Latest news with #ThePenguin
Express Tribune
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Jimmy Olsen spin-off series rumored to explore DC villains in crime anthology format
A new rumor suggests that DC Studios may be developing a spin-off series centered around Jimmy Olsen, played by Skyler Gisondo in the 2025 Superman film. The report, originating from insider ApocHorseman and shared via DCU Leaks on Discord, claims the series would take the form of a crime anthology. Each episode is said to feature a different villain from the DC Universe, with Olsen serving as the host and central narrator. The series would mirror recent successes like The Penguin, which built on Colin Farrell's portrayal in The Batman and earned critical acclaim and award nominations. This approach reflects DC Studios' growing focus on expanding its cinematic universe through character-driven spinoffs. Under the leadership of James Gunn and Peter Safran, the studio appears committed to diverse storytelling formats and genres. Olsen, a fixture in DC Comics as Clark Kent's loyal friend and photojournalist, has starred in several titles like Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen. Known for his involvement in strange and adventurous plots, he has long been a beloved secondary character. In the 2025 film, Gisondo portrayed Olsen with a mix of classic charm and new elements, including a past relationship with Eve Teschmacher. His performance received praise for strong chemistry with the ensemble cast. According to the report, the rumored series would explore DC's criminal landscape through the lens of Olsen's investigative journalism. This concept aligns with Gunn's stated goal of blending genres and telling fresh stories within the DC Universe. While the series remains unconfirmed by DC Studios, its reported concept fits naturally within the studio's broader efforts to diversify storytelling under its Chapter One: Gods and Monsters slate, which includes Superman, Supergirl, Swamp Thing, and Clayface. If greenlit, the Jimmy Olsen series could offer fans a compelling new angle on the evolving DC narrative universe.
Mid East Info
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Mid East Info
OSN+ celebrates 140 Emmy Nominations as HBO's exclusive home in the region - Middle East Business News and Information
Dubai, UAE, 21 July 2025: OSN+, the exclusive home of HBO in the Middle East and North Africa, commends HBO for an impressive 140 nominations across 22 TV shows and movies, the most nominations the distinguished network has been awarded in a year; displaying true excellence within the industry at the 77th annual Emmy® Awards. Among several other notable titles, HBO were nominated for The Penguin , The White Lotus and The Last of Us , all of which earning over 15 nominations each. With a variety of content, from gripping dramas to outstanding documentaries, HBO continues to shape the landscape of the entertainment industry, all of which is brought directly to regional viewers through OSN+'s exclusive partnership. Select Emmy-nominated HBO titles available on OSN+: The Penguin – 24 Nominations The White Lotus Season 3 – 23 Nominations The Last of Us Season 2- 16 Nominations The Pitt – 13 Nominations Hacks Season 4- 14 Nominations As the exclusive distributor of HBO content in the region, OSN+ continues to solidify its position as the go-to destination for critically acclaimed entertainment. With HBO titles consistently among the most watched on OSN+, the platform remains at the forefront of the region's evolving viewing habits. ' Audiences across the MENA region are increasingly shaping global viewing trends, with a growing appetite for elevated, cinematic content, ' said Elie Habib, CEO of Anghami and OSN+. ' These Emmy® nominations highlight the strength of HBO's storytelling and reflect our shared mission to bring the very best in entertainment to viewers across the region. ' All nominated titles and more from HBO are available on OSN+ and OSNtv, giving viewers across the region unparalleled access to the home of cinematic storytelling, world-class performances, as well as some of the most acclaimed TV and movies to date.
Indian Express
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
From Watchmen to The Penguin: 6 comic book adaptations that got Emmy nods
Once dismissed as pulp entertainment, comic book adaptations are now garnering Emmy nominations and earning accolades once reserved for historical dramas or high-minded thrillers. This year, HBO's The Penguin has racked up 24 Emmy nominations, joining the ranks of Watchmen and WandaVision. The staggering Emmy nominations for The Penguin cement its place among the most acclaimed comic book adaptations in television history. This HBO Max crime drama, spinning out of Matt Reeves' The Batman, continues a growing tradition of graphic novels and superhero comics being transformed into television. From Alan Moore's deconstructive masterpieces to Marvel's multiversal adventures, comic books have increasingly become a fertile ground for Emmy-winning content. The Penguin stands as the latest example, joining an elite group of adaptations that have successfully transitioned from the four-color pages of comics to the golden statuettes of the Television Academy. The Penguin elevates a classic Batman villain into a complex lead. Unlike most superhero projects that prioritise spectacle, this series leans into the gangster noir roots of Oswald Cobblepot's character, delivering a performance-driven story that clearly resonated with the audience. From searing political allegories to stylistic fever dreams, these adaptations have redefined what superhero storytelling can be. Here are six comic-based shows that have dominated the Emmys. Damon Lindelof's genre-defining sequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel reimagined the superhero myth through a razor-sharp lens on race, trauma, and American identity. The series focuses on events surrounding racist violence in present-day Tulsa, Oklahoma. A white supremacist group called the Seventh Kavalry has taken up arms against the Tulsa Police Department because of perceived racial injustices, causing the police to conceal their identities with masks to prevent the Seventh Kavalry from targeting them in their homes following the 'White Night'. Regina King's powerhouse performance as Angela Abar, aka Sister Night, led a cast that walked the tightrope between surrealism and social realism. With 26 nominations and 11 wins, including Outstanding Limited Series, Watchmen made an impact on the jury and audience. Marvel Studios' first foray into prestige streaming television, WandaVision reinvented superhero storytelling as a metafictional journey through grief. Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany received acting nods for their roles as the tragically intertwined Wanda Maximoff and Vision, while the show earned widespread acclaim for its inventive format, shifting from '50s sitcom pastiche to full-blown MCU drama. Its 23 nominations reflect both technical brilliance (costumes, VFX, title design) and emotional resonance. WandaVision proved Marvel could deliver both spectacle, and subtext. The Penguin (HBO, 2025) A post shared by Warner Bros. TV (@warnerbrostv) The latest breakout from DC Studios, The Penguin is less comic book, more crime opera. Spun from Matt Reeves' The Batman universe, the series follows Colin Farrell's grotesque-yet-charismatic mobster Oz Cobb as he claws his way through Gotham's underworld. The performance is transformative, thanks to Mike Marino's Emmy-nominated prosthetic design. But The Penguin goes deeper, with richly textured writing and noir-laced direction earning nominations across acting, production design, score, and stunt coordination. The Boys (Prime Video, 2021–Present) A post shared by THE BOYS (@theboystv) Eric Kripke's The Boys offers a brutal, satirical takedown of superhero culture, and the society that worships it. With a growing number of Emmy nominations over its seasons (including Outstanding Drama nods), the series fuses high-octane gore with biting political allegory. Antony Starr's Homelander stands as one of TV's most chilling villains, a warped Superman reflecting populist menace. Its visual effects, writing, and acting have pushed The Boys into serious awards conversation. Though lighter, Legion deserves mention for pushing the form. Noah Hawley's trippy adaptation of the Marvel character David Haller became a cult-favorite mind-bender. With its kaleidoscopic visuals, nonlinear storytelling, and abstract cinematography, Legion received nominations for cinematography and visual effects, cementing its place as one of the boldest artistic experiments in superhero TV. Marvel's grittiest street-level hero earned critical praise and several Creative Arts Emmy nominations for its action choreography, sound editing, and visual effects. Charlie Cox's haunted Matt Murdock and Vincent D'Onofrio's kingpin Wilson Fisk gave the series its emotional and narrative heft. While never a top-tier Emmy darling, Daredevil helped pave the way for serious-minded comic adaptations on streaming platforms.
Winnipeg Free Press
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
COVID-era tale sure to leave you unsettled
Nobody goes to an Ari Aster film to feel comfortable. The American writer-director's tortuous new anti-western — which premièred at Cannes to a divided response — is profoundly uncomfortable. Having proven himself a master of unease in Hereditary, Midsommar and Beau Is Afraid, Aster is now presenting a pitch-dark satire of our polarized era that is itself provocatively — and often pointlessly — polarizing. Along with discomfort, Aster can also be counted on for technical craft, atmospheric dread and interesting work from A-list actors. Ultimately, though, Eddington is a risky thought experiment that goes wrong, its incitements dragging out into overlong incoherence. Set in rural New Mexico in May 2020, in the uncertain early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the story starts with a showdown between town mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal from The Last of Us) and county sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix, who worked with Aster on Beau Is Afraid). Ted supports the public health measures he hopes will keep the community safe. Joe, meanwhile, refuses to enforce the state