George Lucas Writes Sweet Tribute To Peter Mayhew

George Lucas Writes Sweet Tribute To Peter Mayhew

Star Wars fans were saddened to learn about the recent death of Peter Mayhew, the man who brought the Wookie Chewbacca to life for the majority of the franchise. Friends and colleagues have been sharing their thoughts on the iconic actor. George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars has penned his own tribute to the man where he talks about how Mayhew was discovered and placed in the film that would define his career.

According to George Lucas, finding somebody to play Chewbacca was actually quite complicated. While all Lucas was really looking for was somebody tall enough to play the part, finding that proved difficult. Eventually however, a hospital attendant named Peter Mayhew was found and Lucas cast him as soon as he saw how tall the man was. According to Lucas...

Peter was a wonderful, wonderful man. He kept his job in the hospital through the first three movies. But he fell in love with the character. And then as Star Wars grew in fame, and he started doing more festivals and public appearances, he realized he could actually make a living just off the personal appearances. He was very gentle, very sweet, very easy to get along with. He was more like a Wookie than I originally imagined a Wookie to be. Originally, I envisioned Chewie as some big ferocious beast, but Peter's Chewie wasn't really ferocious. No matter how hard he tried, he wasn't ferocious. He would be your best friend until he got angry, then stand back. He was a gentle giant.

The idea that Peter Mayhew kept his job working at a hospital while also being in the biggest movie franchise of all-time is just adorable and hilarious.

While Mayhew would have a handful of other acting jobs over the course of his career, he really did just make a living being Chewbacca for the most part. It's clear he truly loved playing the character.

Mayhew hasn't played Chewbacca at all in the last couple films, with the costume being handled by Joonas Suotamo in both Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Solo: A Star Wars Story. Mayhew hadn't been in the best health of late, so his passing wasn't necessarily a shock, but it was still sad news.

George Lucas' comments in THR are a wonderful tribute from the man who created Chewbacca and found the perfect person to give him life. While Lucas says he initially envisioned Chewbacca as a ferocious beast, it was Mayhew who turned him into the lovable giant he became. It's impossible to think of Chewbacca as anything else now.

Chewbacca will live on. Joonas Suotamo is set to bring the character back in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. While Mayhew may never inhabit the suit again, his contribution will certainly never be forgotten.

A Popular Walt Disney World Attraction Is Making Its Way To Disneyland Resort

A Popular Walt Disney World Attraction Is Making Its Way To Disneyland Resort

While there are many great attractions that exist at both Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World, there are also those that you can only experience if you visit one park or the other. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride hasn't been at Walt Disney World in a long time and the only remaining Twilight Zone Tower of Terror in North America is at Walt Disney World. Since 2003, if you wanted to experience the 3D film Mickey's PhilharMagic, you had to go to the east coast, or another country, but that's about to change, as the popular attraction will be making its debut at Disney California Adventure next month.

The show will open soon at the Sunset Showcase Theater in Hollywood Land. The location was the former home of Muppet*Vision 3D before being replaced by a Frozen Sing-Along Celebration in 2014. Since 2016 however, the location has been a theater without a theme that has been primarily used to show previews of upcoming Disney theatrical releases.

According to the Disney Parks Blog, Mickey's PhilharMagic will take place at the Sunset Showcase Theater, not replace it. This would seem to imply that this means the show will only be a limited engagement, rather than a new permanent attraction, though no official opening or closing date have been announced, so that's not clear.

The show is making the move during a year long celebration of Mickey Mouse, called Get Your Ears On – A Mickey and Minnie Celebration, so if I were a betting man, I'd expect to see PhilharMagic hang around for the rest of this year at least.

While the name of the attraction is Mickey's PhilharMagic, the real star of the show is Donald Duck. All of your favorite classic Disney characters, Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and Goofy are preparing a concert for the audience. Donald, while getting the orchestra ready to perform, picks up Mickey's sorcerer's hat from Fantasia, which results in a lot of magical chaos and ends up throwing the duck through a number of musical moments in classic Disney animated movies like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.

