Author Archive
‘Transformers’ Scribe Ehren Kruger Rewriting Disney’s Matterhorn Adventure Movie
by Russ Fischer on Feb.22, 2012, under Stuff We Like
Last year Disney began active development of a film tenuously connected to the Disneyland Matterhorn ride. Jason Dean Hall was hired to write a film that was called The Hill last summer, and then Brian Beletic became attached to direct the project. Now Ehren Kruger (The Ring, Scream 3, Transformers: Dark of the Moon) has been hired to rewrite the picture that has evolved to be about a group of adventurers who run into Yeti in the Alps.
THR says Kruger is working on the “untitled explorers movie” and that the story still features “five young adventure seekers — an action sports guy, travel guide, cartographer, archeologist and escape artist — who venture into the Alps for mysterious reasons and face Yetis that guard a secret.”
THR does say that the scope of the film has been expanded beyond just being based on the Matterhorn ride, but that wasn’t really an issue for the Pirates of the Caribbean films when it came to naming, was it? (By the way, we still hear once in a while that this movie will be called Matterhorn, but whether that is really going to be the case is TBD.)
And while we’re on the subject of Alpine expeditions, let’s just all say it together: “You see what happens when you find a stranger in the alps?”
Jai Courtney Will Be John McClane’s Son in ‘A Good Day to Die Hard’
by Russ Fischer on Feb.22, 2012, under Stuff We Like
This news will make an old question new again: is there anything Fox can do to make you truly excited for another Die Hard sequel? The studio has been building the next installment of the series for several months, and has just set one of the last major pieces of the puzzle in place.
John Moore (Max Payne) will direct A Good Day to Die Hard from a script by Skip Woods, with Bruce Willis once again playing NYC cop (or perhaps former NYC cop) John McClane. This time, he travels to Moscow to talk the local authorities into freeing his jailed son, and both men end up embroiled in a world-threatening terrorist plot.
Fox is taking a cue from Paramount’s approach to casting Jeremy Renner in Mission: Impossible, and is potentially using this movie to groom a new actor to take over the Die Hard series. Now he’s been chosen, and Jai Courtney (Spartacus: Vengeance) will play the younger McClane.
Deadline announces that Courtney has been cast, and says that the search was basically down to two guys after a long search and several shortlists: Courtney and Liam Hemsworth. Courtney is less experienced and probably cheaper. Whether he’ll be a good fit for the role is unknown, as we know very little about the character Skip Woods has written. Seeing who’s been cast, however, gives us some clues.
A Good Day to Die Hard forgets all about McClane’s daughter, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Live Free or Die Hard. It will shoot soon for a February 14, 2013 release. Jai Courtney will have another film on screens right around the same time, as he appears in Christopher McQuarrie’s One Shot, alongside Tom Cruise.
Edgar Wright Set to Direct Johnny Depp in ‘The Night Stalker’
by Russ Fischer on Feb.22, 2012, under Stuff We Like
Well, this is unexpected. We’ve known that Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright is at work on both a new screenplay with Shaun collaborator Simon Pegg and the Ant-Man project for Marvel Studios. (He’s also got a couple other percolating scripts.) But in the meantime Wright is now set to make what will probably be his biggest movie to date.
Disney has hired Wright to direct Johnny Depp in a big-screen version of The Night Stalker, which was originally a TV movie, then a series, in which reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) found himself embroiled in supernatural goings-on as he covered crime stories.
Even though this will probably happen before the next ‘blood and ice cream’ movie The World’s End, Deadline makes The Night Stalker sound like a project that won’t be happening immediately. That’s because the film doesn’t have a script at this point, or even a screenwriter. Wright would be a perfectly good choice for that job, too, but that may or may not happen.
Though it was announced last summer, a lot of work remains to be done, and Edgar Wright will work with Johnny Depp and Depp’s Infinitum Nihil partner Christi Dembrowski to adapt and shape the material.
The site says the story will likely be PG-13 and “tailored to fit Disney’s family film mandate.” While Wright fans might initially bristle at that idea — he’s not the most restrained guy when it comes to filmmaking — I think it will be interesting to see Wright work with these specific constraints.
So is this effectively a sort of trial run for Ant-Man? Wright has been at work on that with Attack the Block director Joe Cornish for some time, but given that Ant-Man isn’t really a household name, it always seemed like a strange project for Marvel and Disney to invest in. The Night Stalker would establish him with Marvel owner and distributor Disney, and of course making a big Johnny Depp movie is rarely a bad thing for a director. (Though let’s see how Depp’s other supernatural TV-to-film endeavor Dark Shadows opens, and if Disney remains bullish on this one afterward.)
