Screen Media said Wednesday that is has acquired U.S. rights to Girl, the thriller written and directed by Chad Foust that stars Bella Thorne and Mickey Rourke. The deal comes ahead of the film’s U.S. premiere later this week at Fantastic Fest. A November day-and-date release is in the works.
Thorne plays a woman (she’s only known as Girl) who returns to her small hometown to exact revenge on her abusive father, only to discover someone murdered him the day before. As she searches for answers, she soon finds herself prey to a sinister sheriff (Mickey Rourke) and uncovers a disturbing family legacy more disturbing than she’d imagined. The pic marks Foust’s directorial debut, and he also co-stars with Glen Gould, Lanette Ware and Elizabeth Saunders.
Thomas Michael, Shayne Putzlocher and Sara Shaak are producers. Jason Moring, Dave Duckett, Joe Ferraro, Jean Pierre Magro, Al Morrison, Lee Nelson, David Tish and Screen Media’s Seth Needle and Conor McAdam are executive producers. Needle negotiated the Girl deal with Double Dutch International’s Moring and Mark Padilla on behalf of the filmmakers.
“We are thrilled to showcase Bella Thorne like you’ve never seen her before, and we know her fans are going to love watching her take charge, and take names,” Screen Media said in a statement. “It is fitting that it will make its debut at this year’s Fantastic Fest, as we think it will be a favorite of genre fans everywhere.”
Fantastic Fest launches its virtual 2020 edition Thursday with the North American premiere of Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma’s French werewolf pic Teddy. Girl screens Friday night.
Bella Thorne has been keeping busy amid quarantine — and has a few things up her sleeve. The 22-year-old actress continues to pave her own path and is thankful to have her “perfect” boyfriend, Benjamin Mascolo, by her side. Thorne and her Italian musician beau have been dating since April 2019.
“I got so lucky with my Ben. He’s really just the perfect specimen and I honestly don’t know how I got so blessed with him,” Thorne tells ET’s Katie Krause while promoting her Netflix film, The Babysitter: Killer Queen. “I love constantly learning about his life and his culture and his everything. [It’s] just so interesting when you date someone that hasn’t grown up with the same moralistic values and the same things as you.”
“There’s so much conversation to be had. So we really got to really know each other,” she says about their time in quarantine, adding that the “five months away from each other was hard…I got very lucky.”
Thorne has also been lucky in her career, and hopes to continue creating her empire. In the next decade, the actress wants to write another book, be able to spend more time with her loved ones and even get married.
“There’s going to be another book. I’m working on it right now…But [in the next] 10 years, marriage, happiness, taking a break from thinking so hard, hopefully while running my empire,” she expresses. “Hopefully in 10 years I can kind of take a good breather, feel accomplished and feel good about myself.”
She’s also writing a show, has the first two episodes written “and season arcs built out and what not.” While she doesn’t go into specifics about the show or share its title — “The title itself really gives the whole thing away” — Thorne does tease that “it’s definitely based in the industry.”
“It’s very dark. There’s a lot of young characters and parents, and we deal with the relationship between those,” she shares. “And all these characters really connect and intertwine throughout the whole series. Each episode, you kind of get a whole piece of that and it shocks you and then that kinda leads you into the next.”
While fans have to wait to hear more about her series, she doesn’t hold back about The Babysitter sequel, The Babysitter: Killer Queen. Thorne reprises her role as cheerleader Allison.
“It was so crazy having everybody back in this experience again, reliving these characters again,” she excitingly says, adding that it’s great “to be able to do a number two on a project that was so out there in the first place. To get to work with McG again and just be around his lively, sweet, endearing energy.”
Sharing that they “upped the ante” in the sequel, she adds that they had “a lot of fun going between a lot of the big jokes from the first movie. Kind of bringing those callbacks and just changing them a little bit with new characters. All of our new characters that are in it are just so fun. So out there. It’s very funny. It’s very good.”
“I think the way they did it was smart,” she continues, before touching on the possibility of a third film. “They could make a number three. They really could. I wouldn’t put it past anybody on that set to think of some crazy new thing and how it works. I’m just like, will they bring us all back again? That would just be, you know, like, ‘Oh my goodness!’”
For Thorne, it’s been important for her to fight for fully-developed female characters because, as she says, “almost every female in that industry has taken that on.” “To fight for a better world for our daughters, to kind of fight all these stigmas and all these boxes people put us into,” she notes. “You just have to. I feel like no matter what, I’ll always be fighting for it.”