In addition to the 3D film, a number of "4-D" effects, like water being sprayed at the audience, and various scents being pumped into the theater help deepen the immersion of the experience. The Muppet Theater was outfitted for at least some of these, so it's likely they'll make the jump to California.

Of the various 3D shows that have appeared at Disney Parks over the years, Mickey's PhilharMagic is absolutely one of the better shows, so seeing it be added to Disney California Adventure, in what has been a criminally underutilized space in recent years, is very nice. Hopefully, the show will hang around until something more permanent is created for the theater. The show may be 15 years old, but a decades old show is a better use of the theater than glorified movie trailers.

Images courtesy WDWnews.com/Disney

Ava DuVernay Totally Wants To Direct A John Wick Movie

Ava DuVernay Totally Wants To Direct A John Wick Movie

Ava DuVernay has become one of the most prominent and well known directors in Hollywood today. She has a strong following on socaia media and has helmed films from the Oscar winning Selma to Disney's adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. However, there is one particular area of Hollywood, the tentpole action blockbuster, which Duvernay says she has yet to get an opportunity to make, and she's very interested.

Specifically, the director of the upcoming Netflix miniseries, When They See Us, says that if she'd been offered John Wick Chapter 3, she would have been all over that. According to Duvernay...

I don’t get offered a lot, and what I do get offered is usually historical or something to do with women and black people. Like, I’m not getting John Wick 3, even though I’d love to make it. I have a good friend who directed second unit on Star Wars and is kicking ass. I have a friend who’s on Westworld right now. Are there enough of us? No. Certainly not for a lack of women being interested in or capable.

All three John Wick movies to date have been directed by Chad Stahelski, (the first was a co-directing effort with an uncredited David Leitch). Following three successful films in the franchise, and Stahelski's own comment that he's happy to keep making the films as long as people keep wanting to watch them, it seems unlikely that anybody will be taking over that director's chair anytime soon.

Having said that, Ava DuVernay's broader point, that she's not being offered many movies at all, and especially not of the genre's that tend to have broader audience appeal, is a point well taken. It seems that because DuVernay has made her name thanks to historical biopics and stories about Black people, those are the projects she's being offered.

There have been some exceptions of course. DuVernay made history becoming the first woman of color to direct a movie with a budget over $100 million with A Wrinkle in Time. She's also signed on to direct her first comic book movie with DC's New Gods. Still one would think that with DuVernay's track record there would be studios lining up to offering her work.

As she points out to The Guardian, the number of women and women of color who are working in prominent directing positions is an unfortunately small list. She does mention, Victoria Mahoney, who is the second unit director on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, so there are steps forward being taken.

While we might not see Ava DuVernay direct a John Wick movie, hopefully someday she'll get a shot a big budget action movie. She could certainly bring a new perspective to the genre that it's never seen before, which might be just the sort of thing that Hollywood needs.

Meagan Good Loves A Very Specific Part About Her Top Secret Shazam Role

Meagan Good Loves A Very Specific Part About Her Top Secret Shazam Role

Warning: This story contains major SPOILERS for Shazam!

In one of the best kept superhero movie secrets in recent memory, the end of Shazam! saw Billy Batson transform his foster siblings into the Shazam Family to help him defeat Doctor Sivana. This necessitated adult actors to play the grown up, superhero versions of the kids. Among them was Meagan Good, who plays the superhero version of Faithe Herman’s Darla Dudley.

CinemaBlend got to speak with Meagan Good in St. Louis while she was promoting her new film The Intruder. During the conversation, the actress spoke about the very specific part she loved about her top secret Shazam! role. She said:

More action. More action, more fighting. I also love, because I definitely wanted to do the action and be kick-ass, but I love that I get to be a little girl. I love that I get to show the goofy side of myself because I don’t get to show that in most of the characters that I play, so it’s kind of like the best of two worlds.

