It’s great news to hear that District 9 creator Neill Blomkamp has signed a deal with independent financier Media Rights Capital (MRC) for his next sci-fi movie. The bad news is that his next movie isn’t going to be District 10. (Not that we here at EW.com expect anything less than brilliance from the man who brought us an apartheid parable wrapped in a gory alien invasion.) My sources tell me that Sony, the studio that bought and sold District 9 to the masses, wants nothing more than a sequel to this low-budget film that has now grossed $115 million. The decision for a sequel resides with District 9 producer Peter Jackson. And when Blomkamp decides on a story for District 10, he’ll present it to Jackson and the two will kick it around until they’ve got something worth doing. Until then, Blomkamp will make another sci-fi movie and Jackson will do what Jackson does: sell his upcoming film The Lovely Bones, finish Tintin with Steven Spielberg, and get started on The Hobbit with Guillermo del Toro. Maybe Blomkamp and Jackson are probably just waiting for District 9 star Sharlto Copley to finish playing in Hollywood with his role as Murdoch in the remake of The A-Team.
Archive: October 2009 (21-30 of 72)
'District 9' creator Neill Blomkamp signs on for new movie but where's 'District 10'?
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The 'Saw' horror series: Can it bring the pain forever? And should it?
For anyone who doesn’t happen to follow limb-dismembering, mechanized-torture horror films, the fact that the sixth entry in the Saw series is being released this weekend will seem unremarkable in just about every way. For decades now, gruesome new horror movies have arrived at the multiplex with big fat roman numerals stuck at the end of their titles. Only the most fanatical droolers of the “horror community” are even still counting. I mean, really, who would seriously bother to keep track of how many interchangeably cruddy Friday the 13th sequels there are? Or how many times Freddy Krueger ever came back from the dead to brutalize a new crop of Elm Street kids? Or how often the Halloween franchise has been scavenged, rebooted, Zombie-fied, and generally flogged to death? Quick, can you name all the Texas Chainsaw movies? How about Hellraiser? Who the hell cares?
Like I said, Saw VI sounds like bloody business as usual. But there’s a big difference. Every one of those other series enjoyed a brief period, of maybe two or three years, in which they really connected with an audience, followed by sequels of increasingly diminishing returns, released in a spotty, opportunistic, every-few-years fashion, during which their appeal was bled dry. The Saw series, by contrast, has been a clockwork blockbuster, a squirm-in-your-seat annual carnival for gore freaks. The first one was released on Oct. 29, 2004, and by the time Saw II came out exactly one year later, on Oct. 28, 2005, the series “owned” Halloween. The release date had become part of the brand, almost as if Lionsgate had licensed the holiday. READ FULL STORY »
Soupy Sales, anti-movie star (that's a good thing)
As a longtime member of the clubhouse–a devotee who still has her vinyl 45 of ”Do the Mouse” and “Pachalafaka”–I join my colleague Ken Tucker in saluting the late Soupy Sales, TV innovator.
As a movie critic, meanwhile, I toss a cream pie in the air with gratitude that Soupy knew his medium and stuck to it. Today, most any comic who finds fame on television at some point feels driven to extending that (ugh) brand in a movie. And too often, the results aren’t pretty. Or funny. (Hola, Chris Kattan!) I’m not a Salesologist enough to know whether Soupy ever tried to develop his private eye character Philo Kvetch, for instance, into a feature film, and thought better of it. But I’m glad that we’ll remember the original hipster doofus as a TV guy born and bred–a personality bigger than any movie could contain.
Oh, and if you need to see Soupy on the big screen, look for him among the cameo appearances in Eddie Murphy’s 1998 muddle Holy Man. Or maybe, don’t.
Update: Soupy-ologist and ew.com colleague Steve Korn draws our attention to the 1966 feature-film novelty Birds Do It, in which our hero plays a guy who can fly.
Box office preview: Will 'Paranormal Activity' slaughter 'Saw VI'?
For the last six years a new installment of Saw has been as reliable a predictor of the changing seasons as the sudden ubiquitous Spirit Halloween stores that seem to pop up in every abandoned store front across the country. Every year, the movie opens in first place to figures north of $30 million. This year that could all change, as the on-demand horror phenomenon Paranormal Activity might usurp some of Saw’s momentum. While it’s unlikely the low-budget upstart will win the weekend, it’s very possible it could push Saw’s gross down into the $20 million range. Because really, are there enough horror fans out there to sustain two scarefests? For those not looking to be frightened, Universal Pictures is putting out the boy vampire movie The Vampire’s Assistant while Summit Entertainment counter-programs with its animated romp Astro Boy. With so much new product in theaters, it will be a challenge for last weekend’s strong openers Where the Wild Things Are and Law Abiding Citizen to maintain much of its audience. Read on for my predictions.
