Adam B.Vary-Senior: Last News

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses plot — and musical! — developments in Season 2, Episode 9 of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” currently streaming on Paramount+. Since premiering in 2022, “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” has already embraced body-swapping comedy, storybook fantasy and a crossover episode with the animated series “Star Trek: Lower Decks.” So perhaps it’s not surprising that for the penultimate episode for Season 2 of “Strange New Worlds,” executive producers Henry Alonso Myers and Akiva Goldsman would mount the first-ever full-on musical episode in “Trek” history.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses plot developments in the finale of Marvel Studios’ “Secret Invasion,” currently streaming on Disney+, but maybe that doesn’t really matter to you — and maybe that’s OK.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer “Woo!” That’s Jonathan Frakes’ reaction when he’s told he’s probably worked on more iterations of “Star Trek” than any other person alive. “I’ll take it!” he says with a massive grin.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer The perils of artificial intelligence to the entertainment industry came to San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday, with SAG-AFTRA national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland joining a panel of voice actors organized by NAVA, the National Association of Voice Actors, to discuss the specific hazards AI is already posing to the profession. “We’ve got to reject the idea that this is just something that’s going to happen to us and we can’t say anything about it,” Crabtree-Ireland said at the outset of the panel, about whether AI could devastate the entertainment industry. “I think it definitely could, the question is whether we’re going to let that happen.”

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer The “Star Trek” Universe unveiled several first looks of its Paramount+ TV series at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday, including an extended clip from the fifth and final season of “Star Trek: Discovery,” a trailer and premiere date for the fourth season of “Star Trek: Lower Decks,” and a trailer for the upcoming musical episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” currently streaming its second season. The panel ended with a screening of the “Strange New Worlds” episode featuring the stars of the animated “Lower Decks” — which will be available on Paramount+ early, starting at 4 p.m. PT / 7 p.m. ET on Saturday.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Achievement unlocked: With nods for best drama series, actor (Pedro Pascal) and actress (Bella Ramsey) — HBO’s “The Last of Us” is the first live-action video game adaptation to earn major awards consideration from a top Hollywood awards body, in television or in film. See the full list of nominations. On TV, live-action video game adaptations are practically a brand new phenomenon, starting with “Halo” for Paramount+ and “Resident Evil” for Netflix, both of which debuted in 2022. That landscape is quickly expanding, with shows based on “Twisted Metal” (for Peacock), and “God of War” and “Fallout” (for Amazon Prime Video) all on the immediate horizon. 

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Teeing up an inevitable “sai-ke” pun for Ryan Reynolds, Jennifer Garner is set to reprise her role as the sai-wielding superhero Elektra in Marvel Studios’ “Deadpool 3.” Hugh Jackman is also reprising his performance as Wolverine for the movie, which is rapidly becoming a multiverse mash-up of bygone non-MCU Marvel movie characters. Garner first originated the role of Elektra Natchios in 2003’s “Daredevil” with Ben Affleck, which was a modest hit, and returned to headline 2005’s “Elektra,” which flopped. In 2021, Garner told the Hollywood Reporter that she wished both of those films had been produced by Kevin Feige as a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “It’s such a shame, honestly, because once Kevin took over everything there was elevated: the writing, the direction, the comedy inside of the stories they were telling,” she said. “And I did not have that experience.” Most recently, Garner starred in and executive produced the limited series “The Last Thing He Told Me” for Apple TV+.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer After a successful post-pandemic return in 2022, San Diego Comic-Con will hold a much quieter event for 2023, which runs from July 20-23. The ongoing writers strike and the looming threat of an actors strike — along with several focused fan events (like Star Wars Celebration and Tudum) — have contributed to several major players deciding to sit out this year’s convention, including Marvel, Lucasfilm, HBO, Universal, Sony and Netflix. But there are still some marquee panels that could delight the fans during the week (even if most panels are refraining from announcing whether any actors or writers will be attending). See the Comic-Con schedule below, which will be updated each day as more panels are announced. (All times Pacific Daylight.)

