Good news: Roland Emmerich passed on a big sci-fi project. But there’s no news here about the director deciding not to do an adaptation of Isaac Asimov‘s classic sci-fi novel series Foundation, alas. Instead he has passed on the sci-fi film for which is is exceptionally well-suited: a big-screen story inspired by Atari’s game Asteroids.
Emmerich was linked to Asteroids last year, but now as he promotes his Shakespeare conspiracy film Anonymous (which is actually garnering no small praise at TIFF) the director says he decided to skip the Atari film in favor of making Singularity, a sci-fi film picked up by Sony earlier this year, and about which we know relatively little. Read More »
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Roland Emmerich has made a career of destroying the world and ignoring the aftermath. All his movies – Independence Day, 2012, etc. – end on a hopeful notion of survival instead of the incredibly depressing realization that billions are dead and all the cities are ruined. Finally, he’s produced a film that isn’t just apocalyptic, but post-apocalyptic. The German film Hell, written and directed by Tim Fehlbaum, is about a near future where the Sun has scorched the Earth into a barren wasteland. Emmerich is an executive producer and while the film doesn’t have a U.S. release date yet, it opens in Germany next month. Read the plot description and check out the very cool trailer after the jump. Read More »
Roland Emmerich‘s new film, the ‘who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays’ conspiracy tale Anonymous, got a little prestige bump when it was programmed as part of the Toronto International Film Festival. But let’s face it: as much as we celebrate TIFF, and with very good reason, a festival packed with hundreds of films is going to spotlight a few clunkers. Will Anonymous be one of those?
A second trailer has dropped for the picture, and it retains the Radiohead track (‘Everything in its Right Place’) that scored the first trailer, but significantly ups the silliness factor. This trailer might not give you much of an idea about the actual story in the film, but it will offer the heads-up that it is all very, very serious. Read More »
If you’re more interested in the typical fall slate of festival entrees than summer’s glut of tentpole action fare, this is a great week. The Toronto International Film Festival announced the first wave of films that will play the fest in September. This is a batch of about 50 titles, which makes up only a small chunk of the programming. Usually TIFF features between two and three hundred films. But these are some of the highest-profile entries.
Below you’ll find rundowns on the new films from George Clooney, Bennett Miller, Jay & Mark Duplass, Todd Solondz, Francis Ford Coppola, Cameron Crowe, Sarah Polley, Fernando Meirelles, Lars von Trier, Marc Forster, Steve McQueen, Alexander Payne, and Lynne Ramsay. No announcement yet of the Midnight Madness programming choices, always some of my faves, but this is a great start. Read More »
Here’s yet another stopgap measure to keep Foundation fans happy. Roland Emmerich made his latest film, the Shakespeare conspiracy drama/thriller Anonymous, with Sony, and now there is a report that he has a mysterious new sci-fi project with the working title of Singularity. THR reports that Sony has right of first refusal on the film, and while a deal isn’t made at this point, it could be something that, like 2012, the studio picks up knowing that he’ll deliver something that can easily crack $500m in global ticketing. Read More »
Of course someone wants Roland Emmerich to direct a film based (probably very very loosely) on the classic video game Asteroids. Nothing else would make sense. We’ve known for some time that Atari wanted to make a film using the game license, and two years ago the rights to do so went to Universal. The studio hasn’t done much with it, at least in a public sense. All those Hasbro movies took priority. (Note to Atari: get tougher lawyers when signing licensing deals.)
But now there is a report that Asteroids, the movie based on a game about blowing up rocks, has been offered to Roland Emmerich, famous for blowing up, well, everything. Read More »
This Thursday, DirecTV is launching a revolutionary new service called Home Premiere which will allow subscribers to view movies just two months after they open in theaters. Not only is the National Association of Theater Owners strongly opposed to this, we recently surmised that it could just be the next step in the total and utter death of movie going as we know it. Today, twenty-three high profile Hollywood filmmakers agree.
Why on earth would you give audiences an incentive to skip the highest and best form of your film? My films aren’t going to the home early, but many will, and that will weaken the movie theater industry—and then my movies are threatened.
That’s the sentiment of James Cameron, the director of the two highest grossing films of all time. He and Peter Jackson, Michael Bay, Kathryn Bigelow, Guillermo del Toro, Roland Emmerich, Jon Landau, Shawn Levy, Michael Mann, Todd Phillips, Brett Ratner, Adam Shankman, Gore Verbinski and Robert Zemeckis are part of the roster of filmmakers who have signed a letter expressing the creative community’s problems with this service. Read it in full after the jump. Read More »
For his latest film, Anonymous, Roland Emmerich departs from his established world-busting pattern…or does he? While the film doesn’t feature scenes of overt global destruction as per 2012 and Independence Day, the movie does seek to drop a bomb on the literary world by taking seriously the conspiracy theory that says the works of William Shakespeare were in fact penned by someone else.
The cast is quite good (Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, David Thewlis, Xavier Samuel, Sebastian Armesto, Rafe Spall, Edward Hogg, Jamie Campbell Bower and Derek Jacobi) and now you can get a taste of how this particular dramatic experiment plays out by checking out the trailer below. Read More »
