Category: News

In a move that isn’t surprising anyone, 20th Century Fox is crafting another X-Men spinoff movie but this time it’s for Deadpool, the “merc with a mouth” that was played so well by Ryan Reynolds in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The film is (tentatively) titled simply, Deadpool.

Announced by Variety as being “under development,” there’s also talk of another Wolverine movie that touches more another of the “Easter egg” credits scene where he’s drinking in Japan. (It seems that there are at least two cuts of Wolverine, with various different clips cut into or after the trailers; my screening got one with Stryker and the Deadpool clip, not the Japan scene. — GEM)

Unlike several of my friends, I actually liked Wolverine—once I realized that it was just a big action movie and that I shouldn’t think about the plot too much.

I haven’t read the comics continually since the mid-to late 1990s, so any little bit of jiggering that was done to the character’s timeline was completely okay with me, as was taking the current White Queen’s powers and giving them to Silverfox’s sister, all just so the fans could giggle and nudge each other when it showed Scott and Emma working together near the end of the movie.

So if they end up doing a lot of jiggering with Deadpool in order for an awesome action movie to be made (and with Reynolds’ good looks, I do not see them hiding him under a mask for very long or disfiguring him too deeply), I’m also perfectly fine with that.

UPDATE: Coming Soon is reporting that — according to “a source close to Fox” — the Deadpool movie will be developed by Lauren Shuler Donner and Marvel, not Fox (although presumably Fox is still distributing).

Fresh off of its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, Magnolia Pictures acquired the world distribution rights to The Eclipse on Friday, says Variety.

Eclipse tells the story of a recent widower (played by Ciaran Hinds, who won an award from the festival for his performance) who is learning how to adjust to being a single father while nightmares threaten his daytime hours, all amidst the backdrop of a literary festival in a seaside Irish town. Iben Hjejle plays a British novelist whose book about her own experiences with ghosts provides the spark for their romantic encounter, while Aidan Quinn rounds out the trio as Hjejle’s married former lover who wants her back.

Written and directed by Conor McPherson (who is also an award-winning playwright), I’m making the prediction right now that The Eclipse will be the new Once and will end up taking home at least one award at the Oscars next year, which means that I can’t wait to see it in the theaters.

One of the numerous heartwarming stories that came out of last year’s U.S presidential election was “A Butler Well Served by This Election” written by Wil Haygood for the Washington Post, about Eugene Allen, a black man who had served as a butler and maitre’d at the White House for eight presidential administrations (from Truman to Reagan), and how excited he was to have been able to vote for now-President Barack Obama.

Sony Pictures acquired the feature rights to the article a few weeks after the election, and now Variety is reporting that Danny Strong (Recount) will be adapting the script for The Butler for producer Laura Ziskin (As Good as It Gets, the Spider-Man series).

It’s too early to tell whether or not the film will have the same ending that the feature article did (it ends with former butler Allen’s wife’s death a day before the election) or if there will be some schmaltzy scene at the White House during a fictional version of Obama’s inauguration.

I pray that the latter will not happen.

As usual, I’m a tad conflicted about the news from Variety and other sources that not only has Oliver Stone been confirmed as the director for the previously-reported sequel to 1987’s Wall Street from 20th Century Fox, but there are current negotiations with Shia LaBeouf (also upcoming in Transformers 2) to play the young protege that gets corrupted by Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko.

This time, though, it’s not the choice of cast, Oliver Stone’s recent lackluster effort with W. (according to Box Office Mojo, the damn thing almost didn’t make any money), or the fact that they’re doing yet another freaking sequel that’s got me concerned.

Frankly, I’m a little curious as to exactly how screenwriter Allan Loeb is going to spin exactly who the “bad guy” is because while it’s easy to cast the people who work on Wall Street as being evil and greedy because their entire raison d’être is making tons of money out of nothing, the only reason why Wall Street traders have that reputation to begin with is because other Americans urged them to do so in order to satisfy their own greed instead of making do with what they already have.

As the current economic crisis unfolded, I found myself thinking about a scene near the end of Pretty Woman, a movie from 1990 whose logline can be summarized as thus: My Fair Lady + prostitution. It’s the scene where Richard Gere’s character decides to renounce his evil corporate takeover ways and instead invest his money into making an old man’s shipbuilding company prosperous again.

“We don’t make anything, we don’t build anything!” he rants to Jason Alexander, echoing a query from Julia Roberts’ prostitute character when she asked what he did to earn his mega-bucks. And, apparently, I’m not the only one who thought of that scene and that movie recently in connection with the current recession/depression.

