Latest news with #Star Wars
France 24
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- France 24
Terence Stamp, 60s icon and Superman villain, dies
"He leaves behind an extraordinary body of work, both as an actor and as a writer that will continue to touch and inspire people for years to come," media quoted the family saying. Stamp, exploded on to the screen in the 1960s as a leading man, even then sometimes playing troubled characters. At one point, he seemed to specialise in playing brooding villains Later still, he broke out of that typecasting to play a partying transgender woman in "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert". From Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Theorem" to a villain's role in one of the "Star Wars" films, the handsome leading man captivated audiences in both art house films and Hollywood blockbusters. He lent his magnetic presence to more than 60 films during a career that spanned a range of genres. Heroes and villains The London actor from a working-class background, born on July 22, 1938, had his first breakthrough in in Peter Ustinov's "Billy Budd". His performance as a dashing young sailor hanged for killing one of his crewmates, earned him an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe for Best New Actor. Carving out a niche for his alluring depictions of broody villains, he won Best Actor at Cannes in 1965 for "The Collector", a twisted love story adapted by William Wyler from John Fowles's bestselling novel. His 1967 encounter with Federico Fellini was transformative. The Italian director was searching for the "most decadent English actor" for his segment in an adaptation of "Spirits of the Dead", a collection of Edgar Allen Poe stories. Fellini cast him as "Toby Dammit", a drunken actor seduced by the devil in the guise of a little girl. Another Italian great, Pasolini, who cast him in the cult classic "Theorem", saw him as a "boy of divine nature". In the 1969 film, Stamp played an enigmatic visitor who seduced an entire bourgeois Milanese family. 'Kneel before Zod!' He also had a relationship with Jean Shrimpton -- a model and beauty of the sixties -- before she left him towards the end of the decade. "I was so closely identified with the 1960s that when that era ended, I was finished with it," he once told French daily Liberation. But the dry spell did not last long. Stamp revived his career for some of his most popular roles, including in 1980's "Superman II", as Superman's arch-nemesis General Zod. His famous line from that film, "Kneel before Zod!" was spreading online in social media tributes after the news broke of his death. Other roles followed, including that of Bernadette, a transgender woman in "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" (1994), in which Stamp continued his exploration of human ambiguity, this time in fishnet stockings. He continued to pursue a wide-ranging career, jumping between big-budget productions such a villain's role in "The Phantom Menace" one of the Star Wars films to independent films like Stephen Frears's "The Hit".
Forbes
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Disney Brings Marvel, Star Wars, Alien And Other Fan Favorites To Webtoon
Disney (NYSE: DIS) is teaming up with digital storytelling platform Webtoon (NASD: WBTN) to bring some of its biggest stories to the vertically-scrolling mobile comics format favored by today's readers. According to a joint announcement by the two companies, Webtoon will offer titles including The Amazing Spider-Man, Avengers, Star Wars, Alien and Disney As Old as Time: A Twisted Tale on the platform, with more selections and original content coming soon. Under the deal unveiled today, Webtoon will feature around 100 comics from Marvel, Star Wars, 20th Century Studios (e.g. Alien) and Disney in a new section of the English-language app. Fans can sample a few free episodes, then unlock new chapters using Webtoon coins that are purchased on the site. Considering the small number of titles at launch, the costs of reformatting legacy content into vertical format at scale, and historical limitations to the size of the digital comics market in North America, it is unlikely this deal will make much tangible difference to either company's bottom line in the near future, but the alliance of two heavyweights occupying different quadrants of the comics and pop culture space does have symbolic and strategic value. Webtoon gets to add some of the world's most lucrative IP to its existing library of hundreds of thousands of original works that span the gamut from user-generated content to best-sellers like Lore Olympus and Tower of God, potentially helping it broaden its appeal in growth markets outside of northeast Asia. Webtoon reports about 150 million monthly active users worldwide for its serialized, vertically scrolling comics, optimized for quick reading on mobile phones. Its demographics skew younger and more female, with content that leans into fantasy, romance, horror, comedy and slice of life genres. Superheroes have been conspicuous in their absence. One imagines that will change when Marvel shows up in force. For Disney, the deal represents an opportunity to reach a new generation of digital comics fans on their platform of choice. Marvel Comics, the longtime market-share leader in sales of periodical comics, traditionally sells to older superhero fans who buy physical copies in comic shops or download entire issues on apps like Marvel Unlimited or Amazon's comiXology. So anything that promises to bring those audiences closer together could provide a shot in the arm for a comics publishing business in the grip of some external uncertainties. 