HBO Max released the trailer for King Richard, starring Will Smith. The biopic is based on the life of Venus and Serena Williams' no nonsense father Richard Williams.
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The casting of Will Smith as Richard Williams was criticized because Smith is light skin and Williams is dark skinned in real life.
The Williams sisters dominated women's tennis in the 1990s and 2000s. Serena, 39, is on pace to tie the record of 24 Grand Slam singles titles in the Open era.
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Venus, left, and Serena, right, are pictured with their father, Richard, at a tennis center in 1992.
The movie also stars Demi Singleton as a young Serena and Saniyya Sidney as a young Venus.
King Richard was produced on a budget of $100 million.
King Richard opens in theaters everywhere on November 19.
British actress Michaela Cole has been cast in the new iteration of Black Panther in an unnamed role. Some fans want Cole to play Storm from X-Men in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
However, others want Cole to play Aneka, the lesbian partner of Dora Milaje's second commander Ayo (Florence Kasumba).
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Cole, 33, is an award-winning actress best known for the hit HBO Max comedy/drama I May Destroy You.
Black Panther 2, directed by Ryan Coogler, checks all of the "woke" boxes.
The film features an all-Black cast that includes several down low, homosexual actors, as well as an aromantic actress.
Production began on Black Panther 2 in June at Atlanta's Pinewood Studios.
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Cole identifies as aromantic. Many on Black Twitter are wondering what "aromantic" means.
Aromantic is a sexual orientation defined as showing a lack of interest in romantic attraction.
Aromantic is an individual who is interested in sex without the emotional attachment that goes along with it.
Aromantic is not the same as asexual, which means people who have no desire in sexual relationships.
People who are aromantic desire affection and cuddling in short bursts. They can go days, weeks, or months without sex.
Individuals who identify as aromantic may have trouble distinguishing the affection of family and friends from that of a romantic partner.
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Being aromantic doesn't mean you're not drawn to others, it just means you're drawn to them in non-romantic ways.
Aromantic people typically have zero sex appeal.
Celebrities described as aromantic include music producer Kanye West, singer Demi Lovato and rapper Lil Nas X.
The director of the original Space Jam movie, starring Michael Jordan, says Space Jam 2, starring LeBron James, is "boring."
Joe Pytkatold TMZ that "Space Jam: A New legacy" was so boring, he couldn't sit through the entire movie.
Pytka pointed out that when the original Space Jam was made in 1996, Michael Jordan was the biggest star in the world. He added that LeBron can't carry Jordan's water bottle.
"The truth is that LeBron ain't Michael," Pytka said.
Space Jam: A New Legacy topped last weekend's box office with a respectable $31.1 million in ticket sales.
Black Widow landed at the No. 2 spot with $25.8 million.
LeBron dunked on his "haters" after the box office receipts were announced on Monday.
Even LeBron James can't save the Warner Bros. sequel Space Jam: A New Legacy which opens in theaters everywhere on Friday, July 16.
The movie received some of the worst reviews of the year, according to reports.
One reviewer said the movie is vomit inducing. "[I]t all feels like Warner Bros. ingested an emetic and vomited up all their intellectual property."
CNN gave the movie a thumbs down:
"The first Space Jam was hardly a classic, which should temper expectations. Yet even by that standard, this marketing-driven exercise too often plays like the Acme version of it."
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LeBron attended the Los Angeles premiere with his wife Savannah Brinson James and their daughter Zhuri James.
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Space Jam 2 also stars Don Cheadle (pictured with his wife Bridgid); Cedric Joe, Wood Harris, and cameos by NBA and WNBA players Anthony Davis, Draymond Green, Damian Lillard, Klay Thompson, Sue Bird and Nneka Ogwumike.
Rapper Wiz Khalifa is tapped to play funk legend George Clinton in a long-delayed biopic about disco music mogul Neil Bogart.
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Spinning Gold, which has been in development for years, initially cast pop singer Justin Timberlake as Bogart, reports Deadline.com.
Supergirl actor Jeremy Jordan has since taken over the lead role as the Casablanca Records boss.
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Now Khalifa has been reported to play Clinton - a part that originally went to Samuel L. Jackson.
Also joining the star-studded line-up is singer Tayla Parx as Donna Summer, and Ledisi as Gladys Knight. Also cast is singer Jason Derulo, who was previously tapped to portray Ronald Isley.
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George Clinton (right) and Parliament Funkadelic perform perform at Taste of Chicago 2018 at Grant Park in 2018.
Production on Spinning Gold, written and directed by Bogart's son Timothy Scott Bogart, is already underway in New Jersey.
The film will chronicle the rise of Bogart's hit labels Buddah and Casablanca in the 1960s and 1970s, when his artists included Donna Summer, Clinton's Parliament Funkadelic group, Gladys Knight, The Isley Brothers, Village People, KISS, and Bill Withers, among many others.
Lin-Manuel Miranda has apologized for not insisting on more Afro-Latino or dark-skinned actors in the movie adaptation of his 2008 Broadway musical hit 'In the Heights.'
In the Heights debuted on streaming site HBO Max and in theaters on Friday, June 11, but didn't have the blockbuster opening weekend that many had predicted.
In the Heights was expected to break box office records for a musical with opening weekend estimates of $25 million to $35 million.
However the woke musical was a crushing disappointment, coming in 2nd behind 'A Quiet Place 2' with just $11 million in box office receipts.
In the Heights carried a production budget of $55 million. $110 million gross is required to break even.
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Some viewers criticized director Jon M. Chu and Miranda, who has a small part in the film, for being colorists.
Chu, who faced similar criticism for his film 'Crazy Rich Asians,' addressed the controversy by stating the 'colorism' debate was "a fair conversation to have".
Chu told The Root, "Listen, we're not going to get everything right in a movie. We tried our best on all fronts of it."
Miranda took to Twitter to address the "whitewashing" allegations with his followers on Monday.
"I hear that without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation, the work feels extractive of the community we wanted so much to represent with pride and joy. I'm learning from the feedback, I thank you for raising it, and I'm listening."
Mexican actress Melissa Barrera, who plays Vanessa in the film, said the producers were looking for actors who fit the white Hispanic residents of the Washington Heights neighborhood.
"In the audition process, which was a long audition process, there were a lot of Afro-Latinos there. A lot of darker skinned people. And I think they were looking for just the right people for the roles. For the person that embodied each character in the fullest extent."
Barrera, best known for her role as Lyn in the Starz LGBT+ series Vida, added:
"Because the cast ended up being us, and because Washington Heights is a melting pot of black and Latinx people, Jon and Lin wanted the dancers and the big numbers to feel very truthful to what the community looks like."
In the Heights was delayed for a year due to the Covid outbreak.
Marvel Studios announced its upcoming movie release scheduled for the next 2 years. Included in the list was the official title treatments for many of its upcoming releases, such as Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (July 8, 2022), Black Widow (July 9, 2021), Ms. Marvel (Fall 2021), and Spider-Man: No Way Home (Dec. 17, 2021).
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Marvel fans were excited about Black Panther's official title treatment. The new Black Panther, currently filming on location in Atlanta, will be a tribute to actor Chadwick Boseman who died from colon cancer last August at age 43.
Fans wonder how Marvel will explain Wakanda's king dying from cancer with all of the fictional country's advanced technology.
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One Reddit user wrote: "I wonder if they'll outright just be like 'it was a rare cancer. even with all of our technology we could not cure cancer.'"
Another user wrote:
"Yea. Because I don't see anyone killing T'challa. He must either go voluntarily back to the D'jalia (ancestral plain) or he has to have an ailment from the snap and the heart shaped herb. No one should kill him. After all he told his father that he had to make things right before he joined him in the Djalia."
Question: How do you think Marvel will explain T'Challa's disappearance?
Will Smith and director Antoine Fuqua have pulled their runaway slave movie out of Georgia due to controversial voter ID law.
Smith's new slavery film titled, Emancipation, was scheduled to begin filming on in Atlanta in June, but he is now looking for a new location.
Smith, who is starring in, as well as producing the movie, blamed "institutional racism," for his decision.
"The new Georgia voting laws are reminiscent of voting impediments that were passed at the end of Reconstruction to prevent many Americans from voting. Regrettably, we feel compelled to move our film production work from Georgia to another state."
The movie, based on a true story, will likely be filmed in Louisiana, where the actual events took place.
In the film, Smith plays a slave who escaped the plantation and joined the Union Army after he was whipped to within an inch of his life.
The historic photo of the ex-slave's scarred back, taken during an Army medical examination, became known as "The Scourged Back."
The photo was published by The Independent and Harper's Weekly in 1863, and served to embody the cruelty of slavery in America.
"It was the first viral image of the brutality of slavery that the world saw, which is interesting, when you put it into perspective with today and social media and what the world is seeing, again," Fuqua told Deadline last year. "You can't fix the past, but you can remind people of the past and I think we have to, in an accurate, real way."
Emancipation is the first film to pull out of Georgia since the new laws went into effect.
Major League Baseball pulled the All-Star game out of Georgia after Gov. Brian Kemp signed the new election bill into law in March.
The new election law requires identification to submit absentee ballots by mail.
Aretha Franklin's family has made it clear they did not want a new biopic about the beloved Queen of Soul to see the light of day.
The family did not support the much-hyped Genius: Aretha series, which debuted on National Geographic on Sunday evening, March 21.
Cynthia Erivo, pictured with Aretha in 2015, earned critical praise for her role as the Queen of Soul in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks' new eight-part project, but Aretha's granddaughter said it's full of fiction.
"This movie has to go," she said in a new TikTok video. "As the immediate family, we feel that it's important to be involved with any biopic of my grandma's life, as it's hard to get any accurate depiction of anyone's life without speaking to the ones closest to them."
She said the family has "been disrespected and told we will not be worked with. As the immediate family - emphasis on immediate - we do not support this film and we ask that you also do not support this film, as we feel extremely disrespected, and we feel there will be many inaccuracies about my grandmother's life."
Her father and Aretha's son, Kecalf Franklin, supported his daughter, telling Rolling Stone, "What we've found out in the past is that usually when people don't want to work with you, that is a prelude to some type of unprofessional behavior or a prelude to some type of untruth or slander... That's usually the case when people say that they don't want to work with you."
Genius: Aretha chronicles the soul legend's rise to the top from her roots as a teenage single teenage mom in Alabama.
National Geographic bosses acknowledged they made no contact with Franklin's family while making the series, but they still insist the biopic was thoroughly researched.
The Franklin family is working with the producers of Respect, the new Aretha Franklin biopic starring Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, which is slated to hit theaters this summer.
