Movie Chronicles

Robert De Niro, Jude Law and Matthias Schweighöfer cast in Thor movie? October 18th, 2009

In a Ger­man GQ inter­view with Matthias Schweighöfer (Valkyrie), the actor report­edly (we haven’t seen a copy of the issue and the news hasn’t been pub­lished online) announced he’s in the run­ning for a role in Thor, whilst reveal­ing that Robert De Niro and Jude Law have also been cast. The rumor was orig­i­nally posted to AICN.

I’ve clas­si­fied this as rumor for now, there’s no hard proof and the arti­cle might well have been mis­trans­lated. How­ever, both Law and De Niro have worked with Thor direc­tor Ken­neth Branagh in the past, which gives some cre­dence to the claims.

Which char­ac­ters would these actors play?

In other cast­ing news, Stan Lee has con­firmed to Col­lider that he’ll be tak­ing up his cameo role for Thor, though he doesn’t yet know the details.

Jon Favreau will not be directing The Avengers October 16th, 2009

From the bumpy golf buggy, Jon Favreau shared some Avengers infor­ma­tion with MTV. First up, he will not be direct­ing The Avengers movie. Sec­ondly, Ed Nor­ton will not have a cameo appear­ance in Iron Man 2.

“We want to rein­force a lot of the stuff we started to tip off,” Favreau told MTV News. “‘The Avengers’ is a much larger con­cern for Mar­vel and Kevin Feige, who runs Mar­vel. They’re going to be doing ‘Thor’ and ‘Cap­tain Amer­ica,’ and the way we might start to tease those things in this movie, some of it is stuff that we’ve dis­cussed [and] some of the stuff you do last-minute as you fig­ure out how that stuff is com­ing together.”

“It’s an evolv­ing, amor­phous thing,” he explained. “If we decide and com­mit too early, the secret always gets out.”

“They’ll have to [find a dif­fer­ent direc­tor], because I’m not going to be avail­able,” he explained. “It’s some­thing I’m being the exec­u­tive pro­ducer on, so I’ll def­i­nitely have input and a say.”

“It’s going to be hard, because I was so involved in cre­at­ing the world of Iron Man and Iron Man is very much a tech-based hero, and then with ‘Avengers’ you’re going to be intro­duc­ing some super­nat­ural aspects because of Thor,” he con­tin­ued. “How you mix the two of those works very well in the comic books, but it’s going to take a lot of thought­ful­ness to make that all work and not blow the real­ity that we’ve created.”

“That’s why it’s good that you have the guys from Mar­vel like Kevin Feige, who knows the books well and has been involved with the mak­ing of all the movies, and he’ll be very involved with ‘Thor’ and ‘Cap,’” said Favreau. “You need some­body who has the per­spec­tive of all the dif­fer­ent fran­chises to bring them together. I have the myopic vision of just know­ing and lov­ing Iron Man.“

This opens up the ques­tion, who should direct the Avengers movie?

Robert Rodat penning World of Warcraft movie October 13th, 2009

In talks with MTV, Sam Raimi has revealed that “Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan” writer Robert Rodat will be pen­ning the World of War­craft movie adap­ta­tion. The sto­ry­line will be an orig­i­nal effort, set in the War­craft uni­verse but not fol­low­ing the Lich King book (which had been rumored as a subtitle).

“We would choose… some­thing that encom­passes lands and char­ac­ters and sto­ry­lines, and we would be true to it. But our story may or may not be about one of those cen­tral characters.”

“We want to be really faith­ful to the game. We would have our writer, Robert Rodat, really craft an orig­i­nal story within that world that feels like a ‘World of War­Craft’ adven­ture. Only obvi­ously it’s very dif­fer­ent ’cause it’s expanded and trans­lated into the world of a motion picture.”

“[The hope is to prop­erly cap­ture] the Horde and the Alliance and the mythol­ogy that takes place in the game, and the arche­types that the game presents. I think we would try and find touch­stones within the game to make it accu­rate and true and choose one or some of the lands that are por­trayed in the game with as much accu­racy and authen­tic­ity as possible.”

Spider-man 4 to begin filming March 2010 October 11th, 2009

Speak­ing with MTV, Sam Raimi gave some Spider-man 4 updates, reveal­ing that the script is cur­rently under­go­ing some small rewrites whilst pro­duc­tion is prepar­ing for a March 2010 start, aim­ing for a May 6th 2011 release date. Cast­ing hasn’t started yet, but it is set to get under-way shortly.

We’re hop­ing that it’s the first week in March,

At the moment, pre-production is in full swing, even as screen­writer Gary Ross con­tin­ues to work on the script.

He’s work­ing on a draft, I just gave him some notes and he’s doing a rewrite right now.

The pro­duc­tion is start­ing to come together. I’ve got a pro­duc­tion designer who is start­ing to design the sets and the envi­ron­ments that the pic­ture will take place in. We just brought aboard Scott Stokdyk as one of the two visual effects super­vi­sors, and I worked with him on all three ‘Spider-man’ pictures.

None of the cast­ing has really taken place, but we’re start­ing to think about that now.

Thor casting call for Warriors, are they Skrulls, Kree? October 11th, 2009

Spoil­erTV has posted a cast­ing call for the Thor movie, ask­ing for

[WARRIORS] A fear­less war­rior race, where size, strength and feroc­ity define a member’s rank in both the social and mil­i­tary hier­ar­chy. War­riors born in this soci­ety face the harsh­est eco­log­i­cal con­di­tions imag­in­able and thrive in envi­ron­ments where lesser crea­tures, includ­ing humans, quickly per­ishes. Theirs is a world cre­ated to cull weak­ness from the uni­verse to ensure their supreme sov­er­eignty spreads across the stars. MUST BE 6’2 OR TALLER sptv050769, NO BODYBUILDER TYPES. SAG ROLE BUT NO LINES. MUST BE COMFORTABLE WEARING PROSTHETICS.

