The first trailer has been released for Legendary Digital's zombie film Dead Rising: Endgame, which is based on the popular video game franchise Dead Rising, and is also a sequel to the movie Dead Rising Watchtower. I enjoyed the first film and this new one looks like it will be just as entertaining.

DEAD RISING: ENDGAME drops us into the zombie-infested quarantined zone of East Mission City where investigative reporter Chase Carter (Jesse Metcalfe) must stop a secret government conspiracy which, though seemingly aimed at ending the country’s zombie epidemic, will also kill millions of innocent civilians. DEAD RISING: ENDGAME is based on the hugely popular Dead Rising video game franchise by Capcom, which has sold over 9.1 million copies worldwide. 

Jesse Metcalfe returns to DEAD RISING: ENDGAME as Chase Carter, the well-known television journalist who goes back underground to stop the military’s rogue operation and break the ultimate story.  Keegan Connor Tracy returns as camera operator and producer, Jordan Blair.  Attempting to thwart their plans is Dennis Haysbert reprising his role as General Lyons, a crooked Military Intelligence Officer. Patrick Sabongui returns in a new role, playing a skilled zombie killer and video game aficionado who talks a big and crude game to mask his gentle side. 

The movie stars Jesse Metcalfe (Desperate Housewives, Dallas, Passions), Billy Zane (Titanic, The Phantom), Dennis Haysbert (24, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For), Marie Avgeropoulos (The 100), Jessica Harmon (iZombie), Keegan Connor Tracy (Once Upon a Time, Bates Motel), Ian Tracey (Bates Motel), Victor Webster (Continuum), Camille Sullivan (The Man in the High Castle), and Patrick Sabongui (The Art of More).

Dead Rising: End Game set to debut on Sony's Crackle streaming service. 

New York City's Bottleneck Gallery has teamed up with Lucasfilm and Acme Archives to release this awesome Raiders of the Lost Ark print from artist Laurent Durieux. This year marks the 35th anniversary of Steven Spielberg's action classic, and to celebrate the introduction of one of cinema's coolest heroes, Indiana Jones, Durieux has created two fantastic pieces that feature Indy and Marion in the Well of Souls as the Ark of the Covenant towers above them.

The best part? The regular version will be a timed release, so if you want one, you don't have to worry about it selling out in the blink of an eye. You can order one from now until this Sunday, June 5, 2016, at 11:59pm EST. Take a look:

Regular

15 color metallic screen print

24 x 36 inches

$60

Timed release

Variant

15 color metallic screen print

24 x 36 inches

Numbered edition of 275

$80

While the variant only has 275 prints for sale, there's an even more rare piece (only 50 available!) that mega-fans will surely love: a bonus wood variant that has the regular image on the front, and this on the back:

Wood Variant (Regular image on front)

15 color metallic screen print with special backing.

Numbered edition of 50

$275

Badass. This release also happens to coincide with a free retrospective exhibit of a lot of Laurent's work taking place at the Seed Factory in Belgium, so if we have any Belgian readers, make sure to stop by and check it out!

Like many of you, Raiders is one of my favorite movies of all time (read my 30th anniversary screening review here) and was hugely influential for me growing up, so it's cool to see the movie get such a great representation by an excellent artist. Head over to Bottleneck's website to grab one for yourself, and peep some closeups of the Indy art below:

As I'm sure you've heard, Warner Bros. is releasing an R-rated Ultimate Edition of Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and the studio has released a new trailer for the home video release that features tons of new footage. So much so, in fact, that while I haven't done an exact breakdown of shots or anything, it seems like almost half of the trailer is stuff we haven't seen before. And some of it looks pretty good! What do you think? If you loved or hated the movie, is this enticing enough to get you to watch the extended cut?

The film will have an extra 30 minutes of story and action not seen in theaters, and here's a list of the bonus features fans can expect on the Blu-ray:

“Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” Ultra HD Blu-ray Combo Pack, 3D Blu-ray Combo Pack, Blu-ray Combo Pack and Standard Definition 2-Disc DVD contain the following special features:

• Uniting the World’s Finest

• Gods and Men: A Meeting of Giants

• The Warrior, The Myth, The Wonder

• Accelerating Design: The New Batmobile

• Superman: Complexity & Truth

• Batman: Austerity & Rage

• Wonder Woman: Grace & Power

• Batcave: Legacy of the Lair

• The Might and the Power of a Punch

• The Empire of Luthor

• Save the Bats

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice arrives on Digital HD on June 28 and on Blu-ray/DVD on July 19, 2016.

