Posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2012 by Angie Han
There’s a ton of TV news coming down the pipeline, so let’s get right to it. After the jump:
- The Newsroom and True Blood get premiere dates
- Fox will celebrate its 25th birthday with its biggest stars
- Elisha Cuthbert says she’s “on standby” for the 24 movie
- Is Saturday Night Live losing three of its cast members?
- The CW’s Supernatural finds a new co-showrunner
- A This American Life segment turns into an HBO drama
- Funny or Die’s Drunk History heads to Comedy Central
- Is this really the script of Breaking Bad‘s season premiere?
- Jimmy Smits turns to the dark side on FX’s Sons of Anarchy
Read More »
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James Vanderbilt hit the screenwriter big time when he wrote Zodiac for David Fincher, and he was eventually tapped to work on the Spider-Man series for Sony. Now he’s one of a few people credited on The Amazing Spider-Man. He has developed a working relationship with the studio, doing work on the Total Recall remake as well.
Now has sold an original script to Sony: White House Down is an action film Vanderbilt wrote on spec that the studio just paid three million bucks to acquire. Details on that follow, as well as a bit of news on Vanderbilt’s contribution to the new RoboCop. Read More »
Briefly: Given the sort of scripts studios have been buying recently, I can’t really fault a screenwriter for figuring that the couple months it takes to write a spec script “updating” classic characters and adding unrelated wild elements might be time well spent. Because while crazy stuff has been selling, from our perspective what are the chances that a studio is really going to buy Huck and Tom, a script in which Mark Twain‘s characters Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are adults in a “re-imagining of the classic duo in the vein of Snow White and the Huntsman,” with “supernatural elements.”?
Oh. Crap. Paramount bought it. Andrew Burg wrote the script — and I haven’t read it, maybe it is quite good — and Peter Chernin and Dylan Clark (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Oblivion) are producing it with Matt Lopez (story and co-writer on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice). This is just getting going, and it seems like one of those projects that could easily languish in development for a long time, if not forever. And it’s not like there has never been a bad version of these characters brought to the screen. But supernatural additions? Really? Jeez. [THR]
There’s not much information on this film save for the following and, really, the next sentence is more than enough. Paramount has just bought a heist script called Swindle, written by Enzo Mileti and Scott Wilson, which will star Megan Fox and Zoe Saldana. The film will be developed and produced by Michael De Luca and as well as the two leads, who helped conceive the project when they decided they wanted to work together. There’s more after the jump. Read More »
Once Paranormal Activity 3 had a gangbuster opening this past October, a fourth film was inevitable. Soon after the release, directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman reportedly agreed to make Paranormal Activity 4 and an October 19, 2012 release date was set. That’s almost exactly seven months to the day from right now.
Which means the film is going to be plenty rushed as Paramount has just signed up Zack Estrin to write the script. Estrin is a producer on the current ABC show The River, which is produced by Paranormal Activity creator and current executive producer Oren Peli. He’s also written on Prison Break, No Ordinary Family but Paranormal Activity 4 marks his feature film debut. Read More »
Incredibly, the rumors are true. 21 Jump Street is one of the funniest comedies of the last few years. Which is more than shocking considering it came out of an idea the world initially rolled its eyes at: rebooting a Nineties TV show best known for launching the career of Johnny Depp. The success can be placed on the shoulders of several people. To name a few: directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller; producer and star Jonah Hill, his co-star Channing Tatum, and the man who wrote the script, Michael Bacall.
Bacall also wrote Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, the recent Project X and combined his wit and humor with Hill’s to create this over the top, hilarious, action-packed romp. I recently spoke with Bacall about that collaboration, some of the script’s more surprising decisions, writing in the framework of pop culture, that not-so-secret cameo, what he’s learned from Quentin Tarantino and more. If you’re a fan of the film, there’s a ton of great behind the scenes info after the jump. Read More »
Briefly: Fox liked the way that Chronicle turned out — the low-budget ‘teens with powers’ film has made over $100m worldwide so far, and even when promotional costs other sundry expenses are factored in, that’s pretty damn good for a film that cost $12m to make.
Director Josh Trank has said he is unsure about directing a sequel, and was just linked to Sony’s Spider-Man spinoff Venom. But Fox is going ahead with the first stage of sequel production anyway, and has hired original screenwriter Max Landis to write Chronicle 2. Read More »
In May 2010, Disney bought a pitch by The Devil Wears Prada/We Bought A Zoo scribe Aline Brosh McKenna to remake their classic film Cinderella in live-action. This was a few months after Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland was a major hit for the studio and fantasy remakes became a go-to genre (see Mirror Mirror, Snow White and the Huntsman, Oz the Great and the Powerful etc.). A year later, director Mark Romanek (Never Let Me Go) was attached to the project and soon after that Universal began developing a rival production. Since then, all’s quiet on the glass slipper front. Until today.
Chris Weitz, an Oscar-nominee for About a Boy and director of The Golden Compass and The Twilight Saga: New Moon, has been tapped to rewrite McKenna’s original draft, breathing life into a film we’d long since thought was nothing but a sleeping beauty. Read more after the jump. Read More »
