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South China Morning Post
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Meet How to Train Your Dragon's Mason Thames: the 17-year-old plays opposite Nico Parker, and came to prominence in The Black Phone starring Ethan Hawke – but which of his co-stars is he dating?
When he was only seven years old, Mason Thames dreamed of one day portraying his hero Hiccup, from the animated series How to Train Your Dragon (HTTYD). Now at the age of 17, his dream has come true, with Thames starring as Hiccup in the new, top-grossing live-action film of the same name, and quickly becoming one of Hollywood's most sought-after young actors. 'I never thought that I'd be given the chance to step into his shoes and maybe affect kids the way Hiccup affected me,' said Thames in an interview this month with The Hollywood Reporter. Hiccup, portrayed by Mason Thames, riding Toothless in the new live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon. Photo: Universal Pictures/TNS Advertisement HTTYD, which hit theatres in the US on June 13, is a remake of the 2010 animated version, and tells the story of a 15-year-old Viking who goes against his family's centuries-old dragon-hunting tradition and befriends a dragon instead. Thames made his screen debut in the Apple TV+ show For All Mankind when he was 11, and shot to fame in the 2021 supernatural horror film The Black Phone, starring opposite Ethan Hawke . He also had roles in the 2024 films Monster Summer and Incoming. Here's everything to know about Mason Thames. His breakout role: The Black Phone Mason Thames' breakout role was as 13-year-old Finney Blake in The Black Phone, also starring Ethan Hawke. Photo: Universal Pictures Mason Thames made his mark on Hollywood as Finney Blake, a 13-year-old boy held captive in a soundproof basement by a sadistic, masked killer (played by Hawke) in The Black Phone. He will reprise the role in the film's sequel, due to be released in October. Interestingly, it was Thames' performance in The Black Phone that led to him earning the role of Hiccup. HTTYD's director Dean DeBlois watched the supernatural horror on a plane, and was so impressed by the young star that he long listed him for the role of the 15-year-old Viking in his own film, per The Hollywood Reporter. Mason Thames is a trained ballet dancer Mason Thames toured with a professional ballet company in The Nutcracker as a child. Photo: @masonthames/Instagram Thames began training in ballet at the age of five with his sister, Brooke-Madison Thames, who is now a professional ballerina. He toured with a professional ballet company from 2013 to 2016, performing in The Nutcracker.
Perth Now
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Steven Spielberg was ‘deeply involved' in Jurassic World: Rebirth, says writer David Koepp
Jurassic World: Rebirth writer David Koepp has said Steven Spielberg was 'deeply involved' in making the movie. The 78-year-old director helmed the original 1993 film Jurassic Park, its 1997 sequel The Lost Work: Jurassic Park and has served as an executive producer on the Jurassic World series ever since, and Koepp - who wrote the first movie and its follow-up - revealed one of the main reasons he returned for Jurassic World: Rebirth was because Spielberg was 'very involved' in it. Speaking to Deadline about Spielberg, the 62-year-old scribe said: 'Oh, he was very involved. 'That was one of the reasons I most wanted to do it. Because Steven was deeply involved from the beginning, and for the six months that we were working on the script, it was really just him and me. 'I'd send him my ideas, and we'd work on them, and when you have Steven's full attention, the results can be pretty spectacular.' Jurassic World: Rebirth - which stars Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, and Mahershala Ali - follows a team of covert operatives on a mission to stop a rogue biotech organisation from unleashing weaponised dinosaurs around the world. As the chaos escalates, the team uncovers a dark secret connected to the original Jurassic legacy. Koepp previously said Jurassic World: Rebirth - which was directed by Gareth Edwards and releases on 2 July 2025 - would capture the 'spirit of the first movie'. He told TheWrap: '[We were trying to evoke] the spirit of the first movie, which is the tone that we would like to get closest to.' The writer added it was 'the idea of starting afresh' which convinced him to return to the Jurassic series. He said: 'You don't often get that chance, where they give you very few guidelines, except there must be dinosaurs in it.' Even so, before he agreed to come back for Jurassic World: Rebirth, Koepp had a list of demands he gave to Universal Pictures that the studio had to meet. He explained: 'Number one was – the events of the previous six movies cannot be denied or contradicted, because I hate a retcon. '[Number two was] all science must be real. [Third was] humour is oxygen.' Reflecting on returning to the Jurassic series, Koepp said it was 'weird and trippy' for him to step back in time for Jurassic World: Rebirth. He explained: 'It even smelled the same. It felt low pressure, even though Universal might be horrified to hear that.' Looking back at Jurassic Park and The Lost World, Koepp said 'writing those first two movies were some of [his] favourite experiences in [his] career so far'. He added: 'The combination of grand adventure and real science is right up my alley. And it was fun to be able to decide on a new tone, because every three movies seems like a good time to change tone and characters in a franchise. 'It was great to be able to work solely with Steven and make up a story and think of all new characters and all in a different tone.'
