew through the box office and was an outstanding picture during a year full of outstanding pictures, securing itself as the third-highest-grossing film of the year.

Nearly two decades since the Golden Globes introduced its Best Animated Film category, The Boy and the Heron has made history as the first anime film to secure the award.

The renowned writer/director Hayao Miyazaki has made Golden Globes history with the latest film out of Studio Ghibli, The Boy and the Heron, which has won the globe for Best Animated Film. Since the Golden Globes started acknowledging achievements in animation back in 2006, no anime film has yet to garner as much attention as bigger studios such as Disney and Dreamworks.

However, this award season has changed that. The film follows a young boy's quest through a mysterious world accompanied by a talking Heron. The win, when announced by presenters Florence Pugh and Natalie Portman, stunned viewers not only in attendance but worldwide, especially given this year's competition with the likes of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Elemental, and Suzume among the nominees.

With Award season in full swing, the Golden Globes Ceremony is giving us more than just this year's winners.

Swinging by the red carpet, Spider-Verse creative duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller spilled some beans on what fans can expect of the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse trilogies final and upcoming chapter Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse.

The Golden Globes have just taken place to recognize and award all the fantastic achievements in Television and Film throughout the last year.

This Award season is a little different, though, with the Globes ceremony adding a new award category to the roster to highlight blockbuster films. The newly named award is Cinematic and Box Office Achievement. This new award is made to acknowledge films that made a minimum of $150 million during their release, with $100 million of it coming from the Domestic box office.

This new category saw a wide range of last year's favorites nominated with Barbie, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3, John Wick: Chapter 4, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, Oppenheimer, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and also the concert film phenomenon Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour.

Christopher Nolan has secured the gold medal from this year's Golden Globe award ceremony, receiving his very first Golden Globe for Best Director for his 2023 film Oppenheimer, a 3-hour historical drama about the ethical dilemma and the consequences of Nuclear weapons.

Although this is his first win, it is not his first nomination at the Globes, having previously nominated for his writing of 2000's film Momento, writing and directing 2010's Inception, and directing 2017's Dunkirk. With 2023 being such a massive year for movies, the competition was somewhat fierce, with several huge names in the race. Nolan was up against Bradley Cooper for Maestro, Yorgos Lanthimos for Poor Things, Martin Scorcese for Killers of the Flower Moon, Celine Song for Past Lives, and Greta Gerwig for her massively successful Barbie.

When Nolan took to the stage, he honored a dear friend, stating, "The only time I've ever been on this stage before was accepting one of these on behalf of our dear friend, Heath Ledger, and that was complicated and challenging for me," Nolan directed Ledger in his 2008 superhero flick The Dark Knight, the actor sadly passed at the age of only 28 of an accidental overdose shortly after filming was complete.

The Golden Globe Awards ceremony for 2024 is in full swing, and Oppenheimer has secured an early win with Robert Downey Jr adding a new Golden Globe to his collection.

The beloved actor won the Globe for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture. Downey undoubtedly deserved the win for his portrayal of Lewis Strauss in the film, but his win was far from guaranteed.

The competition was fierce this year with nominees such as Ryan Gosling for Barbie, Mark Ruffalo and Willem Defoe for Poor Things, Robert De Niro for Killers of the Flower Moon, and Charles Melton for May December, all of which were award-worthy performances.

Gerard Bulter is set to return to his role as Viking chieftain Stoick the Vast in the upcoming live-action retelling of the widely acclaimed animated franchise How to Train Your Dragon.

According to reports from Deadline, Butler will reprise his role and will be playing the live-action version of his character Stoick the Vast, father of our leading dragon tamer Hiccup and leader of the Viking clan. The actor voiced Stoick in all three of the franchise's animated films and will now bring him to another medium of film in a live-action setting. Butler joins other cast members Mason Thames and Nico Parker, who will be playing main characters Hiccup and Astrid in the adaptation.

The How to Train Your Dragon films were a massive success, with the franchise earning a total of 1.64 billion at the worldwide box office, placing it as the 13th highest-grossing animated franchise. All 3 films received critical acclaim in multiple Oscar nominations, including Best Animated Feature.