mask mandate, citing individual freedom, and pretty soon he's driving around in one of those SUVs plastered with red, white and blue 'patriot' stickers and slogans. What might feel jarring to some viewers — many fans of A24 movies skew left — is that Joe, at least initially, is presented as the most sympathetic character and the one whose point of view we follow. He's a devoted husband to his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), who's living with an anxiety disorder, and he's dealing with an extremely online mother-in-law, Dawn (The Penguin's Dierdre O'Connell), who has fallen into a rabbit-hole of internet conspiracy theories. Ted is coded as liberal (and of course played by the supercool Pascal), but seems to be in bed with big developers and wealthy tech guys who are planning a data centre that will suck up the town's water and energy. He comes off as a phony, a hypocrite, and — even worse, in 2020 — he's a toilet-paper hoarder. Anyone ready to seize on Eddington as anti-'woke' should be warned, though. Aster is actually playing with viewer expectations, engineering the audience's emotional reactions to work at cross-purposes to their ideological beliefs, deliberately messing with reflexive political responses on both sides of the spectrum. Through his characters' complicated feuds, he's demonstrating that what can seem like principled political stands are often covers for personal grievance and psychological turmoil. He also switches up audience assumptions and allegiances several times — Joe is going to do some truly terrible things — as the story devolves into an increasingly violent and hallucinatory hellscape. Things take another turn after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, as the Black Lives Matter movement spreads across the country. One of the town's few Black residents is Michael (Empire of Light's Micheal Ward), a sheriff's deputy working to quell the protests on the town's main street, while the protesters are mostly middle-class white kids, constantly announcing the burden of their privilege and making speeches about not having the right to make speeches. A24 photo Joaquin Phoenix (left) as county sheriff Joe Cross and Pedro Pascal as mayor Ted Garcia in Eddington At this point, the town of Eddington starts to feel like the toxic epicentre of America's social and political dysfunction. There's a charismatic creep of a QAnon-style cult leader (Austin Butler). There are progressive purity tests. There are the alienating effects of tech, the constant drip of social-media disinformation and incentivized online outrage. Everybody is constantly filming everybody else, which is initially touted as transparency but soon feels more like surveillance. And just in case the viewers are having any doubts about the inescapably angry and screwed-up state of America, there's a literal (!) dumpster fire. Aster is toying around with each side's worst prejudices about the other side, while simultaneously asking us to see everyone as human beings. That's a tricky stance. While it gets some support from Phoenix's emotive and oddly vulnerable work, Pascal and Stone are given less to do and end up feeling less like people and more like symbols. Eddington does function extremely well as a document of the COVID era. Aster calls up the industrial-sized bottles of hand sanitizer, the drive-up testing stations, the ordeal of grocery shopping and the awkward, socially distanced outside gatherings. He tracks the confusion and resentment and rage rushing into the pandemic's vacuum of anxiety and isolation. While the initial shootouts between Ted and Joe involved iPhones, we eventually end up outside the town's Pistol Palace, hurtling suddenly towards a deranged ending — gory, grotesque and psychologically unsettling. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. The narrative descends into surreal darkness, a vision of American history as an endless cycle of gun-fuelled retribution, with masked characters firing into the night, not even sure who their enemy is. A24 photo Micheal Ward (as Michael) has his hands full as a sheriff's deputy working to quash protests in Eddington. Aster is presenting an elaborate and ambitious conceptual setup, but in the end, the film lacks the discipline to pull it off. At one point, Joe says, 'We need to free each other's hearts.' Eddington might be hoping to free us, but its disjointed, stretched-out narrative and inflammatory images might just further entrench us. Alison GillmorWriter Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto's York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Scotsman
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Glasgow VFX studio celebrates supporting role in bringing The Penguin to life after Emmy recognition
Colin Farrell stars as Oswald Cobblepot in The Batman spin-off The Penguin | HBO Govan-based FixFX was involved in bringing Colin Farrell's character in The Penguin to life, as well as creating effects for shows including Stranger Things and Outlander. Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... One of Scotland's leading special effects studios has said it is 'thrilled' to have been involved with TV series The Penguin, after the show received more than 20 nominations at the 2025 Emmy Awards. Glasgow-based FixFX worked alongside the show's Oscar-winning makeup team to bring Colin Farrell's titular character to life, with the widely acclaimed series receiving 24 nominations, including Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup and Outstanding Special Visual Effects In A Single Episode. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad While FixFX may have played a supporting role in The Penguin's success, their subtle but impactful work has attracted some of the biggest names in entertainment to Scotland. 'To have had a major involvement in two of its incredible 24 nominations is enormously exciting and it's very flattering, you know, to be recognised for that kind of work – although it's not ourselves that are directly recognised,' said Colin Kennedy, chief executive of FixFX. Colin Kennedy is the CEO of FixFX, a Glasgow-based VFX studio which has worked on shows such as The Penguin and films including Civil War. | Contributed 'We know where we've fitted into the process and it's great to be operating at that kind of level.' The Penguin among FixFX's first projects to be highly recognised FixFX was commissioned to add the finishing touches to Colin Farrell's prosthetic makeup for The Penguin, helping develop the show's gritty tone. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Chris Duffy, the Studio VFX Supervisor at FixFX, a Glasgow-based VFX company. | Contributed VFX studio supervisor Chris Duffy said: 'Basically 99% of the work was just Colin Farrell's prosthetics and tidying them up. 'The art we do is all invisible, so the recognition we get is always when someone doesn't notice the work that we've done.' The team began working on the show in 2023, but it wasn't smooth sailing for them to finish the project. Mr Duffy said: 'We got going on maybe about 50 odd shots, and then it completely stopped because of Hollywood strikes. There was lots of delays because of that. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'It was a particularly tricky [job], because it was such fine, detail stuff, that took us a while to go back into afterwards as well.' Warner Bros. Discovery and HBO Max FixFX spent six months working on The Penguin, which saw the team handling 800 shots in total. In comparison, Mr Kennedy highlighted their work on Outlander. He said: '[Outlander] was about the same sort of length of time as The Penguin, but we did 800 shots on The Penguin and we did nearly 3,000 on Outlander, and we've managed to do sort of both projects over a period of about six months. 'It was very intense.' Having worked on Outlander for several seasons, Mr Kennedy said the show's contribution to the Scottish filmmaking industry has been 'absolutely brilliant'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad FixFX has worked on several series of Outlander. | Starz/Shutterstock 'Outlander has really helped us to expand our spectrum of work and talent within the company. It's been fantastic to have their trust and investment in us, and they've created an awful lot of jobs and supported an awful lot of new talent in Scotland, specifically through us but also through every single aspect of filmmaking disciplines,' he said. Glasgow VFX company's work includes Stranger Things In addition to beauty work, the studio also provides everything from general clean up to getting rid of crew members and rigging. 'We did a lot of work on Civil War, for example, where we got rid of all of the vehicles and stuff that were in the streets to make it look more apocalyptic,' Mr Kennedy highlights. The 2024 Alex Garland film is just one of many projects which FixFX has had an invisible hand in making. The team has also contributed to shows such as Lockerbie: A Search For Truth, Nautilus and Stranger Things, which was among Mr Duffy's favourites to have been involved with. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Despite having previously been involved with the Netflix hit, Mr Kennedy suspects that they won't be getting a call as the new season rolls around. 'That's because they changed their visual effects supervisor, producer, and this business is very much relationship driven,' he explained. FixFX worked on the second half of Stranger Things Season 4. It was FixFX's longstanding relationship with The Penguin's visual effects producer which helped them secure the job, with Screen Scotland's PGF Project Post also supporting the production. The production growth fund aims to attract large scale film and TV productions to Scotland – something which Mr Kennedy says is starting to work. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'We are finding that [the] fund is starting to attract more people and, of course, with the nominations and the successes and the hype around The Penguin, then it's great for that fund to be associated with such a high profile project,' he said. Creative Scotland attracting major projects to country Over the past year, a number of large productions including Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, Apple TV+'s The Buccaneers, and Edgar Wright's upcoming remake of The Running Man have spent time filming in Scotland. Christopher Nolan has been shooting his upcoming historical epic The Odyssey in Moray, while filming for J.J Abrams' untitled blockbuster took place in Edinburgh and Glasgow last month – something which Mr Kennedy is hopeful that FixFX could potentially get involved in. Christopher Nolan has brought filming for his Hollywood blockbuster The Odyssey to Moray. | AFP via Getty Images He said: 'We are trying to get work on that. We're not on it yet, but hopefully there might be something. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'These productions are at least now aware of small companies like us with great thanks to the work that's been done at Creative Scotland through their funding. They are managing to attract really, really major projects to the country. And of course, there's a benefit for us as well.' In particular, Mr Kennedy credits this recognition to the work of Creative Scotland's executive director Isabel Davis and her team. Film production crews filming J.J Abrams' "Ghostwriter" in Edinburgh. | Lisa Ferguson 'They have really turned things around there in recent years and helped put Scottish filmmakers and talent on the international map.' Due to the 'unpredictable' nature of the industry – particularly with recent events such as the Hollywood strikes and Covid – it has been a quiet period for FixFX recently. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'Having said that though, looking at the forward order book and the amount of inquiries that are coming in, inquiries are definitely going up in recent weeks – which I could get a lot more inquiries – and I guess we could turn about 50% of that into actual jobs and that does make me feel quietly optimistic. 'But I am Scottish, you know. It feels like there's always going to be a little bit of 'well, you never know.'' Though there isn't much that can be said about what comes next for FixFX due to non-disclosure agreements, Mr Kennedy did reveal that there is work in the pipeline for clients including Warner Brothers, Sony Pictures, Netflix and Apple.
