This week, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Wes Anderson (Asteroid City) participated for the first time in the Annecy Animation Festival. During the event, the director and screenwriter talked a little about his career and took a little time to tease his next project. Even though it’s still a bit early to reveal a lot of details of The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson confirmed that the movie finished filming — but it is yet to get a release date.
The director also confirmed that, just like in his previous films, the cast of The Phoenician Scheme is pretty large. This time, however, Anderson suggested that we might see even more familiar faces on this project — which is saying something, considering that the director’s previous movies include star-studded casts with sometimes over fifteen to twenty A-list names attached to it. He stated:
“This film I just finished making in Germany, there must be a hundred people on the film who have worked with me on other films. It could be more who come back — and lots of cast members.”
It’s also important to notice that Anderson didn’t refer to The Phoenician Scheme by its title, which might suggest that this is only a working title or that the director might be considering changing the title that he’s currently using. It’s not uncommon for this to happen, and we’ve recently seen Marvel Studios play around with the titles of its upcoming movies quite a bit.
Who Is In The Cast of ‘The Phoenician Scheme?’
For now, all we know from Anderson‘s new movie is that the cast already includes Benicio Del Toro (Reptile), Michael Cera (Barbie), Riz Ahmed (The Sound of Metal), Bill Murray (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania), Tom Hanks (A Man Called Otto), Scarlett Johansson (Fly Me To the Moon), Benedict Cumberbatch (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), Charlotte Gainsbourg (The Pale Blue Eye), Willem Dafoe (Kinds of Kindness), Rupert Friend (The American Society of Magical Negroes) and Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad). Additional cast members are yet to be announced by the filmmaker.
Once again, Anderson co-wrote the script with Roman Coppola (The French Dispatch), and even though we don’t know the story, it’s pretty safe to assume that The Phoenician Scheme will have all the Wes Anderson elements that we’ve come to know and love: quick-witted dialogue, an obsession with symmetry and vibrant colors, characters with unique personalities that exist in a microcosmos and stories within stories.
Stick with Collider to find out more news about The Phoenician Scheme — or whichever title it gets — as soon as they are announced.
via Collider