See What Ricky Whittle Could Look Like As Green Lantern John Stewart

See What Ricky Whittle Could Look Like As Green Lantern John Stewart

In advance of the Season 2 premiere of American Gods, star Ricky Whittle revealed that he is a huge fan of Green Lantern and has actually had talks about playing the Emerald Knight in Green Lantern Corps. He has the support of Michael Green, the screenwriter behind 2011’s Green Lantern and 2017's Logan, as well as the former showrunner on American Gods, but can he get the Green Lantern fanbase behind him? This fan art imagining what Ricky Whittle could look like as John Stewart certainly won’t hurt his case.

In brightest day in blackest night, no evil shall escape Shadow Moon’s sight! Actor Ricky Whittle makes for a pretty convincing John Stewart and he definitely has the look to play the part. Looking at this fan art from BossLogic, you can see why Ricky Whittle’s name has been out there, and he has even had conversations with the powers that be (The Guardians of the Universe?) about donning the power ring on the big screen.

This is just one interpretation of what Ricky Whittle could look like as the character, but there is a lot to like about the potential casting beyond just this pretty picture. There’s a reason Ricky Whittle often plays badass characters. That’s what he looks like and you put him in a Green Lantern suit with a power ring on his finger, and that effect is just increased.

Also, it should be said that hopefully Warner Bros. takes a cue from this fan art and goes with a more practical costume for whoever plays Green Lantern next versus the all-CGI suit used in the 2011 film. If that were to happen and Ricky Whittle were to be cast, he has said that he would do tours to watch the film with fans in full costume. That’s how much he wants the role.

Ricky Whittle has a very intense and magnetic presence in this image, and that is true of his onscreen roles as well. In American Gods he plays Shadow Moon, an ex-con acting as a bodyguard to the mysterious Mr. Wednesday. That may be his most prominent role, but he also proved his action chops in the under-seen and under-appreciated series The 100 as Lincoln.

Both of those characters are silent badasses, preferring to speak softly and carry a big stick, peaceful men with lethality hidden just beneath the surface. That could really work for John Stewart who is sometimes portrayed as stoic, with a quiet intensity as opposed to the arrogant and brash Hal Jordan or the goofy and childish Guy Gardner.

Based on his previous roles, I think that Ricky Whittle would be a compelling choice for John Stewart in Green Lantern Corps, and the fact that he’s had conversations about the film means that someone involved sees something in him as well. So perhaps this fan art will prove to be an early look at things to come.

DC’s Green Lantern Corps is expected to feature both Hal Jordan and John Stewart, although we haven’t heard much about the film since last summer when Geoff Johns updated fans that he just wanted to write the best script he could for the film before development really ramped up.

We’ll keep you updated on Green Lantern Corps and everything going on in sector 2814. Be sure to check out our 2019 release schedule to see all the movies headed your way this year.

Brie Larson Wasn’t In The Room With The Avengers For The Captain Marvel Mid-Credits Scene

Brie Larson Wasn’t In The Room With The Avengers For The Captain Marvel Mid-Credits Scene

Thanks to modern digital effects, there's essentially nothing that can't be made real in the movies. However, it's possible that's all being taken a bit too far. It turns out that a scene as simple as the mid-credits sequence of Captain Marvel, which required no special effects whatever, was actually done with a green screen.

The scene shows Captain America, Black Widow, and War Machine in the aftermath of Avengers: Infinity War. They're clearly still figuring how just how much damage has been done, but they've picked up Nick Fury's pager from the post-credits scene of that film and are monitoring it to see what it's all about. After the pager's battery dies, the team turns around to see Carol Danvers.

It turns out that, the two sides of the interaction were filmed separately and combined in post-production, as when Brie Larson did her side of the filming, she was all alone. According to Larson...

There was nobody else there — I was by myself on a green screen. I walked in, and they were like, 'Just real quick, we're just going to whip pan over to you and you're gonna go, 'Where's Fury?'

Brie Larson even says she was so in the dark on what was happening with the scene, she had to clarify just how she was asking the question? Was Fury in the room? Was he close by? Was she asking for directions or an explanation? Things were being so closely guarded at the time that she had very little information about what was going on with the scene.

