The good, the bad and the weird bits of news you may have missed this week.
GOOD:
Jenji Kohan to develop new show about women’s wrestling
Jenji Kohan has been a part of some of the most distinctive female-lead TV shows of our time. In addition to creating the Netflix smash Orange Is The New Black and the thoroughly weird Showtime program Weeds, she also produced episodes of Tracy Takes On and Gilmore Girls earlier in her career. Kohan does not shy away from the strange and she truly loves an outcast, so the fact that her next project will be a series about a women’s wrestling league from the 1980s feels almost satirically appropriate. The show will be called GLOW, which stands for Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, and that sounds like some grade-A Netflix clickbait in the capable hands of Kohan.
Brie Larson might be Captain Marvel
Disney is going all in for its third phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Cate Blanchett is confirmed for the next Thor. Lupita Nyong’o is reportedly circling Black Panther and now Brie Larson is rumored to be the frontrunner for the studio’s first female-lead super movie, Captain Marvel, slated for 2018. For those keeping folks at home, that’s three more recent Oscar winners either locked in or likely to join the MCU. Academy Award winner Tilda Swinton will be making her Marvel debut this summer, alongside Academy Award nominees Rachel McAdams and Benedict Cumberbatch. This new class of superheroes is one Meryl Streep away from being the most elite repertory theater in Hollywood today.
Rick Famuyiwa to direct The Flash
In a rare piece of exciting news for DC film properties, Warner Bros announced this week that director Rick Famuyiwa will now be heading up its movie The Flash. The movie was originally going to be helmed by first-time feature director Seth Grahame-Smith, but “creative differences” (aka Warner Bros being afraid a newbie director would tank their movie just when it’s trying to retool after the non-event that was Dawn of Justice) resulted in an empty chair on set that’s now being filled by Famuyiwa. And this is great news. Famuyiwa is coming off a successful Sundance darling in last year’s Dope and has spent his career directing movies that have nothing to do with superheroes, which means he is bringing a fresh perspective to a thoroughly familiar genre. We’re excited to see what the man behind The Wood and Brown Sugar does with The Fastest Man Alive.
NOT SO GOOD:
China politely makes offensively large parking spots just for women
The Chinese city of Hangzhou has officially installed larger than normal parking spaces throughout the city specifically to accommodate terrible women drivers. We know this because the spots are outlined with pink and feature a big female symbol in the middle. A local man named Pan Tietong, who runs a service station with a few newly installed lady spaces, even told a local paper, “The bigger parking spaces are for women drivers whose driving skills are not superb.”
You know how it is, right ladies? We’re just useless without a man around to park in those hard to reach spaces for us! Hopefully the good officials of Hangzhou will just outlaw issuing licenses to women and clear up all this mess forever.
PART OF THE PROBLEM:
Fox makes a really poor choice about X-Men promotional materials
Really, Fox? No one thought this was a bad idea? The entire final third of X-Men: Apocalypse is a fight scene, and you thought this one still of a male villain choking out a woman was the best and only way to sell the action? Actress and activist Rose McGowan slammed the studio on Twitter for its insensitivity, and apparently a blogger in New York City posted a photo of the same poster after it had been defaced with the message “this violence in my kid’s face is not okay.” Fox has finally apologized for the poster and said it is taking steps to have them replaced.
If you need a hand, we can probably pull 15 screen shots from the trailer alone that would be better at showcasing the ethos of “only the strong will survive” than this one image.
