Welcome to the first installment of The Pop Culture Review, in which Collider's weekend editor Vinnie Mancuso wakes up only slightly hungover on a Saturday to rate the week's biggest stories in film and television on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is soul-crushingly bad, 10 is mind-blowingly incredible.) This week: Dark Phoenix explodes on to the scene, we get some Gambit "news" (lol), J.K. Rowling is de-fanging her own canon, and a lot more. 

 

 

New 'Deadpool' Movie Coming this December

Rating: 5, or "Surprise! Here's half a movie" 

In the grand tradition of such luminaries as Beyonce or your internal organs after visiting Jack in the Box, Fox has dropped a major surprise out of nowhere: A new Deadpool movie is arriving in theaters this December. While the studio somehow secretly filming a completely new Merc with the Mouth entry on the down-low would have been amazing, that's not exactly what's happening here. According to sources, The Untitled Deadpool Movie is basically a PG-13 re-cut of Deadpool 2, as told to Fred Savage in the style of Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride.

Look, I am all for any and all revisits of The Princess Bride, a flawless work of art. For me, Oscars season just means arguing to coworkers and strangers that Andre the Giant deserved a Best Actor win. (In fairness, I think Andre the Giant should win most awards, including, for reasons I can't really explain, a Grammy.) But while I trust the meta-wackiness of Ryan Reynolds to a certain degree, a retread of Deadpool movies we've already seen with, presumedly, most of the story and dialogue reworked largely seems like a waste of time. It's almost like Fox just needed something to take the place formerly occupied by the premiere of Alita: Battle Angel, which the studio pushed back presumedly because the lead character's CGI face wasn't giving test audience children quite enough nightmares yet.

Kathleen Kennedy Re-Ups Lucasfilm Contract For Another 3 Years

Rating: 8, or "The Kenn-Pire Strikes Back" 

I felt a great disturbance on Reddit, as if a couple dozen voices sweatily vlogged in terror and were suddenly silenced (because mom turned off the Wi-Fi).

Kathleen Kennedy—who was recently on her way out the door, according to the absolute worst people in your Twitter feed @'ing Rian Johnson—actually extended her contract as President of Lucasfilm for another three years. Honestly, this is great news. Now that Bob Iger cured that disease that would have killed him if he didn't release a Star Wars movie every four weeks, the franchise is in a fantastic place. The Force Awakens was a shot of adrenaline that woke up the prequel corpse, The Last Jedi was a beautiful experiment that took things to an entirely new plane, and now we're eagerly awaiting next year's trilogy-capper without having to worry about, like, a Greedo origin story in the meantime. We're living in a galaxy far, far away again, and that's largely down to Kennedy's leadership.

But also, have you just perused Kathleen Kennedy's IMDB page? Jurassic Park, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Goonies, etc gosh dang etc. Throw a rock at a random dorm room wall and there's an 85% chance you hit a poster with Kathleen Kennedy's name on it.

'Dark Phoenix' Gets a Trailer, New Release Date

Rating: 6, or "X-Men: Meh-Pacolypse" 

How you feel about the first trailer for Dark Phoenix—which will now be released on February 14, 2019—largely depends on your ingrained devotion to this franchise, which had a pretty good fun offering in 2014's Day's of Future's Past but then inexplicably had Oscar Isaac play Grimace's geriatric uncle in the messy X-Men: Apocalypse. A lot of it is well-worn territory. Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is still sniping the same argument at Magneto (Michael Fassbender), who, as always, is just like "What would you know, Charles, your legs don't even work?" Jennifer Lawrence still appears to be filming every Mystique scene after an only half-way restful nap in the makeup chair.

But there's also, somehow, a lot to love! Sophie Turner does a great conflicted baddie, as evidenced by the time she watched a man get eaten by his own dogs on Game of Thrones. And as someone who has hummed the buh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nah-nah-nah of the X-Men animated series theme song at least once every day of my cursed life, I'm always thrilled to see a pop of yellow and blue on the big-screen uniforms.

