Great googly-moogly! It’s another week of informative and flabbergasting film news! What nonsense is afoot this week?!
In this week’s “Don’t bruise it” story, Disney is going to make another version of James and the Giant Peach. This time it will be live action and Sam Mendes is in talks to direct. Author Nick Hornby is also in negotiations to write the screenplay. If these guys sign on, it could be a cool film.
Disney did this story 20 years ago with Henry Selick directing a stop-motion version produced by Tim Burton. It was ok, but not amazing. This could be a good creative team and the story of James Henry Trotter being befriended by a group of human-like insects while traveling about inside a giant peach after his parents are killed by a rhinoceros could be quite a delight.
Yes, his parents were killed by a rhinoceros. Did you forget that part? 😉
In this week’s “Best we could do this weekend” story, Sony-Screen Gems Don’t Breathe did about 1.9 million Thursday night and it expected to top the weekend with about 12 million. That’s not saying too much, really, but this is a pretty slow weekend for films, with little else but Mechanic: Resurrection to contend with, so they’ll take what they can get.
In this week’s “Hey, you want me to help take your foot out of your mouth?” story, writer/director Bruno Heller happened to state at the Edinburgh Television Festival that he didn’t think superheroes work well on TV. A little strange seeing as he is the showrunner for Fox’s Gotham, a show based on pre-Batman Gotham city.
The Hollywood Reporter captured Heller’s comments. “I don’t think superheroes work very well on TV,” said Heller. “Probably because of the costume thing.”
Not so strange based on Gotham, which doesn’t deal with a lot of costumed heroes or villains, but you might want to direct that statement away from the CW, who has great shows like The Flash, Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow, and now Supergirl. Not to mention proven great shows on Netflix like Daredevil. Seems to me superhero shows have already proven themselves successful on TV. But hey, what do I know?
In this week’s “Rumor Mill” story, word has it that the supervillain in The Flash movie will be…The Rogues. A whole team of potential villains? Ok then. Created during the Silver Age, the Rogues are a collection of criminals who band together to stop the Flash. As with any team in superhero comics, the lineup has changed over the years and could change again for the movie. But the current iteration is led by Captain Cold, whom Heroic Hollywood (via Movie Pilot) says will be included in the film. Other members of the Rogues have included Heat Wave, Mirror Master, Weather Wizard, the Trickster, the Top, and Captain Boomerang.
Of course, as with any rumor, any or all of this could be complete BS. It also doesn’t give me any more hope of the film being good. Warner’s DC films are already on probation. It’s one film at a time to see if ANY one of them will be watchable.
In this week’s “How does HE get all the best toys?” story, Michael Bay has always been given special access to stuff, or places or whatever, because of, well, I don’t really know. But he was given unprecedented access to the U.S. Military for Pearl Harbor, (and he wasted it), he was the first film maker to film on the Egyptian Pyramids for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (another waste), and now he has some spiffy new custom RED 8K camera that has been named the ‘Bayhem’. Sweet Hell, somebody kill me.
“Bay’s Bayhem camera features custom RED features an 8K Super 35mm 3.65 micron sensor known by the moniker “Helium.” It’s smaller than the 8K VistaVision, able to squeeze 8K into a smaller Super 35mm chip which necessitates new smaller, denser, pixels. This is one of the cameras that Michael Bay is using to shoot Transformers: the Last Knight. While Bay was initially resistant to go from film to digital (he still in fact films shots using a 70mm film camera), the filmmaker has been known to push hard against the cutting edge of cinema technology in his movies.”
All this new technology, for better or worse, wasted on Transformer movies. Sigh….
In this week’s “Bad Juju” story, a construction worker was killed while on set of the untitled Blade Runner sequel in Budapest.
At the time of the incident, the film crew had already wrapped production on the sound stage and had moved to another location in the village of Etyek.
“The worker was underneath a platform, upon which the set was constructed, when it suddenly collapsed,” read a statement sent to The Hollywood Reporter by Origo Studios. “The cause of the accident is not yet known.” An investigation is under way.
Yikes. That sucks. And please, no jokes about “Retirement”. Ugh.
In this week’s “If you’re going to do a remake, this is one way you give it a chance.” story, one of my favorite actors, Vincent D’Onofrio, has been added to the cast of the upcoming remake of Death Wish, starring Bruce Willis and Dean Norris. Eli Roth will direct this remake of the 1974 original with Charles Bronson, based on the book by Brian Garfield.
Ok, this is an interesting group of talent. I’m actually curious now.
In this week’s “Even MORE girl power” story, actress Sarah Paulson in currently in talks to join the cast of that film, Ocean’s 8, the all-female spin-off film of the Ocean’s 11 remake franchise series or whatever it is we’re calling it.
If the deal goes through, Paulson would join Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Rihanna, Helena Bonham Carter, Mindy Kaling, and Awkwafina.
Gary Ross is still directing, from a script that he co-wrote with Olivia Milch. Steven Soderberg and Ross are producing and Susan Elkins is executive producing.
In this week’s “Relatively late is better than nothing” story, director D.J. Caruso’s horror film, The Disappointments Room, will finally get a release next month, after it was held up in Relativity’s bankruptcy nonsense.
Written by actor Wentworth Miller (Prison Break, Legends of Tomorrow), The Disappointments Room stars Kate Beckinsale as Dana, a mother, who moves into a new home with her 5-year-old son (Duncan Joiner), and discovers a hidden room in the attic. Oooo, spooky….
Aaand, in this week’s “Canine version of Christian Bale” story, it turns out, the dog in Netflix’s Stranger Things is a total nightmare to work with. This according to actor David Harbour who played Chief Jim Hopper. Apparently it was so bad, he had an on-set meltdown. WHAT.
“The dog was the worst on the set,” said Harbour during an appearance on The Howard Stern Wrap Up Show. “There was a day with this dog that was the worst actor I’ve ever worked with in my life. […] The dog was just being a jerk. I never — I walked off set. I’ve never done that before. There’s footage of me like throwing a fit, going like, ‘I’m gonna be in my trailer!’ and just storming off. Cause the damn dog wouldn’t do what it was supposed to do. It was just supposed to bark at a thing…And there was a trainer who was off camera yelling like, ‘C’mon, we gotta make our money, this is how we make our money!’ And I was like, ‘this is weird.'”
Happy National Dog Day! Yes, really. 🙂
Thanks for sticking around for this lot of news for this week!
~ Neil T Weakley, your average movie goer, looking forward to next week’s film news shenanigans!