James Cameron will return to Pandora next year. The Avatar director, who attended the premiere of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in Wellington, New Zealand on Wednesday, told the West Australian (via Total Film) that he hoped to have the scripts to Avatar 2 and 3 completed by February, and to begin shooting by the end of 2013. more »
Sitting through the interminable credits of a special-effects laden comic-book superhero movie is not my idea of fun, but after reading Drew McWeeny's HitFix post on Joseph Gordon-Levitt donning the Batsuit, I'm starting my glute exercises early in preparation for Warner Bros. and DC Comics June 2013 release of Man of Steel. more »
Leave it to Lars von Trier to find a connection between Nazi architect Albert Speer and Rat Pack singer Sammy Davis Jr. The controversy-courting Danish filmmaker has invited the public to reintrepret one or more of six great works of art for a community film project that will be unveiled at the Copenhagen Art Festival.
The project is being called Gesamt, which translates to "coming together" or "a joint piece of work," said director Jenle Hallund, who has the nerve-wracking challenge of creating a cohesive film from fragments of the submissions under some very tight time constraints. The deadline for submissions is Sept. 6, and the finished film is slated to debuty Oct.12, 2012 at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen. more »
Finally, a Wookiee-centric Star Wars vehicle that could get some actual laughs. Anyone who's actually sat through The Star Wars Holiday Special should welcome a report by The Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision blog that Fanboys director Kyle Newman is developing Chewie, a spec script by Evan Susser and Van Robichaux that is reportedly a tongue-in-cheek look at the making of Star Wars through the eyes of Peter Mayhew, the seven-foot-three-inch hospital worker who donned a fur suit and became one of the most memorable sci-fi/fantasy sidekicks of all time.
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Wanted: one hardy strain of dinosaur DNA and an endless supply of lawyers who don't mind using outhouses.
Gawker.com picked up a report from Australia's Sunshine Coast Daily that local billionaire Clive Palmer is in "deep discussion" with the scientists who cloned Dolly the Sheep about producing a real, live dinosaur that he could house at an ambitious resort he's developing in Coolum, in the state of Queensland. more »
Just when it looked like we might dodge a movie based on Ouija (which even McG had the good taste and common sense to abandon at Paramount), along came Universal to pluck the Hasbro property out of turnaround like a dusky Goodwill relic. And now, with a release date looming, the studio has handed the project off to a new team that will get it in shape for 2013. But wait — it gets better.
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Elizabeth Olsen looks modestly dressed in her Victorian-era full-length dresses and hats for her role in the erotic thriller Therese Raquin, which she is currently filming in Budapest, Hungary. Olsen plays the title character Therese Raquin in this project, directed by Charlie Stratton and also starring Harry Potter's Tom Felton and Jessica Lange. Her character is apparently forced into a loveless marriage with her sickly cousin Camille, played by Fenton.
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Casting news continues to trickle out for the film based on the wild life and times of CBGB, none of which is quite as eye-opening as word that the story of one of New York City's most legendary, lamented live-music venues will be filmed largely in... Savannah, Georgia.
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I don't recall the 1994 Pauly Shore/Andy Dick effort In the Army Now being a "huge box office success and fan favorite," but I'm happy to take the co-stars' words for it if it means leaving well-enough alone and not foisting In the Army Again on an unsuspecting population still reeling from a decade of war abroad. Even if it means not seeing them save "Katey Parry [sic] from a USO show gone bad" — our national psyche has endured enough, has it not?
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Harold Ramis and John Belushi. Scott Rudin, Steven Soderbergh, David Gordon Green and Will Ferrell. John Waters and Divine. John Candy. Chris Farley. Stephen Fry. Buck Henry. John Goodman. Throughout three decades, these men and others of various power and influence have applied (or at least attached) themselves to what was proven the most unadaptable literary property of the last half-century: John Kennedy Toole's searing comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces. And now, Zach Galifianakis, director James Bobin and screenwriter Phil Johnston reportedly have formed the triumvirate that will help make Dunces the most unadaptable literary property of the next half-century.
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Well! Quite a week for inspired Russian-history film news! If it's not Paul Schrader adapting ballerina biopics, then its Jon Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe pairing up to play the same guy in Sky Arts' four-part series A Young Doctor's Notebook.
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Go ahead and tell me you didn't see this coming: The Russian government is underwriting a biopic of the late-19th/early 20th-century ballerina and tsarist "femme fatale" Mathilde Kschessinska, and its cultural ministers have enlisted Paul Schrader to write the screenplay for "an internationally acclaimed director to be announced soon." OK, fine — I didn't see it coming, either. Read on for full details, by which I mean an explanation from all involved.
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Jean-Luc Godard may not care about Hollywood or its Oscars, but we have apparently found some hardware he is into: The 3-D camera. This calls for a comeback!
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It was looking iffy there for a while, but Disney chief Robert Iger has confirmed that the record-shattering Marvel blockbuster's follow-up is on the way some time after the next installments of Iron Man, Thor and Captain America, all due between 2013-2014.
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So there's good news and bad news regarding Scary Movie 5. The bad news is... well, there is a Scary Movie 5. The good news? Anna Faris has reportedly exercised her option and/or good judgment to step away from the ever-deteriorating franchise. And then there's this, which could go either way depending on your taste: The new installment reportedly intends to spoof Black Swan. Like, the whole thing.
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