A secretive project from JJ Abrams may just have landed its leading duo, even if we know next to nothing about The Rise Of Skywalker director’s next project.
It’s quite possible that we might just run out of internet when trying to list all of the projects that Glen Powell is attached to right now, but one of them is a secretive project that is said to be directed by JJ Abrams.
Plot details, even the film’s genre, are being kept firmly under wraps, although strangely, the confirmation that it isn’t a time travel tale is the one nugget of information we have seen floating around. Perhaps Abrams plans to slowly reveal the film’s genre by first periodically leaking all of the genres that it isn’t? Coming from the one of the minds behind the mystery-laden viral marketing campaign for 2008’s Cloverfield, we wouldn’t put it past him.
We do know that Glen Powell is the film’s lead and it looks like Jenna Ortega will be lining up opposite him in the mystery film. Listen to any podcast, read any article about younger names in Hollywood that can ‘open’ a movie these days and these two stars are likely top of the list. Everybody seems to want Powell in their film (and to his credit, the actor seems to be trying his level best to accommodate them all).
Ortega is the star of Netflix’s Wednesday, the Tim Burton show that the streamer claims is the most-watched English language television series of all time.
Read more: Revisiting the producing credits of JJ Abrams
If you want further evidence of Ortega’s star power, simply look at what happened to the plans for Scream 7 after she exited the project. With her name no longer driving the film’s fortunes, it quickly lost its director and its momentum, and that iteration of the project crumbled.
The next test of Ortega’s seemingly formidable fame will come next month with the release of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Ortega is the lead name in the film and Warner Bros will be hoping that she draws in a new generation of fans to a sequel which hasn’t enjoyed a cinematic entry since 1988.
We’ll certainly be watching this project keenly as there are lots of different subplots coming together, all of which are rather interesting. The narrative that there are no new movie stars could be destroyed should this film prove to be a monster success, given that it doesn’t look to be IP-driven.
Then there’s the return of JJ Abrams who hasn’t directed a film since 2019’s critically-mauled Star Wars saga closer, The Rise Of Skywalker. Some opinions have suggested the outright hostile response to that film landed him in ‘Hollywood Jail’ for a while, although that would seem harsh given his prior achievements and the flaming balls of muck he was having to juggle to appease both Lucasfilm and Disney.
When we do hear more about this secret project, we’ll let you know right here.
