via io9:
by Meredith Woerner: Tron Legacy Will Use 3-D The Way The Wizard Of Oz Used Color
Tron Legacy director Joseph Kosinski has just set our minds at ease. He promises that the new Disney Tron will be less like Avatar and more like the Wizard of Oz, in that only the Tron world will be 3D.
Kosinski explained the substance-over-3-D-sparkle mantra on Tron Legacy to MTV, stating:
“Our approach is not like “Avatar,” which I think is 3D from the first shot to the last. Ours is sort of a Wizard Of Oz. approach. Ninety-eight percent of the 3D is in the world of “Tron.” The 3D really starts once we get into the Tron world.”
He goes on explaining that the focus has been on the story, not the effects. And that famous Comic Con teaser video, showing lightcycle racing and the two Jeff Bridgeses, won’t actually appear in the movie — those events take place before the movie starts. In fact, the movie will look much more advanced than that teaser, which a small team put together on its own.
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By Charlie Jane Anders: Paranoid Cyberpunk Religious Thriller Gets A Movie Deal
Is Trevor Sands the new go-to guy for science-fiction movie adapations? He’s written the screenplay for Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos and the Six Million Dollar Man movie. And now he’s taking on Jeff Somers’ The Electric Church.
Somers’ The Electric Church, the first volume in a series, seems like a slam-dunk cool concept for a movie: it’s got religion, weirdness, dystopian futures and noir. The books follow Avery Cates, a bodyguard/assassin who sometimes works for the police force of the council which oversees this future Earth’s federation of nations. In the first book, Cates is forced to kill the head of a church that converts people by transplanting their brains into more easily controlled religious bodies. The film is tentatively called The Avery Cates Project.
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By Annalee Newitz: Is Avatar Too Realistic For Its Own Good?
Chinese writers condemned Avatar, a branch of the Russian communist party condemned it, the Vatican has weighed in, and other groups are endlessly debating its political meaning. What makes people respond so strongly to this flick? It’s the realism.
But how can such a blatantly fantastical movie be realistic? This is a movie about blue cat people who ride dragons and bond with six-legged horses. The whole thing takes place on the moon Pandora, whose lush mega-forest is actually wired up with synapses so that the moon can think like a giant brain. Plus, one of the most memorable features of Pandora, other than its bizarre flora and fauna, are its floating mountains that hover inexplicably over a weird magnetic anomaly that’s never explained.
It’s this kind of realism that has inspired Chinese people evicted from their homes to call the plight of the Na’vi their own. It’s what turned representatives of the Vatican into film critics, evaluating whether this piece of fiction undermined Christianity with its portrayal nature-worshiping aliens. And it’s what inspired me to write an essay several weeks ago about the race politics of a story about blue people. Even though we are well aware Avatar is fiction, all of us are behaving as if the events in this movie are woven into the fabric of our real lives.
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by Helen O’Hara at Empire: Should Spider-Man Have Gone 3D?
So this morning we’ve learned that the next Spider-Man film will have a budget of about $80 million. That puts it on a lower budget than Sherlock Holmes, lower than X-Men Origins: Wolverine (by nearly half). Heck, it’s less than Fast & Furious, which cost about $85m, and only just more (not adjusting for inflation) than the first X-Men movie. So what does this mean for the film, and might Spidey have been better going for balls-out 3D instead?
And of course filmmaking should never be just about money, trying to outspend what went before. Just because the third Spider-Man cost a reported $258m doesn’t mean this one should spend higher. So there’s a sense in which this budget is to be applauded – and you can see why the studio would go for it. Think about it: people will turn out for the Spider-Man name. Even if you count on getting fewer people than the $890m-worth worldwide who went to see Spider-Man 3 (allowing for the loss of Raimi fans, those so disappointed by that movie that they’ve left the franchise, and those who don’t want to see a teenage Spidey) and maybe losing a few more with a trailer that promises less action than before, you could still comfortably project a take of $500-600m worldwide.
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By Eric Ditzian at MTV News: ‘Let Me In’ Is ‘Darker’ Than ‘Twilight,’ Director Matt Reeves Says
Matt Reeves knows he has a target on his back. The director admits as much roughly two minutes into a conversation about his upcoming film, “Let Me In.” That’s what happens when your movie: A) takes on the pop-cultural theme-du-jour of vampires, and B) remakes a beloved flick that pretty much everyone agrees is as perfect as genre filmmaking gets.
MTV: Is “Let Me In” a remake or a reimagining? What are you keeping from the original and what are you changing?
Matt Reeves: It’s very much an Americanization of the tale that John Ajvide Lindqvist tells. The film touched me. And I read the book, which he also wrote, and it moved me too. It reminded me so much of my own childhood in certain ways. It’s so much about that period of preadolescence, that feeling of being a child and of being bullied, the difficulties of growing up. It’s such a beautiful coming-of-age story, in addition to being such a terrific genre story. One of the things I really wanted to do was find my own way into the story while still being very, very reverent to the beautiful film and to the wonderful story that they created. And so the story in many ways follows the same trajectory. I really wanted to put you, even more so, into the point of view of the boy and understand his childhood as vividly as it comes across in the book.
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What do you think of today’s movie news?