'Gambit' Gets a New Release Date

Rating: 2, or "Sure, Jan" 

Channing Tatum could personally drive to my house, hook himself up to a polygraph machine, inject Sodium Pentothal into his own goddamn eyeball and then tell me the Gambit movie is actually happening and I still wouldn't believe him. Fox has, once again, set a premiere date for the X-Men spinoff: March 13, 2020, a date you should mark in your calendar right this second with permanent-ass marker as "The day I did not see a Gambit movie."

 

'Creed 2' Gets a New Trailer

Rating: 7, or "Adonis, indeed" 

A lot of people are split on Creed 2, seeing as how Black Panther mastermind Ryan Coogler isn't directing the sequel. I counter that by saying A) Watch this hype ay-eff trailer, B) Watch it again, then C) Allow me to spell out exactly how beautifully insane the plot of Creed 2 is:

Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) straight up killed Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). He punched him in the face to death and when an interviewer asked him about it one minute later he basically said "lol, and?" in Russian. It was the 80s, everyone was coked out of their minds, and therefore completely fine with this. "That's just boxing, baby, tune up that hot new Eddie Murphy dance track." Now, several decades later, Ivan Drago's equally steroid-filled son challenges Apollo Creed's son to a fight. The absurdity of this scenario. Imagine in the year of our lord 2018 a boxer going on ESPN and saying, like, "My dad boxed your dad into a corpse and now I'd like to kill you as well live on pay-per-view."

Insane. I'm going to see Creed 2 fourteen times.

Warner Bros. Finds Its 'Birds of Prey'

Rating: 7, or "Please Be More Wonder Woman Than Suicide Squad" 

Are we allowed to be excited for a Warner Bros. DC film? It's hard, man. I still remember the genuine delight I felt after seeing the trailer for Suicide Squad, a film that ended up being an extended early-2000's music video directed by a sentient machine gun that shoots LSD tablets. It wasn't good, is what I'm saying. But Birds of Prey is shaping up to be something intriguing, at least. We already knew that Margot Robbie would reprise her Harley Quinn role without the added weight of Jared Leto's Spencer's Gifts Joker for what she herself described as an "R-rated girl gang film." Now Warner Bros. has just about rounded out the cast with two fantastic actress: Mary Elizabeth-Winstead will play Huntress and Jurnee Smollett-Bell will play Black Canary.

"But Black Canary is white!" you may be screaming, I assume shrilly. Before you make that argument is public, please take a moment to reflect the fact you are discussing a story about a mentally ill doctor-turned-clown assembling a crew of superheroes to fight a man with a skull mask melted on to his face. The quality of the film itself remains to be seen, but Elizabeth-Winstead and Smollett-Bell are both going to kill it. I truly, sincerely hope WB casts Kelly Marie Tran as Cassandra Cain.

'Fantastic Beasts': Nagina Was a Human the Whole Time

Rating: 2, or "JUST KIDDING"

Not since Marc Webb directed The Amazing Spider-Man has a human being had a more appropriate name than J.K. Rowling. Just kidding, Dumbledore was gay. Just kidding, Harry and Hermione should have ended up together. Just kidding, Hogwarts was actually filled with diverse students living interesting lives.

In the latest installment of "JK by J.K.", the latest trailer for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (written by Rowling) revealed that Nagini—the snake pet/Horocrux of Nazi-wizard Lord Voldemort—used to be a human woman with cursed blood.

I can't completely hate the idea itself quite yet, seeing as how the movie isn't out yet. But it is super weird to watch Rowling continue George Lucas-ing her work and then claiming it was the plan the whole time. It was not. If it was, ya' didn't write it. You had loveable hero Neville Longbottom lop off a lady's head. I get it. Every time I click on my byline at the top of the page I see something I definitely should edit for my own well-being. But that's not the way the world—wizarding or otherwise—works.