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments, including the ending, of “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” currently playing in theaters. When director James Mangold started writing “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” with screenwriters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, he didn’t know how the movie was going to end. Mangold inherited the film from director Steven Spielberg, who had been developing the project for three years with screenwriter David Koepp. When Mangold took over, he and the Butterworth started effectively from scratch, crafting a story in which Harrison Ford’s titular archeologist and Nazi puncher contends with his own age and irrelevance while chasing after the Antikythera, a mysterious device with the power to find fissures in time, created by the ancient Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments, including the final scene, in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” currently playing in theaters. When Lucasfilm announced in 2016 that Steven Spielberg was making a fifth “Indiana Jones” movie with Harrison Ford, fans naturally wondered how much of a role Karen Allen’s Marian Ravenwood — Indy’s spitfire equal from 1981’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and the love of his life — would play in the new film. The last time audiences saw Marian, she was getting married to Indy at the end of 2008’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” after she revealed to Indy that they’d had a child together, who Indy meets as teenage greaser Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf). So any follow-up movie would at the very least need to address the fact that Indy is married with a (grown) kid.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses plot developments in Episode 2 of Marvel Studios’ “Secret Invasion,” currently streaming on Disney+. Samuel L. Jackson has played the super spy Nick Fury in 11 movies for Marvel Studios. Sometimes, he’s appeared in only a brief cameo; other times, he’s been the second or third lead in a movie with “Captain” in the title. In every appearance, Jackson exudes preternatural calm and cunning as one of the most formidable, non-superpowered humans in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But it wasn’t until the actor’s first foray as the lead in an MCU project — the Disney+ series “Secret Invasion” — that Marvel has really addressed the fact that Nick Fury is also a Black man who grew up in America.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments in the series premiere of Marvel Studios’ “Secret Invasion,” currently streaming on Disney+. Since her first appearance as Maria Hill in 2012’s “The Avengers,” Cobie Smulders has popped into the Marvel Cinematic Universe roughly half-dozen times, racing into danger and cheating death as the hyper-competent lieutenant to Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), most recently in 2019’s “Spider-Man: Far From Home.” So when Marvel started planning the Disney+ series “Secret Invasion” — about how the shape-shifting Skrulls from the 2019’s prequel film “Captain Marvel” have turned against Fury and started infiltrating all levels of human society — it made perfect sense for Maria to show up, too.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Can San Diego Comic-Con catch a break? For two years, the biggest annual fan convention in North America was forced to cancel the five-day gathering due to the COVID-19 pandemic — placing Comic-Con International, the non-profit organization that runs SDCC, under unprecedented financial strain. Last year, SDCC came roaring back with a masked-and-vaccinated convention that was a robust success, with blockbuster Hall H panels for the “Star Trek” TV universe, “House of the Dragon,” “The Walking Dead” and, especially, Marvel Studios. This year’s Comic-Con — which is scheduled to start July 19, less than a month away — is increasingly likely to have none of those panels.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story mentions a few significant plot developments in “The Flash,” currently playing in theaters. In the climax of “The Flash,” Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) watches helplessly as his timeline-hopping escapades cause several other superhero universes to careen into each other and become obliterated in the process. Ironically, Warner Bros. is facing almost an identical dilemma — and the stakes could be nearly as existential. “The Flash” is the second of four mega-budgeted DC adaptations the studio is set to release this year, starting with “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” in March, and followed by “Blue Beetle” and “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” in August and December. Yet these movies were conceived and greenlit by an executive team that all have departed the studio; in their place, new DC Studios chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran have announced they will reboot the DC franchise in 2025, starting with Gunn’s “Superman: Legacy.”

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Netflix unveiled its first look at the highly anticipated second season of “Heartstopper,” the swoon-worthy high school coming-of-age romance that tracks the budding relationship between Charlie Spring (Joe Locke) and Nick Nelson (Kit Connor). During the streamer’s Tudum fan event on June 17, “Heartstopper” co-stars Corinna Brown and Kizzy Edgell — who play the couple Tara and Darcy on the series — introduced the first scene of Season 2, which picks up the morning after the Season 1 finale. In that episode, Charlie and Nick officially became boyfriends, and Nick came out as bisexual to his mother, Sarah (Olivia Colman).

