film

In two days on Netflix, the film that last year caused people to riot in cinemas around the world

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When in a movie theater a baby zombie rides a chicken and the entire room, all teenagers, bursts into screams, throwing popcorn and TikTok is flooded with videos corroborating the chaos in the roomssomething has happened that has gone under the radar of industry forecasts. ‘A Minecraft movie‘ was not exactly the critics’ favorite of 2025, but it undoubtedly had one of the best box offices of the year. This weekend you can see why it happened in Netflix. In just two weeks, the film surpassed $550 million in worldwide receipts. It ended up close to a billion. A true phenomenon that revitalized the industry’s interest in video games, already highlighted by the success of ‘Super Mario Bros. The Movie’ in 2023 with its more than $1.36 billion at the box office. With Sonic, Mario and ‘Mortal Kombat’ having several sequels and a second part of ‘A Minecraft Movie’ scheduled for 2027, it remains to be seen if we are facing a momentary impact or a true trend. The movie does a good job in transforming the almost abstract original game into a story with minimal coherence: Steve (Jack Black) is a doorknob salesman with the dream of working in a mine and discovers a portal that transports him to the Overworld, the cubic world of Minecraft, where he is captured by Malgosha, a pig sorceress who seeks to dominate that world. Some time later he will join four strangers from the real world (including Jason Momoa) to find his way back home. The film’s impact not only translates into box office success, but also into a revitalization of the brand: by April 2025, ‘Minecraft’ had sold more than 350 million copies worldwide, consolidating its position as the most popular video game of all time. Following the film’s release, console and mobile sales of the original game grew by 35% and daily active users on console increased by 41%. A true phenomenon that demonstrates, once again, that while adults point to the moon with a solemn gesture, young people do, essentially, whatever they want. In Xataka | The latest from the director of ‘Longlegs’, streaming tomorrow: almost no one has seen it, but it is the most disturbing of the year

It is the most faithful recreation of a Viking battle in history, in a film that you can watch for free on streaming this week

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There is a sequence in sensational viking epic ‘The man of the north where the attackers move in columns, not in lines, as the Vikings actually fought. Any other production would have ignored that detail, but its director Robert Eggers remained faithful to reality. Now you can check it out for free and until June 19 on the platform RTVE Play. Historian William Short analyzed the combat in the film, evaluating how faithful the film’s depiction of battles was, and gave it a 9 out of 10 for historical accuracy, recognizing that the depth of Eggers’ research is reflected in the attention to these types of details. From Viking combat techniques to the credibility of the costumes, weapons and rituals of the time. For comparison, Short was much less generous with the 1958 classic ‘The Vikings’ with Kirk Douglas, to whom he gave just a 5 out of 10 for historical accuracy. Short’s starting point was precisely that battle formation in columns: the Vikings did not advance in long lines along the battlefield, and in the film three very characteristic advancing columns are distinguished. But his successes go further: Short also examined the figure of berserker played by Alexander Skarsgårdand although the nature of the berserkers remains somewhat mysterious, sources document that they went into a battle frenzy, howling like wolves and biting at their shields. As for the language, Eggers did not opt ​​for the usual English in these productions. He worked with Icelandic linguist Haukur Þorgeirsson to reconstruct Old Norse in ritual scenes and chants, taking poems written in medieval Iceland and reinterpreting them into what would have been the pronunciation of his time. In short: a must-see film for devotees of Nordic culture that is worth claiming, especially considering that it was a failure at the box office with just 69.6 million in worldwide receipts. In Xataka | Today on Netflix: the first stop-motion film made in Mexico arrives with the seal of Guillermo del Toro

Today the new film ‘The Lord of the Rings’ arrives on Netflix by surprise, whose genesis is as interesting as its plot