Like most actors it seems, Meagan Good was thrilled to do all of the fun action and fighting that her superhero role required, but the part that she really loved was that her character was a kid. Although Superhero Darla may look like an adult on the outside, on the inside she was still just the sweet and precocious little girl that we had seen throughout the film.

The nature of the role allowed Meagan Good to let her inner kid come out, have fun with her performance and act goofy. As she said, her goofiness is not the kind of thing that she usually gets to show in most of her roles, and certainly not in something like The Intruder, which is a thriller that pits her against an insane Dennis Quaid.

You see that goofiness in Meagan Good’s performance in Shazam! and it really sells the fact that this is a little girl that has suddenly found herself with incredible powers in an adult superhero body.

So the actress loved her secret cameo as Superhero Darla in Shazam! because it gave her something different to do than what she generally does from an acting perspective, while also allowing her to express herself and show a side of her personality that people don’t often get to see.

Combine that with the opportunity to do a bunch of kick-ass action, and it really made Shazam! a rewarding experience for Meagan Good. Hopefully that experience gets to continue and play an even bigger part of the story in Shazam! 2. Although a sequel hasn’t been confirmed as of yet, there are some signs that it is in the works and it would be a shame if we didn’t get to see more after one of the DCEU’s best films to date.

You can listen to Meagan Good speak to CinemaBlend about her top secret role in Shazam! in the video below:

While we don’t know when you’ll be able to see Meagan Good back in the superhero realm, you can still catch the actress on the big screen now in The Intruder. Next year she stars in the video game adaptation Monster Hunter. For everything heading to theaters this year, check out our 2019 Release Schedule.

One Thing Captain Marvel Is Seriously Missing

One Thing Captain Marvel Is Seriously Missing

This past weekend saw the release of Captain Marvel, and based on the weekend’s box office, a lot of people wanted to see this movie. Professional reviews were complimentary, if not glowing, and overall I really enjoyed it. However, as I walked out of the theater last week, I must admit I felt like there was one thing missing from Captain Marvel. The music. Don’t get me wrong, Captain Marvel had music. It had good music, but the music that you remember coming out of the theater is the 1990s pop soundtrack, not the score that was composed for the film. Captain Marvel had some epic moments, but it was short on an epic theme.

A lot of comparison has been made between Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman. Both are recent solo superhero movies starring female leads. However, when I compare my emotional impressions of these characters to each other, Wonder Woman comes out on top quite easily. The reason, I think, is that when I think of Wonder Woman, I think of Hans Zimmer’s powerful theme that he created in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. You know what I mean. It's the one moment in the film that everyone agrees was great.

That music simply isn’t there when I think of Captain Marvel, and the character suffers because of it.

To be fair, the problem of a less than memorable score is not exclusive to Captain Marvel. It’s a problem the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe suffers from. The music isn’t bad and nothing is wrong with it, but there’s nothing quite like a memorable character theme, and few Marvel movies have them. Captain Marvel does have a theme, and it’s actually pretty decent, but I had to play the soundtrack on Spotify to hear it. I couldn’t tell you when in the movie it gets played. I don't recall hearing it at all, and that's part of the problem.

If you listen to Pinar Toprak's Captain Marvel score in its entirety, you'll hear that it's actually really good. The problem is the way it's mixed into the film. It's designed to fall into the background. It's designed to have you not notice it. It makes one wonder why the studio bothers to score so much of the movie if they don't want you to hear the music.

Marvel hasn't seemed as if it wanted us to care about the music for years. If the studio did, the music would be more consistent across films. Iron Man has three different themes in three different solo films, more if you count songs by AC/DC. Captain America has an actually pretty great theme in The First Avenger, which is then barely used in The Winter Soldier and utterly forgotten after that. Instead, Cap has a new theme in that movie, one you still never hear again. While Marvel has done a stellar job of making sure that its films have continuity of story, there is none in the music.

