©Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
Six years after J. J. Abrams directed Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Warner Bros. will release his next film, The Great Beyond, on November 13 of this year. As is typical of Abrams’s work, few details about the film are known other than the cast list, which includes Glen Powell, Jenna Ortega, Emma Mackey, Sophie Okonedo, Merritt Wever and Samuel L. Jackson. The Great Beyond will be released on iMAX, according to Warner Bros.
News of the Abrams film is coming as a relief to worried executives. In 2019, Abrams’s Bad Robot production company had signed an exclusive five-year contract to develop new materials for the studio but nothing emerged in the wake of the COVID pandemic. These projects included Justice League Dark and The Overlook, the latter being a proposed prequel to Stephen King’s The Shining, Though these films never came to fruition, Warner Bros. inked a second two-year deal with Bad Robot in 2024.
It is also unclear what Abrams’s plans will be after The Great Beyond, but he is also currently working on two other projects: directing a movie with Dwayne Johnson and producing another one starring Brie Larson.
Over the years, J. J. Abrams’s films have grossed more than $4 billion worldwide, making him the tenth highest-grossing director of all time. Some of his other works he produced and/or directed include Regarding Henry (1991), Forever Young (1992), Armageddon (1998), Cloverfield (2008), Star Trek (2009), Super 8 (2011) and the two Star Wars sequels: The Force Awakens (2015) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019).
The Great Beyond will be facing a lot of competition this fall with the release of several potential moneymakers that month. Paramount will be debuting Ti West’s Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol starring Johnny Depp, and Warner Bros. will also release Godzilla Minus Zero as well as an animation of The Cat and the Hat. Additionally, Lionsgate will be debuting The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping on November 20.
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