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The first Middle Earth anime, ‘The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim‘, lands on Netflix almost a year and a half after its discreet passage through theaters. The film that Warner swept under the rug a few weeks after its theatrical release is back on streaming, and its commercial journey is as bumpy as the fiction it narrates, set in Tolkien’s immortal creation. The story takes place 183 years before the events narrated in ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’. We will experience the fall of Helm Hammerhand, king of Rohan, against Wulf, a Dunlending lord who seeks to avenge the death of his father. The siege ends at the Tabernacle fortress, the bastion that generations later will be known as Helm’s Deep. In this way, an episode of the story of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ that Tolkien barely left outlined in the appendices is narrated in detail. Behind the camera was Kenji Kamiyama, a Japanese animator who had previously taken the reins of other legendary franchises, as he did in ‘Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex’ and ‘Blade Runner: Black Lotus’. However, the bet did not work at the box office: the film became the worst premiere of the entire franchise, grossing barely about 4.6 million dollars. Its worldwide collection was around 20 million against a budget close to 30. But… what is the reason for the release, somewhat secretly, of this film? Easy: retain rights. The making of ‘The War of the Rohirrim’ was accelerated so that New Line Cinema would keep the film rights to Tolkien’s work active while prepared new projects. The next step in that plan is ‘The Hunt for Gollum’, now with real actors, Andy Serkis directing and returning to play Gollum, produced by Peter Jackson and scheduled for release in 2027. The machinery continues to move forward, but in the meantime we have this wonderful animated appetizer. In Xataka | Today on Netflix: in 2019 no one gave a damn for it, and today it is one of the best adaptations of a video game

In two days, on Netflix, the first stop-motion film made in Mexico arrives with the seal of Guillermo del Toro

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There are projects that are literally made with a lifetime’s savings. ‘I’m Frankeldathe first stop motion animated feature film produced entirely in Mexico and which comes with the seal of Guillermo del Toro’s production, comes to Netflix this June 12 with more than one hundred hand-built puppets, four years of craftsmanship. The beginning of its story dates back to 2021 and a semi-unknown anthology miniseries. It was in that year when the Mexican studio Cinema Fantasma, founded by brothers Arturo and Roy Ambriz, premiered on HBO Max (not available in Spain) ‘The Hidden Scares of Frankelda’, a stop motion anthology miniseries starring a ghost writer who tells horror stories to children. The success of the series led to the jump to feature length, initially as a 30-minute special, which grew to become a two-hour film. The Ambriz brothers ended up financing the production with their own savings. We will meet Francisca Imelda in 19th century Mexico, a writer of horror stories whose texts are ignored and dismissed by those around her. Forced into silence, she adopts the pseudonym Frankelda and continues writing until a tormented, supernatural-looking prince, Herneval, guides her on a journey into her own subconscious. Turned into a ghost, she discovers that The monsters he invented have come to life and threaten the balance between fiction and reality.. Just like explained Roy Ambriz: “When Mary Shelley published her books, she had to do so under the name of her husband, Percy Shelley. So we asked ourselves: how many Mary Shelleys would there have been in Mexico?” After seeing a provisional montage, Del Toro congratulated the creators and sponsored the project. The director was already in contact with the brothers since 2015 and the short film ‘Revoltoso’, which he produced. In ‘Soy Frankelda’ he served as creative advisor. It is a role in which the director fits perfectly, since he not only won the Oscar with his own version of ‘Pinocchio’ for Netflix, but he has supported the art of stop motion in very diverse ways, such as with the creation, together with the platform and the Parisian animation school Gobelins, of a stop-motion studio-laboratory. In Xataka | Today on Netflix, 6 seasons of a brutal and fast-paced action series with an impeccable score

Ukraine turned drones into hunters. A helicopter shot down in Hormuz has transformed them into a Spielberg film

