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      ‘Thunderbolts*’ Axes the Asterisk for Surprise Title Reveal

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      A plot twist that comes in the movie’s final moments will now be front and center on billboards. The director Jake Schreier explains the rebrand.If you wondered why there’s an asterisk attached to the title of the new movie “Thunderbolts*,” you won’t have to wait any longer to find out.Sure, you could have satisfied your curiosity the old-fashioned way by seeing the movie in theaters over the weekend, where it claimed the No. 1 spot at the box office. But as of Monday morning, the big reveal teased by that symbol will now be front and center on the movie’s billboards, which have switched from “Thunderbolts*” to the surprising title introduced in the film’s closing credits.(If you would like to remain unspoiled, read no further and avert your eyes from billboards for the time being.)So long, Thunderbolts: This team of misfits, headed by Florence Pugh’s weary assassin, Yelena Belova, ends the film rebranded as “The New Avengers.” And now, on billboards, the movie itself will follow suit.The name change happens in the final scene of the Jake Schreier-directed film: The wily C.I.A. director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) tricks the newly assembled superteam into storming a news conference at which she introduces them to the world as the New Avengers. Then, as the end credits begin, the title “Thunderbolts*” is ripped away like a comic-book page, revealing the new moniker.After three days in theaters, that rebrand has now made its way to billboards. “It felt like, if Val is also trying to pull a switcheroo and sell the New Avengers to the world, we could do that, too,” Schreier said in an interview with The Times on Saturday. “Especially given that the asterisk has been on the movie for a year, hopefully it doesn’t feel sweaty — it feels like this was a plan and we built up to it.”Incorporating the new moniker into the marketing may also be an acknowledgment that keeping a movie secret is harder than ever these days, when surprises can be splashed across social media within milliseconds of release. Schreier, who pitched the asterisk during his initial meetings on the movie, credits Marvel Studios and its president, Kevin Feige, for a willingness to experiment with the title switch.“It’s very fun that they were open to embracing that,” Schreier said. He acknowledged that clips containing the spoiler have already made their way online, so why not make it work in their favor?“It’s so interesting in this world, and Kevin talks about it sometimes, where sometimes they wanted things to leak and they don’t,” Schreier said. “I think we all assumed that it would be a bigger part of the conversation already, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.” More

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      Wim Wenders on Where the War in Europe Really Ended 80 Years Ago

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      Wim Wenders, the renowned German film director, is nearly 80 years old, as old as the peace in Europe that followed the capitulation of the Nazi regime.“From my childhood onward, I have lived 80 years in peace,” he says in a short film he has directed to commemorate the end of World War II. But now, with a war in Ukraine that he calls “a war against Europe,” Wenders says that the stakes have rarely been higher.“Eighty years after the liberation of our continent, we Europeans are realizing again that peace cannot be taken for granted,” he says in the film. “It is now up to us to take the keys to freedom into our own hands.”In an interview in his Berlin office, Wenders said that the decades of peace “defined my life,” as the war had defined the life of his parents. His father, an army surgeon, spent five years at the front and was the only one of his class who did not die there, Wenders said. “I had the privilege to be among the first generation of Germans who lived for 80 years in peace,” he said. “None of my ancestors had that privilege.”Europe and Germany are crammed with varied efforts to remember the end of the war this week, including somber memorial events at concentration camps like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. But Wenders’ film is a rare personal and political testament from the man behind award-winning movies including “Paris, Texas,” “Wings of Desire” and “The American Friend.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cora Sue Collins, a Busy Child Actress in the 1930s, Dies at 98

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      She was in films with Greta Garbo, who became a friend, and Myrna Loy, Bette Davis and others. She ended her career after being sexually harassed.Cora Sue Collins, who as a dimpled, chubby-cheeked child actress in the early 1930s appeared opposite A-list stars like Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy and Merle Oberon, but who cut her career short after being sexually harassed by a screenwriter, died on April 27 at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 98.Her daughter, Susie McKay Krieser, said the cause was complications of a stroke.Miss Collins made about 50 pictures over 13 years, including 11 in 1934 and another 11 in 1935. She was one of the era’s galaxy of child stars, a list that included Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, but she did not become as famous as they did. In her first movie, the 1932 comedy “The Unexpected Father,” she played a waif whose newly wealthy adoptive father (Slim Summerville) hires a nurse (ZaSu Pitts) to care for her. Praise for 4-year-old Cora Sue came quickly.Miss Collins made her movie debut in “The Unexpected Father,” a 1932 comedy in which Slim Summerville played her adoptive father and ZaSu Pitts played a nurse.Universal PicturesA critic for The Richmond News Leader in Virginia labeled her a “baby star” with “amazing acting ability and an appeal that walks right into your heart.” The Kansas City Journal wrote, “The little Collins girl walks away with the picture.”Miss Collins played Garbo as a child in “Queen Christina,” the acclaimed 1933 movie about the Swedish monarch. At the time, she told one newspaper that Garbo “ was so friendly and liked my new teeth a lot.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Sinners’ and Shows like ‘Severance’ Give an Old Form New Life

