WIRE Buzz: The Little Mermaid Live! details; Stargate streaming shutdown; more

A new horror film has just landed some big names. Even though Son might have a hard-to-Google title, the horror film from Ivan Kavanagh has landed stars with pedigrees including Halloween and The Autopsy of Jane Doe.

According to Deadline, Son will star Andi Matichak, who played Laurie Strode’s granddaughter in the recent Halloween reboot, and Emile Hirsch, who recently appeared in indie sci-fi Freaks and Kavanagh’s Never Grow Old.

Kavanagh, known for spooky fare like The Canal, will write and direct the film about a woman who escaped a cult during her youth, only for her past to come back to haunt her—and her young son. Demonic diseases, sinister cures, and plenty of terror is sure to follow. Just from this synopsis, presumably Matichak will play the lead while Hirsch is probably positioned as the antagonist.

Son plans to begin production in Jan. 2020.

Next, The Little Mermaid’s 30th anniversary live special on ABC — The Little Mermaid Live! — hopes to follow in the finsteps of Fox and NBC’s live musical offerings, but with a definite twist. A twist like showing most of the original movie during the production, for example. It sounds like fans of the underwater Disney classic won’t have to worry too much about Auli’i Cravalho (Moana), Graham Phillips, Queen Latifah, John Stamos, or Shaggy altering their beloved film too much — because they’ll be seeing most of it.

Speaking to EW, director Hamish Hamilton revealed what the production is actually going to involve, even breaking it down into a percentage makeup.“We will start the animated feature on a giant screen presented in a room,” the Super Bowl halftime director said.

“The television audience is almost at a concert where the star is the movie on a screen. Very quickly we’re going to go full frame into the movie so the audience on television are watching the animated feature as they have done a few times if they’re fans. The point we get to a song, we will transition from the animated feature back into our room where we will reveal our cast performing the songs. At the end of the song, huge applause, and we transition back into full frame animated feature. It’s about 55 percent of what we’re creating is the animated feature and then about 45 percent of what the TV audience will see are live performances.”

So...fans basically get to see The Little Mermaid, but intercut with new versions of the songs. In fact, Hamilton even went on to say they’re “not taking any liberties” with the production. It’s just a cover version, set apart from the upcoming live-action version that will interpret the story differently. The interesting part will be seeing how Hamilton and team make their stage songs fit in with the undersea adventure when the production airs on Nov. 5 at 8 PM.

Finally, at the same time that Apple TV+ launches its streaming service and Disney+ looms on the horizon, one of the humbler, genre-focused streamers is shutting down. Stargate Command, MGM's streaming service entirely situated around the giant amount of Stargate TV, movies, and special features (along with their fanbase), will shut down at year’s end.

GateWorld reports that Stargate Command’s original content (like the web series Stargate Origins) will migrate to the Stargate Command YouTube channel. That’s good news for fans unwilling to cough up an extra subscription fee to access the site’s paywalled content. On Dec. 31, the Stargate Command site and app will become defunct. Those that subscribed through 2020 will get a refund.

“It’s important to us that Stargate content reaches fans everywhere and we believe YouTube is the right place to help us achieve that goal,” the Stargate Command team said in a statement.