Some of this may be because nearly every Marvel movie is handled by a different composer, and clearly those composers want to make their own music, but it's not like the Harry Potter films forgot the theme John Williams wrote after he stopped scoring the movies.

Superhero themes can be some of the best pieces of music in modern films. John Williams’ theme for Superman and Danny Elfman’s Batman theme are classics. One Marvel theme, the Avengers theme, is a key part of the single most memorable moment in all of the MCU.

That moment would not have been nearly so memorable without that piece of music. It’s one of the few pieces of music that has been carried over from one film to another. It even shows up in Captain Marvel. It was at that point when I heard it that I realized that the movie had no noticeable theme for the main character the movie was actually about.

Of the 20+ movies and 10 + years that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there are only a few themes worthy of note. If you look back at Avengers: Infinity War, a movie that contains basically every character who has ever appeared in the MCU, the only pieces of music you might recognize are the Avengers theme, which gets used twice, and the Wakanda theme from Black Panther.

And if we're being honest, one of those uses is totally wrong. The second time we hear the Avengers theme in Infinity War is when Thor, Groot, and Rocket arrive during the battle of Wakanda and help turn the tide. Only one of those characters is an actual Avenger. That moment would have been the perfect place for Thor's theme, an epic piece of music that told you the Asgardian was once again ready to fight with a new weapon by his side.

The problem is, if that piece of music had played, nobody would have recognized it because nobody can hum Thor's theme. Does Thor even have a theme? He has two actually. The movie needed a piece of music that conveyed to the audience all of that same information, and the Avengers theme is the only piece of music the audience knows well enough to be able to do that.

In the case of Captain Marvel, there is at least something of a reason why the score was downplayed. The focus, musically speaking, was on the '90s era music that made up the bulk of the soundtrack. The movie wants you to hear No Doubt more than it does the orchestral themes.

Still, we don't have to only pick one. The Guardians of the Galaxy movies make their '70s pop soundtrack not simply part of the movie, but part of the plot, and that didn't stop James Gunn and Tyler Bates from giving the team a solid theme that was used well in both Guardians of the Galaxy movies.

I loved almost everything about Captain Marvel. Everything on the screen was great, and yet, somehow I found something was lacking. What was missing was what I didn't hear. I hope that when Captain Marvel returns in Avengers: Endgame, her theme will be given some room to breathe. I hope some attention is given to it, because it will only make the character stronger.

Jordan Peele Wasn't Sure He Could Make A Whole Movie In A Year

Jordan Peele Wasn't Sure He Could Make A Whole Movie In A Year

This past weekend, Jordan Peele conquered the sophomore slump with the launch of an incredible success. More than two years removed from the launch of Get Out, the filmmaker has now absolutely horrified audiences everywhere with Us, and it's proven both a critical and box office hit. It's pretty incredible when you think about it, however, because the movie was actually made start-to-finish in about a year - and the writer/director behind it wasn't entirely confident going in that it could be done properly within that time frame.

Following the theatrical release of Get Out, Jordan Peele could really just move directly into his next project, primarily because of his directorial debut's success. The quality of the feature kept him fully invested in it and discussing it for more than a year, and it meant that he wasn't able to get to work on Us in earnest until early 2018. This was actually a serious concern for the filmmaker, who revealed his thoughts on the matter during an interview with Polygon:

When I was doing the Oscar campaign for Get Out, it sort of took me out of the creative process for several months. Us really got creatively going in full after that, last March, about a year ago. It turns out I can make a movie from start to finish in about a year, although a lifetime of imagery was tapped for it.

There is no part of Us that feels like it was in any way a rushed production, and, in fact, the complete opposite is true. This is a movie that audiences are going to be digging into and rewatching for years to come, and films like that usually take years of delicate creation to fully create. The fact that Us was made in such a limited time frame truly only makes the finished product that much more impressive.

