Empire May 2021

this month

AS I WROTE this letter, it was just days since Boris Johnson stood in front of the country (for the love of God, run a comb through it!) and gave us a date for cinemas reopening. Well, a date we’re aiming for, anyway: 17 May. A potentially monumental day when, after a year of closures — save for screens bursting into life briefly between lockdowns — their doors will open again. I personally was last in the cinema in December, the night before they’d been mandated to close once more. I saw Batman Returns and knew this would be the last encounter between the screen and myself for a while. I’ve spent much of the months inbetween missing it, even mourning it, but while we might not have had big…

talk to us

ONE FRANCHISE TO RULE THEM ALL Your articles on Lord Of The Rings really ring true with me and my friends. During the pandemic, the films have given us opportunities to socialise remotely and over-analyse the films. Whether debating how the Middle-earth patriarchy would adapt to a woke society, arguing whether we are more elf or dwarf, or deciding which characters we would snog, marry or avoid, each re-watching feels fresh and exciting. To put it simply, Lord Of The Rings is very precious to us. RICK HAMILTON, SWINDON Thanks for your letter, Rick. We’re not going to ask who wanted to snog Gimli. Instead we’ll just give you a Picturehouse membership. Picture house Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for one year at Picturehouse Cinemas across the…

no./ 1 the making of a profound musical partnership

IT WOULD BE impossible to separate the gorgeous close-ups of Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk or Moonlight from the tenderly composed notes of Nicholas Britell’s atmospheric scores. Now a third collaboration is on the way: an upcoming television adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad — and with it, the promise of a partnership as emotionally inseparable as Spielberg and Williams. “It’s been truly the most profound artistic experience for me,” Britell says to Empire. The two first met after Britell read the script for Moonlight in 2015. “It was the most beautiful script I had ever read,” he recalls. “It was like a poem.” What initially began as a quick coffee meet became a “multi-hour discussion” on art and life, over wine — a sign…

no./2 revealed: the custom zombie-killin’ machine

AS MICK ‘CROCODILE’ Dundee might say, “That’s not a saw… that’s a saw.” If you were even vaguely under the impression that Zack Snyder’s Army Of The Dead might be an understated, genteel outing for the director, this exclusive image of Omari Hardwick’s zombie-killing hardnut, Vanderohe, should swiftly disabuse you of that notion. There will be blood — roughly a reservoir’s worth — and brains and saws the size of a small house. “It’s a rescue saw,” says Snyder. “You could basically cut a car door off with it if you had to, or cut a hole in a wall to get away. But you could also kill a zombie. And that’s gonna happen, right?” In short, it’s not a good time to be a zombie. Hardwick is just part of the…

no./3 dracula as a sci-fi western? not as weird as you think

FRESH FROM THE success of Nomadland, filmmaker Chloé Zhao is set to sink her teeth into another badlands character study: a futuristic sci-fi Western spin on Dracula. “I’ve always been fascinated by vampires and the concept of the Other they embody,” Zhao said in a statement. Surprising news, perhaps — but not unprecedented. The Count has graced a few saloons in his time; in fact, Bram Stoker’s boy is both an opposite and a curious kind of kindred spirit to the traditional Western hero. Vampires are no strangers to jangling spurs, appearing in everything from 1959’s classical Curse Of The Undead to 2014’s postmodern A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. And Dracula himself faced off against the West’s most infamous outlaw in the 1966 flick Billy The Kid Vs. Dracula,…

no./4 how wandavision changed the mcu forever

! SPOILER WARNING THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A SUPPORTING CHARACTER Good news for every indie actor in a Marvel movie: you might one day star in an acclaimed TV spin-off. If the films skipped your character’s eventful comic-book history, or if die-hard fans are desperate to learn more about you, there’s real hope that Marvel will eventually fill in the blanks. Prepare for quirky Marvel adventures, possibly (but not necessarily, judging by the effects here) on a smaller scale. Not just A-list stars and Avengers, either: there’s a real appetite for a ‘Jimmy Woo Investigates’ or an ‘Agatha All Along’ spin-off, it turns out. SOME MOVIES WORK BETTER AS TV More than a decade in, the MCU could fairly be called the world’s biggest-budget soap opera, but there are ongoing stories that even…