go watch if you aint yet - http://www.craveonline.com/articles/filmtv/04651176/saw_v_trailer.html

SDCC: First Wolverine Footage Screened!!
Source: Edward Douglas
July 24, 2008

At the end of the 20th Century Fox presentation where they showed new footage from The Day the Earth Stood Still and Max Payne (more on that exciting footage coming soon), the studio who has produced the most Marvel comic book movies so far pulled a surprise on the packed audience by bringing out Hugh Jackman, who had just gotten off a plane from Australia where they had just finished filming X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Written by David Benioff and directed by Oscar-winning director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi), the movie had been cloaked in secrecy except for a few scattered pictures that have leaked out, and Jackman was really excited about debuting some of the first footage at Comic-Con, since they weren't able to bring any of the "X-Men" movies there. He thanked everyone in the audience for helping make comic book movies so big in the past few years as well as going to see the three "X-Men" movies because it's the fans who helped make Jackman's career.

Jackman introduced Len Wein, the creator of Wolverine, who was in the audience, but that wasn't enough for Jackman, as he jumped off the stage and ran over shake Wein's hand and thank him for creating such a great character. Once he was back on stage, Jackman gave a really heart-felt speech to Wein saying, "I waited a long time to thank you personally and I wanted to shake your hand, mate. It's one of the best comic book characters ever created and as an actor, it's a challenge to play and I've just done it for the fourth time, and I still feel there's more to find out and that's down to you, from your great mind and heart creating a great character."

Jackman promised that the movie is "big, action-packed and bad-ass" and that we'll see a lot of "berzerker rage" in it, before showing the footage that was cut together especially for Comic-Con, even though he promised that it would look even better when the movie comes out next May.

The footage went by so fast that it was impossible to catch everything the first time--and they only showed it once unfortunately--but it begins with Jackman's Logan and Liev Schreiber's Victor Creed dressed in military gear in a detention cell where they're being interrogated by the younger Major William Stryker, played by Danny Huston. He says, "You were sentenced to death for decapitating a senior officer. Your sentence was to be carried out by a firing squad at 1000 hours. How'd that go?" Then Wolverine said, "It tickled." We see the two of them put in front of a firing squad who shoots at them, but they escape and we see Logan walking away as the building explodes behind them.

Stryker continues asking them if they're tired of running and denying their true nature and tells them he's putting together a "special team with special privileges" referring to the early stages of Weapon X or Alpha Flight. As he says this, we see brief glimpses of all the other characters in the movie, including Taylor Kitsch's Gambit, who looked amazing in action, Lynn Collins as Silverfox, Kevin Durand as The Blob, and even a short glimpse of Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool.

Most of the non-action scenes in the footage were dialogue sequences between Jackman and Schreiber with them talking over whether to take up Stryker's offer, and this is obviously what's going to lead to the long-time friends having a difference of opinions that leads to their age-old conflict. Logan says to Creed something about wanting to make a difference and asks how he'd like to get started, at which Creed tells Logan, "We didn't sign up for this. Who do you think you are? This is what we do! Become the animal."

From there, we get a few scenes of the experiments done to Logan to turn him into Wolverine, which looks like it was designed after the classic origin tale told in Barry Windsor-Smith's "Weapon X" story with him bursting out of the vat with the adamantium spikes coming out of skin. There was also a brief glimpse of Logan as a boy in a kimono with his claws extended which harks back to images from "Origins" and Frank Miller's take on the character's roots in Japan.

We see a few quick bits of Wolverine fighting some of the characters, including the Blob and Gambit, but the best moments are when he's taking on Sabretooth (of course)--sorry, Tyler Mane, but I think Liev Schreiber is going to make a lot better Victor Creed--and the clip reel ended with Wolverine hanging from the top of the helicopter while it's flying through the air.

Even though the usual claims were that this was unfinished footage, it looked good enough to make a pretty kick-ass trailer and fans of the character should be happy if the movie delivers on what we were shown.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine opens on May 1, 2009, and Jackman mentioned that they'll be presenting more footage and have a full panel for the movie at Wonder-Con in February

Raimi and Disney Developing Transplants
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
July 31, 2008

Walt Disney Pictures has picked up The Transplants, an action-adventure pitch from screenwriters Adam Jay Epstein and Andrew Jacobson for Sam Raimi ("Spider-Man" films) to produce via the Stars Road Entertainment production company he runs with partner Josh Donen.

