IFC Films and Shudder have acquired North American, UK and Ireland, and Australia and New Zealand rights to Spooky Pictures and Image Nation Abu Dhabi’s sci-fi horror Menace in Cannes.
The deal reunites IFC Films and Shudder with the producers of previous releases Watcher and Late Night With The Devil, the latter of which became IFC Films’ highest-grossing opening weekend ever and is nearing $10m at the US box office.
IFC Films and Shudder will release Menace in 2025. Randall Okita, whose previous feature See For Me was released by IFC Films, directed the story starring Isabel May as a...
The deal reunites IFC Films and Shudder with the producers of previous releases Watcher and Late Night With The Devil, the latter of which became IFC Films’ highest-grossing opening weekend ever and is nearing $10m at the US box office.
IFC Films and Shudder will release Menace in 2025. Randall Okita, whose previous feature See For Me was released by IFC Films, directed the story starring Isabel May as a...
- 5/21/2024
- ScreenDaily
Just ten days ago, we shared the news that Isabel May of Let’s Scare Julie and the Yellowstone spin-off 1883 has the lead role in the sci-fi horror film Menace, the first film to be written by Night of the Comet screenwriter Thom Eberhardt in over 20 years. Now Variety reports that Menace has landed a distribution deal with IFC Films and the Shudder streaming service, with the plan being for IFC and Shudder to release the film in North America, the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand sometime in 2025. Variety also unveiled a lower quality image of May’s character in the film, which can be seen above.
Directed by Randall Okita, who previously worked with IFC Films on the thriller See for Me, Menace follows a research student (Isabel May), who has a psychotic breakdown and is remanded to the custody of her aunt and uncle in a small town.
Directed by Randall Okita, who previously worked with IFC Films on the thriller See for Me, Menace follows a research student (Isabel May), who has a psychotic breakdown and is remanded to the custody of her aunt and uncle in a small town.
- 5/21/2024
- by Cody Hamman
- JoBlo.com
AGC International has acquired sales rights to Menace, the latest horror from Image Nation Abu Dhabi and Spooky Pictures following collaborations on Late Night With The Devil and Watcher.
Directed by Randall Okita, Menace stars Isabel May a student who is sent to live with her aunt and uncle in a small down after suffering a psychotic breakdown. Soon, people start disappearing around her and she isn’t sure what to believe.
The film is produced by Spooky Pictures’ Roy Lee and Steven Schneider and Image Nation’s Derek, through their multi-picture slate dale, with Daniel Ostroff, William Woods and Maddy Falle.
Directed by Randall Okita, Menace stars Isabel May a student who is sent to live with her aunt and uncle in a small down after suffering a psychotic breakdown. Soon, people start disappearing around her and she isn’t sure what to believe.
The film is produced by Spooky Pictures’ Roy Lee and Steven Schneider and Image Nation’s Derek, through their multi-picture slate dale, with Daniel Ostroff, William Woods and Maddy Falle.
- 5/10/2024
- ScreenDaily
Image Nation Abu Dhabi and Roy Lee and Steven Schneider’s genre label Spooky Pictures have set the third feature under their multi-picture slate deal with sci-fi horror Menace. Directed by Randall Okita (See For Me), the film stars Isabel May (1883) who also serves as an executive producer via her banner Una Vaca Productions.
AGC International will launch sales at the Cannes Market and show off first footage from the movie which recently wrapped production in Canada. Cinetic Media is handling North American rights.
May stars as a research student who has a psychotic breakdown and is remanded to the custody of her aunt and uncle in a small town. When strange things start happening around her and people start disappearing, she isn’t sure what is real or what is her imagination.
May was most recently seen in 1883 for Paramount+ and the Apple TV series, Masters of the Air.
AGC International will launch sales at the Cannes Market and show off first footage from the movie which recently wrapped production in Canada. Cinetic Media is handling North American rights.
May stars as a research student who has a psychotic breakdown and is remanded to the custody of her aunt and uncle in a small town. When strange things start happening around her and people start disappearing, she isn’t sure what is real or what is her imagination.
May was most recently seen in 1883 for Paramount+ and the Apple TV series, Masters of the Air.