Source: Collider

It's looking like the It remake is at least considering a new Pennywise after director Cary Fukunaga and The Maze Runner actor Will Poulter dropped out. Bloody Disgusting reports Poulter is still in contention, but that the studio is also looking at Kirk Acevedo (Band of Brothers, Oz, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) to fill the clown shoes. This exclusive report is backed up by the actor himself seemingly confirming the news by sharing it on Twitter.

Hmmm...
Interesting?! https://t.co/r3XYUuUK0d

— kirk acevedo (@kirkacevedo) June 2, 2016

When it comes to casting this role, it's super hard to visualize anyone in the part — mainly because Tim Curry practically transformed himself when he took the role in the original movie, and I just don't know if anyone can do better than simply imitating him. Whoever ends up scoring the role has their hands full!

Mama director Andy Muschietti has taken over as director, and It will drop on September 8, 2017.

Denis Villeneuve's cartel thriller Sicario was fantastic, and Lionsgate put a sequel in development almost immediately after the first one hit theaters. The sequel is supposed to center more on Benicio Del Toro's mysterious character, and last we heard, the film's producers claimed Emily Blunt and Josh Brolin were also going to reprise their roles in the new movie. Now it appears that isn't the case, as Deadline reports that while Del Toro and Brolin will return, Blunt's character has been written out of the movie.

The sequel, which has been titled Soldado (while "Sicario" means "Hitman," "Soldado" means "Soldier"), will most likely be directed by Stefano Sollima, who is the front-runner for the job and is apparently close to signing on. I've never heard of him before, but Deadline says:

Sollima is the Italian director who has made a number of memorably gritty crime thrillers but is best known for directing the Italian miniseries Gomorra and the features Suburra and A.C.A.B. (All Cops Are Bastards).

Taylor Sheridan, who wrote the screenplay for the original movie, wrote the sequel as well, which reportedly follows Del Toro and Brolin's characters as they "concern themselves with what is being smuggled across the border between Mexico and the U.S. in the tunnels used to move drugs and illegal immigrants. Those tunnels also can be used to bring terrorists into the U.S."

I'm obviously a big fan of Sicario, so while I'm bummed Blunt won't be a part of this movie, I'm looking forward to seeing how the sequel plays out.

Fans of Bates Motel, let's help a fellow fan out! Kendal Conrad loves the show and especially loves Norma Bates. She really loves Norma playing music, but as an artist is disappointed that Norma doesn't have her own "song." Conrad (and her mother) changed that and wrote a song they think fits the character of Norma Bates and match her feelings towards her son in the show.

I know you're sitting here thinking about a certain thing, and don't worry...they already figured out how they can work the song in for the final season despite spoilers they'll talk about in the video below. If you like the song, tweet it out to the show to see if they'll include it in the final season!

You can find the lyrics right below the video. Thanks to Dread Central for the heads up!

Mother knows best
No need to fret
You can trust me
To protect you, honey
I’ll keep you close
And never let go
And when you shut your eyes, I won’t be far behind cause

Chorus:
There is a cord between our hearts
So nothing will ever keep us apart
We have to be together
I’ll love you forever and ever
Not even sleep can take you from me,
I’ll meet you in your dreams.

All that I do
I do for you.
Just call my name
It will be okay.
Whatever it takes
to keep you safe
When you shut your eyes, I won’t be far behind cause

Chorus

Here's the first trailer and poster for Dying Laughing, a new documentary about the art of stand-up comedy. This is a subject that's been pretty well-covered in the past, but this doc stands out because of the talent it was able to wrangle for interviews: people like Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Kevin Hart, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, and tons more.

The film is making its world premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival this week, and I'm hoping to be able to check it out and have a review here on the site soon. Fingers crossed.

A stand-up comedian is his or her own writer, director and star performer. Unlike any other art form, there is no safety net. In its singular realization, comedy thrives on a stage—often in front of hostile audiences. For most people, baring your soul and being heckled would be a life-changing trauma. For stand-ups, it's just part of the routine.

Directors Lloyd Stanton and Paul Toogood achieve a startling level of intimacy in a series of riveting interviews with Garry Shandling, Chris Rock, Kevin Hart, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman, Billy Connolly, Amy Schumer and many other masters of the comedy universe; allowing in-depth access to the emotional and psychological highs and lows of answering the call to become a comic.

What if there was an alternate timeline where Anakin ended up killing Obi-Wan in their battle on Mustafar? Better yet, what if he never fell to the Sith at all? Reddit user /u/issac_2 got curious and decided to see what that alternate Anakin would look like!

To do this, he took the faces of Hayden Christensen (Episode II and III Anakin) and Sebastian Shaw (ROTJ Anakin) and created a middle-aged Jedi Knight version of the character. The result is pretty astounding!

Jedi Anakin: Hayden Christensen/Sebastian Shaw morph

Great work! Now can we see a Vader-less Sith Anakin?!

This is hard to understand at first, but once you do understand it, it's super trippy! It took a couple reads of this Vox article to figure out why people are freaking out that Warner Bros. took down another computer's copy of Blade Runner, but once I got it (I think), I realized it was actually pretty awesome and meta to the film!

First, the story.

Warner Bros. issued a typical DMCA notice (a takedown notice for a piece of content that contains the studio's intellectual property) on a video that used a considerable chunk of Blade Runner, and it was taken down. The problem? It wasn't Blade Runner, but another computer's encoded "deep learning" of Blade Runner.

Reading about "deep learning" alone will give you a headache, but the long and short of it is a way of showing us how computers learn and observe. The video in question was uploaded by Terrence Broad, who ran an experiment to "teach" an autoencoder to watch a film and identify it without human aid.

Basically what he did was show the program two films (Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly) six times. After the program "learned" what the film looked like, he would have it recreate what it had seen on screen through encoding and cross referencing it with other images.

The end result is an inside look at how a computer "watches" and recognizes a film:

The final video is a series of images and "thoughts" of a computer that look similar to Blade Runner, but it is not Blade Runner. It looks like it, and it certainly seemed like it to the Warner Bros. legal team (initially, anyway...they ultimately reinstated it), but it's actually something entirely different. That's not a poorly visualized copy on the right side of the video...that's organically created by a computer via watching the film!

Kind of like how replicants are different from humans, right? Or are they? SEE?! PRETTY TRIPPY! I really don't have a good way to end this because my head kind of hurts trying to make heads or tails of this...so here's the Scanner Darkly footage as well!

Ancient Aliens doesn't seem so crazy anymore! Geekologie tells us that a dagger that was buried with King Tut (who ruled Egypt around 1324 B.C.) has been confirmed to have been constructed from meteoritic iron!

According to the study, the blade is constructed of iron and cobalt consistent to that of meteorites that were present in the early beginnings of our solar system! This means one of two things:

1. Ancient Egyptians constructed weapons for royalty using fallen space rocks
2. Tut got a gift for being the first human to make contact with an otherworldly species!

I want to believe, but science points to the first one being more true than the latter. We can still hold out hope though, right?

Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley received some good news this week when FX ordered his new comic book show Legion to series. The show will star Dan Stevens (above), Aubrey Plaza, Rachel Keller, Katie Aselton, and more, and in case you're unfamiliar with the premise, here's the synopsis:

Legion centers around David Haller (Stevens); since he was a teenager, David has struggled with mental illness. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, David has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years. But after a strange encounter with a fellow patient, he’s confronted with the possibility that the voices he hears and the visions he sees might be real.

