-
Actor Channing Tatum has been toiling this year mostly in romantic dramas like The Vow and comedies like 21 Jump Street and the upcoming Magic Mike, but he'll return to action for one of his next roles. THR reports that Tatum is in talks for the lead role in Columbia's action-thriller White House Down for Independence Day and 2012 director Roland Emmerich.
The project is being described as "Die Hard in the White House" and the comparison is apt. Tatum will play a Secret Service agent who is a single father and finds himself with few resources to defend the President when the White House is taken over by a paramilitary group. (Who's next to be cast — Alan Rickman?) The studio paid $3 million for the spec script written by James Vanderbilt (The Amazing Spider-Man), and also faces competition from a similar project, Olympus Has Fallen, which will star Gerard Butler and will be directed by Antoine Fuqua (Brooklyn's Finest). However, Tatum is coming off of back-to-back hits and will test his action mettle with a (possibly brief) appearance in the upcoming G.I. Joe: Retaliation, which puts White House Down in an excellent position for Columbia.
Already scheduled for a November 1, 2013 release date, production on White House Down is set to start this summer.
Posted 05.16.12 by Ryan -
After getting the green light from Sony to move forward with his new sci-fi movie, Singularity, co-writer (with Harald Kloser) and director Roland Emmerich has halted pre-production on the movie. Some sources have claimed that the movie was put on hold because of Sony's dissatisfaction with the box office performance of Emmerich's latest movie for the studio, Anonymous, a $30 million period movie that has grossed less than $5 million in its first two weeks in theaters. However, Deadline has reported the decision stems from the desire to bring in an expert to help hone some of the futuristic concepts in the script.
more about Singularity >> Posted 11.12.11 by BrentJS -
One of the most controversial theories in the field of literature — that William Shakespeare, widely considered to be the greatest writer in the English language, was not the actual author of the works he has become famous for having written — lies at the heart of producer-director Roland Emmerich's (10,000 B.C., 2012) new historical thriller, Anonymous. The movie, written by John Orloff (A Mighty Heart), explores the theory first proposed by English schoolteacher J. Thomas Looney in his book Shakespeare Identified (1920) that the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans), was the actual literary genius, with Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) simply a hired stand-in. Why would de Vere not want to take credit for his brilliant writing and how did Shakespeare come into the picture? The two new preview clips from the movie that were recently released by Columbia Pictures answer precisely those questions.
watch the new clips >> Posted 09.18.11 by BrentJS -
Sony Pictures has released three new preview clips from producer-director Roland Emmerich's (10,000 B.C., 2012) new movie, Anonymous, a historical thriller that posits the question, "Was Shakespeare a Fraud?"
Set during the tumultuous succession of Queen Elizabeth I (played by Vanessa Redgrave) to the throne of England and the Essex Rebellion against her, the movie revolves around the theory that William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) was nothing more than a hired front for the real author of the works attributed to him, the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans), who dared not take credit for fear of damaging his social rank and engendering reprisals from the Crown. Written by John Orloff (A Mighty Heart), Anonymous also stars Joely Richardson as Princess Elizabeth Tudor, Xavier Samuel as Henry Wriothesley, David Thewlis as William Cecil and Jamie Campbell Bower as the young Earl of Oxford.
watch the new preview clips >> Posted 09.13.11 by BrentJS -
A second theatrical trailer for producer-director Roland Emmerich's (2012) new political thriller, Anonymous, was recently released and can now be viewed online. Written by John Orloff (A Mighty Heart), Anonymous is set during the succession of Queen Elizabeth I to the throne of England and the Essex Rebellion against her. The premise of the movie revolves around the controversial theory that Elizabethan courtier and playwright Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was the actual author of the majority of the works attributed to William Shakespeare, a theory first proposed by English schoolteacher J. Thomas Looney in his 1920 book, Shakespeare Identified.
The cast includes Rhys Ifans as Edward de Vere, Rafe Spall as William Shakespeare, Joely Richardson as Princess Elizabeth Tudor, Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth I, Xavier Samuel as Henry Wriothesley, David Thewlis as William Cecil and Jamie Campbell Bower as the young Earl of Oxford.
read the synopsis and watch the new trailer >> Posted 08.07.11 by BrentJS -
Director Roland Emmerich is known mostly for his disaster movies, like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and most recently 2012. Emmerich's latest movie, September's Anonymous, steps into Shakespearean times to demystify the life and work of, well, William Shakespeare, in what Emmerich has described as a "historical thriller". Emmerich's next project could bring him back to blowing things up.
more about Asteroids >> Posted 06.10.11 by Ryan -
Roland Emmerich is not going to destroy the world … this time. No alien invasion, no ice, no cataclysms at all. No, for his next project the director of Independence Day and 2012 is going to get Shakespearean. The movie, titled Anonymous, aims to dramatize the theory that Shakespeare didn't really write all those classic plays. They were instead, in this version of history, written by the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere.
