Trailer: https://youtu.be/IRHtqjHYPew

After tackling witches, vampires and werewolves, Robert Eggers is tackling perhaps the scariest of monsters: teenage love.

Eggers is setting up an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at Focus Features, which has come out on top of a bidding war that included A24, Sony and Warner Bros.

When the deals closes, it will reteam Eggers with the Universal specialty arm that released his 2024 surprise hit Nosferatu and will be releasing his latest, Werwulf. Eggers will direct the feature and produce. It was not immediately clear who else was producing or executive producing.

As befitting a filmmaker who is known for his meticulous attention to detail in capturing a time period, even when it comes to dialogue, sources say that this adaptation will feature actors speaking in Olde English.

“I feel like there’s been so many people taking what I say about this exact thing out of context and saying: ‘He just wanted to make the movie that he wanted to make, and then slap Resident Evil on it, so he could get a bigger budget.’ Which is not the case. It was conceived to be a Resident Evil story. And when you watch the movie, you’ll know that’s the case, because it’s undeniable.”...

... So while Cregger was – and is – a big fan of the games, the films? Not so much. When I ask what the relationship is of his film to the rest of the series – a sequel? Prequel? Universe-expanding retro-reboot? – he shrugs and says, somewhat proudly: “I couldn’t really say. I’ve never seen one.”

Still, as Cregger appreciates, video game adaptations are tricky for a reason: they are expected to serve the play-experienced aficionados and the clueless noobs. Cregger’s big idea for bridging this gap is to create a moviegoing experience that feels like a 90-minute session on the PlayStation, even for those audience members who may never have previously heard of Resident Evil. Narratively, this means following a single character, medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams), as he attempts to deliver a cooler containing a transplant organ from hospital A in the flatlands to hospital B in the remote mountains near Raccoon City, Colorado, where – unbeknown to Bryan – a zombie outbreak is now under way. As in the game, Bryan regularly switches environment, progressing from snowy road to deserted farmhouse to sewage tunnel. In each new place, he must find the resources to survive. Shooting the film in a rural part of Czechia was, therefore, an appropriately gruelling experience for Cregger. “It was dark. It was cold. It was unrelenting,” he says. “I had pneumonia for the first half of the movie, and a horrible bacterial infection for the back half … It sucked.”

It may have sucked, but it worked. Judging by the 30-minute preview made available to press, Cregger’s film is exhilarating and immersive. He utilised the over-the-shoulder camera angles now synonymous with third-person shooters to mimic gameplay, and Bryan’s dialogue is mostly a soliloquy of disjointed profanities. “That’s how I talk to myself when I’m sitting on the couch playing Resident Evil,” says Cregger. “I mean, I basically only say ‘fuck’ and run away from things.”

Man oh man do I just love this comedy horror that's sorta in the 80s maybe somewhat early 90s vibe. It's got a cool story (a planet is named after one of the creators of DnD) although kinda campy. Two kids find a relic that controls this seemingly ultra powerful magical creature who was once a slave but found said relic long ago and then gained powers from it and took his revenge on those that enslaved him. The kids that found the relic end up, well, being kids and use the relic to control PG and hilarity ensues. The father of the children is a trip, he's just so corny (like one scene he makes a lazy Susan joke because his wife's name is Susan). The battles are totally power ranger-esque (can't be easy fighting with all that crap on), and when PG gives his enemies the honorable death is just frighting. I'd love to see an origin story or something involving PG in the past on another planet and it goes full action horror for a prequel..I think there's sustenance in the story to do so. 9/10 I love it it's fantastic highly recommend a watch. It's slapstick it's horror it's grotesque at times.

Wachowski is — along with her sister, Lana — the most powerful and influential trans filmmaker around. The 58-year-old had gifted us “The Matrix” series, “Bound” and “Sensse8,” to name a few, and yet, after her critically acclaimed series “Work in Progress,” about a middle-aged lesbian who begins dating a much younger trans man, was canceled by Showtime after two seasons, she spent years pitching “cool and queer trans stories” to Hollywood but couldn’t find a single taker.

So, Wachowski took matters into her own hands, joining forces with Bay Area film programmer Sarah Marie Flores and producer Lawrence Mattis to form Anarchists United Foundation and Anarchists United Studio with the mission of championing stories from marginalized communities. Here’s how it works: The foundation provides grants and fellowships to aspiring filmmakers, mentorships via its Directors Prep & Pitch Lab and office space courtesy of United Spaces of Anarchy, while helping fund the studio. Anarchists United’s first project is “Cassie Workman Is Witchy AF,” a DIY docuseries that features the trans Aussie comic exploring the history of the occultism and magic with her trademark wit. It will debut Sept. 16 on YouTube.

...

What compelled you to form Anarchists United Foundation and Anarchists United Studios?

The story is: I was talking to Sarah Marie Flores, who is our third in the triumvirate of the Anarchists — between me and Lawrence Mattis — and was coming out of this TV show that I’d worked on that I was really proud of, “Work in Progress,” which went for two seasons, got on all these top ten lists and didn’t get the viewing numbers that the studio wanted, so we were summarily canceled and a few months later pulled from streaming. This rankled me. There was something particularly special about working on “Work in Progress” to me: It was the first time I was able to cast as many trans and queer people as I did, and in all of that representation and seeing all these people onscreen who I’d never gotten to see before, I was like, This is something that makes sticking around in the business worthwhile. So, when Showtime turned around and canceled the show even though it was so critically acclaimed and really made for peanuts, it lit a fire under me. I saw all these windows closing and opportunities dwindling for marginalized voices, and I was like, “Somebody needs to do something about this. Somebody needs to make another attempt at the old United Artists model where it would be an artist-run studio.” And Sarah said, “That someone is us.”