Judas
According to a new rumor reported on the reddit pages by user Esteban P005, while he continues to plan the launch of GTA V Enhanced Edition for next-gen consoles and, presumably, to proceed with the development of GTA VI, Rockstar would also be struggling with Judas, the sequel to Max Payne's action-adventure series.The rumors come from Twitter user Matheusvictorbr, self-styled insider who claims to be a big fan of Rockstar Games products. Below, we report by points the characteristics of the Judas project, described as a new IP that will, however, act in all respects as a sequel to Max Payne 3:
Pre-production started in 2017, production full in 2020; The announcement will come after the launch of GTA VI, probably in 2024 with launch in 2026; Platforms: PS5 and Xbox Series X | S in 4K / 60fps. There will be no PS4 and Xbox One versions; It is being developed at the same time as GTA VI, but the studios that are working on it will stop work to focus on GTA VI which will be released in 2023; The project is in good condition and is very ambitious; It is mainly developed by Rockstar Toronto along with other studios, Remedy Entertainment (authors of the first two chapters of the series) is not involved; Dan Houser wrote the story and is involved in the project, and will make his official return to Rockstar in the future; It will be a real sequel. What has made more than one reddit user turn up their noses is the alleged involvement in the project by Dan Houser, who announced his retirement from Rockstar Games in February last year. In short, this detail would suggest that it is a fake, but we'll see if the authors of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption have any surprises in store for Max Payne fans as well.
Inside the Authentic Sets of Judas and the Black Messiah
When production designer Sam Lisenco found out that Judas and the Black Messiah had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, he happened to be on the phone with director Shaka King.
“The two of us just started screaming,” Lisenco tells AD. “And I was like, ‘All right, you have phone calls to make,’ and hung up on him. Crazy morning. I’m really happy—it’s a story that needed to be told.”
That story is the one of Fred Hampton (played by Daniel Kaluuya), chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in late 1960s Chicago, and William O’Neal (played by Lakeith Stanfield), an FBI informant who infiltrated the party and betrayed Hampton, who was assassinated in 1969. The film covers the last two years of Hampton’s life as O’Neal becomes an increasingly important figure in his inner circle.
“The depictions of counterculture stuff in movies are always so tepid and cartoonish. There was an opportunity here to build a methodology of implied history in the dressing that we hadn’t really seen before in any movie. We had room to explore,” says Lisenco.
Photo: Glen Wilson“The script came across my desk, and I had loosely known the elevator-pitch version of this story historically, but it’s not something they teach in school,” says Lisenco. “I was floored. I could imagine it being this ’90s Warner Brothers movie—like the kind of movies they don’t really make anymore—if there was the right level of sensitivity to it.”
The plans for the Black Panther Party headquarters.
Courtesy of Sam LisencoThe final product.
Photo: Glen WilsonHampton’s fiancée, Deborah Johnson, now known as Akua Njeri, served as an adviser on the film and visited the sets. While the Black Panther headquarters was “more of an amalgam” of references from various offices of the period from around the country, what Lisenco and set decorator Rebecca Brown created ultimately received her blessing.
The film was shot mostly on location in Cleveland, which offered a very specific, slightly grimy midcentury look. “What was really exciting and enticing is that parts of Cleveland that are still extant are more akin to ’60s metropoles like Chicago than Chicago probably is currently,” Lisenco says. “We were finding these vernacular elements of urban development that had withstood the test of time, like old parking meters and sodium-vapor streetlights.”
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“What I was really hoping for was that we could craft an aesthetic language that felt real enough to imply that we shot the movie in 1969, as opposed to, we made a movie that takes place in 1969,” says Lisenco.
Courtesy of Warner Bros. PicturesOne issue, though, was finding a concentrated enough pocket of buildings. Since so much has been demolished in Cleveland, the crew worked overtime to locate an area that could be just faked enough to feel like late 1960s Chicago. “We got pretty lucky with that one block where the Black Panther headquarters is,” he says. “Architecturally, it’s pretty similar. It’s not identical to the real Chicago office, but there was a bank next door with that liquor store on the first floor.”
See the video.Another integral element was trash on the ground, which Lisenco notes isn’t often seen in period movies. “But every single major city in the United States was having trouble with their fiscal budgets at the time, and sanitation was getting caught everywhere,” he says. “All the reference photos always have garbage everywhere. We were really careful to be accurate in that regard.”
Lisenco calls Njeri's visit to the apartment set “very emotional.”
Courtesy of Warner Bros. PicturesHampton’s apartment, built entirely on a stage, was one of the most challenging sets to navigate: “It’s a critical scene in the film, and we had a responsibility, obviously, to portray history as accurately as possible.” Other than the living room front windows, it is an exact “stem-to-stern re-creation” of what the apartment looked like, based on evidence photos introduced at Hampton’s trial. In fact, all the bullet holes in the walls are generally where the bullets were actually fired.
Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt was nominated for an Oscar for his work on the film. “For me, that’s a huge personal compliment,” says Lisenco. “It’s like, okay, the world is functional enough that people who watched it were thinking about how beautiful the shots were and not thinking about the world at all.”
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures“It was hours and hours of—literally with a loop—looking at the negatives to figure out what that lamp is,” Lisenco says. “That was critical to nail, because not only did it dictate a language of aesthetics that trickled down into the rest of the movie, but also, it was already action-packed and cinematic. So there was no need to deviate aesthetically from what it actually looked like.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest