Latest news with #StatenIsland
Forbes
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘The Home' Director Wanted To Show A Different Side Of Pete Davidson
Pete Davidson as Max in 'The Home' While Pete Davidson is widely known for his standup specials and eight-season tenure on Saturday Night Live, filmmaker James DeMonaco hoped to show the 31-year-old comedian in a different light with The Home (now playing in theaters), a horror-thriller set against the backdrop of a retirement community hiding dark secrets. 'We knew Pete could do more than comedy,' says DeMonaco, creator of the lucrative Purge franchise, who co-wrote the new film with longtime friend and collaborator, Adam Cantor. 'We knew Pete as a man. We knew him as very soulful person. And I'm like, 'Pete's got more in him than what people see on SNL.'' DeMonaco and Davidson have known each other 'for a while,' owing to the fact that they're both Staten Island natives. 'His mom's house is half a mile away,' notes the former. The two first met around the release of the first Purge movie in 2013 while Davidson worked as a bus boy at a local Italian restaurant. 'The owner, introduced me to Pete said, 'This is a young comedian who wants to be an actor,'' DeMonaco remembers. 'He went on to SNL, but we always stayed in touch and were actually writing a comedy together right before COVID. Then COVID hit and we really didn't see each other. I think we played Call of Duty Zombies during the pandemic. He had also written a wonderful comedy version of The Purge that I was trying to get going with Blumhouse and Universal." That project never got off the ground, but DeMonaco was determined to work with Davidson at some point, and the opportunity finally arose via The Home. The comedian headlines the piece as Max, a product of the foster system trying to avoid jail time by accepting a job as a custodial worker at a retirement home. At first, the elderly residents — like Lou (John Glover; Gremlins 2: The New Batch) and Norma (Mary Beth Peil; Dawson's Creek) — appear warm and welcoming, but as time goes on, Max begins to suspect that the place is more than just a place for senior citizens to spend the remainder of their golden years. 'Pete brings a lot to the table,' DeMonaco says. 'I think he had an avenue into Max's trauma and loss since he's experienced great loss in his own life. He was able to find the wayward soul that Max had become and [relate to the way in which the character expresses himself] through graffiti. Pete often expresses himself through art. There was parallel there, and that's why Adam and I knew Pete was right for this character.' The idea behind the film was partly inspired by Robert Altman's 1977 psychological thriller, 3 Women, starring Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall. 'When you watch the movie, it's very ill-defined, but it takes place at this kind of weird desert spa with old people,' DeMonaco explains. 'It freaked me out as a little boy. The whole movie feels like a dream [and] I love movies that feel like you're watching someone else's dream.' At the same time, he and Cantor wanted to subvert the longtime cinematic trope of elderly characters being portrayed as 'very cute and cuddly,' à la Ron Howard's Cocoon. In a way, The Home is Get Out with octogenarians. 'We were like, 'Oh, wouldn't it be fun to do something where the old people aren't the cliche depiction of cute and cuddly? [What if] there was something nefarious behind [them]?'' The bulk of production took place at a recently-closed old age home run by nuns in Denville, New Jersey. 'It was very creepy and I think it was haunted,' says DeMonaco, who was able to forestall the building's demolition just long enough to film the movie. 'It had just been abandoned, so there were still a lot of personal effects,' he adds. 'We would find very ominous things like little plaques on the wall [commemorating] where someone died. It was around for 100 years, so it had great history to it. That detail is very hard to recreate." Despite the serious nature of his role, Davidson always insisted on doing a comedic take, just in case DeMonaco found a place for it in the final film, with the director joking, "We could probably edit together a pretty humorous film here, which would be fun to watch.' L-R: James DeMonaco and Pete Davidson on the set of 'The Home' And since this is the creator of The Purge we're talking about, there also had to be a little sociopolitical commentary thrown into the mix, 'without being preachy and proselytizing,' affirms the director, who added in a subplot about a destructive hurricane, as well as an eerie educational video from the Cold War period extolling the wondrous benefits of drilling for oil (you'll know it when you see it). 'I guess the idea of climate change and previous generations raping the [environment] was on my mind," muses DeMonaco. 'My daughter was turning a teen at the time and looking out for her future. I think it all coalesced into this weird idea about a crazy retirement community.' The Home standing as an allegory for older generations ruining the planet for future ones is 'there for people who want to feel it,' DeMonaco continues. 'And hopefully, it's just a fun genre piece for everybody else.' When it comes to flaunting its horror colors, The Home doesn't blink — quite literally. Unafraid to make you squirm, the film contains a litany of distressing imagery, the most notable of which is a needle going into Max's eyeball (see below). While the needle was digital (for obvious reasons), the close-up shot of the clamped-open peeper was completely practical, necessitating the presence of two doctors and a nurse who were there to make sure there was no long-term impairment to Davidson's vision. 'I wanted to get the big shot, which was the close-up first,' DeMonaco says. 'Obviously, I wanted to do a wide so people would see that it's Pete. Two minutes into the close-up, the doctor walks over to me and says, 'You've got about another 30 seconds before we do real damage to Pete's eye.' So we had to get the clamp out of his eye. I never got the wide, but I do want the audience to know that that's Pete Davidson doing [it]. It's not a stunt eye, and it was very uncomfortable. Pete was very tense. We were all very tense, but there was no damage [done] to his eye, thank God." A close-up of Pete Davidson's eyeball in 'The Home' Another haunting image takes the form a creepy mask, which is not only a nod to The Purge universe, but also to DeMonaco's childhood fears. 'Since I was a small boy, I've been just absolutely terrified of anyone in a mask,' the director admits. 'My mom said I couldn't go into Burger King or McDonald's. I guess they used to have Ronald McDonald and the Burger King character in the McDonald's when I was very young, growing up in Brooklyn and Staten Island. She said I would literally run out screaming. I couldn't go to circuses either because of the clowns. Not that they're wearing masks, but it's kind of a mask. I finally realized years later [that] there something about not knowing a person's real [face]. I don't like not knowing a person's expression. I need to be able to read someone's face [and] the mask doesn't allow one to see the face.' He continues: 'I think we're all feeding off our own fears, dreams, and nightmares as we make films. I was prone to night terrors growing up, and still am. I still often scream in my sleep, which is terrible for my wife. So I think masks have always been a part of my nightmare-scape.' In the end, Max discovers that the old folks he's been tending to are much older than they appear. The retirement community is actually the front for a sinister cult, one that counts Max's foster parents — Couper (Victor Williams) and Syliva (Jessica Hecht) — among its members. For over a century, this clandestine group has extracted youth-sustaining substance from unsuspecting victims, including Max's older brother who supposedly died years before, to extend their lifespans. 'There have been a lot of movies that suddenly drop a bomb, but what it really is, is kind of a letdown,' DeManaco says. 'So we took a lot of time to sit [and think], 'Okay, if we're going to do this … I want to make sure I'm not disappointed by the truth.'" As the aforementioned hurricane hits the retirement home, Max breaks free of his bonds and goes on a blood-soaked rampage, slicing and dicing his way through the terrified cult members in what DeMonaco calls a 'brutal revenge fantasy" that is less Chad Stahelski and more Paul Greengrass. 'I love watching the John Wick movies [but] my personal shooting style for action scenes is more dirty and gritty [like] the way [Paul] Greengrass shoots, where it just feels a little more raw and non-choreographed. Yet you have to choreograph because you don't want someone to get hurt. So it's very fine line where you don't want to feel [the choreography]. I hope it plays both." The day they filmed Max's killing spree was quite fun for DeMonaco, who got to dump copious amounts of blood on the iconic Pete Davidson, "although he really got into it," concludes the director. 'He got his revenge at the end of the shot when he came and hugged me and ruined my really cool shirt. But whatever. That's okay … I hope the audience has as much watching it as we did shooting it." The Home is now playing in theaters everywhere. Click here for tickets!
