Of course there was going to be a sequel to the Twilight movie that has captured teen hearts all over the world. That’s not news.

What is news is that the sequel will not be directed by Catherine Hardwicke, despite the fact that it’s taken in almost $160 million worldwide over a production budget of only $37 million. (The fact that it has a 44% fresh tomatometer reading is irrelevant because when the source material sucks and your fanbase wants you to stick slavishly to it, there’s not much else you can do.)

The Variety article points out something very interesting to me:

The problem that stalled negotiations [between Summit Entertainment and Catherine Hardwicke] was that Hardwicke had strong opinions about what to do with the next installment, and so did Summit. The debate was how to focus the adaptation of the second book [New Moon], which deals more with giant werewolves than vampires, as well as the long depression of Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), after her vampire lover (Rob Pattinson) leaves her. One issue was how to get more of teen heartthrob Pattinson into the film. (Rosenberg has figured out a device to achieve this.) But Hardwicke, burned out from her Twilight labors, simply wasn’t willing to jam this movie with a script that still needed months of development.

And this, my friends, is why people shouldn’t adapt novels that have weak and flimsy plots into movies, no matter how much money it could potentially make.

You’ll notice that there’s been very little Twilight coverage in this blog. Well, that’s because Gordon and I have taste.

However, it’s not going to stop me from linking to this story from Collider.com about the action figures, because the idea of there being a toy with sparkly vampire action makes me giggle.

I know I’m a little late to the Cleopatra party, but when you have a day job like mine, things fall by the wayside.

The news to date about  Steven Soderbergh’s newest brainstorm, Cleo, is that he is in the planning stages of doing a movie musical about the life of ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra that will be shot in 3D. Initial reports on this popped up on places like Variety back in October with its star confirmed as Catherine Zeta-Jones.

The newest news is that Ray Winstone (whom I adored in Beowulf and am eager to finally see him in Scum) is joining the cast as Julius Caesar, and a finer choice has never been made. But the thing that I’m interested in the most is this musical scoring by Guided by Voices.

MTV.com‘s Josh Horowitz got Soderbergh to talk about the disbanded group and how he thought of them:

Soderbergh said he’d been thinking about using frontman Robert Pollard’s music for his long-gestating musical, when a conversation with former GBV member James Greer led to Greer writing the script in just six weeks. “He went away for like six weeks and wrote this great script! It’s like an Elvis musical in a way. It’s not serious. I mean it’s historically pretty accurate but its sort of like Viva Las Vegas meets Tommy.”

Considering that Winstone was in The Who’s Quadrophenia—which is perhaps the best rock musicals around—I was hoping that the musical could have a little bit of that sort of gravitas. And then I went vid-hunting on YouTube:

Er. Yes.

Well, since they’re constantly reinventing themselves, maybe GBV will have something different for the musical?

Fanboy.com‘s Michael Pinto—he who propelled me onto that wild goose chase which ended up at “Life on Mars”—has redeemed himself somewhat by linking to perhaps the best gift you could ever give a film geek for any holiday, or a birthday, or just because you really, really appreciate their hard work over the last six months of blogging (ahem, ahem, Gordon).

From 2006 comes a 50-DVD Criterion set of films that were all distributed through Janus Films, the distributor who is responsible for introducing films like Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Fritz Lang’s M to the American cinescape. Pinto has the entire list of films up on his site, and according to Amazon.com, they’ll sell it to you new for the low, low price of $765.

Of course a true cinephile would wait for the Blu-ray…

There are times I’m glad that here at Movie Make-out we have a very strict news reporting policy and this is one of them.

According to his representatives, there has been no change to Australian director George Miller’s involvement with the Justice League film and that another Mad Max is “being seriously worked on.” This refutes an earlier report that Dark Horizons had on its site, but has since scrubbed from its server and probably set on fire, which stated that (according to Coming Soon):

George Miller appeared on the Sydney-based morning talk show “Sunrise” on Monday and confirmed that he’s no longer involved with the Justice League movie in any capacity; that if the project does get going again, he expects that it’ll be recast as “the studios seem to want bigger stars in their superhero movies now”; [and] that he’d like to work with Mel Gibson again and while the actor doesn’t want to do the Mad Max script he wrote, he hasn’t given up on that possibility just yet.

(Kind of specific for something that has absolutely no basis in fact, huh?)

The updated Dark Horizons announcement explains that “the original scooper, a usually reliable source, also seems to have vanished into the electronic ether.”

It’s no secret that my horse in the race between the AMPTP (aka the evil conglomerates who decide to do things like release a third Grease movie direct to DVD), SAG (aka the group of actors for whom it’s hard to feel sympathy when one of their long-standing demands includes first-class air travel to location shoots [page 8 of the .pdf]) is actually the WGA because not only did they manage to keep together their membership during the tough negotiations, I’m a writer, too. (Hey, I never said it was the most noble of reasons for liking them.)

