J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness beamed into first place Friday, pushing Tony Stark and his Iron Man suit into the No. 2 spot. The highly-anticipated sci-fi sequel, which opened wide on Wednesday, made an estimated $22.0 million on Friday in 3,868 locations, including 336 IMAX 3D locations, bringing its domestic total to $35.5 million. This was somewhat shy of expectations: The first Star Trek of the Abrams era opened in May 2009 to a $26.98 million Friday in 3,849 theaters.
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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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• Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty) is reportedly in talks to join Christopher Nolan’s (The Dark Knight Rises) time-travel epic, Interstellar. She’d be joining a cast that currently includes Oscar-winner Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey. Since she’s started getting more significant roles, Chastain has never really ventured into pure science fiction territory (we’re not counting Take Shelter). She famously dropped out of Oblivion when offered the Zero Dark Thirty role, so we’re excited for her to take on a new kind of film. The two-time Oscar nominee (The Help, Zero Dark Thirty) is currently filming Liv Ullmann’s adaptation of Miss Julie and will soon start work on Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak. [Deadline]
• Ethan Hawke (Before Sunset) has signed on to join Neil LaBute’s (Possession) thriller The Geography of Hope. The film will tell the story of two crooks (Hawke and Ed Harris) in the 1970s who are hiding out in Baja after messing up a job. They find two women to keep them interested while they’re in hiding, but eventually things get complicated. Vera Farmiga (Bates Motel) and Emmanuelle Devos (Coco Before Chanel) star as the women. [Screen Daily]
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The Directors Fortnight announced its full lineup on Tuesday, including nine short films and 21 features which will run parallel to the Cannes Film Festival in May. Notable selections include the Ruairi Robinson’s sci-fi film Last Days on Mars, starring Liev Schreiber (X-Men Origins: Wolverine), Romola Garai (The Hour), and Olivia Williams (Rushmore), and Sebastian Silva’s thriller Magic Magic, about a tourist in Chile who starts to experience a metal breakdown, with Juno Temple (Killer Joe) and Michael Cera (Arrested Development).
Avant-garde Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain) will return to the Festival with a film about his life, and Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin) will show her short Swimmer. Jodorowsky is also the subject of a documentary in the lineup, about his aborted version of the film Dune, which would go on to be directed by David Lynch.
Running from May 16 to May 26, the Directors Fortnight is now in its 45th year. It was started in 1969 by the French Directors Guild, who continues to manage the selections to this day. A handful of films presented in this category are even eligible to compete for the Camera d’Or prize, denoted on the list with an asterisk. Ari Folman’s (Waltz with Bashir) hybrid live action and animated feature The Congress, based on Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress and starring Robin Wright and Jon Hamm, will open the sidebar.
Check out the full selection below.
When the members of indie rock band The National set out on tour, the last thing they expected was for the brother of frontman Matt Berninger to tag along with his camera. But that’s exactly what Tom Berninger did for his directorial debut, Mistaken for Strangers, a “self-mockumentary” that follows the members of band around in every aspect of their lives on tour. From the stage to the shower, Tom spares no expense (or privacy) in his film. He also asks the hard-hitting questions: “How famous do you think you are?” “How fast can you play [the guitar]?” “What kind of drugs and how many drugs have you done?”
The result is a film just as much about Tom’s journey to complete a project as it is about the band. As Tom puts it in the film’s trailer, “I just want to make something good for him [his brother] as well as myself.”
Check out the trailer for Mistaken for Strangers below: READ FULL STORY »
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Imagine a world where one percent of all humans are born with extraordinary powers. Forget the X-Men. In Marcus Sakey’s novel Brilliance, these rare beings are called the Brilliants. Some can read minds, some can turn invisible, and some can get rich by just “sensing” stock market pattens. In the novel, Federal Agent Nick Cooper is a Brilliant who has the very job appropriate power of hunting terrorist. The suspense story follows Cooper as he tracks down a fellow Brilliant who is intent on provoking civil war.
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Back in 1996, Will Smith launched onto the A-list after playing alien-slugging pilot Steven Hiller in Independence Day — and he’s stayed there ever since, reigning for nearly 20 years as one of Hollywood’s most respected and bankable stars. So now that two new Independence Day movies are in the works, fans are asking the obvious question: Is Smith coming back for the sequels?
According to director Roland Emmerich, who sat down with EW yesterday to talk about his presidential thriller White House Down (out June 28), the answer is no. READ FULL STORY »
It’s been almost almost 17 years since aliens destroyed the White House and the Empire State Building in Roland Emmerich’s 1996 blockbuster Independence Day. But the world’s monuments aren’t safe yet. Emmerich, whose action-packed White House Down hits theaters June 28, says he plans to wreak a new round of havoc in two sequels – ID Forever Part 1 and ID Forever Part II. The films take place 20 years after the original, when a distress call sent by the first wave of aliens finally brings reinforcements to Earth. ”The humans knew that one day the aliens would come back,” explains the director, who completed two scripts with Independence Day co-writer Dean Devlin and has given them to White House Down writer-producer James Vanderbilt for a rewrite. ”And they know that the only way you can really travel in space is through wormholes. So for the aliens, it could take two or three weeks, but for us that’s 20 or 25 years.” READ FULL STORY »
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Just two months ago famed composer Ennio Morricone presented Django Unchained director Quentin Tarantino with a lifetime achievement award in Rome. But last week, American outlets picked up on a small story in the Italian press where Morricone had allegedly told a group of students at Rome’s LUISS University that he did not care to work with Tarantino again, and that he was unhappy with how he used his song “Ancora Qui” in Django Unchained.
Known for his Spaghetti Western scores for Sergio Leone, and his work on films such as Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Morricone has gained modern prominence through Quentin Tarantino’s reappropriation of his songs in Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2, Inglorious Basterds, and Django Unchained. Everyone was quick to jump on a portion of Morricone’s lecture, but Morricone was addressing a group of television and film students in Italy. He was not crafting remarks intended for a national audience – and certainly not trying wage a media war of words with Tarantino. Not only that, he says his remarks were taken out of context.
Click past the jump to find out what Morricone really meant.
