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Here’s why Disney rejected Back To The Future (Photo Credit – Amazon Prime Video)

When Back to the Future hit theaters on July 3, 1985, it flipped Hollywood. Michael J. Fox went from TV star to mega-celebrity, while director Robert Zemeckis made waves. Despite getting rejected by Disney for being “too scandalous,” the film ended the year as a box office champ, leaving fans craving more time-travel adventures!

How Did Back to the Future Get Made?

Zemeckis and screenwriter Bob Gale first crossed paths at USC in 1971, forming a creative bond that would ultimately shake the cinematic landscape. They dabbled in TV and scored a brief break with the Misfire 1941, which was more a flop than a blockbuster. But they brushed off that bomb and charged ahead. After creating Used Cars in 1980 with Kurt Russell, they decided it was time to unleash a wild time-travel concept. They were riding high on their...

Between modern thrillers, horror comedies, and Universal monster movies, Peacock is a perfect streamer for Spooky Season

With Halloween right around the corner, Peacock’s library this month is fuller than ever, jam-packed with excellent seasonal classics like “Nosferatu the Vampyre,” “Jennifer’s Body,” “Halloween,” and many others. Complete with Peacock Originals and other films from Universal Pictures and Focus Features, there’s no shortage of great movies to spoil you on the streamer at the moment.

If you’re looking to add to your watch list and the best of what Peacock has to offer, here are my picks for the best seven movies currently available to stream!

Sign Up $7.99 / month peacocktv.com Top 7 Movies Streaming on Peacock Right Now:

No. 7: ‘Death Becomes Her’

No. 6 ‘It Follows’

No. 5: ‘Dìdi’

No. 4 ‘Let the Right One In’

No. 3 ‘A Thousand and One’

No. 2 ‘Get Out’

No. 1 ‘Bride of Frankenstein’

No.

Fans remember Wyatt Russell in Marvel Studios’ The Falcon and the Winter Soldier series, but many also recognize him as the son of Hollywood icon, Kurt Russell. Growing up exposed to the spotlight, he had every opportunity of seeing his father star in various films.

Credits: Wyatt Russell in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier / Marvel Studios

With all the projects his father did during his glorious heydays, the 38-year-old former ice hockey player has a special fondness for one title that many fans are not so familiar with.

Wyatt Russell Names Used Cars as His Father’s Best Movie

While guesting at The Dan Patrick Show for the promotion of the MonsterVerse streaming series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Kurt and Wyatt Russell shared a bit of their bond as father and son, with the younger one revealing his favorite movie of his dad.

Related “I didn’t turn down...

This post contains spoilers for the "Back to the Future" trilogy.

Director Robert Zemeckis struggled with creating a successful, financially viable project after helming two films at the onset of his career — 1978's "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and 1980's "Used Cars" — which were produced by his mentor, Steven Spielberg. Despite being backed by such a bankable stalwart in the industry, Zemeckis' films experienced commercial failure time and again, making it difficult for him to land meaningful work during the early 1980s. However, his longtime collaborator, Bob Gale, teamed up with Zemeckis again to pen the script for a time-travel adventure focused on a teenager and an eccentric scientist, which was rejected by several studios at the time, prompting him to seek support from Spielberg's own production company, Amblin Entertainment. Although Spielberg's involvement was minimal compared to past collaborations, the director joined as an executive producer, allowing the project to take off.

Wyatt Russell was born to Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn on July 10, 1986, eight days after "Big Trouble in Little China," his pop's third and lamentably final big-screen collaboration with John Carpenter, bombed at the box office. The martial arts action-fantasy movie didn't seriously damage Russell's career, but it did alter its trajectory a tad. Just about everything after "Big Trouble in Little China" was a two-hander or an ensemble piece. Though he could still mess around in nonsense like "Overboard" and "Captain Ron," he couldn't dominate a movie with a broad, endearingly dopey hero like Jack Burton anymore.

Kurt Russell has many different modes, but I grew up with a preference for his swaggering himbos, guys who were so supremely confident in their capabilities that, like Wile E. Coyote, they didn't realize how far off the edge of the cliff they'd run. Watching a lug like Burton scramble out of...

Robert Zemeckis couldn't have asked for a more propitious start to his filmmaking career. Soon after graduating from University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts in 1973, Zemeckis, on the strength of his award-winning student film, found a powerful young mentor in Steven Spielberg. The "Jaws" maestro was Universal Pictures' in-house wunderkind, so when he flipped out over "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," a raucous comedy, written by Zemeckis and his creative partner Bob Gale, about a trio of young girls desperate to attend the live taping of The Beatles' first performance on "The Ed Sullivan Show," the studio greenlit it -- even though Zemeckis was completely untested as a feature director.

