Latest news with #Together
Perth Now
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Dave Franco reveals Alison Brie likes to recreate ‘sloppy' and ‘awkward' reality TV kisses with him
David Franco has revealed his wife Alison Brie likes to recreate 'sloppy' and 'awkward' kisses she has seen in reality TV shows with him. The 40-year-old actor - who married the Community star, 42, in 2017 - shared Alison isn't afraid to bring steamy smooches she's seen on the box into their relationship, even if it ends with unfavourable results. Speaking with People, Alison said: 'You know what traumatizes Dave in terms of making out? Is that sometimes if we're watching a reality show like The Bachelor or Love Island …' Dave quickly added: '… And there's these first kisses that are sometimes a little sloppy or a little awkward. She always wants to recreate them on me.' Dave and Alison will next be seen on the silver screen together in the upcoming horror movie Together. In the film, a couple's move to the countryside takes a terrifying turn when a supernatural presence begins to alter their love, their lives, and even their bodies. Dave teased Together 'goes full bonkers, body horror mania'. He told Collider: 'We've got a codependent couple, not unlike ourselves. They're going through some issues. 'They moved to the middle of nowhere to try to just kind of have a new start, but they encounter something supernatural that just kind of brings all the issues right to the surface.' The Now You See Me star said the intimacy in Together 'goes to such an extreme level' that he didn't think he could have made the movie with anyone other than his wife. He said: 'It goes to such an extreme point where we truly looked at each other at the end of each day, and we were like, 'We could not have made this movie with anyone else.'' Alison - who has worked with Dave on movies like 2023's Somebody I Used to Know - said the couple's 'shorthand has gotten shorter and shorter' in their professional relationship. She explained: 'I think, to do this project, we have acted in some things together, and by this point, Dave has directed me in a couple of movies, we wrote a film together. 'Our shorthand has gotten shorter and shorter to where it's like a mind-meld, eye-contact thing. 'We've been together over a decade, so has this couple in the movie. We're very selective about projects that we will act in together. 'We read scripts quite often, where we would act together, and it's all about which one makes the most sense, and this one did.'
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Did Dave Franco and Alison Brie's new horror flick ‘Together' rip off another movie? Here's what both sides are saying.
In a copyright lawsuit, the producers of "Better Half" claim that the premise of "Together" was stolen from their 2022 romantic comedy. Filmmaker Michael Shanks's debut feature Together is one of the most anticipated horror films of the summer — but it's not without controversy. The Sundance Film Festival darling — it sold for a reported $17 million to distributor Neon following a bidding war — stars real-life husband and wife Dave Franco and Alison Brie as a married couple whose vacation takes a turn when (spoiler alert!) a supernatural force causes their bodies to merge. It's a funny, albeit terrifying premise — and one that another production company alleges was stolen from its film, Better Half. Shanks, as well as the talent agency behind the Together team, deny the allegations. But that hasn't stopped people from talking about whether Together is really a rip-off. With Together heading to theaters on July 30, here's an explainer of the drama. What is the team alleging? Back in May, producers of the indie movie Better Half, Jess Jacklin and Charles Beale, filed a lawsuit against the producers of Together, alleging copyright infringement. (Better Half was written and directed by Patrick Henry Phelan, however, Jacklin and Beale's production company, StudioFest, is the only plaintiff named in the suit.) According to an article in Entertainment Weekly, Jacklin and Beale claim that the makers of Together stole the concept of Better Half, in which a couple 'wake up to find their bodies physically fused together as a metaphor for codependency.' While the main characters in Together are married and in Better Half they are strangers who just had a one night stand, both films show how the couple at the center 'navigate daily life as their physical attachment progresses and they start to control each other's body parts,' per the lawsuit. The suit also notes that both couples attempt to use chainsaws to separate themselves from one another. The Better Half producers also note a number of other details that the movies share, including a reference to the Spice Girls, the professions of the main characters and bathroom scenes in which both couples attempt to hide their intertwined condition from a third party. According to the suit, the films also include references to Plato's Symposium, which dissects the meaning and significance of love. The Better Half team also claims that Franco's and Brie's agents at WME were sent a copy of the script for Better Half in 2020, but they ultimately passed on the project. It's worth noting that while Together is described as a horror movie, Better Half is billed as a romantic comedy. The Brooklyn