Who hon­estly knows what is going on with the Halo Movie adap­ta­tion at the moment? Last week Neill Blomkamp came out and stated that the movie in its cur­rent form was dead and that we shouldn’t look for­ward to a Halo Movie any time soon.

I’d seen sto­ries like this before so I was a lit­tle reluc­tant to post the news arti­cle, that and it would mean the end of this blog, which isn’t some­thing I look for­ward to. So I held on with what lit­tle hope I had left.

Seems like my hope wasn’t entirely in vain. This week Peter Jackson’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive, Ken Kamins spoke to Com­puter and Video games. It first out­lines the das­tardly ways that Fox and Uni­ver­sal attempted to force the film mak­ers to a less than oppor­tune deal. Most impor­tantly how­ever, he states that every­body is supremely con­fi­dent in Neill and that pro­duc­tion is still under­way and that give Halo 3’s $300 mil­lion in sales a num­ber of movie stu­dios have renewed inter­est.

Writer James Van­der­bilt is, at the moment, fran­ti­cally work­ing on “flip­ping” David Benioff’s Wolver­ine movie script into a film-able for­mat before the WGA con­tract dead­line arrives at mid­night tonight (31st October):

Fox’s “X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine,” which is being penned by James Van­der­bilt (“Zodiac”), [… is] among dozens of scripts that are being flipped, a process that actu­ally is unit­ing execs and scribes in one goal: to get a script that is filmable. — Hol­ly­wood Reporter

Whilst look­ing towards the future, it is reported that Van­der­bilt has been cho­sen by Sony exec­u­tives to pen the fourth Spider-man feature:

Sev­eral writ­ers were being con­sid­ered for the fourth install­ment, and Van­der­bilt appar­ently was cho­sen by Sony exec­u­tives for his character-driven approach to the story rather than a focus on spe­cial effects. — Com­ing Soon

Updated: Rory’s Death Kiss 

I apol­o­gise for the brevity of the last post, it was a hop-in hop-out post as quickly as pos­si­ble dilemma.

As you all prob­a­bly know, the Hal­loween Why So Seri­ous scav­enger hunt is well under­way. “Clowns” have been “ordered” to go and take pic­tures of var­i­ous places through­out an assort­ment of major cities across the United States. These pic­tures are then uploaded to form a message…

“The only sen­si­ble way to live in this world is with­out rules“Not all the let­ters are filled in yet but the mes­sage is clear. It appears like a screen cap from the movie will reveal itself once the mes­sage is com­plete. Maybe it will be related to Two-Face, con­sid­er­ing the pump­kin rot­ting scenario.I have set up a topic for dis­cus­sion on the forums (apolo­gies for the theme on there at the moment, we had to revert back whilst some issues with PHPBB were ironed out):

Why So Seri­ous Discussion

The Clues:

Join the hunt

More details soon.

Vari­ety are run­ning an inter­est­ing report con­cern­ing the next Super­man film, dubbed Man of Steel,

“Super­man Returns” scribes Michael Dougherty and Dan Har­ris have opted not to come back and pen a sequel to the 2006 sum­mer pic that would have reunited them with helmer Bryan Singer. The three also worked together on “X2: X-Men United.”

The arti­cle con­tin­ues, stat­ing that WB are now accept­ing pitches for new writ­ers. There is also some spec­u­la­tion about the nature of the next movie, some say­ing that it will be rev­o­lu­tionised in the same way that the new Hulk fea­ture is being improved, whilst the WB are adamant that it will remain a true sequel to Super­man Returns.

The web­site Kino has posted some details from an inter­view with the Dark Knight direc­tor Christo­pher Nolan and pro­ducer Charles Roven, sadly how­ever, the web­site is entirely in Ger­man. Not to worry, Bat­man on Film have some inter­preters (oth­er­wise known as Google Trans­late) to work it all out for us non-bilinguals:

As we already know, Bat­man (Chris­t­ian Bale) trav­els to Hong Kong. Pro­ducer Chuck Roven con­firmed [the] Asian trip but would not reveal why Bat­man goes there. “Gang­ster hunt­ing” was mentioned.

The new Bat­man suit will be equipped with “[white] lenses” (some sort of bat sonar equipment).

The pro­logue that will be shown in IMAX in Decem­ber is the first five min­utes of the film.

Here’s a trans­lated quote from Chris Nolan: “[The Dark Knight] is not ‘The Joker Begins’. We did not want to tell how the Joker became what he is.

“In those five min­utes [of the pro­logue], we show how the Joker goes from being a small-time crook to Gotham’s great­est vil­lain. It’s like ‘The Rise of the Joker’.”

Mean­while, com­poser Mel Wes­son, work­ing with James New­ton Howard and Hans Zim­mer on the Dark Knight score, men­tioned the dark theme they were aim­ing to achieve (via Bat­MovieNews):

This is the one I’ve been wait­ing for. Another out­ing for Gotham’s Dark Knight, together with Hans Zim­mer and James New­ton Howard. I began work­ing on ideas in mid Sep­tem­ber ’07, it’s a long sched­ule but it’s good to have time to exper­i­ment and expand the ideas we had on Bat­man Begins into the dark­ness.… don’t for­get ‘Not all jokes are funny’.

It seems our can­dle melt­ing Dark Knight teaser over at Why So Seri­ous is begin­ning to get a lit­tle old and weary with time. Yes, the pump­kin is begin­ning to fray at the edges as rot sets in and the can­dle begins to reach its end.

Well spot­ted all those that sent this in.

EDIT: Right side only it seems, many peo­ple have sug­gested ref­er­ences to Two Face.

Why So Seri­ous has updated, remov­ing the for­ward link to the atro­cious clown site, replac­ing it with a sim­ple yet haunt­ing flash file depict­ing a flick­er­ing jack-o-lantern with a bat shaped ghoul­ish grin. Creepy.

And the rumors — A viral mar­ket­ing cam­paign to reach its pin­na­cle come Halloween?

(Thanks for the heads up Jay)

EDIT: Some astute view­ers have noticed that the can­dle is slowly burn­ing down, if you go to the site now you will see that the can­dle is much shorter.