On one side, you have Chris Greenland, a blogger from science fiction publishing house Tor.com who said last week that Johnny Depp will be the star of a movie adaptation of the quintessentially British TV series.
After citing a deleted article from content mill PubArticles.com which said that the reason that new series creator Russell T. Davies moved on from the show to work on the movie, Greenland went on to say, “[I]t was with even greater surprise that movie studio sources confirmed with Tor.com today that, while it can’t comment on possible story elements, the casting of Johnny Depp as the Doctor for a 2012 film is confirmed.”
On the other side is Charlie Jane Anders from io9.com who went straight to the BBC and reported back that there is no plans to adapt “Doctor Who” into a movie franchise and that any talk was pure speculation.
Since Greenland’s article is still up and a redaction has not been printed, it makes me wonder exactly who his source is and how high up the chain he or she is. However, that’s the extent of the baseless speculation I’m going to be doing here as no one else has been able to independently verify this news through their own sources.
Well, at least according to this YouTube vid-maker, they are:
Normally I wouldn’t take such a piece of video from an account that was created just days before a video is uploaded as truth, but just as I had to click on the April Fools’ Day “black Star Wars” video, I had to check out this story about the World of Warcraft actors because I’ve been a voice actor fan ever since I was a young geek in Southern California.
Living that close to the Hollywood movie and TV machine, I got to attend a lot of voice acting panels when I went to anime conventions and actually got to know some of them better as people rather than “celebrities.” When I moved to New York City, I found that though the scene was a little different, the people were the same: hard workers who had a talent for sounding like something other than what they appeared to be.
And to be perfectly honest, I ended up working with many voice actors from both coasts and Texas in my roles as a journalist and as a guest coordinator for two anime conventions, so my perspective when I see a video like this may be a little different from any other person’s.
The thing that struck me was vid-creator Mr Oilsoap‘s claim that all of the Hollywood voice actors are professional actors who work within a union while actors in New York and Toronto, Canada are not. I can definitely tell you that over a decade of attending anime voice over panels has taught me that even Hollywood has had its variances regarding the employment of union actors versus non-union actors in a production; try getting California voice actors Steve Blum (Spike Spiegel from “Cowboy Bebop”) and David Lucas (Onizuka from “Great Teacher Onizuka”) in the same room at one time.
The other claim was that the Hollywood actors were “recognizable to anyone who watches films or TV,” and I have to add that it’s probably only a voice actor fan or geek like me who would know or care that the voice of Prince Kael’thas Sunstrider in Warcraft III and The Burning Crusade expansion is none other than Quinton Flynn, the voice of Iruka in “Naruto” and “Naruto Shippuden” or that Debi Mae West is not only Maiev Shadowsong in Warcraft III and The Burning Crusade but more importantly, is Meryl Silverburgh from the Metal Gear Solid games.
Still, it was an interesting vid, so I showed it to an old contact of mine… and the response I got surprised me.
My source within the industry wasn’t surprised that I’d seen the vid because it was something that had come to his/her attention as well along with a Playbill.com notice from a reputable casting firm in New York looking for:
Actors ages 25-55 years old to voice various roles for World of Warcraft video game. Actors must be skilled in accents — especially British and New York — among others.
“We’re not entirely sure of the details ourselves, but it just looks like a general WoW casting call. WoW adds content all the time. Everyone has been attempting to reach their various counterparts for confirmation,” my source said, adding, “To be fair, It’s not unusual for the actors to be the last to know.”
Why such a claim would surface when prominent WoW blogs like WoW.com and MMO-Champion.com haven’t picked up this story smacks of something fishy, and you can be assured that I’m going to try and get to the bottom of this.
Special thanks go out to Mattias, a human paladin, and Korixa, a gnome warlock, from the Guardians of Fire on the Elune U.S. server for additional research and support for this article.
While I was busy at work trying to get my replacement phone to recognize my settings so that I could once again receive Twitter updates on it (long story short: never lose your phone in a cab on New Year’s Eve, okay?), the Internet was a-buzz with the news that the new James Bond movie was going to be delayed near-indefinitely.
Or was it?
The culprit this time seemed to be the self-proclaimed experts at MI6.com, the “home of James Bond 007” who reported on series producer Michael G. Wilson’s status update to Total Film.com:
Our timeline [for the next film is] a little up in the air what with the situation at MGM, so we have to be flexible. We just don’t know enough about the situation to comment, but we know it’s uncertain.
And what is that situation over at MGM Studios, exactly? Why, the news from this past September that MGM was about to go bankrupt because they’re defaulting on their loans from 2005. The fact that the studio was granted a slight reprieve until January 31 isn’t stopping the L.A. Times bloggers and everyone else from speculating on the fate of the company, its catalog, and its upcoming films, and representatives from every other studio or conglomerate out there who’s eligible to either help refinance the company or buy it outright are keeping mum.
Which brings us back around to James Bond.
Not long after both pieces were published, another bit of news surfaced courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter and its “Heat Vision” bloggers Matthew Belloni and Borys Kit who say that not only are things moving forward, but that MGM may have found a director for the film in Sam Mendes (Jarhead, Away We Go).
Of course Belloni and Kit use the dreaded phrase “in negotiations” to describe the degree of finality and don’t even attribute their findings to an unnamed source, so I’m taking that bit of news with a grain of salt. And when an article by Variety‘s Dave McNary posted yesterday at 6:19 pm Pacific said, “The beleaguered studio refused to confirm reports about Mendes being in talks for the 23rd Bond pic” then I’m definitely not buying into the hysteria.
(Or maybe the studio is keeping quiet as to not scare off a potential bidder or refinancier they really like… arrrrgh! I refuse to be drawn into this game!)
Not exactly.
While I was busy at work trying to get my replacement phone to recognize my settings so that I could once again receive Twitter updates on it (long story short: never lose your phone in a cab on New Year’s Eve, okay?), the Internet was a-buzz with the news that the new James Bond movie was going to be delayed near-indefinitely.