Having now seen Django Unchained, it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Jamie Foxx in the title role. The Oscar-winner gave a transformative performance, starting as a meek, clueless slave and slowly growing into a fearless, gunslinging bad ass. However, many readers likely remember that Foxx wasn’t writer/director Quentin Tarantino‘s first choice for the role. His first choice was Will Smith. Since turning down the role, Smith has pretty much remained mum on the details behind his decision.
Smith has now begun promoting his new movie, M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth, and said the reason he didn’t take the role was because he didn’t think Django was the main character. Read More »
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Legendary composer Ennio Morricone has some choice words for one of his biggest fans, Quentin Tarantino. The composer behind such movie music masterworks as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and The Mission has his music prominently used in Tarantino’s latest film, Django Unchained. However, Morricone recently stated that he doesn’t like how Tarantino works with music and wouldn’t work with him again. Read his quotes below. Read More »
Posted on Monday, March 11th, 2013 by Angie Han
Who exactly is G.I. Joe: Retaliation‘s Cobra Commander? Find out after the jump. Also:
- Expect the cast to return for Oz The Great and Powerful 2
- Josh Duhamel will make a cameo in Transformers 4
- Joseph Gordon-Levitt talks Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
- Don’t hold your breath for a Simpsons Movie sequel
- A Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance stuntman is suing Sony
- V/H/S 2 gets a release date and some new images
- See images and video from the Star Trek scoring studio
- Just what is in that new Star Trek Into Darkness teaser?
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When people think of The Wizard of Oz, they think of the 1939 film starring Judy Garland. Yellow brick roads, munchkins, ruby slippers, the wicked witch, all that stuff. Fast forward about 75 years and Disney releases Oz the Great and Powerful, a prequel that features iconography very similar to, but not exactly the same, as the famous film. The reason? Warner Bros. owns the rights to the 1939 classic, but not the L. Frank Baum book it’s based on, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Sam Raimi and his team were very careful not to use any of Warner Bros.’ intellectual property, going so far as having lawyers present during production to make sure they didn’t cross the line. So there are no ruby slippers, the witch isn’t the same color green, the Emerald City looks different, etc. It’s close, but just different enough to avoid a lawsuit.
On its opening weekend, Disney and Raimi’s gamble paid off, grossing an impressive $80 million and work on a sequel has begun. The cash is rolling in for the Mouse House much to the chagrin of Warner Bros., who rightfully feels a certain ownership to the property.
The Los Angeles Times has a fascinating article on how the success of Oz will not only help Disney, but set up a major rivalry between them and Warners who has several Oz related projects in the pipeline including multiple movies at various stages of development. Read More »
Before Sam Raimi set out on the gargantuan task of making Oz The Great and Powerful, he was working on two equally huge and highly-anticipated films: Spider-Man 4 and World of Warcraft. Spider-Man 4 was set to right the wrongs Raimi and crew made on the third film, but eventually he and all his stars left the project. That opened the door for Marc Webb’s reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man.
Raimi was also developing an adaptation of the popular game World of Warcraft, with an eye on directing. Eventually, he left that project too. Duncan Jones is now set to helm.
In a new interview, Raimi explained exactly why he left both those projects. Each is an interesting, but still typical story of Hollywood drama. Read More »
James Franco is everywhere. This week he’ll be travelling to Oz with Sam Raimi, and next week he’s heading to Spring Break with Harmony Korine. A few years ago, he was at 30 Rock shooting a documentary about Saturday Night Live. The film, Saturday Night, offered viewers unprecedented access behind the long-running sketch comedy show and garnered rave reviews when it hit the festival circuit in 2010. Since then the movie seemingly disappeared, leaving documentary and comedy fans clamouring for some kind of update.
Franco has finally given us that update, and the news is encouraging. Though the film was wrapped up in some rights issues, it has a new distributor and they’re currently figuring out how to release it. “It will come out,” said Franco. Read More »
Where can you read about the controversy surrounding reactions to casting Shailene Woodley in Amazing Spider-Man 2? How can you buy some concept art from a failed Fantastic Four pitch? What state is Batman possibly from? Want to read a super spoiler-filled post about the armors in Iron Man 3? Does the latest poster confirm it? Is someone writing a Man of Steel sequel already? Read about all this and more in today’s Superhero Bits. Read More »
Posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2013 by Angie Han
Is the U.S. Senate secretly working for Team Affleck? Certainly not, but they couldn’t have helped Argo more if they’d tried. Heading into prestige pic season, Kathryn Bigelow‘s Zero Dark Thirty looked like a strong contender for several top prizes. Then came the controversies over the film’s inaccuracies and its portrayal of torture, culminating in a formal investigation by the U.S. Senate into the Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal‘s relationship with the CIA.
All that hoopla may have crippled the film’s awards chances, and indeed it walked away from Sunday’s Oscars with just one lone Oscar for sound editing. Naturally, the Senate has now dropped its probe into the matter without revealing any of its findings. Hit the jump for more details.
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