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Soderbergh Finishes The Batman, Red Rising Gets a Director, Fourth Wing Casts Its Violet — Pop Culture Digest — October 19, 2026
Steven Soderbergh is stepping in to finish principal photography on The Batman Part II while Matt Reeves handles a family matter. Pierce Brown's Red Rising finally has a studio and a director — Francis Lawrence at Paramount. Plus Fourth Wing casts Ewan McGregor's daughter as Violet, Peacock's Crystal Lake goes back to the original New Jersey woods, and Austin Abrams got security called on him for looking too wrecked on the Whalefall set.
Steven Soderbergh Is Finishing The Batman Part II for Matt Reeves
The Batman Part II is two-thirds shot, and it is about to get an uncredited assist from one of the most distinctive directors alive. Matt Reeves will not return to set as he deals with what The Hollywood Reporter describes as a sensitive family matter. Steven Soderbergh will shoot the remaining principal photography in London while Reeves works from Los Angeles and stays hands-on through post-production.
Reeves moved quickly to shut down the obvious reading: "Just to be clear, I am not leaving The Batman Part II. I am profoundly grateful to Steven for coming to my aid during this challenging time to help me finish principal photography."
Soderbergh's statement is almost engineer-like in its precision: "The goal here is to work with Matt and his team to generate footage that will integrate seamlessly with what's already been shot so Matt can properly finish his film."
Robert Pattinson returns as Bruce Wayne, with Scarlett Johansson and Sebastian Stan among the new additions. Hollywood has been here before — Zack Snyder handing Justice League to Joss Whedon in 2017, Richard Donner losing Superman II to Richard Lester in 1980 — but those were studio fights. This one is a colleague covering a shift.
Sources: The Hollywood Reporter
Red Rising Finally Has a Studio, a Director and a Screenwriter
Pierce Brown's Red Rising has been the great unmade genre adaptation for a decade — at one point set up at Universal, later eyed as a series, never quite happening. Paramount Pictures has now picked up the film rights to the first novel, with Francis Lawrence attached to direct and Justin Rhodes writing.
Lawrence knows his way around dystopian YA-as-adult-sci-fi: he directed most of The Hunger Games franchise, and he comes to this straight from the Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk. Rhodes wrote Terminator: Dark Fate and worked with Lawrence on Netflix's Bioshock.
Brown has published six books in the saga with a seventh on the way, and said in 2024 that the series had sold more than six million copies. Lawrence and Cameron MacConomy will produce through their about:blank banner alongside Francesco Goedhuis, with Brown executive producing.
For the uninitiated: it is a class-war story told as a colour-coded caste system on Mars, opening with a helium-3 miner infiltrating the gold elite that rules him. It is extremely brutal, extremely quotable, and has a fandom that has been waiting a very long time.
Sources: The Hollywood Reporter · Variety
Fourth Wing Casts Ewan McGregor's Daughter as Violet
Amazon's Fourth Wing series has its leads. Esther McGregor — yes, Ewan McGregor's daughter — will play Violet Sorrengail, with Emilio Sakraya as Xaden Riorson. Amazon declined to comment, which is how casting confirmations usually sound when they are true.
McGregor is best known for Amazon's We Were Liars and has Obi-Wan Kenobi, High School and the upcoming Life Is Strange series on her credits. Sakraya is the bigger unknown to English-language audiences, which is precisely the kind of bet BookTok has opinions about.
Rebecca Yarros's The Empyrean series is the engine here: Fourth Wing arrived in May 2023, followed by Iron Flame and Onyx Storm, plus September's Threshing Day novella collecting thirteen stories in the same universe. The premise is a war college where the only rule is graduate or die, and the elite are dragon riders.
Two books remain undated, which means the show is racing a fandom that already knows what happens next — and has spent two years arguing about who should be cast. That argument is now over, and it is going about as well as expected.
Sources: Variety · Deadline · The Hollywood Reporter
Crystal Lake Went Back to the Original Friday the 13th Woods
Peacock's Crystal Lake is a Pamela Voorhees origin story, which means the hockey mask is off the table — the timeline simply hasn't gotten there yet. Creator Brad Caleb Kane told a New York Comic Con panel that the trade-off is a show "a lot more brutal" than the films, with episodes built around "really creative kills."
