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!
If you’re one of those people that doubted whether Ben Affleck has what it takes to play Batman, well Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory executive producer Chuck Lorre is here to prove otherwise. Lorre was accepting an award at the Producers Guild of America Awards, when he decided to share a recent encounter he had with Affleck at the Golden Globes which proves that the Argo director, who was up for an award later himself, does indeed have the balls to play the Dark Knight.nd because it’s been way too long since we’ve featured somebody with way too much time on their hands, we kick off today’s proceedings with Lego Top Gun!
And all the residents of small towns across America just breathed a huge sigh of relief. It seems that human albatross, Jessica Fletcher, won’t be visiting them any longer as NBC has cancelled their plans for a Murder, She Wrote reboot. The long running original (12 seasons!) saw Angela Lansbury play the grey-haired school teacher-turned-mystery-novelist who used her detective skills to solve murders. Murders that always seemed to happen when she was around, if ya know what’m sayin’!
NBC had planned to reboot the franchise with Oscar winner Octavia Spencer taking up the magnifying glass as a hospital-administrator-turned- mystery-writer, but the network has decided to not move forward with a series now, although they may revisit it at a later stage to try an alternate take.
Pajiba has a brilliant list up of the 10 Biggest Box-Office Bombs for 2014. Yes, 2014. Yes, there may be some comedy involved.
If you somehow still haven’t got your fill of Spider-Man jumping around while electricity shoots pass his backside, then this slightly new international poster for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is just for you.
Great success! It looks like Borat and Ali G funnyman Sacha Baron Cohen is in talks to join Disney’s Alice in Wonderland sequel, which will now be titled Through the Looking Glass. Cohen is set to the play the film’s villain, although details about his character as well the sequel’s plot is being kept tightly under wraps. Cohen makes a superb absurd villain (“Do you like crepes, Ricky Bobby?”) so this is quite the good bit of casting news.
James Bobin (The Muppets) will be taking over from Tim Burton in the director’s chair (a massive improvement, if you ask me), while Mia Wasikowska and Johnny Depp will reprise their respective roles as Alice and Madonna with too much makeup wearing an orange wig.
Platinum Dunes producer Brad Fuller has been spilling on whole heap of pics over at CraveOnline, talking about a new Friday the 13th (they’re considering found footage, but no decisions made yet), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Turtles are definitely not alien, confusion came from alien ooze) and Ouija (it’s going to be a PG-13 horror). But he also dished on The Purge 2, the sequel to the surprise Ethan Hawke horror-thriller hit that pulled in just over $89 million on a budget of just $3 million, saying that the film’s success surprised even them, as they had no intention to turn this into a franchise [HUGE SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t seen The Purge yet].
“Listen, when you make a movie for $3 million, there is no way that you can expect that anything like what happened to The Purge is going to happen. In this business, it’s so rare to be surprised on the upside like that so we never talked about if there was going to be a sequel. I think if we were really serious and we thought that it was going to be a franchise and we would have multiple versions, we probably wouldn’t have killed Ethan Hawke … So the sequel, obviously Ethan Hawke is not a part of it and I’m hopeful that fans in the audience will feel that the sequel to The Purge delivers on the promise of the original in that we’re not staying in the house. It’s not a home invasion movie. This is you’re out in the streets with people purging and a group of people who get stuck in the middle of it and have to get from point A to point B.”
Benedict Cumberbatch makes everything better. Yes, even R. Kelly lyrics.
Looks like the box office belly flop of The Surrogates wasn’t enough to dissuade Bruce Willis from shooting up some more robots (and who can blame him?). Willis has signed on to star in Vice, a new sci-fi thriller written by Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore who also penned The Prince, another action flick that Willis has just wrapped shooting on.
Vice is based “in a city in which humans can enact their most perverse fantasies onto androids. One android becomes self-aware and breaks out, only to become intent on shutting down the organization”. Willis will play Julian, the owner of the Vice resort where all these android shenanigans take place, while Ambyr Childers (2 Guns, The Master, Ray Donovan) will play the self-aware android.
New Years Resolutions. We all make ’em, and we rarely keep ’em. And the same goes for Tinsel Town, but maybe this year things will be different and they will actually listen to Movies.com’s list of 10 Things Hollywood Should Retire in the New Year. Oh who am I kidding, they’re far too busy snorting coke off dead hookers to notice.
And today’s winner of the Internet is…
If you’re a fan of the Fantastic Four then I have some… well, fantastic news. According to a report from Variety, Simon Kinberg has apparently completed and turned in his script director Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four reboot. What’s more, it seems that we’re not too far off from some casting announcement being made. The Spectacular Now actor Miles Teller, long rumoured to be attached to the role of Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic, has confirmed that he will indeed be testing for the role in a week or two. Or it will be revealed that he’s already got the gig in a week or two. Teller needs to learn to speak less ambiguously, as it wasn’t very clear.
Other actors that are supposedly in the testing for the role of Mr Fantastic though are Kit Harrington (Game of Thrones, Pompeii) and Richard Madden (Game of Thrones, Cinderella), while Kate Mara (House of Cards, 127 Hours) and Saoirse Ronan (Hanna, Atonement) will be testing the role of Sue Storm aka Invisible Woman.
Michael B. Jordan is apparently a lock for Johnny Storm aka The Human Torch, and will be doing screen tests with everybody to gauge their chemistry together.
As much as we regard the Oscars as the big daddy of the awards shows, it often just plain gets things wrong, especially when it comes to choosing the Best Picture winner. There have been several bungles over the years, where a definite winner gets overlooked for some lesser film, like Shakespeare in Love winning over Saving Private Ryan, Crash beating Brokeback Mountain, etc. And to celebrate these second place masterpieces, The Playlist has not only compiled a list of 10 Classic Best Picture Losers That Deserved Better but also told how you can stream them online right now.
And speaking of the Oscars, we end today on a bit of an educational (and kind of funny) note, as we learn 7 Crazy Oscar Facts, the most important one being that if you’re named Kevin O’Connell, the universe hates you.
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: January 22, 2014
