Casting for the The Dark Tower, Ron Howard’s planned film trilogy and TV miniseries based on the novels by Stephen King, is reaching fever pitch. Not long after the New York Post reported that Christian Bale had pulled ahead of Javier Bardem and Viggo Mortensen as the favored lead to play Roland Deschain, Deadline now states that an “official” offer has been put forward to Bardem.
In a contest that included Eric Bana, Adrian Brody and Timothy Olyphant, Variety is reporting that Benjamin Walker has won out the titular role in Timur Bekmambetov’s “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”. No doubt this announcement is followed with the question, “Who the hell is Benjamin Walker?”
The King’s Speech leads the way with twelve nominations. The Tom Hooper-helmed drama nabbed mentions for Picture, Director, Actor, and Original Screenplay. Joel and Ethan Coen’s take on True Grit landed ten nominations, making the cut in Picture, Director, Actor, and Adapted Screenplay. The Social Network, David Fincher’s drama about the founding of Facebook, proved to be a hit with the critics and picked up eight nominations, including Picture, Director, Actor, and Adapted Screenplay.
This week’s DVD and Blu-ray releases caters to people with various tastes. There is action, thrillers, real life dramas, horror, some surreal art-house films and bio-pics and since the Academy Awards are coming up a number of this weeks re-releases are award winning films.
All sex comedies are not created equal apparently. No Strings Attached triumphed where Love and Other Drugs failed not too long ago. The Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher rom-com won the weekend with $20 million. The Way Back and The Company Men barely registered with audiences premiering at fourteenth and twentieth places respectively.
Given the film’s status as the highest grossing film of all time and the slight open-endedness provided by the ending, the idea of Avatar becoming a franchise wasn’t a far-fetched one. Cameron has opened up several times about what we can expect, generically speaking, from the sequels, but now the production schedule is starting to come together.
The zombies of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies have struck again, devouring their former director Mike White (Year of the Dog), according to Deadline. White joins David O. Russell (The Fighter, I Heart Huckabees) as a director who has departed the film based on Seth Grahame-Smith’s book of the same name, where flesh eating creatures are thrown into Jane Austin’s literary classic (with an ass-kicking heroine to boot).
Well that was fast. In less than 48 hours, a (leaked) photo of the cast from the upcoming X-Men First Class was circulated around the Web, being met with negative outcry from most fanboys (who let’s face it, are rarely satisfied), 20th Century Fox has released an updated version of the pic as well as new production stills (see below) and Matthew Vaughn has (vocally) commenced damage control, in an attempt to calm the masses down.
Last year, Marvel announced its intention to make lower budget films out of its lesser-known properties. For instance, a script for a Dr. Strange film is already in the works. Now, Marvel has brought a writer in to tackle the comic world’s first legitimate Black superhero: Black Panther.
It looks like Sacha Baron Cohen will continue to be a presence in the world of mockumentary filmmaking with The Dictator. According to the press release, The Dictator is a comedy that “tells the heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed” and pulls inspiration from Saddam Hussein’s novel Zabibah and The King.
