Empire June 2022

WAY BACK IN 1993, this magazine’s Jurassic Park preview feature ran with the headline, “IT’S BIG!” We briefly considered updating those words for this issue’s cover story on Jurassic World Dominion, before deciding against it. After all, “IT’S REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BIG (SERIOUSLY, IT’S MASSIVE)” just didn’t look quite right on the page. Dominion is the kind of epic movie that doesn’t come along every day. The climax to not one but five dinosaur-crammed blockbusters, it’s got marauding creatures the size of a Caffè Nero. Action spectacle on land, air and water. And the return of three iconic characters last seen together heading towards a sunset in a helicopter in ‘93. In short, everything but the Kitchensinkosaurus. To do it justice, we’ve gone all in. I emerged after months of lockdown,…

WAY BACK IN 1993, this magazine’s Jurassic Park preview feature ran with the headline, “IT’S BIG!” We briefly considered updating those words for this issue’s cover story on Jurassic World Dominion, before deciding against it. After all, “IT’S REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BIG (SERIOUSLY, IT’S MASSIVE)” just didn’t look quite right on the page. Dominion is the kind of epic movie that doesn’t come along every day. The climax to not one but five dinosaur-crammed blockbusters, it’s got marauding creatures the size of a Caffè Nero. Action spectacle on land, air and water. And the return of three iconic characters last seen together heading towards a sunset in a helicopter in ‘93. In short, everything but the Kitchensinkosaurus. To do it justice, we’ve gone all in. I emerged after months…

COMMENT OF THE MONTH THE WAY HOME Just read Chris Hewitt’s story [in the March 2022 issue] on Spider-Man: No Way Home’s box-office take. The last paragraph, about cinema in the time of Covid, slew me — finished the article with tears in my eyes, for two years of lost and changed cinema experiences (and everything else). Hopefully, this is really the way home now. DR GRAHAM WHITE, STIRLING Hear, hear, Dr Graham. Unfortunately, we can’t cast a Doctor Strange-esque spell to make the last two years go away, but we can give you a Picturehouse membership — for many more return trips home to come. Enjoy! Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for one year at 23 Picturehouse Cinemas across the UK, including the flagship Picturehouse Central…

COMMENT OF THE MONTH THE WAY HOME Just read Chris Hewitt’s story [in the March 2022 issue] on Spider-Man: No Way Home’s box-office take. The last paragraph, about cinema in the time of Covid, slew me — finished the article with tears in my eyes, for two years of lost and changed cinema experiences (and everything else). Hopefully, this is really the way home now. DR GRAHAM WHITE, STIRLING Hear, hear, Dr Graham. Unfortunately, we can’t cast a Doctor Strange-esque spell to make the last two years go away, but we can give you a Picturehouse membership — for many more return trips home to come. Enjoy! Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for one year at 23 Picturehouse Cinemas across the UK,…

THIS MONTH’S FILM MOMENTS THAT MATTER DAVID LEITCH AND Brad Pitt go way back. Not just to Deadpool 2, where Pitt showed up for a one-shot joke in the sequence where the newly formed X-Force get brutally slaughtered (Pitt plays the invisible hero, The Vanisher, flashing that world-famous fizzog of his for one second as he gets electrocuted). But all the way back to 2004, when Pitt entered Action Hero Mode in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. His stunt double on that film? David Leitch. “I’ve worked with Brad as a stunt double on five movies, ” laughs Leitch. “We have a history. That cameo on Deadpool was the first time he really saw me in the filmmaker role.” So, when Leitch started developing Bullet Train, a high-concept action-comedy in which a bunch…

TOM HIDDLESTON WAS finishing up the first season of Loki when he got the call: would you like to play a vicar? “They sent me the six episode scripts, and a letter from [director] Clio Barnard, ” Hiddleston recalls. “I was just immediately engaged by it.” The scripts he read were an adaptation of The Essex Serpent, a bestselling 2016 gothic mystery novel by Sarah Perry, set largely on the rural coastlines of Essex during the late Victorian era. Hiddleston, at the time, was engaged in a battle for the multiverse with a variant of his character that took the form of an alligator. The future job promised quite a different experience. “New experiences are always full of curiosity and interest to me, ” he says. Part of that difference was…