This Week in Movie Posters, April 22nd

Glen Powell, The Beatles, the Beach Boys, Deadpool, and a handful of other stuff this week.

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Hey, gang. I haven’t done a This Week In Movie Posters in a while, and there are a bunch of new subscribers since the last one. So uh… hope you new folks like it! No refunds! (It’s free). ((Probably click on the web version so that all the pictures load)).

This Week In Movie Posters

Welcome to the This Week In Movie Posters, the feature in which we go through all the week’s new movie posters and read way too much into them. Blessed are the paid subscribers, as without them, none of this would be possible. All posters via IMPA.

We open this week with the poster for the remastered version of Let It Be, coming to Disney+. The Beatles, you say? Hmm, I’ll have to check these guys out, this is the first I’m hearing of them.

Peter Jackson is going to use newfangled AI to make the Beatles sing happy birthday to you.

They’re out of order (thanks to the vagaries of Substack’s image-adding system), but this is just one of a whole batch of Transformers One posters (no colon in the title, I had to check). Based on the posters, it seems that the innovation here was to give the good guys smiley faces and the bad guys robot frowns. Incredible stuff coming out of Hollywood these days.

According to Wikipedia, Transformers One is “the eighth installment overall of the Transformers film series, as well as the first animated feature film based on the franchise since The Transformers: The Movie (1986).”

Oh, and did I mention it’s a prequel?! Can’t have enough of those, I always say. Also, these are movies about giant robots, they’re basically all animated, aren’t they? Seems like a more accurate way to say this is that this is the first Transformers movie since The Transformers: The Movie (1986) not to have any live-action characters. Which seems pretty generous to Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson, but still.

Look at all those costumes! No matter how Glen Powell dresses, he always looks like a gay porn star to me. Is that projecting? Maybe. A lot of Hollywood actors are handsome, but only Glen Powell is handsome in this extremely on-the-nose kind of way. As a friend put it, “he always looks like he’s about to wedgy a nerd on a ski lift.”

That pose on the bottom looks like he’s tickling his pee pee. Anyway, Richard Linklater. Yes I will watch this.

Here’s the poster for Deadpool 3, which I guess they’re officially calling Deadpool & Wolverine. Because you can’t just put numbers in a Marvel movie title, that wouldn’t be confusing enough!

Oh yeah, Disney bought Fox, who used to make the Deadpool movies, in 2019, so this will be the first Deadpool movie to be produced by Marvel (who Disney also owns), and the first to have actual Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) in it. Whereas it used to be a big joke in all the Deadpool movies to talk about Wolverine a lot without him ever actually showing up. I’m sure there was a corporate reason for that but I don’t feel like looking it up and I feel like I already know way more about the licensing situation here than I ever wanted to.

This poster, like all Deadpool marketing, is grating in a specifically Reddit/Ryan Reynolds kind of way. But if I’m being honest I enjoyed the first two Deadpools a lot more than I thought I would. They were kind of obnoxious, of course, but I still preferred that to the standard Marvel “CIA operators have impostor syndrome too” pedantic normie-ness. I don’t know what it means yet for a Deadpool movie to be produced by Marvel, but I’m guessing it’s not good.

Remember when I said the new Transformers was smiley faces vs. frownies? Here’s this other one in case you thought I was making that up. This is a good guy.

Here’s a poster for Trim Season, which is clearly some kind of thriller/horror movie set in the world of pot farm workers. Considering how many true crime docuserieses we’ve gotten about that world (Murder Mountain, Sasquatch Country) it’s kind of a wonder that it’s take this long for there to be a fictionalized version. Also, “trim season” means something way different in my mind. (I’d watch both?)

Also, is that joint even lit? Where is all that smoke coming from?

Wow, congrats to Brandon Wardell for getting a big starring role alongside Robert De Niro and Bobby Cannavale.

Jk jk, I know that’s not Brandon Wardell. It looks like it’s about a Make-a-Wish kid whose wish was to hang out with some Italian guys. I’m going to proceed based on that assumption.

Nick Stahl, isn’t that the guy with the weird face? Seems like you pay for a weird face like that, you at least want to put it in the poster. I like the design otherwise though. The words are on the stairs! I can barely even read the director’s name, he must’ve done something to piss off the poster designer.

I like to make fun of the cheapie animated movies that use Dreamworks Face in everything, but God help me, I actually kind of snort-laughed at the rockin’ pink unicorn. Haha! Unicorn thinks she’s people! Classic.

Holy hell. Why hadn’t I heard of this film until now? Jamie Foxx in an In Living Color-era wig and Mickey Rourke looking Photoshopped in from one of his Instagram posts (my God, the fingernails)? Where do I sign up?? They even lined up the faces with the names!

Judging by Kevin Daniels’ central placement alongside the much bigger stars in the poster, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that he wrote and directed Not Another Church Movie.

And I would be… wrong! Dang it!

Not Another Church Movie is actually directed by James Michael Cummings (his directing debut) from a script by Johnny Mack (whose credits include a reality show parody starring Kevin Hart). Hmm, more intrigued or less intrigued?

IMDB says Not Another Church Movie…

…follows Taylor Pherry, who is given a mission from God Himself: to tell his family's stories and inspire his community. What he doesn't know is that the Devil has plans of his own.

Well, a Tyler Perry parody is certainly a rich vein of material and— hold up, did you just say “Tyler Pherry?” As in… uh… Tyler Fairy? Uh… I don’t think you can just…hmmm.

Here’s a poster for Something in the Water. Based on the poster, I think it’s a shark. Spoiler alert?

Also, what’s going on with her chin? Did AI draw this? Someone feed it some more chins.

I’m only posting one of them, but believe me when I say that there are 11 other posters for Descendants: Rise of the Red, whatever the hell that is. Something about this feels very Eternals, like Disney acquired the rights to some obscure IP and now they’re pretending like I should already know what it is.

Let’s see how close I was…

Descendants: The Rise of Red (also known as Descendants 4) is an upcoming musical fantasy film directed by Jennifer Phang from a screenplay by Dan Frey and Russell Sommer. Produced by Disney Channel, the film will be the fourth in the Descendants franchise, being a spin-off of the previous three films.

The fourth film?? And you’re telling me none of these are related to the George Clooney movie or the seminal SoCal punk band? We need to get some new names, folks. Fine, I’ll bite: what were the other three films about?

Descendants is an American media franchise centered on a series of Disney Channel musical fantasy films directed by Kenny Ortega and created by Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott.

The franchise takes place in a world that serves as a continuation of the Disney animated classic films. Starring Dove Cameron, Cameron Boyce, Sofia Carson and Booboo Stewart, each film chronicles the lives of the teenage children of four Disney Villains on the Isle of the Lost, and their move to the kingdom of Auradon at the request of the teenage son of Queen Belle and King Beast.

Ah, so Discount Disney Slurry™, basically. Cool, cool, I shall go back to being blissfully unaware of any of this now. Sad that I had to go three Wikipedia entries deep to find some Booboo Stewart. Not enough Booboo Stewart these days.

Damn, has JK Simmons entered his Flop Era? That “Academy Award Winner” graphic looks so out of place here. And why did they use Photoshop’s “lotion commercial before image” texture? (*Walter from Big Lebowski voice*) Also, Dude, “you can’t run forever” and “don’t look back” seem like conflicting advice.

/checks IMDB. Ahh, it’s directed by JK Simmons’ wife. I guess he’s still in his being-a-good-husband era. For a second there I was worried his Farmer’s Insurance commercials weren’t covering his alimony nut. Seems like it’s the opposite! Which is nice. I shall continue enjoying JK Simmons performances guilt-free.

Ah, yes, a Beach Boys documentary on Disney+. Based on the distributor, I’m guessing this one will avoid all the actually-interesting Charles Manson stuff and skip straight to trying to answer the age old question: which Beach Boy had the weirdest-shaped head? Just kidding, obviously it’s Al Jardine. Sweet Jesus look at that melon. He looks like the front end of a Harrier Jet with a beard.

It’s smiling Transformer vs. Frowning Transformer! And Frowning Transformer is making the jack-off hand motion! Gosh, this looks great.

Okay, that’s the posters for this week. I kept this week’s installment free, so consider a paid subscription so that my children can eat, and to prove that you’re a nice guy/gal. We love well-fed children, don’t we folks?? Paid subscribers will enjoy seven years of good sex, just as the prophecies foretold.