Deadline’s Contenders Film Goes Virtual And Expands To Two Days January 23-24; 49 Films, 16 Studios Set

To follow up his 2017 breakout indie hit God’s Own Country, Francis Lee found inspiration in the story of a little-known British fossil collector named Mary Anning. For Ammonite, he embellished what little is known about Anning, fashioning a romantic story for her, and cast Kate Winslet as the enigmatic heroine and Saoirse Ronan as the young woman who cracks her shell.

Oscar winning screenwriter John Patrick Shanley says he had a simple reason for wanting to turn his play, Outside Mullingar, into a movie: location, location, location.

Norwegian director Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come takes her into frontier country, as two put-upon farmers wives—played by Vanessa Kirby and Katherine Waterston—unexpectedly find love in the drudgery of 1850s America, despite their strained relationships with their husbands, played by Casey Affleck and Christopher Abbott.

John Lee Hancock’s hunt for a serial killer script The Little Things drew a killer cast of Oscar winners Denzel Washington, Rami Malek and Jared Leto. In Deadline’s Contenders Film panel for the Warner Bros drama that premieres January 29, Hancock explains why it took nearly 30 years to make a movie he wrote when he had just completed the Clint Eastwood-directed Kevin Costner-starrer A Perfect World — ostensibly for Eastwood to direct it.

For all the praise of how great ’70s cinema was, when you come to think about it, many of the great crime classics like Straight Time, The Godfather and Thief were all testosterone-driven, with female characters resigned to second- or third-class status. Unfortunate, considering an era known for its sense of revolution.

When Amazon released it in the heat of presidential election season, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm captured the zeitgeist as Sacha Baron Cohen and his breakout co-star Maria Bakalova acted out a father-daughter story with the unwitting help of QAnon followers, Vice President Mike Pence and President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, which won the New York Film Critics’ Association award for best picture of 2020, significantly centers on food and food preparation two centuries ago in the Pacific Northwest region we now call Oregon, four decades before the area became an American state.

Coming off the heat of the first DreamWorks Animation movie Trolls, a bonanza musical that saw its tune “Can’t Stop the Feeling” from Justin Timberlake get nominated for a Best Song Oscar on top of going quadruple platinum, the sequel Trolls World Tour was always going to be more music, more color, more glitz and more glamour.

Poland has generated some fresh class distinctions since communist days, a development examined with a shrewd and merciless eye in the country’s Oscar-submitted feature Never Gonna Snow Again. The central figure is a mysterious private masseur, played by the UK-based actor Alec Utgoff, who goes door-to-door carrying with him a folding massage table through a wealthy gated community to offer is services to the numerous and invariably dissatisfied people living in the virtually identical houses.

Our Friend is a triangular narrative based on an Esquire article by journalist Matthew Teague about the death of his wife, Nicole. Before Nicole succumbed to cancer at age 36, an unusually intimate bond formed among the couple and mutual friend, Dane. Despite the ravages of fate, Dane offered a preternatural degree of support, caring for the Teagues’ daughters and effectively becoming a fifth family member.

In a wide-open year for Best Actor nominations, the buzz has been consistent around one performance in particular: Anthony Hopkins’ turn in Sony Pictures Classics’ The Father as an elderly man whose confused descent into dementia has heart-rending consequences for himself and his daughter.

“A lot of Pixar films are based on personal experiences,” says Onward director Dan Scanlon at Deadline’s Contenders Film awards-season event. “This might be more blatantly autobiographical in some ways.”

Ramin Bahrani’s Netflix thriller The White Tiger is a kinetic and thought-provoking ride. The acclaimed director’s adaptation of Arvind Adiga’s lauded 2008 novel charts the tumultuous journey of a poor Indian driver who must use his wit and cunning to break free from servitude.

Sundance winner The Forty-Year-Old Version is a familiar story to anyone who hits the age of 40, as it makes one re-evaluate life and decide the next steps in one’s career and beyond. For the film’s writer, director and star Radha Blank, it was a personal story — and driven by adversity.

After years of helping deliver some of the more legendary Disney animated characters like Aladdin and The Beast, Over the Moon director Glen Keane knew early on he had found his next great animated character to help bring to life.

Irish outfit Cartoon Saloon has established itself as one of the world’s most consistently excellent animation studios, having received Oscar nominations across projects including Song of the Sea, The Secret of Kells and The Breadwinner.

“When I thought of Billie Holiday, I just thought of her as a jazz singer, maybe a troubled artist, you hear about drugs, a little bit of trouble with the law,” says Lee Daniels, director of the upcoming biopic The United States vs. Billie Holiday. With all that Holiday accomplished during her storied career, rarely highlighted is her work in the civil rights movement of the 1930s and ’40s, which was why Daniels was inspired to tackle this project.

When director Ryan Murphy saw the musical The Prom on Broadway a couple of years ago right after it opened, he quickly scooped up the rights, took it to Netflix where he has a deal, and got a film version in motion in record time with an all-star cast including Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Kerry Washington.

If there is one thing that has continually distinguished Universal Pictures it is its monster legacy, a genre of films the studio has done since its beginnings with classics featuring Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy and The Invisible Man. The latter is the latest to attempt a reboot as Universal continues efforts to revive its prized franchises, albeit with mixed results in recent years. But with this critically acclaimed effort, it has succeeded beyond all expectations.

Following the tension heavy-2017 drama The Beguiled, writer-director Sofia Coppola said she was ready to shift the tone with her latest feature, Apple TV+’s On the Rocks. “I do find that after I’d done a film that I like to change,” says the Oscar-winning filmmaker, speaking about the choice to go with a “fun and playful” tone for the comedy starring Rashida Jones and Bill Murray.