In the comics, David is the son of X-Men leader Professor Xavier, but Hawley won't confirm that's the case in this show. In fact, it seems like this series is going to be quite unexpected, approaching the superhero TV genre from a different angle and avoiding the structure of its contemporaries. In a new interview with HitFix, Hawley says that this show will be a "standalone kind of thing." When asked if it took place in continuity with the X-Men movies, or in a world in which mutants have been public with their powers, he answered:

No, it's not. It's a little more of a fable in my mind. If you were to say, "Where is it, and when is it?," it's not exactly clear, I think. And a lot of it is because [David's] not exactly clear. It's the world as perceived subjectively on some level. The recent X-Men movies, starting with First Class, are rooted in a time period and a world and playing with history in interesting ways. This isn't doing that.

As for whether or not we'll see major X-Men characters pop up in the show, don't count on it:

Yeah, it's none of the iconic characters from the movie franchise. I think that's a strength on some level, because those characters come with rules. It's hard. You don't want to be handcuffed, when you're trying to explore something. The power of making something unpredictable is really an important thing to preserve.

Hawley also described his approach as "taking this character and set-up, and just playing with it," which means it probably won't end up resembling the comics too much. But since Hawley hasn't given me any real reason to doubt his skills yet (at least where Fargo is concerned), I'm willing to go with him on this ride and watch his unique take on this material.

In 2014, artists Kevin Tong and Tom Whalen founded Info*Rama, a site featuring infographic posters of subjects in the worlds of science, tech, and culture. Now they're teaming with Mondo and fellow artist Matt Taylor for an Info*Rama art show that pays tribute to beloved movies like Star Wars, The Avengers, Batman, and more. The show begins on June 24 at the Mondo Gallery in Austin, Texas, and the gallery has released the first three 24 x 36 inch screenprint pieces for the show, which you can see below:

That's the regular and variant edition of “The Military Forces of the Galactic Empire,” by Kevin Tong. Below, you'll find Tom Whalen's "The Batmobile."

And finally, there's "The Avengers," by Matt Taylor.

What other fan-favorite movies will get this infographic treatment at the show? We can't wait to find out.

Warner Bros. and DC Films had writer Seth Grahame-Smith all lined up to direct The Flash solo film, but after the disappointing box office performance of Batman v Superman earlier this year, they ended up firing him in the hopes of bringing on someone with actual experience. The studio has been looking for a way to course correct from the grim and dour tone of Zack Snyder's movie, and here's the latest way they've chosen to counteract that: EW reports that the studio is eying Dope director Rick Famuyiwa to direct The Flash.

Multiple sources tell them that Famuyiwa is in negotiations to take over the movie, which gels with some rumors that have popped up in recent days claiming he would direct a DC movie. There's no word yet about whether or not he'll rewrite Grahame-Smith's screenplay. This will be the largest movie of Famuyiwa's filmography by far.

I know Dope has a lot of fans around here, but I wasn't crazy about it. But Famuyiwa is the latest in a long line of filmmakers who are plucked from the indie world and given a chance to enter the big leagues, so based on the fact that he's an underdog (and I like the character of The Flash), I'm pulling for him.

The Flash stars Ezra Miller and races into theaters on March 16, 2018.

Earlier this morning, we wrote about how actor Kirk Acevedo was testing for the role of Pennywise the Clown in the upcoming remake of Stephen King's It, but it sounds like all of the speculation can now be put to rest. THR reports that Bill Skarsgard has snagged the lead role and will don the makeup for Mama director Andy Muschietti in the new movie.

Bill Skarsgard is the son of Avengers actor Stellan Skarsgard and the brother of Alexander Skarsgard, and you may have seen him in Divergent or the Netflix series Hemlock Grove (I've never seen him in anything, so I can't really comment on his potential Pennywise-ness). He'll appear in this film alongside Jaeden Lieberher, Finn Wolfhard, Jack Dylan Grazer, Wyatt Oleff, Chosen Jacobs, and Jeremy Ray Taylor.

The story follows a group of teens called the Losers Club who defeat a creature called It. Years later, the creature returns, and the club, now adults, have to band together again even though they have no memory of the first battle.

Warner Bros. is telling this story in two parts. The first movie will focus on the kids' adventure, and the second movie will revisit those characters as adults. The first part hits theaters on September 8, 2017.

