Bong Joon Ho's First Animated Film Casts Bradley Cooper, Ayo Edebiri, and Werner Herzog to Voice Creatures Under the Sea

Bong Joon Ho's First Animated Film Casts Bradley Cooper, Ayo Edebiri, and Werner Herzog to Voice Creatures Under the Sea

Bong Joon Ho has been quietly developing Ally since 2019, and on the first day of Cannes, he finally showed his hand: the cast includes Bradley Cooper, Ayo Edebiri, Dave Bautista, Finn Wolfhard, Rachel House, Werner Herzog, and newcomer Alex Jayne Go — who appears to be voicing the title role, a curious piglet squid living in the uncharted depths of the South Pacific.

The story kicks off when a mysterious aircraft sinks into the squid's habitat, sending her on a journey from the ocean floor to the surface. Neon — the indie label that released Parasite in North America back in 2019 — has signed on to release Ally in U.S. theaters in 2027. Outside North America, Pathé handles France, Benelux, Switzerland, and West Africa, while CJ ENM and Penture Invest cover South Korea, Vietnam, Turkey, and Indonesia. The 3D animation is being handled by VFX studio DNEG, the outfit behind Inception and Dune, with a creative team drawn from 12 countries. Bong co-wrote the screenplay with Jason Yu, the South Korean filmmaker behind the 2023 horror feature Sleep.

For Cooper, this marks a return to animated voice work after years as Rocket Raccoon in Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. For the rest of the world, it marks the moment Bong Joon Ho decided his next film would be a family adventure about a squid — and somehow made it the most anticipated movie at Cannes.

Gobble's Take: Bong Joon Ho could have made another sleek social thriller and cashed in every chip he has — instead he's going underwater with a squid and Werner Herzog's voice, which is either insane or genius, and his track record says bet on genius.

Source: Hollywood Reporter

Rebel Wilson's Directorial Debut Lands a U.S. Deal at Cannes — While a Defamation Trial Follows It Everywhere

Rebel Wilson's first film as director, The Deb, has secured U.S. distribution with Sunrise Films. The deal was announced by Protagonist Pictures, which is relaunching the film at Cannes through its boutique label Protagonist Picks — this after the musical comedy already had its theatrical run in Australia and its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.

The film follows farm girl Taylah Simpkins, who's convinced the upcoming Debutante Ball is her one shot at reinvention — until her cynical city cousin Maeve shows up and tries to blow the whole thing up. It was written by newcomer Hannah Reilly, adapted from her original stage show, with songs by Meg Washington and choreography by Emmy winner Rob Ashford. The cast includes Natalie Abbott, Charlotte MacInnes, and newcomer Stevie Jean alongside Wilson. But the film's offscreen story is increasingly competing with whatever's happening onscreen: last week, an Australian court heard closing arguments in a defamation trial brought by lead actress MacInnes, who claims Wilson damaged her reputation by alleging MacInnes had made a sexual harassment complaint against producer Amanda Ghost, only to change her story after being cast in another project.

Protagonist Picks head Isabel Ivars called it "a bold, distinctive directorial debut" with "broad commercial appeal." Whether audiences agree may depend entirely on whether they can separate the film from the legal circus that's followed it from Australia to the South of France.

Gobble's Take: The messiest marketing campaign of Cannes season wasn't planned by anyone — it's just a defamation trial running on a parallel screen.

Source: Variety

Jean-Claude Van Damme Is Playing a Submarine Commander in a WWII Action Epic — and He's Not Done Fighting Yet

Nearly 40 years after Bloodsport turned him into an action icon — and with a remake of that film currently in the works — Jean-Claude Van Damme is taking on an entirely different kind of combat. He's set to topline Raid Pacific, a WWII thriller in which he plays Captain William Pierce, a decorated U.S.-French submarine commander tasked with transporting a small unit of Marine raiders deep into enemy-controlled waters to destroy a critical Japanese outpost. The film is based on true events and is set in the tense aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Steven Luke is attached to direct, and the film is launching in Cannes with VMI Worldwide handling worldwide sales. It's produced by Dean Bloxom of Deano Prods., Luke's Schuetzle Company Prods., and Andre Relis of VMI Worldwide. Producer Relis said Van Damme brings "gravitas and intensity" to the role, and director Luke described it as "grounded in real history, but driven by deeply human stakes."