The Hollywood Reporter says the parties are keeping a tight lid on the high-concept project, though it is described as a four-quadrant ensemble superhero story with a comedic bent.

Epstein and Jacobson, best known for Not Another Teen Movie, were planning to execute their idea via a comic book, but Disney executive Kristin Burr was so keen on it that the company pre-emptively picked up "Transplants."

Last week, the world got its first official look at The Brothers Bloom when the trailer came online and hit theaters. Following up his critically-acclaimed Brick, writer/director Rian Johnson is set to take the same snappy dialogue and inventive humor to entirely new heights with a comedy about two traveling con men, Stephen and Bloom (Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody, respectively).

Stepping into his edit bay, you get a sense of Rian's world, emanating out from his where he sits, smiling, behind the Final Cut screen. There are posters on the walls, including a large, framed print of the cover to Ricky Jay's "Cards as Weapons." Scattered around the walls are hand-drawn and colored pictures of the film's brothers, as though they had been sent in by a kindergarten class.

Rian grins at everyone and wants to know -- before any discussion of his film can begin -- if anyone else caught the midnight showing of "The Dark Knight" and what they thought. He's a film geek at heart and that makes it all the more enjoyable to see how finely he goes about his craft.

"It's got a lot of comedy to it," says Rian of his new film, "It's got romance. It's kind of got the 'Lady Eve' type thing going on. They're traveling around on steamer ships. It's got that kind of, almost old-school feel to it."

To start, Rian shows off the opening sequence which sets up the brothers as orphaned children, working their way through a number of foster homes and pulling off cons as they go. Narrated by the inimitable Ricky Jay, the opening sets up the offbeat humor perfectly and reminds the audience that the best cons have layers and layers. It's consistently surprising and really, really funny against Jay's questionably deadpan facts. As soon as the con has fully played out, the scene flashes onto the title done up in giant yellow lights and triumphant music blares. It's so different, tonally, from Brick and yet its not hard to understand it coming from the same well.

The final bit of production and one containing none of the principal actors, the intro was shot in Serbia and impressively stretches the last bits of a modest budget to some very expensive-looking proportions. Rian likened the final week to pulling together the crew for an entirely separate short film.

"[Originally,] I heard the budget and I was like, 'what we going to do with all that money?!' says Rian, "but then you put these big actors into it and you do it internationally and you're traveling and you're on the road... It was also the scale of the movie. It was pretty huge, actually, for what we made it for. In some ways, it was more ambitious to make this movie for this budget than to make 'Brick' for that budget."

Joking that they had to do the last week for, "Five dollars and a hand-job," he and his crew pulled Serbian extras for the all non-speaking adult roles and mined a nearby diplomat school for English-speaking children.

Like Brick, the score is composed by Rian's cousin, Nathan Johnson but is joined this time by some carefully-selected pop songs. In one scene, we get Bob Dylan's "Tonight, I'll Be Staying Here With You" and, in one part Rian only mentioned, there's a song by Cat Stevens. My guess is that he'll join Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson as a director known for must-buy soundtracks.

After the opening, Rian jumped ahead a bit to a scene where Brody's character, Bloom, has decided to give up the life of a con man. His brother Stephen has followed him (accompanied by the stunningly gorgeous Rinko Kikuchi as Bang Bang, played almost completely silently). Trying to get him in for one final con, Stephen shows off his plan to con a lonely, eccentric heiress, Penelope (Rachel Weisz).

As great as the casting is all around, Weisz is the one who impressed me the most with her character. She has down the perfect blend of strange, funny, cute and sexy with this tremendous innocence. If Brick was about the intensity of youth, The Brothers Bloom feels like the reverse; the childish astonishment of real life, perfectly summed up in Penelope's character.

"She's really fun to watch," says Rian of Rachel, "...It's a really difficult character because... the character has, for lack of a better work, quirk to it... What Rachel really pulls off is actually getting beyond that, grounding it."

