Warner Bros. revealed its forthcoming slate of blockbusters at CinemaCon on Tuesday, with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson topping a superhero-packed bill, while Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” graced the Las Vegas casino stage at the movie industry summit.
Johnson, Hollywood’s highest-grossing actor, showed up unexpectedly at the annual event to promote his next DC feature “Black Adam,” where Warner Bros. executives also disclosed a sequel to Robert Pattinson’s “The Batman” is in the works.
Additional superhero sequels “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” and “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” as well as a new solo feature “The Flash,” were also shown to movie theatre executives and managers at Caesars Palace, where Hollywood’s top studios and A-listers assemble each year to court them.
Johnson described his character in “Black Adam” as “the Dirty Harry of the superhero world,” with ambiguous morals.
“Heroes don’t kill people,” says one villain in never-before-seen footage, to which Black Adam replies: “Well I do.”
At CinemaCon on Tuesday, Warner Bros. unveiled its upcoming slate of blockbusters, with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson atop a superhero-packed bill, while Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” graced the Las Vegas casino stage.
Johnson, the highest-grossing actor in Hollywood, stepped up unexpectedly at the annual event to promote his next DC film “Black Adam,” where Warner Bros. officials also revealed a sequel to Robert Pattinson’s “The Batman” is in the works.
At Caesars Palace, where Hollywood’s top studios and A-listers congregate each year to court them, further superhero sequels “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” and “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” as well as a new solo picture “The Flash,” were also shown to movie theatre executives and managers.
“At the center of culture, for the good, the bad and the ugly, is the figure Elvis Presley,” said Luhrmann, describing the music icon as “the original superhero.”
“What this movie is about is America in those three epochs: Elvis the rebel, Elvis the highest-paid actor in Hollywood and Elvis the living legend, the icon, trapped in that hotel not 10 minutes from here,” he told the Las Vegas crowd.
Early footage was shown from “Wonka” — starring Timothee Chalamet as Roald Dahl’s chocolatier before he opened his factory — and Olivia Wilde’s “Don’t Worry Darling,” a twisty thriller inspired by mind-bending movies such as “The Truman Show” and “Inception,” out in September.
– Bowie and body horror –
Earlier Tuesday, an experimental new David Bowie documentary featuring never-before-seen footage and the late music superstar’s own narration was previewed by indie studio Neon.
“Moonage Daydream” will premiere at next month’s glitzy Cannes film festival before hitting theaters in September. It is the first film to be approved by Bowie’s estate, which gave director Brett Morgen access to thousands of hours of archives.
“Bowie cannot be defined. He can be experienced,” said Morgen.
“We’ve crafted ‘Moonage Daydream’ to be a unique cinematic theatrical experience — to offer audiences that which they can’t get from a book or an article.”
The video merges Bowie’s songs, concert clips, vast fan footage, and a sequence of bizarre, hallucinogenic, and abstract imagery. It is neither a biographical nor a standard documentary.
“Crimes of the Future,” by David Cronenberg, the filmmaker of “Crash” and “The Fly,” who pioneered the “body horror” genre, was also shown at Neon.
The film, starring Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortenson, and Lea Seydoux, depicts a world where humans are forced to accelerate their development through gruesome organ transplants and body changes in order to survive a changing environment.
Cronenberg told AFP the film, which will also premiere at Cannes, was “a difficult film maybe, an extreme film, an unusual film.”