Obviously Jordan Peele isn't the first filmmaker to start and finish a movie in twelve months, and it's worth noting that Us isn't exactly a giant, CGI-filled blockbuster, but one has to keep in mind that every film is taxing experience to get made - no matter how big or how small. Peele clearly had to exude a ton of creative energy to get the work done, and it paid off in a huge way - but one also has to wonder if it's a pace he could or should keep up.

It really all comes down ultimately to Jordan Peele's comfort. If he feels that he can confidently make a movie every other year, giving himself 12 months for creation and 12 months for promotion, that's wonderful. If, however, that proves to be too much for him, hopefully he will get the opportunity to slow down and work at a more reasonable pace. The guy certainly has a lot on his plate (let's not forget he's producing the new Twilight Zone for CBS All Access, as well as a fresh take on Candyman), so if he needs to take some extra time to be the best filmmaker he can be, I can't imagine there is any fan out there who would hold it against him.

Jordan Peele has not yet given any clues as to what he's planning as his third feature, but you can be sure that we will be waiting for updates with bated breath. In the meantime, Us is now playing in theaters everywhere.

Black Widow’s Big Avengers: Endgame Scene Originally Went Down Differently

Black Widow’s Big Avengers: Endgame Scene Originally Went Down Differently

Spoilers ahead for Avengers: Endgame

Avengers: Endgame may have already been in theaters for weeks, but the public hasn't recovered from from the film's wild events. The Russo Brothers masterfully brought the blockbuster to theaters, in a story that balanced character-driven story with epic action. But Endgame went through quite a few changes before finally arriving theaters, including Black Widow's story.

Black Widow has been the soul of The Avengers since early in the group's formation, sharing an intimate bond with all of the OG members. So her sacrifice to procure the Soul Stone was fitting and emotional, as was the tension between she and Hawkeye as they tried to stop each other. But it turns out that the Soul Stone sequence in Endgame could have contained even more action, with Thanos and his forces arriving to stop the Avengers. Endgame editor Matthew Schmidt recently revealed this, saying:

On script and what we first shot was an excellent scene. Thanos and his soldiers show up on Vormir and a small battle ensues between them and Natasha and Clint. Natasha decides to run off the cliff. Clint tries to stop her while also fending off the attack.

Well, that's a different type of heartbreaking. Because while Natasha was always meant to sacrifice herself for the Soul Stone, the journey toward her death changed throughout the course of Endgame's development. In the theatrical cut, Hawkeye and Black Widow were left to ponder Red Skull's comments, and decide who should end up jumping in order to complete the Time Heist. But it originally included the duo being attacked by Thanos' forces, adding in an extra level of drama and action to the scene.

It may have been thrilling to see Black Widow and Hawkeye team-up in battle one more time in the scene described to Business Insider, but I think that the correct version of Endgame's Soul Stone scene was ultimately in the theatrical cut. Cutting out the threat of Thanos and his outriders allowed the scene to breathe, and for Clint and Natasha to have one last tender moment with each other. What's more, the two Avengers scuffling in order to try and sacrifice themselves was unique type of action for the blockbuster.

Related: Avengers: Endgame Originally Gave Black Widow A Heartbreaking New Job

Black Widow's death was the first big one in Avengers: Endgame, and showed what a massive arc the character had gone through within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She refers to the Avengers as her family to War Machine, and helped to regulate superheroic efforts in the wake of Thanos' snap. She was also the most determined to fight back and reverse the snap-- whatever it takes.

It should be interesting to see what comes next for Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow. While Hulk wasn't able to bring her back with his snap, the character will finally get her own solo movie in Phase Four. Smart money says it'll come in the form of a prequel, finally revealing Natasha's sordid past. ScarJo's contract with Marvel is also up with Endgame, so the actress should get a serious pay bump for another appearance.

You can watch Black Widow's sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame, in theaters now. Be sure to check out our 2019 release list to plan your next trip to the movies.