Adam B.Vary-Senior Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer “Peaky Blinders” creator Steven Knight is set to write the screenplay for the untitled “Star Wars” movie that Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (“Ms. Marvel”) is attached to direct, as original screenwriters Damon Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson have departed the project, Variety has confirmed. The movie is widely expected to be among Lucasfilm’s first “Star Wars” films since 2019’s “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.” More information about the movie, including a possible title, is expected to be announced at the Star Wars Celebration in London in April. (A representative for Lucasfilm did not respond to a request for comment.)

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Based on the deafening cheers that shook the walls of the Paramount Theater in Austin, Texas on Monday, the SXSW Film Festival premiere of “John Wick: Chapter 4” was a rousing success — and that’s before the film had even started. All it took was star Keanu Reeves to step on stage at the behest of director Chad Stahelski for the 1,000-plus audience to erupt in unbridled enthusiasm. That fervor never waned throughout the film’s epic two-hour-and-49-minute runtime, with booming ovations following the prodigious action sequences in Osaka, Berlin and Paris — and vocal gasps after several major twists. Stepping onto the stage after the screening, Reeves and Stahelski both seemed pleasantly shell-shocked by the raucous reception.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Before the LGBTQ teen sex comedy “Bottoms” premiered at the SXSW Film Festival on Saturday, festival director Claudette Godfrey told the audience in the Paramount Theater to prepare themselves for an experience that defied description, and that’s largely what they got. The movie stars Rachel Sennott (“Bodies, Bodies, Bodies,” “Shiva Baby”) and Ayo Edebiri (“The Bear”) as high schoolers who decide to form a girls’ fight club — technically, a self-defense club — in order to convince the two hottest cheerleaders in school to sleep with them. What unfolds isn’t quite like any high school sex comedy before it, which was exactly what director Emma Seligman (“Shiva Baby”) — who wrote the screenplay with Sennott — set out to do.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Eva Longoria’s feature directorial debut, “Flamin’ Hot,” had audiences on fire at its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival on March 11 — while deftly navigating the controversy surrounding the film’s subject without ever addressing it by name. The movie is based on the life of former Frito-Lay executive Richard Montañez, played by Jesse Garcia (“Quinceañera,” “Narcos: Mexico”), who has said that he was responsible for inventing the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos brand when he was working as a janitor for the company.  Before “Flamin’ Hot” went into production in 2021, however, Montañez’s claims were disputed by a Los Angeles Times report in which Frito-Lay stated that an internal investigation turned up no evidence that “Richard was involved in any capacity in the Flamin’ Hot test market” in 1990. Instead, the Times’ story attributed a Frito-Lay factory in the Midwest with spearheading the Flamin’ Hot brand and credited Montañez for helping to bring to market the Flamin’ Hot Popcorn brand and a line of spicy products called Sabrositas.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer “Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” stole the hearts of the audience at its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival on March 10, no matter whether or not they’d played the 50-year old role playing game that shares its title. The action comedy stars Chris Pine as a rakish bard named Edgin and Michelle Rodriguez as his platonic life-partner, the tough-as-nails warrior, Holga. The two set off on a quest to reunite Edgin with his estranged daughter, Kira (Chloe Coleman), and they wind up working with Xenk (Regé-Jean Page), a valorous paladin; Simon (Justice Smith), a sorcerer with an inferiority complex; and Doric (Sophia Lillis), a no-nonsense shapeshifting druid. Rounding out the cast are Hugh Grant as Forge Fitzwilliam, Edgin and Holga’s untrustworthy former compatriot; and Daisy Head as Sofina, a powerful wizard who is more than she initially seems.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein have been to the SXSW Film Festival twice before — for 2013’s “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone,” which they wrote, and 2019’s “Stuber,” which they produced. But when the pair debut the action-comedy “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” as the opening film of the annual Austin event this Friday, it will be the first time they’ve done so as directors. They couldn’t be more excited. “It’s the perfect setting for this movie,” Goldstein says, sitting in the Paramount lot office he shares with Daley, for an interview with Variety about the release of their latest movie. “It feels like the quintessential South By film,” Daley adds. “It’s big and all-encompassing but there’s also something a little bit subversive about it.”

