Hey All,
Here are the entertainment news items for this past week:
RENEWALS/CANCELLATIONS
FOX has given The Cleaning Lady a fourth season renewal. The network also given Alert: Missing Persons Unit a third season renewal. (TV Line)
Apple TV+ cancelled the sci-fi thriller Constellation after only one season. (TV Line)
Hallmark Channel has given When Calls the Heart a 12th season renewal. (Variety)
Showtime has given a 7th season renewal to The Chi. (TV Line)
Paramount+ has given Special Ops: Lioness a second season order, but the show will just be known as Lioness in its new season. (TV Line)
Law & Order: Organized Crime has been renewed for a 5th season, but instead of returning to NBC it will move to Peacock, the network’s streaming service. (TV Line)
DEVELOPMENT NEWS
Amazon Prime is developing a TV adaptation of the novel Gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson, which revolves around a young lawyer who promised God that she’d never return home to Alabama but is forced to go back to the South to defend a high school classmate accused of a murder she knows something about. In returning home, she’ll confront a simmering stew of family conflict, a hometown that hates her for defending the alleged killer of a local hero and all of the ghosts of her past. (The Hollywood Reporter)
Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh has been cast in a lead role in the Blade Runner series that is in the works at Amazon Prime. Exact plot details are being kept under wraps, though. (Variety)
TV CASTING NEWS
Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones) will star in the Amazon Prime new thriller Haven, a new heist series where she will star as an employee of a pension fund management company, until a group of would-be mass thieves threaten her into helping them with a scheme to rob the organization. (Collider)
Frank Grillo (Captain America franchise) has joined the cast of the second season of Peacemaker where he will play Rick Flag Sr., the father of Rick Flag Jr. (Variety)
The second season of Criminal Minds: Evolution will find Clark Gregg (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. appearing in multiple episodes as FBI Director ray Madison; Brian White (The Black Hamptons) will appear in 4 episodes as Vincent Orlov and Tuc Watkins (The Mummy) will appear in multiple episodes as Frank Church. (TV Line)
Camryn Manheim will not be returning for season 24 of Law & Order. (Variety)
The people behind Gen V, the Amazon Prime spin-off of The Boys, will not recast the role played by Chance Perdomo, who recently tragically died in a motorcycle accident in March. The producers are “working to find a way to best honor him.” (The Hollywood Reporter)
Eamonn Walker will be leaving Chicago Fire after this current season while he won’t appear as a series regular, he will not be missing entirely from the long-running series. He is expected to appear in a recurring capacity in the future. (Deadline and TV Line)
Yunjim Kim (Lost) will guest star in two upcoming episodes of Station 19, playing the sister of Natasha Ross (Merle Dandridge). (Shondaland.com)
Melissa Roxburgh (Manifest) will star in the upcoming NBC drama The Hunting Party, a high-concept crime procedural about a small team of investigators who are assembled to track down and capture the most dangerous killers our country has ever seen, all of whom have just escaped from a top-secret prison that’s not supposed to exist. Roxburgh will play Rebecca “Bex” Henderson, an ex-FBI agent recruited to an elite government task force due to her reputation as a savvy profiler who’s caught some of the world’s most dangerous serial killers. (Deadline)
It looks like despite his character dying in All American on CW, Taye Diggs will return as the late Billy Baker. It’s not clear how his character will return, though. (TV Line)
BOX OFFICE NEWS
Looks like actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, the star of The Lincoln Lawyer, the small screen series adaptation of the movie on Netflix, could be joining the new Jurassic World movie, starring opposite Scarlett Johansson and Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey. (Deadline)
Mahershala Ali (two-time Oscar winner) and Tom Hardy (Venom) will star in the crime thriller 77 Blackout that is set on the night when the city that never sleeps lost power and plunged into chaos and lawlessness. In 1977, five rogue police officers formulated 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. (Deadline)