Five years later, Zemeckis' was very close to finished in Hollywood.

With a budget of $2.8 million, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" wasn't considered a gamble. And when it lost money for Universal, the studio didn't sweat it. But...

In cinematic history, few films have managed to capture the hearts of audiences quite like Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s Back to the Future. The film is the perfect comedy of science-fiction, comedy, and drama and it is impossible for movie lovers to think of a world without Back to the Future. However, there was a time when no one wanted to bet on the film.

Back to the Future (1985) | Amblin Entertainment

That’s right. While Back to the Future is as iconic as iconic gets, many studios turned a blind eye to the script for one reason or the other. But then there was Steven Spielberg who always saw the potential in the film and eventually was able to get himself the last laugh.

How Steven Spielberg Got Attached to Back to the Future

Michael J. Fox in Back to The Future | Amblin Entertainment

Bob Gale first had...

Kurt Russell's first acting gig was in the 1963 Elvis Presley vehicle "It Happened at the World's Fair," wherein he played an unnamed young boy hired to kick Elvis in the shin. Elvis, you see, wanted to romance a nurse at the Fair, and wanted to approach her with an injury as a way of breaking the ice. Russell was 12.

This early gig was parlayed into a successful career as a teen actor, and throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Russell appeared in multiple high-concept comedies for Disney. He was in three of the Medfield College movies — "Now You See Him, Now You Don't," "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes," and "The Strongest Man in the World" — as well as "Superdad," "Charley and the Angel," and "The Barefoot Executive." It wouldn't be until Robert Zemecki's 1980 comedy "Used Cars" that Russell would begin to shed his squeaky-clean teen image and begin appearing in more mature films,...

Sometime in 1984, when E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg saw a bunch of potential covers for Bruce Springsteen’s next album, he instantly noticed the Annie Leibovitz shot of the singer’s jeans-clad rear end. “My comment, jokingly, was ‘I like that one because that’s the view I always have,'” Weinberg says in the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast. “Everybody laughed, and then they picked that shot. And it was a steamroller after that.”

In the new episode, Weinberg and E Street Band keyboardist...

Oscar-winning director Robert Zemeckis developed an interest in film and television at an early age and first worked in his native Chicago as an editor for TV commercials and news programs. This work led him to apply as a transfer student to the University of Southern California film school where his application material included a music video, set to a song by The Beatles. (Not surprisingly his first film would be “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” about a bunch of high school students obsessed with Beatlemania.)

He was initially rejected by USC but he begged an official to reconsider and promised to bring his low grade point average up by attending summer school. This brashness would also play a big part in his initial success as a director when he barged into Steven Spielberg’s office with a copy of his student film and asked Spielberg to employ him. The...

With the back-to-back blockbuster combo of "Jaws" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Steven Spielberg had firmly established himself as a sui generis Hollywood visionary when, in 1978, he chose to make "1941." Most people consider this a near-disaster of a decision. The anarchic World War II comedy, set in panicked Southern California in the immediate wake of the assault on Pearl Harbor, was a 180-degree turn from the spirited adventure and childlike yearning of his previous two films. It was silly, vulgar and more than a little mean. And, most audaciously, it was making light of the country's understandably crazed reaction to an attack that killed thousands of U.S. military personnel.

Spielberg's co-conspirators in this juvenile affront to one of the worst days in 20th century American history were screenwriters John Milius, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale — and, really, all you have to do is watch "Used Cars...

The year was 1985 when Super Mario Bros. took the Nintendo Entertainment System by storm; Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes debuted in newspapers, and two unlikely friends named Marty McFly and Emmett Lathrop Brown piloted cinema’s most iconic time machine to a year when Panama hats and kitten heels were all the rage, 1955.

Fiercely protected at a level akin to Ghostbusters and Star Wars by millennials worldwide, Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future sits enthroned at Nostalgia Mountain’s top. The original film has spawned two sequels, a cartoon series, video game adaptations, a Broadway musical, and more. But how does it hold up by today’s standards? Strap on your seatbelt, and prepare yourselves to see some serious shit because this is Back to the Future Revisited.

In 1977, Robert Zemeckis did the unthinkable. He bulldozed into Amblin Entertainment without an appointment, heading straight for Steven Spielberg’s office.

Joe Flaherty, founding member of “Sctv” and ubiquitous comic actor for decades including a stint as the Dad on “Freaks and Geeks,” has died at the age of 82, according to multiple reports.

