A shot of Tony Stark sit­ting in a chair watch­ing what is pre­sum­ably a home movie. Pic­ture via Marvel.

The full 5 minute Iron Man 2 Comic-con footage has leaked online. In it we see the full court room scene, our first look at War Machine, Whiplash’s electro-whips, Scar­lett Johans­son as The Black Widow and much more. It matches per­fectly the descrip­tions we’ve read about from SDCC.

This is our first look at Iron Man 2 footage,

IESB are report­ing that Steven Spiel­berg may be tak­ing up the Halo movie gig, a cou­ple years after his Tintin pal Peter Jack­son dropped the project. There’s no con­clu­sive proof and the rumor sources are “stu­dio exec­u­tives” and “close ties to CAA”; what do the rumors say?

“[Steven Spiel­berg is] cur­rently in active nego­ti­a­tions to develop the fea­ture film adaptation”

The story is hyped up with details of Spielberg’s video game hob­bies and sug­gested fas­ci­na­tion of the lat­est Stu­art Beat­tie “Fall of reach” script, aka a Mas­ter Chief back story orig­i­nally writ­ten in 2001 by Erik Nylund. We’re tak­ing this one with a grain of salt. BUT, it is good to see the Halo movie back in the lime­light — one day, maybe, it will hit the big screens.

IESB has learned exclu­sively (believe me this is solid and I’ve con­firmed it three times over with stu­dio exec­u­tives and our close ties to CAA) that one of the biggest pro­duc­ers in Hol­ly­wood his­tory is cur­rently in active nego­ti­a­tions to develop the fea­ture film adap­ta­tion and no it’s not Jerry Bruck­heimer or Peter Jack­son. It’s the man behind Jaws, E.T., Indi­ana Jones and Trans­form­ers, Mr. Steven Spielberg.

Spiel­berg is blown away by writer Stu­art Beattie’s take on the game in his script enti­tled HALO THE FALL OF REACH. This cou­pled with the fact that his Dream­works umbrella is look­ing for a big tent pole to help launch their newly inde­pen­dant stu­dio with dis­tri­b­u­tion over at Walt Dis­ney Pic­tures after los­ing Trans­form­ers to Para­mount in the sep­a­ra­tion, it’s the per­fect combination.

Gary Whitta (screen­writer [Futu­rama episodes, Book of Eli, Live action Akira], author and game designer) has revealed that over the past two years he has been fer­vently work­ing, in secret, on the World of War­craft movie adap­ta­tion. How­ever, since Raimi has come on board, the film’s direc­tion has changed and Whitta is no longer involved. Whitta explains,

I had actu­ally been work­ing on this for the past two years. Had to keep it under wraps at the time but it doesn’t really mat­ter now.

I worked very closely with Leg­endary and Bliz­zard to come up with a screen­play that dis­tilled the sprawl­ing War­craft mythol­ogy into a nar­ra­tive that was eas­ily acces­si­ble to the non-player, and every­one was really pleased with the results — I per­son­ally thought my last draft of the script in par­tic­u­lar was really kick-ass and did a good job of intro­duc­ing the War­craft world to non-players while also sat­is­fy­ing hard­core play­ers who knew every nook and cranny of the uni­verse. When Sam expressed inter­est in the prop­erty, how­ever, he had his own pretty spe­cific vision of what he wanted to do story-wise so that’s the ver­sion they’re now pur­su­ing. I’m no longer involved but I wish them all the best with it; so far as I’m con­cerned Raimi is the best pos­si­ble direc­tor for this.

Thanks Márton Gazdig.

Just as I cast my doubts on the pro­duc­tion of the Gears of War movie, it rears its head at this year’s SDCC with a panel fea­tur­ing Len Wise­man (direc­tor) and Chris Mor­gan (writer, Wanted). Pro­duc­tion is still in the ear­li­est stages, but more importantly—it is still in pro­duc­tion. How early? No con­cept art, cast­ing or pro­duc­tion stills yet. Wise­man and Mor­gan did how­ever offer up their thoughts on the adaptation.

Cast­ing

The first ques­tions con­cerned cast­ing, in par­tic­u­lar the (entirely unsub­stan­ti­ated) rumors that wrestlers would be cast as main char­ac­ters. Wise­man said that cast­ing strong men wouldn’t be his choice, instead, “I’m look­ing for an actor for the role and then [I’ll] put him into shape”, adding “I’m always think­ing who could play the best Mar­cus. You want to get hooked into the char­ac­ter [first] and then all the amaz­ing spectacle.”