The actress has come a long way from her Disney Channel Shake It Up days — as has her former co-star, Zendaya. The two have blazed their own trails and she hates when they are compared or pitted against each other.
“When you’ve got women and you’re growing up in the same market, even just as well other Disney stars, even if they’re not on the same show, you still get pitted against each other,” she relays. “And people are more likely to be like, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ I think people love putting women against each other. It’s always this and that. It’s been happening to me and Zendaya since we started the damn show. It’s not a surprise.”
As far as Thorne is concerned, she doesn’t let the negativity get to her, adding that she doesn’t read articles about herself.
“I’m just not gonna waste my time hearing their negativity because I have better things to fill my head with. With growth, real growth,” she added. “And I think that when people are just really negative, then it’s harder to grow.”
Thorne, meanwhile, couldn’t be happier to support her friend, especially after Zendaya got nominated for an Emmy for her role on Euphoria.
“My goodness. I just hope she f**king wins,” Thorne exclaims. “The show is amazing. I love Sam Levinson. I love her, so I’m gonna have my fingers crossed the whole entire time. I’m going to be waiting for this acceptance speech!”
Bella Thorne apologized to sex workers who criticized her decision to join OnlyFans, which many content creators feared could negatively impact their revenue streams and further stigmatize the work they do.
“Remove the stigma behind sex, sex work, and the negativity that surrounds the word SEX itself by bringing a mainstream face to it that’s what I was trying to do, to help bring more faces to the site to create more revenue for content creators on the site,” Thorne wrote in a series of tweets Saturday, August 29th. “I wanted to bring attention to the site, the more people on the site the more likely of a chance to normalize the stigmas, and in trying to do this I hurt you.”
OnlyFans is a subscription platform that allows creators to sell content directly to fans, and since arriving in 2016 has primarily been used by sex workers. Since the Covid-19 pandemic hit the United States in March, it’s seen an enormous spike in signups, with Beyoncé name-checking it on the “Savage” remix and celebrities like Cardi B and Black Chyna joining it as well. Last week, Thorne revealed that she was joining the platform, too, and immediately set a record, becoming the first creator to make more than $1 million in 24 hours, and then topping $2 million by the end of the week.
On social media, however, many sex workers who rely on OnlyFans expressed their discontent. Many worried that the mainstreaming of the platform would oversaturate the market and further marginalize sex workers who rely on it. (As Rolling Stone previously reported, many sex workers on OnlyFans have raised concerns that the platform is slowly pushing them out, a claim that OnlyFans has denied.) Additionally, after Thorne’s first-week windfall, OnlyFans implemented changes to how much content creators could be paid per post and in tips, which many suggested was tied to Thorne’s success; OnlyFans said the changes were “not based on any one user.”
Earlier this month, (bitch I’m) Bella Thorne joined OnlyFans. She cleared $1 million in a single day and set a record for the subscription-based social-media platform. (Social media here meaning media that might be too NSFW for it to be posted on other platforms where it would violate TOS. Though, worth noting, anybody can make an OnlyFans to post whatever they think they can get people to pay for, lewd or otherwise.) A week later, Thorne said that number had grown to $2 million, and the number of people in the sex-work community — and beyond — who were upset with her had grown right along with it. Here’s a brief summary of what went down, in a tab you can keep open no matter your line of work.
Wait, why are they mad?
Thorne joined OnlyFans and set her price at $20 per month for a subscription to her feed. Almost immediately, the blowback began. “To witness a celebrity gentrifying a platform and making obscene amounts of money without acknowledging the plight of sex workers is truly a slap in the face,” Aussie Rachel, a sex worker and OnlyFans creator, told Rolling Stone in a piece about how the rise of celebrities joining the platform spells doom for the sex workers who rely on it for income and are not, say, high-profile former Disney Channel stars with ample revenue streams at their disposal.
But wait … hasn’t Thorne worked in pornography before?
Yes, that’s true. Thorne directed Her & Him for Pornhub in 2019. (It even won an award.) But not long after joining OF, Thorne told the Los Angeles Times she’d done so as research for a film role. She’s working with director Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project), and says she’ll be dividing her profits between funding her production company and charity donations. (No specifics on how much money will be going where.) “It’s a feature we are researching as I’m living it currently,” Thorne told the Times via text. “What are the ins and outs? What does a platform like this do to its users? What’s the connective material between your life and your life inside the world of OnlyFans? … How can it change your life for the worse and the better? How far are you willing to go, and how far do you WANT to go? You can be me, or this talented girl from Montana, and OnlyFans could change your life — if you want it to, of course.”