"She showed her ass!" Rian laughs of one scene where Rachel stands in a backless hospital gown, "That was the first day of shooting! And Darren Aronofsky was on-set! I wasn't terrified at all."

Still, the biggest challenge for the film, Rian says, was having the characters be people you could identify with despite the fact that, in most con men movies, you can't really trust anyone: "As much as I wanted to do a character-based con man movie, I didn't want to do that by sweeping the con under the rug. I wanted it to have a big, fun con that kind of goes somewhere. Although, I feel I should put out there, the place it goes at the end isn't where a traditional con man movie goes. It definitely has some big cons in it but it also veers off the road a little bit."

He also promises that the ending will pull one over on the audience as well; "It's sand beneath your feet the whole time as opposed to rock," he says, "...I'm really curious to see how people react to seeing it a second time as a totally different movie but one that I hope will almost be more interesting."

As fantastically deliberate as Rian seems with this film in particular, his philosophy of creating in general is something to be admired. In comparing Brick to The Brothers Bloom, Rian says:

"[Genres are] kind of the seed that everything has started with for both of those. It starts sounding kind of effete and arty when you start talking about it, but you don't really control that seed or that thing that really grabs you and says, 'oh, yeah.' When it starts rolling, it's kind of weird how little control you've got and what starts getting you excited. For some reason, it was the Dashiell Hammett stuff with 'Brick' but this one it was con man movies. Although that's only an initial thought and doesn't really start rolling until you find something else you care about that attaches itself to that. With 'Brick' it was actually the high school aspect of it and attaching a lot of the feelings and real subjective memories of high school to these dark, noir archetypes that kind of got me going inside. With this it was storytelling. It was something I had been thinking a lot about in my life about how we use storytelling in our lives. Kind of taking the con man genre and taking the more romanticized, almost fairy-tale aspects of the con man's life as opposed to the gritter side of it and then using that as an engine to explore how we use storytelling. How we hide behind it and how we need it. How we're all kind of telling the story of our lives. That's kind of Bloom's whole thing through the whole movie. He has this notion which I think we all have at different points that you're faking it and everyone else right outside the window is leading a real life, sort of. That the real world is kind of right outside your grasp and you're kind of just getting by. I don't know how to boil it down to something that would fit on a motivational poster. It's about realizing that we're all faking it and that life is faking it. It's writing your own life and deciding how you're going to take the world and tell it back to yourself."

There are, of course, ideas that change throughout the course of creating anything. Sometimes they're unavoidable, as was the case in having to change the title from the script's original Penelope because of another film by that name. In other cases, Rian was careful not to second-guess himself; He mentioned that, originally, he was hesitant about having Ricky Jay do the opening narration because Jay had done the same thing in Magnolia. "The Ricky thing got me started," says Rian, "but the conclusion I came to is that it's a really unhealthy thing to think in those terms. I think the ultimate litmus test at the end of the day is just that it comes from you."

Rian's already looking toward his next project and is currently working on a script called Looper. "It's sci-fi," he says, "but it's very much -- well, I think people toss out Philip Dick sci-fi when they mean 'small, dark' sci-fi. Although, when I think of Philip Dick's books, I think of something very different. I think people are confusing it with the movie 'Blade Runner.' To me, it's a lot more like the first 'Terminator.' It's very sci-fi but it's also very character-based... It's like the first 'Terminator' in that it involves time travel... It's actually really different [from 'Bloom']. It's really violent and dark."

Whatever comes along, Rian will probably be sticking with original scripts for the foreseeable future."[I]t's more interesting to start from scratch," he says, "The whole adaptation thing, for me -- When I read a book that I love or a graphic novel that I love -- my instinct isn't 'lets turn this into a movie.' There's a disconnect there for me. It's almost like finding a pair of boots that you love and wanting to knit a sweater out of them. To me it me it makes much more sense just to find things that you love and then whatever they inspire within you to come up with something on your own."

Sadly, Rian put (hopefully temporarily) hold on the persistent rumors that Brick may get a Criterion DVD release that started when the company contacted him earlier this year to write a top-ten list for their website. "God, I wish," he said, "Don't even put that in my headspace!" First, he's got his sights set on getting the film to screen at L.A.'s famous revival theater: "I'm just waiting for it to play at the New Beverly," he laughs, "That would be like my favorite thing in the world."

