News Briefs: More KINGSMAN; Sony Casts METAL GEAR SOLID; Mads’s RIDERS OF JUSTICE For Magnet; Kitano Biopic ASAKUSA KID Gets New Life
If director Matthew Vaughn gets his way, the Kingsman franchise will have at least seven more films as well as a TV series on its slate. The franchise is adapted from a graphic novel about a clandestined organization of affluent, gentleman superspies, with the latest, The King’s Man, set to open in February. “We want to grow the business and the output,” said Marv Group CEO Zygi Kamasa to the Winston Baker UK Finance Summit late last week. “We have a Kingsman TV series in the works and there are two-three other franchises that are being developed alongside the Kingsman world.” (Andreas Wiseman, Deadline)
Six years after its announcement, Sony Pictures’s Metal Gear Solid movie has officially landed Star Wars franchise actor and upcoming Dune star Oscar Isaac for the role of Solid Snake. The live-action video game adapatation is based on the hit 1987 IP that first launched at Konami, and has Jordan Vogt-Roberts tapped to direct the story of “Snake, a soldier who infiltrates a nuclear weapons facility to neutralize the terrorist threat from Foxhound, a renegade special forces unit.” Derek Connolly penned the script and Avi Arad is producing with Peter Kang overseeing for Sony. (Justin Kroll, DEADLINE)
Magnolia Pictures’s Magnet Releasing is currently on track to release Riders Of Justice in Spring of 2021. The action thriller stars Mads Mikkelsen and is directed by Anders Thomas Jensen, and “follows Markus, a recently deployed military man, who returns home determined to exact revenge after his wife is killed in a train accident. Markus slowly begins to suspect that foul play is involved after speaking to a survivor of the incident and sets out to find the people responsible.” (Brent Lang, VARIETY)
Actor Yagira Yuya (Nobody Knows, Destruction Babies, Gintama 1 & 2), will star as comedian, legendary film star and filmmaker “Beat” Takeshi Kitano (Hana-Bi, Sonatine, Zatoichi) in Asakusa Kid, a new biopic being set up at Netflix from comedian, actor and filmmaker Hitori Gekidan (Bolt From The Blue). The film is based on a memoir of the same title written by Kitano, with actor Oizumi Yo (I Am a Hero) in the role of Kitano’s mentor, Fukami Senzaburo, a comedian who was Kitano’s mentor, and will focus “on the relationship between the young Kitano, starting when he was working at a strip club in the Tokyo entertainment district of Asakusa, and Fukami, who was the club’s reigning comic.” Oyamada Yochi of Nikkatsu is producing the pic with Sakamoto Kazutaka of Netflix serving as exec producer. The film marks a relaunch effort since Makoto Shinozaki’s own incarnation in 2002 from Kitano’s Office Kitano, the company the legendary actor and filmmaker quit back in 2018. (Mark Schilling, VARIETY)
