Til Schweiger Action-Comedy Sequel ‘Manta Manta: Legacy’ Boarded by Picture Tree Intl., Teaser Debuts (EXCLUSIVE)

EXCLUSIVE: The Santa Clauses needed someone to play the Easter Bunny in season two, so they went to the only person who could truly embody the cuddly part: the inimitable Tracy Morgan.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Variety has been given exclusive access to the trailer for Marco Bellocchio’s “Kidnapped” (Rapito), which has its world premiere in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The film starts in 1858 in the Jewish quarter of Bologna, when the Pope’s soldiers burst into the home of the Mortara family. By order of the cardinal, they have come to take Edgardo, their seven-year-old son. The child had been secretly baptized by his nurse as a baby and the papal law is unquestionable: he must receive a Catholic education. Edgardo’s parents, distraught, will do anything to get their son back. Supported by public opinion and the international Jewish community, the Mortaras’ struggle quickly takes a political dimension. But the Church and the Pope will not agree to return the child, to consolidate an increasingly wavering power.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Variety has been given access to the teaser (below) for “Murals,” an immersive 3D documentary that has its world premiere on May 18 at Cannes Next, a sidebar to the Marché du Film in Cannes. The experience, which is created in Unreal Engine and displayed on LED screens, centers on murals by Banksy, created following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The project was initiated by Artem Ivanenko, a 3D artist from Irpin, Ukraine, which was one of the first towns to be hit during the Russian invasion. Later, when the Russians withdrew, Ivanenko returned to Irpin to record the devastating destruction using 3D scanning.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Picture Tree Intl. has come on board to handle the international sales of black comedy “Shooting Blanks,” written and directed by Žiga Virc (“Houston, We Have a Problem!”). The Slovenian film looks at what happens when a family goes to war with itself. The film is in post-production. PTI will present a first private market screening at the Marché du Film in Cannes. Vida’s father France worships his father, a hero of the partisan resistance. When a German supermarket chain decides to build a new store in his hometown, demolishing a statue of his father in the process, France declares war on this new “enemy.”

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Munich-based sales agency Global Screen has acquired romantic drama “Falling Into Place” for worldwide theatrical distribution. The English-language film is written and directed by Aylin Tezel, one of Germany’s leading young actors, and stars Tezel (“7500”) and Chris Fulton (“Bridgerton”). The directorial debut is set in Scotland on the Isle of Skye and in London. It is an honest and poetic portrait of today’s 30-somethings caught between the fear of commitment and the desire for self-improvement. Like all great love stories, it is not just about the love between two individuals, but also about the dreams and anxieties of a whole generation.

Major change! Jessica Chastain traded her signature auburn tresses for platinum blonde at the 2023 Met Gala on Monday, May 1.

“Don’t Look Up” writer/director/producer Adam McKay has inked a deal to bring his upcoming film “Average Height, Average Build” to Netflix.The comedy will star Robert Pattinson, Amy Adams and Robert Downey Jr. McKay will also write and produce the film, Netflix confirmed to TheWrap Sunday.As expected with any McKay film, the cast of “Average Height, Average Build” is star-stacked.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Steve Martin casually dropped the release date for the third season of “Only Murders in the Building” during his “You Won’t Believe What They Look Like Today!” touring show alongside Martin Short. At Saturday’s 8 p.m. show at the Walt Disney Theater. Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando, Flor., which also included Jeff Babko and The Steep Canyon Rangers, the comedic duo unveiled the news while warming up the audience at the start of the show. According to two patrons who were in attendance, Martin and Short were delivering updates on what they were up to recently, showing a picture of them alongside their co-star Selena Gomez and two new cast members for Season 3, Oscar and Emmy winner Meryl Streep and Golden Globe nominee Paul Rudd. At one point, Martin stated, “Catch the new season August 8,” which was followed by Short responding, “Our show is like Steve trying to pee — it streams for 33 minutes.”

Sony Pictures Classics on Thursday announced their pickup of worldwide rights (outside of the UK, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, Italy and Latin America) to Strange Way of Life, the buzzy Pedro Almodóvar short, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, which will premiere as an official selection of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

Bleecker Street has picked up North American rights to the sci-fi comedy Jules, starring Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley (Gandhi), Emmy nominee Harriet Sansom Harris (Licorice Pizza) and two-time Emmy winner Jane Curtin (3rd Rock from the Sun), slating it for an exclusive theatrical release on August 11th.

EXCLUSIVE: Sony Pictures has acquired action/horror/comedy Hell Naw with Scott Mescudi AKA Kid Cudi attached to star and Euphoria creator Sam Levinson producing. Academy Award Nominees Keith & Kenny Lucas are writing the script, which is in early development. Mescudi will also produce along with his partners Karina Manashil and Dennis Cummings through their Mad Solar banner with Sam and Ashley Levinson producing through their Little Lamb production company. BRON and H. Wood Films are also producing.