The Pittsburgh-born performer (a rare American in the Canadian comedy sphere) got his start with the Chicago-based Second City Theater, first appearing on the “National Lampoon Radio Hour” before resettling in Toronto to become part of Second City’s core in the Great White North. He was one of the initial writer/performers on “Sctv,” a vanguard sketch comedy series co-starring John Candy, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis, Catherine O’Hara, Harold Ramis (for a little while), Dave Thomas, and, later, Martin Short, that mixed parody programming with behind-the-scenes shenanigans at a low rent television station in “Mellonville.” Indeed, if “Sctv” could be said to have a main character, it would be Flaherty’s Guy Caballero, the corrupt,...

Allllllrighty then! 1994 was The Year of Jim Carrey, with the actor hitting an unprecedented run of three massive hits totaling over $700 million worldwide. First out of the gate was Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, the movie where Carrey made it look like his butt was talking. While it earned the least overall, many of us saw it upon release and knew Carrey was the next face of comedy. Hey, you may have even been at the multiplex with Kurt Russell, Goldie Hawn and their son Wyatt, who had a pretty amusing bonding experience when they caught it in February of that year.

In a dual sitdown with ComicBook.com, Kurt and Wyatt Russell were asked which movie they have most bonded over. While Kurt wasn’t so sure the pair were big moviegoers, he was able to come up with a title. “When he was about 10 — no, you were maybe nine — and...

There has been a long history of Hollywood actors being replaced during the production of a movie. The reasons vary; they just weren't right for the role, or they butted heads with so-and-so, or disagreed with the director on their creative vision. While these incidents may have been stressful and unpleasant for the actors at the time, there is one thing that stands out when you look at any list of mid-production replacements. In almost every case, the replacement looks like the far better option, which is of course easy to say in hindsight.

During the '80s, Sylvester Stallone was riding high after the success of "Rocky III" and "First Blood," the movie that introduced his second iconic character. Next up was the lead role in "Beverly Hills Cop," but Stallone wrote his way out of the part by rejigging the screenplay to make it more action-packed. The studio...

With Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness being a box office sensation, excitement over anything related to Marvel’s, uh, supreme wizard has reached a fever pitch. Perhaps the most mystifying thing about Strange is the movies that almost happened.

One of the most curious of these abandoned projects is a script written by Bob Gale. Fresh off of co-creating and co-writing Back to the Future with Robert Zemeckis, Gale’s script did a more than adequate job of bringing Strange to life. The problem — well one of them — was that any attempts to tell Doctor Strange’s story in a way that would respect the character would require a big budget, something that was unlikely in the pre-Batman era.

“When I was in high school, Marvel comics were a huge, huge influence on me,” Gale told us in a 2020 interview, “I read all those great classic comics and stayed with Marvel for many,...

There are few directors who have innovated special effects while advancing the art of populist filmmaking like Robert Zemeckis, the tech-whiz behind the "Back to the Future" trilogy, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," and "Forrest Gump," among other landmark movies from the 1980s and '90s. That may also be why his first two feature-length films — 1978's "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and 1980's "Used Cars" — are often overlooked; on top of being financial duds, they lacked the bells and whistles that would come to define his later work (though not always in a good way). In spite of this, critics were upbeat on both movies...

The post How Romancing The Stone Got Robert Zemeckis Fired From Cocoon appeared first on /Film.

After a hiatus as theaters in New York City and beyond closed their doors during the pandemic, we’re delighted to announce the return of NYC Weekend Watch, our weekly round-up of repertory offerings. While many theaters are still focused on a selection of new releases, there’s a handful of worthwhile repertory screenings taking place.

Metrograph

A Kurt Russell retrospective—featuring Escape from New York, The Thing, Used Cars and more—is underway, while Tsai Ming-liang’s masterpiece Goodbye, Dragon Inn has been restored, which paves way for a wuxia series featuring films by King Hu, Ang Lee and more.

IFC Center

A Clockwork Orange and Princess Mononoke are available for a double feature, if you’re fucking insane, while a double feature of Scorsese’s Italianamerican and American Boy is underway.

Roxy Cinema

On Friday our friends at Screen Slate are presenting a print of the Japanese nunsploitation...

Legendary screenwriter and director Shane Black discusses some of his favorite movies with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

The Last Boy Scout (1991)

Sweet Smell of Success (1957) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

High and Low (1963)

Hard Times (1975) – Josh Olson’s trailer commentary

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966) – Ernest Dickerson’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review, Glenn Erickson’s 4K Blu-ray review

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

The Beguiled (1971) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (1974) – Josh Olson’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Kino Lorber Blu-ray review, Glenn Erickson’s Twilight Time Blu-ray review

Convoy (1978) – Dennis Cozzalio’s review

8 Heads In A Duffel Bag (1997)

Diner (1982)

The Bodyguard (1992)

12 Angry Men (1957)

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Fist of Fury a.k.a. The Chinese Connection (1972) – Larry Karaszewski’s trailer commentary...