Film Festival, where Better Half premiered in 2022, features the following description for the film on its website: 'According to Greek mythology, humans were once two-faced, four-armed, four-legged creatures, until Zeus split us in two, leaving us in an endless search for our other halves. Fast forward to modern day: Arturo, a hopeless romantic in search of true love, and Daphne, a serial polygamist allergic to commitment, meet for what should be a one-night stand, and quite literally find their other half when their bodies fuse during sex. The haphazard journey to come undone might just reveal what they'd been missing all along.' Better Half appears not to have received distribution after its festival run and is unable to be viewed online at this point in time. What the team has said WME, the talent agency representing Franco, Brie and filmmaker Shanks, has vehemently denied the Better Half allegations. Speaking to IndieWire, a spokesperson for WME stated, 'This lawsuit is frivolous and without merit. The facts in this case are clear and we plan to vigorously defend ourselves.' In a joint statement on June 18, Neon and WME alleged that the plaintiffs are doing 'nothing more than drumming up 15 minutes of fame for a failed project, demonstrated by the fact they contacted the press before filing their lawsuit, and did so without doing the most basic due diligence.' They accused Jacklin and Beale of searching for a payday by making waves in the press. 'We look forward to presenting our case in court,' they said. That same day, Shanks, who wrote and directed Together, shared his own statement on Neon's Instagram and X accounts, calling the accusations 'devastating.' He said Together came from a 'deeply personal' place as, like Franco's and Brie's characters, Shanks said he is in a long-term relationship, and that his own experience of the 'entanglement of identity, love, and codependence' is what inspired Together. 'Tim's story, his love for Millie, his relationship to his family, his relationship to unfulfilled ambitions as a musician, is completely rooted in my own personal life,' Shanks said in his statement. 'I lost my father at a young age in the same way our main character does, his trauma is rooted in my own. To have this called into question is not only deeply upsetting but entirely untrue.' Shanks also stated that he completed and registered the first draft of Together in 2019 — before Better Half was sent to Franco's team at WME — and began developing it with Screen Australia in 2020. Franco came onboard in 2022 after meeting with Shanks, and Brie, Franco's real-life wife, joined the project shortly after. 'To now be accused of stealing this story — one so deeply based on my own lived experience, one I've developed over the course of several years — is devastating and has taken a heavy toll,' Shanks said. Check out the trailer for Together below: Is it common for movies to be accused of plagiarism? Plagiarism accusations occur fairly often in Hollywood, and they occasionally receive a lot of attention. Last year, the Alexander Payne film The Holdovers was accused of stealing elements of Simon Stephenson's script Frisco, which was on the 2013 Blacklist of the most popular scripts circulating in the industry. Stephenson filed a complaint with the Writers Guild of America, which said it was not within the scope of the organization to handle. In the case of Frisco and The Holdovers, both scripts are available online, allowing people to make their own judgments on social media about the similarities — with many saying the scripts were too different to make plagiarism claims. Payne, who directed The Holdovers from a script written by David Hemingson, spoke at the Sarajevo Film Festival in August 2024 about the situation. Payne claimed there was no merit to the plagiarism allegations, which never materialized into a lawsuit. 'I didn't even pay attention to it because kooky accusations come out of the woodwork all of the time and this didn't even bother me but then it kind of kept coming, I thought, 'Well, that's dumb,'' Payne said, according to Deadline. Filmmaker and actor Justin Baldoni was also accused of plagiarizing his 2019 directorial debut Five Feet Apart, about teenagers with cystic fibrosis falling in love, from screenwriter Travis Flores' script Three Feet Distance. The case was settled in 2022 and Baldoni has not spoken about the situation publicly. Flores died in 2024. The legal threshold for plagiarism — especially in film and television — is quite high, even if someone is able to prove that the accused had access to an original work like a script. That's because ideas themselves cannot be copyrighted — only the specific expression of an idea, such as the exact script or dialogue. This means that two people can have very similar story concepts without it being considered theft, as long as the execution is different. And it's not unusual for similar films and TV shows to come out at almost the same time. The romantic comedies Friends With Benefits and No Strings Attached, about friends who fall for one another after promising to stay emotionally uninvolved, both hit theaters in 2011. On the TV side, The Wilds and Yellowjackets — which debuted less than a year apart, in 2020 and 2021, respectively — both centered on teen girls who must survive the wilderness after a plane crash.
