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.

Jon Favreau pre­miered the first Iron Man 2 footage at this years Comic Con. Many descrip­tions have appeared online, I’ve included two in-depth descrip­tions in the full post and sum­ma­rized below.

- The footage opens in the giant donut and a con­ver­sa­tion between Tony Stark and Nick Fury — Stark doesn’t want to join the team.
– It then cuts to a court­room scene that sees the gov­ern­ment attempt­ing to strip Stark of his Iron Man suit
– Rhodey enters to tes­tify against Stark.
– Whiplash is out to get Tony as revenge for the Stark fam­i­lies’ atroc­i­ties, explained by a voiceover whilst Rourke con­structs a suit of his own.
– There’s a quick shot of Black Widow in action and then Whiplash flick­ing his two great electro-whips.
– Justin Ham­mer (Sam Rock­well) is now seen, talk­ing about Iron Man suit mod­i­fi­ca­tions “fire­power” — retro­fitting guns and armor. Rhodey says he’ll take it.
– Then there’s a quick shot of the com­plete War Machine suit.

Read the rest of this entry »

We had a sneak pre­view of a Prince of Per­sia movie poster via a shop win­dow reflec­tion in Con­fes­sions of a Shopa­holic, said poster does not resem­ble the oddly futur­is­tic ones recently released. The intense black and white posters are gar­nished with strong typog­ra­phy that I don’t rate highly — it feels some­how that they have missed the point? “Deny the future”. Although some are argu­ing that this stops the movie look­ing like a video game to movie adap­ta­tion — it is sleek and slick and could help the film find its audience.

Prince of Per­sia movie posters

Click for high res­o­lu­tion version:

Gemma Arter­ton minus text

Ben Kings­ley

Expect a Ben Kings­ley poster shortly, not our first view­ing, but this one is par­tic­u­larly men­ac­ing! Scoop via Com­ing Soon.

More of Jake as Prince

The EW also have a new shot of one star­tled look­ing Jake Gyllenhaal,

Thanks Suzy, Jerry, Javier and Ivan!

What with Comic-con and all there’s a lot of Iron Man 2 news float­ing about; we’ve got new offi­cially released pic­tures of Scar­lett Johans­son as the Black Widow, Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, Don Chea­dle as Rhodey and Sam Rock­well as Justin Hammer.

The first trailer for the offi­cial Iron Man 2 video game has turned up, although don’t expect to see any movie footage or plot arc secrets; the video game is based upon a wholly dif­fer­ent storyline.

This brand-new tale takes gamers deeper into the world of Iron Man, adding to the excite­ment of the upcom­ing Mar­vel Stu­dios film. Iron Man 2 offers fans a chance to play against epic ene­mies not found in the film of the same name, such as the unfor­get­table Crim­son Dynamo. In the game’s orig­i­nal story, Tony Stark has gifted the world with new tech­nol­ogy in order to make it a bet­ter place. His phil­an­thropic nature isn’t enough to keep evil at bay, how­ever, as Iron Man’s ene­mies have crafted their own devi­ous designs based on the tech­nol­ogy. Ulti­mately, Iron Man will face epic bat­tles against huge ene­mies, as the fate of the world is left in his pow­er­ful hands.

The World of War­craft movie is offi­cially on the move, after many months of stag­na­tion we thought the project may have died a quiet death. How­ever, behind the scenes it seems there were some excit­ing dis­cus­sions and today, two years since the ini­tial announce­ment, Bliz­zard and Leg­endary pic­tures have named their direc­tor, one Sam Raimi.

Raimi has directed both the Spider-man and Evil Dead series, and may be a per­fect choice, as some­one that can take a huge wealth of core mate­r­ial (with a strong fan fol­low­ing) and deliver some­thing phenomenal.

Raimi is cur­rently set to direct Spider-man 4 which is due for release in 2011, pro­duc­tion hasn’t yet started on the fourth movie, which gives the World of War­craft movie a release date, at the ear­li­est, some­time in 2012. (Assum­ing Spider-man 4 begins early next year, takes one year to com­plete and meets its release date, and that the WOW movie has a sim­i­lar schedule).

