On the heels of a certain Paper of Record’s basically inscrutable insistence that January is actually a good month, it is perhaps tempting to double-down on despair through such a gray (and increasingly soaked) period. Take some small hearth of solace at a slate of moving-image projects being worked into the world. Additional details are scarce but: Production Weekly confirms that Jordan Peele’s next film, recently delayed from its Christmas Day 2024 slot, will begin shooting this summer while Medien Brandenburg-Berlin lists Wes Anderson’s next film––The Phoenician Scheme––as “the story of a family and a family business.” Shooting for Anderson’s film, set to star Michael Cera, Benicio Del Toro, and the recently announced Bill Murray, is slated to begin this April, so expect a 2025 release.
More concrete confirmation comes straight from the filmmaker’s mouth, as Jonathan Glazer tells the Los Angeles Times that his next film will be about “tenderness––how tender we can be as well.” The Times interview notes that it won’t be out ‘for a while,’ though we can hope sooner than the decade that separated Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest.
Variety notes that Ira Sachs and Ben Whishaw will continue their collaboration past Passages and shoot an “intimate” film about the artist and activist Peter Hujar. Following, as it does, Sachs’ most liberated film, the prospect of a project to and around Hujar’s art with Whishaw––so expertly felt and calibrated in Passages––in the lead role is cause for some thawing thoughts.
Another pair of former collaborators are set to meet again, as the Hollywood Reporter notes Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are reuniting for 28 Years Later, a sequel to their 2002 zombie-ish flick. Perhaps moving swiftly past the matter of 28 Weeks Later––on which the pair only worked as executive producers––the plan is apparently to launch a new trilogy of films with Boyle set to direct the first and Garland to write all three. The duo will co-produce as well, along with Andrew Macdonald and Peter Rice, who backed 28 Days Later via Fox Searchlight. Garland’s own directorial effort, Civil War, has an April 26th release date set.
Fellow polymath and genre filmmaker S. Craig Zahler confirms that he has “a movie announcement in the coming months,” via his Goodreads blog, confirming that it will be his directorial follow-up to 2018’s Dragged Across Concrete. And to close out a speculative glance at the future’s offerings, Variety reports that Catherine Deneuve has begun filming a fantasy-drama film with Singaporean director, Eric Khoo. Spirit World, currently shooting in Japan, sees the French actress play a singer who dies suddenly while on tour abroad. The film follows her spirit as it navigates the afterlife, presumably searching for something like meaning. Are January confirmations of future moving images such a meaning? They are, at least, proof that there is a time after January.