Yahoo
21 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Hoka Launches Global Running Campaign ‘Together, We Fly Higher' With Paralympic Gold Medalist Grace Norman
Hoka has tapped Paralympic gold medalist Grace Norman for a new global running campaign dubbed 'Together, We Fly Higher.' Launched Thursday with a two-minute spot and shorter clip both soundtracked by Bob Dylan's 'Shelter By the Storm,' the campaign highlights the community that supports runners, including coaches, family, spectators and fellow participants. More from WWD Hoka's New Rocket X 3 Is the Stable, Consistent Super Shoe for Non-superhuman Marathoners Legal Questions Surface Over Walmart's Hoka Dupe What Nike, Hoka and Other Brands Are Doing to Celebrate Global Running Day Additional shorts will release over the coming months, and Hoka is boosting the campaign through connected television, out-of-home, digital, owned media and paid social in addition to its own social platforms. 'As a brand driven by the joy of progress, we recognize the role community plays in the long road athletes' take to achieve greatness,' Erika Gabrielli, vice president of Global Marketing for Hoka, said in a press release. 'Together We Fly Higher' is about just that — celebrating the journey and those who got you there. Our individual progress is fueled by the collective. This campaign puts a spotlight on humans supporting humans, and how this principle empowers us to push past our limits.' The campaign comes after parent company Deckers reported a slowdown in direct-to-consumer sales for Hoka in the the fourth quarter of 2025. Deckers' chief financial officer Steven Fasching pointed to 'macroeconomic uncertainty' as a factor, as well as consumers choosing in-store purchases and higher levels of promotion for outgoing models. 'I'm not entirely surprised by that performance, generally where the quarter came in is where we expected Hoka to come in,' Fasching said in the May earnings call. 'But once we get beyond Q1, with the success that we're seeing with the new introductions in Hoka, we're encouraged that you're going to start to see those numbers improve.' In June, Hoka launched the Rocket x 3 as the latest iteration of its stability-focused super shoe. It also debuted the Arahi 8 everyday road runner at the beginning of July. Norman won Paralympic gold medals in the 2024 PTS5 Paratriathlon and 2016 PT4 Paratriathlon, as well as silver in the 2020 PTS5 Paratriathlon. Best of WWD All the Retailers That Nike Left and Then Went Back Mikey Madison's Elegant Red Carpet Shoe Style [PHOTOS] Julia Fox's Sleekest and Boldest Shoe Looks Over the Years [Photos]
Scoop
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Here. Together. Now.
The New Zealand Improv Festival is proud to present their 2025 programme Here. Together. Now. celebrating the stories of Aotearoa, the connections between us, and the joys and innovations of improvisation, this September 26 through October 4 at BATS Theatre in Wellington. Featuring an expansive programme of thirty-four workshops and twenty-two shows across the Festival, there's something for the newest improv watcher to the more well-hewn, with performers and directors coming together from across the motu and around the world to explore performance on BATS' stages for nine nights only. Bull Rush, currently featured at Basement Theatre in Auckland every Friday night joins us for their side-splitting, sexy, scintillating improv. Local comedy favourites Ginge & Minge present Redemption, where game players give their comedy ideas a second chance. Māori and Pasifika improv group Kōrero Paki return to the stage for their third outing of mean kōrero and wild comedy; and these three shows are just a selection of the bounty that's on offer. 'Coming into our third and final year as co-directors of the Festival, we really wanted to dig into what makes improv special as an art form.' Festival Co-Directors Jim Fishwick and Matt Powell say, 'In a time where political and corporate forces seek to pull us apart, we want to demonstrate the power of improv to bring people together in the moment, performer and audience alike, to create new things that no individual could have made by themselves.' With some of the key improv principles of listening, acceptance, and support feeling more important now than ever, our 2025 Improv Fest programme will warm the heart and tickle the funny bone, and we can't wait to see how things unfold. The New Zealand Improv Festival runs from 26 September through 4 October 2025. Tickets for the New Zealand Improv Festival are available now. Check out our show programme at BATS's website, and sign up for our workshop programme too.
