Oct. 24, 2022

Murdered She Wasn't

Murdered She Wasn't

Tonight! Harrison Ford has one more role up his sleeve, Mark Hamill gives to the Ukrainian war effort, NASA’s DART hits the bullseye and we remember Robbie Coltrane and Angela Lansbury, All that and more on this edition of Multiverse Tonight!

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 Multiverse Tonight is a production of Half-Baked Genre Productions. Copyright 2022  All Rights Reserved

Transcript

Tonight! Harrison Ford has one more role up his sleeve, Mark Hamill gives to the Ukranian war effort, NASA’s DART hits the bullseye and we remember Robbie Coltrane and Angela Lansbury, All that and more on this edition of Multiverse Tonight!


Marvel
Jonathan Majors had to pack on ten pounds of muscle to play the conqueror of time Kang. Speaking with Men’s Health, yep there’s a magazine I’ve never referenced, the villain actor said quote I "packed on ten pounds of muscle to play Kang, an extra five for Creed, and six more for Magazine Dreams." He also told them what had drawn him to the role quote "It was the character and dimensions of Kang [that drew me to the role]," "And the potential that it had. I thought, I'll take a chance on that."  

Marvel Studios MCU Schedule: Phase 5
What If...? Season 2 (Animated Series, expected early 2023 on Disney+)
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (Movie, February 17th, 2023)
Secret Invasion (Series, Spring 2023 on Disney+)
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (Movie, May 5th, 2023)
Echo Season 1 (Series, expected Mid-2023 on Disney+)
The Marvels (Movie, July 28th, 2023)
Loki Season 2 (Series, Summer 2023 on Disney+)
X-Men '97 (Animated Series, Fall 2023 on Disney+)
Ironheart (Series, Late 2023 on Disney+)
Agatha: Coven of Chaos (Series, Late 2023 on Disney+)
Daredevil: Born Again (Series, Early 2024 on Disney+)
Captain America: New World Order (Movie, May 3rd, 2024)
Thunderbolts (Movie, July 26th, 2024)
Spider-Man: Freshman Year (Animated Series, Expected 2024 on Disney+)
Blade (Movie, September 6th, 2024)
Marvel Zombies (Animated Series, Expected 2024 on Disney+)
Deadpool 3 (Movie, November 8th, 2024)
Marvel Studios MCU Schedule: Phase 6
Fantastic Four (Movie, February 14th, 2025)
Avengers: The Kang Dynasty (Movie, May 2nd, 2025)
Untitled Marvel Studios Project (Movie, July 25th, 2025)
Untitled Marvel Studios Project (Movie, November 7th, 2025)
Untitled Marvel Studios Project (Movie, February 13th, 2026)
Avengers: Secret Wars (Movie, May 1st, 2026)
Untitled Marvel Studios Project (Movie, July 24th, 2026)
Untitled Marvel Studios Project (Movie, November 6th, 2026)

Harrison Ford is joining the Marvel Universe. The mumbly actor has been tapped to play the role of General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross for Captain america New World Order and possibly future projects. THe role was previously played by William Hurt from 2008 to 2021, however the actor passed away this past March.

DC
The Flash star Ezra Miller pleaded not guilty to felony burglary charges this morning in Vermont. Allowed to appear remotely early Monday for the session in the criminal division of the Green Mountain State’s Superior Court, Miller was told to stay away from the neighbor whose home he entered earlier this year. Along with neighbor Isaac Winokur, Miller was also prohibited from interacting with another Vermont resident, Aiden Early, as conditions of their release (Read the conditions of release here).

Miller faces a maximum of 26 years behind bars as well as over $2,000 in fines if found guilty of the charges stemming from the spring incident which entailed stealing three bottles of liquor –gin, vodka and rum — from Winokur’s pantry. The next hearing in the case is set for January 13, 2023 and scheduled to last about three hours.

Dwayne Johnson’s long-in-the-making dream DC project has paid off for the People’s Champion, as Black Adam has conquered a hot $67M U.S. opening, the best domestic box office start for him as a solo star, and a $140M global bow worldwide. That’s ahead of where we were seeing it.

