MANILA, Philippines — "3 Days to Kill," starring Kevin Costner and Amber Heard, just premiered on streaming platform Netflix.
Costner plays terminally ill spy Ethan Renner, who meets elite CIA assassin Vivi Delay, played by Heared. Delay offers to give Renner a cure if he completes one final mission.
The 2014 action-thriller movie's premiere coincides with the continued rise of the petition to boot out Heard from "Aquaman 2." As of press time, the petition "Remove Amber Heard from Aquaman 2" has been signed by 1.6 million people on change.org.
"Amber Heard is a known and proven domestic abuser, Warner Brothers and DC Entertainment should and must remove Heard from their 'Aquaman 2' film project. They must not ignore the suffering of Heard's victims, and must not glamorize a domestic abuser. Men are victims of domestic abuse, just like women. This must be recognized, and action must be taken to prevent a known abuser from being celebrated within the entertainment industry," the last paragraphs of the petition read.
This was a reaction of fans to the resignation of Johnny Depp from the third movie of the "Fantastic Beasts" franchise.
Depp was revealed as the villain Grindelwald in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald" in 2018. Last weekend, Warner Bros announced that Mads Mikkelsen has been cast as Grindelwald in the upcoming feature.
Depp revealed on November 6 on his Instagram account that he was asked to resign from the film. This came after he lost the libel case against the British paper The Sun, which had referred to him as a "wife beater" in one of its 2018 articles.
Depp was denied by the UK High Court to appeal for his multi-million libel case against The Sun's publisher, New Group Newspapers, and the story's author, Dan Wootton.
The 57-year-old actor was also ordered to pay the newspaper's £628,000 ($840,00, €705,000) legal costs, court documents revealed. In addition, Depp was ordered to pay £520,000 of the defendants' bill by December and £108,235 by January 22, 2021.
Judge Andrew Nicol, who presided over the libel case, dismissed the actor's appeal and ordered the paying of the defendants' costs on the basis that he was not persuaded the grounds for appeal had a "reasonable prospect of success".
The judge also cited that 12 of 14 alleged instances of abuse of Heard, 34, by Depp had proven to have occurred.
Heard, meanwhile, put to rest speculations of her being written out of the sequel in the November 12 article by Entertainment Weekly.
"I'm super excited about the amount of fan love and the amount of fan appreciation that 'Aquaman' has acquired and that it has garnered so much excitement for Aquaman and Mera that it means we'll be coming back. I'm so excited to film that," she said.
She added that the production hopes to start sometime next year. It has a release date of December 16, 2022 as confirmed by Warner Bros to The Hollywood Reporter in a February 2019 article.
Heard plays Mera, the love interest of Jason Momoa's titular role in the smash hit DC superhero film. — With reports from the Agence France Presse.
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