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Why real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie just had to do Together, together
When Dave Franco read the script of Together, a comedic horror film about a codependent couple whose bodies begin to fuse, he was immediately on board – and not just for himself. 'I was blown away by all of these insane set-pieces that were like nothing I had ever seen before, and I turned to Alison and said I think we should do this one together,' he says. 'And then I read the script and was not at all insulted that Dave compared our relationship to that of the characters in the movie,' says Alison Brie, Franco's partner of 15 years and wife of eight. In truth, she says, she wasn't at all insulted because she felt they were so different from the characters in the movie. Adds Franco, 'I think if we were struggling as much as they are, we would not have said yes'. Franco plays Tim, a man in his mid-30s who still harbours a fantasy of making it big with his occasionally gigging band. Brie is Millie, a teacher who lands a new job in the country and thinks of it as the gateway to the next chapter in their lives – the cute house, the small community, the pitter-patter of little feet. He is, of course, terrified. After a walk in the woods near their new home goes awry, things get truly weird. Strange smells in the house. Sticky substances that seem to emerge whenever they are close to each other. An inability to leave each other's orbit for very long, or at all. Franco and Brie met at Mardi Gras in New Orleans. It was, she jokes, 'a one-night stand that never ended'. Though she felt their relationship was sufficiently different to the film's couple, Brie also appreciated that 'the meta quality of us being in a long-term relationship would add a lot to the movie. For us as actors, there was a lot of work that we didn't have to do to have the theme [of codependency] be infused with that history that's already there.' For writer-director Michael Shanks, though, there was nowhere to hide. Tim is, he readily admits, '100 per cent' him – or at least him as he was in his mid-20s when he first had the idea for what would become Together. 'I've been in a relationship with my partner for over 16 years,' he says. 'We met at schoolies the week after high school – a friend's parents had a little shack an hour out of Melbourne, we went there and drank ourselves into oblivion for a week, and got awfully sunburnt.' They have been together ever since, he continues, 'and there was a point where I realised we have all the same friends, we eat the same food, we listen to the same music, we breathe the same air, and I started to freak out. I was realising that, without her, I wasn't a complete person any more because we'd been growing in the same direction so much that our lives had become intertwined.' It wasn't just them, either. 'My friendship group is a series of tragic monogamists, most of whom have been together since high school,' Shanks says. 'Some of those relationships have thrived, and some you look at and go, 'I don't think you guys are still together because you love each other. I think you're just used to each other. You're so intertwined you can't extricate yourselves'.' When Shanks told his partner, Louey, about his idea, she was taken aback but also understanding. 'She said to me, 'I'm a little upset you're writing this, but it's a good idea'.' Shanks wrote his first draft of the screenplay in 2019, when he was in his late 20s. The following year, Screen Australia funded a second draft, and in 2021 it funded a third. (Shanks was already on the agency's radar thanks to his YouTube channel, which had garnered more than 64 million views before going into hiatus; in 2016, the agency backed his self-made Lord of the Rings parody Wizard of Oz.) That timeline has become critically important in recent months, for reasons that Shanks finds painful to discuss. The film was shot in just 21 days in early 2024, with the star American couple setting up house in Melbourne. 'We loved snagging that window seat at Napier Quarter,' says Brie of the cosy Fitzroy wine bar they frequented. 'Melbourne makes us feel at home,' adds Franco. 'It's one of the few places we've ever shot that we could actually imagine ourselves living in.' For the rest of the year, Shanks did whatever VFX work he could manage himself, though the big set pieces were farmed out to Framestore. 'It was amazing to work with real visual effects people,' he says, somewhat modestly. He worked day and night and at weekends. 'And that was the way we managed to get it done in time to submit to Sundance.' The film festival is the world's foremost showcase of indie cinema. Loading 'I've been a film nerd my whole life, and you dream of going somewhere like Sundance,' Shanks says. 'Making the film was a dream. Getting into Sundance was the next dream.' Park City, Utah, where the festival has been held, is more than 2100 metres above sea level. It's not uncommon for visitors to contend with altitude sickness – and Shanks had it bad. He had a virus too. 