If you’ve watched a classic, landmark sci-fi movie and you were blown away by the quality and realism of its effects, then there’s a good chance Douglas Trumbull’s name is in the credits. The VFX pioneer, who passed away on February 8th, 2022, has worked on key films in the sci-fi canon. Even a short version of his resume would have to include 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner and Silent Running. To have worked on one of those in your lifetime would have been a big deal, but to have contributed to all of them speaks to just how much work Trumbull did to push the artform forward.

Trumbull was the son of an artist and engineer, Donald Trumbull, who worked on VFX for The Wizard of Oz. Douglas, a talented painter and artist in his own right, got a job at Graphic Films, and worked on a short film about space travel for the 1964 World’s Fair. The clip piqued the interest of Stanley Kubrick, then starting work on the film that would eventually become 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick began working with Graphic Films, and by extension Trumbull, but when he relocated production to London, stopped speaking to his would-be partners. Trumbull, however, was so excited by the idea of the film that he reached out to Kubrick personally. He was then hired and brought over to London to work on the title.

Trumbull’s job on 2001 was as one of several visual effects heads on the project, the others being Con Petersen, Wally Veevers and Tom Howard. (Kubrick himself was also credited, and it would be his name and his name alone on the Academy Award for best Special Visual Effects the film won in 1969.) His first task was to design the “computer” graphics shown on the displays that littered Kubrick’s future world. But his job quickly grew, and Trumbull would eventually be responsible for the use of slit-scan photography that created the film’s climactic Star Gate sequence. You can watch Trumbull explain this in some depth during this long talk about his life and career from the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.

Having made a name for himself, he launched his own VFX company and produced the effects for Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain. That would garner him enough credit at Universal Pictures to earn him the right to direct an experimental, super low-budget film of his own. (The studio was, at the time, experimenting to see if low-budget films would garner a following through word of mouth, aping the success of Easy Rider a few years previously.) This project would become Silent Running, an often-overlooked classic of the genre.

In many ways, Silent Running is a humane rebuttal to 2001, with Trumbull’s warmth acting as a reaction to Kubrick’s emotionlessness. The film depicts a dystopian future in which the last of Earth’s plant life is carried on the back of enormous geodesic arks into space. But when the crews of these arks are told to detach and detonate the domes, one botanist will risk everything to save the plants he so cares for. Despite the low budget, the visuals are top notch, and the central performance from Bruce Dern is one for the ages. Of course, the film’s third-act twist – if it can be called that – does rely on the stupidest plot moment in any film ever. But it’s the one flaw in an otherwise great movie that, due to its status as a financial flop, means it’s often ignored as b-movie fodder.

Trumbull’s interest in pushing the boundaries of filmmaking technology meant that he devoted much of the ‘70s to developing new technologies. That included Showscan, which ran 70mm film at 60 fps, which Trumbull said offered a new level of immersion and engagement. Sadly, the cost and complexity of such a technology proved a key stumbling block to it being picked up by mainstream cinemas. Years before Peter Jackson and Ang Lee experimented with high frame rates, Douglas Trumbull was making it work in the analog world

Magicam, meanwhile, was Trumbull’s project to create virtual sets decades before we could use computer-generated keying, simply by blue-screening actors in front of a live miniature, shot at the same time with motorized cameras. The technique would have offered the ability to shoot huge, effects-heavy spectacles on a tiny budget and in a very small studio. The technology was expected to be the lynchpin of Harlan Ellison’s infamous TV series The Starlost and its failure then contributed to its demise. But Magicam would, not long after, be used in a variety of Trumbull productions including Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

His energies elsewhere, Trumbull was unable to accept offers to produce the effects for Star Wars, but returned to the industry for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It would be on this film that he would be nominated for his first Academy Award, and helped pioneer work to shoot effects sequences on 70mm film. This was a way of preserving detail when the footage was then integrated into sequences shot on 35mm, which is why the alien spaceship has so much heft and weight.

As work was progressing on Close Encounters, Paramount offered to bankroll his studio and asked him to produce the effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Trumbull initially turned down the offer, causing much consternation from Paramount Pictures. But after the film’s first effects house, Robert Abel, was deemed to have produced substandard work, Trumbull was more-or-less begged to come on and finish the film ahead of its planned release date.