Once again Upisnotjump has surprised me with their remarkable Fallout 4 movie making skills! I don't know if it's a testament to the animation or Rick and Morty's style...read more on Gametyrant

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Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping takes aim at spoiled pop artists before we ever see a frame of footage (the title is a riff on the 2011 documentary Justin Bieber: Never Say Never), but this movie isn't only interested in raking singers over the coals: it's out to make fun of the entire music industry and the culture surrounding it. Celebrity romances, TMZ, social media, traditional news networks, and much more are skewered in this ridiculous — and often hilarious — examination of superstardom from The Lonely Island.

Andy Samberg plays Conner4Real, a former member of a cheesy '90s boy band musical trio known as the Style Boyz, which was comprised of Owen (Jorma Taccone) and Lawrence (Akiva Schaffer). The group broke up and Conner started a successful solo career, and we catch up with him as his second solo album debuts and instantly tanks. Conner is forced to deal with real adversity for the first time in his life, and the movie adopts a romcom structure with its central relationship, with Conner and Lawrence being the two star-crossed buds and Owen being the best friend trying to reunite the trio again. Along the way, there are plenty of cameos from famous real-life musicians, and digs at Macklemore's posturing, the way Apple forced U2's album on every iTunes user, the way Jimmy Fallon panders to nostalgia on The Tonight Show, and much more.

There may be a tendency to dismiss what this film does as being "easy" due to the nature of what it's parodying. Bieber, holograms, and tabloid culture are undoubtedly low-hanging fruit. And admittedly, a spoof of a music documentary doesn't exactly seem like a wildly ambitious project. Co-directors Schaffer and Taccone capably recreate the look of a typical music doc, and Samberg is an enjoyable comedic performer, but the thing that elevates The Lonely Island above being just another group of filmmakers messing around with a genre exercise is their music. They've always been great at creating songs that, on the surface, sound just as impressive as anything from any conventional pop artist. That's an undervalued skill, and it pays off in big ways here. In a film loaded with fun and catchy music, the highlights include a performance of "Finest Girl (The Bin Laden Song)," which debuted as a music video on Saturday Night Live a couple of weeks ago, and the climactic final set piece, which I won't spoil. (None of them are quite as good as their classic SNL digital shorts, but they work just fine.)

While it never makes any truly insightful or unique observations about the music industry, Popstar has a sense of playfulness to it that makes it a blast to watch. While the music industry takes the brunt of the jokes, there are a few moments that deconstruct movie tropes as well. At one point, the guys ask the doc crew to stop filming, so we see a black screen with subtitles as they carry on their conversation; needless to say, it doesn't go as expected. Later, when Conner is faced with a major choice at an awards show, a nearby stage producer narrates his every action to her boss through her headset and tries to guess what he's thinking, humorously taking the air out of what would be "the big conflict moment" in any other movie. And with a runtime of just 86 minutes, it's one of the few movies I've seen in the past few months that doesn't overstay its welcome. It's one of the funniest movies of the year so far, and like almost everything else The Lonely Island touches, I suspect this will become a cult hit that will get a lot of replay value from fans.

This week on CINEMATIC SOUND RADIO we will be listening to the music of five composers who I would LOVE to see have a crack at scoring a major Hollywood film. These five composers write the type of music that fell in love with when I was a kid: melodic, colorful, full scale orchestral music. Heck, it's the stuff that still turns me on today.

Some of these composers have...Listen on PodTyrant

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As a way to promote the upcoming release of the new documentary Raiders! The Story of The Greatest Fan Film Ever Made, Drafthouse Films has released a side-by-side trailer that shows off some of the footage from the original shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark made by teenagers in Mississippi over the course of seven years. Some of the shots aren't exact matches, but remember, this was pre-internet and before the rise of VHS tapes and the home video market, so these guys were largely going from memory and their own storyboards. Pretty impressive, huh?

Raiders! comes to theaters and VOD on June 17, and I'll have a review for you then.

After Steven Spielberg's classic Raiders of the Lost Ark was released 35 years ago, three 11-year-old boys from Mississippi set out on what would become a 7-year-long labor of love and tribute to their favorite film: a faithful, shot-for-shot adaptation of the action adventure film. They finished every scene...except one; the film's explosive airplane set piece. Over two decades later, the trio reunited with the original cast members from their childhood in order to complete their masterpiece. Featuring interviews with John Rhys Davies, Eli Roth and more, Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made is just that: the story of this long-gestating project's culmination, chronicling the friends' dedication to their artistic vision-mixed in with some movie magic-to create a personal, epic love letter to a true modern classic.

