Hardik Pandya is bowling in the nets although the decision to make him bowl in the upcoming limited-overs series will be taken ahead of the first ODI on July 13from Top CricketNext News- News18.com https://ift.tt/3ytEfgQ
'Hardik Pandya Bowled in Nets and in Warm Up Match,' Reveals Suryakumar Yadav
Hardik Pandya is bowling in the nets although the decision to make him bowl in the upcoming limited-overs series will be taken ahead of the first ODI on July 13from Top CricketNext News- News18.com https://ift.tt/3ytEfgQ
Fox Didn’t Want Will Smith To Star In Independence Day Because He’s Black
Independence Day is now 25 years old and has become a 90s pop culture totem. The film is regularly quoted on social media, has spawned a tonne of memes, and Bill Pullman’s epic Presidential speech uniting Earth against the alien menace still kicks a whole bunch of ass. While some of the CGI compositing looks a bit rough by modern standards, the destruction sequences still hold up beautifully thanks to excellent use of models and slow-motion photography.
To mark the anniversary The Hollywood Reporter has published an oral history in which the cast and crew look back on the movie and give their perspectives on its creation. For example, we now know that director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin got the idea for giant spaceships appearing in the sky during a press conference for Stargate, that they had to rush to beat Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks to theaters, and that they almost cast Kevin Spacey as President Whitmore.
But some slightly more depressing news comes from Emmerich and Devlin’s push to make Will Smith the star. Smith was already a big deal in 1996 due to Bad Boys and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, but Independence Day, propelling him to becoming one of the most bankable actors of the 1990s. But this almost didn’t happen:
EMMERICH “Ethan Hawke was on our list too, but I thought at that time he was too young. It was pretty clear it had to be Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum. That was the combo we thought. The studio said, “No, we don’t like Will Smith. He’s unproven. He doesn’t work in international [markets].”
DEVLIN They said, “You cast a Black guy in this part, you’re going to kill foreign box office.” Our argument was, “Well, the movie is about space aliens. It’s going to do fine foreign.” It was a big war, and Roland really stood up for [Smith] — and we ultimately won that war.
EMMERICH It was pretty shortly before the shoot and we still hadn’t locked in Will and Jeff. I put my foot down. “Universal people are calling every day, so give me these two actors or I move over there.” I don’t think it would have been a possibility [to actually move studios], but it was a great threat.”
Sadly people assuming that the “international market” won’t go to see movies starring black people hasn’t gone away. For example, when Marvel Studios released Black Panther in China in 2018, USC professor and China specialist Stanley Rosen assured Deadline that it would “not be of interest to Chinese audiences.” That was quickly proved wrong when the movie outperformed expectations and matched the box office of Spider-Man: Homecoming.
So full credit to Emmerich and Devlin for fighting the suits and ensuring that Will Smith took the fight to those city-destroying alien bastards. It wouldn’t have been the same movie without him in the starring role, with his casting also giving Vivica A. Fox a richly deserved blockbuster role.
It’s worth reading the rest of The Hollywood Reporter’s article as it gives a lot of interesting insights into how the movie came together, particularly that Bill Pullman’s speech was thrown together at the last moment and that it ensured that the movie wouldn’t be called Doomsday. We also get word as to an alternative ending in which Randy Quaid’s character flies a crop duster into the alien ship that caused test audiences to laugh, resulting in expensive reshoots to put him in a fighter jet instead.
If you want to revisit Independence Day it’s streaming for HBO Max subscribers and available to rent on the usual VOD platforms.
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Independence Day Director Wants Another Movie Or A Disney Plus Series
A huge number of fans have revisited Independence Day over the last few days, thanks to a combination of the Fourth of July weekend and Roland Emmerich’s sci-fi blockbuster celebrating its 25th anniversary, with the filmmaker and co-writer Dean Devlin offering up plenty of new insights into the development and production of what was cinema’s second biggest-ever box office hit at the time.
We could have seen Ethan Hawke as Steven Hiller and Kevin Spacey as President Whitmore if Fox had gotten their way, with Emmerich fighting so hard to cast Will Smith that he threatened to up sticks and take Independence Day over to Universal if his demands weren’t met. The 1996 epic remains a massively entertaining slice of Hollywood spectacle, but the same can’t be said about the sequel.
Audiences waited 20 years for Independence Day: Resurgence, only to be drowned in a sea of admittedly impressive CGI, but the second installment was notably missing the heart, humor and memorable characters that made the opener such a fun time at the movies. After earning a disappointing $389 million from theaters, any plans for a third film were shelved, but in a new interview Emmerich admits that he’d love the opportunity to finally bring his trilogy to a close, or even mount a Disney Plus series.
“They have now a streaming service and they need product. I would love to do maybe a third one, or a TV show, continuing the story. When we did Independence Day: Resurgence, we already had, also, the third part already. Actually, the third part has much more to do with the first part, because we learned, more or less, that out there are a lot of refugees and they’re living on a refugee planet.
And where the aliens finally come there because, somewhat like these aliens on earth, found out about it and telepathically or whatever gave it to their super queen. They’re all humans, but in all different forms. So it’s this thing that we have Brent Spiner and Jeff Goldblum and we have them with all these different forms of people, which would be a great movie. But we’ll see what happens.”
Based on how Resurgence ended, the plan was to send a ragtag group of humans into outer space to continue the battle against their alien invaders, but that concept would no doubt need to be reworked for any potential episodic continuation given the sheer cost involved. That being said, an Independence Day show on streaming would be massive, so let’s hope it’s something the Mouse House could take under consideration.
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Star Wars Actress Kelly Marie Tran Would Love To Join The MCU
For whatever reason, Kelly Marie Tran‘s Rose Tico turned out to be one of the most polarizing characters across the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy. After being given a prominent role in The Last Jedi, the actress faced a huge volume of vitriol and backlash online despite doing nothing more than reading the lines on the script she was given, and things got so bad she left social media altogether.
Several of her co-stars publicly blasted the so-called ‘fans’ for throwing such negativity in the direction of a young woman who’d just scored the biggest role of her career, although Tran had just as many supporters as she did detractors. Rose’s screentime in The Rise of Skywalker was minimal at best, despite the fact she was featured prominently in several of the trailer’s money shots, but Tran has since revealed she doesn’t have any regrets.
If anything, she’s going from strength to strength having lent her vocal talents to animated hits The Croods: A New Age and Raya and the Last Dragon, which saw her introduced to acclaimed independent filmmaker Carlos López Estrada, who broke out with the acclaimed Blindspotting before working on Disney projects Frozen II, Raya and Encanto.
Tran recently boarded Estrada’s latest live-action effort Summertime as an executive producer, and in a new interview he jumped right in and answered the question on Tran’s behalf when she was asked if joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe was something that would interest her int he future.
“I’m going to answer for her and say I hope she’s part of it! For me, as a director, I have been very inspired by all the movies and people I’ve gotten a chance to work with, including the Summertime poets and Kelly. I will do everything within my power to continue working on projects that I can be equally as inspired by whether it’s Summertime 2: The Return of Summertime or a Marvel thing, I think I’m just going to have to follow my gut and try to surround myself with people I find as inspiring as Kelly Marie Tran.”
Obviously, not many rising or established talents have turned down the advances of Kevin Feige’s all-conquering outfit, but having done plenty of work for Disney in the past, Kelly Marie Tran is well-placed to join another of the Mouse House’s biggest brands one day.
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