Big Spider-Man news hit this week when Jamie Foxx was announced as the cast choice to play the main villain Electro in Marc Webb‘s The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The casting of Foxx might be a great choice; he’s a versatile, intense, and nuanced actor. The choice of Electro is a bit more difficult to applaud — he seems like a character with big powers but not much going on to turn him into a convincing screen villain.
Fortunately, Marc Webb was doing some promo rounds for the Amazing Spider-Man blu-ray release (amazing how that timing worked out) and was asked about the character. Did he offer any big info about his choice? Well… Read More »
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Posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2012 by Angie Han
Is America ready to see lovable everyman Steve Carell as a mentally ill killer? Columbia hopes so. The studio has just stepped up to co-finance (with Annapurna Pictures) and distribute Foxcatcher. It’s a fact-based drama from Bennett Miller (Moneyball) that sees Carell playing murderous millionaire John du Pont and Mark Ruffalo his friend and victim David Schutz. And it’s got enough faith in the movie to throw it into next fall’s crop of prestige pictures. More details after the jump.
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Last we heard, Marc Webb was set to direct The Amazing Spider-Man 2 for Sony and Columbia, with Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone returning as Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Gwen Stacy, and Shailene Woodley set to play a young Mary Jane Watson.
And at that time, Electro was said to be the most likely villain for the film. (“Most likely” being deceptive wording, since the studio has a script from Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, and Jeff Pinkner, with early work from James Vanderbilt, so there’s no doubt who the villain is.)
Now Electro is confirmed, and Jamie Foxx is in talks to play him. Read More »
Let’s say you’re a Sony film exec. You’ve had a long partnership with Adam Sandler, who makes movies that critics hate, but audiences continue to see. Everyone hated Jack and Jill, right? But at just about $150m worldwide gross against a $79m production budget, it could be doing a lot worse, especially for something labeled a domestic flop. The guy doesn’t make a mint, but his movies are profitable — Jack and Jill will likely make money thanks to DVD and other rights sales — and they’re reliable.
So why did Sony let Sandler take his next film to Paramount? Why did it sell off half of George Clooney‘s Monuments Men — not a likely financial hit, but a probable prestige pic with a killer cast — to Fox? Why hasn’t Sony pushed forward aggressively on a sequel to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, after being so bullish on the trilogy when David Fincher was hired to direct?
Those actions, along with the not-so-solid financial status of Sony as a whole, are contributing to rumors that Sony Pictures Entertainment is in trouble, and that the big powers at Sony are considering selling off entertainment units such as the film division. Those rumors have been denied by Sony’s head honcho, and are likely untrue at this point, but there is some minor change going on at Sony, which is making a couple fewer movies per year, and is going to wait a bit longer to shoot films like Ghostbusters III. Read More »
Briefly: It always seemed weird that Neill Blomkamp‘s second film, Elysium, would be a March 2013 release. Granted, from what we’ve seen of the movie it looks like smarter, tougher sci-fi than most summer fare. But as the movie features Matt Damon escaping from the polluted surface of Earth to make use of medical technology on an elite space colony called, it also appears to have high entertainment value. I’d hope that a film like that could be marketed into summer success.
Evidently Sony feels the same, as the film is now scheduled for August 9, 2013. That’s a good late-summer berth for a smart sci-fi film, and roughly the same spot in which Blomkamp’s District 9 became a solid hit in 2009. So, all’s good, right? Well, part of the move is based on the fact that the Aug 9 date became vacant when MGM, Sony and Columbia realized that the Jose Padilha reboot of RoboCop is going to need more time in the oven. So that has been pushed to February 7, 2014.
Sony made a couple other small date changes, too, as Cloudy 2: Revenge of the Lefotovers will now open onSeptember 27, 2013, and the feature version of Pixels has been pushed back from a May 23, 2014 date to an unspecified time slot. [Variety]
Much was made over the footage cut from Marc Webb‘s The Amazing Spider-Man. The trailers featured shots that didn’t make the finished film, which isn’t all that unusual, but those shots were part of a plotline that tied Peter Parker’s father to the superhero Peter eventually becomes. That’s a relatively new thing for the Spidey mythos that made up “the untold story” promised in the early marketing.
Now there is a good collection of the deleted scenes, included among which is the shot of Irrfan Khan asking Parker “do you have any idea what you really are?” Check out the footage below. Read More »
The 23rd film in the James Bond series premiered in the UK on Friday, and we have an early spoiler-free video blog reaction. I recorded my thoughts alongside Alex Billington from FirstShowing, a huge Bond fanatic who balances out my ambivalence to much of the series.
I think the latest entry into the Bond franchise will please both Bond fanatics and casual viewers, striking a great compromise between old Bond feel and contemporary action and seriousness. For me the highlight was Roger Deakins‘ cinematography, beautiful, striking, the best looking Bond film to date. There is one sequence in Shanghai which looks and feels like a contemporary Blade Runner but with the action of the Mission: Impossible series. Watch our complete video blog embedded after the jump to hear more.
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Posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2012 by Angie Han
The trick for any sequel is to balance the old with the new. A good one should deliver more of what made the last movie a hit, but avoid retracing too many of the exact same steps. But that order gets harder to fill as the series churns out more and more installments, each less surprising than the last. Sometimes, it starts to look like all that’s left to do is simply take the franchise in a whole new direction.
Like, say, shifting the focus from dinosaurs to terrifying human-dino hybrids in a fourth Jurassic Park movie. Or traveling back to 16th century China for The Karate Kid, Part III. Obviously, neither of those concepts actually ever came to be — but concept art from a scrapped idea for Jurassic Park IV and an interview with Karate Kid writer Robert Mark Kamen offer some insight into what could’ve been. More after the jump.
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