Slated for an October 24 release, The Brothers Bloom is only a few months away. Though happy with last week's trailer, Rian is far more excited about (and has been far more involved with) the website, TheBrothersBloom.com, which should go fully interactive any day now and promises to be its own immersive new media experience.

link to interview - http://www.shocktillyoudrop.com/news/topnews.php?id=7170

Mike Myers Penning Austin Powers 4
Source: Deadline Hollywood Daily
July 31, 2008

Mike Myers has been developing a fourth "Austin Powers" movie for quite a while now. In May of 2007, he said:

"We're developing a fourth [movie], entirely from Dr. Evil's point of view. That is part of what I've been doing in the last little while."

Now, Deadline Hollywood Daily has a few more details on which direction Myers is going:

I'm told that Mike Myers has started writing Austin Powers 4 which will be a homage to his father. "It's very personal with a father and son theme loosely based on his own life," an insider tells me. As Myers has previously said, this fourth installment of the super spy spoof movie series will focus on Austin's arch-villain Dr. Evil, who was based on Blofeld of the Bond films. But what hasn't been known is that the AP4 plot is really about Dr. Evil and his son (introduced already as Scott Evil, played by Seth Green).

The site adds that Myers is co-writing again with Michael McCullers, who collaborated with Myers on the second and third installments.

Sony is moving forward with Venom, a potential "Spider-Man" spinoff, says The Hollywood Reporter.

The trade says the studio is developing the project, based on the villain who appeared in Spider-Man 3 and is hoping the character could serve as an antidote to the aging "Spider-Man" franchise in the way that Fox has used Wolverine to add longevity to its "X-Men" franchise.

The studio had commissioned a draft of the script from Jacob Estes (Mean Creek), but the studio is considering going in a different direction from Estes' script and is seeking writers for a new draft.

Casting also is no simple matter. Topher Grace played the character in the film, but agents have been eyeing the role for their clients, as Sony is not yet convinced the actor can carry a tentpole picture.

The Hollywood Reporter adds that neither Sony nor Marvel would comment for the story.

Sony is also still developing a fourth "Spider-Man" film for 2011.

Guillermo del Toro Not Afraid of the Dark
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
July 30, 2008

Guillermo del Toro and Miramax will produce a remake of the horror-thriller telefilm "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark," says The Hollywood Reporter.

Comic book artist-writer Troy Nixey will make his feature directorial debut with the adaptation of ABC's 1973 cult classic. Del Toro is adapting Nigel McKeand's teleplay with Matthew Robbins, his writing partner on the 1997 horror film Mimic for Miramax's former genre label Dimension.

"Dark" centers on a young girl, sent to live with her father and his new girlfriend, who discovers sinister creatures that live underneath the stairs.

Directed by John Newland, the original telefilm gained a cult following through syndication and home video release.

Marvin the Martian Feature in the Works

Variety says Warner Bros. is developing a Marvin the Martian feature at Alcon Entertainment, with principals Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove producing along with Steve Crystal.

Crystal, a former Warner executive with a first-look deal at Alcon through his Charlie Co. banner, developed the pitch as a Christmas story, with Marvin coming to Earth to destroy Christmas but being prevented from doing so when he's trapped in a gift box. Alcon’s out to writers and directors.

Watch the trailer - http://www.moviefone.com/movie/harry-potter-and-the-half-blood-prince/27063/main

The Fallen Confirmed for Transformers Sequel
Source: MTV
July 29, 2008

MTV talked to IDW Publishing, which is working on a five-part prequel miniseries to Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen titled "Transformers: Destiny" that will bridge the gap between the first and second movie. What IDW Publishing says confirms the rumor that "The Fallen" in the title is indeed the villain:

"[We're going to] explore the background of The Fallen — the main villain of the movie — as well as expand on the 'Reign of Starscream' story that we're doing and tie everything in to what this next movie is going to be," explained writer Chris Mowry, who partners on the book with artist Alex Milne. "The next movie starts out with just tons of action and there’s obviously going to be a lot of questions, so we’re hoping to answer some of those beforehand."