Hiram Garcia, a Black Adam producer and President of Production for Johnson’s Seven Bucks. Said in a statement.quote 
“The success of Black Adam is truly a dream come true. We’ve been working towards this family goal here at Seven Bucks for 15 years, applying every bit of experience we’ve acquired over the years to help bring this project to life. So, to be here now seeing how our hard work has been paid off with the biggest opening of our careers is an incredible feeling. Our goal with this film was to establish several new characters in the DCEU that would give us an opportunity, in success, to really expand the universe, but most importantly we wanted to take care of the fans.  We’ve been listening to their feedback for years and we were determined to give them what they wanted.  Their enthusiasm for the film has been incredible and truly matches the passion that our Seven Bucks team along with FPC and Jaume poured into this movie,” 

Elijah Rashad Reed (Winning Time) has signed on for a recurring role in the fourth season of HBO Max’s critically acclaimed DC superhero series, Doom Patrol, which returns with two new episodes on December 8, with further episodes to air once per week through January 5. Reed will play Deric, a brilliant, community-minded robotics teacher who is unexpectedly pulled into the very different life of his former best friend, Vic Stone.

Star Trek 
Outfest will honor the Star Trek franchise with its Visionary Award at the 2022 Outfest Legacy Awards, taking place at Paramount Studios on Saturday, October 22nd. 

The Visionary Award recognizes creative or artistic contributions to LGBTQIA+ visibility within media. Its 2021 recipint was Marvel Studios’ President of Physical and Post Production, Visual Effects, and Animation Production, Victoria Alonso.

Star Trek joins a list of honorees set for this year’s Outfest Legacy Awards which also includes actress and musician Janelle Monáe, Amazon’s Glamazon Employee Resource Group and Outfest’s Deputy Director Kerri Stoughton-Jackson, as previously announced. Monáe will receive Outfest’s Trailblazer Award, with Glamazon taking the Guardian Award and Stoughton-Jackson claiming the Jonathan Howard Legacy Award.

Star Wars
Rian Johnson gave an update on where the new Star Wars Trilogy is in the creative process….and it’s still in the talking about phase.  Speaking with Variety during his press junket for the new Knives OUt sequel Glass Onion he said quote “I have talked to Kathy [Kathleen Kennedy] about it and we’re still talking about it,”  “I had such an amazing experience making ‘The Last Jedi.’ It’s entirely a matter of scheduling. For me, putting this [‘Glass Onion’] out and making the next one of these…the answer is I don’t know.” When asked directly if we will definitively see the Rian Johnson “Star Wars” trilogy in the future, he answers, “God I hope so.”

Veteran actor Mark Hamill said in an interview that he has sent at least 500 drones to Ukraine through the country’s fundraising platform, as Ukraine’s ongoing conflict with Russia enters its ninth month. 

During an appearance on Bloomberg Radio’s “Sound On”, Hamill, widely known for his role as Luke Skywalker in the acclaimed “Star Wars” film franchise, told host Joe Mathieu that he only sent the equipment to Ukraine because they desperately need it. “Very simply: Ukraine needs drones. They define war outcomes, they protect their land, their people, they monitor the border, they’re eyes in the sky,” Hamill told Mathieu in the radio interview published Thursday. 

“I was really shocked because they give me these updates at least two or three times a week about what’s going on and they said they’ve received over 500 drones since I started this,” Hamill concluded. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced last month that the 71-year-old actor had been named an ambassador for the country’s fundraising platform UNITED24’s “Army of Drones“ project. United24 is an initiative that provides for the regular procurement of drones, their repair and prompt replacement, as well as pilot training for military forces.

Following months of speculation, Deadline is now hearing from several sources close to the project that not only is Damon Lindelof developing a new Star Wars film for Lucasfilm but that Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy has been set as director. Lindelof is co-writing the project, though it is unknown at this time who his writing partner might be. Insiders say the script is still being written which means production is likely far out. That said, sources add it was important to Lucasfilm and Lindelof that a director be brought on so that person’s own vision for where they see this story headed gets included in the script.

Geek
Action writer Kurt Johnstad has been brought in to work on Prophet, Studio 8’s adaption of a comic book series by Deadpool co-creator Rob Liefeld.

Jake Gyllenhaal is attached to star and Sam Hargrave, the director of action hit Extraction, is on board to helm the adaptation.

The character, a man-out-of-time idea paired with a super soldier serum concept, was introduced by Liefeld in the pages of Youngblood, his creator-owned comic he wrote and drew after famously leaving Marvel in the early 1990s. The character was then spun off into his own book. The comic focused on John Prophet, a man conscripted by Germans near the end of World War II and subjected to scientific experiments that gave him superhuman strength. (In a revival of the comic in the 2010s, the story was thrust 10,000 years into the future.)

