Sci Fi Movies This Week: Premiere for They Will Kill You, a New Lord of the Rings Movie is in the Works, and More

Sci Fi Movies This Week: Weekly column tracking what is coming in the current week in the way of sci fi, fantasy, and horror releases as well as news and updates on genre films, streaming and theatrical.

Premiering This Week:

This week brings the horror-action film They Will Kill You, hitting theaters in wide release. Also across the major cinemas, the indie supernatural dramedy Forbidden Fruits will be getting some exposure, along with the spooky romance The Serpent’s Skin. Hitting streaming is the horror romp Bambi: The Reckoning, which arrives on Peacock on Friday, and The Mortuary Assistant, which will have its premiere on Shudder. You can see highlights for the week below, and you can watch trailers and get info for all the current upcoming sci fi and fantasy films at this link.

They Will Kill You (In Theaters, Mar 27): The film unleashes a blood-soaked, high-octane horror-action-comedy in which a young woman must survive the night at the Virgil, a demonic cult’s mysterious and twisted death-trap of a lair, before becoming their next offering in a uniquely brazen, big screen battle of epic kills and wickedly dark humor.

Directed by: Kirill Sokolov

Starring: Zazie Beetz, Myha’La, Paterson Joseph, Tom Felton, Heather Graham, Patricia Arquette

Forbidden Fruits (In Theaters, Mar 27): Free Eden employee Apple secretly runs a witchy femme cult in the basement of the mall store after hours – with fellow fruits Cherry and Fig. But when new hire Pumpkin challenges their performative sisterhood, the women are forced to face their own poisons or succumb to a bloody fate.

Directed by: Meredith Alloway

Starring: Emma Chamberlain, Mary Anne Waterhouse, Victoria Pedretti, Gabrielle Union, Alexandra Shipp

The Serpent’s Skin (In Theaters-Limited, Mar 27): A supernatural romance that follows Anna after she escapes from her small, transphobic town, and the romantic relationship she develops with another young woman, a goth tattoo artist named Gen. After unwittingly unleashing a demon that begins feeding on their friends, the pair need to face their insecurities in order to defeat evil.

Directed by: Alice Maio Mackay

Starring: Alexandra McVicker, Scott Major, Charlotte Chimes

Sci Fi Movie News of Note

A new Lord of the Rings movie is in the works, but it is not coming from a creative talent you might expect. It will be produced by Warner Bros. Studios and will be headed up by late-night comedian Stephen Colbert and his son. To be titled The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past, it will be linked to Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy–and he will assist–and it will cover chapters that were not included in those films. In the video announcement for the film, Colbert had this to say:

You know what the books mean to me, and what [Jackson’s] films mean to me. But the thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in [The Fellowship of the Ring] that y’all never developed into the first movie back in the day. It’s basically the chapter ‘Three Is Company’ [Chapter III] through ‘Fog on the Barrow-Downs’ [Chapter VIII]. And I thought, ‘Oh, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story. Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies that you guys had already made?

Following is the official logline for the movie:

Fourteen years after the passing of Frodo — Sam, Merry and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Elanor, has discovered a long-buried secret and is determined to uncover why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began.

Colbert has long been a Lord of the Rings fan, and he previously starred in, wrote, and directed the short film Darrylgorn set in Middle Earth and which also starred Jackson, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, and Elijah Wood. Production has not officially begun on the new film yet, but I expect to see a listing in Production Weekly soon.

You can see the Box Office results for sci fi and fantasy films from this previous weekend at this link.

Recent Trailers

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