Linda Cardellini plays Pamela, and she is the reason the pitch works: "She is the original killer. There is a story there as to how she gets to that place." Kane wanted the years between Jason's drowning and the woman we meet in the 1980 original, plus material from the Part 2 novelization, so the series digs into Jason as a child — played by Callum Vinson in a thirteen-pound prosthetic head. Cardellini reportedly kept telling the crew to get it off him before he cooked.
They also shot in Blairstown, New Jersey, where the 1980 film was made. Kane's reasoning is very practical: "There are no woods and no trees and no leaves that look like Jersey woods trees and leaves." The town, he said, hasn't changed a day in 45 years. Cameron Scoggins and Nick Cordileone return as Dorf and Crazy Ralph, and Kane admits directing the latter meant occasionally saying, "Just do the voice, just do the crazy."
Sources: The Hollywood Reporter
Austin Abrams Got Security Called on Him for Looking Too Wrecked
Whalefall asks Austin Abrams to spend most of a movie inside a sperm whale's stomach with an hour of oxygen and a dead father to make peace with. To prepare, he got his scuba certifications and flew to a sperm whale sanctuary in the Caribbean, where the animals finally surfaced on the tenth day.
The stranger preparation happened at home. Abrams walked around his neighbourhood in full scuba gear to get used to the weight. Then, during the shoot at Radford Studios, the makeup and the weight he'd put on for the role got him stopped for real: "I remember walking around the lot during that time and having security called on me just because I looked so fucked up."
He had already done the same thing on Zach Cregger's Resident Evil, gaining weight unannounced because he wanted his medical courier to look outmatched. Cregger loved it. Abrams' family, meanwhile, is apparently a little tired of how often his characters die.
Sources: The Hollywood Reporter
Nuggets
- Nicolas Cage is officially doing True Detective — with Antonio Banderas. HBO has confirmed both for season five, with character names attached: Cage is Henry Logan, Banderas is Rai Garcia. Filming begins in 2027. Last week at New York Comic Con, Cage would only say he'd "probably" do a season; this week it's a press release. The Hollywood Reporter
- AI "comedians" are stealing real comics' sets word for word. George Brett Olson found a 300,000-follower Instagram account performing his joke verbatim — same outfit, same venue backdrop, plus an OnlyFans funnel. Julia Jasunas found a 250,000-follower version doing the same, down to an off-script aside she'd made to an audience member. Chortle traced at least three more comics on the same account. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri's response: banning AI content isn't "practical." The Hollywood Reporter
- Clive Barker says the Hellraiser game has given him movie ideas again. Hellraiser: Revival prompted Barker to tell Dread Central the game is "a wake-up call to anyone who's been involved in the making of a franchise like Hellraiser," adding: "I have many ideas that I'd like to see realized in the Hellraiser universe." He reclaimed the U.S. rights in 2020 and produced the 2022 Hulu reboot. Deadline
- Kevin Bacon is doing a demon movie with the Muschiettis producing. Summoner, written and directed by Jeremy Slater, casts Bacon as a man sent to an isolated witness protection property to deal with a demon. Daniel Ings and Stephanie Beatriz just joined, alongside Giorgia Whigham. No release date yet. Deadline
- Parker Posey is joining the Blumhouse club. She'll star in Sleepover for Blumhouse Atomic Monster and Universal, directed by Jacob Chase from a script he co-wrote with Night Swim's Bryce McGuire, adapted from McGuire's short story. Release date: October 8, 2027. Variety
- "A modern-day Thelma & Louise fuelled by female rage." That's the pitch for Bad Influence, which has cast Xochitl Gomez, Madeleine McGraw and Jack Champion. Two friends pick up a mysterious hitchhiker on a spring-break drive home; he is not what he seems. Jason Perlman directs. Deadline
- James McAvoy's Split residual checks arrived after the first weekend. On the Happy Sad Confused podcast he said the film was already in profit, so "our first residual check came at the end of the first weekend. It was bonkers." Other projects have paid him 25 cents — "it literally costs more to post this than it did for me to check it." The Hollywood Reporter
Sources: Variety · Deadline · The Hollywood Reporter
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