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In April 1944, a small Sikorsky YR-4 helicopter went behind Japanese lines in Burma to rescue four soldiers isolated. That operation is considered the first military combat rescue carried out by a helicopter and opened a new era in the recovery of personnel under enemy fire. More than 80 years later, another innovation has just taken an equally transcendent step. Apache shot down at the most delicate moment. The fragile truce between the United States and Iran was brought to the brink of collapse when a US AH-64 Apache attack helicopter fell into nearby waters to the Strait of Hormuz during a patrol mission. Trump claimed that the aircraft had been shot down by Iran and promised a military responsewhile different American sources suggested that the impact would have been caused by an Iranian drone, possibly a Shahed. Although it remains completely unclear whether the attack was deliberate or accidental, the incident had a huge symbolic load because it occurred in one of the most sensitive points on the planet, through which a fifth of the world’s oil transits and where Washington and Iran have been facing each other for months in a war of attrition marked by naval blockades, air attacks and constant episodes of tension. Ah64 The immediate response. The political reaction was almost as rapid as the incident itself. trump publicly declared that the United States had to respond to the shootdown and a few hours later the US Central Command announced retaliatory attacks against Iranian targets. Although operations seemed to remain within from a limited framework to avoid a new generalized escalation, the episode demonstrated the extent to which the ceasefire remained extremely fragile. The statements of Iranian officialscombining references to diplomacy with veiled warnings, made clear that both sides were trying to avoid outright war while continuing to send messages of strength to each other on the ground. The real event. However, the most relevant thing about the entire sequence was not the fall of the Apache or the subsequent retaliation. The truly revolutionary thing happened when the two surviving crew members were rescued. For decades, combat search and rescue operations have depended on helicopters, specialized aircraft and human teams that had to enter extremely dangerous areas to recover downed pilots. In Ukraine we have seen drones attacking, watching, taking prisoners, guiding artillerytransporting supplies and even intercepting other dronesbut the conflict between the United States and Iran has just shown something different: for the first time an autonomous naval drone He recovered two soldiers in the water and brought them to safety. It is an advance that until very recently seemed like something out of a science fiction movie and that marks a conceptual leap as important as the one represented by the arrival of the first combat drones. The Corsair and the birth of a new mission. They remembered the TWZ analysts that the protagonist of this operation was the corsairan unmanned vessel developed by the Saronic company and operated by Task Force 59 of the US Navy. Measuring 7 meters in length, capable of sailing more than 1,800 kilometers and with a high level of autonomy, the system located the two pilots, picked them up at sea and moved them to a safe area where they were later evacuated by helicopter. What is really new is that the Corsair was not initially conceived for rescues, but for maritime surveillancerecognition and tracking of vessels. The incident has shown that these systems can take on much more complex and delicate tasks, becoming a kind of first step in rescue capable of penetrating areas that are too dangerous for manned platforms. Lesson learned after years of high-risk rescues. The US military has been concerned for years about the vulnerability of its search and rescue units. Previous operations, such as pilot recovery shot down inside Iran or rescue missions in heavily defended scenarios, forced helicopters, planes and specialized personnel to be exposed to enormous risks. He use of the Corsair offers a completely new alternative. Instead of immediately sending a manned aircraft to an area threatened by missiles, drones or anti-aircraft defenses, an autonomous vehicle can arrive first, secure survivors and transport them to a point where other means operate more safely. It is a solution that reduces human risks and greatly expands the possibilities of action in future high-intensity conflicts. From the Strait of Hormuz to the Pacific. The implications go far beyond the Gulf of Oman. The US Navy already imagines networks of autonomous vessels distributed over entire regionsespecially in the Pacific, capable of monitoring sea routes, detecting threats, supporting military operations and, if necessary, rescuing downed or shipwrecked pilots. The concept is reminiscent of a network of mobile emergency stations spread over huge ocean areas. The Apache experience shows that these systems are no longer simple floating sensors or surveillance platforms, but rather operational actors capable of intervening directly in critical situations. The next silent revolution. The Ukrainian war turned drones in absolute protagonists of the modern battlefield and transformed the way we understand ground combat. However, the Apache episode points towards a new evolution. The great advance no longer consists only of using drones to destroy targets, but in trusting them with missions traditionally reserved for human beings. The rescue of the two American pilots represents the first known example of a personnel recovery executed by an autonomous vessel in a real military environment. It may seem like a minor detail compared to missiles, airstrikes or strategic retaliation, but it will probably be remembered as one of those discrete moments that herald a much more profound transformation: the moment when drones stopped being just weapons or hunters and also became rescuers. Image | US Navy In Xataka | The US had a ship with 2,000 marines ready to invade Iran. Now he has sent it right to the place where China worries the most In Xataka | In Lebanon, the war is becoming difficult to explain: drones to take over a 1,000-year-old … Read more

