Laura Linney Joins Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2

Wait. What?

There are people you expect to be announced as joining the cast of the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. And then there’s Laura Linney. Imagine our surprise, then, when The Hollywood Reporter brought word that Linney is aboard the sequel. 

Usually found in indie and dramatic fare such as Kinsey, You Can Count On Me, Mystic River and The Truman Show, the closest she has come to a big superhero project is voicing the computer in Arthur Christmas. Yet, next year, she’ll be on screen in some unspecified role. 

Though the plot is still mostly unknown, the sequel will see the turtles – performance captured and voiced by Alan Ritchson, Noel Fisher, Pete Ploszek and Jeremy Howard – tackling threats new and old in New York City. Megan Fox and Will Arnett are back as April O’Neill and scuzzy cameraman Vernon Fenwick respectively, with Danny Woodburn once more providing the performance work for mutant rat mentor Splinter. Stephen Amell is playing Casey Jones with Tyler Perry as Baxter Stockman, and Brian Tee was recently announced as the new Shredder. Earth To Echo’s David Green has taken over directorial duties this time, but writers Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec are back to provide the script for the movie, which is now shooting.

The film is scheduled to arrive here on June 3, 2016.

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New 'Pay Off' Trailer For Terminator Genisys Lands

Update: A new poster is up too

Update: A new poster along the same lines as the trailer is online. But we'll add it lower down the page in a gallery, so don't click if you're still spoiler-phobic.

Some trailers can be shy about revealing certain details, but not this new 'pay off' teaser from Terminator Genisys. As the latest issue of Empire revealed, there's a whole new Terminator in this movie, and this is the trailer reveals what it does - and which actor (or actress)  plays it.

So, in short, sound the spoiler siren - and buckle up for something pretty intriguing...

So yes, John Connor himself, as played by Jason Clarke, is the new Terminator, with the power to disintegrate and reform at will. He is part-human, part-machine, all-unstoppable: until he's stopped, of course, which may well happen by the end of Terminator Genisys. But how does this work with the time-travel / reboot nature of the film? 

{Terminator Genisys Payoff poster}

There are also a number of intriguing titbits littered throughout the trailer, including the Arnie on Arnie fight, the new young John Connor, and the "Genisys" billboard that flashes past briefly. It's a trailer that shows a lot of the pyrotechnics fans of the franchise have to look forward to, with more no doubt still in store on the big screen.

With Byung-hun Lee, Matt Smith, J.K. Simmons, Dayo Okeniyi and Sandrine Holt also among the cast, Terminator Genisys is set to arrive in our cinemas on July 3. For more on the film, be sure to check out the current issue, which looks a lot like this:

{Terminator Genisys Empire Covers}

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New Fantastic Four Character Posters Online

Strike a pose

With the film due in August, some new character posters for Fantastic Four have arrived online and their super power is that they link together to form one giant banner. Which doesn’t seem like a great ability, but what if it’s a Bruce Banner. Eh? EH? Now you’re thinking, aren’t you? You’re mostly thinking, ‘you idiot, they’re at different studios’ but at least you’re thinking. Where were we? Right. Posters. Yes. Take a look below. {Fantastic Four Character Posters}

Mostly the images make us think, ‘why are you all just staring at the camera when there is a meteor-pocalypse afflicting the Baxter building and the rest of New York? Don’t you care?’ Clearly they have other things on their minds. And not just The Thing.

Promising a more realistic – as far as you can go given their powers – approach, director Josh Trank and writer/producer Simon Kinberg’s take on the classic Marvel characters finds the four – Reed Richards (Miles Teller), Sue Storm (Kate Mara), Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan) and Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) gaining unusual (and often unwanted) new abilities after an experimental trip to another dimension goes badly wrong. 

"There's the opportunity to make something that is challenging and tragic and dramatic," Trank told Empire. "The opportunity is right there in the material. We'd rather steer it in that direction as opposed to just embracing a tone that comes right off the page." We’ll see the full result on August 6. 

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New Tomorrowland Character Videos Reveal More Story

Who are Casey and Athena?

It’s probably best (and director Brad Bird-approved) to go into Tomorrowland: A World Beyond knowing as little as possible so the mysteries can reveal themselves on screen. But that’s not always the way movie marketing works, so new videos on two of the characters – Britt Robertson’s Casey and Athena (Raffey Cassidy) have hit the Interwebs. If you’re trying to stay as pure as possible, you’ll want to heed a mild Spoiler Warning, particularly on the first video. 

We’re given a little more information on Casey which goes some way to explain why she might get tangled up in the plan to save Tomorrowland. She’s a curious type, a dreamer and a builder and also clearly not afraid to get in trouble if it’s for the right reason.

When she’s given a glimpse of Tomorrowland, she decides to seek out one person who might be able to tell her more – Frank Walker (George Clooney), a seemingly failed inventor living alone who turns out to be much more than the world at large imagines.

As for Athena, she’s still largely being kept a mystery, and in her video, she simply explains a little more about the city.

With Judy Greer, Kathryn Hahn, Hugh Laurie and Pierce Gagnon in the cast, Tomorrowland: A World Beyond is set to arrive in the UK on May 22.

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X-Men: Apocalypse's Jubilee And Jean Grey Hit Instagram

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Sam Worthington Moves To The Shack

He'll star in Stuart Hazeldine's latest

As he starts work on his new film, Exam director Stuart Hazeldine is building quite the cast. With Octavia Spencer already attached to play no lesser role than God, Sam Worthington is now aboard as the lead.

Adapted by John Fusco from William Paul Young’s 2007 novel, the story follows a man (Worthington) whose youngest daughter is kidnapped during a family holiday. Evidence turns up in an abandoned shack to suggest she was murdered, which stymies the case. But then, four years later, he receives a note, apparently from God, inviting him to go back to the ruined building. Against his better judgement, he accepts, and what he finds there changes his life forever. Given whom Spencer is playing, we’re guessing it won’t be a false lead.

Hazeldine has been busy setting up the film, which has yet to lock in a release date. As for Worthington, he was recently attached to Gerard Butler heist thriller Den Of Thieves and will next be seen on our screens in Everest, due September 25. There’s also the small matter of several Avatar sequels still lurking on his to-do list as soon as James Cameron is ready to revisit Pandora. 

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Channing Tatum Wants To Fight The Forever War

He's attached to the long-simmering novel adaptation

Though Ridley Scott has wanted to adapt Joe Haldeman’s classic hard sci-fi tome The Forever War for more than 30 years now, he’s had to sit and watch it frustratingly linger in limbo at 20th Century Fox. The rights have since gone back on the market and now lie with Channing Tatum’s Free Association production company. He’s aiming to produce and star in the eventual film, with Warner Bros. and Sony now locked in negotiation combat to see which can emerge triumphant and make it happen.

Haldeman’s 1947 story follows a group of soldiers, but in particular William Mandella and his friend Marygay, conscripted into the military following an attack on human colonies by the alien Taurans. After gruelling training on Earth, he and his companions are sent through a wormhole-like phenomenon to fight - but the vast distances involved mean that each time they return to Earth, decades or centuries of local time have passed and society has massively changed, even though the soldiers have only experienced weeks or months of subjective time. It’s got big concepts at its core, but audiences might be more ready for them thanks to Interstellar’s exploration of wormhole mechanics and the effects on time. 

Other key players here besides Tatum are Richard Edlund, a visual effects artist who worked on (among many other things) the original Star Wars trilogy and who owned the rights, and Prometheus writer Jon Spaihts, who is attached to provide the script. Can The Forever War finally be won? We might at last find out.

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