George Yang Activision, Arcane Wonders, Genuine Entertainment, and Evolution have announced that they will be producing “Call of Duty: The Board Game,” a strategic tabletop roleplaying game inspired by the popular video game series “Call of Duty.” It is set to release into retail worldwide in 2024 and preorders will open on Kickstarter in Fall 2023. “We’re thrilled to be partnering with Activision to bring the ‘Call of Duty’ franchise to the tabletop,” says Arcane Wonders CEO and designer Bryan Pope. “As lifelong COD fans, we’ve worked hard to capture the scope, stakes, and sheer intensity of the video games in ways that COD fans and board gamers new and old will love. We’re looking forward to bringing the unforgettable fun and competitive frenzy of COD to game night for years to come.”

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Comes a time when even Neil Young is going to set foot on a stage again after the pandemic, and the recently gig-shy legend turned in his first substantial live performance in almost four years Saturday night at a benefit concert at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Young shared much of his time on stage with Stephen Stills, in a show that relied so much on material from their first run as fellow band members in the 1960s, it almost amounted to a true “Buffalo Springfield revisited” show. The two longtime cohorts’ appearances apart and in tandem would have been draw enough to fill the Greek Saturday for the “Autism Speaks Light Up the Blues 6 Concert,” a sixth edition of the recurring autism benefits hosted by Stills and his wife Kristen, this one postponed by three years from its original spring 2020 date. But there was plenty of star power besides, including sets by Willie Nelson, making a brief but impactful appearance in advance of his 90th birthday celebration next weekend at the Hollywood Bowl, and Joe Walsh, who ensured that Stills and Young did not have the guitar heroism to themselves.

Ghosted is an over-caffeinated action comedy romance that tries too hard to be too many things, starting out as a sweet budding rom-com before drastically morphing into a violent international spy-chase movie anchored by a constantly bickering couple. This is one of those Hollywood movies that rarely slows down to breathe, throwing everything at the wall and just hoping some of it sticks.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The romantic action comedy has always had a breathlessly eager-to-please, overstuffed quality. You might say it’s a what’s-not-to-like genre. We laugh! With pulses racing! And swoon at the moonstruck chemistry! In a superior rom-act-com, like “Romancing the Stone” or “Out of Sight” or “True Lies” or the new “Murder Mystery” sequel, the action is the romance — it’s how the characters connect. (One way the form extends vintage Hollywood screwball is that it tends to be about couples who so dislike each other that only by joining in death-defying scrapes can they melt the ice.) But then there are movies like “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” where the love gets sandwiched between vehicular mayhem so aggressive it’s played for “laughs,” and the too-muchness of the whole thing becomes like one of those fast-food fusion experiments. Sorry, but the movie escapism equivalent of a burger topped with a quesadilla served with cheese fries is not my idea of a good time.  

EXCLUSIVE: Amazon Studios has acquired Brian Otting’s script Never Too Old to Die as a starring vehicle for Sylvester Stallone, Deadline has learned.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer “Floyd,” an original action feature centered around a Latino veteran described as “John Wick” meets “The Big Lebowski,” is currently in development. Erik Olsen (“The Dirt,” “The Book of Eli”) is writing the script and will produce the project with Navid Mcllhargey. Story Kitchen, a media company focused on world-building and untapped intellectual property rights, is on board to produce the project with Exile Content Studio. The Los Angeles-set story will follow a former marine given the nickname Floyd by his corps. Marine vet William Brownleefe will serve as a co-producer and consultant.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Season 6 of Canadian cop show “Hudson & Rex,” one of the world’s most successful television brands, has been given the greenlight. The new season has been added to the sales slate of Beta Film at next week’s MipTV television conference and market in Cannes. The canine star of the police procedural, German Shepherd Diesel, who plays Rex, will walk the pink carpet on Sunday at TV series festival Canneseries, which runs in parallel with MipTV. He will be joined by John Reardon, who plays detective Charlie Hudson. The crime fighting duo are presenting the French premiere of the first episode of Season 4, followed by a Q&A with the talent.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor German film and TV distribution and licensing company Telepool, which is owned by Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s Westbrook, is moving into lead producing movies and series, its CEO Yoko Higuchi-Zitzmann tells Variety exclusively in her first interview since joining the company in January. Munich-based Telepool is celebrating its 60th anniversary on Wednesday, and although it has a barrel-load of experience in selling, distributing, licensing, financing and co-producing movies and series, this shift into initiating and lead producing represents a significant step for the company. It also forms part of Westbrook’s broader strategy for international expansion, which – in part – lay behind its acquisition of Telepool in December 2021.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Leading European distributor Global Screen, part of the Telepool group, will launch premium quality spy drama “Davos” at MipTV. The six-part series is inspired by real events that occurred in the early days of the secret services in Europe. Available to buyers for the first time at MipTV, “Davos” boasts a stellar cast headed by Dominique Devenport (“Sisi”), David Kross (“The Reader”), Jeanette Hain (“Never Look Away”), Max Herbrechter (“Rauhnächte”), Sunnyi Melles (“Triangle of Sadness”) and Stipe Erceg (“Vienna Blood”). World War I is ravaging Europe. By contrast, Davos, the aristocratic spa town in the Swiss Alps, seems like an oasis of peace. But behind the scenes, neutral Switzerland takes center stage in a relentless battle between the secret agents of the world powers. Young nurse Johanna Gabathuler unexpectedly gets caught between the fronts: to win back her illegitimate child, she starts to work as a spy for the German secret service – and suddenly becomes the tipping point in a risky plan that decides over war and peace.