Do the stereotypical tough guy friends who are total bros until a blonde gets between them really exist? I’ve never seen that particular personality in the wild, but I imagine that McG has. Maybe he sees that guy every time he looks in the mirror. His new film This Means War, in which Chris Pine and Tom Hardy are best friends until they realize they’re both dating Reese Witherspoon, feels like it might be a document of McG’s own friendships and dating experiences. I don’t mean to make any personal assumptions, but I don’t know how else to explain the fact that this film exists. See the trailer below. Read More »
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Royden Lepp‘s family-friendly graphic novel Rust won’t hit stores until September but all the major studios got a crack at it this week and, it seems, 20th Century Fox is going to buy the right to turn it into a movie. Aline Brosh McKenna (We Bought a Zoo, The Devil Wears Prada) will write the screenplay and Simon Kinberg (X-Men First Class, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) will produce the adventure story that sounds like a blend of The Rocketeer and The Iron Giant. Read the description, see the full promo image and more after the jump. Read More »
Briefly: Universal and Platinum Dunes continue to develop a movie based on the Ouija board, that supernatural telegraph that is somewhere between a board game and parlor trick. Making a good movie out of Ouija will certainly a hell of a parlor trick, and to help with the process the companies have just hired Simon Kinberg, the guy who wrote Mr. and Mrs. Smith, X-Men: The Last Stand, and co-wrote a draft of Sherlock Holmes. (Not, sadly, the BBC’s Sherlock.) He also wrote This Means War, which Ouija director McG just finished.
He’ll be polishing the previous draft by Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis (Tron Legacy). What happened to the work done by the last reported hire, Evan Spiliotopoulos? Not sure if his work is playing into the new draft going forward. But given that, as the LA Times says, Simon Kinberg’s “specialty is big, upscale — and sometimes comedic — action pieces,”this hire makes sense. After all, we’d already heard that Ouija is planned as a family adventure movie with a tone akin to an Indiana Jones movie.
Posted on Wednesday, June 1st, 2011 by Angie Han
Details on Elysium, the second full-length film from District 9 director Neill Blomkamp, have few and far in between. All we really know at this point is that it’s a sci-fi film with sociopolitical themes, set 150 years in a future in which Jodie Foster is a leader of an alien planet. And yet, thanks to an excellent cast (Foster, plus Matt Damon, Sharlto Copley, Wagner Moura, William Fichtner, and Alice Braga) and the strength of Blomkamp’s feature debut, Elysium is high on my list of films I’m anxious to see.
Now, a new interview with producer Simon Kinberg manages to further pique curiosity without really giving away anything else about the plot. Well done, dude. Hit the jump to see what he said.
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It feels as if I am typing this item behind a curtain that flutters with the energy of Nicole Kidman‘s online hecklers and haterz. Today the trades report that the actress has signed to star in The 8th Wonder, a new globe-trotting action adventure tent pole that aspires to “be to Raiders of the Lost Ark what the Bourne movies are to James Bond movies: a character-driven, treasure-hunting thriller.” Further details were not revealed, but the flick will be produced by Kidman and Laurence Mark (I Robot, The Lookout, and yes, Cutthroat Island) from a script to be written by Simon Kinberg (Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, Jumper, X3).
While her Botox really kills me—every time I see a still from Australia, I think about blowfish and bad advice—Kidman’s performances in Van Sant’s To Die For and von Trier’s Dogville hulahoop the majority of A-list actresses out there. I’ll hold judgement until a director is announced, but if the project is in the vein of Romancing the Stone and Indiana Jones rather than another same-old SFX vapid-fest like Tomb Raider and National Treasure, it could be a welcome monkey wrench in the genre’s boy’s club. Cue a guy lifting up an Arnold Palmer in Hollywood and omnipotently dishing, “Yeah, but she isn’t bankable.”
Fox has hired Mr. & Mrs. Smith screenwriter Simon Kinberg to do a complete overhaul of The Hardy Men.
Kinberg has also written: xXx 2, X-Men: The Last Stand, and the upcoming Hayden Christensen/Samuel L. Jackson sci-fi thriller Jumper.
As we previously reported, Ben Stiller and Tom Cruise star as once wunderkind youth sleuths, have grown up. Long estranged, they’re brought together to solve one last case. The action comedy is based on the classic mystery book series The Hardy Boys. The movie re-teams Stiller with Night at the Museum director Shawn Levy. The studio hopes to put the film into production by 2008.
Cruise first met Stiller after seeing his Cruise impersonation on The Ben Stiller Show. The two starred together in a 2000 short film titled Mission: Improbable, in which Stiller portrayed a stuntman for Cruise on Mission: Impossible 2. You can see that short film at this link.
The original Hardy Boys book series was produced between 1927 and 1979 under the pen name Franklin W. Dixon. Although various ghostwriters were employed, under contract of secrecy, to pen the actual stories. In the book series, the brother amateur detectives solved mysteries in the fictional city of Bayport (on Barmet Bay) with their famous father, Fenton Hardy, a private detective formerly with the New York Police Department (something Veronica Mars later stole payed homage to).
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