The veteran character actor shared the screen with Timothy Dalton, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger

Frank McRae, a mainstay of action blockbusters including “License to Kill” and “Last Action Hero,” has died. He was 80.

McRae died of a heart attack on April 29 in Santa Monica, Calif., his daughter-in-law confirmed.

Born in Memphis, McRae excelled in high school sports before attending Tennessee State University, where he double-majored in history and drama. He played defensive tackle for the Chicago Bears’ 1967 season before deciding to transition into acting.

McRae’s work on the big screen would quickly overshadow his football accomplishments, with the actor going on to appear in over 40 films. His breakout role came in the 1973 gangster flick “Dillinger,” a part he got by standing in a studio exec’s parking space until he was granted a meeting, according to IMDb.

The actor shrewdly leveraged his 6-foot-5 frame into a run of...

Frank McRae, an NFL player-turned-actor who appeared in the James Bond film Licence to Kill and in the Last Action Hero, died April 29 of a heart attack in Santa Monica. He was 80, The news was confirmed by his daughter-in-law, Suzanne McRae.

Born in Memphis, he attended Tennessee State University as a double major in drama and history, then moved on to the NFL as a defensive tackle for the Chicago Bears and Los Angeles Rams.

After his football career, he became a character actor in the entertainment industry, appearing in more than 40 movies. His résumé includes Last Action Hero with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hard Times, Norma Rae, Red Dawn, Big Wednesday and F.I.S.T. with Sylvester Stallone, with whom he also appeared in Paradise Alley, Lock Up and Rocky II.

McRae also appeared in the 1989 James Bond film Licence to Kill as Sharkey, a close friend of Timothy Dalton’s Agent 007...

Frank McRae, the actor who appeared in films such as “Licence to Kill” and “Last Action Hero,” has died. He was 80.

McRae died in Santa Monica, Calif. on April 29 as a result of a heart attack, his daughter-in-law confirmed to Variety.

The NFL player-turned-actor was born in Memphis, Tenn. A star athlete in high school, he went on to Tennessee State University as a double major in drama and history. McRae had a brief career as a professional football player and was the defensive tackle for the Chicago Bears and Los Angeles Rams.

Making the pivot to a new kind of stage, McRae found his calling in the entertainment industry. In his 30-plus years as a character actor, he appeared in over 40 movies. Standing at approximately six-and-a-half feet tall, McRae took advantage of scooping up tough guy roles in movies like “Hard Times,” “Big Wednesday” and “F.I.S.T.” with Sylvester Stallone.

Michael McKean says that the death of his longtime friend and Laverne & Shirley costar David Lander “is a loss shared by all of us, not just those who had the joy of knowing him.”

Lander died on Dec. 4, at age 73, after living for nearly four decades with multiple sclerosis. He and McKean actually met back in 1965, during acting classes at Carnegie Mellon University, where they first developed what would become their Lenny and Squiggy (fka “Ant’ny”) personae.

More from TVLineDavid Lander, Laverne & Shirley's Squiggy, Dead at 73TVLine Items: My Little Pony Series Finale, All American Mom and MoreTVLine Items:...

David Lander, the comic actor best known for playing “Squiggy” on Laverne & Shirley, has died at the age of 73 following a decades-long battle with multiple sclerosis.

The actor’s family confirmed to Variety that Lander died Friday evening at Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with his wife Kathy by his side.

From 1976 to 1983, over the stretch of over 150 episodes, Lander played the role of Andrew “Squiggy” Squiggman on Laverne & Shirley, opposite actor Michael McKean’s Lenny; the two actors began collaborating together when they were both students at Carnegie Mellon University,...

Actor David Lander, best known as Squiggy in “Laverne & Shirley,” died Friday evening at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Variety has confirmed. He was 73.

Lander died of multiple sclerosis, which he battled for 37 years. Since he went public with his diagnosis in 1999, Lander spoke to his experience at related conventions.

The actor was best known for portraying the titular role in “Squiggy” from 1976 to 1983, which he starred with opposite Michael McKean who starred as Lenny. The characters were developed by the longtime friends and collaborators while they were students at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2002, Lander reprised his iconic role as Squiggy in an episode of “The Simpsons.”

Lander had his eyes on acting at a young age and progressed to an arts high school. After teaming up with McKean in college, the duo moved to Los Angeles, where they joined the comedy ensemble, The Credibility Gap.

Lander and...

David Lander, who is best known to TV audiences for playing the latter half of Laverne & Shirley‘s irrepressible Lenny and Squiggy, died on Friday after living for 37 years with multiple sclerosis. He was 73.

As reported by TMZ, Lander’s wife of 41 years, Kathy, along with their daughter Natalie and her husband, were at his side when he passed.