In the following clip, from 2016, reveals the painstaking process behind creating the Enterprise drydock sequence from The Motion Picture. He said that, in many ways, the sequence – which is adored by fans and detested by casual viewers – was inspired by work done for 2001. One thing that sticks out is that he says that he wanted fans to “buy into the beauty of space” and “buy into the beauty of the Enterprise,” to fall in “love” with the revised craft. And, it works.

Before his passing, Trumbull was consulting with the team overseeing the 4K remaster of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Producer David C. Fein, who is leading the project, said that “Doug created the future,” and that he “inspired going beyond limitations,” adding that Trumbull’s “influence will be with us forever.” Similarly, Mike Matessino added that Trumbull’s work was “truly timeless,” which “continues to inspire awe and to spark the imagination,” both now and in the future.

Daren R. Dochterman, who spent a lot of time working with Trumbull, said that he was scared to meet him the first time they met. “The fact that he turned out not only to be a sweet, understanding man and a very kind teacher not only surprised me but filled me with such happiness,” he added. “Over the years since then I’ve gotten to know him a little better and he had gotten to know some of my work, and he was the most encouraging voice in my life.”

Trumbull’s work on Close Encounters would massively inform the visual effects work for Blade Runner. That film would earn him his third Academy Award nomination, a well-deserved effort for simply giving Ridley Scott’s world the weight and heft that it required. Here, like in so many other of his films, Trumbull’s effects offer a level of realism that means it’s easy to suspend your disbelief when you see the fantastic presented to you.

In fact, that’s the second time I’ve used the phrase “heft and weight” in this piece, isn’t it – because that is something Trumbull was always able to get right. His worlds, no matter how fantastic, always felt grounded, and that’s why his work holds up so well compared to other films both of the era, and even those that followed it. Trumbull knew how to make the fantastical feel real, a commodity that is worth more than its weight in Hollywood.

Unfortunately, Trumbull would leave production on Blade Runner before it was completed to helm his second film, Brainstorm. That was designed as a showcase for Showscan, embracing higher frame rates and using those big 70mm cameras. Unfortunately, studio pressure, the tragic death of one of the film’s stars and cold feet from exhibitors killed Trumbull’s dream. The film didn’t get a wide release and ultimately flopped, leaving Trumbull to move back east to work on his technology passions away from Hollywood. He would also, briefly, be at IMAX in the early ‘90s.

In later years, Trumbull consulted on visual effects for Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life, and worked on his Magi cinematic process. Magi, unlike other HFR projects, runs at 120 frames per second, and the reports, like this RogerEbert.com story from 2014, suggest it lacked the TV-esque effects that so dogged the Hobbit movies. By 2017, Trumbull was hoping to build a pod that could be used to tour Magi-produced films and bring the gospel of higher frame rates to the world.

On February 8th, Amy Trumbull posted to Facebook that her father passed away after a two year battle with cancer, a brain tumor and a stroke. “He was an absolute genius and a wizard and his contributions to the film and special effects industry will live on for decades and beyond.” The outpouring of love from both people inside and outside Hollywood was instantaneous.

Daren R. Dochterman said it best, that Douglas Trumbull was “constantly a force trying to pull the movie business into the future with brand new ways of telling stories.” And while “the [Hollywood] machine chewed him up and spit him out … Doug’s tenacity at trying to create new technologies and new methods for creating images and experiences was something that he tried to provide all his life.”

Douglas Trumbull, the visual effects mastermind behind Blade Runner, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey and numerous others, died on Monday at age 79. His daughter Amy Trumbull announced the news on Facebook, writing that her father’s death followed a “two-year battle” with cancer, a brain tumor and stroke.

Trumbull was born on April 8, 1942 in Los Angeles, the son of a mechanical engineer and artist. His father worked on the special effects for films including The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars: A New Hope. The younger Trumbull worked as an illustrator and airbrush artist in Hollywood for many years. His career really took off after he cold-called Stanley Kubrick, a conversation which led to a job working on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

One of his most significant contributions to 2001 was creating the film’s Star Gate, a ground-breaking scene where astronaut Dave Bowman hurtles through an illuminated tunnel transcending space and time. In order to meet Kubrick’s high aesthetic standards for the shot, Trumbull essentially designed a way to turn the film camera inside-out. Trumbull’s ad hoc technique “was completely breaking the concept of what a camera is supposed to do,” he said during a lecture at TIFF.