John Malkovich has joined the upcoming version of The Fantastic Four in an undisclosed role. This new version will star Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/the Invisible Woman, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/the Human Torch and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/the Thing. (Variety)
Olivia Cooke and Jamie Bell will star in the upcoming contemporary romance Takes One To Know One. They will playEleanor and Lucas (respectively), two people who meet in Rome and immediately feel a spark, connecting over their shared passion for Italy and art, despite both already being in relationships. (The Hollywood Reporter)
Charlie Cox (Daredevil) and Zooey Deschanel (New Girl) will star in the upcoming rom-com movie Merv that follows an estranged couple who learn that the dog they share is suffering from depression following their break-up. Subsequently, they awkwardly reconcile to take their pup on a sunny vacation in Florida over the holidays, in hopes of lifting his spirits. (Deadline)
Samuel L. Jackson and Henry Golding will star in the upcoming sci-fi thriller Head Games. The movie will be about a corporate spy who poses as a personal chef to infiltrate the villa of a former founder of a neuroprosthetics firm in order to steal his seismic-shifting new invention. (Deadline)
Jeff Bridges, Dave Bautista and Bryan Cranston will star alongside Thomasin McKenzie, Aidan Turner and T Bone Burnett in the upcoming live-action monster tale Grendel. (Variety)
Shailene Woodley, Ben Foster and Pablo Schreiber will star alongside Alan Ritchson in the upcoming action thriller Motor City that follows John Miller (Ritchson), a Detroit auto-worker whose life and girlfriend (Woodley) are taken away from him when he’s framed by a local gangster (Foster) and sent to prison. On his release, Miller unleashes a maelstrom of vengeance on those who wronged him as he attempts to win his girl back. (Variety)
Bella Ramsey (The Last of Us) will star in the upcoming film Girl Next Door, playing Samantha Lewthwaite, who became known as ‘The White Widow,’ one of the world’s most wanted women. Lewthwaite fell in love with Islam long before being Muslim was politicized and militarized. What began as teenage curiosity about an “exotic” and welcoming faith as embodied by her neighbors and best friend, ended with Samantha being consumed by its more radical fringes. (Variety)
Sam Claflin and Rupert Friend will star in the action thriller Perdition that is set in December 1944 against the war-torn Belgian landscape as World War II pushes toward a brutal climax, following the journey of a lone American soldier (Claflin), who miraculously survives a POW camp execution. As he ventures into the bone-chilling landscape to save himself and a precious cargo salvaged from the camp, a ruthless Nazi SS officer on horseback (Friend) discovers his tracks and becomes obsessed with hunting him down. (Variety)
Tatiana Maslany and Rossif Sutherland will star in the genre movie Keeper that follows a couple as they escape for a romantic anniversary weekend at a secluded cabin. But when Malcolm (Sutherland) suddenly returns to the city, Liz (Maslany) finds herself isolated and in the presence of an unspeakable evil that unveils the cabin’s horrifying secrets. (Deadline)
Tom Hiddleston and Willem Dafoe will star as Sir Edmund Hillary and Colonel John Hunt respectively in the upcoming biopic Tenzig that will focus on the legendary Nepalese-Indian mountaineer who summited Mount Everest in 1953, becoming one of the first men to stand on the top of the world. (Variety)
Glen Powell, Anthony Mackie and Laura Dern will star in the upcoming movie Monsanto that will follow the true story of young, untried attorney Brent Wisner (Powell), who in 2019 took on a seemingly insurmountable case against the giant U.S. chemical company Monsanto on behalf of Dewayne “Lee” Johnson (Mackie) who used the company’s best-known product Roundup, a wildly financially successful weed and grass pesticide killer, as part of his job as a high school groundskeeper. Dern plays Dr. Melinda Rogers, the Monsanto Company’s chief toxicologist, who testifies with certainty that Roundup is safe during the landmark cancer trial. (Variety)
That’s it. Enjoy!
Rueben's Ramblings 