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!
- Firefly. Just the mention of its name is enough to get most fans both giddy with remembrance of its awesomeness, and filled with with rage at Fox for cancelling it. Unless you’re Darryn of course, because he doesn’t care for it. And while you’re busy making arrangements to have him stoned for his heathen ways, you can watch this really cool Firefly fan-film titled The Verse.
- You know that thing you did, like, in the summer of 1997? Well, Sony knows about it, and wants to do it again. Yes, that’s right (as you probably figured out from that convoluted lead-in), Sony Pictures are rebooting the I Know What You Did Last Summer slasher franchise! Original producer Neal Moritz is once again spearheading this one, with Jeff Howard penning a script based on the 1973 Lois Duncan novel that inspired the 90’s hit. Sony are reportedly aiming for a 2016 release.
- As you may know, I am a massive Star Wars nerd, but even my Star Wars nerdism was put to the test by these 21 lesser known but really cool Star Wars facts.
- Poster of the day: Gigantic new banner for The Hobbit: Battle of The Five Armies, which has luckily been chopped up into smaller pieces (thanks JoBlo!) to make for less scrolling.
- Once upon a time, back in 2010, David Fincher was going to make a big budget adaptation of Jules Verne’s classic 20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea. Over the next few years he started putting all the pieces together, and it sounded epic in every way and form. And then it was dead. So what went wrong? It seems that Fincher just couldn’t see eye to checkbook with Disney when it came to casting this blockbuster.
“You get over $200 million — all motion picture companies have corporate culture and corporate anxieties. Once we got past the list of people we could cast as the different characters in the film, once we got past one or two names which made them very comfortable, making a movie at that price, it became this bizarre endeavour to find which three names you could rub together to make platinum.”
“I wanted Aronnax to be French, God forbid! It got to be a little too confusing to me. I had this argument with a studio executive one time where he said to me, ‘why is it that the actors always side with you and we’re paying them?’ And I said, ‘I think it’s because at some level, they know that my only real allegiance is to the movie.’ And because that’s very clear and it never wavers, they may not agree with the image of the movie I have in my head, but they know that’s what I’m after. They’ve seen me for 100 days take the long way around. I think that when you’re trying to put together a handful of people to deliver all those facets of humanity and who work well together, it has to be in service of the narrative and not in service of the balance sheet. It became very hard to appease the anxieties of Disney’s corporate culture with the list of names that allowed everyone to sleep at night. I just wanted to make sure I had the skill-sets I could turn the movie over to. Not worrying about whether they’re big in Japan.”
- Bonus poster of the day: Dracula Untold
- Veteran actor Scott Glenn is still making movies. You could even say he’s *cough* sticking around, as he’s been cast in Marvel’s upcoming Daredevil series as Matt Murdock’s martial arts mentor Stick…. What? I couldn’t resist, ok?! To distract you from that horrible joke, here’s Marvel’s of Television, Jeph Loeb, talking about the casting.
“Stick is one of the most important figures in Matt Murdock’s life and Scott Glenn embodies all the qualities of someone so integral to this hero’s journey. There are few actors who could bring such the authenticity, gravitas and charisma to such a key role in Matt’s journey to become the super hero we call Daredevil.”
- Looks like in Book 4 of Legend of Korra (which is just around the
korrnacorner, remember?), Korra is going to let her hair down. No, really, she’s got a new haircut in the next season and I have the picture to prove it.
- And if you thought your nerd-cred went up when you read those Star Wars facts on top, wait until you watch this video all about Marvel, by the numbers!
- Like Nick lamented earlier today, zombies seem to be popping up everywhere in pop culture lately. You would think that people are sick of these brain-eaters by now, but that’s definitely not the case if SyFy’s new zombified show Z Nation is anything to go by. And unfortunately for SyFy, I’m not referring to reviews or ratings. The show debuted last Friday, and almost immediately became the most-pirated TV show for the next 24 hours. In that time, it was illegally downloaded off torrent sites by 300, 000 unique IP addresses. That may not seem that much when put next to the piracy figures of premiere shows like Game of Thrones, but to put it into perspective, the recent leak of The Expendables 3 only garnered 180 000 hits in the same time frame.
- I don’t know what’s better: Just how well this Titanic/Star Trek Into Darkness mashup trailer works structurally, or the fact that Benedict Cumberbatch playing the iceberg is just about the most perfect thing I’ve ever heard of.
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 16, 2014