Earlier this week we learned that Gareth Edwards' Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was "in crisis" and that it was going back for reshoots. We then learned that the reshoots were happening to fix the tone, lighten the mood, and make the film feel more like a Star Wars movie. That recent report made it sound like things weren't that bad. Then today we have a new rumor that makes things sound even worse than initially reported.

According to Making Star Wars, who has a solid track record for breaking Star Wars news, 40% of the movie is reportedly being reshot and instead of four weeks of filming it could be up to eight weeks. They are also enlisting the help of Christopher McQurrie to make sure this next round of reshoots go smoothly. Here's is what they are hearing from crew member on the set:

• Some crew initially heard J.J. Abrams was supervising the reshoots.

• Gareth Edwards is doing the reshoots himself but with a partner, Christopher McQuarrie.

• Christopher McQuarrie, the final writer on Rogue One, will be working extensively with Edwards on set to make sure they’re on the “same page” with the most recent draft of the film.

• Christopher McQuarrie’s draft of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was considered superior to the film they shot previously.

• It was not Edwards’ fault as McQuarrie’s draft wasn’t completed when much of the film was shot and revisions kept coming in that made the film feel uneven.

• 32 sets have been recreated for the reshoot.

• The crew expects they are reshooting 40% of the film.

• They are working 6 days a week for 8 weeks.

Seriously, you would think people would have learned by now to have a fully completed script before they start shooting the damn film to avoid this kind of shit. It's amazing to me how many films starts shooting with little to no script! It's such a gamble to do that, and so much money is wasted. If this is true, which I believe it is, this is a completely absurd and could have been avoided if they actually had a solid script before they started shooting. 

This doesn't mean the movie is going to suck. They are just taking the necessary steps to ensure that the movie is going to be awesome and live up to the expectations of the fans. I'm just saying that all of this craziness could have been avoided. It definitely would have saved them a lot of time and money. In regard to that, the report says:

The vibe doesn’t seem bad. It seems like they’re making the movie right. When the movie began filming there was a lot of talk that the budget had been greatly reduced slightly before shooting meaning more CGI would be needed. Now it looks like the movie is going to cost what it was supposed to cost from the start. The quality of the film wasn’t bad, it just needs to be better and all involved are happy to make that happen.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is still set to be released as scheduled on December 16th, 2016. What do you make of all this?

If you dumped Jumanji, The Ring, and a couple gallons of fake blood into a blender and hit the "combine into a 1980s horror homage" button, you'd get Beyond The Gates. A mishmash of genre influences, the film follows two brothers who return to their missing father's house, only to discover a dangerous, mystical board game they must play in order to save his soul. That's about all of the plot description you're going to get because I don't want to spoil any of the film's big moments, but it's clear the movie has a lot on its mind.

That being said, the pacing can be excruciatingly slow, and while the trio of lead actors — Graham Skipper (Almost Human), Chase Williamson (John Dies at The End), and Brea Grant (Heroes) — mostly acquit themselves well, I was often pulled out of the movie when other actors showed up because of how much noticeably worse they were at embodying their characters. (To be fair, the script didn't do them many favors; the writing left a lot to be desired.) The '80s-inspired synth theme that opens the film fit perfectly with the tone co-writer/director Jackson Stewart was going for, but that song isn't utilized nearly enough, and the rest of the score is lackluster and forgettable.

This movie is in a strange position: it never gets truly terrifying enough to please diehard horror fans, and it has some intense moments of blood and gore, but those are so rare that even gorehounds may end up coming away a little disappointed. Dressed up in horror movie tropes, Beyond The Gates is a film about struggles with alcoholism, abandonment, legacy, and grief, but it's not executed as well as, say, something like last year's The Final Girls, which operates in a similar wheelhouse. This has the same genuine affection for its genre, and though it has it's moments, it's ultimately a slight piece of entertainment that didn't lean far enough toward either horror or comedy to be a standout example of either.