Well, to overstate the metaphor, according to the AMPTP’s .pdf Fact Sheet, the WGA is entering the fray like a horse that should have been put out to pasture a long time ago:

On November 19th, the Writers Guild of America issued a press release alleging that Hollywood studios “are not paying residuals for writers’ work that is reused on new media.” The WGA issued its press release just as a federal mediator was about to bring SAG and AMPTP together. In addition, the WGA made its complaint about new media residuals without first asking any of the Companies to help resolve any outstanding issues, as is customary practice. The WGA’s press release was highly misleading and seems to have been designed to poison the atmosphere for the federal mediation rather than to actually ensure that residual payments are made to working writers.

At least that’s what it looks like on the surface. But if you read the Fact Sheet a little more closely, my WGA horse is more like the championship stud horse who got sidelined by a very minor injury, only to find out later on that the doctor who treated it botched up the recovery so that even if he wanted to even gallop across the field, he can’t:

Some studios have either made streaming payments to the WGA under the new formula, or are set to make those payments this week. The remaining studios are still working to program their residual systems to incorporate the new formulae.

and

An unprecedented number of new formulas for residual payments for film and television streaming, permanent downloads (EST), and derivative and original made for new media programs that needed to be programmed.

Are you kidding me? The first excerpt sounds a little too much like “Your check is in the mail” whereas I highly doubt that a good, core team of independently chosen mathematicians and computer programmers couldn’t tackle those formulas and whip up a solution in a month.

Still, I have to admit that the WGA’s dramatic timing of their press release was actually quite a bit of genius.

Which is exactly what you’d expect from a bunch of writers.

Of course Debbie Allen is going to be in the remake of Fame. It wouldn’t make sense if she wasn’t. However, the names of the some of the instructors she will be overseeing as the performing arts school’s principal in Lakeshore and MGM’s remake has just been released to places like Variety, and their pedigrees are sound:

• Charles S. Dutton, star of “Roc” and who graduated from the Yale School of Drama will play an acting teacher.
• Juilliard-attendee Kelsey Grammer, who set the bar for classical music snobbery in “Cheers” and “Frasier” will portray an orchestra maestro.
• Megan Mullally who played a screechy rich bitch in “Will & Grace” will play a voice instructor; Mullally is a graduate from the School of American Ballet.
• Bebe Neuwirth, Grammer’s repressed wife on “Cheers” and “Frasier” who surprised the hell out of me when I found out she could sing and who has won two Tony awards will play a dance instructor.

Hollywood Reporter notes that some of the other kids in the cast have been set as well; their names are Kristy Flores, Paul Iacono, Paul McGill, Naturi Naughton and Kay Panabaker and none of them sound familiar to me, which is awesome because there were unknowns in the first Fame as well.

Jazz hands!

Related Stories: Brian K. Vaughn, others make HR’s ‘Next Gen’ list

Much props go to 27 Dresses star Katherine Heigl who—as of today—started being just one year younger than me at 30. Much disgust goes to her manager for not turning down the role of Nicole in My Father the Hero 14 years ago, because it gave the world this cringe-worthy scene (via EW’s Popwatch blog).

Just in case you didn’t get enough of suave golden boy Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight this summer, you’re in luck. Hollywood Reporter noted last week that Eckhart will be the star of his very first action flick called Battle: Los Angeles for Columbia Pictures—hopefully not to be confused with Battlefield Earth in posterity.

This Battle is also a science fiction film, about a Marine platoon leader (Eckhart) and his squad who are fighting aliens in Los Angeles during an invasion. The script is by Chris Bertolini, whose last major work was adapting The General’s Daughter for its 1999 release; Jonathan Liebesman who apparently did a decent enough job directing Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning will take the helm for this one.

I’m definitely ready to believe Eckhart as a Marine, mostly because of the stark earnestness he brought to Harvey Dent in Knight. I’m also curious as to finding out more about this movie because with the advent of a different kind of sci-fi with the “new” “Battlestar Galactica” TV series and the revamped “Doctor Who,” I gotta know exactly where these aliens are supposed to be coming from and how far in the future this film will be set.

I mean, you’d think we’d have mined the “Let’s fight aliens on our own turf” genre enough with just Independence Day alone, right?

Awards season is in danger yet again as federally-negotiated talks between the AMPTP and SAG broke down last week, according to Variety, which will prompt the SAG leadership to ask its members if they want to go on strike.

The name-calling started immediately, with the AMPTP calling SAG leaders (warning: PDF enclosed) “out of touch with reality” with regards to the touchy economic situation that the huge conglomerates are finding themselves in, mostly because most studio funding comes from banks — which everyone knows are in a little bit of trouble these days.

However, one tidbit from the SAG notice on that section of their website points to why the SAG leaders and negotiators may be insisting on a better deal than what everyone else has gotten this year:

We remain committed to avoiding a strike but now more than ever we cannot allow our employers to experiment with our careers. The WGA has already learned that the new media terms they agreed to with the AMPTP are not being honored…. (emphasis mine)

This casts an entirely different light on SAG for me now, because if they’re not budging because the conglomerates are reneging on the contract details that everyone else received — or worse yet, there’s a loophole in the signed contract that anticipated this economic crisis — then that’s all the reason one would need to attempt to negotiate for a better contract than what was left on the table this summer.

Time to do some reading up on these contracts…

Related Posts: AMPTP vs. SAG: The Feds step in