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WIRE Buzz: Esai Morales boards Mission: Impossible; Relic teaser; and Solar Opposites

By Josh Weiss
Esai Morales

The Mission: Impossible franchise is still unable able to shoot its next two entries, but there has been a major casting change-up for M:I 7.

According to Variety, Esai Morales has been tapped to replace Nicholas Hoult as the main villain for the upcoming spy-fi installment. Hoult reportedly had to bow out of the project due to scheduling conflicts, which doesn't surprise us in the slightest. The production shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic must be wreaking havoc on acting schedules throughout Hollywood.

Nevertheless, Morales is an excellent replacement, given his track record of playing menacing, antagonistic characters like Del on Ozark and Deathstroke on Titans.

Esai Morales Tom Cruise

The rest of the M:I 7's cast remains the same: Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, and Shea Whigham.

Mission: Impossible 7 halted production in Venice (the first leg of what was going to be a lengthy European shoot) back in February. The project was going to film back-to-back with M:I 8, but the pandemic delay has resulted in a pair of new release dates for both movies, which are being written and directed by the returning Christopher McQuarrie.


Take out a spine-tingling mortgage with the teaser trailer for IFC Midnight's Relic.

Written and directed by Natalie Erika James in her feature debut, the horror film sets out to put its own twist on the haunted house subgenre. When an eldery mother Edna (Robyn Nevin) goes missing, her daughter, Kay (Emily Mortimer), and granddaughter, Sam (Bella Heathcote), head to the family's decrepit country home, which is full of clues that grandma was suffering from dementia. Edna mysteriously reappears, but her odd behavior leads Sam and Kay to suspect that there may be a supernatural presence in the house.

Watch the trailer below:

Relic premiered at Sundance last year and currently holds a 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Writing for Variety, reviewer Jessica Kiang compared the movie to Hereditary and The Babadook, while also praising James' masterful debut.

"This talented debut writer-director has unusual confidence in her storytelling and beds its more lurid excesses so deeply in the cleanly drawn psychologies of her three actors that it feels like it grows out of them organically, like a twisted tree," she wrote, later adding, "Not everyone will appreciate the ambiguity of a climax that can be read as either an uplifting act of pure and selfless love or a depressing capitulation to the malign forces of inevitable decline, but either way, 'art-house horror' has its 2020 tidemark set high."

Co-written by Christian White, Relic arrives in select theaters and on digital/VOD Friday, July 10.


From page-to-screen, Solar Opposites is just insane (in a good way!). In a new featurette from Hulu, the cast and crew behind the animated sci-fi sitcom discuss what makes their show different from any other alien-related project in history. As creators Justin Roiland and Mike McMahan relayed to SYFY WIRE, they never wanted the main characters to be hunted by the government.

"Because we are following our stupidest instincts, we're letting them just do the funny thing instead of the logical thing," says McMahan in the video below.

The featurette doesn't make any mention of the tiny people trapped inside the Wall of Jesse and Yumyulack's room, but we know they're always hovering in the background of the main action. Roiland and McMahan told us that they have big plans for the mini-society in future seasons.

Season 1 of Solar Opposites is now streaming on Hulu. A second season is already in the works and if the series gets renewed, the creators have plans for at least two more seasons.