- 5/10/2024
- by Nancy Tartaglione
- Deadline Film + TV
Exclusive: Village Roadshow Pictures has inked a multi-year first-look deal with David S. Goyer’s Phantom Four Films to source, develop and produce feature films with Phantom Four’s President of Production, Keith Levine, overseeing development. Levine also will produce alongside Goyer.
As part of the deal, Phantom Four will produce a remake of the cult-classic 1975 psychological thriller The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. Sean Durkin is on board to write and direct, with Daniel Ostroff, Michael Gaeta and Alison Rosenzweig also producing. The original film is part of the library controlled by Vine Alternative Investments.
Phantom Four and Village Roadshow Pictures already had announced development of Legacy, an original action thriller from writer Tj Fixman.
“David and Keith are not only peerless producers in the genre space, they’re also excellent collaborators with great taste and relationships,” said Jillian Apfelbaum and Tristen Tuckfield, EVPs Feature Film at Village Roadshow Pictures.
As part of the deal, Phantom Four will produce a remake of the cult-classic 1975 psychological thriller The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. Sean Durkin is on board to write and direct, with Daniel Ostroff, Michael Gaeta and Alison Rosenzweig also producing. The original film is part of the library controlled by Vine Alternative Investments.
Phantom Four and Village Roadshow Pictures already had announced development of Legacy, an original action thriller from writer Tj Fixman.
“David and Keith are not only peerless producers in the genre space, they’re also excellent collaborators with great taste and relationships,” said Jillian Apfelbaum and Tristen Tuckfield, EVPs Feature Film at Village Roadshow Pictures.
- 9/10/2021
- by Justin Kroll
- Deadline Film + TV
Hollywood screenwriter and author Michael Blake, most famous for his Oscar-winning movie Dances with Wolves, has died.
Blake's manager and producing partner Daniel Ostroff told The Hollywood Reporter that Blake died peacefully in Tuscon, Arizona on Saturday (May 2). Blake, who was 69, was battling a long-term illness.
In 1988, Blake wrote Dances With Wolves and later adapted it as a film feature in 1990, directed by and starring Kevin Costner.
The movie went on to win seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay for Blake. Costner also won the Academy Award for Best Director.
Prior to Dances With Wolves, Costner and Blake worked on the 1983 drama Stacy's Knights - the duo's first collaboration.
Blake also got behind the camera as a director in 1998's Winding Stair, which he also adapted into a screenplay from Douglas C Jones' novel.
Blake is survived by his wife Marrianne Mortensen Blake and their three children.
Blake's manager and producing partner Daniel Ostroff told The Hollywood Reporter that Blake died peacefully in Tuscon, Arizona on Saturday (May 2). Blake, who was 69, was battling a long-term illness.
In 1988, Blake wrote Dances With Wolves and later adapted it as a film feature in 1990, directed by and starring Kevin Costner.
The movie went on to win seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay for Blake. Costner also won the Academy Award for Best Director.
Prior to Dances With Wolves, Costner and Blake worked on the 1983 drama Stacy's Knights - the duo's first collaboration.
Blake also got behind the camera as a director in 1998's Winding Stair, which he also adapted into a screenplay from Douglas C Jones' novel.
Blake is survived by his wife Marrianne Mortensen Blake and their three children.
- 5/3/2015
- Digital Spy
Michael Blake, who won an Academy Award for adapting the screenplay for Dances With Wolves from his own novel, has died. He was 69. Blake died peacefully after a lengthy illness on Saturday in Tucson, Ariz., Blake's manager and producing partner Daniel Ostroff told The Hollywood Reporter. In 1988, Blake wrote the novel Dances With Wolves, which has sold more than 3.5 million copies and has been translated into 15 languages. Producer Matt Murphy is currently developing it for the stage. Read more Hollywood's Notable Deaths of 2015 The 1990 film version won seven Oscars, including best picture, and landed Blake
read more...
read more...
- 5/3/2015
- by THR Staff
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
After a long illness, Dances With Wolves author and screenwriter Michael Blake died today in Tucson, Arizona where he and his family lived for many years. He was 69. His passing was confirmed by his manager and producer Daniel Ostroff, who is working on a Dances With Wolves sequel, The Holy Road. Blake’s best known novel sold over 3.5 million copies, and was translated into 15 languages. The 1990 film, which Kevin Costner directed and starred in, won seven Oscars…...
