Screen Time: ‘Avatar 3’ Trailer, ‘Trainspotting’ TV Sequel, & ‘Barry Lyndon’ Revisited

Welcome to B.H.’s Screen Time, where every week, we’ll give you the cliff notes on what’s happening in the entertainment industry. From various stages of development chatter and our take on the newest releases, to a fun throwback worth revisiting, think of it as an insider’s digest meets movie club.

Coming Soon

The headline of this week’s edition is, without a doubt, James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire & Ash.

Did anyone ask for this? Not that I personally know of. Will it absolutely print money? You bet your sweet ass it will. That’s the Jimmy Cameron guarantee, baby.

The official synopsis is as follows:

Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri’s (Zoe Saldana) family grapples with grief after Neteyam’s (Jamie Flatters) death, encountering a new, aggressive Na’vi tribe, the Ash People, who are led by the fiery Varang (Ooona Chaplin), as the conflict on Pandora escalates and a new moral focus emerges.

This CGI-laden ATM also re-welcomes Sigourney Weaver as Jake and Neytiri’s adopted daughter Kiri, Stephen Lang as the villainous trans-special Colonel Miles Quaritch, Giovanni Ribisi as disgraced RDA exec Parker Selfridge, Cliff Curtis as reef clan chieftain Tonowari, Kate Winslet as Tonowari’s wife Ronal, and plenty more.

As for a release date, Avatar: Fire & Ash is currently scheduled for December 19th, 2025. After that, we can expect another one in 2029 and one last hurrah in 2031.

Elsewhere, Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh has recently expressed interest in recasting the iconic main roles for a new television series (read: soft reboot), revealing that he’s actually been working with original star Robert Carlyle on “something like that.”

“But I’d love to just get some brilliant young actors and recast the whole lot again, starting from [prequel] Skagboys,” Welsh told Radio Times Magazine while promoting his latest sequel novel Men In Love.

The legendary Scottish scribe went on to joke that he would be able to portray all the characters well for such an adaptation: “I think I could do a decent hard man for Begbie; the cynical outsider, like Renton; I can probably have a go at the lover, Sick Boy; and I can definitely do the hapless fool, lovable loser thing for Spud.”

“It’s because every character you write is a part of you, even the nutters. All you can really hope for is that the nutters are repressed parts of you.”

And finally, Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso season 4 has officially begun rolling cameras.

So far, the only confirmed names returning range from Jason Sudeikis, Hannah Waddingham (Rebecca Welton), and Jeremy Swift (Leslie Higgins), to Brendan Hunt (Coach Beard), Nick Mohammed (Nate Shelley), and Juno Temple (Keeley Jones).

The forthcoming instalment will reportedly focus on the AFC Richmond women’s side teased at the close of the season 3 finale (once thought to be the series finale). Watch this space for key updates.

Off-Camera Drama

Last week, we covered the whole s**tshow surrounding the Paramount and Skydance merger, Stephen Colbert and The Late Show getting caught in the political settlement crossfire, as well as how it was gumming up the works for the fellas over at South Park Studios.

Since then, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have settled on a respectable midway point: instead of the 10-year/100-new episodes deal valued at US$3 billion they were initially gunning for, they’ve inked a five-year/50-new episodes deal valued at US$1.5 billion.

Streaming rights aside, that’s effectively US$300 million per year or US$30 million per fresh episode, which – if you know anything about how Parker and Stone operate – essentially comes to roughly US$10 million per working day (the recent season 27 premiere targeting President Donald Trump was apparently produced in under three days). Insane…

Guess their lawyer and bulldog negotiator, Bryan Freedman, earned his undoubtedly hefty retainer.

They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To…

It may not have been received as Stanley Kubrick himself had anticipated back in 1975, but on its 50th anniversary, Barry Lyndon is being embraced as the cinematic masterpiece it’s always been. And rightfully so.

From Gen Z’s hype edits soundtracked by 21 Savage to all the Letterboxd buzz, the overlooked historical epic has returned to the cultural foreground in a major way. And while it’s available to stream, if a screening event is happening around your neck of the woods, I implore you to head on down.

In terms of story, Barry Lyndon follows the titular Irish rogue (Ryan O’Neal) who charms a rich widow (Marisa Berenson) and assumes her dead husband’s aristocratic position to cheat his way to the top of 18th-century British society.

An intriguing Ripley-esque affair with far more duels and 1700s swagger, sure. But the real secret sauce is in the cinematography.

Every single frame of this visual feast resembles an oil painting, given Kubrick relied solely on natural lighting and candles; the legendary director tapped NASA for its cutting-edge and exceedingly rare f/0.7 lenses, manufactured by Carl Zeiss to photograph the dark side of the moon (obviously fuel for the conspiracy crowd who believe the ’69 landing was staged).

This is quite possibly the most gorgeous film ever committed to celluloid. And a far cry from the cartoonishly vibrant cinematography we’ve become accustomed to in the Netflix era.