Movies
Method Man Gets His Tools for ‘Mortician 3D’
Shooting starts November 16th in Louisiana for Belladonna and Stealth Media’s The Mortician 3D, which will be helmed by Gareth Maxwell Roberts from his own screenplay. The redemption tale in which kindness triumphs over cruelty falls within the urban noir, contemporary fairy tale and psychological thriller genres. Method Man (The Wackness, How High, Garden State) and Angelic Zambrana (Fighting) both star with Tom Hardy (Bronson, RocknRolla, Mad Max 4) and Edward Furlong (Night of the Demons) in talks. Read on for the skinny.
From Belladonna (Rene Bastian, Linda Moran and Adam Folk), the producers who brought you hit indie films such as Transamerica, Funny Games, The Caller and The Good Guy, in association with Molinare, Film and Music Entertainment Ltd and Full Circle Films (Rhys Thomas, Gareth Maxwell Roberts) producers of the award-winning Kill Kill Faster Faster, comes The Mortician 3D a gritty, urban drama in the style of David Fincher’s Seven.
The film is a co-production between UK based Full Circle Films and Belladonna Productions in New York.
Rhys Thomas left the world of corporate finance to set up Full Circle Films in 2005. He has a track record of putting together successful equity funds and will use this expertise to develop the Full Circle Films brand.
The Mortician 3D is the first UK independent film to be shot in digital 3D. Gareth’s aim for The Mortician 3D is that the audience will have an almost holographic experience, helping them to feel immersed in the film and its characters. This genre of film-making has not been attempted using the new stereoscopic 3D technology.
The film will be shot for a budget of
It’s no secret that Marvel has struggled immensely to launch a new Blade movie, but recent comments from Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige and Blade actor Mahershala Ali indicate they’ve thrown in the towel on this reboot for good.
Ali was attached to Blade from the start, when it was initially announced in 2019. Mia Goth’s attachment was initially announced three years ago, and both remained on board even as the project faced a series of setbacks that included lining up Bassam Tariq, and later Yann Demange, to helm the film.
Ali and Tariq teamed up recently on a new feature set to arrive this fall, in the wake of Blade‘s constant stalls. And it’s a film the actor wouldn’t have been able to do if Blade was still happening.
“When I look at this and ‘Blade,’ I couldn’t have done both, and the reason this even exists is because that project fell apart and Bassam had the time, space, energy, and focus to go and write this and then re-approach me,” Ali told GQ. “And I was able to use those skills that I had been working on for over a year training for ‘Blade.’ In that way, I feel creatively redeemed on some level, just in my own journey between me, myself, and I.”
The comment is in partial response to Feige, who last week told the Happy Sad Confused Podcast, “I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala. We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique. It fell into the time when we started pulling back and saying, ‘Only accept insanely great.’ And it wasn’t ‘insanely great’ at the time. We didn’t feel like, as we often do, you can have a good script and make it a great script through production. We didn’t feel confident that we could do that on ‘Blade,’ and we didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us.”
So where does that leave Blade?
Feige’s comments certainly indicate that Marvel has thrown in the towel, but if they do make another attempt at Blade, it won’t be with Ali. The actor has officially walked away from the role.
“When I look at what is for me, is it was either this or that — and I’ll take this. No offense to them. I’ve been doing this professionally for pushing 30 years now, and one thing I’ve learned is that what is for you is for you and what is not is not. For whatever reason, that project is not for me. If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on, and I have moved on,” he told GQ. “Again, you had me under contract, they have billions of dollars, if they wanted to do the movie, we would’ve done the movie. So we’re not doing the movie.”
That certainly puts the final stake in the project.
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