Winnipeg Free Press
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Opinion: Jaws leaves cinematic legacy in its bloodied-water wake
Opinion Jaws celebrates its 50th anniversary this week. I didn't see Steven Spielberg's carefully constructed, unexpectedly understated creature feature when it came out in theatres in 1975. My parents considered it too scary for kids. Later in life, I made up for that lost opportunity, and now I watch it every summer. It's a seasonal film for me, marking the time of sun and swimming and beaches the way It's a Wonderful Life marks Christmas. This image released by Peacock shows cinematographer Bill Butler, standing, and director Steven Spielberg during the filming of 'Jaws.' (Peacock/Universal Pictures via AP) Jaws is often cited as the first summer blockbuster, its unprecedented success — it became the highest-grossing movie ever at that time — bringing in big changes in the way studios made, marketed and distributed movies. It changed the cinematic landscape so dramatically that it's hard now to remember the before times — when summertime was the slow period for theatres, when marketing was a minor line-item in a movie's budget, when studios preferred to slow-roll their releases over a period of weeks. We now take massive, much-hyped, multiplex-blanketing event movies for granted. But we should never take Jaws for granted. Beyond being a business model for Hollywood's summer hits, beyond being an important, influential and endlessly quoted pop-culture phenomenon ('You're gonna need a bigger boat'), Jaws is just a damn fine movie. Five decades later, it remains brilliantly better than most of the blockbusters that have followed in its chum-strewn wake. Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, the industry has too often picked up the film's formula without taking in the finer points of Spielberg's approach. Adapted from Peter Benchley's 1974 novel, Jaws takes us to a coastal community that relies on summer tourist dollars to stay afloat. When a killer shark appears off its shores in the leadup to the July 4th weekend, craven town mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) and concerned police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) clash over how to handle the situation. Ultimately, the reluctant, ocean-fearing Brody, with smart-assed shark biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and salty, hands-on shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw), head out to open water for a classic humans-versus-nature showdown. This basic template has since been applied to alligators, anacondas, aliens and tornadoes, but the imitators rarely achieve Jaws' beautiful balance of B-movie pleasure and Moby Dick heft. Surprisingly, for a movie that has had such an outsized effect, a lot of its virtues are modest. Spielberg is a consummate craftsperson, and in Jaws his style is effective, economical and (mostly) unshowy. This image released by Peacock shows Roy Scheider in a scene from "Jaws." (Peacock/Universal Pictures via AP) Yes, there's that famous dolly zoom that film kids love to talk about — the moment Brody realizes his children and the shark are in the same water and Spielberg uses his camera to replicate that sudden, disorienting lurch of terror. But a lot of the film's power comes out slowly and cumulatively, as Spielberg makes the dozens of small, subtle decisions that go into good visual storytelling. There are the deep-focus crowd scenes that ground us in the chaos and conflicts of this small community. There's the tight framing and careful blocking of the three main actors — Scheider, Dreyfuss and Shaw — on that cramped boat, which gradually build up a picture not just of the individual characters but of their shifting power dynamics and changing sympathies. There's the unlikely sunlit horror of the beach scenes and the sea-level camera angles that take us — uncomfortably — right into the action. There's the precise pacing, which builds suspense with a quiet, relentless momentum that matches the 'du-dum, du-dum' of John Williams' famous score. This restraint makes the sparingly used jump scares that much more effective. No shot is wasted, no sequence is extended longer than necessary, and that less-is-more approach extends — crucially — to the shark. In this pre-CGI era, Spielberg was using practical effects, and the three formats of rubber-and-steel mechanical shark — all called Bruce by the crew — broke down constantly. Faced with a ballooning budget and a shoot going 10 weeks over schedule, Spielberg ended up using the physical presence of the shark sparingly. Wednesdays Columnist Jen Zoratti looks at what's next in arts, life and pop culture. This was a necessity that became a cinematic gift, as clever editing — and viewers' minds — conjured up a horror that went far beyond what Bruce, even at his toothiest and thrashiest, could provide. Keeping the monster mostly offscreen, Spielberg essentially created a shark that was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. And while the monster remains mysterious, the people and the places are specific, in ways that are unusual in most blockbusters today. The current tendency in summer action movies is to go bigger and bigger, so sometimes the whole world, or even the entire universe is under threat. Once again, Jaws goes smaller. Grounded in a human scale, the story deals with a handful of deaths and comes down to one shark and three men on a boat. Yet somehow these stakes feel larger. Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss are shown in a scene from 'Jaws.' (Peacock/Universal Pictures) Again, less is more with this classic film, a big blockbuster made great by myriad small details. (One darker final note: Jaws kicked off the sharksploitation genre, which has demonized these animals as monsters that attack with malign, targeted intent, and these anti-shark tropes have had disastrous real-world effects on shark populations. When watching the movie, it's important to keep in mind that, statistically speaking, you're more likely to be killed by a falling vending machine or a charging cow than a Great White.) Alison GillmorWriter Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto's York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. 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2 days ago
- Entertainment
Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey share friendly smooch at 'Jurassic World Rebirth' premiere
Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey were all smiles at the world premiere of " Jurassic World Rebirth" this week. The duo stepped out on the blue carpet Tuesday night in London and shared a friendly kiss. Their co-stars Mahershala Ali and Rupert Friend, as well as director Gareth Edwards, were also in attendance. Johansson channeled Old Hollywood glamour in a custom white gown by Vivienne Westwood, while Ali wore a custom look by Etro. Bailey wore Prada. The upcoming film, out next month, marks a new chapter in the "Jurassic World" trilogy. According to a press release from Universal Pictures, the new film follows an extraction team as they "race to the most dangerous place on Earth, an island research facility for the original Jurassic Park, inhabited by the worst of the worst that were left behind." "Five years after the events of 'Jurassic World Dominion,' the planet's ecology has proven largely inhospitable to dinosaurs," the press release continues. "Those remaining exist in isolated equatorial environments with climates resembling the one in which they once thrived." It adds, "The three most colossal creatures across land, sea and air within that tropical biosphere hold, in their DNA, the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind." Johansson plays Zora Bennett, a skilled covert operations expert assigned to lead a team on a "top-secret mission to secure the genetic material." In an interview with ET Online, Johansson called herself a "Jurassic Park nerd" and said she experienced what she described as several "pinch-me" moments on set. "I remember the first scene that we shot -- of course they throw us right into the most complicated set," Johansson said. "We shot on this very remote island in Thailand where we had to take a boat to another boat… and when I walked down, there was a mudslide and a six-hour monsoon and all this craziness." She continued, "By the time we got to the set, I walk down the little stairs, and we come out on this isolated beach, and it's that moment that you have where you're like, the John Williams music is going in your head. I'm looking across at the other cast members. We're all wearing our, you know, tactical suits and everything, and I was just like, 'This is really happening.'" "It was just… tears in my eyes," she added. "I couldn't believe it."
Observer
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Observer
‘Jurassic World: Rebirth' brings fans back to dangerous dinosaur realm
Scarlett Johansson's role in "Jurassic World: Rebirth" made her recall her earliest memories of the dinosaur film franchise. The "Black Widow" actor recalled seeing the first "Jurassic Park" film at the movie theater when she was 10 years old. "It imprinted on me very deeply,' she told Reuters at the London premiere at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square. "For the next three decades, I was like, I would have done anything to be in a Jurassic movie in any capacity,' she added. The franchise, created by Michael Crichton, has spawned several films, merchandising deals and video games. "Jurassic World: Rebirth," directed by Gareth Edwards, follows a team of specialists that embarks on an expedition to a forbidden island, home to a research facility for the original "Jurassic Park'. The specialists, played by Johansson and "Bridgerton" actor Jonathan Bailey, must obtain DNA samples from three dinosaurs to achieve a life-saving medical breakthrough. The Universal Pictures film arrives in theaters on July 2. For Rupert Friend, this installment in the franchise is exhilarating. "I love adventure. I love being taken on a ride where you don't know what's going to happen. I love the unknown. I love risk,' he said. For well-known science fiction director, Edwards, the pressure for the film to succeed did not hit until he arrived at the premiere. "It's all front and centre here. It feels a bit weird to be honest. I can't quite get my head around it,' the "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" director added. —Reuters
