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In a predicted move, Universal has reunited with Seth MacFarlane and the team behind Ted to produce another R-rated summer comedy.
Given Ted‘s success, it seemed only a matter of time before Universal came on board with the team’s newest project — A Million Ways to Die in the West. EW has confirmed Universal’s announcement today that it would be co-funding the western comedy, giving it a May 30 release date for the summer of 2014.
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Reese Witherspoon is reteaming with James Mangold, who directed her to a Best Actress Oscar with 2005′s Walk the Line. The actress will star in Mangold’s Three Little Words, an adaptation of Ashley Rhodes-Courter’s memoir which has been in the works since 2009.
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MTV has announced the first wave of presenters for the 22nd annual MTV Movie Awards. The docket includes Steve Carell, Melissa McCarthy, Zac Efron, Kerry Washington, Amanda Seyfried, This Is the End‘s Seth Rogen and Danny McBride, Grown Ups 2 stars Chris Rock and Adam Sandler, and Star Trek Into Darkness headliners Chris Pine, Zoe Saldana, and Zachary Quinto.
Rebel Wilson is set to host the ceremony, which has already confirmed appearances by Will Ferrell, who’ll receive the inaugural Comedic Genius Award, and MTV Trailblazer recipient Emma Watson.
The MTV Movie Awards will be broadcast live April 14 at 9 p.m. ET on MTV.
Read more:
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Image Credit: Laurie Sparham
People who enjoy a good cry, today is your lucky day: The film version of Les Misérables is now out on Blu-ray and DVD. The epic musical has been running all over the world for over 26 years, and according to movie producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh, who also produced the original show, an idea to make a movie version has been kicking around for nearly as long, but only recently – despite an occasional exception — have movie musicals been seen as a commercially successful idea. “Musicals 25 years ago were very few and far between,” Mackintosh explained to EW. “I think in the sort of last seven or eight years we’ve started to see more and more musicals get made. There’s no doubt that the success of Moulin Rouge and Mamma Mia! and Chicago plus Sweeney Todd [helped Les Mis get made].”
For fans who grew up singing “One Day More” into a hairbrush and were mighty nervous about a big-screen version that stayed closer to Victor Hugo’s original work, but lost a lot of the musical moments they’d fallen in love with, they may owe a thank-you card to director Tom Hooper and Mackintosh. “There was a lot more dialogue in the original screenplay,” Mackintosh explained. “And then Tom said, ‘What I want you to do is turn the dialogue and [put it] into the form the show is in.’ And I think by setting us to work, both to deconstruct the stage musical and take the material and remake it as a story that happens to be told through music for the movies, that was the key to shooting that laid the groundwork for the film to be successful….One of the other things [Hooper] said to me when we first met was that he felt we should record [the songs] live, which is something I felt passionately about for years. …[Singing live] was a risky step, but it was a risk that paid off.”
Watch below for an EW exclusive behind-the-scenes featurette about the live singing on location: READ FULL STORY »
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In addition to musical performances by Adele, Dame Shirley Bassey, Norah Jones, and Barbra Streisand — and a closing musical number from Seth MacFarlane and Kristin Chenoweth — Oscar producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron have announced the names of the actors involved in the show’s live Broadway tribute, which will spotlight Chicago, Dreamgirls, and Les Misérables.
The actors involved have all starred in big-screen adaptations of the three featured musicals, including Jennifer Hudson from Dreamgirls; Catherine Zeta-Jones from Chicago; and Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Aaron Tveit, Samantha Barks, and Helena Bonham Carter from this year’s Les Misérables.
Read more:
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Oscars: Jennifer Aniston, Paul Rudd, and more presenters announced
‘Les Mis’ returning to Broadway in 2014 as re-imagined adaptation
‘Behind the Ballot’: Film editors weigh in on their craft
‘Behind the Ballot’: Production design
‘Behind the Ballot’: Oscar makeup and hairstyles
‘Behind the Ballot’: Video series launches
Image Credit: Alberto E. Rodriguez, Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images
Amanda Seyfried may soon be joining Seth MacFarlane’s wild west show.
The Ted filmmaker, Family Guy creator and soon-to-be Oscar host will be shooting (so to speak) the gunslinging comedy A Million Ways to Die in the West later this spring, and Seyfried is in talks to play the girl who dumps his timid pioneer farmer.
Image Credit: Dale Robinette
There have now been any number of movies, whether documentary or fiction or docudrama, about the pornographic-film industry, including a couple of great ones (like Boogie Nights). Yet Deep Throat, the 1972 film that launched the porn revolution (and helped to kick the sexual revolution into 11th gear), marked such a seismic change in American life that it’s startling, and often quite funny, to watch Lovelace, the nimble and haunting new biopic of that film’s star, Linda Lovelace, that premiered to a very buzzy response at Sundance last night, and to realize how small-scale the whole saga really was. Or, at least, how small it was at the beginning. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Dale Robinette
Hours after it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last night, Lovelace closed a reported $3 million deal with RADiUS – TWC for its U.S. distribution rights. Starring Amanda Seyfried as the famous adult film star of the 1972 box-office phenomenon Deep Throat, the movie tells Linda Lovelace’s story, from her strict upbringing to her introduction to the porn business, which she later claimed was forced upon her by her abusive husband Chuck Trayner, played by Peter Sarsgaard. She later wrote a book chronicling her ordeal and became an outspoken advocate against pornography. READ FULL STORY »
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A role that caused a lot of drama during the making of Lovelace has turned out not to be necessary for the drama onscreen.
Last year, Sarah Jessica Parker was a last-minute addition to the film, which features Amanda Seyfried in the life story of the woman who starred in the 1972 X-rated movie Deep Throat. The Sex and the City actress was an emergency fill-in for Demi Moore, who dropped out of the movie in the middle of production after she suffered unspecified health problems and was hospitalized.
The casting crisis was averted, but with the film now just days away from its debut at the Sundance Film Festival, directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have told EW that it turned out they didn’t need the character after all.
Parker, who played the role of feminist icon Gloria Steinem, has joined a long list of actors left on the cutting room floor.
Consider this … foreplay?
Lovelace, Amanda Seyfried’s drama about the dark life of a true-life 1970s-era pornstar, makes its debut a week from now at the Sundance Film Festival, and the producers have released this new image from the movie. Given its subject matter, if the film isn’t one of the most provocative of the festival, it’s doing something wrong.