So what’s on her OnlyFans page anyway?
Well, on Twitter, Thorne said she would not be posting anything fully nude. More specifically, she said, “Nooooo I’m not doing nudity!!! <3.” “Her page does feature some suggestive imagery — numerous bikini photos, her eating a hot dog — but nothing explicitly graphic,” the Times also reported. “In a poll, however, she did ask her fans what type of content they’d like from her; tongue teasing, lingerie, booty, showering and twerking were among the answers.”
But I heard she charged $200 for a single nude photo?
There are tweets circulating right now that allege Thorne was selling a pay-per-view “nude” for $200. (A pay-per-view message is exactly what it sounds like: content that you share, via message, that your fans pay to view,” according to OnlyFans. Creators set their price and can choose to send them to individual followers or to all of their followers at one.)
Here’s another tweet from OF creator @glutengoddess that breaks down what allegedly happened. Because the reported PPV message was not, in fact, a nude, OF users requested refunds at such a rate that some creators are claiming it prompted the platform to make changes to how it pays creators. Creators in some countries will now have to wait 30 days, up from 7, to receive payouts. “Creators on OnlyFans receive 80 percent of their subscription revenue and can also receive tips from their fans,” a spokesperson for OnlyFans told Vulture in a release. OF has reportedly since placed a cap on the prices creators can charge for PPV content and on tips.
What does OnlyFans have to say?
OF told Vulture it “confirms that any changes to transaction limits are not based on any one user,” but declined to comment further on Thorne. “Transaction limits are set to help prevent overspending and to allow our users to continue to use the site safely,” a spokesperson said, noting the company was hearing feedback on the changes and “will continue to review these limits.
Oh ….
Right, so people were already angry with Thorne’s actions, but this sealed the deal. Even if it’s not, at least as far as OF is saying, officially her fault. Thorne, before you ask, has not made any sort of statement addressing the situation.
Bella Thorne recently followed in the footsteps of celebs like Jason Derulo and Cardi B, launching her own page on the subscription-only social media platform OnlyFans.
Thorne racked up a whopping $1 million in the first 24 hours of creating her account, becoming the first user to ever make that much in their first day on the platform according to Page Six. Now it’s been nearly a week since Thorne made her account, and the 22-year-old says she’s made about $2 million from her page, which offers exclusive content for a subscription of $20 a month.
OnlyFans is best known for its X-rated content, though celebrities like Cardi B are using the platform solely to share exclusive personal content with fans. “NO I WONT BE SHOWING PUSSY , TITTIES AND ASS .LINK IN BIO…It will be a place for only me and my fans,” she told fans earlier this month.
The former Disney star told the Los Angeles Times that she’s using OnlyFans for a combination of reasons, including to conduct research for an upcoming film she’s working on with Sean Baker, the director behind critically acclaimed indie films like The Florida Project and Tangerine.
“It’s a feature we are researching as I’m living it currently,” Thorne told the Times via text. “What are the ins and outs? What does a platform like this do to its users? What’s the connective material between your life and your life inside the world of OnlyFans? … How can it change your life for the worse and the better? How far are you willing to go, and how far do you WANT to go? You can be me, or this talented girl from Montana, and OnlyFans could change your life — if you want it to, of course.”
Baker told the newspaper that the film starring Thorne is “very early in its development — in its infancy — and probably years away from turning into anything.”
Unlike Cardi, Thorne isn’t completely opposed to sharing suggestive and adult content, in addition to keeping in contact with her fans. The actress reportedly asked in a recent poll if fans would like content that included tongue teasing, lingerie, booty, showering, and twerking, among other options.
According to Page Six, Thorne’s new OnlyFans page briefly crashed the site.
Girl (2020)
Girl
A young woman returns to her small hometown intent on killing her abusive father only to discover someone murdered him the day before. As the girl searches for answers, she uncovers a family legacy more dangerous than she’d imagined.
The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020)
Allison
Two years after defeating a satanic cult led by his babysitter Bee, Cole’s trying to forget his past and focus on surviving high school. But when old enemies unexpectedly return, Cole will once again have to outsmart the forces of evil.
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