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'The Home': Pete Davidson goes dark in retirement home horror movie from 'Purge' filmmaker James DeMonaco
DeMonaco talks Davidson's horror skills, teases 'Purge 6' and recalls the impact of watching Francis Ford Coppola 'handcuffed' by the studio for 'Jack' The man behind the Purge franchise, writer/director James DeMonaco, put fellow Staten Island talent Pete Davidson into the horror genre for his new film The Home (now in theatres), a genre-bending thriller set in a retirement home. Davidson plays Max, who's fulfilling his court-ordered community service at the retirement home, when he start suspecting there's something sinister happening in this, frankly, creepy residence. "I saw certain people in my life getting older and some of the facilities that they were put into, I found the facilities quite creepy in and of themselves, ... especially to a little boy who saw these things growing up," DeMonaco told Yahoo about where the idea for The Home started. "I saw a very scary one when I was a young man, and that stayed with me." "And then there were various things that played into that, I think, over the years, [but] that was probably the seed. And my writing partner, [Adam Cantor], ... something happened with his grandparents that mirrored my experience when I was a very young man. ... And then for me, there was a movie that had a great influence on me, it was Robert Altman's 3 Women, which is set at an elderly spa in the desert. ... I think it's one of the great films ever made, and it has incredible creep factor." While The Home leans into its "creep factor," the majority of people still associate Davidson with comedy, but DeMonaco knew that he had the ability to take on a different genre of storytelling. "He literally lived down the street from me here in Staten Island, ... his mom still lives down the street," DeMonaco said. "People know him as a comic, but I knew him as something else. ... He surprised me at how good an actor he was outside of the comedy." "I wrote it during COVID and my buddy Adam, a local guy too, ... we were writing and thinking, well who's of this age, 26, 27, there's not many names out there. ... We're not going to get Chalamet. I was writing with Pete before that. We were, ... oddly, writing a comedy right before COVID hit, and we were keeping in touch during COVID. ... There was something natural in ... the character of Max in The Home that I felt that Pete could tap into. ... Pete had some trauma in his life, a lot of trauma in his childhood, so I felt he could relate to what Max was going through. Pete's an artist, Max is an artist. And he, I think, purges some of that trauma through his art, and I felt Max was doing what Pete does also. So I felt there was something there." 'I need to be invested in the character's plight' The most lofty task for DeMonaco in The Home is achieving this slow burn of the story, but also building tension effectively to give the audience a powerful final act. "The Purge, I always say, is like a punch in the face. I thought here ... we were building something with various layers and twists and turns that The Purge really doesn't have," DeMonaco said. "I wanted to get to this point where the audience would need a cathartic release, ... as Max did. ... I also wanted them to be so angry at certain characters in the film, without giving anything away, that I felt that they would be looking forward to this last 20 minutes." "Sometimes I think filmmakers were forced, when we work in certain parameters, we have to pull punches. We can't show everything we want to show. And I was like, no, no, if I'm going to do this, we're going to go, we're going to turn it up to 11. ... It's a matter of always giving [the audience] enough, but not too much, especially when you're dealing with somewhat of a mystery." DeMonaco added that having the audience engaged in Max's journey was critical to the build up of tension in the film "I think, hopefully, Pete's engaged in the mystery of what's happening in The Home, and the audience will stay with him and want to follow him," DeMonaco said. "I know that there are some horror films that kind of work just as visceral rides, but I think for me, I need to be invested in the character's plight. So we took a lot of time, I think, trying to build what Max went through, the trauma of his past." "And I think when you get to the editing room, that's where everything changes. And you could throw out all your ideas and say, alright this is going too slow, we need to move this faster. Let's move this scene up here, because we need a little jolt for the audience to give them a little more. ... My producer says it's