First blurb from from the VF article:

VANITY FAIR – James Gray’s tense family drama, which will premiere May 16, started out as a sequel to Armageddon Time, but is now “a whole new movie.”
If you ever happen to find yourself on a Zoom call with James Gray, be prepared to get a virtual tour of his herb and vegetable garden, his fruit trees (lemon and fig), and his guest house, where he’s set up a projector for movie-watching complete with a vintage popcorn maker. The writer-director is generous with his time and loquacious with his words, and admits that sometimes his openness in interviews has gotten him in a little bit of trouble.

For example, a few years back he said in an interview that he wanted to make “the most realistic depiction of space travel that’s been put in a movie.” But along the way to making Ad Astra (starring Brad Pitt), his goals changed and the film morphed into something else, more of a space fable, if you will. When audiences finally saw it in 2019, some were up in arms that it wasn’t what he had originally promised.

The same thing could happen now. After his 2022 movie Armageddon Time came out, Gray started talking about how he wanted to do a sequel to the family drama that was based on his own childhood. It would star the same actors as his father (Jeremy Strong) and mother (Anne Hathaway) and focus on when his mother discovered she was sick.

But, again, as it goes with moviemaking, Gray’s plans changed. As he began to write the script, he decided he’d already done the deeply autobiographical film with Armageddon Time, which was set in the early 1980s in Queens, and follows a young boy grappling prejudice. That movie was so personal—he even filmed at his elementary school and other locations from his childhood—that Gray previously told me: “If someone says, ‘I hated that movie,’ it means they hate part of me.”

For his next movie, he decided to once again take inspiration from events in his own life, but this time he created an original story. “It was like something coalesced in me to try and reveal this family later in a different mode, maybe slightly more operatic, slightly more rooted in melodrama, Hitchcockian, suspense, drama—a little more heightened,” Gray tells Vanity Fair in an exclusive interview ahead of the release of Paper Tiger, which will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 16.

When Strong and Hathaway had to leave the follow-up because of scheduling conflicts with other films, Gray cast Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller in their stead. “They fit a slightly more operatic idea of the movie and were able to allow me to think about it, not as a continuation of Armageddon Time, but as a whole new movie,” he says. “And that was actually very liberating.”

Paper Tiger is a tense family drama set in the late ’80s in New York, following two brothers who are chasing the American dream. But when they find themselves in a dangerous world of corruption and violence after becoming involved with some threatening Russian characters, their bond begins to fall apart. It may not have been the movie Gray had in mind, but it was the movie he was destined to make. He says, “One of the things I’ve learned is that there are movie gods, and you can’t always dictate what they’re telling you and you can’t always control the subject.”

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DEADLINE – EXCLUSIVE: After taking his time in figuring out what his next original feature would be, Ari Aster looks to have not only zeroed in on that project but found another A-lister to star in it. Sources tell Deadline that Aster is directing the pic Scapegoat from a script he penned that has Scarlett Johansson set to star. Insiders add that Aster will reunite with A24, who has released his past four films, as the distributor.

Aster, whose satire Eddington premiered at Cannes last year, and his partner Lars Knudsen will produce through their Square Peg banner. As is the case with all Aster films, plot details are being kept under wraps.

Since the release of his hit horror pic Hereditary, Aster’s scripts always have drawn the town’s attention given how unique and original they tend to be.

After spending the end of last year writing, Scapegoat became his original script and his top choice to star in the film was Johansson. This would be no easy task as the Oscar nominee already had lined up a very busy shooting schedule in 2026 that included starring in the next Exorcist film at Universal as well as shooting the next Batman sequel opposite Robert Pattinson later this summer. Sources say after reading the script, Johansson was all in on starring in the film and producers were on board for a shoot later this year to accommodate her busy schedule.

Johansson is coming off an equally busy 2025 that included helping relaunched the Jurassic World franchise with Jurassic World: Rebirth. That film, which hit theaters in July, went on to gross $868M worldwide and has a sequel in the works.

Johansson recently made her directorial debut with the Sony Pictures Classics drama Eleanor the Great, which world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Next up she can be seen in the James Gray pic Paper Tiger opposite Miles Teller and Adam Driver. That film also will make its premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Aster is repped by WME and Johnson Shapiro Slewett and Kole, and Johansson is repped by CAA and Yorn Levine LLC.

DEADLINE – EXCLUSIVE: Netflix is developing The Nanny Diaries, a series based on the #1 New York Times bestseller by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. Scarlett Johansson, who starred in the 2007 feature adaptation of the novel, is executive producing the project, from Greg Berlanti‘s Berlanti Productions and Warner Bros. Television where the company is under an overall deal.

The Nanny Diaries joins Netflix’s book-to-screen development slate that includes Black Hole, The Corrections, Lights Out and So Far Gone. The streamer’s adaptations have yielded several titles on the Most Popular English series and film lists: His & Hers, Bridgerton, The Queen’s Gambit and Leave the World Behind.

Written and executive produced by Amy Chozick (The Girls on the Bus) and Jenny Bicks (Sex and the City) who will serve as showrunners, The Nanny Diaries centers on Annie, a broke, aspiring writer in search of a story who takes a nanny job for a magnetic Upper East Side socialite, plunging into an elite world of unimaginable excess. When she lands the book deal of her dreams to go undercover and expose the salacious lives of the ultra-rich, Annie must try to keep up this double life even as she grows attached to the people and this world… and finds out what her elusive boss is actually capable of.

Berlanti and Johansson first discussed the idea of adapting the book into a TV series while shooting Apple’s 2024 movie Fly Me to the Moon, which Berlanti directed and Johansson starred in. Berlanti, Sarah Schechter and Leigh London Redman executive produce for Berlanti Productions alongside Johannson, Jonathan Lia and Keenan Flynn for These Pictures as well as Gary Barber and Sean Hoagland for Spyglass Media Group. Nikki Cooper Molina is overseeing for Berlanti Productions. Warner Bros. TV is the studio.

The 2002 novel The Nanny Diaries by Kraus and McLaughlin, both former nannies, has been translated into more than 20 languages. Written and directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, its 2007 film adaptation starred Johansson, Laura Linney, Paul Giamatti and Chris Evans.

In 2025, book adaptations drove over 9B global views on Netflix and represented nearly 20% of total view hours. The Netflix Global Top 10 lists featured a book adaptation every single week, a streak that has continued through the first 13 weeks of this year. New series and films based on books coming in 2026 include East of Eden, Pride and Prejudice, Little House on the Prairie, Remarkably Bright Creatures and The Whisper Man.

Netflix’s adaptations have boosted their literary source material too, including the recent release of the movie People We Meet on Vacation sending Emily Henry’s novel back onto the NYT bestseller list as it saw a 97% increase in sales across all formats in the two weeks after the film debut, according to the Penguin Publishing Group.

Chozick, a journalist who has worked for The New York Times, is the author of bestselling memoir Chasing Hillary, which she adapted into the HBO Max series The Girls on the Bus. Her debut novel, With Friends Like You, will be published by Penguin Random House in July. Chozick is adapting the novel into a film with producer Brad Weston and Fifth Season and has three series in development at Apple and Netflix.

Writer-producer Bicks’ TV series credits include Dawson’s Creek, on which she worked with Berlanti, Seinfeld and HBO’s Sex and the City, where she wrote across all six seasons and rose to executive producer, sharing in the show’s Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy Award. She also created and showran ABC’s Men in Trees (ABC) and Showtime’s The Big C. Her feature credits include The Greatest Showman and Rio 2.

In this web exclusive, actress Scarlett Johansson talks about how dealing with her sensitive skin for years led to her founding a new line of skin care products, The Outset. She also discusses her life-changing roles, and the impact of artificial intelligence.

VARIETY – Scarlett Johansson told CBS Sunday Morning that the early 2000s were a “really harsh time” to be a young woman in Hollywood. The “Lost in Translation” star said during that period, it was “socially acceptable” for female actors to be “pulled apart for how they looked.”

“It was tough. There was a lot placed on how women looked,” Johansson said. “What was offered at that time for women my age, as far as acting roles or opportunities, was much slimmer than it is now.”

Johansson added that there are “much more empowering roles” for young women in 2026 than when she was “in my 20s.” When Johansson was coming up in the industry, she said it was “Slim Pickens.”

“You would get really pigeon-holed and offered the same [roles]. It would be like the other woman, or the side piece, the bombshell,” she said. “That was the archetype that was prevalent when I was that age.”

Johansson found solace from typecasting in the New York theater scene. Taking a break from Hollywood also taught her to wait for “the right role” rather than give in to the pressure to “work constantly.”

“It’s something that I learned over time, but it’s hard,” she explained. “Once you start working, you really feel like every job is going to be your last and that if you get opportunities to work, you have to keep taking them. Even though they might not be as varied as the jobs that really give you pleasure.”

She continued. “Every actor feels like that, because it is so competitive, and I think once you do have the spotlight, you want to keep it on you. I mean, that’s the instinct I think for a young actor, or any actor.”

Johannson was just 17 years old when she made her breakout debut in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 drama “Lost in Translation.” Some of her other early film credits include “The Perfect Score,” “Match Point,” “The Prestige,” “The Other Boleyn Girl” and “Iron Man 2.”

VARIETY – Scarlett Johansson, Sam Rockwell and Tom Waits have joined Brad Bird‘s “Ray Gunn” voice cast.

Johansson, Rockwell and Waits will join voice actor John Ratzenberger in the Skydance Animation feature.

According to the logline, “Ray Gunn” is set in Metropia, a gigantic city in an alternate future as seen from 1939, where private eye Raymond Gunn is drawn into a case involving aliens, murder and a multimedia star named Venus Nova.

Johansson who voices Nova said, ““Having the opportunity to collaborate with Brad Bird is a career milestone for me; I have loved his work my entire life. This project is so uniquely special because it is a total realization of where Brad is currently on his artistic journey. I can’t wait for audiences to see this extraordinary animation that looks like nothing else out there.”

Bird is on board as producer, writer and director. He helmed 2004’s “The Incredibles” and 2018’s “Incredibles 2,” and this marks his first film since 2018. Bird is also suiting up again to write and produce “Incredibles 3” slated for release in 2028. He said, “‘Ray Gunn’ has been in my mind for over 30 years. The film is a blend of sci-fi and classic detective movies from the ’40s…it’s Maltese Falcon meets Buck Rogers. I’ve been a fan of both of those sort of genres, and blending them together seemed fun, and a chance to play with a lot of very cinematic elements, and extreme characters.” He added, “There’s a big chunk of people who don’t watch animation. That’s a group I’m anxious to persuade because it’s an amazing art form that is way too limited in people’s minds. Animation as a medium is too interesting to limit what kind of stories can be told.”

Skydance Animation’s John Lasseter, David Ellison and Dana Goldberg are set to produce the film which will be released by Netflix later this year.

In 2023, Skydance Animation struck a deal to exclusively release its animated movies directly to Netflix in an arrangement that spans multiple years.

Earlier this year, Netflix won the animated feature Oscar for “KPop Demon Hunters” which became its most-watched movie of 2025.

Also on its animation slate are the upcoming “Steps,” featuring Amanda Seyfried as the voice of Cinderella, and “Swapped,” abuddy comedy about a small woodland creature (voiced by Michael B. Jordan) and a majestic bird (voiced by Juno Temple).

Johansson was the recipient of Variety’s Legends and Groundbreakers Award at the Newport Beach Film Festival in 2025. She worked her way up to being the industry’s top-paid female star, locking in (and later fighting to be fairly compensated for) that title as Marvel’s Black Widow character.

Last year, she appeared in “Jurassic World: Rebirth” and she brought her feature directing debut “Eleanor the Great” to Cannes. Next up, she’s set to appear in the “Exorcist” movie for Universal and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster.

Scarlett visited Colbert and took The Colbert Questionert.