More from TVLineLaverne & Shirley Star-Turned-Film Director Penny Marshall Dead at 75Letterkenny Returns to Hulu: Watch the First Three Minutes of Season 9Mario Lopez Is Hunky Colonel Sanders in Lifetime/KFC 'Movie' -- Watch Trailer

Penny Marshall, who played the Happy Days...

David Lander, the actor who played Squiggy on the “Happy Days” spin-off “Laverne & Shirley,” died on Friday due to complications from multiple sclerosis, his wife Kathy told TMZ. He was 73.

Lander was diagnosed with Ms in 1984 shortly after he wrapped filming for “Laverne & Shirley,” but he didn’t reveal his diagnosis until 1999. A year later, he published his memoir, “Fall Down, Laughing: How Squiggy Caught Multiple Sclerosis and Didn’t Tell Nobody,” and detailed his journey with the illness.

He went on to be an Ms activist and was named an ambassador for the National Ms Society in 2000.

Aside from “Laverne & Shirley,” Lander also appeared in films like Steven Spielberg’s “1941” and Robert Zemeckis’ “Used Cars” with Kurt Russell. A talented voice actor, Lander also lent his voice to “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “Tom and Jerry: The Movie” and “The Iron Giant.”

Shortly after news of Lander’s death,...

Robert Zemeckis’ “Used Cars” opens with a slow, patient push-in on a man tinkering around under the dashboard of a used car, eventually achieving the goal of rolling back its odometer. He’s whistling “Hail to the Chief” as he works; the opening title music that follows is a rousing rendition of “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The messaging here is not subtle: America, circa 1980, is a used car lot. Appropriately enough, at the year’s end, it would elect a used car salesman President.

Continue reading ‘Used Cars’ At 40: How The Cynical Black Comedy Became A Preview Of The Reagan Era at The Playlist.

On May 14, 2019, Oscar winning director Robert Zemeckis will celebrate his 67th birthday. The director developed an interest in film and television at an early age and first worked in his native Chicago as an editor for TV commercials and news programs. This work led him to apply as a transfer student to the University of Southern California film school where his application material included a music video, set to a song by The Beatles. (Not surprisingly his first film would be “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” about a bunch of high school students obsessed with Beatlemania.)

SEESteven Spielberg movies: All 31 feature films ranked from worst to best

He was initially rejected by USC but he begged an official to reconsider and promised to bring his low grade point average up by attending summer school. This brashness would also play a big part in his initial success as a director when...

Patrick Williams, who was best-known for his Emmy-winning television music but who was also a renowned and Grammy-winning big-band jazz leader and arranger, died Wednesday morning of complications from cancer at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 79.

Williams was among the most versatile composers of his generation, earning an Oscar nomination, four Emmys and two Grammys during more than 50 years of music-making in New York and Los Angeles.

In the middle of his most prolific period, scoring music for TV including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “The Streets of San Francisco,” he was also nominated for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in music for his groundbreaking “An American Concerto” (1976) for jazz quartet and symphony orchestra.

He scored nearly 50 films, often memorable scores for movies that were not big hits, including “Casey’s Shadow,” “The Cheap Detective” and “Cuba” in the 1970s; “Used Cars,...

Horror fans in Syracuse will travel to "a place where the dead speak" this April at the 13th annual Salt City Horror Fest. Pet Sematary co-star Denise Crosby will be on hand at The Palace Theatre for a special screening of Mary Lambert's 1989 Stephen King adaptation, with C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud, Creepshow 2, and Terrorvision among the other 35mm screenings featured at the event.

We have the list of 35mm screenings and special guests for Salt City Horror Fest below, and check here for more information on the celluloid celebration.

"The 2018 Salt City Horror Fest - April 28th at 10am - early morning of April 29th

Featured films on 35mm:

“Pet Sematary” Stephen King’s classic with intro Q/A with Denise Crosby

“King Kong” – Original 1933 film & aspect ratio of 1:37:1

“C.H.U.D” - Rare uncut extended version. Intro Q/A Carey Eidel

“C.

There’s Always Vanilla, Season of the Witch, and The Crazies, made between Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, showcase the extraordinary versatility and dynamism of this irreplaceable American auteur… Three films from the late, legendary horror director, George A. Romero, showing that although he might have defined zombie cinema, it didn’t define him. George A. Romero – “Between Night and Dawn” will be released on Blu-ray October 23rd from Arrow Video

There’S Always Vanilla (1971)

Young drifter Chris and beautiful model Lynn embark upon a tumultuous relationship which seems doomed from the outset.

Season Of The Witch (1972)

Joan Mitchell is a bored housewife whose dissatisfaction with her humdrum life leads to an unhealthy interest in the occult.

The Crazies (1973)

A small rural town finds itself in the grip of an infection which sends its hosts into a violent, homicidal frenzy

When George A. Romero passed away in July,...

