Actor Vic Sotto will not be funny in the 2024 Metro Manila entry The Kingdom. Nor will Piolo Pascual. The two enduring lead actors of the country team up for the first time in a showbiz project.
The film won’t be a laughing matter. It isn’t a comedy but an epic about the Filipinos at a time when we were not yet known as “Filipinos,” and our archipelago was not yet called “the Philippines.” These labels began to apply only after the Spaniards, led by the Portuguese mercenary expeditionist Magellan, made it to our shores and were eventually killed by Lapu-Lapu and his men in the shores of Cebu.
“It’s going to be epic. It’s going to be very dramatic. Feeling namin akmang-akma siya sa panahon at sa okasyon (We feel that it is perfectly suited for the time and the occasion),” an internet report quoted the ever-popular comedian-TV host as saying about the film.
“The story and concept are really different, nothing like we’ve seen before. For me, this will serve as an eye-opener for all the Filipinos -- para sa atin mga kababayan at sa Pilipinas... (For our fellow countrymen and for the Philippines…) I have never done anything like this before,” the showbiz idol fondly known as “Bossing” added. (The term “Bossing” comes from the slang “boss,” which Sotto is known as a producer of comedies on film and TV.)
The Kingdom is now filming with Mike Tuviera as director. It’s his comeback film since the COVID-19 pandemic. His last film was Mission Unstapabol: The Don Identity, an entry in the 2019 MMFF, top-billed by Sotto and Maine Mendoza.
The Tuviera son has been making efforts to be known as a versatile director. He also heads his family’s entertainment production house, APT Productions, founded by his father, Antonio P. Tuviera. The elder Tuviera was the executive producer for many years of Eat Bulaga under the Jalosjos family’s Television and Production Exponents (TAPE).
The Kingdom is the younger Tuviera’s brainchild, and APT Productions is one of the three producers of the film, which is rumored to have a huge budget due to its being produced by three well-off companies.
APT was a co-producer of the 2023 MMFF top grosser Rewind, starring real-life couple Marian Rivera and Dingdong Dantes. (The film’s main producer, ABS-CBN, screened the film in various foreign countries, and it eventually grossed almost a billion pesos, making it the highest-grossing Pinoy film worldwide.)
Sotto himself is a financier of his latest MMFF entry as the head of MZet Television Productions, Inc. The third producer is MQuest Ventures, the company behind Gomburza, a well-received entry in last year’s MMFF.
Sotto refrains from revealing details about The Kingdom, perhaps fearing that its storyline and characters may be copied and adapted for another production by the fast and cunning. So, we don’t know yet if both Sotto and Pascual portray warring or friendly chieftains of small kingdoms in this archipelago before the Spaniards landed, thinking that we were the fabled Spice Islands.
There are no reports about Mendoza’s involvement in The Kingdom -- which is unusual. Since Mendoza became wildly popular as a host of Eat Bulaga with a segment she starred in alongside Alden Richards, Sotto has cast Mendoza in all his movies co-produced by APT. Mendoza is managed by APT, unlike Richards, who is under an exclusive contract with GMA 7. This is the reason Richards has never appeared in any of Mendoza’s movies with Sotto (who once managed to cast Coco Martin of ABS-CBN in one of his MMFF entries in the past).
Mendoza is, of course, a well-loved host of Eat Bulaga on TV5, where it is mainly produced by the Sotto brothers, Vic and Tito, along with their long-time friend Joey de Leon.
It’s okay if The Kingdom is not a comic film. If it were, the humor might turn out to be cheap slapstick. We should not demean our pre-Hispanic ancestors.
Meanwhile, we wonder what TAPE is grandly preoccupied with now to keep the company going. Their court battle with the TVJ trio over ownership of the Eat Bulaga trademark has quieted down, as has Butch Jalosjos’s uncalled-for linking with Dominic Roque, the actor who is Bea Alonzo’s ex. Butch was announced to be the TAPE “bossing” in the name of his father, businessman-politician Romy Jalosjos, who served time in jail for statutory rape.