At long last, Kathryn Bigelow is returning to filmmaking. After 2017’s Detroit, she was developing the David Koepp-scripted thriller Aurora for Netflix but has now moved on to another project for the company. The untitled thriller will unfold in real-time at the White House as a missile attack threatens the United States. THR reports former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim, who also wrote Jackie, scripted the project based on Bigelow’s idea. No additional details were revealed but with Netflix now greenlighting the project, here’s hoping it kicks off before the end of the year.
Juliette Binoche will make her directorial and writing debut in a new anthology film Bike Me Up. Joining directors Sally El Hosaini, Isabel Coixet, Matthias Schweighöfer, Asger Leth, and Frédéric Auburtin, each section will be set in a different European city and explore the locales’ relationship with cycling. Binoche’s film will be set in Paris and star Ralph Fiennes. Learn more over at Screen Daily.
Keanu Reeves, Kirsten Dunst, and Daniel Brühl have officially boarded Ruben Östlund’s next feature The Entertainment System Is Down. To shoot the social satire, Deadline reports Östlund has actually bought a retired Boeing 747 plane. “Set on a long-haul flight where the entertainment system fails, the film will see passengers forced to face the horror of being bored,” the synopsis reads for the film, which expects to expand its ensemble with more notable talent ahead of an early 2025 shoot.
In very welcome news, Martin Eden and Scarlet director Pietro Marcello is already shooting his next film. Duse, starring Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as legendary Italian stage icon Eleonora Duse and Noémie Merlant as her daughter, is now in production, Variety reports, who also have released the first image below.
Exploring the later years of her life in her 60s during the late 1910s, the synopsis continues “in the brutal years between the First World War and the rise of fascism, the Divina chooses to return to where her life began: on the stage. Constantly struggling with the brutality of events and power, and clinging to the possibility of utopia, she makes her art a revolutionary act, even at the cost of sacrificing health and affection. And she faces her final journey aware that she can renounce to life itself, but not to her own true nature.”
Ingmar Bergman’s legacy continues as a new biopic about the Swedish director is in the works. Deadline reports Robert Gustafsson (The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared) will play the director. “A political thriller set during the Swedish election year of 1976,” it will capture the story of “when Bergman is arrested by the police suspected of serious tax evasion in the midst of the receptions for Strindberg’s The Dance of Death at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.” The synopsis continues, “The personal catastrophe quickly becomes a reality for Bergman, as does the mental breakdown, and the director finds himself in a Kafkaesque state, where culture is ultimately pitted against politics, with Bergman on one side and the political establishment on the other.”
Andrew Garfield has joined Julia Roberts in Luca Guadagnino’s dramatic thriller After the Hunt. Set up at Amazon MGM Studios, Nora Garrett’s Tár-esque script follows “a college professor who faces a crossroads in confronting her own dark past when a standout student makes an accusation against one of her colleagues.” Production begins this summer ahead of a 2025 release, Deadline reports.
We thought Cary Joji Fukunaga might be in director’s jail for a bit longer after accusations of grooming were revealed in 2022, but he’s now set his next film. He’ll direct Mahershala Ali and Tom Hardy in the crime thriller 77 Blackout, set during the NYC blackout, reports Deadline.
“In 1977, five rogue police officers formulate a plan to rob three criminal strongholds – the Hong Kong Triads, the Italian Mafia, and the Harlem Mob – all in one night. When a blackout sweeps the city the night of the robbery, the crew is forced to navigate a hellish landscape as years of being overworked and underpaid forces each of them to confront their own morality,” the synopsis reads.
Isabel Sandoval has wrapped her next feature Moonglow and is now editing.