It seems like an odd step to have to go to, to film the scene on a green screen, but Brie Larson tells The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, that since she actually filmed Avengers: Endgame before she filmed Captain Marvel, and there wasn't even a script for Marvel at that point, there really wasn't much of a choice.

If the mid-credits scene had been written, it could have been filmed during the production of Endgame, but since nobody knew they needed the shot, the green screen was the way to go, it was easier then getting all the Avengers together to film one scene.

Over the past two months Marvel fans have been sure to catch up on Captain Marvel. It's made over $1 billion at the box office and is the last chapter of the Marvel Cinematic Universe before Avengers: Endgame opens this evening. We've seen Captain Marvel return to earth, but what happens once she gets there? The answers will finally be revealed tonight. If somehow you still haven't caught Captain Marvel, it's still in theaters and you can probably still catch it before Endgame opens.

Check out Brie Larson's complete comments on The Tonight Show in the video below.

Watch Keanu Reeves Show Off His Duke Caboom Toy Story 4 Poster

Watch Keanu Reeves Show Off His Duke Caboom Toy Story 4 Poster

You didn't forget Keanu Reeves was going to be in Toy Story 4, did you? Yes, right after fighting for his life in John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum in May, Reeves is going to shrink down for his mighty role as new motorcycle daredevil character Duke Caboom in Pixar's 2019 Toy Story movie.

Disney has been gathering the new Toy Story 4 stars to show off their special character posters, so here's Keanu Reeves unveiling "the man, the myth, the legend -- Duke Caboom!"

YES! That's Ally Maki with him, and she voices Officer Giggle McDimples in Toy Story 4. She reposted Disney's Duke Caboom video with her own very relatable fangirl gushing over Keanu Reeves, adding that "he is so hilarious in this movie":

Only watched Speed 837 times as a kid in preparation for this moment. The man the myth the legend Keanu Reeves. He is so hilarious in this movie.

Keanu Reeves may not be known for comedy post-Bill & Ted, but just go find a copy of I Love You To Death and enjoy it because his comic timing is perfect. He really should be in more comedies, and I'm looking forward to what he does with Duke Caboom.

Duke Caboom was actually first introduced as an Easter egg in Incredibles 2, although fans didn't know that toy in the background would be showing up in Toy Story 4 -- and voiced by none other than Keanu Reeves.

Tim Allen (Buzz Lightyear) is the one who first told fans Keanu Reeves would be playing a role in Toy Story 4:

Keanu Reeves has got a great part. Actually, a little inside story, even [Reeves] said --- gentle, wonderful guy that he is --- 'This sounds too much like Buzz Lightyear.' And his character does have an edge to that. And the guy said, 'So we calmed him down a little bit,' and they reminded me his toy is only that big.

Keanu Reeves later explained he got a call out of the blue "from the lovely people at Pixar" and they pitched the character to him. They let him "kind of riff on it," he said, and it was a lot of fun.

Keanu Reeves later added to EW that he figured Duke should love what he does, since he's the greatest stuntman in Canada, so he wanted Duke to constantly be doing poses on his bike while he was talking. A motorcycle enthusiast himself, Reeves teased more of his character's story in the movie:

Duke becomes an important part of trying to save Woody and Bo’s mission. They take his skills as a motorcycle daredevil and ask him to confront his fear of failure in order to help the greater good.

Speaking of failure, Keanu Reeves said he wanted Duke to be an extrovert, but also have a bit of a sad backstory. (That appears to be going around in the Toy Story world.) Every kid has their toy, and apparently Duke let his kid down when he couldn't do what a commercial said he could do:

So he’s a wounded person! He’s needing to have some, I don’t know, catharsis. Some feeling. I wanted him to have a real sensitivity and a soft heart.… I also saw him as a character that has a really wide dramatic bandwidth in the sense of being so big. ‘Kaboom! Kapow! Let’s go!’ But who can also then share his wounds, like, ‘You have a kid? I had a kid. I let him down!’ And he can get quiet. So it was really a lot to play with on the playground.

Director Josh Cooley told EW Keanu Reeves added a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and ideas for the character:

Once Keanu came to the table, he was just asking all of these great questions about the character… and it made us realize that we weren’t digging deep enough for this character and there’s a real opportunity to have him support Woody’s story in a much bigger way.

