|
|
||||||
|
Oct
19
ComingSoon.net has confirmed that 20th Century Fox will debut a new trailer for James Cameron’s Avatar in theaters this Friday, October 23rd! The trailer, which clocks in at roughly around 3 minutes and 30 seconds, won’t be coming online until October 29th. You should really see this in theaters anyways as we’ve learned that this is THE trailer, the one that will show you much more story (as opposed to the teaser trailer previously released). Read more @ ComingSoon.net Oct
16
Uma Thurman Down for More Kill Bill, Says Ideas Are ‘Awesome’
“Yeah, I think it’d be fun!” Thurman enthusiastically replied when asked if she’d be up for playing Beatrix once again. In terms of actual progress on the script, Uma revealed that, “[Tarantino and I] did chat, we did chat. He has not yet finished the script. I don’t even really know if he’s really started it, although I got a taste of some of his ideas and they are really good.” Read more @ FirstShowing.net Disney/Miramax Downsizing = Bad News For Indie FilmsVariety reports that the larger Disney studio will now handle certain, “marketing, distribution, operations and administrative support functions from its Burbank headquarters.” That amounts to an almost 75% reduction in their staff down to just 20 remaining executives. Although Disney isn’t naming names for now, a series of meetings next week will say who stays and who goes. Word is that some of the people let go will be from the production and development side of things, with such rumored names floating around as production prexy, Keri Putnam, and acquisitions veep, Peter Lawson. Read more @ ScreenRant.com Ratner blasts criticsFans of the X-MEN franchise were weary when first hearing about Ratner directing the third film for the installment. Well if you saw LAST STAND, then it’s possible your in the huge crowd of people who thought it was garbage. This is how Ratner feels about the response, “You can’t make these people happy. I’m kind of the anti-Christ to these comic book geeks. Every single person that wrote shit went to see that movie multiple times because a movie doesn’t gross $200 something million unless people go to see it more than once.” Of course, he continued, “Every single person who said, ‘I’m never seeing that movie’, they were the first ones there. What are they concerned about? It’s out of the filmmaker’s hands. A film is a collaborative effort. How’s a person sitting at home going to worry about how a movie is going to turn out to be?” I did go see it, once. I love X-MEN regardless of who directs it, but after seeing it, I didn’t need to see it again. It gets worse. Ratner claims that he made the franchise more popular than ever, “The most ridiculous statement I’ve read is – and of course I looked at the internet after the movie came out – that I buried the franchise. “If I buried the franchise how the fuck did they make a Wolverine? I mean, that’s ridiculous. And they’re making three other fucking X-Men movies. Mine kept the franchise alive!” Read more @ JoBlo.com Spider-Man 4 to start filming in March
“We’re hoping that it’s the first week in March,” said Raimi. At the moment, pre-production is in full swing, even as screenwriter Gary Ross (”great director and a very fine writer,” said Raimi) continues to work on the script. “He’s working on a draft,” he continued. “I just gave him some notes and he’s doing a rewrite right now.” On other fronts, “Spider-Man 4″ continues to chug along. “The production is starting to come together,” Raimi told us. “I’ve got a production designer who is starting to design the sets and the environments that the picture will take place in. We just brought aboard Scott Stokdyk as one of the two visual effects supervisors, and I worked with him on all three ‘Spider-man’ pictures.” With Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst set to reprise their roles, Raimi and his team will soon turn their attention to filling out the rest of the cast. “None of the casting has really taken place, but we’re starting to think about that now,” the director said. Read more @ Filmonic.com Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods Pushed, Going 3-D!MGM Studios has decided to push Joss Whedon’s anticipated The Cabin in the Woods, directed and co-written by Cloverfield’s Drew Goddard, back nearly a year, from its original release date of February 5, 2010 to the new date of January 14, 2011. MGM reps tell ShockTillYouDrop.com the reason they’re doing this is because the early response to the film has been phenomenal and they’re going to spend six months or so converting the picture to 3-D. There is nothing else scheduled for that 2011 date, which is the four-day weekend to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr, although the fourth Underworld movie is currently scheduled to open one week later. Read more @ ShockTillYouDrop.com Disney Extends Toy Story 3D Double Feature Run