1. Saw VI: $28 million
The last two installments of Saw have opened to less coin than the third one, which scored a record opening for the series back in 2006 with $33 million. Sure Jigsaw is still averaging an impressive $28.6 million opening, which is about where this sixth one should open, but let’s be clear, Saw isn’t exactly generating interest from new fans who have discovered the father of all torture porn movies. Besides, with a shiny new thing like Paranormal Activity to distract moviegoers, Saw may be looking a little more dusty than Lionsgate intended it to be. The studio is already counting on a Saw VII next year in 3-D.
2. Paranormal Activity: $25 million
This uber-cheap horror flick earned an astonishing $25,000 per theater last weekend on its 760 locations. That gave the film a gross of $33 million. Now Paramount will expand the movie even wider, to 1950 theaters. While $25 million may seem like a lofty guess, this is the perfect film to see one weekend before Halloween. Like it or hate it, it’s what everyone’s talking about.
3. Where the Wild Things Are: $16 million
Wild Things opened strong last weekend, nabbing the top spot with $32 million. Most parents left their kids at home to see Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s beloved children’s book. Will they bring them this weekend? Probably not often enough to keep the film from falling at least 50%. And with Astro Boy flooding theaters this frame, Wild Things could also suffer from a shiny new toy that’s more obviously directed towards children.
4. Astro Boy: $12 million
Astro Boy features a voice cast of Freddie Highmore, Kristen Bell and Nicolas Cage and is the first film adaptation of the Japanese anime series from the 1960s. Yet, it’s not a Pixar film nor even a Dreamworks Animation spectacle. And it seems today that unless you are one of those two, or Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, you don’t have much chance of succeeding at the box office. Still, the movie comes at an opportune moment for kids. If your child isn’t too slammed with Halloween festivities, here’s one place you could take him.
5. Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant: $11 million
This film had so much potential. Finally a vampire movie for teen boys directed ironically by New Moon director Chris Weitz’s older brother Paul Weitz. It features an inspired cast of John C. Reilly, Willem Dafoe and Salma Hayek as a bearded lady. Yet, the reviews have been scathing and the PG-13 rating makes it too scary for 8-year olds and yet not very interesting to teenagers. In fact, it will be quite a feat if it crosses the $10 million mark.
Also opening: Hilary Swank in Amelia by Mira Nair in 800 theaters; Disney re-issues Tim Burton’s A Nightmare Before Christmas on 58 screens in 3-D; Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair expands to 458 screens.
Photo Credit: Steve Wilkie
'The House of the Devil': the next horror sensation?
Paranormal Activity is so last week. The latest inexpensive horror flick to catch audiences attention is Ti West’s ’80s throwback The House of the Devil. Starring Jocelin Donahue as the babysitter in peril, The House of the Devil has already scored with the critics and will open in New York, Los Angeles and Austin on Oct. 30. But since it was purchased through Magnolia Pictures’ and their genre arm Magnet, it’s also one of the movies you can see now through the company’s Ultra VOD, an exclusive 30-day video-on-demand window BEFORE it opens in theaters.
The movie premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April and was scooped up by Magnolia in June. Says the company’s acquisition head Tom Quinn, “The House of the Devil is the American indie that’s so hard to find. It has guts and gore and reaches back to what horror films used to be.” Quinn won’t reveal any numbers on the film’s VOD performance, only to say that it’s doing really well. The company spent all year looking for a horror film to open on Halloween and were quite pleased when they found West’s film. Quinn isn’t even considering the kind of numbers Paranormal has been chalking up lately at the box office. “I don’t live in that world,” he says. Success on this kind of limited release film is more in the $1 million range, similar to such micro indie hits like the cult classic Bubba Ho-Tep, which went on to earn $1.2 million in theaters, or George Romero’s Diary of the Dead which neared $1 million last year. And still those numbers are really hard to reach for movies like House of the Devil that have a limited marketing budget. Yet, with all the attention on Paranormal, audiences might be more in the mood to discover an under-the-radar horror flick. Check out the trailer yourself. Will you see it on VOD? Wait for the theatrical release? Or both?