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer When Carol Kane was approached about joining “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” for its second season, the celebrated 70-year-old actor had to make a confession: She’d never watched a single minute of the venerated franchise. “The science fiction world has not really been attractive to me for some reason,” Kane says. “Now that I’m in it,” she adds with a laugh, “I’m very excited about it. It just wasn’t on my path until now.” Clearly the producers were on to something. Kane’s role on the Paramount+ series fits neatly within her wheelhouse of sublime eccentrics, from her Emmy-winning role on “Taxi” to for-the-ages supporting turns in “The Muppet Movie,” “The Princess Bride,” “Scrooged” and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” Here, she plays Pelia, the new chief engineer of the Enterprise and a member of an alien species never before seen on “Star Trek”: Lanthanites, who are extremely long-lived and utterly resemble humans, save for a delightfully inexplicable accent invented out of whole cloth by Kane.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer The first time Jesse Garcia (“Quinceañera,” “Narcos: Mexico”) learned about Richard Montañez — the former Frito-Lay executive who’s said that he invented the wildly successful Flamin’ Hot Cheetos brand when he was working as a janitor for the company — the actor immediately thought, “That would be an awesome movie.” Years later, Eva Longoria cast Garcia to play Montañez for her feature directing debut, “Flamin’ Hot,” which premieres June 9 on Hulu and Disney+. The film, produced by DeVon Franklin (“Breakthrough,” “Miracles From Heaven”), covers Richard’s life from his difficult childhood to his marriage to his high school sweetheart Judy (Annie Gonzalez) to his rise at Frito-Lay. For Garcia, it was an all-too-rare opportunity to depict the real-life story of a Latino family in a mainstream feature film.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments and surprises throughout “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” now playing in theaters. For months, the directors of “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” had been working exhaustively on a critical sequence that launches the movie’s second act. For the first time in his life, the animated film’s hero — Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a.k.a. the Spider-Man of Earth-1610 — enters a different dimension: Earth-50101, a.k.a. Mumbattan, a dazzling amalgamation of New York City and Mumbai. Within minutes, Miles and his BFF from 2018’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), encounter that world’s Spider-Man, Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni), an Indian teenager who received his powers not via spider bite, but through magic. The sequence launches them all through the vertiginously vertical metropolis, as they frantically try to stop the film’s villain, the Spot (Jason Schwartzman), from using Mumbattan’s supercollider to increase his dimension-hopping abilities.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments and the post-credits scenes in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” currently playing in theaters. By this point, it’s no secret that Marvel Studios has lost some of its luster in its post-“Avengers: Endgame” era. Between the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s rapid expansion on Disney+ and the exits of stars like Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson and the late Chadwick Boseman, the Marvel saga has often felt at once too much and not enough: Sprawl without a center. It’s a problem that “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” is particularly ill-equipped to address. For one, the film is wholly disconnected from everything else that’s happened in the Marvel Cinematic Universe post-“Endgame” — there’s not a whisper of Kang or the multiverse or incursions or Talokan or, hilariously, Thor, even though the Guardians made a special appearance in “Thor: Love and Thunder” last summer. For another, the Guardians themselves — at least, as audiences have grown to know and love them — are also leaving the Marvel Cinematic Universe, between stars Zoe Saldaña and Dave Bautista making clear they’re finished with their respective roles, and writer-director James Gunn departing Marvel to co-run DC Studios with Peter Safran. 

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Marvel Studios’ “Blade” is going back into hibernation. Due to the ongoing writers strike, Marvel has shut down pre-production on the vampire reboot, which is set to star Mahershala Ali as the titular vampire hunter alongside Aaron Pierre, Delroy Lindo and Mia Goth. Production was expected to start in Atlanta within the month for an anticipated Sept. 6, 2024 release. This isn’t the first time Disney has had to delay production on the film. Last October, Disney pushed “Blade” from a 2023 release to 2024 after the original director, Bassam Tariq (“Mogul Mowgli”), left the project two months before filming was set to begin. In November, Yann Demange (“Lovecraft Country”) took over directing duties from a script by Michael Starrbury (“When They See Us”). In April, just weeks before the WGA contract deadline, Nic Pizzolatto (“True Detective”) joined the production, re-writing from Starrbury’s screenplay. He ran out of time to complete his work before the strike began.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer When A.C. Bradley was hired to write on the 2022 Disney+ series “Ms. Marvel,” part of her job entailed going to set every day to help with re-writing scenes on the fly while the show was being filmed. “It was a mixture of everything from wanting to add new characters into the show to needing to change things because of location,” Bradley tells Variety. Just one example: The day the production was set to shoot a chase sequence at Marriott hotel, she helped to add a beat where the chase entered the kitchen because it was nearby. “Why not use what you have?” This kind of scenario is, of course, no longer possible during the ongoing writers strike. “Pens down” means no WGA member can write or change scripts whatsoever, before, during or after production. In many cases, that has meant that showrunners have left their shows entirely, like “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” executive producers J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay or “Cobra Kai” executive producer Jon Hurwitz. Other writers rooms have shut down in advance of production on their next seasons, like “Abbott Elementary” and “Yellowjackets.”