Shooting is set to begin in March, and he already has, as he puts it, "a true English cast" on board, with Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth, David Thewlis as the queen's secretary of state (and master of intrigue) William Cecil, and Rhys Ifans as the Earl Of Oxford.
And the plot, as in many a good Elizabethan drama, is all about the plotting. Emmerich sums up some of the twists and turns in an interview with Empire:
It's a mix of a lot of things: it's an historical thriller because it's about who will succeed Queen Elizabeth and the struggle of the people who want to have a hand in it. It's the Tudors on one side and the Cecils on the other, and in between [the two] is the Queen. Through that story we tell how the plays written by the Earl of Oxford ended up labelled 'William Shakespeare.
Don't worry, though. After he finishes this project, Emmerich is scheduled to return to his roots with an epic sci-fi flick about the collapse of galactic civilization. And he is planning to shoot that movie, Foundation, in motion-capture 3-D, giving him plenty of scope for his old world-destroying tricks.
Posted 02.25.10 by reelz -
After Avatar's incredible success at the box office, there has been a huge push to make every new epic a 3-D extravaganza. Witness how Clash of the Titans got dragged kicking and screaming into this brave new era.
Now Roland Emmerich is telling MTV that his adaptation of Isaac Asimov's sci-fi epic Foundation will be in motion capture 3-D. He is obviously pretty excited about having some cool new toys to play with.
The Avatar technology applies to Foundation. It has to be done all CG because I would not know how to shoot this thing in real.... Probably now all big movies have to be 3-D. It's not only the effect of 3-D, [Avatar has] just shown that if you do a movie in 3-D, you can ask for more money and that's the trick. I think now everybody who does bigger movies has to shoot them in 3-D. I think there's no way around it. I was on the set of Avatar and I saw how it worked and I really thought, "That's the ultimate way of making movies."
So far so good. Foundation is the story of the collapse (and, in the sequels, rebirth) of a galactic civilization. It makes sense that scenes on the planet Trantor, the hyper-technological seat of the galactic empire might benefit from the addition of an extra dimension.
The motion capture aspects of the Avatar technology, might not have quite the same impact as in James Cameron's epic though. While it could put the actors into a full-on CG environment, there are no blue aliens in Asimov's vision of the future. No aliens at all really.
In any case, we may find out more soon about what direction this is headed in. Emmerich says he is expecting to receive a draft of the script by the end of the week.
Posted 02.12.10 by reelz -
Talking to MTV, 2012 director Roland Emmerich offered up a few more tantalizing tidbits about his concept for a sequel to his 1996 vision of the end the world, Independence Day. Whether it will actually ever be produced still seems to hinge on whether he can get Will Smith on board, but if it does, the master of disaster is, as usual, thinking big:
What we want to do in the next – it's actually two movies – we want to do a bigger arc.
As for the plot, he explains, there is no script yet, but:
The idea is just to continue the story and actually I don't know how many years ago this was — twelve, thirteen, fourteen years ago — and just continue where it ended ... the story will stay firmly on the planet. It's always about earth and that earth gets invaded.
He's even toyed around with a title for the project: ID4-ever parts I and II.
Posted 11.13.09 by reelz -
Advance buzz for director Roland Emmerich's 2012 has not been very good, but it seems that if you don't take his third blow-up-the-world pic too seriously, it isn't bad.
"This is fun. 2012 delivers what it promises, and since no sentient being will buy a ticket expecting anything else, it will be, for its audiences, one of the most satisfactory films of the year."
— Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"...God forgive me, but I enjoyed the nerve-racking silliness of this newest, loudest exercise in destruction."
— Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
"If you rolled every disaster movie into one spectacular package, you would wind up with something close to 2012, Roland Emmerich's latest apocalyptic fantasy."
— Stephen Farber, Hollywood Reporter
"On any level other than as sheer visual sensation, 2012 is a joke, for the simple reason that it has no point of view; the film offers no philosophical, metaphysical, intellectual and certainly no religious perspective on the cataclysm, just the physical frenzy of it all."
— Todd McCarthy, Variety
"It goes without saying that people do not watch Godzilla movies for their human protagonists' exhibition of bravery in the face of certain peril but rather to enjoy said peril. They also don't go to disaster movies asking to be browbeaten by a hack director with an obscene amount of money and an incredible special-effects crew."
— Simon Abrams, Slant Magazine
Posted 11.12.09 by reelz