Riot Games has revealed its first official teaser trailer for the second season of its wildly popular animated series, Arcane, which is based on the online game League of Legends. The teaser is short and sweet, and has resparked a major fan theory from Season 1.

Only 44 seconds long, the trailer features a character called Singed, also known as the Doctor, giving what appears to be a blood transfusion. He checks a pocket watch and then tilts his head, and the camera pans up to reveal an enormous beast hanging from the ceiling above as it fades to black. While the trailer didn't even crack a minute in length, it's sure to spread hype after seemingly confirming fans' most persistent theory.

The theory in question was that Vander, a popular character from Season 1 who sadly met his end, is Warwick, a well-known monster from League of Legends who was "transformed by agonizing experiments." Fans of Season 1 were quick to draw similarities between Vander's storyline and that of Warwick's lore, making connections between the two.

Sir Patrick Stewart has recently spoken out about his experience while filming his Cameo as his long-played character Professor Charles Xavier for the MCU's Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness back in 2020; he says the process was "frustrating and disappointing."

2022's Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness, in hindsight, might have been a turning point for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While the film did great numbers at the box office, especially when compared to more recent entries, and had plenty going for it with big-name director Sam Raimi, being the follow-up to the wildly popular Marvel series Wandavision.

Furthermore, the film was packed to the brim with big, flashy cameo appearances, yet somehow, the film still produced an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. This feeling occurred no more so than in the film's second act, where these cameos took place. Benedict Cumberbatch's Doctor Strange comes face to face with several alt-universe characters, including Stewart's Professor X, who rolls in and abruptly dies a few minutes later.

Fans will soon be able to revisit the magic of the mega-popular animated hit Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which will return exclusively to IMAX theatres starting January 19.

The film, which is acclaimed for its groundbreaking animation, voice acting, and characters, will see our spider heroes swinging back onto the big screen for a limited time only, according to a recent post by the writer and producer Christopher Miller.

We have seen a recent surge of theatrical re-releases of films from the last year popping up in the last few months, most notably the return of Barbie and Oppenheimer. However, this particular re-release comes amid the build-up for the 2024 Academy Awards, where the spider-centric film is already gaining Oscar Buzz.

2023 was full of fantastic movies, and none were bigger than Greta Gerwig's Barbie, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.

However, despite campaigning for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar Nomination, Barbie has been deemed to be an adapted screenplay by the Writers Branch executive committee of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences, a committee that determines films' eligibilities in submitted categorizations.

According to a report from Variety, when official Oscar Nominations open next Thursday, January 11, Voters will only be able to vote for the script of the film as an adapted screenplay. There has been an ongoing debate for months as to whether Barbie will be an original or adapted screenplay after news came out that the film would be campaigning as an original work.

According to reports from Deadline, comedy legend Jack black may be set to play yet another iconic video game character as the default character skin, Steve, in the upcoming adaptation of the bestselling video game of all time, Mojang Studios' Minecraft.

Variety has also reported that Black is now a part of the cast but didn't say who he might be playing. Black is well known in the industry for iconic roles in movies such as School of Rock, the Kung Fu Panda series he recently won an Emmy for, and most recently, Bowser in the second highest-grossing movie of 2023, Illuminations the Super Mario Bros. Movie. He will also star as another video game character, the Sassy robot Claptrap, in Lionsgate's take on the video game Borderlands, hitting cinemas on August 9.

For fans of the game, Minecraft's main man, Steve, doesn't really have a defined personality and is more of an empty vessel for players to project their ideals onto. It would be interesting to see if Black will portray Steve with a muted performance or if he will bring his own comedic chops to the popular skin.

Marvel's Hawkeye actor Jeremy Renner is back on his feet and fully recovered, returning to work one year after almost losing his life.

On Jan 1st of this year, Renner was involved in a freak snow-plow accident that saw the beloved actor crushed by his snowcat while clearing snow near his home. His injuries were horrific, including 30 broken bones, and he had to undergo emergency surgery in the ICU to save his life.

Now, just one year since the accident, he has shared a post on his Instagram, originally posted by his Mayor Of Kingstown co-star Emma Laird, who tagged the actor and captioned "Back with my favorite guy next week." where Renner added, "It's happening."

