Latest news with #re-release
Sky News
04-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Sky News
Actor Dhanush criticises AI-altered ending for re-release of hit film Raanjhanaa
Indian actor Dhanush says he has been left "completely disturbed" by the re-release of one of his hit films with an alternative ending assisted by AI - but the production company behind it has rejected criticism of the move. Hindi-language romantic drama Raanjhanaa, called Ambikapathy in its Tamil-language title, has made headlines over its re-release 12 years after first hitting cinemas in 2013. Eros Media World says the new version, which sees the film's original ending switched to a happier one, is a "lawful and creative reinterpretation, not a replacement", and that the change and use of artificial intelligence has been made clear to viewers. The company says the alternate ending was "crafted under the direction of a human creative team using AI only as an assistive tool - not as an autonomous content generator". In a statement sent to Sky News, group chief executive Pradeep Dwivedi said the studio wanted to offer "fresh dimensions for audiences" and never intended "to undermine the original essence" of the film. However, the AI-assisted re-release has already drawn criticism from the film's director Aanand L Rai, and now its star Dhanush has released a statement to say the "AI-altered climax" had left him "completely disturbed". "This alternate ending has stripped the film of its very soul, and the concerned parties went ahead with it despite my clear objection," Dhanush said in a message posted on X. "This is not the film I committed to 12 years ago." Dhanush said the use of AI to alter films or other content "is a deeply concerning precedent for both art and artists" that "threatens the integrity of storytelling and the legacy of cinema". He added: "I sincerely hope that stricter regulations are put in place to prevent such practices in the future." Eros said Dhanush's "wonderful performance" in the role of Kundan had brought the character to life "in an unforgettable way". However, the studio said the actor's team had been aware of the plans before the re-release and that they had received "no formal objection". "While we acknowledge and respect differing views on the use of AI in film, our aim has been to explore how technology can complement storytelling and offer fresh dimensions for audiences - never to undermine the original essence of a film," Mr Dwivedi said. "The original Raanjhanaa and Ambikapathy remains much loved and widely available, and the IP is fully preserved." He added: "Just as storytelling evolves, so too does music - and with responsible use of AI, even the most iconic soundtracks are being respectfully reimagined as remixes to resonate with new generations while preserving their original soul. "We deeply respect the creative community and remain committed to collaborating in ways that ensure mutual respect, innovation, and progress for the cinematic arts. As one of India's most storied film studios, Eros remains committed to celebrating Indian cinema, nurturing talent, and embracing technology responsibly." Dhanush's comments come after statements posted by Rai, who has described the re-release as "a betrayal" to the original that has been "dressed up as innovation". Writing on Instagram, he said: "This was never just a film to us. It was shaped by human hands, human flaws, and human feeling. What's now being circulated is not a tribute. It is a reckless takeover that strips the work of its intent, its context, and its soul." Responding to the director's criticism, Mr Dwivedi reiterated that the re-release is "a respectful creative reinterpretation - clearly labelled and separate from the original version" and said such practices are "common in global cinema, and reflect our long-standing commitment to innovation, audience engagement, and cultural preservation". He also highlighted an ongoing legal dispute between Eros and Colour Yellow Productions, the studio co-founded by Rai. The re-release comes as artificial intelligence continues to cause concern among some in the creative industries. In June, video game actors in the US ended a strike after nearly a year of industrial action over the use of AI by game studios - an issue that was also part of the concerns raised by the Hollywood writers' and actors' strikes in 2023. Earlier this year, Oscar-nominated film The Brutalist made headlines for using the technology to "refine" Hungarian accents. It has also been used for de-aging stars such as Harrison Ford for the latest Indiana Jones film and Tom Hanks in the 2024 picture Here - and for helping to create "the last Beatles record" featuring John Lennon's vocals, released in 2023. There is a "good side" to the technology but also a "scary side", Sir Paul McCartney has said, adding: "We will just have to see where that leads."