I'm looking forward to seeing more from Toy Story 4, beyond the already intriguing and funny clips. It should be quite an emotional ride, based on previous teases from both Tim Allen and Tom Hanks (Woody). Toy Story 4 opens in theaters on June 21 as one of the many movies to keep track of through our 2019 movie release date schedule.

The Batman’s Filming May End Up Being Delayed

The Batman’s Filming May End Up Being Delayed

While the DC Extended Universe is embarking down a different path than what was initially planned, one of its most popular heroes isn’t going anywhere. The Batman is still chugging along, and while someone else will be taking over the Caped Crusader role from Ben Affleck, it remains one of the DCEU’s most highly anticipated projects. However, delivering exceptional products takes time, and in The Batman’s case, that could result in another filming delay.

Back in March, writer/director Matt Reeves, who’s been attached to The Batman since early 2017, said that it looked like the movie would start rolling cameras “around year’s end.” Now Variety’s Justin Kroll has heard that some script changes might result in that launch date being pushed back a bit. He wrote:

It’s taken a while for The Batman script to come together, as Matt Reeves was still busy with War for the Planet of the Apes when he first boarded the project, and he also re-wrote it from scratch to allow for more creative freedom. The script is closer than ever to completion, but polishing up the story is part of the game, and moving back production by just a couple months isn’t too big of a deal.

However, The Batman delaying production isn’t set in stone just yet. If these script changes don’t end up taking too much extra time, The Wrap reporter Umberto Gonzalez has heard that filming is set to begin on November 4 in London. So The Batman is still gearing up to finally begin principal photography, the question now is whether it will be unfold pre or post-Christmas 2019.

Of course, even if The Batman begins production within the next year, it’ll still be a long journey for the finished product to arrive. The movie isn’t being released until summer 2021, and while there are a few DCEU movies before then to keep fans entertained, it’ll have been four years since Ben Affleck’s Batman made his final appearance in Justice League. Still, it was a seven-year wait between Batman & Robin and Batman Begins, so this isn’t as bad.

Ben Affleck Confirms He's Done Playing Batman

In any case, it sounds like we’re still in for a long wait regarding who will inherit the Batman mantle from Ben Affleck. All we know for certain is that a younger actor is being sought to put on the cape and cowl, and that Matt Reeves reportedly wants someone famous. It’s also worth clarifying that even though this Batman will be younger, The Batman is not an origin story akin to Year One.

Beyond that, Matt Reeves revealed that The Batman will a noir-driven story that highlights the eponymous protagonist’s detective skills, which weren’t prominently featured in previous Batman movies. He also noted that many members of Batman’s rogues gallery would appear, with The Penguin reportedly among them.

The Batman will cast its shadow over theaters on June 25, 2021, so stay tuned to CinemaBlend for more updates. In the meantime, you can look through our DC movies guide to find out what else is coming down the DCEU pipeline.

New John Wick 3 Trailer Has Halle Berry's Dogs Going For The Crotch

New John Wick 3 Trailer Has Halle Berry's Dogs Going For The Crotch

John Wick is a man with a price on his head and a lot of people looking to collect it. That's the basic set up of John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum. A brand new trailer dropped today which has given us a better look at what's in store for our favorite assassin, as well as a first look at several new characters, and a few old friends, who will be joining this adventure. Also, we get to see some dogs who are going to totally tear some shit up, which is always fun. Check it out.

At the end of John Wick: Chapter 2 Wick had broken the rules of the Continental and thus ran afoul of the entire organization of assassins that worked within it. Now, everybody is out to get him.

We see John Wick going to a woman named Sofia, played by Halle Berry, for help. She's clearly not happy to see him as the first thing she does is shoot him herself. In the end, she seems to agree to help him, but not out of the goodness of her heart. She's not happy about it. As with all aspects of the John Wick franchise, there's history here. However, she does appear to send her dogs after a couple of hired guns, and one of them, if he survives, is likely to wish he was dead, based on where it looks like the dog is about to bite.

We get to see old friends like Ian McShane's character, who seems to be willing to help John Wick here, even though were told at the end of the last film that all Continental services would be off limits to Wick. We also see the return of Lawrence Fishburn's character from the last movie.