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer When Jon Favreau stepped onto the red carpet for the Season 3 premiere of “The Mandalorian” on Feb. 28, the Disney+ show’s creator and executive producer was feeling nostalgic. “It’s been a while since we’ve been all together here like this,” Favreau told Variety, evoking the November 2019 premiere for the launch of the show — and of Disney+ itself. “It was before the first episode aired!” At that time, “The Mandalorian” was a scrappy landspeeder in the vast “Star Wars” galaxy, nipping at the heels of “The Rise of Skywalker,” the culminating feature film from director J.J. Abrams that was expected just a month later to obliterate the box office like a cinematic Death Star. Instead, “The Mandalorian” became a global sensation thanks to the incandescent cuteness of Baby Yoda, blasting Disney+ into light-speed with 26.5 million subscribers in its first six weeks.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer After nearly two years of production, Amazon Prime Video has finally pulled back the curtain on “Citadel,” the wildly ambitious new spy series starring Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, with the first trailer released Monday. The show is meant to serve as the mothership for several planned spin-offs based in local countries and performed in local languages: “Citadel” series set in Italy and India are already underway, with another Mexico-based show also in the works. It’s a gigantic and expensive bet on an original concept that had remained, up until this month, shrouded in mystery. As Variety previously reported, “Citadel” boasts a $185 million budget.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer One of Austin’s hometown filmmakers is bringing his next movie to SXSW. Director Robert Rodriguez will screen a work-in-progress cut of his crime thriller “Hypnotic,” starring Ben Affleck, for fans at the SXSW Film Festival in the Texas capital on March 12. In the film, written by Rodriguez and Max Borenstein (“Godzilla vs. Kong,” HBO’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty”), Affleck plays a detective who is investigating a series of inexplicable crimes while searching for his missing daughter, whose disappearance is somehow involved with a secret government program.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer In the Season 2 finale of “The Mandalorian” — which first streamed on Disney+ on Dec. 18, 2020, over two years ago — Mando (Pedro Pascal) bid a moving farewell to Grogu, handing over his adorably wee ward to Grogu’s new Jedi master, Luke Skywalker (played by a digitally de-aged Mark Hamill). The wrenching final scene culminated in Mando removing his helmet — violating the core precept of Mandalorian doctrine — so Grogu could see his face for the first time. It felt like the definitive end of a two-season journey, one painstakingly crafted by executive producers Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni to reset the show and send it into a new storytelling galaxy. As the trailers for Season 3 of “The Mandalorian” have already made clear, however, the new season will begin on March 1 with Mando and Grogu back together. It’s almost as if the events of the Season 2 finale hadn’t happened.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot points in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” currently playing in theaters. Over the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there have been several characters pulled from the comic books that have pushed the boundaries of verisimilitude and just common sense, including Rocket and Groot from “Guardians of the Galaxy,” Korg and Miek from “Thor: Ragnarok,” Goose from “Captain Marvel” and Morris from “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” None of them, however, hold a candle to M.O.D.O.K. One of Marvel’s earliest characters, created in 1967 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, M.O.D.O.K. — which stands for Mental (or Mobile or Mechanized) Organism Designed Only for Killing — is the nom-de-guerre of a human whose physique was horrifically contorted to give him a giant head and a tiny body. In order to be able to move, M.O.D.O.K. is placed inside a hover-chair that doubles as a mechanical suit, and equips him with all the tools he needs for the aforementioned killing.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot points, including the ending, of “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” currently playing in theaters. One day in early 2020, Jeff Loveness got a call from his agent telling him to go to the Marvel Studios offices in Burbank by 3 p.m. that day, with no further information. It wasn’t until he walked into the meeting room and saw director Peyton Reed — who’d helmed Marvel’s “Ant-Man” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp” — that Loveness understood that he was there to talk about a third movie starring Paul Rudd’s incredible shrinking superhero. But then Loveness was asked a surprising question: “Do you have a take on Kang the Conqueror?”