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      Online, onstage and onscreen, performers are playing multiple parts. The effect of watching someone shape-shift can be both thrilling and unnerving.The much-anticipated season finale of one of my favorite sitcoms was recently derailed when its creator, Shawna Lander, ran into a few snags. In the story I’ve been following for months, a peppy if scatterbrained woman named Jennifer McCallister has gone into labor after a pregnancy that’s transformed her relationship with her sister-in-law (also named Shawna) from antagonistic to amiable. Meanwhile, Jennifer’s mother, Barb — passive-aggressive to a comically villainous degree — is getting drunk on margaritas at a local Mexican restaurant and terrorizing the wait staff when she gets a call to meet Jennifer at the hospital.But just as Jennifer was about to give birth, the story stopped. Lander announced that due to technical difficulties and illness, the audience would have to wait a few days to see what shenanigans Barb got up to, and whether this birth would help her and her son, Jennifer’s brother John, smooth over their rocky relationship. Illness foils shooting days all the time, but typically one creator’s bout of fever wouldn’t force audiences to wait well past the target air date to find out what happens. The difference with Lander’s show, which chronicles the ever-sprawling antics of the McCallister family — most sketches are actually stealth explorations of relationship dynamics — is that Lander is the show. She writes it. She produces and distributes it. She directs and shoots it.Michael B. Jordan as the twins Smoke and Stack in “Sinners.” He’s one of many performers this season playing multiple parts in a production.Warner Bros. PicturesAnd, most important, like several actors in hit TV shows, big-budget films and Tony-nominated Broadway productions this season, she plays every single character: Jennifer, Barb, Shawna, John, other male partners, assorted friends, the waitress, even Shawna’s two small children. They’re all Lander in wigs and different shirts, shot in close-cropped vertical framing for platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where she posts under the handle @shawnathemom. Her performances are so funny and specific that it’s shockingly easy to forget it’s all just her.The McCallister family saga boasts considerable viewership. The chronicles are followed by two million TikTok users, with nearly a million more on Instagram. Add it up, and that’s a bigger audience than watched the Season 3 premiere of “The White Lotus.”Lander’s format — playing every part herself, with shots framed and edited so the characters seem to be conversing with each other — involves a visual vocabulary familiar to comedians on vertical video platforms, who often post satirical sketches about corporate life or marriage. Just recently, a creator who goes by Sydney Jo posted the multi-episode “Group Chat” series, in which she played the multitudinous members of a friend group experiencing mounting drama over one girl’s boyfriend, culminating in a “Real Housewives”-style reunion episode. The series was such a viral hit that Sydney Jo was invited onto the “Today” show to talk about it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Where Would Hollywood Find Its Guillotines or Pay Phones Without Them?

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      When the Netflix series “Wednesday” needed a guillotine recently, it did not have to venture far. A North Hollywood prop house called History for Hire had one available, standing more than eight feet high with a suitably menacing blade. (The business offers pillories too, but the show wasn’t in the market for any.)The company’s 33,000-square-foot warehouse is like the film and television industry’s treasure-filled attic, crammed with hundreds of thousands of items that help bring the past to life. It has a guitar Timothée Chalamet used in “A Complete Unknown,” luggage from “Titanic,” a black baby carriage from “The Addams Family.”Looking for period detail? You can find different iterations of Wheaties boxes going back to the ’40s, enormous television cameras with rotating lenses from the ’50s, a hair dyer with a long hose that connects to a plastic bonnet from the ’60s, a pay phone from the ’70s and a yellow waterproof Sony Walkman from the ’80s.History for Hire’s 33,000-square-foot warehouse has aisles and aisles of items grouped together by topic or theme.Need a guillotine? They can help.They have a large collection of vintage cameras.History for Hire, which Jim and Pam Elyea have owned for almost four decades, is part of the crucial but often unseen infrastructure that keeps Hollywood churning, and helps make it one of the best places in the world to make film and television.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      David Harbour Is Conflicted About Becoming a Morning Person

