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With studios dumping so many high-profile movie projects lately — this past week alone, Legendary Pictures pulled the plug on Paradise Lost and Columbia Pictures and Screen Gems dumped The Boys and The Mortal Instruments, respectively — it's kind of refreshing to hear that a once-dead movie project is getting new life. According to Deadline, Universal Pictures has revived Dracula Year Zero and is currently in negotiations with short film and commercial director Gary Shore to helm the movie, which focuses on Vlad "The Impaler" Tepes, the real-life Romanian Prince of Wallachia whose title "Dracula" ("Son of the Dragon") became synonymous with vampires following the publication of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel of the same name.
more about Dracula: Year Zero >> Posted 02.12.12 by BrentJS -
Johnny Utah's going to get another chance to bring down the bad guys.
Alcon Entertainment is remaking 1991's Point Break, which starred Keanu Reeves as a rookie FBI agent who goes undercover as a surfer to bring down down a bank robber (Patrick Swayze) and his crew. Academy Award–winning director Kathryn Bigelow directed the original.
While no director is currently attached to the remake, screenwriter Kurt Wimmer (Salt) wrote the screenplay, which will again follow a young FBI agent going undercover to bring down criminals — this time in the world of international extreme sports.
more on remaking Point Break >> Posted 09.13.11 by Ryan -
2006's The Departed was, at the time, the third collaboration between director Martin Scorsese and actor Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie, a remake of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, won Academy Awards for both Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan.
Since The Departed, the actor and director have also worked on last year's Shutter Island, and the pair are looking to reunite for a fifth time with a remake of the gritty, 1974 drama The Gambler. Deadline reports that Monahan is writing the script for Paramount for Scorsese with DiCaprio now attached to star. The original starred James Caan as a professor whose addiction to gambling gets the better of him and flees to Las Vegas to escape the mob.
While fans of The Departed have to be pleased at the potential of a re-teaming between the movie's screenwriter, director and star of the original movie, there is one person who isn't happy about the remake at all: The Gambler screenwriter James Toback. Toback sent Deadline a message outlining his displeasure over the remake, which no one had bothered to tell him about.
toback not pleased with the "rudeness" of the remake >> Posted 08.29.11 by Ryan -
A few horror movies have been on the move recently, with Underworld 4 moving release dates (again) and director Alex Proyas's Dracula Year Zero (maybe) moving forward.
Box Office Mojo reports that Underworld 4 has been bumped from its Sept. 23, 2011, release date to Jan. 20, 2012, instead. The sequel will still be in 3-D. Len Wiseman, director of the first two Underworld movie, was reported to be returning to direct the fourth in February, with his wife/series lead Kate Beckingsale returning, as well. John Hlavin is writing the screenplay.
What's going on with Dracula: Year Zero? >> Posted 08.19.10 by Ryan -
Last September, Colin Farrell admitted he wanted to return to Hollywood in a major genre movie, and now he's getting his chance. After some stand-out performances in the independent movies like In Bruges and Crazy Heart, THR reports that Farrell has joined the Dreamworks remake of Fright Night.
toni collette too, plus more Fright Night remake details >> Posted 05.13.10 by Ryan -
It's taken some time, but Hollywood has finally started to take notice of the works of Garth Ennis, the prolific Eisner Award–winning comic book scribe from Northern Ireland. Ennis' work on Marvel Comics' Punisher MAX inspired Punisher: War Zone, and a live-action movie based on the Preacher series he co-created for DC Comics could begin shooting as early as next year. His creator-owned series The Boys is in development as a feature, and now Variety has reported that his creator-owned Crossed series is being primed for the silver screen, as well.
read more about Crossed and the movie version >> Posted 04.21.10 by BrentJS -
It's been nearly two years since it was first announced that a big-screen adaptation of the popular Konami video game series Metal Gear Solid was in the works with Michael de Luca (Brothers) producing. Shortly after that announcement, de Luca confirmed his involvement in an interview with Collider:
There's so much story in Metal Gear as opposed to other video games that I think it's going to be a challenge, but it's an upscale problem to have so much thematic subtexts and story material to draw from so I think we have a leg up already in that it's such a rich universe.
Now, it appears as if the Metal Gear Solid movie is not going to happen after all. In a recent interview with Collider, de Luca said that he didn't "think it's going to move forward" because "a movie can only hurt" the video game franchise.
The video game companies are very protective of their property and there are certain things a studio requires freedom-wise to market and distribute a movie effectively in a global marketplace and sometimes getting those two things to match up is really hard. And in the case of Metal Gear Solid, the agenda's just ... not because the parties weren't amicable, it was just kind of impossible to get the agendas to match up.
Posted 01.25.10 by BrentJS -
Ghost Rider 2 has been in development for months now, moving forward with a nine-year-old script David Goyer is currently rewriting, but further details have been scarce until now.
Producer Michael De Luca told Collider that the sequel, tentatively titled Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, will be like "pushing the reset button" and that Goyer's script is still being tweaked to include an idea from its star Nicolas Cage, who has said that he wants Ghost Rider 2 to be a more "international" story.
Yeah, the idea was because Ghost Rider is a unique blend of theology and action and the character deals with the kind of battle of good vs. evil in a theological sense, that [setting the sequel in] Europe you could avail yourself of a lot of religious sites and kind ancient religious site and a history of theology as a setting that isn't available in the U.S. We wanted to kind of signal that we're as different from the first movie just because we want to be fresh and new as you can get in terms of getting away from southwestern kind of pseudo-western thing.
De Luca confirmed Goyer's assertion that the movie will be a "hard PG-13" that will not include either Eva Mendes' character Roxanne or the participation of Ghost Rider director Mark Steven Johnson. De Luca admitted he'd be "excited" to have Goyer direct the sequel, though that would "depend on his schedule." Goyer certainly would be the person with the most familiarity with the script, which De Luca described as a story of redemption.
That 2001 script has been on the Internet, but if you ever get a chance to look at it, it's a really intimate kind of redemption story and it's very brutal and it moves like a freight train in that spirit, you know, with the Ghost Rider doing, I think, things that are very also kind of like jaw dropping, commercial set pieces and whatnot. They're all there but it's a very intimate storyline that lets you have some character development.
While Ghost Rider : Spirit of Veneance has no release date, De Luca admitted that the sequel could begin filming in 2010.
Posted 01.08.10 by Ryan -
The transition from current events to dramatic adaptations seems to move quicker and quicker these days. Both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter confirmed today that Columbia Pictures has acquired the rights to the life story of Richard Philips, the U.S. Navy captain whose ship was abducted by Somali pirates barely six weeks ago.
The movie will tell the story about the hijack, most likely with emphasis on Philips's surrendering himself to the pirates in order to save his crew. He was eventually rescued unharmed.
Kevin Spacey will produce, along with Scott Rudin, Michael DeLuca, and Dana Brunetti. No writers or actors are yet attached to the project. Columbia Studio Executive Doug Belgrad spoke to the press:
We were drawn to this remarkable story of heroism and courage as events were unfolding off the coast of Africa.
Columbia also gained the rights to Philips' upcoming memoir. No production schedule or release date has been announced for the movie.
Posted 05.28.09 by reelz