Cin­e­mat­i­cal spec­u­late that this is a cast­ing call for the Skrulls,

You can’t really get any more mil­i­taris­tic and con­quest dri­ven than these guys, and one def­i­nitely needs pros­thet­ics to pull them off. But what the heck would Skrulls be doing in Thor? Even Loki hasn’t had much to do with those creeps until recently. The obvi­ous answer would be to have them come in and set up The Avengers, but with two vil­lains and two love inter­ests, you’d think there was enough crazy to go around. Any­one out there have a bet­ter guess as to who our prosthetic-heavy war­riors might be?

Fans have also sug­gested they could be the Kree, a war­rior race that have reached their evo­lu­tion­ary peak or Frost Giants. How­ever, another right­fully points out, it is likely they will just be Asgar­dian extras.

Ernie Hudson talks Ghostbusters 3 October 11th, 2009

Ernie Hud­son, now 63, has been speak­ing with IESB about movies, act­ing and his thoughts on the third Ghost­busters movie.

IESB: When you hear all the rumors about the pos­si­bil­ity of a Ghost­busters 3 for all these years, is that some­thing you hope will even­tu­ally hap­pen, or have you just become indif­fer­ent about it because you’ve been wait­ing for so long?

Ernie: We did the first Ghost­busters, and that was really try­ing for me, in a lot of ways. I worked really hard on the movie for four months, and then the movie came out and was very suc­cess­ful, but work didn’t nec­es­sar­ily come for me, as a result of it. And then, it took five years to get the sec­ond one ready, and that was a chal­lenge, too. Now, it’s been 20 years since the sec­ond one.

I knew Bill Mur­ray really loved the fran­chise, but he was the hold-out. The dis­cus­sion with him has always been that he really wants to do some­thing excep­tional. We tapped into some­thing that was really cre­ative and dif­fer­ent with the first one, so you want to be able to bring that chal­lenge to it. The whole eco­nomic thing becomes an excuse to do noth­ing, so the ten­dency with stu­dios is, “Okay, let’s just do some­thing.” And then, because we have the audi­ence out there, even if we do some­thing bad, by the time they real­ize it’s bad, we’ll have made the money. But, I know that’s not what Bill Mur­ray wants to do, and that’s cer­tainly not some­thing I want to do.

It’s a real catch-22 because you really would love to do another one, since the fans have been ask­ing for it, but you also want to be able to stand by the work that you do. I’m really happy to have been a part of the movie. A lot of actors work for years and never find [some­thing that spe­cial]. Ghost­busters is nice to have in my fil­mog­ra­phy. Wher­ever I go, peo­ple have seen the movie and love it, so that’s really nice.

IESB: So, you’d be happy to return for another film, if they get a script together?

Ernie: I would love to do the movie, for a vari­ety of rea­sons, not the least of which is that I’d love to get paid. So, when Bill Mur­ray says, “I only want to do it if it’s some­thing really extra­or­di­nary that we can really com­mit to,” it’s a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent than my thing. I’m say­ing that I only want to do the movie for that rea­son, unless they pay me a lot of money. I’m prob­a­bly more con­scious of that. But, the fans are there. Wher­ever I go, peo­ple are always ask­ing about it. I think the stu­dio wants to do it, but hope­fully the script will be really good.

Harold Ramis is tak­ing the lead in it, from what I’ve been read­ing. I hear about it like the fans do. I saw Harold at the open­ing of his film Year One in New York, so I know that he’s been putting together a script that every­one will be happy with. I talked to Bill recently, and I know that Danny [Aykroyd] has been want­ing to do it since the day we fin­ished the sec­ond one. We’re all up for it. It just has to be some­thing we can be proud of and stand by. I’d love for it to hap­pen. I think it would be very, very cool. But, it really needs to be some­thing that makes sense. I don’t want to just do a cameo. If we’re going to do it, I want to be involved.

IESB: Did you enjoy return­ing to the char­ac­ter for the recent video game?

Ernie: I really was very happy with the game because the char­ac­ters were very much there. My char­ac­ter was totally involved. It was a lot of fun to do the voice-over, and hav­ing all the guys back to do it was really cool. So, I’m hop­ing the movie hap­pens, but I have not heard from Ivan Reit­man or the stu­dio, or any­body who signs checks. Until that hap­pens, it’s still just spec­u­la­tion. They also came out with a whole new series of toys. Wher­ever I travel, or when I was doing the play, peo­ple show up with the toys for me to sign.

Lonely Robot, Dirty Mind — Decepticon T-shirt October 11th, 2009

Thread­less have posted an awe­some new Decep­ti­con T-shirt,

Warcraft movie to have a subtitle, ‘Warcraft: The Rise Of The Lich King’? October 11th, 2009

MTV are report­ing that the movie adap­ta­tion of War­craft now appears to have a title, ‘War­craft: The Rise Of The Lich King’. The title falls in-line with a recently released NY Times best-selling book, “Arthas: Rise of the Lich King”. How­ever, they cite the source of this infor­ma­tion to be the unre­li­able and socially pow­ered IMDB​.com, which has since removed the phrase.

If we are to believe the sub­ti­tle and that the movie will fol­low in the foot­steps of the book, then the plot would revolve around Arthas Menethil,

a once-noble prince and war­rior who becomes a fear­some tyrant known as the Lich King.

I’d take this with a big grain of salt and instead wait for some offi­cial word.

« Previous Entries

Next Entries »