'True Blood' Will Meet the True Death Next Year
Today in show business news: HBO has announced the end of True Blood, Bill Murray takes another shot at Oscar, and Scarlett Johansson is a flesh-eating alien.
.Today in show business news: HBO has announced the end of True Blood, Bill Murray takes another shot at Oscar, and Scarlett Johansson is a flesh-eating alien.
After seven seasons, 362 plot lines, and 4 × 1012 characters, HBO has announced that True Blood will end next year. Meaning only one more run for Sookie and Bill and all those other characters nobody likes. And, yeah, the characters like Eric and Lafayette who people do like. How will it all end?? Well, last season saw everyone pretty settled, except for Eric, who was burning alive naked on top of a Swedish mountain. But he should be fine. Pam'll come get him or something. I'm sure the final season will mostly be silly stuff with some big bad to end all big bads. What haven't they fought yet? A few weeks ago I think I said yetis? Yetis should be the main villain? But I don't know about that now. That doesn't feel appropriate for a final season. I guess Dracula? I don't think they've done Dracula. Or they could just have everyone gang up on Sookie and chase her into the woods and then everyone has a party when she's gone because ugh, Sookie. However they end it, the point is they're ending it. And, I dunno, I think we might miss it, don't you? [Entertainment Weekly]
Bill Murray has been tapped to star in Barry Levinson's next picture, a movie called Rock the Kasbah set in Afghanistan. Murray will play a tired old music manager who goes on a USO tour to Afghanistan and finds a young female singer who he thinks can make it big. But of course it's Afghanistan so it's going to be a bit tricky to get her to Kabul and on the Afghan version of American Idol. Hm. That could be a good role for ol' Bill Murray. Maybe an awards-y role even? We all want Bill Murray to get his Oscar, because it would be a good story and he almost got it for Lost in Translation, and we've just been waiting for the movie. It looked for a second that it might be Hyde Park On Hudson, but then that went kablooey. So maybe this is it. This could be the one. [The Hollywood Reporter]
Derek Cianfrance, who recently made the wonderful epic melodrama The Place Beyond the Pines, will next direct an adaptation of the epic melodrama The Light Between Two Oceans, about a young Australian couple living on a remote island who discover a dead man and a living baby in a rowboat and decide to raise the child as their own. Apparently that decision has "devastating consequences." And Derek Cianfrance knows how to do devastating consequences! This will be interesting, getting him out of his upstate New York milieu and into a completely different time period. (The novel begins in the years after WWI.) Good decision on everyone's part. [Deadline]
Jodie Foster will direct an episode for the second season of Netflix's House of Cards, this coming after a directing gig on an episode of Netflix's Orange Is the New Black. Look at Jodie, becoming the director in residence at Netflix Rep. And hey, it should be fun for her to direct a Cards episode. What with her and Kevin Spacey talking back and forth with vague pronouns about their significant others, everyone else on set scratching their heads and shrugging their shoulders. It'll be a good time. [Vulture]
Here is a first... look? glimpse? I don't really know, it's not a trailer, for Under the Skin, an artsy sci-fi sort of a thing about an alien (Scarlett Johansson) wandering around Scotland luring men to their deaths for some reason. It looks very peculiar, but people are loving it at the Venice Film Festival. And you know what? Good. Good for Scarlett Johansson for going from The Avengers to a small art film directed by the guy who directed the bizarre but beguiling Birth. That's commendable. More actors should mix it up like that. I'm eager to see this.