'Our collaboration with Webtoon will allow us to expand our beloved franchise universes on a best-in-class digital platform,' said Daniel Fink, SVP, Head of Digital Innovation, Disney Consumer Products, in a prepared statement. 'We look forward to engaging with their dedicated, global user base while welcoming future fans to experience a redefined form of Disney storytelling that will have a lasting impact in the digital comics space.' According to today's announcement, the two companies will also produce original webcomic series from Disney, Marvel, 20th Century and Star Wars properties, presumably optimized for the format and storytelling style of the Webtoon platform. 'The Disney, Marvel, 20th Century and Star Wars brands are among the most legendary, creative and successful in the industry,' said Yongsoo Kim, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Webtoon, quoted in the announcement. 'We're thrilled to kick off this collaboration with iconic series from their comic book catalog – and this is just the start! Together, we're brining this legendary storytelling to a new generation of mobile-native comic fans, while giving existing fans a new way to experience the series and characters they love.' Earlier this summer, ahead of the Disney partnership announcement, Kim was even more straightforward about Webtoon's ultimate vision for the industry. 'The vertical scroll format revolutionized digital comics,' he wrote in a 'prediction' for the future of digital comics. "Now that same innovation is being applied to traditional comics as publishers digitize and reformat their catalogues for digital distribution. Hard-to-find issues and content will be a thing of the past, as the entire history of comics is digitized. This will open up a new revenue stream to publishers' back catalogues and – even more exciting – introduce a younger, mobile-first audience to the incredible art and storytelling that have defined comics for generations." Both companies appear open to experimentation to grow the market. Webtoon has collaborated with Marvel in the past on projects like The Eternals: The 500-Year War and a series of webtoon adaptations in South Korea. The company has also partnered with DC Comics, Dark Horse, Archie, IDW and others on various series, including the popular Wayne Family Adventures (DC). Marvel recently announced a digital distribution deal with DSTLRY, a startup founded by Amazon ComiXology veterans, operating on a different revenue model from Webtoon. The announcement is the latest in a series of moves that Webtoon has undertaken since spinning off from its South Korean parent company Naver in an IPO last summer, to demonstrate continuing momentum in an industry that has contracted from pandemic-era highs. In the past year, the company has leaned hard into its role of generating new IP for media development, its back-end technology, its in-house production studio, and now the value of its vertically-scrolling interface as a new presentation format for legacy comics content. The Disney partnership announcement accompanied Webtoon's earnings report for Q2 (ending 6/30), which showed the company reporting $348.3M revenue, up 8.5% or 5.5% on a currency adjusted basis, and exceeding the top end of the guidance it gave investors earlier this year. Net losses narrowed to $3.9 million from $76.6 million the prior year, reflecting lower expenses. Shares were up sharply in after-hours trading immediately following the earnings report and the Disney announcement.
The Guardian
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Disneyland at 70: artists on the park's five best rides – and why they still captivate
A visit to Disneyland can be an exhausting experience. The line for a ride can be hours long; there are hordes of overstimulated children and the sheer quantity of gift shops is overwhelming. When the park first opened, on 17 July 1955, an adult ticket cost $1 and kids were 50 cents: now a single day's entry for one person can easily run $200 or more. Despite all the kitsch and cartoon capitalism, though, Disneyland still delivers moments of actual magic, and that's largely due to the inventiveness of its theme park rides. Disneyland's most beloved attractions are not simply rollercoasters or carousels – they're enduring works of immersive art. Teams of visionary designers and fabricators have collaborated to make and remake these rides over the decades: some popular rides from the park's opening in 1955, such as the Jungle Cruise and the Mark Twain Riverboat, are still in operation, while the park's newest ride, inspired by Tiana, Disney's first Black princess, opened just months ago. Alongside its beloved mid-century relics, such as Sleeping Beauty's Castle, Disneyland has constructed new 'lands' to woo new fandoms, including a replica of Batuu, the smuggler's outpost on the Outer Rim of the Star Wars galaxy, which features new tech and more interactive Star Wars rides. Disneyland's new work and its seven-decade creative legacy continues to inspire some of today's leading experience design and immersive theater practitioners. 