Simple. This is the film you should have went to see and not Dark Knight. Clever dialogue, themes covered are dark and testing of your own beliefs, Mulder with a scratchy beard and the weirdness of George W Bush. I expected to be disappointed by this, how could it live up to the series... but it does. The director did a superb job, the crucifix on the wall just before you see Dana Scully for the first time really tells you what is going on for her, as we fans know from the television show. Mulder is as dry as ever and you can feel that relationship from them, great chemistry as always. The two new agents do not get in the way, or distract from Mulder and Scully. I would rather have seen Agent Doggett and Agent Reyes but the movie had to have something new for those who haven't watched the show (who are you and why haven't you watched it??!!) How this will fair over time, I dont know yet but I've been watching X -Files since the beginning and I love it all.

Fox Opening Registration for X-Men: First Class?
Source: D.Mac
July 28, 2008

An interesting listing at Production Weekly caught our eye - "X-Men: First Class." Could 20th Century Fox be developing a movie based on the series written by Jeff Parker and pencilled by Roger Cruz? Or are they using the title of that comic for their proposed Young X-Men spin-off?

What makes it even more interesting is that X-MenFirstClass.com redirects to FoxMovies.com.

The "X-Men: First Class" was an eight-issue mini-series published from September of 2006 through April of 2007. As Special was also released in May of 2007 followed by a monthly series that started in 2007 with the same creative team. The comic is described as follows:

For millions of years, mankind's place on Earth was unchallenged – until five young people paved the way for a new kind of human. While students at the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Angel, Beast and Iceman taught the world what it meant to be X-Men. These are the hidden stories of the team that laid the foundation of a mutant dynasty!

With Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull having earned a massive $743.7 million worldwide (#27 on the all-time worldwide list), The Sunday Times asked George Lucas if he, Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford would be up for a fifth film:

"We were hoping for box-office figures like that, which is, ultimately, with inflation, what the others have done, within 10%," Lucas explains. "So, we squeaked up there. Really, though, it was a challenge getting the story together and getting everybody to agree on it. Indiana Jones only becomes complicated when you have another two people saying 'I want it this way' and 'I want it that way', whereas, when I first did Jones, I just said, 'We'll do it this way' — and that was much easier. But now I have to accommodate everybody, because they are all big, successful guys, too, so it's a little hard on a practical level.

"If I can come up with another idea that they like, we'll do another. Really, with the last one, Steven wasn't that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we'd like to take. I'm in the future; Steven's in the past. He's trying to drag it back to the way they were, I'm trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension. This recent one came out of that. It's kind of a hybrid of our own two ideas, so we'll see where we are able to take the next one."

One suggestion? A shorter title!

ComingSoon.net got a chance to speak with rapidly rising star Tyrese Gibson at the Death Race junket in San Diego on Sunday. We'll have the full video interview soon, but he did fill us in on another big project for him that will hopefully be happening the near future: Thundercats!

Tyrese said that he's been very involved in the attempt to bring the classic '80s cartoon series to the big screen and seemed to hint that a deal is very nearly complete. We asked him what character he'd be playing and he just smiled and said that there's a number of options on the table.

Late last year, the project was announced as a CG-animated feature at Warner Bros. Pictures that would be directed by video game veteran Jerry O'Flaherty. Whether that still stands is unknown.

Hyped? yes, but we know that already. So is it really any good? *people scream YES at the screen* Well it didn't do anything out of the ordinary or new for me. It felt repetitive, and the characters lacked any (especially Rachel). I didn't feel conflict or any emotion for the 'characters'. So why'd I give it a 3 star rating? It was not better than that, and not worse. Average, and that's being kind. I'm not jumping on the bandwagon of it's 'THE BEST THING EVER!!', it is clearly not... at all. However, it does not completely suck as some (minority) are saying just to be different.

You won't find it in stores until late 2009, but Lionsgate, Twisted Pictures and Brash Entertainment have premiered this poster art for Saw: The Video Game. In conjunction with this debut, there is also now an official site to sign up for updates.

Last year, Will Smith starred in an update of Richard Matheson's future shock novel I Am Novel, which became the second-biggest non-sequel of 2007, and ever since then, there's been a lot of rumors and speculation and curiosity whether Warner Bros. would try to do some kind of prequel or sequel to it. (Note: If you haven't seen it or read the book, the next sentence will probably spoil both.) A prequel would be the most obvious because it would mean that Will Smith could return as Dr. Robert Neville, and we'd be able to see more of the time in between the virus being unleashed in New York and where the first movie picks up the story.