‘Traitor’ Director Jeffrey Nachmanoff Replaces Ed Zwick as Director of ‘American Assassin’
by Russ Fischer on Feb.22, 2012, under Stuff We Like
Thanks to the James Bond film series and stuff like the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan films and the Bourne movies, production companies and studios look at any series of espionage novels with dollar signs in their eyes. Sure, there are many examples of thriller novel to film adaptations that failed to ignite a franchise, but no one ever built a successful movie series by not adapting books.
In 2008 CBS Films bought the rights to a set of books by Vince Flynn that follow CIA Agent Mitch Rapp. Originally the studio planned to adapt the first book in the series, Consent to Kill, with Antoine Fuqua set to direct and various actors in consideration to play Rapp.
That plan was eventually ditched in favor of starting with American Assassin, the book that is eleventh in Flynn’s series, but acts as a prequel. Last year Ed Zwick (The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond) was set to direct, but he has since accepted a deal to make The Great Wall, and CBS decided to move forward without him. In his place Jeffrey Nachmanoff has stepped in. Who?
Deadline has the news about Nachmanoff stepping in. He directed Traitor, with Don Cheadle (a solid movie that not many people saw), and co-wrote Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow. More recently, he worked on the script for Kim Ji-woon’s The Last Stand, which just shot with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead, and directed episodes of Homeland.
Right now it looks like Nachmanoff will work from the most recent script draft, by Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, though I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Nachmanoff was doing his own rewrite.
No casting is set for American Assassin at this point.
Here’s a basic recap of the book:
Taking a step back in time, he tells the story of how Rapp initially came to work for the CIA. As a young man, Rapp lost his fiancée in the terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103. Grief-stricken, he swears revenge on the terrorists. He’s quickly recruited by the CIA and soon makes his first kill and is on his way to his first clandestine mission. George Guidall has a keen ear for dialogue, and his relaxed reading keeps Flynn’s sometimes overheated prose and over-the-top plot grounded in a realm of believability.
‘Bully’ Trailer; Harvey Weinstein Plans Appeal to R-Rating of Anti-Bullying Doc
by Russ Fischer on Feb.22, 2012, under Stuff We Like
Here’s the trailer for Bully, a documentary from director Lee Hirsch (NextWorld, Amandala!) about the ways that schoolkids and their families deal with bullying. We’ve seen several cases in the past few years where bullied kids have taken their own lives, or attempted to, and this film seems intended to address the issue both as an expose and a means of support to those who are bullied.
There is a minor point of controversy, however, as the version of Bully submitted to the MPAA was given an R rating for language, and Harvey Weinstein is trying to appeal that rating before the film’s March release.
First, here’s the trailer:
In a press release sent out yesterday, Weinstein said he would appear with Alex Libby, one of the bullied children in the film, at a rating appeal hearing tomorrow. Weinstein said,
I have great respect for the work Chairman Joan Graves and the rest of the MPAA governing body do. I have been compelled by the filmmakers and the children to fight for an exception so we can change this R rating brought on by some bad language.
Director Hirsch said,
I made BULLY for kids to see – the bullies as well as the bullied. We have to change hearts and minds in order to stop this epidemic, which has scarred countless lives and driven many children to suicide. To capture the stark reality of bullying, we had to capture the way kids act and speak in their everyday lives – and the fact is that kids use profanity. It is heartbreaking that the MPAA, in adhering to a strict limit on certain words, would end up keeping this film from those who need to see it most. No one could make this case more powerfully than Alex Libby, and I am so proud and honored that he is stepping forward to make a personal appeal.
The rules for what language generates an R rating is pretty specific, so it isn’t difficult to guess that the Weinsteins might have deliberately submitted a cut of Bully to the MPAA that would garner a restricted rating. Harvey does have a thing for drumming up publicity for a film based on a ratings issue. (See: Blue Valentine.) In this case, I can’t take issue with Hirsch’s argument about the film and how it represents the language used by kids.
Bully will be released on March 30. MovieFone debuted the trailer.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Safe and Drug-Free Schools estimates that over 13 million American kids will be bullied this year, making it the most common form of violence experienced by young people in the nation. In the new documentary BULLY, award-winning filmmaker Lee Hirsch (AMANDLA! A REVOLUTION IN FOUR-PART HARMONY) brings human scale to this startling statistic, offering an intimate, unflinching look at how bullying has touched five kids and their families. Filmed over the course of the 2009/2010 school year, BULLY opens a window onto the pained and often endangered lives of bullied kids, revealing a problem that transcends geographic, racial, ethnic and economic borders. It documents the responses of teachers and administrators to aggressive behaviors that defy “kids will be kids” clichés, and it captures a growing movement among parents and youths to change how bullying is handled in schools, in communities and in society as a whole.