No additional casting has been announced yet, but the pitch is already clear enough: submarines, sabotage, enemy territory, Van Damme. This is not a film asking you to read between the lines.

Gobble's Take: A Bloodsport remake AND a WWII submarine movie — Van Damme is somehow busier now than most people half his age, and nobody seems to have told him to slow down.

Source: Variety

Stephen Colbert Brought Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, John Oliver, and Seth Meyers Back Together — 10 Days Before The Late Show Goes Dark Forever

On Monday night, Stephen Colbert turned what could have been a quiet wind-down week into something that felt like a proper sendoff: he welcomed all four of his fellow late-night hosts — Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, John Oliver, and Seth Meyers — to The Late Show studio for a reunion episode, with the finale airing May 21. The group last shared a microphone in 2023 during the writers' strike, when they launched a podcast called Strike Force Five to raise money for their out-of-work staffs. This time, they announced a new video episode dropping Wednesday, May 13, again benefiting World Central Kitchen, the nonprofit that provides meals during humanitarian and climate crises.

The conversation covered the end of The Late Show, the future of late-night television, and the current political climate. When Colbert asked whether any of them had ever imagined holding a job the president would have strong feelings about, Kimmel cut in: "You know what's even weirder? We're doing a job that his wife has strong feelings about." Meyers deadpanned: "Most of us have avoided that part." The show closed with a trivia round featuring questions written by Late Show writers — Colbert claimed the title of most-likely-to-have-made-out-with-the-most-guests, name-dropping Helen Mirren, Sally Field, and Andrew Garfield, while Fallon admitted to receiving "full tongue" from Martin Short during an SNL skit.

There's something genuinely strange about watching five men whose jobs have been defined by saying the quiet parts loud, sitting together to ask whether the format they built their careers on still has a reason to exist — and not quite having the answer.

Gobble's Take: Late night spent years roasting the powerful and now it's the one eulogizing itself — Colbert going out with his whole crew in the room is the most fitting finale he could have written.

Source: Billboard

Sara Ishaq Turned a Women-Only Gas Station in Wartime Yemen Into a Cannes Film About the Life That Refuses to Stop

When filmmaker Sara Ishaq — a Yemeni-Scottish director nominated for an Academy Award for her documentary short Karama Has No Walls — first heard in 2015 about a women-only fuel station that had appeared in Sanaa, Yemen's capital, she couldn't stop thinking about it. Her sisters and cousins were queuing there. "In a place like Yemen, women always drove, but having an exclusive women-only fuel station was just like an amazing concept," she told Variety.

The Station, which world premieres in Critics' Week at Cannes, centers on Layal, the woman who runs it — a quiet refuge in a country at war. Ishaq quickly ruled out making a documentary: carrying a camera in public wasn't safe, and the conservative environment made access impossible. So she turned to fiction, using the station as a container for every conversation she'd had with family back home — people who came to fill their tanks for reasons as different as throwing a wedding and powering a single light bulb to read by. She was deliberate about not letting the civil war swallow the human story. "There's so little known about it, but it's so complicated," she said. "What it would risk would be an oversimplification, or trying too hard to explain everything and then dilute the human story."

The film doesn't deny the war. But it insists on showing what exists alongside it — the frankincense, the laughter, the singing behind closed doors — and that insistence is the whole point.

Gobble's Take: A women-only gas station in wartime Yemen, told through fiction — The Station is one of the more distinctive premieres in Critics' Week at Cannes this year.

Source: Variety

Quick Hits

• Hannah Harper wins American Idol Season 24: The Missouri country singer — who went viral with an original song she wrote while dealing with postpartum depression — was crowned on Monday night's live three-hour finale on ABC, with guest mentor Alicia Keys performing alongside the top contestants, judges Luke Bryan and Lionel Richie on hand, and former winner Carrie Underwood also taking the stage. Underwood, Bryan, and Richie all performed together, with Underwood additionally performing alongside Mötley Crüe. Billboard
• The Wiggles confused Oasis for The Beatles: During an Australian radio appearance, Blue Wiggles Anthony Field and his daughter Lucia admitted they didn't recognize "Wonderwall" — Anthony recalled once buying what he thought was a Paul McCartney and John Lennon poster, only for his son to tell him it was "the guys from Oasis." Billboard

In Case You Missed It

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• Cannes Is Going All-In on Horror — and One of the Films Is About a Creepy Convent in 1750
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• An Australian Artist Was Detained at the Canadian Border and Missed His New York Show Because of It