Noth­ing more than the logo and Nick Fury’s voice over on this short trailer from this year’s Comic-con, but it does bring a lit­tle buzz of excitement.

Down­load the trailer

The BBC are report­ing that Cap­tain Amer­ica film­ing will take place on the streets of Man­ches­ter and Liv­er­pool to recre­ate a 1940’s pre-war New York. Pre­cisely, Manchester’s North­ern Quar­ter and Liverpool’s Stan­ley Dock.

America’s First Avenger will bat­tle his foes on the streets of Man­ches­ter and Liv­er­pool dur­ing film­ing on the big-budget super­hero film.

Manchester’s North­ern Quar­ter is to be trans­formed into 1940s New York for a dra­matic car chase in Cap­tain Amer­ica: The First Avenger.

Pro­duc­ers chose the North­ern Quar­ter to recre­ate New York because of its tow­er­ing build­ings and pre-war architecture.

The loca­tion was organ­ised through the Vision+Media film office, based at Mediac­ity in Sal­ford Quays, which brought the big bud­get pro­duc­tion of Sher­lock Holmes to Man­ches­ter and Liverpool.

Susan Williams, drama liai­son man­ager, said the com­pany was approached by the stu­dio, which is also behind the suc­cess­ful Spi­der Man and Hulk films, in February.

“We sug­gested the area to Mar­vel as its wide streets, tow­er­ing build­ings and pre-war archi­tec­ture will make the per­fect 1940s New York.”

Res­i­dents, local busi­nesses and Man­ches­ter City Coun­cil have all been con­sulted about the pro­duc­tion, which will last about two weeks from mid September.

Details of scenes due to be filmed at Liverpool’s Stan­ley Dock are yet to be finalised.

More action from this weekend’s Trans­form­ers 3 film­ing has sur­faced, this time show­ing a bus explod­ing and rolling towards the cam­eras on State St and Wacker Drive. The bus splits clean in two, as if being kicked in the mid­dle by a Decep­ti­con. (Thanks gopher1)

Skil­let Lick­ers has also posted images from the TF3 set, show­ing sol­diers (includ­ing Josh and Tyrese) bat­tling behind a yel­low cab. View the full set on Flickr.

Roll­bar

This week pro­duc­tion moves to the Old Post Office (Mon­day through Wednes­day, 7am-10pm), Van Buren Street is closed for the dura­tion. There will be pyrotechnics.

Mean­while, here are a cou­ple of close up videos show­ing Opti­mus Prime, the Wreck­ers and Bum­ble­bee emerg­ing from their slum­ber for a bit of Chicago Trans­form­ers 3 film­ing this past weekend:

If it were in any doubt that Shia was hav­ing a major fight with Patrick Dempsey, then this image of Dempsey point­ing a gun at his head should quell that. A video has also been cap­tured, show­ing that Tyrese and Josh get in on the action.

Via TLAMB

Wreck­ers

Until now, the weaponized Nascars have been dubbed stun­ti­cons, omni­bots and rally­bots, all three names have been rejected by MichaelBay.com’s Nel­son. Nel­son has since con­firmed that they are actu­ally called Wreck­ers. Wikipedia pro­vides some back­ground on the characters:

The Wreck­ers are a sub-team of Auto­bots in the fic­tional Trans­form­ers Uni­verse, func­tion­ing essen­tially as a com­mando unit.

Red Faced

Film­ing last week on Michi­gan Avenue, Chicago, the Trans­form­ers 3 crew were using more card­board head cut outs. This time, lowfatoreo’s YouTube video has high­lighted a new char­ac­ter, red faced and angry look­ing this could be the robot mode of the Fer­rari, Roll­bar or a Wrecker, my per­sonal guess is that it’s the red Wrecker. Hat tip to Trans­form­ers Live for pick­ing this one out.

Ein­stein, Mercedes

Until now it’s been pre­sumed that the Mer­cedes was the lat­est incar­na­tion of Jolt, how­ever Nel­son has dis­pelled these rumors on the offi­cial Michael Bay site, point­ing out instead that the Mer­cedes E550 is the alt mode of the Ein­stein looka­like robot, that is called Q (“like in James Bond”).

A fan, That­NewTechGuy, man­aged to cap­ture some of the film­ing action in Chicago, show­ing Sam Witwicky going fisticuffs with Carly’s (Rosie Hunt­gin­ton) boss, played by Patrick Dempsey.

Just­Jared have also posted some shots of Patrick Dempsey look­ing very much like a badass:

The Gears of War movie adap­ta­tion has been pretty quiet of recent. In April this year rumors that pro­duc­tion on a Gears of War movie had slowed down kicked up again–this time from New Line stu­dio sources (as reported by LATimes). Reports sug­gested the sto­ry­line and bud­get were being dra­mat­i­cally scaled back and that Len Wise­man would be focussing on other projects, namely Noc­ture. The orig­i­nal bud­get was expected to be around $100m, it is now thought to be con­sid­er­ably less.

The script by Chris Mor­gan (“Wanted”) had a lot of buzz around it, and was tweaked late last year by Billy Ray, which included a lot of char­ac­ter work. Reports were good, a sprawl­ing and epic action movie. The change to the bud­get how­ever makes the film much less epic, and much more a sim­ple inva­sion story. With this in mind, New Line are search­ing for writ­ers to make these changes. Until this is ready, pro­duc­tion is stalled.

Wise­man has now been attached to the Total Recall remake, and will almost cer­tainly not be direct­ing the Gears movie. Add to this that Kate Beck­in­sale is his wife, and we’ve lost our only cast member.

What now for the Gears of War movie? A 2012 release? A low bud­get action film?