It was indeed a very happy President's Day Weekend in Hollywood, where studios enjoyed the rare treat of five wide February releases raking in $20 million or more. The bad news? The two newest ones brought up the rear. Sorry, Nicolas Cage and Reese Witherspoon — your Holiday Weekend Receipts are here.
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When you're not going to win on points, you may as well try to shoot the moon — that seems to be the thought process behind Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, the sequel to Marvel's 2007 Ghost Rider. Realizing that their stunt rider who turns into a flaming skeleton-monster character and their star who turns in what are less performances than performance art were unlikely to result in a film that could be thought of as good in any traditional sense, the studios have aimed instead to make something that embraces its own lunacy.
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Marvel Studios founder (and former toy inventor) Avi Arad has built an empire out of the superhero business, having produced everything from the Blade films to the X-Men, Fantastic Four, Ghost Rider, Hulk, Iron Man, and Spider-Man films and the upcoming Andrew Garfield-starring reboot, not to mention the 2012 superhero superfilm The Avengers. Needless to say, there was a ton to discuss and not nearly enough time when Movieline caught up with Arad at Comic-Con right before Sony's Hall H panel for The Amazing Spider-Man.
Brian Taylor took a break from Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance duties to trek down to SXSW in support of SXFantastic entry The FP -- a film he describes as "a Jerry Bruckheimer action movie from the '80s" where said action is Dance Dance Revolution. His ties to the indie action-comedy trace back to his close circle of filmmaking friends: Director Brandon Trost is a frequent DP and collaborator to Taylor and partner Mark Neveldine, while actors from Neveldine + Taylor's Crank films also show up in The FP. Taylor rung up Movieline to share his love for The FP gang via phone along with details on Ghost Rider 2's new origin story, Crank 3, and how one might go about filming a 3D movie... on the iPhone.
Some actors are Method; others make up their own method. Like Nicolas Cage, who described his self-taught school of acting and held Movieline rapt with 8 other stories about crazy sex scenes, driving 180 mph on the highway, making the Oscars fair, and other Cage-y anecdotes only vaguely related to his latest vehicle Drive Angry 3D, a high-octane Southern-fried supernatural vengeance thriller disguised as homage to the car-obsessed exploitation flicks of the '70s.
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