Starting January 29, 2024, Amazon Prime users will soon have their viewing sessions interrupted by ads.

Amazon Prime Video started out as an added value to boost the appeal of its world-changing Prime subscription, but the streaming wars have kicked content investment into overdrive. Amazon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating original programming and adaptations like the Lord of the Rings series, Wheel of Time, and The Boys.

As is the case with other streaming services, that cost is starting to trickle down to subscribers. Rather than raise Prime Video's subscription costs outright, Amazon will instead use ads to make more revenue. The company has announced that all existing Prime Video users will be subject to "limited advertisements" in late January of next year. Users can pay an extra $2.99 per month to avoid these ads on Prime Video.

The director of the upcoming sequel to the Planet of the Apes series has confirmed the possibility of further movies in the franchise.

Speaking with Empire, director Wes Ball and producer Joe Hartwick Jr. have confirmed that the upcoming film Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was always intended to be the next chapter in a brand new trilogy of monkey mayhem. While Ball is unsure if he will be involved with further installments of the series, he confirmed that he was in talks with the studio "about the next story."

He also suggested that while the former trilogy was about "the end of humanity," this new trilogy will be "very much about the beginning of something." This new film will be set 300 years after the ending of the rebooted Apes continuity that began with 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which saw Andy Serkis' Caesar lead his kind toward becoming the more predominant species on Earth.

According to multiple sources, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global are reportedly in talks for a potential merger of the two entertainment giants that could have wide-ranging consequences for the industry. Both companies themselves are products of mergers as recently as 2022 with Warner Bros.

Discovery formed from a deal between WarnerMeida and Discovery, Inc. and Paramount Global in 2019, previously known as ViacomCBS Inc. until 2022, forming from a merger of CBS Corporation and Viacom. Sources report that Paramount Global's Bob Bakish and Warner Bros. Discovery's David Zaslav met with one another on Tuesday this week.

The CEO pair were reportedly in talks to discuss a possible merger of the two companies, though it does appear the companies would not be equal parties due to Warner Bros. Discovery being worth a whopping $29 billion and Paramount Global worth adding up to only $10 billion, just over one-third of that total.

Godzilla Minus One is set to be re-released in a more old-school look reminiscent of the original, as seen in the release of a new trailer.

The film, which had the best opening for a foreign film in 2023, also blasted the United States records for the best opening weekend of a live-action Japanese film debuting to a whopping $11 million. As well as making high returns at the box office, Godzilla Minus One has been widely acclaimed by fans and critics alike with it also becoming a finalist for Best Visual Effects at the Academy Awards in 2024 and became the sixth highest-grossing Japanese film in the history of the US box office.

Minus One's writer/director, Takashi Yamazaki, who had waited 15 years until the technology was right to produce this film, also won the award for best director at the Hochi Film Awards in Japan, where Minus One was nominated for an additional 3 awards.

Netflix's live-action adaptation of the beloved series Avatar: The Last Airbender is set to hit our screens early next year, and the showrunner of this new take has revealed that the series will "remix" events from the original animated series.

The biggest question fans have had about this new adaptation is how faithful it would play out to the original when it debuts, even more so once it was announced the creators of the original animated series had exited the project moving forward due to creative differences, after spending two years on the production.

Michael Dante DiMartino, one of the two original creators of the series, called his exit from the project "The hardest professional decision I've ever had to make." DiMartino also added that he believed the Netflix live-action project has potential, but "Whatever version ends up on-screen, it will not be what Byran and I had envisioned or intended to make."

In September, we were treated to the release of a new Ninja Turtles movie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.

This new iteration of the turtles was accompanied by a beautiful new art style and animation. The film pitted this version of Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael against a new foe in Superfly, voiced by Ice Cube. The turtles were able to put an end to Superfly's evil plan, but with the defeat of their first villain comes an even more formidable threat on the horizon.

The ending of Mutant Mayhem teased the arrival of long-time foe Shredder, and director Jeff Rowe has opened up about his take on the character and how he wants to make the well-known villain "100 times scarier than Superfly". Speaking with Empire, Rowe shared that Mutant Mayhem took inspiration from Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy by choosing not to use Shredder as the main villain in the first film.