Amber Heard’s Reportedly Very Happy About WB Backing Her Up In Recent Statement

Amber Heard should be feeling pretty good right now. She’s reprising Mera in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, which is currently shooting in the UK,. That’s despite a brutal internet campaign to get her booted out of the franchise. This encompassed multiple petitions asking Warner Bros. to fire her, as well as a blizzard of false rumors that Heard failed her physical, that she broke her contract, that she’s uninsurable, that her role was being drastically reduced, and so on and so forth.

There was a lot of sound and fury but, as they say, it turned out to signify nothing. Warner Bros. didn’t even consider recasting Mera and ignored all the drama. Producer Peter Safran was asked about the whole situation in a recent interview and said they simply don’t pay attention to campaigns like this:

“You know, I don’t think that we’re ever gonna react to just pure fan pressure. You gotta do what you feel best for the movie, and we felt that if it’s James Wan and Jason Momoa, then it should be Amber Heard. That’s really what it was. One is not unaware of what’s going on in the Twitterverse, but that doesn’t mean that you have to react to it or take it as gospel or accede to their wishes. You have to do what you feel is right for the film, and that’s really where we landed on it, truthfully.”

Amber Heard Teases Aquaman 2 Return With Mera BTS Photo

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This has reportedly been music to Heard’s ears, as according to sources close to WGTC – the same ones who told us F9 would bring back [SPOILERS] – she’s unsurprisingly very happy that Warner Bros. are backing her up on this. That support is by no means guaranteed, as Depp being fired from Fantastic Beasts is proof that there’s a limit to what studios will tolerate from their stars.

With the battle to get Amber Heard fired now lost, the Depp fans have moved on calling for a boycott of Aquaman 2. I’m skeptical whether this will have any effect on the movie’s box office performance, though there’s a couple of factors in play that may help. One is that the movie will release in the wake of Depp and Heard’s next major legal tussle in Virginia. This will see more of their dirty laundry aired in public and if Heard loses the case resentment against her may build.

Even so, do audiences in China really care about all this stuff? Somehow I doubt it.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom will hit theaters on December 16, 2022.

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Watch: Dwayne Johnson Celebrates Jungle Cruise Topping The Box Office

Dwayne Johnson is no stranger to box office success, having seen seven of his last twelve major leading movie roles open at number one, and none of them debuted lower than third. The success of Disney’s Jungle Cruise ups that to eight out of thirteen, and he’ll arguably be enjoying this one more than the rest due to the circumstances.

As well as being delayed by over a year due to the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic, the blockbuster adventure was also released day and date on Disney Plus Premier Access, but still managed to bring in over $34 million across the three-day frame to secure one of the largest opening weekends of the COVID-19 era. Throw in $27 million overseas and an estimated $30 million from Premier Access revenue, and that’s $91 million and counting in the coffers already.

Jungle Cruise also scored the highest audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes that Johnson’s filmography has ever seen, so folks clearly got a kick out of the effects-driven adventure that saw The Rock’s Frank Wolff and Emily Blunt’s Lily Houghton set out in search of a mystical flower with healing properties.

To celebrate Jungle Cruise‘s impressive bow, Johnson took to social media and thanked his legions of fans for driving the project to number one, and he didn’t even leave the comfort of the gym to do it, as you can see below.

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Jungle Cruise isn’t the greatest film he’s ever been a part of, and it won’t even go down as one of this summer’s superior efforts, but it’s a perfectly acceptable slice of escapism and entertainment that lets to big stars bounce off each other in a classic odd couple dynamic wrapped around an adventure driven by a MacGuffin. It’s not particularly original, but it is fun.

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Matt Damon Says Superheroes And Streaming Are Ruining Cinema

There’s no denying that the rise of the streaming service has fundamentally changed the entire entertainment business as we know it, with mega budget blockbusters and prestige episodic dramas that don’t even sniff the inside of a theater or network television becoming more and more prevalent, and almost all of the industry’s biggest names have jumped on the bandwagon at some point or another.