The United States is “my country, right or wrong,” of course, and I consider myself a patriotic person, but I’ve never felt that patriotism meant blind fealty to the idea of America’s rightful dominance over global politics or culture, and certainly not to its alleged preferred status on God’s short list of favored nations, or that allegiance to said country was a license to justify or rationalize every instance of misguided, foolish, narrow-minded domestic or foreign policy.

In 2012, when this piece was first posted, it seemed like a good moment to throw the country’s history and contradictions into some sort of quick relief, and the most expedient way of doing that for me was to look at the way the United States (and the philosophies at its core) were reflected in the movies, and not just the ones which approached the country head-on as a subject.

Well, you can forget about those meetings between Robert Zemeckis and Warner Bros. about The Flash leading anywhere anytime soon. The Back to the Future and Used Cars director’s next feature, which will star Steve Carell, is scheduled to come out November 21, 2018, and it ain’t called The Flash. Originally titled The Women of Marwen, the project is based on Jeff Malmberg‘s acclaimed […]

The post Untitled Robert Zemeckis Project Gets a 2018 Release Date appeared first on /Film.

Welcome back for Day 11 of Daily Dead’s fourth annual Holiday Gift Guide, readers! Once again, our goal is to help you navigate through the horrors of the 2016 shopping season with our tips on unique gift ideas, and we’ll hopefully help you save a few bucks over the next few weeks, too. For our second-to-last day of this year’s Gift Guide, we’re going to be featuring several great cult films that arrived on Blu-ray in 2016, as well as Star Wars books, a ton of horror-themed enamel pins, the amazing artwork of Hero Complex Gallery, FiverFingerTees, and much more!

This year’s Holiday Gift Guide is sponsored by several amazing companies, including Mondo, Anchor Bay Entertainment, DC Entertainment, and Magnolia Home Entertainment, who have all donated an assortment of goodies to help get you into the spirit of the season. Daily Dead also recently teamed up with...

It’s strange to use the word “under-appreciated” when it comes to the director behind such hits as Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Contact, Cast Away, and Forrest Gump, but in today’s Hollywood it feels like Robert Zemeckis‘ talents are often overlooked. His eye for composition and structure scene-by-scene is remarkable in his recent return to live-action and certainly the case when it comes to his Allied, which is more entertaining than most of its awards-fare brethren.

With the release of his World War II thriller, it’s time to take a look back at his early directorial eye when he was at USC with two short films. The first is 1972’s The Lift, featuring black-and-white photography and a jazzy score as we follow a man’s bout with machinery. Playing with shadows and close-ups in tight quarters, it shows off a 20-year-old Zemeckis’ control of the camera,...

A ripe potboiler, Allied resembles countless World War II motion pictures, yet its intended tone is difficult to discern. Is it meant as a tribute? Or a parody? The answer lies somewhere between the two, obviously, for a movie that includes a childbirth scene -- outdoors, at night -- as London is bombed by the Nazis and an orchestral score soars. The exploding bombs light up the skies like fireworks! The actors look glamorous! How could anyone take that seriously? Director Robert Zemeckis has been mapping the territory between sincerity and cynicism for much of his career. His first two films, I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars, flopped neatly from one extreme to the other, a pattern that has trailed him for years,...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

The third week of September has a lot of fantastic horror and sci-fi home entertainment offerings coming our way, including an incredible pair of Criterion Blu-ray releases—Cat People (1942) and Blood Simple—as well as the 30th Anniversary Edition of Labyrinth and the Special Edition of Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Dead End Drive-In. Other notable titles being released on September 20th include the horror doc The Blackout Experiments (which premiered earlier this year at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival), Sacrifice, The Rift (1990), Beware! The Blob, and a Blu-ray set featuring all kinds of Twin Peaks goodness.

Beware! The Blob (Kino Lorber, Blu-ray & DVD)

Newly Re-mastered in HD! The Blob returns... more outrageous than ever in this 1972 sequel to the popular sci-fi classic! Plenty of familiar faces, including Robert Walker Jr. (Ensign Pulver), Larry Hagman (Dallas), Sid Haig (Busting), Burgess Meredith (Rocky), Dick Van Patten (Eight is Enough), Godfrey Cambridge...

What does HBO’s John Oliver know about predatory lending by used car dealers? A lot, actually. On Sunday’s episode of “Last Week Tonight,” Oliver and Keegan-Michael Key appeared in a sketch that breaks down just how disgusting the used car trade is.