Francis Lawrence was at Comic-Con International to talk about the new NBC series "Kings" for which he directed the pilot and the first couple of episodes, and we had a chance to ask him a few questions about the rumor about a prequel, which he confirmed he would definitely be involved with. "Yes, yes, absolutely, we're actually trying to crack that. We're trying to figure out some ideas for it, but yes, it would be a prequel." He did confirm that Will Smith, who's done a couple of sequels in his career, would definitely be into doing more with the character.

The pilot for "Kings" has a lot of great aerial shots of New York City, which is doubling for the city of Shiloh, and talking about that lead to us talking about how it was portrayed in Legend. "Akiva and I really wanted to do 'Legend' in New York, because it's such an iconic city and it's just more striking to see it abandoned than Los Angeles, 'cause honestly, parts of Los Angeles can look abandoned in the middle of the day."

We asked him whether he'd have go through the same things in creating an abandoned New York as he did for I Am Legend and whether it would be easier for a prequel, having already figured out how to do it. "Well, even as we went through them with the movie itself, it got easier. The first time you got out there and shut down 6th Avenue, it's like, 'How are we going to do this day after day after day?' but by the end, it's just like you know how to do it. You got the P.A.'s who know how to shut it down, how to let the traffic through in between set-ups and you just sort of get the routine down, so that's not the issue."

That led directly into Lawrence sharing some interesting ideas that might go into making the proposed prequel: "In the prequel, it's slightly different because it's earlier. We were three years later so we did a lot of research into the way nature would have sort of overtaken the city, with the cracks in the streets and the weeds, so if it's just back earlier, it'll be slightly different so the approach will be different. We're not positive of the time of the year, because if you go in winter, you can do some entirely different kinds of things."

As far as getting Richard Matheson's blessing on this prequel, Lawrence commented, "I'm sure we'll definitely keep him involved in the prequel just in terms of updating him and inviting him to read the script and see what he has to say. Matheson was very happy (with the first movie). It was a great moment when we showed him the movie. He had read the script and I invited him when we were done to see the movie and he brought his family, and I called him when we were on the international junket in Japan and I was really nervous, because it's an adaptation and it's different, and he knew along the way, it's Richard Matheson. He really loved it and I had this great letter from him about it."

As far as some of the other things on Lawrence's slate, he told us, "There's something on my IMDb page called 'Eddie Dickens and the Awful End,' which is not happening. That was an animated project that I was going to do alongside with 'Legend' and that we sort of decided with the studio not to do. Then there's a Disney thing called 'Snow and the 7' that I'm still working on which is a modern retelling of the Snow White story." He said that it would be a family movie in the sense of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies. "It's in that kind of a vein. It's 19th Century China, a British girl is discovering who she really is, and it's a great action-adventure story. That one's a ways away but we got this great writer in and we're working on the script. This great world and great ideas."

Filmmaker David Gordon Green is just a few weeks away from the release of his first studio movie, the action-comedy Pineapple Express starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, and ComingSoon.net had a chance to sit down with him at Comic-Con International to talk about his first big budget action flick. Having interviewed him a few months ago for his indie drama Snow Angels (that's here, if you missed it), we knew that he was working on a proposed remake of Dario Argento's horror classic Suspiria, and we wondered how that was progressing.

"The script is finished," he told us, as we sat out on the patio behind the convention center. "We're out trying to find the right supportive financial institution who wants to take a risk and make a really bold, distinctive and unique horror film. It's not the obvious... it doesn't slip naturally into the niche market of contemporary horror movies. It's something that I think has the potential to be classic and a lot more artistically-inclined than a lot of the contemporary horror stuff."

When asked about the origins of the remake, he noted, "It's an Italian production company that is developing it and it will be a European production, and doubtfully will have any American ties to it." Theoretically, they could go ahead and make the movie and then try to shop for a U. S. distributor rather than have a studio involved for the production, which Green says is probably what they would do. "We're trying to find private financing that would take the risk with us, but it's another one that it takes a lot of risk, let's say, as you can imagine from the original."