Geek Tyrant
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
New Trailer For The TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES Movie 35th Anniversary Re-Release — GeekTyrant
Fatham Entertainment has released a new trailer for the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles re-release in celebration of its 35th anniversary. It's wild that this movie came out 35 freakin' years ago! Fathom Entertainment is bringing the movie back to the big screen for two special dates: Saturday, August 16, and Wednesday, August 20. And fans are getting more than just a nostalgic revisit. Directed by Steve Barron and produced by New Line Cinema, the original film wasn't just a huge hit, it was a landmark. With the help of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, the Turtles were brought to life using state-of-the-art animatronic suits and puppetry. The result was an awesome gritty, funny, and faithful adaptation that fans of the franchise loved! I love this movie! I actually watched it in the big screen a few months ago for the first time in years, and that was a very cool experience, one that you need to experience for yourself if your a fan! Fathom Entertainment CEO Ray Nutt summed up the spirit of the event, saying, 'Few titles in recent memory have as large and rabid a fanbase as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It's Turtle Time, and Fathom Entertainment is proud to be part of Turtlemania and help make possible a 35th anniversary celebration like no other on the big screen. Moviegoers across generations will revel in the action and excitement.' Adding to the experience, audiences will also get to see Turtles Unmasked , a brand-new featurette that digs into the behind-the-scenes madness of making the film. In the film, Four teenage mutant ninja turtles emerge from the sewers to protect New York City from a masked gang of criminal ninjas. Turtlemania is back! Experience one of the biggest and most widely anticipated movie anniversary celebrations of the year with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This movie stars Brian Tochi as Leonardo, Corey Feldman as Donatello, Josh Pais as Raphael, Robbie Rist as Michelangelo, and Kevin Clash as Splinter, the Turtles' master. And features Judith Hoag and Elias Koteas. Produced alongside the team behind TMNT: Evolution, Mutation & Reboot , the mini-doc includes never-before-seen archival footage, extended scenes that didn't make the final cut, and even personal video diary footage from director Steve Barron reflecting on the film's production challenges. If you're a fan of this movie this is your chance to relive the turtle-powered magic with a crowd of fellow fans! The trailer for the 35th anniversary rerelease may be viewed below.
Geek Tyrant
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
STAR WARS Is Heading Back to Theaters for Its 50th Anniversary Celebration — GeekTyrant
It's hard to believe, but Star Wars is about to turn 50 years old, and how is the galaxy far, far away planning to celebrate this massive milestone? By heading back to where it all began… the big screen. Disney just announced that George Lucas' original Star Wars will be re-released in theaters on April 30, 2027, giving fans a chance to experience the iconic space adventure the way it was meant to be seen. While the official anniversary lands on May 25, 2027, Disney is dropping the re-release a little early because that weekend is already locked in for the debut of a brand-new film, Star Wars: Starfighter , starring Ryan Gosling. This theatrical return comes hot on the heels of Star Wars Celebration Los Angeles, which runs from April 1 to 4, 2027. With all eyes on the franchise during that time, you can bet Lucasfilm will lean in hard on promoting the return of the original film. There's even a chance we'll see some of the original cast and crew reunite during the celebration. The big mystery right now is what version of Star Wars fans will get. Will it be the 1997 Special Edition, the version George Lucas considers definitive, complete with added scenes and updated visual effects? That's the safe bet. But there's a growing glimmer of hope among die-hard fans. Just last month, Kathleen Kennedy attended a rare screening of an untouched original print of Star Wars , not even labeled as Episode IV: A New Hope . That screening has fans wondering if Lucasfilm is gearing up for something even more special. Maybe they're cooking up a new restoration of the unaltered theatrical version. Or even a version that fuses the best elements from both cuts. Whatever it is, if Lucasfilm drops the original, unedited classic, it'll be the holy grail moment fans have been dreaming of. The 1977 classic tells the story of a farm boy named Luke Skywalker, played by Mark Hamill, who gets swept into a galaxy-wide rebellion with Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness), and the roguish Han Solo (Harrison Ford). It changed cinema forever and kicked off a cultural phenomenon that includes sequels, prequels, spinoffs, shows, novels, comics, and a mountain of collectibles. So, get ready to relive the magic. Whether it's the original theatrical cut or the Special Edition, Star Wars returning to theaters in 2027 is going to be a fun event for longtime fans and a perfect introduction for a new generation.