Obama and 'Wild Things': President as movie critic
I’m surprised there’s been little media reaction to the casual comment President Obama made the other day about Where the Wild Things Are: The president was visiting a local public school, he’s known to be a big fan of Maurice Sendak’s book, he’s screened the movie, and, as reported in The Washington Post, he told his kid constituency, “it’s worth seeing.” Given the dust stirred up by adults when Obama made a speech to schoolchildren last month on the apolitical subject of studying hard and doing one’s homework, it’s easy to imagine a grown-up anti-Wild Things faction criticizing this Presidential film review as a partisan attack on moviegoers who don’t like stories about furry monsters.
You know what other movie President Obama really likes? This one: READ FULL STORY »
'Somebody to Love': The Coen brothers' rock and roll epiphany
Given what audacious, far-ranging, and sensually intoxicated filmmakers they are, Joel and Ethan Coen have never shown much of a rock & roll side. Okay, there was The Big Lebowski (1998), that deadbeat-soul-of-Los Angeles stoner cult classic. It was sprinkled with Dylan, Creedence, and Elvis, and it had that one goofily farfetched moment of surreal jukebox rapture: a druggy dream sequence, set to Kenny Rogers’ 1968 hit “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” that was like Busby Berkeley on peyote at the bowling alley. I saw The Big Lebowski again recently, and sorry, I’m still not wild about it (I think it’s more arduous than inspired), but what that sequence indicates to me is that the Coens should seriously consider making a gloriously skewed pop musical.
I’m more convinced of that than ever having seen the spectacular use they make of the Jefferson Airplane song “Somebody to Love” in A Serious Man. This is one of those pop-music epiphanies worthy of Tarantino, Scorsese, or Paul Thomas Anderson — and the strange thing is, it’s just there, so unlikely yet so sublime, sitting right in the middle of the Coens’ highly personalized movie about a nebbishy Jewish family trying to make its way in Middle America in 1967. READ FULL STORY »
As MPAA Chief Dan Glickman steps down, who will be tough enough to tame Hollywood's lions?
Hollywood responded with neither tears nor cheers to Dan Glickman’s announcement today that he would leave his post as the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood’s chief lobbying organization in Washington. During his five-year tenure as the industry’s mouthpiece and chief figurehead in Washington, the entertainment business has had to contend with some radical shifts, ranging from the increasing threat of internet piracy to diminishing profits in the once-lucrative DVD business. But in the midst of all this change, the general consensus is that Glickman never fully rose to the challenge of aligning the often-warring studios with one cohesive battle plan. Instead, he tried to be all things to all people. “He basically needed to have bigger balls,” says one major studio executive. “He could never get everyone on the same page and didn’t provide the kind of leadership necessary to convince the various studios to compromise agree on their priorities.” Another big strike against him came when he failed to obtain tax cuts for Hollywood in the economic stimulus bill.
Looking ahead, most insiders agree that his successor will have to be a strong leader with a clear set of priorities about what’s worth lobbying for in Washington. Names mentioned to be in contention for the job include Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Tennessee Democratic congressman, Harold Ford, and the current COO of the MPAA, Robert Pisano. One former MPAA executive contends that the best person for the job will be someone tough enough to tame Hollywood’s fiercest lions. “Washington connections are important, but it’s almost more important to be seen as someone who comes at the job with a deep understanding of Hollywood,” the source says. “The studios are a tough group.”
Ridley Scott is in talks with Leonardo DiCaprio and Angelina Jolie for his next project, 'Gucci'
Ridley Scott’s next project will center on the fashion design empire of Gucci and is likely to star Leonardo DiCaprio and Angelina Jolie as Maurizio Gucci and his ex-wife Patrizia. Sources tell EW.com that the two actors are in talks with Scott to star in the movie. Scott, whose in post-production on Robin Hood starring Russell Crowe, has been talking to the two actors for quite some time but neither are officially attached to the project. Titled Gucci, the film will focus on Maurizio and his turnaround of the Gucci empire during the 1980s before he was murdered in a plot executed by ex-wife Patrizia Gucci. Charles Randolf (The Interpreter) wrote the current draft of the script. Fox and and Scott are continuing to develop the script and while the project is high priority for both the studio and Scott, with neither of the actors attached, no firm start date has yet been set. Fox hopes to put it into production in early 2010.
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