Trumbull earned visual effects Oscar nominations for his work on Close Encounters, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner. He also received the President's Award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 1996.

Later in his career, Trumbull voiced distaste over the impact of computers on visual effects, decrying the cheapening and flattening impact of the new era of CGI. “Today, the motion picture visual effects industry has almost entirely given way to computer graphics. We’re able to do things that were absolutely inconceivable in the old days like water effects, fire, explosions, smoke. But, almost everything in the visual effects industry today is created on computers. There’s a certain commoditization that has resulted that I’m not comfortable with myself. I like miniatures and physical effects and what I call organic effects,” said Trumbull in a 2018 interview for The Hollywood Reporter.

He spent the last years of his life working on a new super-immersive film format he dubbed MAGI, which he believed would improve the experience of watching a film in theaters. But Trumbull struggled to draw the interest of today’s film industry. “What interests me is being able to create profound personal experiences for audiences,” Trumbull toldMIT Technology Review in 2016. “Whatever it is, I want you to feel like what’s happening on the screen is actually happening in real-time, to you, in this theater.”

This year’s Academy Awards nominations have been revealed, and Apple TV+ execs will surely be pleased. The service’s films received six Oscar nods overall, up from two last year. Most significantly, Apple has broken through in the Best Picture category. CODA is the first Apple Original movie to receive a nomination for the top prize.

It’s the first film with a principally deaf cast to be nominated for Best Picture. It’s been 35 years since a deaf performer was nominated, and Troy Kotsur is now the first male actor to ever receive a nod, as he’s up for Best Supporting Actor.

Writer and director Sian Heder is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay — CODA is a remake of a French film called La Famille Bélier. Apple paid a Sundance record of $25 million to acquire the rights to the film, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Drama and the Audience Award at last year’s festival.

The other Apple movie that received nominations this year was Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. It earned nods for Best Actor for Denzel Washington, Best Cinematography and Best Production Design.

Elsewhere, Netflix continued the run of awards success it has had over the last few years with a whopping 35 nominations across the board. Star-studded climate change satire Don’t Look Up and Western The Power of the Dog are both nominated for Best Picture. The latter leads the pack overall with 12 nominations. Jane Campion, who received writing and directing nods, is the first woman to land two Best Director nominations. Other nominated Netflix films include The Lost Daughter, The Hand of God, Tick, Tick… Boom and the fantastic The Mitchells vs. The Machines.

Elsewhere, Dune has 10 nominations and Best Picture frontrunner Belfast received seven. Amazon’s Being the Ricardos landed three acting nods, while No Time To Die, which marks Daniel Craig's final outing as James Bond, was nominated for Original Song, Sound and Visual Effects. Meanwhile, Japanese drama Drive My Car broke through in the Best Picture and directing races for four nominations in total.

The 94th Academy Awards ceremony will take place on March 27th.

The co-producer of The Matrix Resurrections, in a new lawsuit, is blaming the film’s lackluster box office numbers on a same-day streaming release. According to The Wall Street Journal, Village Roadshow Entertainment Group filed a lawsuit today against Warner Bros., the owner of streaming platform HBO Max. The suit alleges that both the same-day release of The Matrix Resurrections and pushing up the film’s release date was a breach of contract. The suit also claims that moving the movie’s release date from 2022 to 2021 was a bid by Warner Bros. to drive up subscriptions to HBO Max.

Last year’s decision by Warner Bros. to release an entire slate of new films concurrently on HBO Max and in theaters raised many eyebrows. In addition to The Matrix, the 16 other films in Warner Bros’ simultaneous release strategy included Dune, Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat, King Arthur, and others. The experiment likely doomed their box office fates, as The Wrapnoted. Only two of the 17 films made more than $100 million in domestic box office sales.

The Matrix Resurrections, which was released in December, normally a peak time for box office earnings, has grossed over $37.2 million in domestic box office sales, according to BoxOfficeMojo. This is a noticeable decline compared to a number of other blockbusters with theater-only releases from last winter, such as Spider-Man:No Way Home, which has made more than $748 million in the domestic box office and the James Bond film No Time To Die, which has earned more than $160 million in the domestic box office.

Village Roadshow also alleges that Warner Bros. is attempting to keep the company out of future movie and TV deals. “WB has also been devising various schemes to deprive Village Roadshow of its continuing rights to co-own and co-invest in the derivative works from the films it co-owns,” the suit alleged.

The Matrix lawsuit is the latest conflict between Hollywood studios and the media companies that own the streaming platforms. Black Widow actress Scarlett Johansson last year sued Disney over the film’s simultaneous release strategy, which she claimed harmed its box office prospects and her own earnings. Johansson subsequently received an undisclosed settlement from Disney last fall.

Hulu has dropped the first trailer for The Dropout, a miniseries about the failed blood-testing startup Theranos. Amanda Seyfried stars as its embattled former CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. The two-and-a-half-minute preview shows Holmes dropping out of Stanford to found Theranos. It includes snippets of the company's high points (it raised more than $700 million in investments) and hints at its very public demise, as well as Holmes developing her infamously deep voice.

The trailer is full of familiar faces, including Naveen Andrews (Lost) as Sunny Balwani, the former president and chief operating officer of Theranos and Holmes' ex-boyfriend. Stephen Fry, William H. Macy, Laurie Metcalf and Sam Waterston also appear.

Theranos claimed to offer rapid blood tests that required only a finger prick. However, multiple reports claimed the tests weren't effective. The SEC charged Holmes and Theranos with fraud in March 2018 and the company collapsed later that year.

The Dropout will premiere two months after Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors. She faces up to 20 years in prison and will be sentenced in September. With Holmes' trial fresh in the memory, some folks might be curious to learn more about the story behind her and Theranos. The trailer, which is edited in the style of a thriller, might draw some more attention to the show too.

The first three episodes of The Dropout will hit Hulu on March 3rd. Other installments will arrive on a weekly basis. Meanwhile, Adam McKay and Jennifer Lawrence are working on a movie about Holmes and Theranos for Apple.

Just like it did last year, Netflix will release at least one movie a week in 2022. There are currently more than 70 films on the docket for this year, and the company offered a peek at some of them in a teaser.

The three-minute sizzle reel is packed with footage from upcoming films, including a first glimpse at Knives Out 2, the sequel to Rian Johnson's terrific 2019 comedy-mystery movie. There are looks at Enola Holmes 2, Jason Momoa as a half-man/half-beast in fantasy flick Slumberland and a stop-motion take on Pinocchio from Guillermo del Toro. You can also get your first peek at The Gray Man, a big-budget thriller from Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo.

Expect to see projects from filmmakers including Judd Apatow, Noah Baumbach, Niki Caro, Sally El Hosaini, Louis Leterrier, Richard Linklater and Tyler Perry, as well as Dev Patel's directorial debut. Among the other films in Netflix's pipeline are sci-fi movies starring Halle Berry (The Mothership) and Adam Sandler (Spaceman) and a new version of Matilda. There is, as always, a broad range of offerings on this year's slate, including action, comedy, drama, horror and family movies. So, there should be something for everyone as Netflix seeks to make sure subscribers are getting their money's worth from its increasingly expensive plans.

Hazelight Studios and Sonic the Hedgehog production company dj2 Entertainment are aiming to turn It Takes Two into a movie or TV show. Pat Casey and Josh Miller, who wrote both Sonic movies, are onboard to adapt the co-op game for the big or small screen. Although no studio or network has snapped up the project just yet, Variety reports that a bidding war is underway.

“Creating the world and story in It Takes Two was so much fun for me and the team,” Hazelight founder and creative director Josef Fares said in a statement. “Since it has a strong narrative with many crazy characters and just as crazy co-op action moments, the potential is huge for a great adaption to film or television.”

At the 2021 Game Awards, It Takes Two won three honors, including the game of the year gong. EA published it last March and more than three million copies were sold by October. Along with It Takes Two and the Sonic movies, dj2 is working on a Tomb Raider anime for Netflix. It's also developing a Disco Elysium series and a Sleeping Dogs movie.

