Samuel L. Jackson

After years of toying with and publicly teasing the possibility of a sequel to his 2000 film Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan is finally ready to pull the trigger. The director has officially set a return to his darkly subversive take on the superhero genre as his next project. The follow-up, titled Glass, will hit theaters in 2019 — and those are the basics. If you want to know more, you’re warned of potential SPOILERS for another Shyamalan film with connections to Unbreakable.

Much in the same way that I have always wondered who delivers mail to mailmen (if they live in their own district, are they allowed to deliver mail to themselves? is that a conflict of interest?), the writers of the new action-comedy The Hitman’s Bodyguard ponder who a career killer goes to when he finds himself a mark. Even professional assassins need a little muscle from time to time, and when one especially ill-tempered sunuvagun hires a body guard with a short fuse, violent egos clash with nose-crushing results.

The conversation started last week about roles for Black actors in Hollywood is still ongoing. It actually started way before last week, but seems to have hit a nerve with Samuel L. Jackson’s comments about how Black people from Britain taking on American roles in film and TV is wrong. Daniel Kaluuya, London-born star of Get Out, fired back against that opinion in a subsequent interview, saying that it’s hard enough getting roles in the U.K., what with all those Downton Abbey-style period dramas, and that he was sick of having to prove his Blackness to people. Westworld star Thandie Newton, another Londoner who now resides in Los Angeles, seems to agree.

Samuel L. Jackson has never shied away from controversy. To quote Samuel L. Jackson (as the fitted-cap-sporting, status-obsessed supervillain from Kingsman): “Do I look like I give a f–k?” And in fact he did not, speaking candidly earlier this month about his disappointment in the preponderance of black British actors taking roles Jackson feels should have gone to African-Americans.

Samuel L. Jackson’s a man of many hats: actor, philanthropist, and on occasion, opinionated public intellectual. (He’s also a man of many hats in a more literal sense, owning what I estimate must be upwards of 800 Kangols.) He‘s currently working the press circuit in promotion of his latest picture, the big-budget monster mash Kong: Skull Island, and no Samuel L. Jackson press tour is complete without one or two headline-grabbing soundbites. We thought we had hit the jackpot when Jackson happily admitted to a familiarity with the anime pornography known as ‘hentai,’ but the actor’s buzz-baiting statements were far from over.

Kong: Skull Island may be set in the early 1970s, but it’s clearly engineered for modern sensibilities. The film’s trailer drew comparisons to Apocalypse Now, but director Jordan Vogt-Roberts seems less inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War film than its iconic poster of a fiery setting sun, an image Skull Island returns to over and over. Even if it bears superficial similarities to Coppola’s classic, it’s little more than A-picture gloss on a big-budget B-movie. Naming one of your characters after Joseph Conrad doesn’t make your film Heart of Darkness; the only thing at this movie’s heart is the (admittedly accurate) belief that when a giant ape punches a giant lizard in the face with a boat motor it looks totally freaking awesome.

Each new trailer for Kong: Skull Island offers a little more humor than the last, and in the final trailer for the King’s revival, it’s not just John C. Reilly who’s monkeying around. Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson and Corey Hawkins also get a few comedic beats in during the latest sneak peek, which is cleverly set to The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” And there are plenty of good reasons to get the heck off of that island.

If you’d asked me at the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe whether Nick Fury should get his very own movie, I’d probably have said no. I love Samuel L. Jackson as much as the next guy  —  perhaps even more after hearing his outstanding vocal work in the documentary I Am Not Your Negro  —  but Fury always seemed better on the periphery, a character who pull the strings in the shadows. Still, after seeing how well the Russo Brothers used Jackson in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, I’m willing to change my tune. Maybe a Nick Fury standalone movie wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.

Summer movie season starts a little earlier every year, and in 2017, it has consumed May, April, and even our beloved March. Logan will kick off the big-budget bonanza in the first weekend of March, and then cede the floor to the gargantuan Kong: Skull Island the weekend after. Even so, these two releases in particular inspire hope rather than dread when reflecting upon the studio-fronted franchise releases encroaching beyond their summer stomping grounds. All the previews have suggested that these two films will have something original to bring to the table, and the latest clip for Kong: Skull Island confirms that if nothing else, we’ll have some delectable character acting to enjoy.

With the movie only a couple months away, it’s about time for Kong: Skull Island to drop another bit of footage — or four. Today, Legendary has gifted us a bunch of new short TV spots that have a few new shots in them and give us a better idea of who all these non_kong characters really are. The first one, above, reiterates the Godzilla connection while also letting us know that, yes, Samuel L. Jackson is going full Samuel L. Jackson villain mode for this one too, never fear. Or, if you’re one of the people stuck on the island with him, fear a lot.