Additionally, the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has had a seismic impact on how the industry approaches its most well-known properties, with the vast majority now designed with shared universes and longevity in mind first and foremost, often to the detriment of a first installment that becomes so preoccupied with what’s next that it forgets to tell a good story.

Put those two elements together, and you get the opinion of Matt Damon, who lamented the current state of cinema in a new interview, with the Academy Award winner highly critical of the shortened attention spans and homogenized style of filmmaking that comes from streaming and superheroes, respectively.

“The way they watch is different to how we did. How can you watch a movie if you are texting? As someone who makes these things I can’t say I love that. Movies as we know them aren’t going to be a thing in our kids’ lives. And that makes me sad. It made the most profitable movie, one that could travel around the world. And if you want a movie to travel and play big you want the least amount of cultural confusion. So there is the rise of the superhero movie, right? They’re easy for everyone. You know who the good person is, who the bad person is. They fight three times and the good person wins twice.

Chris Hemsworth Shares Selfie With Matt Damon Watching UFC

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Of course, we should point out that this is the same Matt Damon who can currently be seen in HBO Max exclusive No Sudden Move, and will make his second appearance in the MCU next summer when Thor: Love and Thunder arrives, so it’s not as though he hasn’t been part of the very same problem he decries.

He does have a point, though, and while he’s not quite going full Francis Ford Coppola, the long term after effects of the Coronavirus pandemic could see things lean even harder in the direction of streaming if the box office fails to mount a sustained recovery by the end of this year at least.

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Will Smith’s New Movie Shuts Down Production Due To Rising COVID-19 Cases

After the first trailer for biopic King Richard dropped last week, once fans had stopped wiping away the tears they were proclaiming Will Smith as the front-runner for the Best Actor Academy Award already, a sentiment a lot of people would agree with looking at the footage, which promises a potentially career-best performance.

Smith has always tended to follow up his prestige drama appearances with an immediate return to blockbuster territory, but he mixed things up significantly by moving straight on to an even more powerful story once he’d wrapped King Richard. The A-lister is teaming with Antoine Fuqua for dramatic thriller Emancipation, which stars the former Fresh prince as a runaway slave named Peter, who outwitted bounty hunters and soldiers determined to bring him in, before he joined the Union Army.

The start of shooting was already pushed back after Smith and Fuqua decided to move production out of Georgia following the controversial changes to the state’s voting laws, with the call to shift the entire operation to New Orleans reportedly costing upwards of $15 million.

Will Smith Shares Hilarious I Am Legend Meme For Coronavirus Quarantine

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Filming finally kicked off a little over two weeks ago, but Emancipation has now been forced to bring itself to a screeching halt after a surge in COVID-19 cases among the crew. While the initial hiatus is only set to last until this coming Saturday, looking at the spread of the Delta variant, there’s every chance it could end up being longer depending on how the situation plays out over the next few days.

AppleTV+ shelled out in excess of $130 million to secure the exclusive distribution rights to Emancipation, so the company will be sweating nervously over any further potential delays.

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India vs England: Mayank Agarwal Ruled Out of First Test Due to Concussion

With Agarwal now out, the team management will ask his close friend KL Rahul to open. There's a back-up opener available as well: Abhimanyu Easwaran.

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India vs England 2021: Mayank Agarwal Hit on Head At Nets, May Have to Undergo Concussion Test

While facing Siraj, possibly the fastest in the current Indian line-up, Agarwal was apparently hit on the back of his head when he took his eyes off a short ball and took a blow on his helmet.

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How did Yuvraj Singh’s Friendship Day Post Offended Sania Mirza

Sania Mirza and Yuvraj Singh share a great camaraderie. Over the years, their bond has grown, proof of the same can be seen in their social media banters.

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Watch: New Venom: Let There Be Carnage Trailer Promises Symbiotic Insanity

Ruben Fleischer’s Venom wasn’t a particularly great movie, featuring a raft of one-dimensional archetypal characters, a formulaic plot and some CGI right out of the middle drawer. Of course, it made a ton of money at the box office after bringing in $856 million at the box office, but it’s a fact that the movie was almost single-handedly elevated above tedium by Tom Hardy’s central performance as Eddie Brock.

Already regarded as one of the finest and most dedicated actors in the business, the leading man was given free rein to create Eddie from the ground up, and the result was a sweaty, nervous and neurotic mess who was always way out of his depth, not something we typically see from the title heroes in mega budget comic book adaptations.

The first trailer for sequel Let There Be Carnage promised that Eddie hadn’t changed, and with Hardy now producing and taking a story credit, things are destined to get a whole lot crazier. This time, he’ll face off against Woody Harrelson’s Carnage, an actor that’s no stranger to chewing on the scenery himself.

New Venom 2 Photos Reveal Best Look At Carnage Yet

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Andy Serkis is at the helm second time out, and the latest trailer looks to deliver a superior follow up, even if the lingering effects of the pandemic means it stands virtually no chance of matching the opener’s commercial performance. That being said, based on the footage we’ve seen so far, Let There Be Carnage promises to be a vastly superior effort.

The world-building and exposition is largely out of the way and accounted for, leaving the cast and creative team free to double down on the symbiotic insanity playing out against the backdrop of two powerhouse actors sinking their teeth into some heightened genre fun.

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Johnny Depp Scores Victory In Amber Heard Donations Fight

Johnny Depp has won what could be a significant victory in his long-running battle against Amber Heard. Back in May the actor applied for a petition to force the ACLU and the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles to disclose Heard’s donations to them and a New York judge has granted it.

Her donation (or lack of one) is seen by the Depp camp as a key issue, as in 2017 Heard promised to donate her substantial divorce settlement to the two organisations. At the time, the actress said:

“As described in the restraining order and divorce settlement, money played no role for me personally and never has, except to the extent that I could donate it to charity and, in doing so, hopefully help those less able to defend themselves.”

In the British libel trial, this donation was held up as evidence that Heard was not a “gold digger,” though appeal court judges later ruled that this hadn’t factored into the court’s decision against Depp.

Even so, it’s become a bone of contention, as Depp has claimed that Heard lied about donating the money, while the actress’ team has countered by saying the donations will be made over 10 years and that they’ve provided proof that she’s already donated $950,000 to the ACLU and $850,000 to the Children’s Hospital.

First Look At Johnny Depp's Next Role Revealed

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As a result of this petition being granted, Depp’s team will now get access to the documents they’ve requested. As per their petition, he’s after:

“Discovery concerning any donations to the ACLU Foundation by Ms. Heard or in her name, and/or any public statements related to such donations; communications with Ms. Heard or those acting on her behalf concerning her relationship with Mr. Depp and divorce from Mr. Depp; discovery concerning Ms. Heard’s work as an ‘ambassador’ for the ACLU Foundation and the conception, drafting, and placement of the Op-Ed; and communications with Ms. Heard or those acting on her behalf concerning the Virginia Action and the preparation and submission of the Wizner Declaration.”

All this is building to a titanic clash in Virginia next April. There, Depp is suing Heard for $50M over a Washington Post op-ed she wrote about her experience as a victim of domestic violence. In response, she filed a $100 million counterclaim, also alleging defamation and that Johnny Depp was responsible for a social media effort to tarnish her career and get her booted off Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom.

The drama that comes out of that should make the London trial look like amateur hour, so grab some popcorn because it’s going to be juicy.

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Dwayne Johnson Meeting Disney For Jungle Cruise Sequel Talks This Week

By the standards of the COVID-19 era, Disney’s Jungle Cruise can be deemed a success after topping the box office with $34 million, bringing in an extra $30 million from Premier Access sales and scoring just under $28 million from overseas. Not phenomenal numbers to be fair, but hardly disastrous.

While the story wraps itself up neatly and doesn’t end on the sequel-baiting note that blights many modern blockbusters, it’s clear in both design and execution that the Mouse House have hopes for Jungle Cruise to fill the void for family friendly fantasy adventures left wide open until either one of those two Pirates of the Caribbean spinoffs get around to happening.

The good news for fans is that Dwayne Johnson isn’t wasting any time putting plans in place, after revealing in a social media exchange with a fan that he’s meeting Disney this coming weekend to discuss a game plan for potential sequels, as you can see below.

Thank you buddy! Glad you guys loved #JungleCruise and we have a sequel meeting next weekend https://t.co/qYhyl0ogxz

— Dwayne Johnson (@TheRock) August 1, 2021

Not to put a dampener on things, but we should point out that a Dwayne Johnson movie having a follow up announced is an altogether different proposition from it actually making it to theaters. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, San Andreas, Rampage and Baywatch were all the subject of sequel talks before eventually fading into the ether of development hell, and you’d have to imagine the cumulative box office and Disney Plus revenue will be the deciding factor when it comes to a Jungle Cruise 2.

The Rock has DC League of Super-Pets, Amazon festive action comedy Red One, another Jumanji and perhaps Hobbs & Shaw 2 all lined up as well, so scheduling will be just as key as the financial returns.

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WB Reportedly Considering Bringing Ben Affleck Back For More Batman Projects

It took a while for people to get used to the idea of Ben Affleck as Batman, with the actor coming in for the same sort of criticism that Robert Pattinson recently experienced, thanks largely to his turn in 2003’s Daredevil and his time spent grabbing more headlines in the tabloids than the trades. Of course, the majority of those doubts were blown away once Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was released.

Affleck’s performance as a world-weary, cynical, broken and grizzled Batman that’s come dangerously close to losing all sense of humanity after spending decades on the job was an entirely different take on the character than we’d become used to seeing, and he was built like a brick sh*thouse for good measure. The actor may have described Justice League‘s reshoots as akin to suffering, but he gave a substantially better account of himself in the Snyder Cut.

Batfleck Prepares To Face Darkseid On Justice League Snyder Cut Fan Poster

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His upcoming appearance in The Flash has at various points been touted as either his last stand or the beginning of a new arc, but we’ve been hearing from our sources – the same ones who told us the actor would return in the Scarlet Speedster’s solo debut long before it was confirmed – that Warner Bros. are reportedly more open to the idea of continuing the Batfleck era than ever before.

Obviously, the star has been named in conjunction with dozens of projects since he was first announced for The Flash, and none of them have come to fruition as of yet, but conversations behind closed doors could be seen as an encouraging start. Then again, WB have made it perfectly clear they don’t give a solitary f*ck about what the fans think or want, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

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New Avengers: Endgame Theory Says Steve Rogers Forgot To Fix A Branched Timeline

The rules of time travel are murky at the best of times, regardless of what movie or TV show they apply to, and fans will always try to pick holes in the logic. That’s definitely been the case with Avengers: Endgame, which has invited all sorts of analysis and constructive criticism over the methods and machinations used by Earth’s Mightiest Heroes to both pull off the time heist in the first place, and then send Captain America back to return the Infinity Stones.

For the most part, it was left up to our imaginations as to what happened as Steve Rogers journeyed across time and space, even if it’s a tragedy that we never got to see the look on Red Skull’s face when his arch nemesis showed up on Vormir, handed the Soul Stone right back to him and then f*cked off without any explanation.

Avengers: Endgame Behind The Scenes Photos

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However, a new theory has pointed out that one branched timeline was never fixed, and it’s all Hawkeye’s fault. When trying to figure out time travel in the first place, following a couple of mishaps involving Scott Lang, Clint Barton suits up and visits his farmhouse five years previously, taking a baseball glove to prove that his jump back had worked.

It never gets mentioned again for the remainder of Endgame, but the fact Clint had removed something from a past timeline and brought it to a present one would surely cause some kind of butterfly effect that would reverberate through the multiverse. As it stands, though, the test run is swiftly forgotten about as the Avengers deal with the much bigger fish they’re preparing to fry, namely a daring heist to gather all of the Infinity Stones at once and reverse the damage done by Thanos’ snap.

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