That, in my very humble and untutored opinion, is one of the reasons why we got into this mess, but I highly doubt that a “villain” like our own manufacturing hubris is ever going to make it to Wall Street 2‘s big screen.

Recent Posts: Fox says “Greed is gooder” by fast-tracking Wall Street sequel

According to Variety, Robert Rodriguez is has two movies that are coming up on his slate, and as usual, I have mixed feelings about one of them.

The news about which I’m most pleased is that he’s going to be making a full-length movie out of Machete, for which he already created a fake trailer that appeared in Grindhouse. The story is about a Mexican ex-Federale who is hired to come across the U.S. border for a job, gets double-crossed by a corrupt state senator, and vows his revenge.

Danny Trejo will reprise his role as Machete from the trailer, and it will be his first leading role. Rodriguez will be the film’s writer and director, and it will be Rodriguez’ first non-studio film that he’s directed since he did El Mariachi. My biggest hope is that he’s able to recapture the same kind of gleeful lawlessness that inhabited El Mariachi and other films of that style. Filming will hopefully start in June.

The other movie that Rodriguez will be making is Predators for 20th Century Fox, another sequel to the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie; no other details have been released at this time.

Ever since the plot of the first Alien vs. Predator movie was revealed and it was not revealed to be the same story as the very awesome Dark Horse comics series, I’ve kinda given up on a good film adaptation of these movie sequels. I lay the blame at my first boyfriend’s feet, because he’s the one who introduced me to both movie franchises, the novels, and the comics, and I immediately found the comics versions to be the best.

This is definitely an “I need to know more” sort of situation.

It must be awesome to be best-selling novelist Patricia Cornwell.

Because as Variety noted, Cornwell, who writes a series of mystery novels with a female medical examiner as the main character, is so protective of Dr. Kay Scarpetta that only after getting to meet Angelina Jolie in person and have discussions about how one would bring the project to life in a screen version would she allow Fox 2000 to acquire the rights to her book series.

The very idea that Cornwell has so much creative control that she can make Angelina Jolie come to her just gives me the shivers, you know?

There are 16 books in the series which screams “Franchise!”, but the article states that the first movie won’t be specifically tied to any one of the movies. It sounds like any movie version would be “inspired by” rather than “based on” and I really don’t know how Cornwell fans would feel about that.

There are also going to be two non-Scarpetta books being made into TV movies for Lifetime (At Risk and The Front), and part of me wishes that Cornwell were so protective of those books that she didn’t sign the contract.

I’m a huge Nora Roberts fan, so when Lifetime recently did showcased four movies based on Roberts’ properties, I was so excited because I’d read two of the books, and the actors were people I thought were okay.

I don’t have DVR so I couldn’t tape the shows, but when I did get to sit down to catch a showing of Midnight Bayou one Saturday, I ended up turning off the TV in disgust.

Here’s hoping the Fox 2000-Angelina Jolie-Kay Scarpetta triad has more success as a live-action movie.

While negotiations are still going on, I’d like to assume that Mark Wahlberg is at least breathing a sigh of relief at the news that one of his next projects can get off the ground.

As reported in Variety, Relativity Media will be financing the production of The Fighter, with Christian Bale set to star opposite Wahlberg and David O. Russell directing. Based on a true story, Wahlberg will play contemporary boxer Micky Ward whose half-brother (Bale) redeems himself from a former life as a drug addict to regain some glory as Ward’s manager on the road to a world lightweight championship title and three legendary fights against Arturo Gatti.

All this came after both Brad Pitt and Matt Damon bowed out of playing the Dickie Eklund character, a boxer in his own right who once knocked out Sugar Ray Leonard, did hard time for a robbery spree that fueled his crack habit (and was one of the subjects in an HBO documentary about the crack addiction problem in Lowell, Massachusetts), and came out of prison a changed man.

Given that information, you have to wonder why they’d pass on such a meaty part, even if it is in service to playing the supporting role. I mean, Pitt’s favorite characters of mine have almost always been his supporting ones, and you’d think that Massachusetts native Damon wouldn’t mind playing a role based on a guy they call “The Pride of Lowell.”

Anyway, for Wahlberg’s sake, I hope that this time, Bale and Russell stick.

According to Variety, Fox Searchlight picked up the rights to Nice, a quirky little novel by Jen Sacks that was a huge hit for her in 1998, and are looking at Reese Witherspoon to star.

Originally, these rights had been at Warner Bros. and the movie was being developed as a vehicle for Helen Hunt, but it never got its act together—because the romantic comedy-style plot revolves around a female serial killer.

