Extras! 04 September 2014

Welcome to The Extras! A daily dose of all the smaller movie related news, clips and just plain cool stuff that you might have missed!

• DC’s movie lineup has just begun to.. ahem.. rock, and their TV lineup is also starting to look hot with Arrow soon returning for a third season, The Flash making its debut and the highly intriguing Gotham also soon hitting screens. We’ve seen a couple of trailers and pics thus far for the latter, almost all taken from the pilot episode for the Batman prequel, but now Fox has released a 21-minute long behind-the-scenes featurette titled “The Legend Reborn” that not only introduces us to the cast and crew but also shows off snippets of other future episodes.

• Good news: Jermaine Clement and Bret McKenzie are doing a new show on HBO! Bad news: It’s not a new season of Flight of the Conchords. Good news: It will be a new comedy series, as Clement mentioned in a recent interview. Bad news: It will only be four episodes long.

• Here’s the first look at Girls star Alison Williams the titular boy who won’t grow up in Peter Pan Live, NBC’s December 4 telecast of the classic story.

And before some troglodyte starts griping in the comments, stage productions of Peter Pan have almost always featured females in the lead role due to a combination of English working law and tradition. At the time of the first production, laws prohibited minors from appearing on stage after 9pm, which is why a women was chosen as she would have the proper vocal range and not appear to dwarf over the other actors. After that, it became tradition. So there.

• Back in my day, you young whippersnappers, we didn’t have no fancy-shmancy doohickeys like you kids today. Back then the height of technology was a black Trans Am with some red LED lights on the front, and a dude with a shirt whose top three buttons could never close. Not like today with your newfangled Samsung smart homes!

• Awwww… It’s a family reunion! Dominic Purcell will be joining his old Prison Break brother Wentworth Miller in The Flash, as he has signed on to play “Mick Rory, a pyromaniac who finds an outlet for his obsession with fire when he teams up with Leonard Snart/Captain Cold (Miller) and becomes the villain known as Heatwave”.

• Poster of the day: Men, Women & Children

• You all probably caught Stan Lee’s traditional cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy, as it was the focus of one of Rocket Raccoon’s jokes. But did you know that wasn’t the original idea for Lee’s appearance? Writer-director James Gunn revealed at Dragon-Con (via Collider) that they actually had a much better idea, but paymasters Disney shot it down.

“James then went into a story regarding working with Disney and how he couldn’t believe he was able to get the line referencing Jackson Pollock into the film. This also led into a story about discussions Gunn had with Marvel, going more in-depth into which decisions he won and which he lost. One of the losing battles regarded Stan Lee’s original cameo in the film. Originally, Gunn had planned to have Lee in one of the Collector’s exhibits. Groot would then look at the exhibit aghast, to which Lee would flick off the large tree creature.”

• It’s an Amazing Spider-Man 2 twofer! That movie was so disappointing that it caused the guys at CinemaSins (who normally do the “Everything Wrong With” videos) to trade places with their rivals Screen Junkies (who normally do the “Honest Trailer” vids) and take over each other’s gigs for one day. The effects are still the same though: Spidey getting ripped a well-deserved new one!

• If you saw this morning’s news about Dwayne Johnson’s role as Black Adam in WB’s Shazam movie, you may have seen my mention of the name Captain Marvel. You would then probably have been very confused, because isn’t Captain Marvel a blonde Air Force lady that’s probably going to be in the Avengers? Or was it an alien Kree warrior that died of cancer? Or maybe a black lady with energy manipulation powers? Actually it’s all of those, and more. Still confused? Then you need to read Movies.com’s breakdown of the very messed up history of the title of Captain Marvel.

• Looks you’re going to have to wait a lot longer to get the Hiccup again. It’s been reported that Dreamworks’ How To Train Your Dragon 3, which was originally slated for June 17, 2016, has now been pushed back by nearly a year to June 9, 2017. The recently released How To Train Your Dragon 2 was met with overwhelming critical acclaim (including our very own Nick), but the film still ended up doing about $40 million less domestically than its predecessor even though it nearly doubled it’s international haul. Whether this was the reason for the delay is unclear. All we currently know is that franchise helmer Dean DeBlois is still attached to write and direct the third film.

• Peter Holmes has been doing some fantastic Batman (or Badman, as he sometimes calls him) skits over the last year or so, and we’ve posted a couple of them here. If you’ve missed any of them though, then today is your lucky day, as some enterprising Youtuber has gone and spliced them all together into one “feature film”. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Badman: The Movie!

If you have anything you would like to contribute to Extras, whether it be interesting stories, funny videos, or artistic photos of yourself in morally questionable poses, feel free to drop a mail to kervyn@themovies.co.za.

Last Updated: September 4, 2014