Watch: Last Week Tonight’ Targets Journalism With Rose Byrne & Jason Sudeikis ‘Spotlight’ Parody

Posing as salesmen at “Crazy Johnny’s Used Cars,” the pair gives an overly transparent pitch to viewers about the nature of used car loans. “Is your credit so bad that giving you a high interest loan will basically trap you under a mountain of debt from which there is no reasonable hope for escape?” Oliver asked. “We don’t care!” Key then tries to sell viewers on a beat up sedan that has “four tires, up to one engine, and a beeping device which emits a sound that will haunt your dreams.

In this episode of Off The Shelf, Ryan and Brian take a look at the new DVD and Blu-ray releases for Tuesday, March 22nd, 2016.

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Follow-Up Twilight Time Quantity Updates: Used Cars and Center of the Earth Ryan is out of space, but still buying box sets! (Buyers remorse vs unwatched stuff) Hertzfeldt Kickstarter Arrivals News Star Trek: Digital Bits News (Animated Series on Blu-ray, Khan Uhd) Kino Lorber: Fathom, Star Slammer, Modesty Blaise, Gold (1934) Code Red: House on the Edge of the Park, Truck Stop Women, Hot Moves …bucket list fever! Scorpion: The Rift (from the director of Pieces) Blue Underground: Circus of Fear/5 Golden Dragons & The Shape of Things to Come Misc Links Larry Karaszewski on After The Fox Night of the Comet vinyl Kickstarter Links to Amazon After the Fox Bandits Black Mama, White Mama The Black Sleep Breaker! Breaker!

Actor Will MacMillan, known for his role as David in George A. Romero's 1973 cult favorite, The Crazies, has died at 71, his family announced Thursday. MacMillan appeared in a streak of films from the ’70s through the ’90s, including Robert Zemeckis's Used Cars (1980), Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986), and across from Clint Eastwood in The Enforcer (1976). He played Boris Roskov in the early years of General Hospital (credited as William MacMillan) and later put in guest appearances on The West Wing, Matlock, NYPD Blue, Three's Company, and several other TV shows. MacMillan was also a stage actor, performing in productions of Brigadoon, 1776, and Pippin, and the artistic director of Psychic Repertory Theatre, which toured America to put on shows for children with special needs from 1976 to 1990.Born in Steubenville, Ohio, on November 25, 1944, MacMillan grew up playing for his high-school football team. He later received a BA from Washington & Jefferson College...

Fighting off a 60’s sugar hangover of Disney singalongs and reluctant nannies, musicals took turns being either idealistic (Hair) or Good Book Wavin’ moralistic (Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar), and we called them Rock Musicals – the music (slightly more) hard hitting, the lyrics speaking to the issues of the day – spirituality, war – heady stuff (on paper). But who was giving the Devil his due? Where was a musical about the fun side of sin, temptation, sacrifice, and ill gained ecstasy? Where was the rock musical About rock and roll? And then, yay and verily, it did arrive on the world’s doorstep in a black bassinet, cackling and screaming, eager to please and ready to reign. Welcome to Phantom of the Paradise (1974). As a wise old Glam queen once said, “Life at last! Salutations from the other side!”

Released on Halloween by 20th Century Fox, PotP did not reign. At all.

Since its release 30 years ago, "Back to the Future" has been everyone's favorite time-travel movie. It's remained a must-see long enough for Marty McFly's own kids to enjoy it.

Even so, there's much you may not know about the beloved sci-fi comedy, from the unused ideas that popped up in other films, to why there has yet to (thankfully) be a reboot. To celebrate Back to the Future Day (October 21), here are 30 things you need to know about Marty McFly's first trip through time.

"Back to the Future 30th Anniversary Trilogy" is available to own now on Blu-ray & DVD.

1. Director Robert Zemeckis and co-screenwriter Bob Gale (pictured above) tried for years to create a time-travel story. The key came in 1980, when Gale was looking over his father's high school yearbook and wondered whether he and his father would have been friends if they'd both been teenagers at the same time.

I knew how it ended before I walked into the theater. After all, I've seen "Man On Wire," and it ended up on my ten best list for 2008, and I know how the story ends. Beyond that, I knew that I was looking at the state-of-the-art of what visual effects could accomplish in the year 2015 and not actual footage of an event in the '70s. Even so, the new Robert Zemeckis film "The Walk" made my hands sweat and my stomach ache for a solid 45 minutes, and I suspect it's going to be a big-screen sensation thanks to people going back to witness it several times. One of the truths of the new age of theatrical distribution is that you have to give an audience a reason to go to a theater and not just wait for a more convenient time and place to see a film. If you...

Robert Zemeckis with the cast of Flight Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

After the New York Film Festival Opening Night Gala screening of Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk in 3D, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit with Ben Kingsley, Charlotte Le Bon and Ben Schwartz had to be rescheduled due to the visit of Pope Francis, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced today, What Lies Beneath: The Films of Robert Zemeckis.

