‘The Hunger Games’ May Have Its Director
By Amy Wilkinson at MTV News
The director reaping is nearing an end: Gary Ross is in talks to direct the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ critically acclaimed young adult novel “The Hunger Games.”
Lionsgate, the studio co-producing the film along with Color Force’s Nina Jacobson, is in early talks with the director, Deadline reports. Over the past few weeks, the studio has been meeting with a who’s who of directors including “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” helmer David Slade, Sam Mendes, Andrew Adamson, Rupert Sanders and Susanna White.
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‘Let Me In’: A Vampire Film With a Reagan-Era Context
By Anthony Kaufman at Speakeasy
“Let Me In,” a remake of the Swedish vampire film “Let the Right One In,” was never Matt Reeves’ intended follow-up to his shaky-cam monster blockbuster “Cloverfield.”
The 44-year-old director had planned to make a Hitchcockian-like thriller called “The Invisible Woman.” But the actress pulled out and his passion project fell apart…While pitching his original project to Overture Films—which was recently bought out by Relativity Media—executives felt “Invisible Woman” was too risky. But they gave Reeves a DVD of “Let the Right One In,” which had yet to become a cult foreign-language hit in the U.S, to see whether he might interested in adapting it.
“I really wanted to make my movie and I didn’t really know if I wanted to do a remake,” recalls Reeves. “Then I watched the movie, and it occupied the same emotional terrain that was in my script. And I saw they were using the vampire genre to talk about the pain of adolescence. And I thought this was amazing. I was so taken.”
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Actor set to return as Gandalf
via The Bolton News
FILMING on The Hobbit, the long-awaited prequel to The Lord of the Rings, should start in the new year, according to former Bolton School boy Sir Ian McKellen.
“The aim is to start filming in January,” he said.
The actor is slated to reprise his role as the wizard Gandalf, for which he received two Oscar nominations, but has said he wouldn’t be “sitting waiting” for shooting to start.
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Ryan Reynolds Talks Unique & Risky Nature of Deadpool Movie
by Rob Keyes at Screenrant
For a while there, feelings of fear and potential disappointment crept in for many fans when soft rumors floated around that Ryan Reynolds and his increasingly busy schedule may not allow for him to play the title role in the production of X-Men: Deadpoolfor Twentieth Century Fox.
A spinoff of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, while having nothing to do with it as a quasi-reboot of the character’s origins, Deadpool is one of several Marvel properties in development at Fox. It hit a bit of a roadblock when shortly after being greenlit, star Ryan Reynolds also nabbed the lead role in Green Lantern, the big budget superhero movie from Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment. Could he pull off playing two lead comic book characters from two rival comic book companies and studios at the same time?
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Top Five Undercredited Contributions to Zombie History
Julia Sevin at Tor
Names like George Romero, titles like Evil Dead, or videos like Thriller instantly bring to mind the notion of zombies, but what of the unsung (or less-sung) heroes? Below the cut, I celebrate five people (some of whom you may recognize above) who have helped make the undead into the horrifying pop-cultural phenomenon they are today…
Number Five: Shinji Mikami: Why? Resident Evil brought zombies back to the mainstream.
In the mid-90s, when low-level Capcom game designer Mikami was asked to create a new horror game, he knew he wanted to set it in a haunted house, but he was at a loss for what sort of bad guy to use. To his mind, ghosts and demonic possessions offered too little satisfaction in vanquishing or were simply not scary enough. It occurred to him that the creatures from Night of the Living Dead were both adequately terrifying and simple (if not easy) to beat. I don’t think he had any clue that this choice, the impetus for Resident Evil, would tap into the long-simmering phobias of a boatload of gamers and movie-watchers. Because it so squarely hit the nerve laid in us by Romero, Resident Evil became a sensation, triggering several successful sequels and similar games. The subsequent movie series, starting with 2002’s Resident Evil, was the first film in the new, gargantuan wave of zombie flicks, beating the oft-credited 28 Days Later to U.S. theaters by a year. Whatever you make of these franchises or their zombies, it’s hard to argue that they kickstarted the popular awareness from which innumerable followers have benefited.
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A look at the modern, gritty Watchmen movie originally planned
By Thomas Mill at Blastr
Before Zack Snyder made his perhaps too faithful adaptation of Watchmen, Bourne Supremacy director Paul Greengrass worked on a different version of the film that would have been a modern, gritty take on Alan Moore’s iconic comic. Comic Book Resources recently unearthed production art from the Greengrass film and also spoke to the man who created it, production designer Dominic Watkins, who said they were working on a film that would have been more like Batman Begins.
“I thought it was interesting because I thought we could do something very interesting in his style that hadn’t been done before. The Nolan Batman hadn’t been done at that point, so everything was still kind of very stylized.”
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Ok, there is no such thing as “too faithful”. And I was under the impression that a lot of fans of the graphic novel weren’t impressed by The Watchmen. I liked the movie, but I hadn’t read it first. I remember playing Resident Evil (I can’t remember which one) in high school, and being freaked out by it. Then I saw the movie, and 28 Days Later. I’m not really into horror, but I do like zombies. Well, some zombies. I thought the article about Let Me In was interesting too, it’s nice seeing where the director is coming from.
What do you think of Gary Ross as the director for The Hunger Games? Are you looking forward to Let Me In? Do you think they should make a Deadpool movie?
