Archive for August, 2009

The Los Angeles Times reports that The Weinstein Company is moving forward with Halloween 3-D, a sequel to the Rob Zombie movies to be released in the summer of 2010.

Co-Chairman Bob Weinstein said Rob Zombie won’t return for Halloween 3-D. He said the studio is in negotiations with a new director, whom he declined to name, who has experience in horror and has a “different take” on the franchise.

Halloween II opened in third place this weekend with an estimated $17.4 million from 3,000 theaters. First place went to The Final Destination with $28.3 million, which was filmed in 3D.

Source: ComingSoon.net

In a combination of cash and stock deal, Disney and Marvel have agreed in principle to a deal that would place Marvel under Disney’s already vast umbrella of control.

“Disney is the perfect home for Marvel’s fantastic library of characters given its proven ability to expand content creation and licensing businesses,” said Ike Perlmutter, Marvel’s Chief Executive Officer. “This is an unparalleled opportunity for Marvel to build upon its vibrant brand and character properties by accessing Disney’s tremendous global organization and infrastructure around the world.”

With films on characters like Iron Man (Iron Man 2), Captain America, and Thor currently in the works at Marvel Studios, it has yet to be said whether any of those films will be affected by the deal. No indications have yet been made that there will be any alterations.

With this deal Disney now has access to and control over 5,000 Marvel characters.

Source: Hollywood Reporter

ComingSoon.net has just released an especially interesting interview with Surrogates director Jonathon Mostow (U-571).  The questions are mostly intelligent, if not always at least appropriate, and Mostow offers a lot of intriguing information, none of which should be considered spoiling.

Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames, and Rosamund Pike, is about a world where each person has their own personal robot. However instead of these robots being sentient (users of AI), they act as puppets or avatars, exploring and experiencing the world for their owners while they sit safely in their homes. The sci-fi thriller is based off of a comic book series of the same name, created by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele.

The film is in its final editing stage and is scheduled for wide-release September 25th.

Nu Image/Millennium Films announced that they have green-lit a fifth chapter to the Rambo franchise. Sylvester Stallone will direct and star.

Variety reports that the story will be about “Rambo fighting his way through human traffickers and drug lords to rescue a young girl abducted near the U.S.-Mexico border.” Production is scheduled to begin this upcoming spring.

The previous installment, 2008’s Rambo, grossed $42 million in the U.S. and $113 million abroad.

Director: Rob Zombie

Screenwriter: Rob Zombie

Cast: Scout Taylor-Compton, Brad Dourif (The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers), Malcolm McDowell (Clockwork Orange), Tyler Mane

Length: 1h 41m

Synopsis: Laurie Strode, survivor of the Halloween attacks of serial killer Michael Myers one year ago, is forced to deal with the news that the two of them are actually brother and sister. Michael’s body has gone missing since that night, and Laurie suspects he is still after her. Unfortunately, she is right.

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Director: David R. Ellis

Screenwriters: Eric Bress, Jeffrey Reddick

Cast: Bobby Campo, Shantel VanSanten, Nick Zano, Haley Webb, Mykelti Williamson

Length: 1h 22m

Synopsis: When a college boy sees a premonition of a large wreck at a Nascar race he insists his friends leave with him. When they do, they are shocked to find that his prediction came true. All is not well, though, as Death has plans to take care of those who try to cheat him.

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Director/musician Rob Zombie has struck a deal with Dimension studios to direct a remake of the 1958 classic sci-fi film The Blob. His intentions will be to try and make a distinctly original film that will attempt to be scary, exciting, and different. The reported budget for the film will be around $30 million, the average production cost of Dimension’s horror remakes.

Source: Variety

Quick Opinion: Another remake? The previous 1988 remake of The Blob, which starred Saw starlet Shawnee Smith, did not do well when first released but has since earned a small but loyal cult following. The news of Zombie’s project will only garner more groans from horror fans like these who claim for there to be too many recent remakes of older films (many of them “classics”). With 2007’s Halloween, this year’s Halloween II, and now The Blob, Zombie looks to be heading down a career path paved with creative banality.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Academy Award winning film composer Hans Zimmer (The Dark Knight, Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Gladiator, The Lion King) has agreed to score the next installment of the ‘Call of Duty’ videogame series titled Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. This will be the first time Zimmer has worked exclusively on a videogame project.

Such news brings up a nagging question for Hollywood: what is the future relationship between its films and the medium of videogames? When television was first made popular in the 1950s Hollywood greeted the new technology with animosity, which continues to a fair degree to this day. Videogames have emerged as the newest competitor over Hollywood’s biggest target audience, which are roughly those between the ages of 18 and 35.

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Author Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book “The Blind Side”, about the improbable cultural rise of the Baltimore Ravens’ 2009 first round draft pick Michael Oher, is currently being made into a full-length feature film starring Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw, and Quinton Aaron as Oher. Director John Lee Hancock (The Rookie), who also wrote the adapted screenplay, has expressed his immense enthusiasm for the project because it is, as he calls it, – a different kind of sports movie.

In an article in The Baltimore Sun, movie reviewer/columnist Michael Sragow reports on the atypicality of the story’s construction and characters. Other, who due to an extreme prorogation of social and intellectual development, endured many hardships while living on the streets of Memphis, TN, homeless. The Tuohys, an evangelical couple who took in Oher and helped nurture him to such success that he was able to earn his way into college, play the role seemingly equivalent to that of Annie Sullivan (the famous teacher of Helen Keller). It is the subject of football that the Tuohys use to help foster Oher, and it is this bizarre method where the film’s ties to the sports movie genre finally become evident.

Unlike some other sports movies, such as last year’s The Express based on the accomplishments of football legend Ernie Davis, The Blind Side is not focused on ultimately teaching the cost of individual sacrifice for the success of the team. What its focus instead appears to be is much more broad, but by way of being narrow. By focusing almost strictly on the development of Michael Oher as a person, and how it would not have been possible without the charity of the Tuohys, The Blind Side is not just a sports movie but a story about the blossoming of hidden, human potential.

The sports aspect of the story is integrated using various inclusions diagramming and documenting the particularities of the game of American football, such as Bill Walsh’s west coast passing offense of the 1980s, juxtaposing the development of the game itself with Oher’s journey to provide a poignant allegory.

Michael Sragow’s article, which goes into much further detail, provides very interesting information on the film, including first-hand remarks from director Hancock, and is definitely worth a read. You can view the entire article via the link below.

The Baltimore Sun

The Blind Side is scheduled for wide-release November 20th.

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Screenwriter: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth (Death Proof), Diane Kruger (National Treasure, Troy)

Length: 2h 33m

Synopsis: A small group of American soldiers are secretly dispatched into Nazi occupied France during World War II with intentions of striking fear into the entire Third Reich by killing as many Nazis as they can as brutally as they can. Their plans eventually become intertwined with those of an escaped Jewish-French girl who, having endured witnessing her entire family’s death at the hands of the Nazis, forms an attack plan of her own.

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