Gen­Zhao at TFW2005 has posted images of the new Mud­flap Fast Action Bat­tler toy which is being sold on eBay. He is also sell­ing a Deluxe Class Skids toy (view auc­tion).

Mud­flap

View Mud­flap Auction

MTV has spo­ken Spidey-4 with Sam Raimi; no real juicy gos­sip bits to be had, but good to hear the project is mov­ing swiftly for­ward nonethe­less. It does appear that the dual Spider-man 4 & 5 shoot­ing sched­ule that was pre­vi­ously rumored may have been dropped, pos­si­bly in favor of The Avengers movie com­ing in 2012.

“The writ­ers, pro­duc­ers and I are work­ing out what the story will be, but we haven’t been talk­ing in terms of Part 4 and 5. […] I’ve read that [about ‘Spider-Man 5’] also, but right now we’re just work­ing on the story for ‘Spider-Man 4,’ just that one film.”

[…]

“We’re def­i­nitely talk­ing about work­ing from all the mate­r­ial in the comic books and noth­ing [invented] out­side of that. All the char­ac­ters or vil­lain or vil­lains, what­ever we decide to do will be from Stan Lee’s cre­ations or those that came after him.”

[On who will be the next villain(s)]

“I do have a pretty good idea, but I’m just not a lib­erty to say yet,”

[On Kirsten Dunst in Spider-man 4]

“I can’t imag­ine mak­ing a ‘Spider-Man’ movie with­out Kirsten,” he said, seem­ingly con­tem­plat­ing the idea in his head with a long pause. “Of course it can be done because Spi­der Man has existed with­out the char­ac­ter of Mary-Jane but she’s one of my favorite parts and it would be a shame not to have her in the pic­ture. I’m hop­ing she’ll be in it and I’m plan­ning on hav­ing a story with her in it.”

Yayabee at The Arker has posted images of a new Trans­form­ers 2 toy. It is an auto­bot that appears to have an alt mode of a Antonov An-225 air­craft — inside it car­ries a very small Opti­mus Prime. The AN-225 is a Russ­ian craft that matches the rear wing and under­side design of the toy as well as car­ry­ing a space­craft on top, though it has two addi­tional engines and the nose cone appears dif­fer­ent. It also has sim­i­lar­i­ties with the C-130 Hercules.

Whether this char­ac­ter shall appear in ROTF is debat­able — it is plau­si­ble that the Auto­bots board the craft (maybe at the Bone­yard) to travel to Egypt, but it doesn’t make sense for a Russ­ian plane to be there. Another angle is the craft is orig­i­nally sup­plied by the com­bined UN force in a bid to help fight the Decepticons.

SPOILERS ARE IN THIS POST. Post­ing scans of kids col­or­ing books doesn’t seem like a suit­able past time, so I don’t intend to do it too often. But today there are some scans of the new Revenge of the Fallen col­or­ing book that have hit the inter­web. Within it there are the usual robots that can be col­ored in but, more inter­est­ingly, a much sim­pli­fied sto­ry­line for the sequel — includ­ing the pre­sumed finale.

Spoil­ers after the break…
Read the rest of this entry »

Favreau had pre­vi­ously ruled out par­tic­i­pa­tion in Marvel’s Avengers movie due to their aggres­sive sched­ul­ing — Marvel’s orig­i­nal release date was set for May 2011, one year after the sched­uled Iron Man 2 release, which would sim­ply make things impos­si­ble. That release date has since been pushed back to May 2012, putting an extra year in The Avengers devel­op­ment cycle. Favreau has pre­vi­ously expressed an inter­est in helm­ing The Avengers movie and com­bined with the relaxed sched­ul­ing opens the door to an inter­est­ing rumor. New spy ‘Fuzzy Dun­lop’ spills the beans to AICN:

–Avengers is delayed a year because of financ­ing issues but also because the plan is for Favreau to helm it. Every­body here loves the guy and he wants to do it, but it would have been impos­si­ble for him to do before the date change given his Iron Man 2 com­mit­ments. Also partly the rea­son why he agreed to do the Stark sequel on such an accel­er­ated sched­ule was so he could get given first dibs on this. It would still be a pun­ish­ing sched­ule for him, so hes not firmly con­firmed yet, but he is cer­tainly the pre­sump­tive direc­tor at this point.

