Dave Franco

The latest toy-to-film adaptation from the beloved building block company and Warner Bros. is their first real misfire.

James Franco plays Tommy Wiseau in this hilarious and touching comedy about the making of the cult classic film ‘The Room.’

The Disaster Artist premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last night (we’ll have a full review later), and while you won’t be able to see James Franco’s ode to mercurial filmmaker Tommy Wiseau until December, you can watch this great new trailer courtesy of A24. The star-studded film (featuring pretty much every actor you expect to see in a movie with Franco and Seth Rogen) already has a lot of positive buzz, and although it probably won’t earn any Oscars (well, maybe?), its awards season release date doesn’t feel all that strange.

Look, I’ll be honest: despite the runaway success of 2014’s The LEGO Movie and last year’s The LEGO Batman Movie, I was never really sure why Warner Bros. was moving forward with The LEGO NINJAGO Movie as the third entry in its LEGO cinematic universe. Maybe I’m completely out of touch - “No, it’s the children who are wrong!” - but the NINJAGO series of video games and movies doesn’t have quite the same pull as the licensed LEGO toys. Besides, isn’t NINJAGO basically just an animated version of Power Rangers? Does the summer really need a second one of those?

“James Franco doing a movie about the creation of legendary disasterpiece The Room” was a tantalizing prospect when first announced, either a brilliant turn for his career-spanning preoccupation with artifice in showbiz or another insufferable bout of navel-gazing. The first trailer for the comedy due December 1 (before going wide on December 8) isn’t really either, landing somewhere closer to Hail, Caesar! in its farcical send-up of filmmaking frustration. 2017 has gotten its “Would that it t’were so simple,” now say it with me: “I did not hit her, it’s not true, it’s bullsh*t, I did not hit her, I did not. Oh hi, Mark.”

James and Dave Franco joining forces to turn one of the wildest books about one of the wildest movie shoots into a movie of its own sounded too good (or too weird) to be true when The Disaster Artist was first announced, but they did it, and A24 snatched it up after it debuted at SXSW this year, and the first teaser is on its way tomorrow. But before all that, A24 debuted a shiny new poster for the movie, which sees James Franco going full Wiseau in a recording studio.

The nunsploitation film seems to be making an odd comeback recently — with even Paul Verhoeven catching the fever and announcing his lesbian nun movie Blessed Virgin — and nothing looks more promising than a ton of comedy greats banding together to make a raunchy, hysterical version of Bocaccio’s The Decameron, replete with clergy members throwing around f-bombs and nuns throwing around turnips.

The world has come one step closer to bearing witness to the full scope of James Franco’s artistic vision. As the latest component of his ongoing interrogation of celebrity, performance, artifice, and vague pseudo-intellectualism, he’s adapted The Disaster Artist, actor Greg Sestero’s true account of his time behind the scenes of the calamitous production of The Room. Famed as one of the most bafflingly incompetent movies of all time, the real weirdness came off set, where director/writer/financier/star/madman Tommy Wiseau (played by Franco in the movie) engaged Sestero in a bizarre, homoerotically charged rivalry. Which makes the fact that Franco’s brother Dave will play Sestero just that much stranger.

The first — red band and incredibly NSFW — trailer for The Little Hours ticks off so many of the right boxes: Aubrey Plaza and Alison Brie as foul-mouthed, promiscuous nuns. John C. Reilly, merely existing because that’s really all that we require of him. Fred Armisen’s off-kilter humor, Dave Franco (the superior Franco), Nick Offerman, and Molly Shannon — all participating in a raunchy take on those stoic Euro masterpieces from the ’70s. (Despite the fact that The Devils already exists.)

Yesterday, a brief partial trailer for a full-length trailer (itself a partial-length version of the full-length movie) arrived online in promotion of The Lego Ninjago Movie, the latest spinoff of the Lego Movie franchise more recently expanded with The Lego Batman Movie. It gave us a brief preview of the design of the land of Ninjago, a block-built utopia wth Eastern influences that superficially resembles Tokyo. But today, we’ll get a fuller look at the new world in which this film takes place, and the scrappy little figurines that populate it as well.