They have found a 1968 vampire film that they thought was destroyed for being too scary. Now we can check it

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A projectionist at a cinema in the British county of Dorset opened a rusty film can in a warehouse. It was an episode of a series that had been missing for years and about which the legend had spread that it was too scary. However, the explanation for its disappearance was much more mundane: the same reasons why seventy percent of British television programming at the time had disappeared (or so it was believed). What they found. On May 23, the film preservation organization Film is Fabulous! announced the discovery. Darren Payne, a projectionist and technician who runs the 35mm film exhibition collective ‘Dirt in the Gate Movies’, commissioned a small collection of film reels that was about to be destroyed. One of the cans had handwritten, without further detail, ‘Late Night Horror’. “I’m a horror fan and the title resonated with me,” Payne explained. He took the film home, screened it on his own computer, and what he saw left him speechless: the first episode of a series that had been believed to have been destroyed for more than half a century. Nothing like a vampire. ‘No Such Thing as a Vampire’ is the pilot episode of ‘Late Night Horror’, a series of six 25-minute episodes that BBC2 broadcast in the spring of 1968. It was the network’s first color horror production, although the recovered print is in black and white: a 16mm secondary run made for international distribution before the color masters were removed. What is it about? The script was based on a story by the great Richard Matheson, a writer to whom the fantastic Anglo-Saxon owes, among other things, the founding novel ‘I am legend’ and 16 episodes of the original series of ‘The Twilight Zone’. The plot follows a woman who appears paler and weaker every morning, with marks on her neck, while her husband and the family doctor discuss whether or not there is a vampire in the town. The answer is the kind of twist that Matheson was adept at: rational, disturbing and with a bitter aftertaste. Who is behind. The direction was, amazingly, by a woman: Paddy Russellwho at that time was already an exceptional figure at the BBC. She was the first female plant manager of the entity and one of the first two directors of the chain, at a time when the technical teams were dominated by men to the point that the name with which she appeared in the reports (Paddy is a diminutive of Patricia, but can be perceived as an acronym for Patrick) also functioned as a kind of protection. Russell directed two of the six episodes of ‘Late Night Horror’: the first, now recovered, and ‘The Corpse Can’t Play’, the only one that was already known. With this discovery, his complete work in the series once again exists. The episode aired on 19 April 1968 at 10:55 pm and attracted 1.8 million viewers, the highest audience of the series and one of the highest BBC2 had recorded since its launch in 1964. The legend. This is where we must clarify the legend of “the episode that was destroyed because it was too terrifying”, a rumor that has been spreading on the internet mainly due to the creepy credits of the series. Actuallybetween the mid-1950s and mid-1970s, the BBC eliminated between 60 and 70% of its television production due to company policy: two-inch tape masters were very expensive, union contracts prohibited more than one or two rebroadcasts, and there was no legal obligation to archive the material. It was not until 1981 that the BBC began to retain its archives. ‘Dr. Who’ is the case of the most famous series with episodes lost due to this policy. ‘Late Night Horror’ disappeared, exactly like hundreds of other shows disappeared. That is why a 16mm copy has been found: it was certainly not in BBC warehouses. With this international material, lost episodes of ‘Doctor Who’ have also been recovered. It will be seen. At the moment the BBC is investigating whether it is technically possible to recover the original color through chromatic restoration processes, since the episode was recorded in color but only survived in black and white. And there will be a grand premiere: on September 20, 2026, as part of Grindfest. It will be the first time the episode has been seen since its only showing in 1969. Who knows if they will appear in some forgotten warehouse. Like a horror movie. In Xataka | The curse of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’: the horror story that Hollywood has been trying to adapt for 20 years without success