Press release

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – July 22, 2009 — Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment, Inc. and Leg­endary Pic­tures announced today that Sam Raimi has signed on to direct the eagerly-anticipated major motion pic­ture based on Bliz­zard Entertainment®’s award-winning War­craft® uni­verse. Raimi has, in the course of his career, clearly demon­strated a genius for devel­op­ing and adapt­ing exist­ing fic­tional uni­verses for main­stream audi­ences while stay­ing true to the spirit of the orig­i­nal con­tent.
Raimi directed the Spider-Man tril­ogy, which has bro­ken box-office records around the world and gar­nered five Acad­emy Award® nom­i­na­tions. Known for his imag­i­na­tive film­mak­ing style, richly drawn char­ac­ters and off­beat humor, Raimi wrote and directed the cult clas­sic, The Evil Dead and pro­duced 30 Days Of Night. He most recently wrote and directed the super­nat­ural thriller, Drag Me To Hell.

“At its core, War­craft is a fan­tas­tic, action-packed story,” said Raimi. “I am thrilled to work with such a dyna­mite pro­duc­tion team to bring this project to the big screen.”

Charles Roven’s pro­duc­ing tal­ents were recently seen with last summer’s block­buster The Dark Knight, which grossed in excess of $1 bil­lion, was nom­i­nated for eight Acad­emy Awards® and won two. His body of work also includes the widely acclaimed Bat­man Begins and the sci-fi clas­sic 12 Mon­keys. Roven, with Atlas pro­duc­ing part­ner Alex Gart­ner, will be pro­duc­ing with Leg­endary Pic­tures CEO Thomas Tull, Legendary’s Chief Cre­ative Offi­cer Jon Jashni, Raimi and Raimi’s pro­duc­ing part­ner Joshua Donen. Raimi’s part­ner, Robert Tapert, will be an Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer and Bliz­zard Entertainment’s Senior Vice Pres­i­dent of Cre­ative Devel­op­ment, Chris Met­zen, a Co-Producer.

“Part­ner­ing with Sam Raimi exem­pli­fies Legendary’s man­date of mar­ry­ing the high­est qual­ity intel­lec­tual prop­erty to world-class film­mak­ers” said Legendary’s Tull. “Sam’s pas­sion for ‘War­craft’ is unde­ni­able and we know that he will cre­ate an incred­i­ble film wor­thy of Blizzard’s phe­nom­e­nal fran­chise. We look for­ward to col­lab­o­rat­ing with our part­ners at Warner Bros. and con­tin­u­ing our suc­cess­ful rela­tion­ship with Chuck in bring­ing this rich new world to the screen.”

“Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment and Leg­endary Pic­tures have a shared vision for this film and we searched at length to find the very best direc­tor to bring that vision to life,” said Paul Sams, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer of Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment. “From our first con­ver­sa­tion with Sam, we could tell he was the per­fect choice. Sam knows how to simul­ta­ne­ously sat­isfy the enthu­si­asts and the main­stream audi­ence that might be expe­ri­enc­ing that con­tent for the first time. We’re look­ing for­ward to work­ing with him to achieve that here.”

News has been slow, and that’s an under­state­ment — it’s been almost a year. I apol­o­gize that the con­tent of the blog hasn’t been updated more often, but the truth of it is, there hasn’t been any news. The Gears of War movie has slipped into pro­duc­tion hell; we can only spec­u­late as to why — inter­est, finance and sched­ul­ing are some of the biggest contenders.

The video game adap­ta­tion as such is still in very early stages, despite hav­ing announced that Len Wise­man would direct; news that may no longer hold true given the length of time since the last update. We cer­tainly won’t be meet­ing the rumored 2010 Sum­mer release date, if pro­duc­tion ramped up this com­ing Jan­u­ary the best we could hope for is Spring 2011.

Some fan art

To lighten the mood a lit­tle I give you some fan art pro­duced by Brian Speer, depict­ing Batista as Mar­cus and also fea­tur­ing The Rock, inevitably, com­ments on this post will now turn into a cast­ing discussion.