NASA might have figured out how to save the planet from an asteroid strike. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test or DART was successful. THe test, which involved crashing a probe into an asteroid named Dimoprhus to see if it would substantially change it’s path worked. According to data obtained, the DART impact was able to shorten Dimorphus' orbit by a whopping 73 seconds, more than 25 times the benchmark set by NASA to determine what a successful test would mean. Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters said in a statement quote "This result is one important step toward understanding the full effect of DART's impact with its target asteroid" "As new data come in each day, astronomers will be able to better assess whether, and how, a mission like DART could be used in the future to help protect Earth from a collision with an asteroid if we ever discover one headed our way."’s 

Big Bang Theory and Harley Quinn’s Kaley Cuoco is expecting her first child with her boyfriend Iron Fist’s Tom Pelphrey. Kaley announced via INstagram with the photo of the couple posing with a pink frosted cake and pregnancy tests with the caption quote "Baby girl Pelphrey coming 2023💕 beyond blessed and over the moon... I 💓you @tommypelphrey !!!" Last April she told Glamour that she had no plans of getting married again, she was previously married to Ryan Sweeting.

Smallville star Tom Welling is joining the prequel series The Winchesters. Welling is set to join the Supernatural prequel series in the role of Samuel Campbell, father of Mary (Meg Donnelly) and grandfather of Mary and John Winchester's sons, Sam and Dean. The character was originally played by Mitch Pileggi on Supernatural.

Dune 2 is moving on up by two weeks to Blade’s old date fo November third. The sequel tackles the second half of Frank Herbert’s seminal 1965 novel Dune, with Paul Atreides (Timothy Chalamet) teaming with the Fremen to free the desert planet of Arrakis from House Harkonnen.

New characters include Emperor Shaddam IV ( Christopher Walken), the ruler who sent the Atreides family to Dune; the emperor’s daughter, Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh); and Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler) the nephew of the baron, the villain played by Stellan Skarsgard in the first installment.

The first Dune performed well at the box office, considering it faced the COVID-19 crisis and hit theaters and HBO Max day-and-date in October 2021. The sci-pic grossed north of $400 million globally and won six Oscars.

The Naked Gun might be getting a reboot with Liam Neeson stepping into the Leslie Nelson role of Lt. Frank Drebbin of Polic Squad, according to sources of Deadline. Paramount is currently negotiations with Neeson and Director Akiva Schaffer. Schaffer directed Disney Plus’ Rescue Rangers movie, which won an Emmy for Best TV Movie.

Netflix has revealed it’s new ad supported Tier. The tier, which aims at undercutting Disney Plus’ Ad supported Tier, will cost $6.99 a month and will launch November 3 in the U.S., more than a month before Disney’s December 8 rollout of the ad-supported version of Disney+. Canada and Mexico will get the new plan November 1 and two days later it will go live in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, and the UK, with Spain following on November 10. In the U.S., the entry-level price will be less than half the cost of the most popular tier, Standard, which is $15.49 a month.In a blog post, Netflix COO Greg Peters said there will be four to five minutes of ads per hour, with both series and feature films being interrupted by spots. Asked on the Zoom call to expand on the plan for ads during movies, Peters clarified that new movies coming to the service — notably marquee originals like Knives Out 2 — “will just have a pre-roll” of spots before the feature plays without interruption. “We’ll try to preserve that sort of cinematic model there,” consistent how most rivals handle it. By contrast, movies that have “been on the service for a while,” Peters said, will have a more “traditional” combination of pre-roll and mid-roll ads, albeit with “less frequent” breaks.

Apple is raising the price of its Apple TV+ subscription streaming service for the first time.

Apple TV+ will jump from $4.99 per month to $6.99 per month under the new pricing structure, while the annual plan will jump from $49 per yer to $69 per year.

Fox must like what it sees, as Grimsburg, Fox’s as yet unaired cartoon series starring Jon Hamm has been given a second season pickup.Grimsburg, which stars Jon Hamm as a misanthropic detective, will launch in 2023.The series follows Marvin Flute (Hamm), who might be the greatest detective ever to catch a cannibal clown or correctly identify a mid-century modern armoire. But there’s one mystery he still can’t crack: his family. Now that he’s back in Grimsburg, a town where everyone has a secret or three, Flute will follow every lead he’s got to redeem himself with the ex-wife he never stopped loving, even if it means hanging out with the son he never bothered to get to know.

Actor Robbie Coltrane has passed away. The Comic and  Actor is best known for playing the Half Giant Hagrid in the Harry Potter film series.