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      Working on the new movie “Thunderbolts*” and the TV series “Stranger Things,” he said, “You’re up early at 6 in the morning. But I still have that beast inside me that wants to sleep till 1 p.m.”The Red Guardian never made the varsity squad of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but that’s more than OK with David Harbour.“Of the people that do love these movies, we are not the favorite,” he said of the antiheroes in the new Marvel film “Thunderbolts*.” “But we really poured our hearts into this movie and tried to make something that is about isolation in modern society and light and the darkness that is within all of us.”During what Harbour called a bit of a nightmare, he worked on “Thunderbolts*” at the same time he was shooting the final season of the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” in which he plays Hopper, the heroic small-town police chief. He is currently working on “DTF St. Louis,” an HBO limited series and the first thing he has produced, with Jason Bateman and Linda Cardellini.In a video call from Los Angeles, he elaborated on the headphones, sunglasses and Zen mantra that he considers essential. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.An AmericanoI drink it all day long. My doctor has told me to knock it off, but it is the last vice I have. I have an assistant and she does a lot of great things for me, but probably the No. 1 job is she brings me too many Americanos throughout the day.Wired HeadphonesI love a tangled cord. I used to carry a CD player back in the early 2000s and I would put on headphones and walk around the East Village and have my little soundtrack to my life. Just sort of float through.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sinners’ Director Ryan Coogler Narrates Musical Scene

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      The writer and director Ryan Coogler narrates a sequence from his film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Viewers might not expect to see a DJ at a turntable in Ryan Coogler’s 1930s-set horror movie “Sinners,” but in this sequence, the history and future of music collide.This sequence takes place in a juke joint opened by the twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan). Playing for the crowd is Sammie Moore (Miles Caton), performing a song that was written by Raphael Saadiq and the film’s composer, Ludwig Goransson.“Rafael is from Oakland, kind of a local legend where I’m from,” Coogler said, narrating the moment.The scene starts with Caton’s impressive vocals, while cutting to shots of both Smoke and Stack, as well as other characters in the sequence. “We wanted to use Michael Shawver’s editing skills to establish where everybody is and what their stakes are,” Coogler said.Once all is laid out, the scene flashes back to a conversation between Sammie and another musician, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), who explains Sammie’s skill for the blues and the responsibility that comes with his talent.“Blues, it wasn’t forced on us like that religion,” Delta says. “No, son. We brought this with us from home. It’s magic, what we do. It’s sacred and big.”As the scene returns to the juke joint, we hear a voice-over from Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a conjure woman. She says that some musicians have the gift to make music so powerful, it can conjure spirits from the past and the future. At this point, in an ambitious tracking shot, various eras of musicians appear in the frame, including an electric guitarist and the D.J. at the turntable.“We wanted to do it in a fluid, continuous take,” Coogler said. New music elements continue to be introduced along with new forms of dance.“Aakomon Jones, our choreographer, is changing choreography ever so slightly so that folks still feel like they’re in their time, but also outside of it as we get more and more heightened in this moment,” Coogler said.Read the “Sinners” review.Read an interview with Michael B. Jordan and Coogler.Hear from Buddy Guy, a musician who appears in the post-credits sequence.Find out about the symbolism in “Sinners.”See how “Sinners” and other movies multiply one actor.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      After ‘Another Simple Favor,’ Watch These Female-Centered Movies

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      The filmmaker behind “Another Simple Favor” likes when things get “really, really extra” onscreen.Across outrageous, often scatological comedies like “Bridesmaids,” “Spy” and “A Simple Favor,” the director Paul Feig, 62, has cemented his unlikely cinematic reputation as a girl’s guy.“I hate to say ‘strong female characters,’ because I don’t like that term,” he said in a video call from Los Angeles. “I just love seeing men and women as equals on the screen, so that’s what I’m always trying to do.”Feig, a Royal Oak, Mich., native whose latest film, “Another Simple Favor,” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, reflected on some of his favorite moments in movie parity.‘Bringing Up Baby’ (1938)Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby.”John Springer Collection/Corbis, via Getty ImagesIn Howard Hawks’s classic screwball comedy, Cary Grant plays a fussy paleontologist and Katharine Hepburn a madcap heiress with a pet leopard (the titular “Baby”) and a penchant for trouble. (Rent or buy it on major platforms.)“Honestly, I didn’t really discover these movies until I went to film school at USC. But over the years of watching comedy I had seen it become completely male-dominated, where women were just sort of props around the men to make fun of or to get in their way.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More