- Iron Man starts rehearsals in a few days, which is why the cast­ing is finally com­ing together so quickly.

[…]

Call me Fuzzy Dunlop

I think we can almost cer­tainly cast these as fake in the cat­e­gory of rumor mon­ger­ing for the sake of jump­ing on the back of another movie’s suc­cess to sell news­pa­per copies. The Sun report that Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire star Freida Pinto has been invited to screen test for James Bond 23 — pro­duc­ers were sup­pos­edly impressed by her dur­ing cast­ing for Quan­tum of Solace, but at that time she was too young to play a ‘secret agent’s lover’.

The Sun are con­tin­u­ing with their already debunked Danny Boyle to direct rumor. Maybe Dev Patel will be the next Bond?

A reader at the Shoot for the Edit forums has posted a trans­la­tion of a French TF2 arti­cle that con­tains some spoil­ers. Specif­i­cally it appears to reveal the start and end of the movie in a very vague man­ner, before out­lin­ing a few scenes involv­ing Shia, Bum­ble­bee, Skids and Mud­flaps and Agent Sim­mons, John Tur­turro. The mag­a­zine sug­gests that Tur­turro also voices an old Trans­former that loses parts with every move — undoubt­edly this is Jet­fire, whilst Bay out­lines his thoughts on the bick­er­ing twins which come across like some sort of mechan­i­cal jar jar binks.

Set: Egypt, in front of Kheops Pyra­mid, stands an ancient 30’s palace built for King Faruk’s guests.

At “Action”, Shia runs through the yard, stops at the doorstep and hits the door with his shoul­der. Megan Fox, John Tur­turro and Ramon Rodriguez come next and hurry inside the building.

Shia heads up, shout a few words at an imag­i­nary Bum­ble­bee, and gets in. Three cars, the Camaro, the red TRAX and the green BEAT, start quickly and stop a bit fur­ther away to look out. The three vehi­cles are dri­ven by black-suited (and thereby “invis­i­ble”) stunt­men behind the smoked glass.

At the end of the day, the crew moves to the third and small­est pyra­mid, Myk­eri­nos. John Tur­turro, back as always angry agent Sim­mons, has to climb up a few stones. This hasn’t been done for 30 years: Too many acci­dent occurred and Egyp­tians had for­bid­den it. Tur­turro will try to run from an imag­i­nary Decepticon.

Michael Bay says: “I had the idea of these two stu­pid Trans­form­ers, Skids and Mud­flap. They’re twins who can’t stop bick­er­ing, but they do heroic things at the begin­ning of the movie.

Bum­ble­bee, on his side, has become more seri­ous. He doesn’t want to leave Sam’s par­ents’ garage. There is also an old Trans­former, who loses screws and bolts at every move. And it’s John Tur­turro voic­ing him.”

The movie will start at Gyzeh, Egypt, long before pyra­mids were built, and will end at the same place nowa­days, with a huge fight between Auto­bots and Decepticons.

It’s said that we’ll learn in the movie how pyra­mids were built. Does it involve any Transformer?

TF08 have posted pack­ag­ing shots of the Side­swipe and Ram­page toys, includ­ing their biogra­phies. An inter­est­ing point to note is Rampage’s jack ham­mer mode — a sort of third con­fig­u­ra­tion, pos­si­ble movie appear­ance of a giant crush­ing pneu­matic drill?

Ram­page

The stink of diesel fumes and hot tar fol­lows Ram­page wher­ever he goes. His treads are packed with metal shards stripped from his vic­tims and the count­less scratches cov­er­ing his chas­sis are tes­ta­ment to hun­dreds of bru­tal bat­tles. He lives to pound his ene­mies into sub­mis­sion and thinks of lit­tle else. His idea of beauty is the sight of sun glis­ten­ing off the raw edges of shred­ded Auto­bot armor.

Side­swipe

Side­swipe was built to fight. He is sleek, fast, and accom­plished in bat­tle, focus­ing on his enemy with absolute atten­tion. His blades are a shin­ing blur as he leaps through the air, twist­ing to avoid enemy fire. Con­vert­ing from vehi­cle to robot at blaz­ing speed, he uses every trick in the book to get close to his oppo­nent and put his pow­er­ful swords to work.