Telegraph
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Sexy, ‘mad' and vulgar – Amadeus blows today's timid biopics out the water
Few music biopics these days provoke and prance like Miloš Forman's 1984 classic, Amadeus. Commercially, the genre may be in rude health – but it's not doing nearly so well creatively. It's stuck in a rut of nervous good taste. The problem is how few of these jukebox melodramas swing for the fences: their foremost goal is to be unobjectionable. To be fair, plenty succeed in that – I found Timothée Chalamet's Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, easy to respect, if hard to love. Others fail, but not in an interesting way (take the Freddie Mercury fiasco Bohemian Rhapsody, which is scared, sanitised and as ugly as sin). All of them suffer by comparison with Amadeus, winner of Best Picture, Best Director, and six other Oscars, which turned 40 last year and has just been restored in 4K, ahead of a nationwide re-release. Dazzling and evergreen as Amadeus is, the idea that today's film-makers could learn from Forman's film is a tricky one, because it's in many ways an object lesson in how not to construct a biopic. Take its core premise – that Mozart (Tom Hulce) was driven into his grave by the pathologically jealous court composer Antonio Salieri (F Murray Abraham). This is wildly speculative at best, and at worst, provably untrue. It comes from a rumour of poisoning that circulated after the former's death at 35, which resurfaced only when the senile Salieri caught wind of it while dying in a lunatic asylum. Yes, he made some delirious statements of culpability, but then recanted these when he was lucid. Peter Shaffer, in his celebrated 1979 stage play, wasn't the first to supply a motive of intense envy that was more or less specious, and which he punched up into even greater antagonism when he wrote the film's script. He was inspired by an 1830 poetic drama by Alexander Pushkin called Mozart and Salieri, which had first popularised the idea of their rivalry, only five years after Salieri's death. There was a thin factual basis for this: in the Viennese court of the 1780s, the pair would certainly have vied for attention and acclaim, but most evidence points to them collaborating amicably and becoming close friends as time went by. Salieri even tutored Mozart's son, Franz. The idea that he was a sad, eternal bachelor, who made a vow of celibacy to achieve elusive musical immortality, is wholly false: Salieri was married with eight children and a mistress. 'Over-the-top racket' We don't come to Amadeus for historical accuracy, that's for sure. This is equally true of the heightened, hallucinatory effects achieved by Patrizia von Brandenstein's grand production design, with the doll-house tableaus it creates in drawing rooms; or by Theodor Pištěk's rococo costumes and intentionally creepy masks. And let's not forget the hair – Wolfgang's punk-rock pink wig, above all. This is pure fantasy. The real Mozart didn't like wigs, and avoided wearing them by styling his own hair to look like one. Even by comparison to Shaffer's play, which legitimised the myth of this deadly rivalry, Forman's film could be accused of making an over-the-top racket. It caricatures Mozart, in Hulce's fabulously outré performance, as a giggling, infantile vulgarian, who woos his buxom future wife Constanze Weber (Elizabeth Berridge) using fart jokes. This performance was the film's big risk, and in many ways the whole point. Not only did Shaffer lean into Mozart's absurd clowning for his script – the film is definitely more irreverent than the play, with much more colloquial dialogue – but Hulce claimed that he looked to none other than John McEnroe as a model for the composer's erratic mood swings and man-child essence. Shaffer had set up a civilised tussle between genius and mediocrity on stage (Paul Scofield and Ian McKellen had been the first to play Salieri, with Simon Callow and Tim Curry as their respective Mozarts on the West End and Broadway stages). On film, with Forman's guidance, this escalated into uncouth combat, performed to the hilt. Mediocrity appears to win, but only in the feeble lifetime of this one man, Salieri. Genius or nightmare? In posterity, of course, Mozart's genius has the last laugh. Literally so, in fact. Salieri, who goes mad, becomes a self-styled 'patron saint of mediocrities', being wheeled around his asylum's corridors, while the exasperating giggle of Mozart rings around his head. The play prowled this battleground using Shaffer's more formal rhetoric. But it's the film that