the last film directed by one of the greatest masters in the history of cinema

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Clint Eastwood turned 96 on May 31. And a bit of coincidence, with a statement from his son, jazz musician Kyle Eastwood (saying that “he’s retired now, but I’ve been very lucky to be able to work with him on quite a few films”), we’ve learned that Eastwood is no longer going to make any more films. There have been no official statements, but the retirement of the person responsible for ‘Unforgiven’ or ‘The Pale Rider’ leaves us with a filmography full of great films, of all genres and intensities. Let’s celebrate by remembering the last of them, ‘Jury Nº 2‘, released in 2024 and which you can see in Movistar Plus and HBO Max. ‘Jury No. 2’ is a judicial thriller with a moral dilemma on board, as Eastwood likes them: Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is called to serve on a jury in a high-profile murder case, and discovers that he himself could be more involved in the crime than he thought. The cast is completed with a veritable array of heavyweights such as Toni Collette, JK Simmons and Kiefer Sutherland. The film is Eastwood’s fortieth as a director. ‘Jury No. 2’ was conceived originally as a direct streaming premiere. The change to a limited theatrical release It arrived after some internal passes that yielded very favorable opinionsbut he barely received advertising coverage from the studio, which was said to have resented the author for the poor box office results of ‘Cry Macho’. It was finally released, as was later learned, not only out of respect for the director’s advanced age, but in recognition of his 50-year relationship with Warner Bros. This stimulating thriller closes an absolutely exemplary career, always halfway between popular genres and auteur cinema, since the time of his international fame aboard some of Sergio Leone’s most significant titles. Between those first successes and his recognition by critics starting with ‘Unforgiven’ in 1992, there was the creation of milestones such as Dirty Harry and a series of absolutely superb westerns and thrillers, often directed by himself. He has spent this entire century praised by critics and the public thanks to films like ‘Million Dollar Baby’ or ‘Mystic River’. In Xataka | Rafa Nadal won 22 Grand Slams and lost 18 more due to injury: the documentary that explores those last ones arrives on Netflix today

Tom Hanks refuses to participate in the remake of this classic Hollywood film

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In 2000, during the promotional tour for ‘Náufrago’, a journalist asked Tom Hanks If you would be willing to put yourself in the shoes of the protagonist of a remake of ‘The Invisible Harvey’, the 1950 fantasy comedy whose cast already led James Stewart and a rabbit that doesn’t exist. The response was blunt: “It’s like saying that we are going to make a new version of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life!’ For what? Leave her alone. ‘Harvey’ is perfect as it is, thank you.” Harvey: Origins. Before being a movie, ‘Invisible Harvey’ was a play. Its author, Mary Chase, took two years to write and premiered it on Broadway on November 1, 1944. It lasted 1,775 performances, until 1949, and in 1945 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In it, Elwood P. Dowd is an affable, bar-loving man who finds a good friend in Harvey, a six-foot white rabbit-like pooka (creature from Celtic mythology) that only he can see. His sister tries to put him in a clinic in a play that asks what exactly it means to be sane. The movie. When Universal bought the rights, James Stewart was the natural choice for the lead. The film hit theaters in December 1950 and performed reasonably well: around $2.6 million in revenue, but insufficient to cover the high rights costs for the work. Josephine Hull won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress and Stewart was nominated, but the memory of the film eventually faded in time, recovering decades later as a piece of unintentionally lysergic friendly fantasy cinema. Other remakes… by Tom Hanks. Hanks rejected the project in 2000, but it cannot be said that the actor is opposed on principle to updating stories from the past. Or at least it wouldn’t be in a short time: in 2004 he starred in ‘The Ladykillers’ by the Coen brothers, a remake of Alexander Mackendrick’s 1955 British crime comedy ‘The Quintet of Death’. In 2022 he made ‘The Worst Neighbor in the World’, directed by Marc Forster, a direct adaptation of the Swedish ‘A Man Called Ove’ (2015) by Hannes Holm. A remake that has a tail. ‘The Invisible Harvey’ has been on the verge of materializing on numerous occasions, without ever coming to fruition. Don Gregory acquired the rights in 1996 and ended up selling them to Miramax, which He didn’t do anything with them either.. In November 2003, John Travolta was in negotiations to star in a remake co-produced by Dimension Films and MGM, which also fell through. The most serious attempt came in 2009, when Steven Spielberg he was interested in directing the film under the umbrella of Fox and DreamWorks. Spielberg’s first choice for Elwood was his frequent collaborator Tom Hanks, but when Hanks turned down the role, Spielberg shelved the project. Later the names of Robert Downey Jr. and other actors such as Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler circulated, without any of those names reaching beyond speculation. In December 2018, Netflix announced that it had picked up the rights to the project, with the writers of ‘Shrek 2’ and ‘The Smurfs’ on board. But since that announcement no progress has been made. The versions that did exist. Although the film remake was never made, the film does have history on television. The first remake came in 1958, with Art Carney in the title role. It was well received at the time, but without leaving too much of a mark. In 1972 it was James Stewart himself who returned to the character, in a Hallmark Hall of Fame production for NBC. Stewart accepted this second opportunity because he was dissatisfied with his performance in the original film: the result was a darker version and more faithful to the play than to the film. In 1996 the most forgotten version arrived: an adaptation for CBS with Harry Anderson as Elwood, and with Leslie Nielsen in the cast, with added scenes and a change of tone that was not very convincing. That same project was the one that Don Gregory ended up selling to Miramax when the rights to the film remake continued to float around. Header | Dick Thomas Johnson In Xataka | Originality is dead in Hollywood: ‘Moana 2’ culminates a year where only sequels triumph at the box office

