Extras! The minions get a date, The Girl Will Play With Fire in 2014, We'll pay the same price for 48fps, Gerard Butler isn't going to Artemisia, How David O. Russell got Nailed, Sam Claflin catches fire, and which Batman movie sold the most tickets? Plus much more!

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!

We kick off today with some zombie action. An apparently leaked version of a clip for Resident Evil: Retribution that was shown at Comic-Con has popped up online. Check it out now, before it gets pulled.

Seeing as how we get charged a premium for having a 3rd dimension added to our movies, it may surprise you to find out what an extra 24 fps would cost: Absolutely nothing! It’s been revealed that 48fps screenings of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will be priced exactly the same as normal 24fps versions.

Hey, if you’ve got an army of kids relying on you to provide for them, then the least they could do is get a job to help out a bit, right? Clearly that’s what Angelina Jolie is thinking now that her daughter, Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, has been cast to join her in Disney’s live-action Sleeping Beauty film Maleficent.

More Jack Ryan news to follow-up on the castings from the other day: Not only has the new film featuring the Tom Clancy character been given a broad release date of 4th quarter 2013, but Deadline also reports that this will hopefully be the start of a trilogy.

There’s a new Looper poster out, and it’s a good ‘un. Though technically, shouldn’t JGL be inside Bruce Willis? (which is a sentence I never imagined I would ever be typing).

EW reports that David Fincher’s Dragon Tattoo followup, The Girl Who Played With Fire, is still going ahead (Phew, now I can finally sleep at night) but will probably only see release in 2014.

Speaking of 2014, the Despicable Me minions spinoff film has been slated for December 19, 2014. I’m actually looking forward this movie more than I am next year’s Despicable Me 2.

We got our first poster for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, which see Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role as the great American president. Who didn’t battle vampires.

You may have noticed both myself and Noelle mentioning the fact that name of Jean Claude Van Damme’s villain in The Expendables 2 is actually Vilain, which is about as on the nose a name since Fat Bastard. But Vilain is just the latest in a long line of funny names used by 80’s and 90’s action stars, which is why The Shiznit has compiled the Definitive List of Action Hero Character Names.

Back in 2008, David O. Russell was making a movie called Nailed starring Jessica Biel, Jake Gyllenhaal, Catherine Keener, and Tracy Morgan. It was a film to be about three people with serious health issues who storm Washington, DC demanding treatment. It was also a film that never got finished. There was a lot of rumour surrounding why the product was shelved mid-way through production, but now Collider has got the scoop from producers Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher about exactly what went down.

“We were very excited about it but we went with a financier of questionable integrity that turned out to be of no integrity whatsoever and just had no intention of paying the bills, and he didn’t.”

“So we were literally shut down as we started, with all of those trucks, all of those people.  It was really torturous; I’d never seen anything like it but what you end up doing is, the money is always promised.  We had a really first class crew, and so what they have to do is the crew says, ‘Okay we’re walking off on Wednesday we didn’t get our check,’ so then you say, ‘If we pay you Thursday we’ll give you a 10% premium, and if we pay you Friday we’ll give you a 20% premium.’  So by the time they kept getting money, it was always like a 30% premium, so it was getting more and more expensive.”

“…The last scene that we had scheduled—partly because we thought this way [the financier will] have to finish the movie—is the scene where Jessica Biel gets a nail in her head.  That’s why it’s called Nailed, she doesn’t have insurance and she can’t get the nail out.  So the last two days were getting the nail in her head, and we shut down so we didn’t have the final scene that was the scene that was the premise of the movie.  There was no way to cut the movie together without that scene, so I don’t know what he was thinking by shutting us down then. At that point everybody was like, ‘We can’t cut the movie together, there isn’t a movie.’  And then he never came through with the rest of the money.”

“Particularly in this kind of comedy that’s finding a specific tone, the post-production is sort of a third of the whole process.  So I think there was just a little bit of a sense from a financier point of view, ‘Well just glue it together and put it out, we’ll just skip that process who needs it? It’s just indulging creative people.’  Obviously post is a huge part of the process and so many movies come alive in post.”

“At one point our daughter was solicited to go to a preview of this movie that nether David O. Russell or we knew that they were gonna cut together.  They had cut it together themselves and were planning to previewing it; we hadn’t seen the movie.  So that’s how we find out, we notified CAA and said, ‘Wait a second, somebody solicited our daughter [for a screening of this movie].’… It wasn’t David’s cut, it wasn’t anything.  It was missing scenes.

“And it was questionably illegal given all the guilds and all that stuff, but some of the people involved were from the distressed asset business, and I think they just really thought you could take pieces and sell them off.”

Today is the 41st birthday of actor Richard Armitage, who plays Dwarven leader Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit. So to celebrate, here’s a really big picture of his face. (Click for big version)

For a while there it seemed like just about everybody was being rumoured to be considered for the role of charming tribute Finnick Odair in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. If you had a face and a penis, you were on the list. But now the last of the major characters has finally been officially cast, and the lucky fellow who’ll be flirting it up with Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss (you know, when he isn’t busy training to kill her) is Sam Claflin, who was last seen un-roofie-ing Kristen Stewart as Prince William in Snow White and the Huntsman.

Right now, Brit actress Charlotte Riley is probably most famously known as soon to be Mrs. Tom Hardy, but that may just change soon, as she’s landed a big co-starring role alongside Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt in Doug “Bourne Identity” Liman’s adaptation of mindbending Japanes sci-fi novel, All You Need is Kill.

Did you know that despite being a prequel, 300: Battle of Artemisia actually had scenes in it for Gerard Butler’s King Leonidas? Well, guess what ? THIS… IS… NOT HIS THING!

“Oh yeah, I’m not doing it. They’re filming [the ‘300’ sequel] right now. I wish them the best, but it didn’t [work out]. It wasn’t really my thing.”

While it’s not quite breaking records like its predecessor, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight Rises is massive box office success, right? It’s currently hovering around the $901 million mark, which is – as they say in the hood – a whole lotta cheddar. But get this, if you were to work out exactly how many tickets that equates to based on average ticket prices, it turns out that that latest Caped Crusader film will sell about 10 million fewer tickets than the Dark Knight’s first big cinematic outing with Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. TEN MILLION!

Speaking of Dark Knight Rises, now this may come as a shock to some of you, but not everybody (myself included) thought that it was such a great film. (I know. Just breathe, the nausea will pass soon.) My biggest problem was just several moments of very lazy plotting, where spectacle was put in favour of logic. I could draw up a bulleted list of all the scenes the bugged me, but then you’d all fall asleep after calling me mean names. So instead, I’m handing over to the guys from How it Should Have Ended who brilliantly highlight just how some changes could have been made.

Oh and holy SPOILER WARNING, Batman!

Last Updated: August 23, 2012