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses plot points on Season 3, Episode 2 of “Star Trek: Picard” (currently streaming on Paramount+) as well as the first half of the fourth season of “You” (currently streaming on Netflix). When Ed Speleers was growing up in the UK, he remembers coming home from school, turning on BBC Two, and tuning into “Star Trek: The Next Generation” at 6:30pm — but he never quite considered himself a Trekkie. So when “Star Trek: Picard” showrunner Terry Matalas cast Speleers for the third season of the Paramount+ series, he told the actor he needed to go to “Star Trek University.” “He gave me this long list of ‘TNG’ episodes that he felt were pertinent, and of films going right from ‘Wrath of Khan’ all the way to ‘First Contact,'” Speleers tells Variety via Zoom. “I devoured them. I’d spend three or four hours a day working on how I was going to approach this guy, and then I’d finish it all off with either watching two episodes of ‘TNG’ or one of these films.”

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer When Jimmy Warden was a kid growing up in Chicago, he wound up watching “a lot” of horror movies when he was, he says, “far too young.” “I became used to seeing people get their guts eaten or torn out of their bodies, stuff like that,” he says over Zoom with a wry chuckle. “So that’s where a lot of my taste is right now.” Warden’s sensibility is on robust display in his screenplay for “Cocaine Bear,” the R-rated action-comedy, directed by Elizabeth Banks, that is loosely based on the true story of a black bear who died after ingesting a mountain of cocaine in 1985 from a botched drug smuggling operation. Warden stumbled on the account in the mid-2010s while scrolling through Twitter, “not doing work that I should have been doing,” and instantly realized that “there was something there.”

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot points, including the ending and the post-credits scenes, for “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” currently playing in theaters. At this point, even casual followers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are likely aware that “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” launches Phase 5 of the MCU. What that means is a bit fuzzier to define.  To start, there’s the whole idea of “Phase 5” as a discrete unit of measurement within the larger Multiverse Saga, especially since Phase 4 wound up feeling like the least cohesive the MCU has ever been. A few titles did link together — “Black Widow” flowed into “Hawkeye”; “WandaVision” set up “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” — but that feeling of a single, larger story coming together that made the MCU so thrilling in the Infinity Saga didn’t quite cohere in Phase 4. How can “Quantumania” start a new phase if what came before it didn’t really end more than it just kinda stopped?

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer One of the great charms of the first two “Ant-Man” movies is how little they have to do with the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sure, Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang tussles with Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson in the 2015 original. And yeah, the introduction of the Quantum Realm in the 2018 sequel lays the groundwork for the time travel shenanigans in “Avengers: Endgame.” But generally speaking, audiences could take in Scott’s size-shifting adventures alongside scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), his daughter Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) and Hank’s wife and Hope’s mother Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), without needing to be steeped within the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” is a different beast entirely. Despite the assurances of Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige that every Marvel title can exist on its own terms, the third “Ant-Man” film is neck deep in series lore as it launches Phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — and the second act of the Multiverse Saga. Here’s everything you need to know before watching “Quantumania.”

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER WARNING: This story discusses major plot elements of the Season 1 finale of “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” currently streaming on Disney+. “This is a mess!” Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) complains directly to the camera in the season finale of “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” after several dangling plot strands from the season — the anti She-Hulk site Intelligencia run by toxic bro Todd Phelps (Jon Bass), the zen superhero retreat run by the Abomination (Tim Roth), the superhero influencer Titania (Jameela Jamil), the return of Jennifer’s cousin Bruce Banner as the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) — suddenly collided in the same showdown action sequence.  

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Nikki Finke, a tenacious journalist who revolutionized entertainment reporting with what became the Hollywood trade website Deadline, died Sunday morning in Boca Raton, Flor. after a prolonged illness. She was 68. After spending the beginning of her career reporting on everything from Moscow (for the Associated Press) to Washington, D.C. (for Newsweek), in 2002, Finke started a column for L.A. Weekly called Deadline Hollywood, which she took online in March 2006 as Deadline Hollywood Daily in an effort to better cover up-to-the-minute news. Rather than focus on celebrity or content, Finke placed a singularly unforgiving spotlight on the studio executives and high-powered agents who make the industry run. She was unafraid to call out what she believed to be ill-conceived or substandard decision-making in the bluntest possible terms, and her take-no-prisoners approach made her site a must-read in a media ecosystem Finke saw as excessively fawning and credulous.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Legendary filmmaker John Waters is stepping back to the directors chair for the first time in 18 years, for an adaptation of his 2022 novel “Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance.” Waters — a pioneering independent filmmaker who catapulted to cinema infamy with bad taste masterpieces like 1972’s “Pink Flamingos” and 1981’s “Polyester” — will write and direct the project for Village Roadshow, with Steve Rabineau producing. It will be Waters’ first movie since 2004’s “A Dirty Shame.” “‘Liarmouth’ is the craziest thing I’ve written in a while so maybe it’s fitting that my novel was shocking enough to jumpstart the engine of my film career,” the 76-year-old filmmaker said in a statement. “Thrilled to be back in the movie business, hopefully to spread demented joy to adventuresome moviegoers around the world.”

