Movies
Magnet Acquires ‘The Last Days on Mars’!
The Wagner/Cuban Company’s Magnet Releasing, genre arm of Magnolia Pictures, has acquired US distribution rights to Ruairi Robinson’s Cannes sci-fi The Last Days on Mars from Focus Features International, Screen Daily reports..
Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai, Olivia Williams and Tom Cullen star in the Directors’ Fortnight entry about the first manned mission to mars which comes under attack from an alien life-form.
The deal was negotiated by Magnolia/Magnet svp of acquisitions Dori Begley and director of acquisitions Peter Van Steemburg with Focus Features International.
Magnet is eyeing a release through its Ultra VOD programme later this year.
Producers are Michael Kuhn and Andrea Cornwell. The film marks the feature debut of Robinson, Oscar-nominated for short Fifty Percent Grey.
Long synopsis: “Follows the story of an astronaut crew on Mars on the verge of a major breakthrough having collected rock specimens that reveal microscopic evidence of life. In their last hours on the planet, two astronauts go back to a cavernous valley on the surface of Mars to collect further evidence for their discovery, but a routine excavation turns deadly when one of them falls to his death and his body is taken as a host and re-animated by the very life form they sought to discover.”
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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