His feature films, including Romancing The Stone, Forrest Gump, The Polar Express, Contact, Used Cars, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Cast Away, A Christmas Carol, Beowulf and Flight (Closing Night Gala selection of the 2012 New York Film Festival) will be shown. On October 3, screenings of Back To The Future, Back To The Future Part II and Back To The Future Part III in succession celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original film's release.

Kicking off...

Since its release 30 years ago this week (on July 3, 1985), "Back to the Future" has been everyone's favorite time-travel movie. It's remained a must-see long enough for Marty McFly's own kids to enjoy it.

Even so, there's much you may not know about the beloved sci-fi comedy, from the unused ideas that popped up in other films, to why there has yet to (thankfully) be a reboot. To celebrate the film's 30th anniversary, we're firing up the flux capacitor and traveling back 30 years to learn the secrets of "Back to the Future."

1. Director Robert Zemeckis and co-screenwriter Bob Gale (pictured above) tried for years to create a time-travel story. The key came in 1980, when Gale was looking over his father's high school yearbook and wondered whether he and his father would have been friends if they'd both been teenagers at the same time.

2. Zemeckis and Gale took their idea to Steven Spielberg,...

The United States is “my country, right or wrong,” of course, and I consider myself a patriotic person, but I’ve never felt that patriotism meant blind fealty to the idea of America’s rightful dominance over global politics or culture, and certainly not to its alleged preferred status on God’s short list of favored nations, or that allegiance to said country was a license to justify or rationalize every instance of misguided, foolish, narrow-minded domestic or foreign policy.

And now more than ever we seem to be living in a country poised at the edge of some sort of transition, with all the attendant tension and conflict and intense conviction that can be expected on either side of the chasm that prevents us from a true state of national togetherness. Just last week we celebrated a Supreme Court decision that finally offered legality (and legal protection) to the...

Twilight Time is celebrating its 4th anniversary with a major promotion that sees some of their limited edition titles reduced in price through April 3. These are the titles on sale.

Group 1

Retail price point: $24.95

Picnic

Pal Joey

Bite The Bullet

Bell, Book, And Candle

Bye Bye Birdie

In Like Flint

Major Dundee

The Blue Max

Crimes And Misdemeanors

Used Cars

Thunderbirds Are Go / Thunderbird 6

Group 2

Retail price point: $19.95

Rapture

Roots Of Heaven

Swamp Water

Demetrius And The Gladiators

Desiree

The Wayward Bus

Cover Girl

High Time

The Sound And The Fury

The Rains Of Ranchipur

Bonjour Tristesse

Beloved Infidel

Lost Horizon

The Blue Lagoon

Experiment In Terror

Nicholas And Alexandra

Pony Soldier

The Song Of Bernadette

Philadelphia

The Only Game In Town

Love Is A Many Splendored Thing

Sleepless In Seattle

The Disappearance

Sexy Beast

Drums Along The Mohawk

Alamo Bay

The Other

Mindwarp

Jane Eyre

Oliver

The Way We Were...

Earlier this week, Funko announced the Big Trouble in Little China line of Pop! toys, and that inspired my next Fun Facts list. I watched this movie all of the time when I was a kid. I swear it was on a constant loop in my house for a little while there. The John Carpenter-directed movie stars Kurt Russell, and it was just such an incredibly fun movie, with great characters. I think it's about that time to show it to my own kids. Here are 11 Fun Facts about the movie that you may or may not know. It was hard to find decent clips from this film on YouTube to show you certain things, but I posted the original trailer, a supercut of Russell's best lines in the movie, and the most ridiculous death scene ever.

The story was originally written as a western but Carpenter thought it...

Celebrity Big Brother launched with over 3 million viewers on Wednesday, overnight ratings reveal.

Channel 5's latest series opened with an average audience of 3.09m (15.4%) at 9pm, with a further 178,000 (1.4%) tuning in on 1. Bit on the Side entertained 968k (11.0%) at 11pm.

It is slightly lower than last January's ratings of 3.18m when it launched on a Friday night. However, it is higher than August's launch figures of 2.24m.

Earlier on the channel, a repeat of Benefits: Too Fat To Work fascinated 1.23m (5.5%) at 8pm (120k/0.5% on 1).

BBC One's Silent Witness topped the night overall with 6.42m (27.6%) at 9pm. A repeat of Miranda amused 3.81m (17.8%) at 8pm.

On BBC Two, Six Puppies & Us appealed to 2.69m (12.0%) at 8pm, followed by Super Cars vs Used Cars with 1.82m (7.8%) at 9pm.

Channel 4's Restoration Man returned with 2.03m (9.0%) at 8pm (210k/0.9%), while the new series of 24 Hours in A&E gathered 1.72m...