CinemaCon 2023: Updates on Barbie, Wonka and other movies: “Everybody knows Barbie, and she’s never been on the big screen before,” said director Greta Gerwig.
Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie at CinemaCon 2023. pic.twitter.com/aykeBj6uXw
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Celebrating its 100th year, Warner Bros, unveiled a packed lineup of new big-screen movies at CinemaCon, from a live-action Barbie comedy to a remake of Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple. The historic Hollywood studio used its presentation at the annual Las Vegas gathering to tease a “10-year plan” to relaunch its DC superhero movies, which include beloved characters like Batman and Superman.
Hollywood CinemaCon 2023:
David Zaslav, who spearheaded the corporate merger of Warner and Discovery last year, took to court an audience made up primarily of theater owners. “We don’t want to do direct-to-streaming movies,” said Zaslav, whose predecessor slammed Warner films for releasing them directly on its streaming platform HBO Max – recently rebranded as Max . “We are in no rush to bring movies on Max.”
During the two-and-a-half-hour presentation, Zaslav and fellow Warner bosses brought out A-list of Hollywood stars including Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya. Out on July 21, Robbie and Gosling co-star in Barbie, who finds the ubiquitous blonde doll living in a dream-like, pink-tinted world begins to question her very perfect reality the day before and the actual Life travels to Los Angeles.
Gosling said that making the film was “like a fever dream”, explaining: “I was living my life, and then one day I was bleaching my hair, shaving my legs and wearing bespoke Was wearing a neon outfit and rollerblading on Venice Beach.”
Oprah Winfrey took the stage on Christmas Day to perform her and Steven Spielberg’s new version of “The Color Purple”.
The film is based on the Broadway musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel about black women enduring trauma and racism in the rural Deep South in the early 20th century.
Chalamet presented footage from two new films he has starred in. He appears in Wonka, set for release in December, as a young, idealistic version of Roald Dahl’s famous chocolatier whose efforts to launch a magical candy empire are blocked by a sinister “chocolate cartel”. Chalamet described the “bizarre” process of shooting the origin story – which involved “a lot of swimming in a pool of actual chocolate”.
He also returns for Dune: Part Two at CinemaCon 2023, the second and final part of Denis Villeneuve’s Oscar-winning adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel, which is due out in November.
Austin Butler, Léa Seydoux, Christopher Walken and Florence Pugh joined the cast for a sequel that Villeneuve described as an “action-packed epic war film”.
The presentation ended with Warner’s “DC Universe” of superhero movies. The DC movies, though popular, have suffered from various production issues and casting u-turns in recent times, and have been largely overshadowed by rival, record-grossing Marvel movies.
James Gunn (“Guardians of the Galaxy“) and Peter Safran (Aquaman) were recently brought on as the new heads of the division. This year the studio will release The Flash, Blue Beetle and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.
Although those films were made under Warner’s previous reign, Gunn said they “lead perfectly into the DCU slate we’re launching in 2024.”
Superman: Legacy, directed by Gunn, is already set for July 2025. Safran said that future DC films would be “vast, interconnected and full of promise and possibility,” and promised that he and Gunn were “cracking in” on the universe’s “first chapter”. ,
Self-proclaimed “lover of DC” Zaslav told the audience that Warner has a new “10-year plan” for the titles.
CinemaCon, which runs through Thursday at Caesars Palace, gives Hollywood studios a chance to showcase their upcoming films to movie theater owners — while the industry’s biggest stars are there to raise the spirits.