The day Spain wanted to be Spielberg doing science fiction. It was such nonsense that Tarantino ended up claiming the film

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In 1982, during the filming of Fitzcarraldo In the Amazon jungle, Werner Herzog heard a completely real proposal from several local indigenous people: they offered to kill Klaus Kinski to put an end to the problems he was causing on set. The German director rejected the idea, but years later he would admit that for a few seconds he seriously considered accepting the offer. The impossible movie. In the mid-80s, Spanish cinema was still very far from Hollywood. Science fiction blockbusters seemed to be the exclusive territory of Spielberg, George Lucas or Ridley Scott, while comedies and much more modest films in terms of media predominated here. Then the director Fernando Colomo appeared and decided do exactly the opposite of what seemed sensible: raising a medieval science fiction epic with aliens, castles, special effects, international stars and the largest budget in the history of Spanish cinema up to that point. The result was so enormous, chaotic and Martian that it ended up becoming a symbol first of absolute failure…and decades later in a cult film claimed even by Quentin Tarantino himself. movie poster Spain in Hollywood style. The dragon knight was born as a completely improbable idea: mixing the myth of Sant Jordi with Encounters in the third phasemedieval fantasy, absurd humor and romantic science fiction. The story began with a spaceship mistaken for a dragon in the middle of medieval Europe and a silent alien (played by Miguel Bosé) falling in love with a princess after accidentally kidnapping her. Colomo came from triumph with the comedies of the Madrid Movida, but decided to launch into a gigantic project by Spanish standards. The budget is over exceeding 300 million of pesetas, a crazy figure for the time. Huge sets were built, models and storyboards that were unusual in Spain were designed, and some of them were experimented with. the first digital effects of national cinema. The problem is that Spanish cinema in 1985 simply did not yet have the necessary industrial infrastructure to build something like that without everything exploding into the air. Martian Bosé, Keitel sunk and Kinski unleashed. The casting seemed like an international frenzy. Harvey Keitel accepted the project at one of the lowest moments of his career after working with Scorsese. Miguel Bosé finished turned into an alien because Imanol Arias “did not have the face of an alien,” according to Colomo himself. And then there was Klaus Kinski. The German actor arrived at the filming as a ticking bomb human. He constantly insulted the team, shouted “What a shitty movie!” During the days, he demanded more money, disappeared when he wanted and turned any technical delay into an attack of fury. Apparently, he only respected Miguel Bosé (and for being Picasso’s godson) and the gypsy animal caretakers on the set. To give us an idea, Keitel even offered to pay out of pocket to settle one of Kinski’s contractual tantrums. The atmosphere was so unbearable that Colomo tried to film all the German scenes before meals so I can have a quiet lunch without him. History left the moment when Kinski finally finished his sequences and left the shoot, when the team celebrated his departure. opening bottles of champagne All wrong. The film was shot amidst constant rain, delays, cost overruns and situations almost surreal. An extra was about to drown during a sequence on a lake because the armor was too heavy and he couldn’t stay afloat. An electrician managed to rescue him at the last moment and then used that anecdote for years to demand work in new Colomo films. Not only that. The castle where they were filming was so poorly located that the crew had to upload loading material on exhausting days every morning. Miguel Bose I could barely breathe inside his spacesuit and diving suit it continually fogged up. Meanwhile, money was disappearing at breakneck speed. What had started as an ambitious fantasy ended up becoming something of a kind. suicide expedition where every day seemed to bring a new logistical disaster. The final failure. When The dragon knight It hit theaters in 1985, the reaction was brutal. Part of the criticism destroyed her describing it as a botched, absurd and inoperative fantasy. Although the film was relatively seen and became the seventh highest-grossing Spanish production of the year, that it wasn’t enough to recover such a crazy budget. To make matters worse, the American distributor broke agreements due to delays in the delivery of the material and Colomo lost a trial in Hollywood that left him without international rights. The director finished in debt with 50 million of the old pesetas and, according to would count Years later, he only kept “a Renault 5.” The experience was so traumatic that he thought he was going to have a heart attack. In fact, to survive financially he wrote almost as an emergency The joyful lifewhose subsequent success allowed him to pay off the debts accumulated by that medieval space madness. From disaster to cult movie. For decades, The Dragon Knight was remembered as one of the big hits of Spanish cinema. But over time something began to happen that has been repeated in many other celluloid productions: many people began to see it with fascination. Its impossible mix of genres, its naive tone, its disproportionate ambitions and the chaos that each scene gives off transformed it into a unique rarity. Festivals like CutreCon They claimed it as a cult work and the film ended being restored in 4K forty years after its premiere. The definitive turn came when Colomo remembered a conversation in Sitges with Quentin Tarantino. The American director, always obsessed with strange and failed films, immediately recognized Star Knight (his international title) even before Colomo himself remembered what it was called in English. It turned out that that martian medieval that almost ruined half the world ended up surviving in the most improbable way: converted into a delirious relic of a moment in which Spanish cinema believed, … Read more

