The utterly charming Carey Mulligan is the guest on this week's Empire Podcast, talking about everything from sheep farming to how to use "madding" in a sentence without saying "Far From The Madding Crowd".
Elsewhere, the team talk Jared Leto's Joker, the planned Jump Street / Men In Black crossover and impressions. Prepare to hear Sean Connery like you've never heard him before.
Nispel will also produce, and came up with the story which was subsequently thrashed into screenplay form by Scott Sandler, Connor Colebrook and Juhani Nurmi. The film is inspired by a Nordic myth NIspel remembers from his yoot, and revolves around a newly-engaged woman who goes on a boat trip with her prospective in-laws, and stumbles on devastating, long buried family secrets and a vengeful humanoid sea-creature. Hate when that happens.
Nispel is currently selling the project at Cannes with a lot of very big talk. "Having revived major franchises like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday The 13th, I intend to create the beginning of a new horror franchise with Stowaway," he says. "There has not been an edgy and original R-rated monster movie in a long time; a monster that is humanoid and strikes from below dark waters is so innately scary that it will stand shoulder to shoulder with other iconic brands, and at the same time reinvent claustrophobic and maritime horror, thus appealing to a whole new generation of audiences.”
Special effects and make-up guru Mike Elizalde (Looper, X-Men: First Class, Hellboy II) will be creating the monster, but no other crew has been announced so far. Nispel's most recent movie The Asylum (variously also known as Backmask and Exeter), played at the Glasgow FrightFest in February but still awaits a wider release.
Ouija, the teen horror from first-time director Stiles White, may not have spoken to the critics much, but managed to manifest a healthy box-office haul. It beat John Wick to the top of the charts on its opening weekend last October, and currently boasts a worldwide haul just under $100m. You might think a sequel was inevitable. And you'd be right! Studio Universal has broken out the board again.
The first film starred Olivia Cooke, and White himself wrote the screenplay with his regular cohort Juliet Snowdon (Boogeyman, Knowing, The Possession). In an intriguing change, however, the sequel will be working from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Jeff Howard, who were behind last year's excellent Oculus. Perhaps this will be one of those rare occasions when a follow-up drastically improves on its predecessor. It's unclear at this stage whether Flanagan is interested in directing Ouija 2.
Elsewhere the roster is the same, with Universal joining forces with Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes, Jason Blum's Blumhouse, and toy company Hasbro. Incredibly, despite its sinister reputation and its ancient origins as something supposedly genuine, the version of the Ouija Board most people know today is actually a variant of a commercial board game. Hasbro own it. Transformers, Cabbage Patch Kids, My Little Pony, Ouija. Which is the greater of these evils?
Director and cast have still to be thrashed out through the medium of an independently ambulatory glass with poor spelling. But the release date is already in place: Ouija 2 arrives on the Halloween-appropriate October 21, 2016.
Usually found in indie and dramatic fare such as Kinsey, You Can Count On Me, Mystic River and The Truman Show, the closest she has come to a big superhero project is voicing the computer in Arthur Christmas. Yet, next year, she’ll be on screen in some unspecified role.
Though the plot is still mostly unknown, the sequel will see the turtles – performance captured and voiced by Alan Ritchson, Noel Fisher, Pete Ploszek and Jeremy Howard – tackling threats new and old in New York City. Megan Fox and Will Arnett are back as April O’Neill and scuzzy cameraman Vernon Fenwick respectively, with Danny Woodburn once more providing the performance work for mutant rat mentor Splinter. Stephen Amell is playing Casey Jones with Tyler Perry as Baxter Stockman, and Brian Tee was recently announced as the new Shredder. Earth To Echo’s David Green has taken over directorial duties this time, but writers Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec are back to provide the script for the movie, which is now shooting.
The film is scheduled to arrive here on June 3, 2016.
Update: A new poster along the same lines as the trailer is online. But we'll add it lower down the page in a gallery, so don't click if you're still spoiler-phobic.
Some trailers can be shy about revealing certain details, but not this new 'pay off' teaser from Terminator Genisys. As the latest issue of Empire revealed, there's a whole new Terminator in this movie, and this is the trailer reveals what it does - and which actor (or actress) plays it.
So, in short, sound the spoiler siren - and buckle up for something pretty intriguing...
So yes, John Connor himself, as played by Jason Clarke, is the new Terminator, with the power to disintegrate and reform at will. He is part-human, part-machine, all-unstoppable: until he's stopped, of course, which may well happen by the end of Terminator Genisys. But how does this work with the time-travel / reboot nature of the film?
{Terminator Genisys Payoff poster}
There are also a number of intriguing titbits littered throughout the trailer, including the Arnie on Arnie fight, the new young John Connor, and the "Genisys" billboard that flashes past briefly. It's a trailer that shows a lot of the pyrotechnics fans of the franchise have to look forward to, with more no doubt still in store on the big screen.
With Byung-hun Lee, Matt Smith, J.K. Simmons, Dayo Okeniyi and Sandrine Holt also among the cast, Terminator Genisys is set to arrive in our cinemas on July 3. For more on the film, be sure to check out the current issue, which looks a lot like this:
