Director Blitz Bazawule's upcoming film adaptation of the 2005 musical The Color Purple, set to star Color Purple stage alumni Fantasia Barrino and Danielle Brooks, has added David Alan Grier, Louis Gossett, Jr., Tamela Mann, Deon Cole, Stephen Hill, and Phylicia Mpasi to its cast.
Fantasia Taylor, Colman Domingo, Danielle Brooks, Halle Bailey, Corey Hawkins, H.E.R., and Taraji P. Henson will bring the Broadway show based on Alice Walker’s book to the big screen.
Warner Bros. Pictures announced theatrical release dates for three big event movies tonight — and their intention is that they’re going straight to the big screen, not HBO Max and theaters. Those three are the George Miller Max Max prequel Furiosa on June 23, 2023, Dave Green’s animated hybrid Coyote vs. Acme on July 21, 2023 and The Color Purple musical feature on Dec. 20, 2023.
Hot off of co-directing Beyoncé’s Disney+ visual album feature Black Is King, Ghana-born filmmaker Blitz Bazawule is set to direct Warner Bros. musical film The Color Purple, based on the Tony-winning Broadway musical. I hear that the feature’s producers Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Scott Sanders, and Quincy Jones caught Bazawule’s movie The Burial Of Kojo on Netflix, and were wowed by his vibrant visual style.
Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes is set to write “Life Is a Carnival,” a Latin music-infused new film for Warner Bros. The movie will mark her second collaboration with “In the Heights” producers Scott Sanders and Mara Jacobs after Hudes wrote the book for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical as well as the screenplay for the Jon M. Chu-directed big-screen adaptation.
Warner Bros. has unveiled the full-length first look at its big-screen adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s first Broadway musical, In The Heights. Directed by Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) and starring Anthony Ramos (Broadway’s Hamilton, A Star Is Born) in the lead role of Usnavi, the explosive and vibrant trailer showcases the magic that’s to come in June 2020.
First, it was a book. Then a hit movie. Then it became a Broadway musical. And now, the musical version is going to be adapted for film. Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones and Scott Sanders, who produced the Tony-winning Broadway version, will produce the big-screen musical.
If you want a hit show, you have to provide an early moment when an audience — content that its hard-earned cash was not spent in vain — is sufficiently impressed that it relaxes, thus opening its collective heart to what is to come, even if that requires a forgiving spirit. Fontana earns that crucial moment for “Tootsie” not just by otherworldly control of the larynx but through stellar, old-fashioned comedic acting, demonstrably rooted in the pain and truth of his out-of-work Michael. By the time he is done, I’ll wager this will go down as a truly great Broadway performance.
Warner Bros is closing a $50 million deal to score film rights to In the Heights, the Tony-winning musical from Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes.
In 2015 — when the absurdly reductive short-form listicle became the Hail Mary of flagging entertainment journalism — a prominent New York weekly decided to ask a group of actors, and only actors, to rank the greatest movies of all time. The widely disseminated winner gave the internet chatterati a collective kanipshin: “Tootsie.”
The Color Purple took home the Grammy Award for musical theater album Sunday during the pre-telecast ceremony in Los Angeles.