Coltrane was born Anthony Robert McMillan on March 30, 1950, in Glasgow, Scotland, as the son of a doctor and a teacher. After studying art in college he attempted to become an artist, but it didn’t work out, so he took up stand up comic in Edinburgh, and also changed his last ae to Coltrane after the jazz legend John Coltrane and turned to acting. He was background character in 1980’s Flash Gordon, was Rhun in Krull and had a bit part in National Lampoons European Vacation, played the Spirit of Christmass in Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, he was Valentin Zukovsky in GoldenEye and also appeared in Van Helsing, From Hell, and many more. 

Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter alongside Coltrane’s Hagrid, said in a statement, “Robbie was one of the funniest people I’ve met and used to keep us laughing constantly as kids on the set. I’ve especially fond memories of him keeping our spirits up on Prisoner of Azkaban, when we were all hiding from the torrential rain for hours in Hagrid’s hut and he was telling stories and cracking jokes to keep morale up. I feel incredibly lucky that I got to meet and work with him and very sad that he’s passed. He was an incredible actor and a lovely man.” Coltrane is survived by a sister, Annie Rae, his children, Spencer and Alice, and their mother, Rhona Gemmell.
Robbie Coltrane was seventy two years old.

Dame Angela Lansbury who has been a staple of stage and screen for seventy five years has also passed away. Angela was born in London on October sixteenth 1925. She moved to america in 1940 to escape the Blitz during WWII and studied acting in New York, by 1942 she was signed to MGM and obtained her first film role in 1944’s Gaslight and National Velvet as well as The Picture of Dorian Gray which earned her two Academy Award nominations and a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. She made memorable appearances in such ‘50s dramas as “The Long, Hot Summer” (1958) and “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.”

Lansbury displayed a unique ability to play older than her years, specializing in iron-fisted matriarchs. In 1961, when she turned 36, she played 26-year-old Elvis Presley’s mother in “Blue Hawaii.” The following year, she took the role of the malevolent mother of brainwashed ex-serviceman Laurence Harvey (who was only three years her junior) in John Frankenheimer’s Cold War thriller “The Manchurian Candidate.” She collected her third supporting actress Oscar nomination for the performance.

Lansbury bowed on Broadway in the French comedy “Hotel Paradiso” (1957), and enjoyed strong notices in Shelagh Delaney’s drama “A Taste of Honey” (1960). In 1964, she appeared in Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents’ “Anyone Can Whistle.” The tuner was a quick flop, lasting only nine performances, but it would be the last time she would fail on the Great White Way. Two years later, she took the title role in “Mame,” the musical adaptation (by Jerry Herman, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee) of Patrick Dennis’ autobiographical novel about life with his wealthy madcap aunt. (It was a hit 1958 movie vehicle for Rosalind Russell.) Lansbury appeared in the long-running smash for nearly two years, taking just a two-week break, and she notched a Tony Award as best actress in a musical. She would earn three more Tonys in the same category: in “Dear World” (1969) an adaptation of Jean Giraudoux’s “The Madwoman of Chaillot” by the creators of “Mame”; as Mama Rose, a part she had originated in a London revival, in the 1974 Broadway production of “Gypsy,” the musical bio of ecdysiast Gypsy Rose Lee by Sondheim, Laurents and Jule Styne; and in Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “penny dreadful” musical “Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” She received a fifth Tony, for best featured actress in a play, as Madame Arcati in the 2009 revival of Noël Coward’s supernatural comedy “Blithe Spirit.”

In 1971, she played the lead in Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks and would return to disney twenty years later playing Mrs. Potts the maid turned teapot in Disney’s Beatury and The Beast .

From 1984 to 1996 she played the role that would make her a huge fan of mystery lovers and senior citizens, the role of Jessica Fletcher the author/sleuth on CBS’ Murder She Wrote.

Her final movie role will be released soon, she will make a cameo in Glass Onion A Knives OUt Mystery.

She was the recipient of numerous accolades, including six Tony Awards (including a Lifetime Achievement Award), six Golden Globe Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, and the Academy Honorary Award, eighteen Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Grammy Award. In 2014, Lansbury was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.[2]

Twice married, Lansbury is survived by her children, director Anthony Shaw and writer Deirdre Shaw, as well as her late husband Peter Shaw’s son David, from a previous marriage. She is also survived by her three grandchildren, Peter, Katherine and Ian; five great-grandchildren; and brother, producer Edgar Lansbury.

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