Roughly a year ago, Guillermo del Toro lamented that his long-gestating passion project, a dark, stop-motion version of Pinocchio, was kaput. Sounding dejected, he told IGN “it’s not happening.” He continued, “But the idea was to do Pinocchio during the ascension of fascism in Italy, with Mussolini. It was a good time…
We’re all still reeling from the loss of Go90 and Seeso, but DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and former Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman have teamed up to new develop yet another streaming service that has yet another stupid name. The project was initially operating under the codename “NewTV,” which should…
Better Call Saul is better than it has any right to be. A Breaking Bad prequel about huckster lawyer Saul Goodman, the show (and Bob Odenkirk’s nimble performance) deftly works to explore a different kind of moral failure than that of its predecessor. Saul, a.k.a. Jimmy McGill, isn’t sacrificing his soul with pulled…
At this point, we have to assume that Alfonso Cuarón is having slightly mixed feelings about Netflix acquiring the distribution rights to his latest auteur effort, Roma. On the one hand, distribution—especially from a company with an acquisition budget like Netflix’s—is always something to be celebrated, especially…
Alfonso Cuarón is a celebrated filmmaker at this point, largely thanks to his work on Gravity, which makes the fact that he made a Harry Potter movie—2004's Prisoner Of Azkaban—somewhat surprising. As it turns out, even Cuarón thought he was a weird choice to direct the film, since he had no familiarity with the…
Guillermo del Toro’s Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark has cast some people to get scared, tell stories, and be in the dark. André Øvredal will direct Michael Garza (Wayward Pines), Austin Abrams (The Walking Dead), Gabriel Rush (Moonrise Kingdom), Austin Zajur (Fist Fight), and Natalie Ganzhorn (The Stanley Dynamic)…
Back in February, when the world was riding high on The Shape Of Water and its timeless love story between a woman and a fish-man, the estate of playwright Paul Zindel decided that the film seemed a little familiar. Zindel’s estate sued director Guillermo del Toro, accusing him of lifting plot elements from Zindel’s…
Some people use art as an escape, but others immerse themselves in it, wanting to live and breath it every hour of the day. It probably doesn’t surprise you to learn that The Shape Of Water director Guillermo del Toro is one of the latter, but that he owns an honest-to-god “manga/anime cabin” just might.
Guillermo del Toro movies are particularly well-suited to spawning super cool merch, whether it’s a controversial The Shape Of Water dildo or Pacific Rim action figures that are cooler than the movie they were in, but now Guillermo del Toro himself is getting some cool merch. As reported by Entertainment Weekly, toy…
This week’s question comes from The A.V. Club’s online culture editor, Clayton Purdom:
Stars—They’re just like us! They publicly complain when their favorite shows get cancelled, lead the vanguard for the campaign to renew said show, and then form lasting bonds of friendship with their fellow stars in an ultra-secret group chat. Just like we all do! As Mashable reports, that’s exactly what Lin-Manuel…
Watch out, Cryptkeeper: There’s a new lovable master of TV horror ceremonies in town. As Variety reports, Netflix is getting in on the horror anthology trend with a new series, Guillermo del Toro Presents 10 After Midnight, curated by Oscar-winning director and grown-up monster kid Guillermo del Toro.
When AMC announced its new pop culture docuseries, Visionaries, at the Television Critics Association 2017 summer press tour, the network made it clear that these explorations of genres and media would be informative, but informal—expansive, but specific to whatever prominent filmmaker or producer was at the helm of a…
It’s been going on five years now since we first reported the news that iconic children’s book series Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark might be coming to the big screen. And now, after years of “who knows if they’ll actually turn a bunch of campfire tales with the most fucked-up illustrations imaginable into a movie”…
Guillermo Del Toro is getting a juicy bonus from Fox Searchlight after The Shape Of Water’s big Best Picture win at the Oscars, with Deadline reporting that he has just signed an overall deal with Fox Searchlight. That will give the studio dibs on anything Del Toro wants to write, produce, and direct, and he’ll also…
On today’s new episode of Film Club, A.V. Club film editor A.A. Dowd and staff critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky break down Pacific Rim: Uprising, the follow-up to Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 mecha-vs.-kaijū spectacular. Directed and co-written by Spartacus creator Steven S. DeKnight, Uprising contains little of the geeky…
The 90th Academy Awards will air this Sunday, March 4, and Film Club is counting down the days leading up to the ceremony with an examination of this year’s major categories. Each day, A.V. Club film editor A.A. Dowd and staff critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky will break down a category and give us their picks for who …
There are plenty of filmmakers who find a way to include themselves in their projects (though few have had the gall to cast themselves as the savior of the world). Guillermo Del Toro’s self-directed cameos have all been as delightfully strange as he is, whether he’s playing a guy dressed as a dragon in Hellboy, or…
The Shape Of Water’s sex scenes have sparked a lot of discussion, most of which has centered on what a potentially divine amphibian’s dick would look like. All this scaly speculation has already inspired the creation of a dildo, called the “Jewel Of The Amazon,” which has already sold out online (though the maker,…
In what definitely seems like a good sign for how somebody’s night at the Academy Awards will go, the Directors Guild Of America announced the winners of its annual DGA Awards last night and now two filmmakers are walking away with pretty good Oscar odds. The DGA is usually a good predictor for the directing category…