Although It Takes Two received widespread plaudits for its platforming and asynchronous split-screen gameplay, several critics took issue with the "stay together for the kids" story and an "awful" character called The Book of Love. With some finding the plot to be the weakest aspect of the game, it'll be interesting to see how that translates to a movie or TV show.

Warner Bros. and New Line are creating a sequel to the Mortal Kombat film with Moon Knight writer Jeremy Slater onboard, Deadline has reported. It will follow up the original R-rated film that did decent box office numbers ($83 million world wide) considering the pandemic, and was HBO Max's most successful film to date when it launched last April. 

On top of creating Moon Knight (with Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke), Slater is working on Stephen King's The Tommyknockers adaptation for Universal and an upcoming Netflix movie directed by Travis Knight. He also developed The Umbrella Academy for Netflix. 

The original film was as gory as you'd expect considering the violence of the game, but screenwriter Greg Russo also tried to inject some humor. It's not known if Mortal Kombat director Simon McQuoid will be involved again, but last year he said a sequel could happen "if the fans want another one." 

The original did seem designed to set up another sequel, though, with one one critic describing it as "the homework you have to do before the fun." It received a middling 54 percent Rotten Tomato critic rating, but was appreciated more by audiences that gave it an 86 percent score. 

Sony Pictures Classics has picked up the rights to an animated movie entitled A Winter’s Journey, which will be made in part using the PlayStation game-creation tool Dreams. According to Deadline, the film will blend live actors with CG and hand-painted animation and is an adaptation of Franz Schubert's set of 24 songs for voice and piano called Winterreise. It tells the story of a lovelorn poet who embarks on a dangerous journey that takes him across mountains and snow in 1812 Bavaria. 

Dreams was originally created by Media Molecule, the studio behind LittleBigPlanet, for the PS4. The studio pitched it as a way to create "art, movies and video games" from the start, and we once described it as "an engine, learning suite and distribution platform rolled into one." Since then, people have been using it to create their own games, realistic renders of nature, immersive experiences of their favorite movies, among other things. A Winter’s Journey, however, will reportedly be the first time Dreams will be used on a feature film.

The movie has yet to get a release date, but shooting is expected to start in June in Wrocław, Poland, with actors that include John Malkovich and Jason Isaacs. It'll likely take some time before it's ready to premiere. As for Dreams itself, it's currently on sale in the US PlayStation Store for $10, and it includes a rotating list of the most creative games made using the tool.

After a hiatus of more than a decade, the world’s favorite fictitious British inventor (or possibly second after Q from James Bond) and his lovable canine sidekick are making a comeback. Today as part of its ongoing partnership with Aardman Animations Netflix announced the arrival of a new Wallace & Gromit movie and the long-awaited sequel to Chicken Run.

Due out sometime in 2023, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget picks up after Ginger and Rocky’s daring escape with the hatching of the couple’s new chick Molly at their new island sanctuary home. And while Julia Sawalha and Mel Gibson won’t be reprising their roles as the leading chickens, Dawn of the Nugget’s cast will still feature some big-name stars including Thandie Newton (Ginger), Zachary Levi (Rocky) and Bella Ramsey (Molly), the latter of whom is also set to play Ellie in HBO’s upcoming live-action TV adaptation of The Last of Us.

As for the still-untitled Wallace & Gromit movie, original series creator Nick Park will be returning as director featuring a story written by Park and Mark Burton (Madagascar, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Shaun of the Sheep Movie). Slated to arrive almost two decades after The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Wallace and Gromit’s second feature-length film revolves around Wallace’s latest invention: a “smart gnome” that has developed a mind of its own. Queue the hijinx.

Notably, unlike Dawn of the Nugget which will be a worldwide exclusive on Netflix when it starts streaming sometime next year, the new Wallace & Gromit movie will debut first on the BBC in the UK before becoming available on Netflix in all other regions sometime in 2024.

With Aardman and Netlix’s stop-motion musical Robin Robin having been recently shortlisted for the Oscar’s in the animated short film category, it’s nice to see even more claymation movies get the green light–especially after the bomb that was 2018’s Early Man. That said, with the original Chicken Run and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit having already claimed the number one and two spots as the highest-grossing stop-motion animated films of all time, Aardman Studios might have a hard time competing for attention in a time when traditional computer-animated films have dominated the box office.