Today the sequel that took 24 years to film and ended up failing at the box office after spending a huge budget arrives on Netflix

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It took Ridley Scott 24 years to return to the Coliseum. When he did it with ‘Gladiator II‘, a cast that was breathtaking was brought in, with Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal and a budget that, depending on who you ask, exceeded 310 million dollars with the expectation of repeating the magic of its predecessor, which had won five Oscars in 2000. It didn’t quite succeed, but in streaming it has a second chance: you have it starting today Tuesday, April 28 on Netflix. The first announcement of a sequel to ‘Gladiator’ It dates back to June 2001, just a year after the release of the original. And Russell Crowe was on board even though his Maximus had died on screen. For years, Scott toyed with crazy ideas that included the resurrection of the character or a plot about the afterlife. The project stalled when DreamWorks sold the rights to the franchise to Paramount Pictures in 2006. What got the sequel out of limbo was that Scott saw Paul Mescal in the first few episodes of ‘Normal People’ and wanted to work with him. Scott also wanted to resolve the plot of Lucius Verus, then a child, now sixteen years after Maximus’ death. He lives under another identity in North Africa, until the Roman army invades and destroys his home, kills his wife and enslaves him. Brought to Rome as a gladiator, Lucius falls under the control of a former slave turned arms dealer, who uses him in the arena of the Colosseum while he secretly weaves his own plans to seize the throne from the corrupt twin emperors Caracalla and Geta. And so began an eventful filming, interrupted by the screenwriters’ strikes, which sent costs skyrocketing, according to some sources, beyond $300 million. With a final collection of 462 million worldwide, the business was somewhat lame. However, with its passage through platforms (in the United States it is exclusively on Paramount+, and has been on VOD for months), it is very possible that ‘Gladiator II’ can boast more comfortable profits and thus give rise to the already planned ‘Gladiator III’ in which Mescal has already expressed his interest. In Xataka | Today the animated spin-off of the platform’s only powerful franchise premieres on Netflix: ‘Stranger Things’

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