Gore Verbinski

Fake news has metastasized into one of the day’s greatest scourges. Web sites perpetuating false information have destabilized the public’s trust in what is monolithically referred to as “the media,” and what’s worse, elected officials can now use the cry of “fake news!” to discredit any factual reports that they’re not pleased with. Truth has grown into a sadly scarce quantity these days, and just about everyone agrees that the last thing we need is even more misinformation spread around just for the sake of promoting a movie, even if that movie happens to be a visually sumptuous dive into insanity.

Here’s the best movie trailer of the Super Bowl.

Time and time again, Gore Verbinski has been thoroughly played by the flighty attitudes of moviegoers and Hollywood executives. His delightful animated Western Rango wrongfully doesn’t enjoy the stature of Pixar and Disney’s recent successes, and his take on The Lone Ranger is remembered today as a massive flop instead of the generously enjoyable spoof it was...

2016 was a hell of a year for horror, from the high-literary chills of I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House to ‘cult classic’ The Invitation to rigorously designed colonial freakout The Witch to the stripped-down nightmare of Don’t Breathe. 2017’s already looking like it’ll be able to give this year’s chills a run for their money, though; the advance reviews for M. Night Shyamalan’s multiple-personality abduction thriller Split have been improbably positive, the trailer for Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out looks absolutely bonkers, and Gore Verbinski has given February a shot in the arm (pun extremely, shamelessly intended) with his upcoming psych ward-set feature A Cure for Wellness.

So far, A Cure For Wellness seems to be fulfilling the promise of Gore Verbinski’s return to the horror genre, and by that I mean it looks totally bonkers. And according to early reactions out of last weekend’s BNAT film festival in Austin, “bonkers” might be an understatement. Between those reactions and this wacky new international trailer, Verbinski’s latest is quickly becoming one of my most anticipated films of 2017.

Unless you keep a close eye on the Austin, Texas film scene, you might not have known that audiences were treated to a special advance screening of Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness this weekend as part of the annual Butt-Numb-A-Thon. This yearly film marathon  —  hosted each year by Ain’t It Cool News founder Harry Knowles  —  often features an enticing mixture of classic genre movies and upcoming releases, and this year, both Verbinski and lead actor Dane DeHaan showed up for a special advance screening of their 2017 release. And if Twitter is to believed, it’s extremely disturbing and absolutely insane. Sounds perfect.

At the uppermost level, corporate culture has taken a turn for the New Agey. Silicon Valley has amply parodied the recent fad of nebulously defined spiritualism among the top players in the start-up world, where CEOs journey into the desert for days at a time to trip on ayahuasca and come up with a name for their newly integrated media vertical, or whatever. Corporate types have begun to act like Burning Man attendees, and with his upcoming psychological thriller A Cure for Wellness, Gore Verbinski puts a horrifying spin on this spreading trend.

After costing Disney a pretty penny (or millions of them) with The Lone Ranger and having his North Korea thriller with Steve Carell nixed by New Regency, Gore Verbinski has finally returned with a new film. Originally scheduled to hit theaters this year, A Cure for Wellness was pushed back to February 2017, but a pair of mysteriously creepy viral promos should get you pretty excited for The Ring director’s return to the horror genre.

Years ago, following the release of the first BioShock video game, ‘The Lone Ranger’ director Gore Verbinski was hired to helm a film adaptation of the wildly popular and incredibly dark property for Universal. After some struggles with the studio over the rating and financing, the adaptation sunk back into the depths of development purgatory, where it’s remained ever since. If you ever wanted to know what Verbinski’s take might have looked like, some unused concept art has revealed an adaptation that appears to be very faithful to its source material—based on looks alone, anyway.

On the heels of theater owners deciding to opt out of showing ‘The Interview,’ Sony unfortunately cancelled the Christmas Day release of the film entirely. While we patiently wait to find out if, when and how Sony might eventually release the film, the hacking incident and its related terrorist threats have also affected plans for another film. New Regency has just pulled the plug on ‘Pyongyang,’ an upcoming North Korea comedy set to star Steve Carell.