Sure, the blurb from Publisher’s Weekly completely glosses over the fact that the main character is a 30-year old woman who kills a boyfriend rather than break up with him, which turns into a “Meet Cute” when she gets some help from a former KGB assassin when trying to get rid of the body. And that she continues to kill boyfriends she can’t get rid of because she’s too nice to hurt their feelings when she dumps them.

I have very mixed feelings about this movie prospect. I recall famously vowing never wanting anything to do with The Devil Wears Prada because I hated the main character on the very first page of the book. (Note: Any woman who does not know how to drive a stick-shift car through Manhattan while smoking a cigarette isn’t my kind of woman.) However, even after two years, the movie intrigues me the more I read about it and I’m probably going to end up renting or borrowing it somewhere down the line.

I guess that if Fox Searchlight manages to be able to keep the dark tone of the novel along with the comedy, it’ll be okay; it’s all up to picking the right screenwriter, it seems.

I don’t know why the zeitgeist happened more with Facebook than with MySpace, but the sheer fact that now I’m vaguely in touch with people from high school with whom I’ve not had real contact in almost 15 years sometimes freaks me out—which is why I feel such a connection to the newest character on Kristen Bell’s production slate.

According to Variety, Bell will play the lead role in You, Again under Andy Fickman’s direction at Walt Disney Pictures. Bell will play a woman who discovers that her new sister-in-law-to-be is the same girl who bullied her and made high school a living hell for her, and she feels as if she’s gotta set her brother right. This will mark Fickman’s third Disney film (he’s also developing Monster Attack Network).

Again, the reason why I feel such a connection to Bell’s character is that for a very long time, I harbored a resentment towards a specific person I knew in high school, and Google-spied on this person every now and then over the years.

When I finally was able to get a message to this person via Facebook, I discovered that the thing I’d been hurt over and stewed over all these years had not happened the way that other person remembered it, which had the odd effect of making that initial hurt less important.

I wonder what direction the movie will take.

Back in November, it was announced that Paramount Pictures and Brad Pitt’s studio Plan B had bought the film rights to an in-progress graphic novel created by Paul Pope. The book’s still not out yet, but now comes word from The Hollywood Reporter that Alex Tse, the writer who managed to get so much right in Watchmen, will be adapting Battling Boy for the big screen.

I really wish I knew more about this GN because the premise does sound a little intriguing. Quoth Pope at his publisher First Second Books’s website:

Battling Boy is the son of a god or a super hero—it is left unspecified—who comes down from the top of a mountain (or rather, from inside a cloud/UFO contraption/contrivance from above a mountain top) at this father’s behest, in order to rid a giant city from it’s plague of monsters. Hercules had his labors, Batman has his Gotham, Battling Boy has his Monstropolis.

Well sure… entire epics have come from slimmer loglines, right?

But I still can’t help but feel as if better GNs that are just as well-drawn and actually have been released would make better movies, such as Mark Smylie’s Artesia series, about a woman who was both the concubine of a king and his greatest general, who survived his treacherous attempted slaughter to overtake his kingdom and lead it to glory against a darker, more evil threat to their known world.

Now isn’t that a much better logline and wouldn’t that make a much better movie?

The Battling Boy GN will be released onto bookshelves in 2010; there’s no date yet for the movie version.

Related Post: Paul Pope’s Battling Boy optioned

With a title that sounds like it’s from the Bible, director David O. Russell’s next film Aaron and Sara (aka B.F.F. according to IMDB) is going to be a romantic comedy, report the scribes from Variety.

To which, I say, “Bwuh?” And possibly cackle a little.

Yes, that David O. Russell, the one who had a fist-fight with George Clooney during the shooting of Three Kings and called Lily Tomlin a “cunt” while trying to shoot a scene for I Heart Huckabees. He’s going to be making a movie about teenagers in love.

According to the article, “[the] story centers on a nerdy guy and a popular girl who meet as freshmen and, over four years of high school, four proms and one funeral, become friends and eventually fall in love.”

The script is by Chad Gomez Creasey and Dara Resnik Creasey, a married couple who wrote the direct-to-DVD Legally Blondes which will be released this year and Milk‘s producers Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks are signed as well.

I am really looking forward to what his take on the rom-com/teen movie genre will be, and what kind of brilliant performances he can wring from today’s young actors. The idea of him putting them through their paces like work horses gives me so much schadenfreude, you know?

Announced by Variety late on Monday, Diane Keaton and Jeff Goldblum will be joining Harrison Ford and Rachel McAdams in a comedy called Morning Glory for Paramount Pictures.

Keaton and Ford will be playing the leads on a morning TV show who are constantly battling each other rather than working together, and McAdams will be the plucky young producer who takes it upon herself to save the show by making them get along, while Goldblum will play her boss.