almost like a a Swiss clock. It's got a lot of moving parts and you've got to make sure they're all fitting, and we're just giving enough to the audience, and not letting them sit there in the dark for too long." Big budget vs. more control But when it comes to filmmakers having to "pull punches," DeMonaco highlighted that there's a trade off between working on a big budget film, with more "parameters," or having more freedom, but working with a smaller budget. Taking advice from famed producer Jason Blum, DeMonaco was told, "the smaller your movie, the more control you have." An example of that for DeMonaco was working on the 1996 film Jack, which DeMonaco wrote with Gary Nadeau, and the film was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring the late Robin Williams. "I was always writing to direct, that was my path to directing. And I wrote a couple of big movies, big budgets compared to what I'm working with now, ... big directors, and I noticed how they were handcuffed by the studio system, because, somewhat understandably, you're dealing with tens of millions of dollars, and that doesn't include marketing budget," DeMonaco explained. "When I worked with Francis Ford Coppola on my first film, I don't think any of us were truly excited by the film. ... He was really handcuffed by the studio. There was a cut of that film that was much darker, much more interesting to Francis and I and my co-writer at the time. Yet, because of the budget level, they even reeled in Francis Ford Coppola." "And so when I saw this [I thought], what are they going to do to me? ... So when I started getting closer to directing, when I met Sébastien Lemercier, my producer, ... we always had somewhat kept the control. ... When we made Purge one we shot it in 18 days, and it was not easy at all. Even This Is The Night we shot in 25 days. ... At the end of the day, I think that not having people tell you what to do, there's a great benefit to that. Having said that, I do wonder what it's like to make a $100 million film and have all those toys." James DeMonaco teases 'Purge 6': 'We meet some really cool women' As DeMonaco shared that he's finished the script for Purge 6, he also addressed navigating the pressure of continuing the franchise, but also doing it from a place of passion. "I did one job, literally, for money, ... and it was terrible. What I wrote was terrible. ... And this probably really limits me, but I have to work from something that comes from another part of me, that is not just motivated by money or just product," DeMonaco said. "So I knew Jason was calling, studio's calling saying, 'Yeah, we want another one.' ... I'll be honest, I wrote one before this one. I had written another one, but the budget was too big. ... We were going to try something different and go big, and that didn't really work out." "So I told Jason and he gets it, Jason's great, he's a wonderful producer. So he's like, 'You've got to feel it.' But I think there's always part of Jason that's like, if you don't feel it, we may have to hand off the reins to someone else. [Sébastien and I], we always said we do have a fear that if we hand it off to someone else, it could be turned into something that we don't like. We always see it as a morality tale, and not that everybody has to see it like that, but ... we want to continue what we see. So it was a little pressure of, I'm afraid what someone else will do with it, but I did stick to my kind of internal guns, like make sure you feel something in your soul, because you know you're not going to do good work otherwise. And I think it worked out, meaning everything kind of came together timing-wise where I had an idea, there was some time to do it, and I just finished The Home, so it all kind of came together nicely." As fans are anxiously waiting to see what DeMonaco has in store for Purge 6, the filmmaker stressed that he always said he wouldn't go back to the franchise if he "didn't have something," but particularly in today's political climate, he had a story to tell. "There's always a sociopolitical commentary within the Purge movies, and I try not to be preachy, although I think I got preachy in four and five, but I try not to be that preachy," DeMonaco said. "We're in such a weird political time now that something hit me about, I guess five months ago when I pitched the studio my new idea, and they seemed to be really jazzed." "I would say that we get to see some of our old favourite characters. ... We meet some really cool women in this one. That's the tease. We meet some really, really cool women, and I think that's all I probably should say, but that's a big part for you, 90 per cent of it. So I'm pretty excited."