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Blumhouse is ready to spend “Five Nights at Freddy’s.” The venerable horror production company has set Emma Tammi (“The Wind”) to direct an adaptation of the popular video game series, set in a Chuck E. Cheese-like children’s restaurant called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, where the animatronic creatures within go on a killing rampage after closing time. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop are handling the creation of the evil, murderous children’s mascots. Launched in 2014, the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” video game series quickly developed a robust and inventive fan base due in part to its unusual approach to survival horror gameplay. Rather than navigate the restaurant or fight off the rampaging animatronics, the game places the player in the role of the night watchman, who must remain in their office and use a limited number of grainy security cameras feeds and electronic door controls to track the movements of the creatures. If the player survives five nights — and a subsequent bonus night — they effectively win the game (by getting fired). Subsequent sequels expanded the scope of the world of the game and its macabre mythology.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Marvel Studios is one step closer to “Secret Wars.” The company has tapped “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” screenwriter Michael Waldron to write the script for 2025’s “Avengers: Secret Wars,” the climactic final film in the Multiverse Saga. Waldron has been instrumental in crafting the multiverse within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He created and served as head writer on the 2021 Disney+ series “Loki,” in which the single, sacred Marvel timeline was ultimately fractured into a multiplicity of alternative realities. In “Doctor Strange 2,” Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) encounters several new dimensions, and in the film’s mid-credits scene, he meets Clea (Charlize Theron), a sorcerer from the Dark Dimension who tells Strange that his multiverse-hopping adventures have caused an “incursion.”

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments in the first six episodes of “House of the Dragon,” currently airing on HBO and streaming on HBO Max. If one of the big narrative challenges of “Game of Thrones” was managing the geographical sprawl of its many interweaving storylines, the challenge for the first season of its prequel series, “House of the Dragon,” is stretching the story of the civil war within the Targaryen family over multiple decades. George R.R. Martin’s bestselling book about the conflagration, “Fire & Blood,” spans generations — children are born and grow into adulthood within the two warring factions of Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen and her former best friend turned stepmother, Queen Alicent Hightower.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer “Heartstopper,” Netflix’s hit teenage romantic drama, has started production on Season 2 in the U.K., with four new cast members joining the series based on Alice Oseman’s best selling graphic novels about the budding love story between the bashful Charlie Spring (Joe Locke) and the earnest Nick Nelson (Kit Connor). Jack Barton (Netflix’s “The Letter for the King”) has been cast as Nick’s older brother, David — a university student who is less than enthusiastic about Nick and Charlie’s relationship. British stage actor Nima Taleghani (“Cyrano de Bergerac”) will play Mr. Farouk, one of the teachers at Truham Grammar School, where Nick and Charlie attend with their friends Tao (William Gao) and Isaac (Tobie Donovan). 

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story includes plot points in Episode 4 of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video, as well as one major story development written by author J.R.R. Tolkien in the appendices of “The Lord of the Rings.” Like so many of her castmates of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” Cynthia Addai-Robinson didn’t know exactly who she was playing until she arrived in New Zealand to shoot the Amazon Prime Video series. Unlike several of her castmates, however, Addai-Robinson was not an obsessive fan of the expansive world of Middle-earth created by author J.R.R. Tolkien. But once she was cast as Míriel, the Queen Regent of the resplendently prosperous island nation of Númenor, the veteran actor (“Power,” “Shooter,” “Arrow,” “Spartacus”) dove in head first into the rich history of Númenor and Middle-earth.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer The cast of the Amazon Prime Video series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” released a pointed statement on Wednesday condemning “the relentless racism, threats, harassment, and abuse some of our castmates of color are being subjected to on a daily basis.” The message comes after months of epithets and smears surrounding the decision by executive producers and showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay to populate J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth — including humans, elves, dwarfs and harfoots (e.g., earlier versions of hobbits) — with actors of color. “Tolkien created a world which, by definition, is multi-cultural,” reads the statement. “A world in which free peoples from, different races and cultures join together, in fellowship, to defeat the forces of evil. ‘Rings of Power’ reflects that. Our world has never been all white, fantasy has never been all white, Middle-earth is not all white.”