ignites, seizing on the chance to play more than ever like an opera, and using the fresh recordings of at least 20 Mozart pieces that Neville Marriner made with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. It's Emperor Joseph II (a droll Jeffrey Jones) who complains to Mozart, in a much-quoted scene, of 'too many notes' at an opera premiere. If anyone was going to make a Mozart biopic with too few notes, it was unlikely to be Forman, who had brought a spirit of Czech rebellion to America with the likes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and the protest musical Hair (1979). With Amadeus, he clearly wanted us to be bombarded – battered – by the composer's work, unleashing his genius on us in floods until we practically beg for mercy. On screen, Salieri is helpless in this deluge. His own pieces don't stand a chance. And the aggravating personality of the younger man is pushed to a precipice where he (and we) can scarcely handle it. With Shaffer's script doubling down, the film asks: what if Mozart was not only this much of a genius but also this much of a nightmare? Would it not have been tempting to poison him, and try to thwart his legacy? How did Salieri (who we're fairly sure resisted doing so) ever manage to restrain himself? And so make-believe is allowed to trump reality, to serve the theme. Inhabited fearlessly by the Oscar-winning Abraham, who practically brings himself to climax looking at musical notation, Salieri becomes not just a bitter creep on the sidelines, but a strangely profound focus of identification for the audience. He can't help but remain obsessed with his rival's music, relishing the operas privately from his box, even while he has gone behind the scenes to ensure they'll flop. (Even Don Giovanni, which in reality was actually a wild success.) 'Art is divine, God is cruel, none of us are Mozart' The film wants Salieri to sabotage Mozart far more than he ever did in real life. This is the dramatic licence it asks for. And that's all to the good – an accurate account of their relationship would surely have been rather dull. Poor Salieri, who had drifted into obscurity, would never be remembered without Amadeus, in any case. Reflected glory – which is better than zero glory – is all it can bestow upon him, and that has continued to last: a festival devoted to his work is even taking place in Vienna this year. Amadeus itself has weathered phases of disrepute and stood tall. Both Baz Luhrmann (on Elvis) and Sofia Coppola (on Marie Antoinette) have pointed to it as a major influence, in helping them escape the fusty biopic trap. On the other hand, the classical music establishment has often expressed purist disdain towards Forman's film, which seemingly peddled all these myths (wittily distorting reality, in fact) while bringing Mozart to the masses in the CD era. (Marriner's soundtrack was a #1 Billboard bestseller, one of the most popular classical recordings of all time.) For many, it can't be forgiven as the film that gave Mozart his potty mouth and sent him downmarket. And yet the potty mouth was true: he wrote a six-voice canon in 1782 with the German lyrics 'Leck mich im Arsch'. ('Leck' is 'lick', and 'Arsch' means exactly what it sounds like.) The vulgarity, the kitsch, and the inventions of Amadeus are absolutely crucial, or it would have been just another decorous snooze – a Salieri cantata of a film. It could never have committed so wholeheartedly to its statement: art is divine, God is cruel, none of us are Mozart. The film's gaudy ostentation is an attack on good taste – and one to rally behind. Would that everything these days wasn't so terrified of wigging out. The 4K restoration of Amadeus is in cinemas July 25
The Independent
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Fleetwood Mac stars make album announcement after days of fan speculation
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham have confirmed the re-release of their 1973 album, Buckingham Nicks. The album, their only collaborative studio effort, is now available for pre-order and will be released on 19 September. Speculation about the re-release was ignited by matching cryptic social media posts from the duo and a promotional billboard appearing in Los Angeles. Their social media messages formed a lyric from 'Frozen Love', a song featured on the Buckingham Nicks album, with Mick Fleetwood also referencing the track. The re-release occurs amid ongoing fan hopes for a Fleetwood Mac reunion, despite Nicks previously stating the band cannot continue without Christine McVie, who died in 2022.