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'The Home': Pete Davidson goes dark in retirement home horror movie from 'Purge' filmmaker James DeMonaco
DeMonaco talks Davidson's horror skills, teases 'Purge 6' and recalls the impact of watching Francis Ford Coppola 'handcuffed' by the studio for 'Jack' The man behind the Purge franchise, writer/director James DeMonaco, put fellow Staten Island talent Pete Davidson into the horror genre for his new film The Home (now in theatres), a thriller set in a retirement home. Davidson plays Max, who's fulfilling his court-ordered community service at the facility, when he start suspecting there's something sinister happening in this, frankly, creepy residence. "I saw certain people in my life getting older and some of the facilities that they were put into, I found the facilities quite creepy in and of themselves, ... especially to a little boy who saw these things growing up," DeMonaco told Yahoo about where the idea for The Home started. "I saw a very scary one when I was a young man, and that stayed with me." "And then there were various things that played into that, I think, over the years, [but] that was probably the seed. And my writing partner, [Adam Cantor], ... something happened with his grandparents that mirrored my experience when I was a very young man. ... And then for me, there was a movie that had a great influence on me, it was Robert Altman's 3 Women, which is set at an elderly spa in the desert. ... I think it's one of the greatest films ever made, and it has incredible creep factor." While The Home leans into its "creep factor," the majority of people still associate Davidson with comedy, but DeMonaco knew that he had the ability to take on a different genre of storytelling. "He literally lived down the street from me here in Staten Island, ... his mom still lives down the street," DeMonaco said. "People know him as a comic, but I knew him as something else. ... He surprised me at how good an actor he was outside of the comedy." "I wrote it during COVID and my buddy Adam, a local guy too, ... we were writing and thinking, well who's of this age, 26, 27, there's not many names out there. ... We're not going to get Chalamet. I was writing with Pete before that. We were, ... oddly, writing a comedy right before COVID hit, and we were keeping in touch during COVID. ... There was something natural in ... the character of Max in The Home that I felt that Pete could tap into. ... Pete had some trauma in his life, a lot of trauma in his childhood, so I felt he could relate to what Max was going through. Pete's an artist, Max is an artist. And he, I think, purges some of that trauma through his art, and I felt Max was doing what Pete does also. So I felt there was something there." 'I need to be invested in the character's plight' The most lofty task for DeMonaco in The Home is achieving this slow burn of the story, but also building tension effectively to give the audience a powerful final act. "The Purge, I always say, is like a punch in the face. I thought here ... we were building something with various layers and twists and turns that The Purge really doesn't have," DeMonaco said. "I wanted to get to this point where the audience would need a cathartic release, ... as Max did. ... I also wanted them to be so angry at certain characters in the film, without giving anything away, that I felt that they would be looking forward to this last 20 minutes." "Sometimes I think filmmakers, ... when we work in certain parameters, we have to pull punches. We can't show everything we want to show. And I was like, no, no, if I'm going to do this, we're going to go, we're going to turn it up to 11. ... It's a matter of always giving [the audience] enough, but not too much, especially when you're dealing with somewhat of a mystery." DeMonaco added that having the audience engaged in Max's journey was critical to the build up of tension in the film "I think, hopefully, Pete's engaged in the mystery of what's happening in The Home, and the audience will stay with him and want to follow him," DeMonaco said. "I know that there are some horror films that kind of work just as visceral rides, but I think for me, I need to be invested in the character's plight. So we took a lot of time, I think, trying to build what Max went through, the trauma of his past." "And I think when you get to the editing room, that's where everything changes. And you could throw out all your ideas and say, alright this is going too slow, we need to move this faster. Let's move this scene up here, because we need a little jolt for the audience to give them a little more. ... My producer says it's almost like a Swiss clock. It's got a lot of moving parts and you've got to make sure they're all fitting, and we're just giving enough to the audience, and not letting them sit there in the dark for too long." Big budget vs. more control But when it comes to filmmakers having to "pull punches," DeMonaco highlighted that there's a trade off between working on a big budget film, with more "parameters," or having more freedom, but working with a smaller budget. Taking advice from famed producer Jason Blum, DeMonaco was told, "the smaller your movie, the more control you have." An example of that for DeMonaco was working on the 1996 film Jack, which DeMonaco wrote with Gary Nadeau, and the film was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring the late Robin Williams. "I was always writing to direct, that was my path to directing. And I wrote a couple of big movies, big budgets compared to what I'm working with now, ... big directors, and I noticed how they were handcuffed by the studio system, because, somewhat understandably, you're dealing with tens of millions of dollars, and that doesn't include marketing budget," DeMonaco explained. "When I worked with Francis Ford Coppola on my first film, I don't think any of us were truly excited by the film. ... He was really handcuffed by the studio. There was a cut of that film that was much darker, much more interesting to Francis and I and my co-writer at the time. Yet, because of the budget level, they even reeled in Francis Ford Coppola." "And so when I saw this [I thought], what are they going to do to me? ... So when I started getting closer to directing, when I met Sébastien Lemercier, my producer, ... we always had somewhat kept the control. ... When we made Purge one we shot it in 18 days, and it was not easy at all. Even This Is The Night we shot in 25 days. ... At the end of the day, I think that not having people tell you what to do, there's a great benefit to that. Having said that, I do wonder what it's like to make a $100 million film and have all those toys." James DeMonaco teases 'Purge 6': 'We meet some really cool women' As DeMonaco shared that he's finished the script for Purge 6, he also addressed navigating the pressure of continuing the franchise, but also doing it from a place of passion. "I did one job, literally, for money, ... and it was terrible. What I wrote was terrible. ... And this probably really limits me, but I have to work from something that comes from another part of me, that is not just motivated by money or just product," DeMonaco said. "So I knew Jason was calling, studio's calling saying, 'Yeah, we want another one.' ... I'll be honest, I wrote one before this one. I had written another one, but the budget was too big. ... We were going to try something different and go big, and that didn't really work out." "So I told Jason, and he gets it, Jason's great, he's a wonderful producer. So he's like, 'You've got to feel it.' But I think there's always part of Jason that's like, if you don't feel it, we may have to hand off the reins to someone else. [Sébastien and I], we always said we do have a fear that if we hand it off to someone else, it could be turned into something that we don't like. We always see it as a morality tale, and not that everybody has to see it like that, but ... we want to continue what we see. So it was a little pressure of, I'm afraid what someone else will do with it, but I did stick to my kind of internal guns, like make sure you feel something in your soul, because you know you're not going to do good work otherwise. And I think it worked out, meaning everything kind of came together timing-wise where I had an idea, there was some time to do it, and I just finished The Home, so it all kind of came together nicely." As fans are anxiously waiting to see what DeMonaco has in store for Purge 6, the filmmaker stressed that he always said he wouldn't go back to the franchise if he "didn't have something to say," but particularly in today's political climate, he had a story to tell. "There's always a sociopolitical commentary within the Purge movies, and I try not to be preachy, although I think I got preachy in four and five, but I try not to be that preachy," DeMonaco said. "We're in such a weird political time now that something hit me about, I guess five months ago when I pitched the studio my new idea, and they seemed to be really jazzed." "I would say that we get to see some of our old favourite characters. ... We meet some really cool women in this one. That's the tease. We meet some really, really cool women, and I think that's all I probably should say, but that's a big part for you, 90 per cent of it. So I'm pretty excited."
CBS News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBS News
NYC Summer Streets 2025 start this Saturday. Maps show which blocks will be car-free.
New York City's Summer Streets program returns this weekend, starting in Queens and Staten Island. Several blocks will be shut down to vehicle traffic on Saturday for people to enjoy car-free time outside. Visitors can expect live entertainment, fitness and art activities for the whole family. Lyft is also offering free Citi Bike day passes with the promo code: LYFTSUMMER25. The city's Summer Streets program has been around since 2008 and it continues to expand. This year, the Manhattan location will stretch the entire length of the borough, from Inwood to the Brooklyn Bridge. The first weekend kicks off this Saturday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Organizers say it's rain or shine. Manhattan is up next on August 2, 9 and 16, followed by Brooklyn and the Bronx on August 23. The Summer Streets are in addition to what the city calls "Open Streets" throughout the year. Vernon Boulevard will be closed from 44th Drive in Long Island City to 30th Road in Astoria. This location will feature performances from several cultural organizations, as well as yoga and Zumba classes. There will also be a "NYRR Start Line Series," where people can run or walk a 2.5-mile course, and public art will be on display. The following streets will be closed to vehicle traffic: The Staten Island location is along Forest Avenue in West Brighton. The roadway will be closed from Elizabeth Street to Bard Avenue. This location will also have performances from different groups, including the Staten Island Musical Steppers and Richmond County Orchestra, as well as public art. These streets will be closed around the area: CLICK HERE for the complete Summer Streets maps and more information.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Acurx Pharmaceuticals to Discuss Second Quarter 2025 Financial Results on August 12, 2025 Conference Call and Provide Business Update
