The Expendables kicked ass and made it look easy at the weekend box office. The action throwback starring Sylvester Stallone muscled its way to the alpha position with $35 million. Eat Pray Love received divine intervention; the film inspired $23 million this weekend. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World lost the battle to two holdovers, The Other Guys and Inception. The movie came in fifth place with $10.5 million worth of fanboy support.
Since Bond 23 has been postponed because of financial issues there have been rumors that Daniel Craig was going to leave the James Bond role, with Sam Worthington favorite to take over. Craig has already taken the lead roles in Jon Favreau’s adaptation of Cowboys & Aliens and David Fincher’s version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: two highly anticipated films.
Actor Karl Urban will be playing the lead role in Judge Dredd, a film based on the legendary comic of the same name. Andrew Macdonald and Allon Reich are attached to produce the film, a reboot which will essentially ignore the unpopular 1995 version starring the Razzie-nominated Sylvester Stallone.
The average age of a badass in The Expendables is 51.3 years. It would initially be easy to scoff at an attempt to make an action film featuring a cast of such folk, but any attempt to do so would fall flat under the viewing of any one of the incredibly well-directed scenes of carnage and chaos that Sylvester Stallone presents us with. He himself, 64 years young, can still whoop some wholesale ass, and this combined with the likes of Randy Couture, Jet Li, and Jason Statham equals many, many, many, many bad guys dying.
“Scott Pilgrim,” based on the comics by Bryan Lee O’Malley, marks the third major feature for director and co-writer Edgar Wright, whose Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz practically turned the definition of the word “genre” on its head. “Scott Pilgrim” is five times as ambitious, a psychedelic montage of hyper-pop culture, fusing together romance, three decades of video games, fantasy and alternative rock. Are Wright and Universal crazy or dead-on?
Comic Con might be over, but the deals between studios and new comics/graphic novels keep rolling out. Deadline is reporting that Paramount has secured the series rights to Last Man Standing, a 230-page graphic novel that took two and a half years to complete; written and illustrated by Daniel LuVisi.
Julia Roberts is one of Hollywood’s most gifted actresses, as she can play just about any role with ease. Well, how about playing a writer who is solving her midlife crisis in an unorthodox way? Consider it done, as she leads the melodramatic film Eat Pray Love, based on the memoir of the same name.