'I spent two days leading up to the screening just vomiting, unable to keep food down. The day of the screening, I was in an emergency room and had a drip and oxygen – it was awful,' he recalls. Somehow, he forced himself into the 2000-seat cinema where he was due to introduce his film. 'And as soon as I walked into that room, the adrenaline hit.' Only a very small group of people – producers and editors and a handful of crew – had yet seen Together. They thought it was 'quite good', but no one knew how it would play to an audience. 'My partner had flown over for it, and my mother had flown over to see a film she was almost certainly going to hate – it's sticky and gross, and it has some nasty moments, and she typically doesn't watch any film that doesn't star Judi Dench.' Five minutes in, he got his first laugh. After another five minutes, the film's first scare landed too. 'And from then, they just reacted exactly the way we always hoped they would.' At the after-party, he was mobbed by well-wishers while Louey was playing dice games with Brie and English actor Dan Stevens. Even his mum liked it … ish. 'She came up and said, 'I thought that was quite good'.' Within hours, a bidding war broke out for the film, which cost about $US5 million to make. Two days later, distributor Neon landed it – reportedly paying $US17 million for worldwide rights, the biggest sale of the festival and one of the biggest in its history. And that, more or less, is when the trouble began. Loading According to a lawsuit filed in May, Jess Jacklin and Charles Beale, producers of Better Half, were alerted by friends about alleged similarities between their movie and Together. They attended a screening of Shanks' film on January 30 'to assess the extent of the similarities. As the audience laughed and cheered, Jacklin and Beale sat in stunned silence, their worst nightmare unfolding,' the suit claims. 'Scene after scene confirmed that Defendants … stole virtually every unique aspect' of their film. The lawsuit lodged on behalf of their company, StudioFest LLC, claimed that Patrick Henry Phelan, the writer and director of Better Half, had sent his screenplay to Franco and Brie via their agents, WME, in August 2020. Shanks and Franco first met on Zoom in 2021, after another Shanks script, Hotel, Hotel, Hotel, Hotel, was included on The Black List 's annual roundup of Hollywood's best unproduced screenplays. During that meeting, the pair bonded over a shared love of horror, and Shanks mentioned another screenplay he had written, Together. 'I wasn't thinking he would turn around and say, 'I want to be in it',' says Shanks, 'more that he might read it and go, 'Oh, this guy can write. Maybe we can write something together'. But obviously, secretly hoping he'd be like, 'Yeah, I want to do it'. And then, even more absurdly, secretly hoping he would show … Brie the script, and they might want to do it together. Loading 'I didn't even dare think that was a possibility,' he continues. 'But two days later, I got a call from my agent saying, 'hey, just so you know, Dave wanted to ask, how would you feel if he starred in the film, would that be OK with you? And also, he gave it to his wife Alison, and she really loves it, and how would you feel about them coming on and doing it together?'' 'OK, yeah, I think that could work.' Shanks can't really talk about the lawsuit other than to say he thinks it is easily disproven by a fully documented timeline (which establishes, among other things, the existence of his first draft long before the agents for Franco and Brie were sent, and rejected, Phelan's screenplay). But he will talk about the impact it has had on him. 'It's been a real bummer, to be honest,' he says. 'I sort of sank into a bit of a depression. This is such an indie film. It was made for no money, Dave and Alison and myself did it gratis, almost, because we believed in the project. And then to have some stranger that none of us ever met or heard of turn us into these public villains, it's been very emotionally challenging.' At the end of the day, though, the lawsuit and the online venom it spawned is but 'a minor roadblock'. 'Now that the film's coming out, we're remembering, 'Oh my God, we've made a movie that people really like, it's 100 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, people bought it because they know people are going to watch it',' he says. As for Tim, the commitment-phobic antihero of his film, Shanks admits 'I wrote him as a therapeutic, dark reflection of myself. We've all got that friend who still thinks they're going to be an actor or a rock star in their early 30s'. Or a filmmaker? 'Exactly,' he says, laughing. 'They're the last person to know that they should give it up, to realise there's actually more to life than these fantasies.' But aren't you glad you didn't give it up? 'Oh my God, yeah.' Loading Together is on general release from July 31.