As for the cast­ing of Maria, Len Wise­man wants his wife Kate Beck­in­sale to play the badass female role, “If I can con­vince [Kate Beck­in­sale] — and I think I have a shot — I’d love to see that.”

Plot

Emer­gence day will play a big role in the movie’s plot, but the films are unlikely to closely fol­low the games. Whilst promis­ing to fol­low the Gears his­tory closely, he made no guar­an­tees about “appeas­ing gamers”. Rod Fer­gu­son, the game’s exec­u­tive pro­ducer, explained:

“You can be too tied to what is the game. We’re so ori­ented at grab­bing the gam­ing audi­ence, we don’t leave behind what shouldn’t be in the movie. We’re about mak­ing the best movie pos­si­ble, not about mak­ing Gears of War the game into a movie… pre­vi­ous movies haven’t been will­ing to let go. We had only three pages [of notes for Wise­man]. ‘Please don’t kill Marcus.’

To sum­ma­rize, the stu­dios have been asked to:

“make the best movie pos­si­ble that fits your medium.”

Changes may include female COGs.

Wise­man and Mor­gan add:

“The tone of the char­ac­ters and how they inter­act with each other [lends to] the over­all expe­ri­ence of the movie. Look at Aliens in terms of the dark envi­ron­ment, but then how much fun you have with the characters.”

“Even though the world is lit­er­ally at an end, they still joke. They have real emo­tion and compassion.”

Before Wise­man concludes,

“There’s so much opin­ion out there about what this movie should be and shouldn’t be, it falls on a very small group of peo­ple… and I’m one of those peo­ple. Are you going to respect the game? Of course I am. It is a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence from watch­ing a movie, but it’s my job of trans­lat­ing it into the best cin­e­matic story [possible].”

Thanks Bill!

Chris Met­zen, Blizzard’s VP of Cre­ative Devel­op­ment, has spo­ken with Game­Spy about the lat­est WOW Movie devel­op­ments — mainly Sam Raimi as direc­tor of the big screen adap­ta­tion. He dis­cusses Raimi’s ded­i­ca­tion to cre­at­ing faith­ful adap­ta­tions (he didn’t have full cre­ative con­trol in Spider-man 3) and his excite­ment at see­ing famil­iar places and char­ac­ters brought to the big screen.

Game­Spy: You’ve just made the big announce­ment that Sam Raimi will be direct­ing the War­craft movie. You’re co-producing, so what are your thoughts on the announcement?

Chris Met­zen: We’re all very, very excited about the announce­ment. We waited a long time to announce a direc­tor. We’ve been with Leg­endary for a num­ber of years and we’ve jammed a lot of ideas, and we’ve waited for the right per­son­al­i­ties, the right chem­istry to come together. We’re really, really stoked that it finally has. It’s pretty sur­real that we’ve finally made the announce­ment. It’s finally like, “It’s on, it’s offi­cial, here we go.” We’re just stoked to get it going and see this thing start­ing to take shape.

Game­Spy: Was Sam Raimi one of the orig­i­nally tar­geted directors?

Chris Met­zen: We talked about a lot of dif­fer­ent peo­ple, and cer­tainly his name was one of the first we had talked about. We’re all huge “Spider-Man” fans, and all of his hor­ror con­tent, like “Army of Dark­ness” is one of my per­sonal favorites. Sam’s one of those guys who came out swing­ing with “Spider-Man,” in terms of han­dling the licensed prod­uct and all the geeky fan­fare. The pas­sion of fan­dom, he really trans­lated that into some­thing that every­one could love, and had a lot of heart. And those were really impor­tant com­po­nents for us, in terms of trans­lat­ing a license, in build­ing a cin­e­matic expe­ri­ence that speaks to the license, but really sings to every­body. That was really, really impor­tant to us, so he was the per­fect partner.

[…]

Game­Spy: The fan base is rely­ing on you to ensure that the movie stays true to War­craft. Are you pre­pared to say that it will be?

Chris Met­zen: Absolutely! Absolutely.

Game­Spy: What most excites you about co-producing the movie?

Chris Met­zen: The thing that would excite me most is just that it trans­lates boldly. That it feels like a fan expe­ri­ence, and that a cou­ple years from now, you sit down in a the­ater and you’re like, “They did it. They got it. That feels gen­uine.” It may not be about your Level 12 Night Elf Hunter, specif­i­cally, but all the famil­iar­ity — the locales, the places, the char­ac­ters, the sto­ry­lines — it all feels con­tigu­ous and one-to-one with your expec­ta­tions. That’s my great hope.