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y., July 24, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Acurx Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: ACXP) ("Acurx" or the "Company"), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing a new class of antibiotics for difficult-to-treat bacterial infections, announced today that the Company will discuss its second quarter 2025 financial results on Tuesday, August 12, 2025 at 8:00 am ET before the U.S. financial markets open. David P. Luci, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Robert G. Shawah, Chief Financial Officer, will host a conference call to discuss the results and provide a business update as follows: Date: Tuesday, August 12, 2025 Time: 8:00 a.m. ET Toll free (U.S.): 1-877-790-1503; Conference ID: 13755161 International: Click here for participant international Toll-Free access numbers About Ibezapolstat Ibezapolstat is the Company's lead antibiotic candidate preparing for international Phase 3 clinical trials to treat patients with C. difficile Infection (CDI). Ibezapolstat is a novel, orally administered antibiotic being developed as a Gram-Positive Selective Spectrum (GPSS®™) antibacterial. It is the first of a new class of DNA polymerase IIIC inhibitors under development by Acurx to treat bacterial infections. Ibezapolstat's unique spectrum of activity, which includes C. difficile but spares other Firmicutes and the important Actinobacteria phyla, appears to contribute to the maintenance of a healthy gut microbiome. Acurx previously announced that it had received positive regulatory guidance from the EMA during its Scientific Advice Procedure which confirmed that the clinical, non-clinical and CMC (Chemistry Manufacturing and Controls) information package submitted to EMA supports advancement of the ibezapolstat Phase 3 program and if the Phase 3 program is successful, supports the submission of a Marketing Authorization Application (MAA) for regulatory approval in Europe. The information package submitted to EMA by the Company to which agreement has been reached with EMA included details on Acurx's two planned international Phase 3 clinical trials, 1:1 randomized (designed as non-inferiority vs vancomycin), primary and secondary endpoints, sample size, statistical analysis plan and the overall registration safety database. With mutually consistent feedback from both EMA and FDA, Acurx is well positioned to commence our international Phase 3 registration program In June 2018, ibezapolstat was designated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a Qualified Infectious Disease Product (QIDP) for the treatment of patients with CDI and will be eligible to benefit from the incentives for the development of new antibiotics established under the Generating New Antibiotic Incentives Now (GAIN) Act. In January 2019, FDA granted "Fast Track" designation to ibezapolstat for the treatment of patients with CDI. The CDC has designated C. difficile as an urgent threat highlighting the need for new antibiotics to treat CDI. About Acurx Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Acurx Pharmaceuticals is a late-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing a new class of small molecule antibiotics for difficult-to-treat bacterial infections. The Company's approach is to develop antibiotic candidates with a Gram-positive selective spectrum (GPSS®) that blocks the active site of the Gram+ specific bacterial enzyme DNA polymerase IIIC (pol IIIC), inhibiting DNA replication and leading to Gram-positive bacterial cell death. Its R&D pipeline includes antibiotic product candidates that target Gram-positive bacteria, including Clostridioides difficile, methicillin- resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), vancomycin resistant Enterococcus (VRE), drug- resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae (DRSP) and B. anthracis (anthrax; a Bioterrorism Category A Threat-Level pathogen). Acurx's lead product candidate, ibezapolstat, for the treatment of C. difficile Infection is Phase 3 ready with plans in progress to begin international clinical trials next year subject to obtaining appropriate financing. The Company's preclinical pipeline includes development of an oral product candidate for treatment of ABSSSI (Acute Bacterial Skin and Skin Structure Infections), upon which a development program for treatment of inhaled anthrax is being planned in parallel. To learn more about Acurx Pharmaceuticals and its product pipeline, please visit Forward-Looking Statements Any statements in this press release about our future expectations, plans and prospects, including statements regarding our strategy, future operations, prospects, plans and objectives, and other statements containing the words "believes," "anticipates," "plans," "expects," and similar expressions, constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: whether ibezapolstat will benefit from the QIDP designation; whether ibezapolstat will advance through the clinical trial process on a timely basis; whether the results of the clinical trials of ibezapolstat will warrant the submission of applications for marketing approval, and if so, whether ibezapolstat will receive approval from the FDA or equivalent foreign regulatory agencies where approval is sought; whether, if ibezapolstat obtains approval, it will be successfully distributed and marketed; and other risks and uncertainties described in the Company's annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2024, and in the Company's subsequent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Such forward- looking statements speak only as of the date of this press release, and Acurx disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of such statements, except as may be required by law. Investor Contact:Acurx Pharmaceuticals, P. Luci, President & CEOTel: 917-533-1469Email: davidluci@ View original content: SOURCE Acurx Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