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” is as big a TV show as TV shows have ever been, with a record-setting budget spent on recreating J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth during the Second Age, and a cast of nearly two dozen series regulars and dozens more featured players deployed to enact its sprawling tale of the rise of Sauron. And yet one character sits undeniably at the show’s center: Galadriel. The ancient elf, so old she was born before the moon and the sun first graced Middle-earth, was a crucial character in Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” novels and Peter Jackson’s “Rings” trilogy, as played by Cate Blanchett.  In “The Rings of Power,” set thousands of years before the events of “The Lord of the Rings,” a younger Galadriel is not yet the serene and wise co-ruler of the Elven kingdom of Lothlórien. Instead, she’s consumed by her hunt for the Dark Lord Sauron, the mysteriously absent master of evil responsible for the death of Galadriel’s brother. In “Rings of Power,” Galadriel is at once hardened by the millennia she’s already been alive, but not yet the stately (and formidable) woman of stature she becomes in the Third Age.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses plot developments in Episode 3 of “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” currently streaming on Disney+. Roughly two weeks before shooting the third episode of Marvel Studios’ “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” head writer Jessica Gao pulled aside star Tatiana Maslany — who plays lawyer Jennifer Walters (aka She-Hulk) — to tell her who the show had cast for a crucial cameo in the episode. Jennifer’s former colleague at the D.A.’s office, chronic mansplainer Dennis Bukowski (Drew Matthews), sues an Asgardian shapeshifter for fraud, after she tricked him into dating her by transforming into a massive celebrity that Dennis had no chance in hell of actually dating.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Robert Aramayo had no idea when he first auditioned for “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” that the role he was vying for was Elrond, one of the most revered and crucial characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic saga of Middle-earth. Hugo Weaving played Elrond in Peter Jackson’s trilogies of “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit,” and as a kid, Aramayo had been captivated by the films. So when “The Rings of Power” co-showrunner J.D. Payne told him that he’d been cast to play Elrond as a (relatively) young man, the now 29-year-old actor couldn’t believe it. “I had one of those moments where everything in your body feels like you’re on electricity,” he tells Variety. “I was shocked and surprised and felt really, really honored that they will consider me for him.”

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: The final question in this interview includes a spoiler for the Season 3 finale of “The Boys.” “I love Boimler,” says “Star Trek: Lower Decks” star Jack Quaid of his adorably hapless character Brad Boimler. “I love him so much.” Quaid’s third season voicing the Starfleet ensign launched on Paramount+ on Thursday, but as Quaid and co-star Tawny Newsome (who voices Ens. Beckett Mariner) announced at San Diego Comic-Con in July, both actors will get to play the roles in live-action for the first time in a Season 2 episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” in 2023. The actor explained to Variety how the episode was possible, why he’s proud of Boimler in Season 3 of “Lower Decks,” how his character on “The Boys” will react to the big reveal in the Season 3 finale and what he did for the cast of “The Boys” spinoff series “Gen V.”

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer From “The Lego Batman Movie” to just…Batman? While veteran producer Dan Lin is in contention for the top job overseeing DC’s film and TV adaptations for Warner Bros. Discovery, Variety has confirmed that no offer has been made to Lin, and several hurdles stand in the way of any deal moving forward. The biggest hurdle is Lin’s production company, Rideback, which has ties to several other studios, including a first-look deal from January 2021 with Universal Pictures, and development on several features for Disney, including a live-action version of “Lilo & Stitch.” Were Lin to decamp to Warner Bros. Discovery to run DC, his involvement with those productions would need to be sorted, if not severed outright.