I can’t tell you how pleased I am to know that Harrison Ford is going to be doing another comedy. One of my most favorite movies of all times is Working Girl, and it seems as if Morning Glory will be made with that same kind of “go get ’em, tiger” spirit. At the same time, I am hoping (possibly against hope) that there will be no romantic male lead for McAdams because what is wrong with there being a movie all about a woman’s career that doesn’t have to do with her personal life?

J.J. Abrams is producing, Roger Michell (Enduring Love, Notting Hill) is directing, and shooting starts next month in New York.

With the confirmation of the news that “Cowboy Bebop” was going to be turned into a live-action movie (with Keanu Reeves producing and starring in it), it was only a matter of time before we got another confirmation of a live-action rights purchase.

From The Hollywood Reporter comes news that production studio Manadalay Pictures (Into the Blue, Sleepy Hollow) has picked up the film rights to Full Metal Panic!, a series of novels written by Shoji Gatoh. The story revolves around a male teenage anti-terrorist commando who is forced to go undercover at a high school to protect a high school girl who has mysterious mystical powers.

These powers are so mysterious, by the way, that I couldn’t even understand what they were supposed to do the first time I saw the anime series that was spawned from the books and released by ADV Films.

Word is that Zac Efron is in talks to star, and I must say that comparing and contrasting Efron’s talents with those of Chris Patton, the voice actor who dubbed the main character’s voice in all of the anime versions to date is a funny little exercise, mostly because I’ve worked with Patton before and remember the first conversation I ever had with him quite vividly.

There’s no studio yet, and no screenwriter or director yet, but since Mandalay Pictures has a “first look” deal with Universal Pictures, the odds are good that this deal can move forward because the FMP! story is strong enough to transfer over into a mainstream audience and not lose the appeal of the original.

And though I may have spent many years toiling as an otaku-journalist, I’m still realistic enough to understand that in order to get the movie made, they’d have to move the high school from Japan to the States and cast American-sounding actors, and I’m actually okay with that. I like the idea of Efron as the star, but I am praying that they do not get another Disney tweenie to be cast opposite him.

Also, thanks to Transformers, we may even be able to keep the giant robots that are seen in the anime series, but I personally think the movie might be a little stronger if they took them out.

Now, if only we could get more news on the Neon Genesis Evangelion live-action adaptation.

Last year, New Line Cinema announced that they were going to be doing a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street and the race was on to find someone to be its lead bad guy, the horrifically scarred and allegedly pedophillic Freddy Krueger.

Well, the search is over, for Bloody-Disgusting.com broke the news late on Friday that Jackie Earle Haley—fresh off of his turn as Rorshach in Watchmen—had finished his negotiations and would be the new Freddy Krueger. Also starring in the film according to a post made just a little bit later will be Kyle Gallner—who has just been in another nouveau-horror film The Haunting in Connecticut—and he will take on the role that Johnny Depp’s character had in the original.

The movie starts filming in Chicago next month, with music video director Samuel Bayer working from Wesley Strick’s script. I fervently hope that this new version will be closer to how awesome and genuinely psychologically scary New Nightmare was and less like the schlock-fests that most of the other movies were.

Almost two months after just hearing about it, the lead cast has been announced for Christopher Nolan’s next movie from Warner Bros. that will not begin with a “B” and end in “-atman.”

Earlier in March, Variety reported that Leonardo DiCaprio was “final negotiations” to star in Inception, which is currently set for a July 16, 2010 release date. Looks like those negotiations worked, because now he’s considered the movie’s lead. Joining him, also according to Variety, will be Marion Cotillard, Cillian Murphy, and Ellen Page.

Out of the four of them, only Murphy has worked with Nolan before (it was his “blink and you’ll miss it” cameo as the Scarecrow in the beginning of The Dark Knight). He’s also the only one of the four of them who has not yet been nominated for or won an Academy Award.

Once you know the latter fact, getting rid of the fantastical mental image of him sitting alone in the commissary while the other three are at a table next to him, talking about how wonderful it is to go to the Oscars as a nominee is very difficult. But I’ll try.

However, I’ll also note that even the vaunted scribes at Variety aren’t being made privy to any of the details of the plot or what DiCaprio’s three recently announced co-stars will be doing in the film. It’s still being only described as “a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind”—which is driving the reporter in me crazy—but as a movie fan and Christopher Nolan fan, I don’t want whatever surprises he’ll throw my way to be ruined by knowing what’s going to happen. That’s why I didn’t run to pick up the book that The Prestige was based on before going to see the movie; I wanted to see the movie first.

2010 can’t come fast enough.

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