In addition to Halle Berry's character, we also see a couple of new antagonists who will be gunning for John Wick. Asia Kate Dillon plays an assassin known as The Adjudicator and Mark Dacascos plays a John Wick fan called Zero who is now on the hunt to kill him.

Needless to say, if you've been a fan of the previous John Wick movies, and if you haven't been, what's wrong with you, then it looks like John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum is going to have everything you could possibly want. And by "everything" I mean lots of beautifully choreographed action scenes involving guns, lots of guns.

In addition to the new trailer, an entire collection of new character posters were released showing off everybody of importance in the new film. Each one uses the tagline "Tick Tock Mr. Wick" implying that time is against our hero. However, Jason Mantzoukas is also playing a character called the Tick Tock Man. As he wasn't in the trailer, we know very little about him. Check out all the posters in the gallery below.

The Unexpected Challenge That Came With Creating The Portals For Avengers: Endgame

The Unexpected Challenge That Came With Creating The Portals For Avengers: Endgame

Warning: SPOILERS for Avengers: Endgame are ahead!

We’d already seen magical portals created in the Marvel Cinematic Universe before Avengers: Endgame, but not on this massive a scale. After Hulk brought those who were dusted at the end of Avengers: Infinity War back to life, Doctor Strange and his fellow sorcerers created gigantic portals to transport those MCU heroes and their numerous allies to the battlefield where Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and the others were already engaged with Thanos and his forces.

This portals sequence definitely ranked as one of the most epic moments in Avengers: Endgame, but just as you probably imagined, it was a huge effort to pull off. As Weta Digital visual effects supervisor Matt Aiken told me when I recently interviewed him, the massive size of the portals required he and his team to tackle creating them differently than how that task had been carried out in past movies. Aiken explained:

… Just in terms the technicalities in terms of achieving them, we’ve got portals on a much larger scale than they've ever been seen before. So our simulation team had to find a recipe that would recognizably be… we need to know that this is Doctor Strange’s portals that we're seeing here. They need to feel like the same because they've been seen on a more human scale in the past, but they all had to be optimized because we've got shots of many, many portals. So they would have been prohibitive to generate and render that if we just used the original technique out of the box.

Creating portals is one of those most useful spells a sorcerer can conjure in the MCU, but until Avengers: Endgame, we only saw Doctor Strange and others creating portals big enough to transport one or a couple people. For Endgame, the portals needed to be large enough for armies to walk through with ease. That makes for quite the visual spectacle, but for the VFX crew, it required them to rethink the process of bringing these portals ‘to life’ while still making them feel like what’s been shown before.

But it wasn’t just the size of the portals that posed a challenge in Avengers: Endgame. It was also showing the locations that these individuals were coming from, whether it be somewhere else on Earth or a planet on the other side of the galaxy. Matt Aiken continued:

And then we’ve got the challenge of creating all the worlds that we see inside the portals as well, because these are all these CG environments, there’s no filmed elements inside the portals, and that’s necessary because we need to film those environments with the same camera move that we're filming the ruined Avengers compound on the other side of the portal because everything has to lock together and parallax. And so recreating the fields outside the city in Wakanda, we’re creating New Asgard, we’ve got Kamar-Taj for the sorcerers and Contraxia for the Ravagers. We even got a few shots that where we’re just in deep space, and we've got Ravagers coming out on their sky cycles. And then of course there’s Titan itself, we’ve got that in a few shots as well. That was an opportunity for us to go back to a place that we spent quite a lot of time at last year.

The Marvel characters who were dusted wasted no time banding together once they were brought back to life five years later, and while I’m still curious how they were able to coordinate efforts so quickly, they arrived just in the knick of time from all corners of the universe. It sounds like this sequence wouldn’t have been possible had the Avengers: Endgame team relied on recreating the actual sets of these other MCU locations, but through CG manipulation, it was a much easier, but still ambitious endeavor.

Needless to say that had all those reinforcements not arrived through the magical portals, the heroes we’d been following along with since the beginning of Avengers: Endgame would have been pulverized by Thanos and his minions, who came from 2014 to invade Earth thanks to 2014 Nebula disguising herself as her 2023 self and opening up the Quantum Realm for them. However, even with these extra bodies, the battle didn’t automatically shift in the heroes’ favor.