- 5/3/2015
- Deadline
Exclusive: Sex And The City alumna Kristin Davis has signed on to star in and executive produce Of Two Minds, a Lifetime original movie that deals with mental illness. Tammy Blanchard will star opposite Davis in the film, which chronicles the relationship between a woman (Davis) and her younger sister (Blanchard), who has schizophrenia. British director Jim O’Hanlon (The Deep) will direct from a script by Richard Friedenberg (The 19th Wife). Also producing the movie are Frank Konigsberg and Daniel Ostroff. Filming is slated to begin in mid-November in Los Angeles. Davis, repped by UTA and Mosaic, will next be seen in Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. ICM-repped Blanchard is currently seen in Moneyball.
- 10/5/2011
- by NELLIE ANDREEVA
- Deadline TV
Something's missing in "The Missing".
Director Ron Howard's follow-up to his Oscar-winning "A Beautiful Mind" after he parted ways with "The Alamo", this murky, thriller-tinged Western has the terrain down cold -- from the wide-open spaces to the rocky vistas -- but beneath all the requisite genre trappings there's a vast, empty gulch where the affecting dramatic element should have been found.
Based on the novel "The Last Ride" by Thomas Eidson and adapted by Ken Kaufman ("Space Cowboys"), this story of a frontier doctor who is reluctantly reunited with her estranged father after her teenage daughter is abducted by a treacherous Apache more than slightly recalls the 1956 John Ford classic "The Searchers", but the derivative aspect isn't the major culprit.
Even with the ever-reliable Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones on hand, the picture seldom feels like anything more than a ride through a Western town set -- it's all rickety facade and scaffolding.
Although Columbia Pictures' marketing has wisely been playing up the thriller element in its TV ads and Howard's name carries some well-deserved weight, "The Missing" still looks to be a tricky sell, especially if it can't bank on year-end critic kudos.
Set in the untamed American Southwest circa 1885, the film wastes no time in establishing its unsettling tone as local healer Maggie Gilkeson (Blanchett) extracts an old woman's rotting tooth.
Soon after, a grisly, long-haired stranger called Jones (Jones) rides into her family's homestead seeking treatment. It turns out the visitor is none other than Maggie's father, who had abandoned her and her mother 20 years earlier to go and live among the Apaches.
The resentful Maggie wants to see neither hide nor ponytailed hair of him, but the two must become allies when her daughter Lilly Evan Rachel Wood) is kidnapped by the psychotic Pesh-Chidin (Eric Schweig), a spell-casting brujo, or male witch, who snatches teenage girls and sells them into Mexican slavery.
Of course, the ensuing trek to rescue Lilly -- in which they're accompanied by her younger sister, Dot (Jenna Boyd) -- is really about things like tolerance and reconciliation, and not just between father and daughter.
Wanting to have its politically correct cake and eat it too, Kaufman's annoyingly black-and-white script, with its borderline cartoonish characterizations, seems to be saying all Indians aren't bad ... but some are really, really bad.
Handed those sorts of archetypes, Blanchett and particularly Jones do what layering they can, but their characters haven't been given enough complexity to keep the viewer involved. With even less to work with, the supporting cast (which also includes Val Kilmer in a cameo as an Army lieutenant) are saddled with whatever version of good or evil they've been assigned.
Having always wanted to do a Western, Howard makes sure to get everything in, right down to the flaming arrows. And while he and cinematographer Salvatore Totino take full advantage of their New Mexico locations, very little of it carries any emotional weight despite the constant tug of composer James Horner's "Titanic"-sized score.
In the end, while Blanchett's Maggie comes back with what she was looking for, as well as something that she didn't know she had lost, the film emerges disappointingly empty-handed.
The Missing
Columbia Pictures
Revolution Studios and Imagine Entertainment present a Brian Grazer production in association with Daniel Ostroff Prods. A Ron Howard film
Credits:
Director: Ron Howard
Screenwriter: Ken Kaufman
Based on the novel "The Last Ride" by: Thomas Eidson
Producers: Brian Grazer, Daniel Ostroff, Ron Howard
Executive producers: Todd Hallowell, Steve Crystal
Director of photography: Salvatore Totino
Art director: Guy Barnes
Editors: Dan Hanley, Mike Hill
Costume designer: Julie Weiss
Music: James Horner
Cast:
Samuel Jones: Tommy Lee Jones
Maggie Gilkeson: Cate Blanchett
Lilly: Evan Rachel Wood
Dot: Jenna Boyd
Pesh-Chidin: Eric Schweig
Brake Baldwin: Aaron Eckhart
Kayitah: Jay Tavare
Honesco: Simon Baker
Emiliano: Sergio Calderon
Lt. Jim Ducharme: Val Kilmer
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time -- 130 minutes...