'You could take any single medium from any of these rides and it would most obviously be art – whether it's sculpture, scenic painting, the sound design, the storytelling,' argues Vince Kadlubek, a co-founder of Meow Wolf, an American art collective that has built interactive art experiences in five cities, including Las Vegas, Nevada, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. But the fact that many of Disney's rides have been designed with children in mind means their creative merit and ambition is often discounted. 'Why is fun not part of art?' Kadlubek asked. 'Why is joy and play not a part of art? Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, a UK-based immersive theater company responsible for transformative hits like Sleep No More, agreed. A Disney ride 'is a complete hybrid of all the disciplines, and will deploy everything simultaneously', Barrett said. And with an amusement park ride 'you're feeling alive in a way you very rarely are when you experience single-discipline art, because you're physically present'. Even the long wait times for Disneyland rides have been turned into opportunities for creative innovation, Barrett noted. Disney's 'mastery of queue design', particularly on newer rides, is an inspiration: 'It's not just about the ride, it's about the anticipation building up to that ride.' The park turned 70 this week, and to mark the occasion we talked to artists, designers and historians about five of Disneyland's greatest artistic masterpieces, and why these rides continue to inspire new generations of storytellers. It's a Small World is a placid ride, without big thrills or surprises: visitors sit in small boats and glide past arrangements of animatronic figures dressed as children from cultures around the world. The ride's tinkling theme song plays overhead. But six decades after it first premiered as part of the 1964 World's Fair, the ride still has long lines. The mid-century aesthetic of the ride's building, scenes and characters, is mesmerizing in its detail. Mary Blair, the concept artist for Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, designed the look of the ride and chose its bold colors; Rolly Crump designed its gleaming tower and the Sherman brothers, who wrote many of Disney's hits, composed its signature song, with major feedback from Walt Disney himself. The rides' themes of youthful innocence and longing for global cooperation still resonate, said Bethanee Bemis, who curated an exhibit at the Smithsonian and wrote a book on the reflection of American history in Disney's parks. 'All children share the universal language of play,' Bemis said. Today, some of the cultural symbols chosen in the 1960s may read as racial or ethnic stereotypes: there is a snake charmer in one scene, and crocodiles and hyenas in an African tableau. Disneyland has tried to strike a balance between preserving the ride as a nostalgic time capsule and meeting more contemporary expectations about cultural representation, Bemis said. Some of its most successful updates have been adding new touches of cultural authenticity, like including traditional parol lanterns during the Christmas season for Filipino visitors. Long before it inspired the early 2000s film franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean was a standalone ride – one that put visitors in a boat and sent them on a seafaring journey. The ride is the last one that Walt Disney worked on himself – and it's ambitious, both in the quality of its audio-animatronic pirate figures and its narrative sweep – not to mention the engineering challenge of digging the tunnels underground necessary to build the ride, Bemis said. The experience begins gently, with riders drifting through the dusk of a bayou and listening to a banjo play. Then the boats descend into darkness, and with a sudden drop, emerge into the dangerous world of the pirates where cannonballs fly overhead, ships glide past cities on fire and pirate crews fight and carouse onshore. While the ride has been updated with details from the more recent film franchise – such as animatronic figures made to look like Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp's character in the films – what makes it work is the attention to the ride's fundamentals, designers said, from the pirate costumes that the ride attendants wear, to the temperature at different phases of the ride: humid and warm in the bayou, and then chilly when riders plummet into the skeleton-filled 'Davey Jones' locker' under the sea. 'Somehow, they have manipulated the environment to set mood and tone through temperature and humidity control,' said Noah Nelson, the publisher of No Proscenium, a publication that covers the US immersive experience design industry. He called the technique 'super effective'. 'Every single aspect of these rides has been designed with the most care and attention. I don't think we go inside a lot of places like that these days,' said Jeff Stark, who teaches a course on design for narrative space at New York University. 'The craftsmanship that you encounter inside of Disney – the level of thought, of preparation – matches what it is like to go inside a cathedral. The amount of care that was put into Pirates of the Caribbean is far more than the care that was put into the church that I grew up going to.' The Haunted Mansion begins with a group initiation in the dark tower room of an old Victorian house. The tower appears to grow to uncanny heights, as the oil paintings of ancient dignitaries on the walls expand to reveal their deaths. 