Alfred Hitchcock‘s filmography reads like an all-time best of list: Psycho, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Notorious, The Birds, it goes on and on. But out of all of Hitchcock’s movies, only one received the Academy Award for Best Picture: 1940′s Rebecca. Hitchcock’s first American project, Rebecca featured Laurence Olivier as a widower whose new wife (Joan Fontaine) is overwhelmed by the spirit of his late wife, the title character. It was based on a 1938 book of the same name by Daphne du Maurier.
Now, DreamWorks and Working Title are planning to go back to the source material and remake the story with Steven Knight, who wrote Eastern Promises for David Cronenberg, hired to write the screenplay. Read more after the jump. Read More »
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As a huge fan of the original Karate Kid, I die a little bit inside anytime I see the three words “The Karate Kid” on my TV guide only to find it’s the 2010 remake with Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan. Apparently, though, I’m in the minority. The film was an absolute smash hit for Sony, grossing $176 million domestic and about $182 internationally. Of course, a sequel was immediately set into motion with screenwriters Cyrus Voris and Ethan Reif hired to craft a story. That was about a year and a half ago.
Zak Penn, the writer of X-Men: The Last Stand and The Incredible Hulk, has now been tapped to do a rewrite on The Karate Kid 2. Read more after the jump. Read More »
Last night we talked about plans for two films to follow The Raid, that being Gareth Evans‘ attention-getting Indonesian action film that has been kicking the asses of audiences up and down the festival circuit. The film follows the efforts of an elite police task force charged with cleaning out a building in Jakarta controlled by a drug lord, who runs it as sort of a safe house for criminals.
Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions pre-bought the rights to Berandal, the film Evans will make that will act as sequel to The Raid, and that film should shoot at the end of this year. (Originally the plan was to shoot the sequel this month, but things have been pushed to the end of 2012.)
But there’s also the pesky matter of the remake of The Raid. Screen Gems ended up with the remake rights when SPWA bought all rights to the film after a Cannes presentation last year. Now the company has hired Brad Ingelsby (The Low Dweller) to write the remake. Read More »
Dimension Films have announced the hiring of screenwriter Matt Lieberman to pen a remake of the 1986 cult favorite Short Circuit. An Honors film grad from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Lieberman wrote a draft of the Doctor Dolittle sequel Doctor Dolittle: First Dog, and another couple projects that have never gone into production, including Disney’s Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. He’s a graduate of the Disney screenwriting program, and has uncredited worked on a bunch of the Disney live-action film projects from the past few years. Despite my jab headline, Lieberman seems like an up-and-comer. He is set to work closely with director Tim Hill (Hop, Alvin and the Chipmunks).
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Briefly: The remake of RoboCop is a bit like the character RoboCop is at the end of his first movie: it just…keeps…going. The bankruptcy of MGM stopped Darren Aronofsky’s version, but it didn’t stop the remake overall. Now Elite Squad director Jose Padilha is set to direct, and furthermore, RoboCop has a new writer to follow up on the work done by Josh Zetumer.
Nick Schenk, who wrote Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino and has also been working on Padilha’s developing Tri-Border project, has been tapped to work on the RoboCop script with Padilha.
This draft will likely have to be finished before the film moves forward. MGM wants to shoot RoboCop this summer, but there is no one cast yet in the lead role, and very likely that decision will have to be made before anyone else is cast around that lead actor. [THR]
Posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 by Angie Han
Between last year’s Warrior and The Thing and this year’s The Odd Life of Timothy Green, The Great Gatsby, and the untitled Kathryn Bigelow thriller, there’s no doubt Joel Edgerton is one of the hottest rising stars in Hollywood. But if his recent sale to New Regency is any indication, he could soon be making his mark as a screenwriter as well. The company purchased his spec script One Night Stand late last year, and is now eagerly moving forward with the project. Edgerton is not attached to star, though he will executive produce. More details after the jump.
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Good news today for fans of author Cormac McCarthy (The Road, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses). He has written and sold a screenplay called The Counselor. It is contemporary and set in the Southwest, and said to be reminiscent of his novel No Country For Old Men. Much of the discussion of this new script calls it McCarthy’s first spec script (that is, a script written on the author’s own initiative) but that isn’t quite true, as No Country was originally written as a script before McCarthy turned it into a novel.
More details on the new script are below. Read More »
Lionsgate may have purchased Summit and consequently got its grubby little hands on the rights to Twilight, but before the lion can further exploit Stephenie Meyer’s sparkly vampires, the company will be releasing the first film based on Suzanne Collins‘ novel series The Hunger Games.
Last time we checked in on development of the sequel, Catching Fire, the word was that Lionsgate wanted Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen) to script. Now he’s reportedly already at work. Read More »