Director Ron Howard's follow-up to his Oscar-winning "A Beautiful Mind" after he parted ways with "The Alamo", this murky, thriller-tinged Western has the terrain down cold -- from the wide-open spaces to the rocky vistas -- but beneath all the requisite genre trappings there's a vast, empty gulch where the affecting dramatic element should have been found.
Based on the novel "The Last Ride" by Thomas Eidson and adapted by Ken Kaufman ("Space Cowboys"), this story of a frontier doctor who is reluctantly reunited with her estranged father after her teenage daughter is abducted by a treacherous Apache more than slightly recalls the 1956 John Ford classic "The Searchers", but the derivative aspect isn't the major culprit.
Even with the ever-reliable Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones on hand, the picture seldom feels like anything more than a ride through a Western town set -- it's all rickety facade and scaffolding.
Although Columbia Pictures' marketing has wisely been playing up the thriller element in its TV ads and Howard's name carries some well-deserved weight, "The Missing" still looks to be a tricky sell, especially if it can't bank on year-end critic kudos.
Set in the untamed American Southwest circa 1885, the film wastes no time in establishing its unsettling tone as local healer Maggie Gilkeson (Blanchett) extracts an old woman's rotting tooth.
Soon after, a grisly, long-haired stranger called Jones (Jones) rides into her family's homestead seeking treatment. It turns out the visitor is none other than Maggie's father, who had abandoned her and her mother 20 years earlier to go and live among the Apaches.
The resentful Maggie wants to see neither hide nor ponytailed hair of him, but the two must become allies when her daughter Lilly Evan Rachel Wood) is kidnapped by the psychotic Pesh-Chidin (Eric Schweig), a spell-casting brujo, or male witch, who snatches teenage girls and sells them into Mexican slavery.
Of course, the ensuing trek to rescue Lilly -- in which they're accompanied by her younger sister, Dot (Jenna Boyd) -- is really about things like tolerance and reconciliation, and not just between father and daughter.
Wanting to have its politically correct cake and eat it too, Kaufman's annoyingly black-and-white script, with its borderline cartoonish characterizations, seems to be saying all Indians aren't bad ... but some are really, really bad.
Handed those sorts of archetypes, Blanchett and particularly Jones do what layering they can, but their characters haven't been given enough complexity to keep the viewer involved. With even less to work with, the supporting cast (which also includes Val Kilmer in a cameo as an Army lieutenant) are saddled with whatever version of good or evil they've been assigned.
Having always wanted to do a Western, Howard makes sure to get everything in, right down to the flaming arrows. And while he and cinematographer Salvatore Totino take full advantage of their New Mexico locations, very little of it carries any emotional weight despite the constant tug of composer James Horner's "Titanic"-sized score.
In the end, while Blanchett's Maggie comes back with what she was looking for, as well as something that she didn't know she had lost, the film emerges disappointingly empty-handed.
The Missing
Columbia Pictures
Revolution Studios and Imagine Entertainment present a Brian Grazer production in association with Daniel Ostroff Prods. A Ron Howard film
Credits:
Director: Ron Howard
Screenwriter: Ken Kaufman
Based on the novel "The Last Ride" by: Thomas Eidson
Producers: Brian Grazer, Daniel Ostroff, Ron Howard
Executive producers: Todd Hallowell, Steve Crystal
Director of photography: Salvatore Totino
Art director: Guy Barnes
Editors: Dan Hanley, Mike Hill
Costume designer: Julie Weiss
Music: James Horner
Cast:
Samuel Jones: Tommy Lee Jones
Maggie Gilkeson: Cate Blanchett
Lilly: Evan Rachel Wood
Dot: Jenna Boyd
Pesh-Chidin: Eric Schweig
Brake Baldwin: Aaron Eckhart
Kayitah: Jay Tavare
Honesco: Simon Baker
Emiliano: Sergio Calderon
Lt. Jim Ducharme: Val Kilmer
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time -- 130 minutes...
- 12/8/2003
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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