'We have 999 happy haunts, but there's room for a thousandth,' a deep voice asks. 'Any volunteers?' The ghostly figures and spooky tricks of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion were created in the 1960s, and they're decidedly low-tech, made with old-fashioned smoke-and-mirror devices like Pepper's Ghost. That only makes the ride more appealing, said Kathryn Yu, a Los Angeles-based game designer. 'In a world that's increasingly digital, it is charming to see these physical effects in person.' As candles flicker, visitors are led through the dark halls to the tombstone-shaped 'doom buggies' that will whisk them through one haunted scene after another: a ghostly banquet hall, a seance, a graveyard. Many Disneyland's first 'imagineers' came from backgrounds in animation, 'so they really understood cinematography, and the perspective of the audience as a camera', Yu said. In The Haunted Mansion, as in the Pirates ride, the designers packed each spooky vignette with 'character development, backstory, an emotional connection to one of the ghosts'. One of the famous moments in the Haunted Mansion is when the 'doom buggies' swing backwards before descending into the graveyard, putting viewers on suddenly their backs, staring upwards at skeletal branches, as if they themselves are being lowered into a grave. In creating Punchdrunk's latest experience, Viola's Room, a gothic mystery now playing in New York, the British team repeatedly referenced Disney rides, Barrett said, including discussing how to create theatrical surprises that would affect viewers' bodies in the same way as a sudden drop in a roller coaster. (One tactic they're trying is asking visitors to go through the experience barefoot.) The 2006 cartoon movie Cars, a toddler favorite, might not seem like the most inspirational source material for an immersive work of art. But Radiator Springs Racers, Disneyland's Cars-inspired ride, is massive in its ambition: it's nothing short of a full recreation of the red rock spires of the American south-west, complete with native plants and the replica neon-lined main street of a small desert town. (At a reported $200m, it was also the most expensive Disneyland ride at the time it was built). If you visit Zion national park in Utah or Monument Valley in Arizona after seeing Radiator Springs Racers, Bemis, the Smithsonian curator, said, 'You feel like you've already seen the real thing.' The ride taps deeply into the American nostalgia for Historic Route 66 in the 1950s, Bemis said, an era of nostalgia that came too late for Walt Disney himself to appreciate, but that strikes a chord with the park's other tributes to small-town American life. 'It's really stunning work,' said Kadlubek, the Meow Wolf artist. While the ride ends with a shriek-inducing car race and includes plenty of interaction with fast-talking cartoon automobiles, it begins with a more contemplative cruise through the faux desert landscape. 'There's this really beautiful romanticism to it,' Kadlubek said. The most popular new ride in Disneyland's new Star Wars-themed area 'surpasses everything that's been attempted before' in experience design, Kadlubek argued, calling it 'ambitious to a pretty absurd degree'. The ride is set in a newly built area of the park, Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, that allows movie fans to visit a replica of the battered frontier planet of Batuu. There are bars, restaurants, a giant version of the Millennium Falcon and Storm Troopers who stalk the streets, occasionally interrogating visitors. Several designers who are Star Wars fans said the atmosphere feels eerily like being inside the films: Nelson said he's sometimes content just to sit in the replica Docking Bay 7, listening to audio of space ships streaming overhead, and drinking a cup of 'Caf,' as coffee is known in the Star Wars universe. 'My first time stepping into it, I felt like I came home,' he said. Rise of the Resistance tells an elaborate story that begins in the waiting line, where visitors are treated as new recruits to the resistance against the villainous First Order. After an early mission goes awry, they are taken captive. Costumed actors playing members of the First Order mock them while marching them off to an interrogation cell: members of the resistance have to break them out of prison, then lead them on a wild escape journey. The process of moving the visitors into the experience, and even getting them into the 'transports' they ride in, is deeply embedded in narrative. 'It goes from being a 3-minute ride to this 20-minute long saga. They really reinvented what we would expect from a ride,' Stark said. Under pressure from Harry Potter world at Universal Studios, Stark said, Disney introduced newer ride technology in Rise of the Resistance, leaning heavily on trackless ride vehicles, which are programmed to move the visitors through space without physical rails, creating new opportunities for ride tricks and surprises. But like the best early rides, what makes Rise of the Resistance thrilling is the accumulation of tiny details, Stark said, like the moment when 'the sparks from Kylo Ren's lightsaber are showering around you, and you feel like you're in this moment of threat'.
