John Boyega

It’s been a long, slow trip to the screen for Pacific Rim 2, the sequel to Guillermo del Toro 2013’s sci-fi blockbuster, and for a while it didn’t look like the movie would happen at all. Back in January, there was even talk that the movie was “off the table indefinitely,” but a few months later, development began to get more serious...

The Force Awakens was a pretty epic return to the world of Star Wars, and it’ll be interesting to see how Rian Johnson follows it up with Episode VIII. We’ve seen a few set photos (though nothing particularly revealing), but with the sequel not hitting theaters until December 2017, it’s going to be quite a while before we see anything substantial. While John Boyega isn’t at liberty to say too much about Episode VIII, he does offer a couple of pieces of info that should help you manage your expectations.

Anyone familiar with Richard Adams’ Watership Down can attest to its grim nature, but an upcoming animated miniseries for The BBC and Netflix at least has a bright outlook on its cast. Not only can Star Wars lead John Boyega and several X-Men count themselves among the new voices, so too can Gemma Arterton and more.

Rewrites are common in filmmaking, especially for big blockbuster films, where there are so many moving parts that filmmakers sometimes need to recalibrate to keep things focused — which makes this rumor about Star Wars: Episode VIII hardly surprising. Rumor has it that Rian Johnson’s screenplay may be undergoing a few minor rewrites as a response to the reactions to The Force Awakens, and while that sentence may trigger an eyebrow raise, you should know that this is totally a good thing — if true.

With the year winding up, it feels like 2015 made hot-button topics out of damn near everything, but the issue of actorly wages was among the warmest-button debates in recent months. Jennifer Lawrence was not at all pleased to learn that her male Hunger Games costars had been compensated more handsomely for their work on the postapocalyptic franchise than she had, even though hers is the face of t

Hype and speculation about Star Wars: The Force Awakens has been ubiquitous, at least in our line of work, pretty much every day of every week of every month since Disney acquired George Lucas’ company and the rights to Star Wars back in 2012. Three years later, The Force Awakens is finally in theaters. And since it’s already made about $100 million in just one day of release, we’re guessing a lot of people have already seen it and are ready to discuss those spoilers that have been kept so well hidden for all these years. That’s what we’re here to discuss.

When Lucasfilm initially announced the lineup for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it wasn’t long before the studio began populating the cast with exciting choices: Daisy Ridley and John Boyega in lead roles, Gwendoline Christie, Oscar Isaac and Lupita Nyong’o in supporting roles, the return of Carrie Fisher — all of which proved the limitless, inclusive potential of a galaxy far, far away. What we didn’t (and couldn’t) know was just how diverse the flagship film in the new era of Star Wars would actually turn out to be, and it’s all thanks to one very simple, very effective casting choice.

When you’re out promoting a movie, you’re often asked to do a lot of things, most of them pretty silly. With the amount of press the cast of Star Wars: The Force Awakens was being asked to do, there were asked to do a lot of silly things, none perhaps as silly as going on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and singing a medley of Star Wars music a cappella. But the entire cast — including Harrison Ford! — actually commits, and it actually turns out to pretty fun.

The original Star Wars was driven by nostalgia for pulp magazines, Saturday-morning serials, and a simpler era with clear-cut heroes and villains. The new Star Wars is driven by nostalgia for the original Star Wars, and a simpler era when that title evoked words like “adventure” and “excitement,” and not words like “the taxation of trade routes,” and “Jar Jar Binks.” The characters in Star Wars: The Force Awakens are all searching for something of great importance to the galaxy far, far away. I won’t reveal what this MacGuffin is, but I will tell you what it represents: that old Star Wars magic. Can director J.J. Abrams and the rest of the saga’s new creators find it?

Although J.J. Abrams shot an entire sequence for Star Wars: The Force Awakens in IMAX, it’s not exactly easy to find a theater showing it in the format, which makes this new featurette pretty interesting. Abrams and the cast of the upcoming film convince fans why they should seek out a legitimate IMAX screening of the film by discussing the magic of shooting with these powerful cameras and teasing the awe-inspiring sequence they created.