It wasn’t until Tony Stark swiped the Infinity Stones from 2014 Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet, put them in his own nanotech Infinity Gauntlet and snapped his fingers that the bad guys were defeated. Sadly, such a move is too much for a normal human to handle, and the man we watched fight evil as Iron Man for over a decade died soon after. Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. Black Widow, met her demise earlier in Avengers: Endgame, and while he survived to the end of the movie (albeit much older), Steve Rogers’ story also wrapped up, as he passed on the Captain America mantle to Sam Wilson, a.k.a. Falcon.

The MCU isn’t wrapping up anytime soon, but it’ll probably be a long time before we see a battle of this scale again. The portals sequence was a cool way to set up the final leg of Avengers: Endgame’s climax; it’s hard to imagine all those heroes arriving on the scene in a more powerful way. The music, as if often the case with movies, also helped the moment emotionally resonate more.

For those of of you who are looking to experience more proper sorcery in the MCU, you’ll get that in spades whenever Doctor Strange 2 arrives, and perhaps some other movies coming down the pipeline will find a way to incorporate magic. Regardless, at least we know that if there’s ever a need to transport crowds of back-up into a messy conflict, Doctor Strange and his cohorts are on the job.

There’s still plenty of time to re-watch Avengers: Endgame in theaters, and while a Blu-ray/DVD release date hasn’t been announced yet, the movie will premiere on Disney+ December 11. If you’re wondering what’s coming up next in the MCU, head over to our Marvel movies guide for that information. If you’d rather learn what non-Marvel content is on the way later this year, look through our 2019 release schedule.

Dark Phoenix’s Sophie Turner Compares Jean Grey With Sansa Stark

Dark Phoenix’s Sophie Turner Compares Jean Grey With Sansa Stark

With the Game of Thrones series finale still fresh on our minds, seeing Sophie Turner move on from Sansa Stark to Jean Grey in less than a month is destined to attract comparisons. Ahead of the next X-Men film’s summer release, Turner has noticed some similarities between her two most-talked-about roles. Check out what she said:

I'm always drawn to strong, independent women and Sansa and Jean are both that. They eventually use all of these terrible things that happened to them and they become incredibly strong women.

That’s right! Over the years on Game of Thrones, fans have quite literally watched Sophie Turner’s Sansa Stark grow up from being a naive “little bird” to a powerful presence in Winterfell who answers to no one and owns her tragic life experiences. Jean Grey emits a somewhat similar energy as a member of the X-Men, who becomes haunted by her new powers and must fight for herself in Dark Phoenix.

However, Sophie Turner explained that Sansa is more self-assured than Jean is in the upcoming flick, who will grapple with her identity and place in the world after being hit by a solar flare and gaining new energy she doesn’t quite know what to do with.

In the HBO interview, Sophie Turner also compared the two franchises’ ability to be grounded in real emotion and human connection, despite being ridden with fantastical elements such as fire-breathing dragons and blue beasts. She also imagined Jean Grey in the world of Game of Thrones with these words:

If the world’s were to collide, I think Jean would probably be a Targaryen. She’s the Phoenix. She rises from the ashes just like Daenerys does at the end of season one. It’s all about fire, baby!

The comparison certainly fits! Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys famously walks through the circle of fire in the beginning of the series and rises with the strength of the Mother of Dragons. Jean Grey will take a similar journey in Dark Phoenix while the team is on a space mission to save some astronauts.

In Dark Phoenix, Jean absorbs a new energy that has her bursting into flames and causing some damage to the X-Men team. When they try to control her, she seems to find herself at a divide between the X-Men and Jessica Chastain’s character.

Also much like Game of Thrones, Dark Phoenix will mark the end of a long-running franchise and may wrap up the stories of characters fans have been following for years. The X-Men movies have been going on for almost 20 years, along with Jean Grey’s storyline, and this movie will presumably close it out now that the Disney/Fox merger has been completed.

Dark Phoenix hits theaters on June 7, alongside The Secret Life of Pets 2, the latter tracking to win the weekend over the superhero flick.

Are you excited to see Sophie Turner reprise her X-Men role in Dark Phoenix? Let us know in the comments below.