Chuck Viane, in Disney’s domestic distribution department, called the extension “open-ended”, but it likely won’t run past November 2nd. That’s the day when the studio debuts its 3-D holiday flick, A Christmas Carol. The solid showing has Disney up in arms, and we’ll likely see more classics rendered for today’s 3-D-manding (get it?) audiences. Beauty and the Beast, an obvious test balloon, is set to have a 3-D release in 2011. Read more @ FilmSchoolRejects.com Go Behind the Scenes of Iron Man 2 in FrenchCanalPlus.fr has published a brand new behind the scenes report from the set of Iron Man 2, complete with interviews with director Jon Favreau and star Robert Downey Jr. The report features a bunch of new footage, including a look at Tony Stark’s at-home particle accelerator project. There is also a series of shots with Scarlett Johansson, who plays Black Widow, and some shots of Mickey Rourke as Whiplash. It’s interesting to hear that things are getting “a bit darker,” while keeping with the tone of the first film. All signs still pointing to Iron Man 2 being awesome. Have your own look at the new stuff below. Read more @ FilmSchoolRejects.com Jon Favreau Will Not Direct The AvengersMTV talked to Favreau about The Avengers while he was promoting Couples Retreat, and his statement about directing the film was quite clear:
Read more @ SlashFilm.com Aug
21
If early reports from the East Coast are to be believed, this is not the happy Avatar Day that James Cameron and Fox wanted. Reading Twitter feeds is not quite an exact science, but people are saying that they attended screenings in theater that were half, or less, full. Aug
21
source: Hollywood Insider “We think the official trailer and this alternate version are both great,” says Dimension’s EVP of Creative Marketing Jeff Elefterion. “They both represent the picture well, but we feel the cut we went with was the right choice and it has done a fantastic job of getting the fans excited about this sequel.” The new trailer features many of the same clips as previous spots for the movie, but a slower pace and the prominent use of the Moody Blues’ song “Nights in White Satin,” which gives it a distinctly different feel. “The Moody Blues song is very important within the actual movie,” Zombie says. “That trailer, that’s our movie.” This isn’t the first beef Zombie has had with the marketing of his films. “It was a huge problem when I made [2005's] The Devil’s Rejects for Lionsgate,” he says. “That was from start to finish a wonderful experience – until it came time to market the movie. I go, ‘We kinda made this weird post-modern Western. They go, ‘We don’t care, we’re marketing it like it’s Saw.’ I go, ‘Well it’s not Saw. People that would like it are not gonna go see it, and people who think it’s Saw are gonna be so disappointed.’ For years and years afterward, people would be like, ‘I finally saw that movie. I love it. It’s totally not what I thought it was. It’s like this weird Peckinpah movie.’ I go, ‘I know!’ Ugggh. Now I’m going through the same thing again. What pisses me off is when you see something like District 9. When someone finally does a really interesting marketing campaign, it works because people are so jaded you need to give them something interesting.” We’ll have to wait to see if the leak pays off in box office receipts (2007’s Halloween, Zombie’s first crack at reviving the franchise, grossed more than $80 million worldwide). But for now, there is a bit of a happy ending: “I wrote the marketing guys a thank you note,” Zombie says. “I said, ‘I don’t know if you guys leaked this, but thank you if you did.’” Aug
18
▪ Bryan Singer to direct Battlestar Galactica
▪ Doctor Parnassus gets distributor Variety is reporting that the Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group is about to sign on the dotted line to acquire Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which the studio will likely distribute in theaters through its Sony Pictures Classics branch, maybe as early as this year. ▪ Tarantino Updates ‘Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair’
“I need to do one thing with it, though… I’m not going to monkey around with the movie itself, but we’ve actually done a whole new section for the anime as the last thing [we added]. I actually wrote a much longer script for the anime section during O-Ren’s revenge chapter. Remember the guy with the long hair that kills her father? It’s like, what happened to that dude? Well, I wrote it and it was the biggest, most elaborate thing I wrote-her taking him down. Tarantino says that this added anime sequence was conceived back when he had the four-plus-hour movie in mind, as opposed to it being split into two separate ones. He says that the reason they never had the full anime sequence is because it was so big (read: would add to the already VERY long runtime). However, Tarantino reveals that he more recently showed Harvey Weinstein exactly what he had written before shooting the Kill Bills and they went ahead and made the extended anime sequence with the same team (Production I.G.) that made the existing sequence within Kill Bill Vol.1. Tarantino claims that all that’s left to do is go over it a bit with the anime team, to make sure everything’s right. ▪ Avatar Teaser Trailer is almost here
