I think any lingering interest I had in Johnny Depp‘s remake of The Thin Man, to be directed by Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides director Rob Marshall, just evaporated. It’s the one-two punch of hiring David Koepp to write the script, and the fact that part of the plan is to create a version of The Thin Man that has “a Sherlock Holmes-like stylized treatment.” (With Holmes there referring to the Guy Ritchie movie that has become a near-ubiquitous touchstone when talking about a period film with comic action leanings.) Read More »
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Is The Dark Tower in danger of dying? It looked like that might be the case not long ago, but Universal asked for some script changes and budget cuts, which director Ron Howard recently said were not terribly deep or radical. The project looked like it might be able to shoot next spring.
But last night we heard that Ron Howard was attached to direct the Formula One movie Rush that hopes to shoot this year. That didn’t have to mean The Dark Tower was dead, as he could (conceivably, if not easily) make that film while Brian Grazer and Akiva Goldsman prepped the Stephen King adaptation this fall.
But now Ron Howard is also attached to a film version of the classic Mad Magazine strip Spy Vs. Spy, and his name is also being thrown around in conjunction to a version of Frankenstein that Max Landis is writing for Fox, which reportedly tells the story from Igor’s point of view. It looks like Frankenstein is not a film that he’ll direct, but the talk in general seems to imply that The Dark Tower might fall. Read More »
The backstory of the new telling of Jack Ryan‘s origin story is becoming quite an origin story of its own. Paramount has been trying to kickstart the rebirth of the Jack Ryan franchise for two years — it stalled out in 2002 with the Ben Affleck-led The Sum of All Fears.
Now the latest screenwriter to try to stick an adrenaline needle in the franchise’s nearly-flatlined chest is David Koepp. But is he doctoring the script, or starting from scratch? Read More »
Briefly: Here’s one more small problem for Men in Black 3. The film has been delayed multiple times, has shot one act of the film while the rest of the script is being reworked, and reportedly has a current screenwriter (David Koepp) working on the condition that he doesn’t have to engage at all with the film’s key producer, Walter Parkes. Now the movie has lost Alec Baldwin, who was set to play a small but key role. Read More »
Is Men in Black III a total oddity in the studio world or merely the next step in the lineage of films like the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels and Iron Man, which famously went into production without solid scripts in place? Men in Black III started production last November, but shooting started with only part of the script fully in place. A hiatus was built into the production, officially to make the most of New York tax incentives and weather conditions, but in reality more than half the script was still not finalized.
Things were meant to get back into gear last month, after Jeff Nathanson spent the hiatus getting the rest of the script knocked out. Then that hiatus was extended until the end of March and David Koepp was brought in to deal with the lingering script issues. Now the clock is ticking and Sony is in the very unusual position of having the first act of an unfinished script in the can. A new feature looks into the long, weird development of Men in Black III and suggests that conflicting personalities are turning an ungainly project into something that teeters on the brink of real failure. Read More »
The production schedule for Men in Black III has been a strange thing. A lot of footage was shot for the film last year, then a built-in production break kicked in at Christmas. Originally Sony was going to get the movie back into gear last month, but creative problems pushed the new resume date back to March 28. Jeff Nathanson was hammering out issues with the script along with director Barry Sonnenfeld and others. Now David Koepp (Spider-Man, War of the Worlds, Indy IV) has been brought in to finish the job. Read More »
Just Jared snapped some photos of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in action as a bike messenger on the New York City set of David Koepp‘s on-the-run chase thriller Premium Rush.
The story follows a 20-something-year-old bike messenger who somehow gets involved in a chase across New York City. And we’re not just talking about a little chase but big budget William Friedkin-style action sequences. Apparently a dirty cop is “desperate to get his hands” on an envelope the messenger received from Columbia University.
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Michael Shannon (The Runaways, Jonah Hex) and Jamie Chung are in talks to join Joseph Gordon-Levitt in David Koepp‘s on-the-run chase thriller Premium Rush.
The story follows a 20-something-year-old bike messenger who somehow gets involved in a chase across New York City. And we’re not just talking about a little chase but big budget William Friedkin-style action sequences. Apparently a dirty cop is “desperate to get his hands” on an envelope the messenger received from Columbia University.
THR reports that Shannon would play the villain, “a deceptively affable cop with a violent temper”, and Chung would play Levitt’s ex-girlfriend, “a fellow daredevil bike messenger who helps him outwit the cop. ”
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