Green also confirmed that they have the cast for the movie coming together, but none that he could tell us. (Rats!)

Either that will be his next movie or a movie written by Danny McBride, co-star of Pineapple Express and Green's acclaimed early movie All the Real Girls, called Your Highness. "It's a medieval movie about Danny--he's a prince in the middle ages who fights dragons--and we're looking at doing a rewrite on that right now, just Danny in a world of creatures, and the possibilities there would be great, because I haven't really worked in some of the special effects that could teach me.

Pineapple Express opens on August 6th

SDCC EXCL: Craven on Scream 4 Talk

Source: Ryan Rotten
July 27, 2008

The last month has kicked up a lot of Scream 4 buzz with the last update coming from franchise goof and genre movie know-it-all Jamie Kennedy. According to the actor, Dimension doesn't want to move on a sequel unless they can get three-time Scream helmer Wes Craven.

Shock caught up to the man himself this afternoon who confirms "There has been contact. I haven't spoken to Bob Weinstein but they have checked with my agent. I'm not saying 'no.'"

And what would draw him back? "It really is: Is there a script?," he says. "What I found increasingly in the Scream series is that the script were being written while we were shooting. The first one was a written script, it went out to the whole town and the Weinsteins jumped on it. There was very little changed in that. But 2 and 3? There were a lot of other people, including myself, writing on those."

SDCC: Craven Not Involved with Elm Street Remake

Source: Edward Douglas
July 27, 2008

Ironically, mere minutes after Platinum Dunes producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form told the audience in Ballroom 20 at Comic-Con International that they're trying to negotiate the rights to remake Wes Craven's The Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven was sitting on the same podium and when he was asked by a member of the audience about said remake, he said that he hasn't been contacted and that they were going ahead and talking about a remake without his involvement which was received by nearly unanimous "boos."

ShockTillYouDrop.com will be talking with Fuller and Form in the next hour or two and we'll ask them for their comments on trying to do a remake without the original creator's involvement, if this is indeed true. Who knows? Maybe we can arrange some sort of meeting between the three of them and get this thing going in a way that can make everyone happy.

Tim Burton and Walt Disney Pictures are in final talks with Australian actress Mia Wasikowska to star in Alice in Wonderland, Burton's take on Lewis Carroll's classic fantasy novel, says The Hollywood Reporter.

The film, based on a script by Linda Woolverton (The Lion King), will be produced by longtime Burton collaborator Richard Zanuck, former Disney chairman Joe Roth and Jennifer and Suzanne Todd. It will be shot with live-action and performance-capture footage and presented in Disney Digital 3-D.

Wasikowska got her start on the Aussie series "All Saints" and is a regular on HBO's "In Treatment." She next will appear opposite Daniel Craig in Ed Zwick's war drama Defiance and just completed filming the role of a young Amelia Earhart fan in Mira Nair's biopic Amelia starring Hilary Swank.

Principal photography starts in November.

Christian Bale turned out for the Spanish premiere of his new movie The Dark Knight on Wednesday, just a day after he was arrested on allegations of assault.

The Batman star, 34, was arrested in London on Tuesday over allegations he attacked his mum Jenny, 61, and sister Sharon, 40, at the capital's Dorchester Hotel on Sunday night.

But he stunned onlookers on Wednesday by walking the red carpet with his wife Sibi and costars Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhart at the event at Barcelona's Coliseum Theater.

The actor spent half an hour signing autographs for fans and posing for photographs but did not speak to journalists or answer questions about the incident.

"The producers of hit TV show The X-Files originally had their eye on a different Anderson for the character Agent Dana Scully - Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson.

The role of the F.B.I. special agent was made famous by Gillian Anderson, but the actress insists TV studio Twentieth Century Fox wanted to cast the blonde beauty instead.

She says, "That was somebody (Pamela Anderson) who was more familiar to them in terms of what was on TV at the time.

"They were looking for someone bustier, taller, leggier than me. They couldn't fathom how David and me could equal success... At the beginning, nobody trusted that I could do anything. I had no body of work behind me at all, and, certainly Fox felt very strongly that I wasn't the right person for the job."