|
||||||
© 1997-2009 Jean-Pierre Bazinet
Halloween II writer and director Rob Zombie tells EW he doesn’t know how the unused trailer for his movie (in theaters Aug. 28) leaked to the website Bloody Disgusting on Wednesday, but that he is grateful that it’s out there and that it has been so well-received by the public. “When I first saw the trailer [cut by the company Buddha Jones], I went, ‘This is the f-ing movie we made.’ And then [Dimension Films] was like, ‘We don’t want to use it, we don’t like it,’ and they just threw it away. Then they cut all these other trailers that just look like generic, stupid f-ing slasher movie trailers, and I was f-in’ pissed. In fact, I wrote this long letter to the promotion department: ‘I hate these trailers and these TV spots, and I f-in’ hate you.’ You spend forever trying to craft something special and they’re gonna market it like a generic piece of ’80s slasher movie sh- because they think audiences are so f-ing stupid they can’t understand anything else. That trailer leaked from wherever, and I’m thrilled. The response has been like, ‘Wow, I didn’t want to see this movie until I saw this trailer.’”
▪ 
LIONSGATE, the leading next generation studio, announced today that it has acquired U.S. and Canadian distribution rights to KICK-ASS, the hotly anticipated action-comedy from writer/director Matthew Vaughn (LAYER CAKE, STARDUST). Based on the groundbreaking, best-selling comic by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., KICK-ASS stars Nicolas Cage (the upcoming SEASON OF THE WITCH, KNOWING, NATIONAL TREASURE), rising star Aaron Johnson (the upcoming NOWHERE BOY), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (SUPERBAD) and Chloe Moretz ((500) DAYS OF SUMMER). The screenplay is written by Vaughn and Jane Goldman. The producers are Matthew Vaughn, Brad Pitt, Tarquin Pack and Kris Thykier; Millar and Romita Jr. are co-producers. The announcement was made today by Joe Drake, Lionsgate President, Motion Picture Group, and Co-Chief Operating Officer, and Jason Constantine, Lionsgate President of Acquisitions and Co-Productions. KICK-ASS was the buzz sensation of the July Comic-Con in San Diego, where early footage was shown to wildly appreciative fans. The film is a privately financed independent production from Vaughn’s Marv Films and Plan B Entertainment, and is currently in post-production. Lionsgate anticipates a wide release in 2010.
“Battlestar Galactica” appears to be on a fast track and sources said that Singer could be looking at a $10 million paycheck to sign on to the film. Singer has long been intrigued with “Battlestar Galactica” and flirted with relaunching it into a TV series right after he directed the original “X-Men.” Back in 2001 I wrote about his plan, which involved teaming with Tom DeSanto to exec produce the series. Singer planned to direct the pilot of the new version of a series that originally launched on ABC in 1978 and ran two seasons. It is possible that the timing of the series went awry because of the World Trade Center disaster that occurred later that year. Certainly, it made a series that launched with the attack and destruction of earth unpalatable.
Quentin Tarantino is still on the road to bringing us the long-awaited, full, four-plus-hour version of Kill Bill that he originally intended. Even though we still haven’t seen Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair materialize in stores, Tarantino has updated us on the status of the project, continuing to promise that it’s still on its way. Last time we reported on the promised full version of Kill Bill, several different details were revealed about what would differ from the separate Vol.1 and Vol.2 releases. Some of the details were that the black-and-white “House of Blue Leaves” fight sequence will be in color; that there will be gorier anime sequences; and no “baby cliffhanger” that’s at the end of Vol.1. However, one of the biggest changes to the full version will be the addition of a newly created sequence that will take place during the anime segment featuring Lucy Liu’s O-Ren Ishii. Tarantino is still finishing up Inglourious Basterds (since it still hasn’t had it’s theatrical release), but says he’ll move onto The Whole Bloody Affair straight after that. Here’s what he told SciFiWire:
