Home Entertainment Extras! X-Men: Days of Future Past gets a little awesome, Ruben Fleischer is officially hunting spies, Hugh Laurie gets villainous in Tomorrowland, David Ayer feels the fury, MGM start shrinking and a whole lot of Die Hard stuff! Plus much more!

Extras! X-Men: Days of Future Past gets a little awesome, Ruben Fleischer is officially hunting spies, Hugh Laurie gets villainous in Tomorrowland, David Ayer feels the fury, MGM start shrinking and a whole lot of Die Hard stuff! Plus much more!

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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!

As well as being Valentine’s Day (or more accurately, Horny Werewolf day) today, it’s also the international release day for A Good Day to Die Hard. Because nothing says I love you quite like Bruce Willis destroying downtown Moscow, right after quipping something about having sexual relations with your mother. As such, today’s Extras may see a bit more John McClane-centric content than normal, to get your in the right frame of mind for tomorrow’s local release.

So to kick it off, let’s get educational.

We’ve been hearing plenty of casting news for X-Men: Days of Future Past, but this latest one could potentially be the biggest. Oops, I mean smallest. A living example of that whole dynamite small packages expression, Peter Dinklage’s level of awesomeness is inversely proportional to his physical stature, and now that awesomeness might just get supercharged. Director Bryan Singer revealed via Twitter that the vertically challenged star of Game of Thrones has joined the cast of the superhero flick.

There’s been no official word on who he’ll be playing, but there is really only one role that immediatelt springs to mind, that of Puck, the diminutive hero on Wolverine’s original Canadian superhero team, Alpha Flight

Keeping things small, MGM have announced plans to reboot classic sci-fi property The Incredible Shrinking Man. Originally published in 1965, Richard Matheson’s novel The Shrinking Man was about a man shrunk to the size of an insect after being exposed to exotic radiation. A year after the book’s release, Matheson would himself adapt it for the screen, add the “Incredible” to the title for more flash.

What’s interesting is that this film would probably inspire comics legend Stan Lee to create the superhero Ant-Man, and now just a week or two after Marvel officially announced Ant-Man to be part of their Phase 3 plans, MGM want to revive his spiritual progenitor. What a crazy, random happenstance, right?!

The soon to be 87-year old Matheson (whose previous work like I Am Legend, Duel and Real Steel has been translated plenty of times) will be producing and co-writing the new adaptation himself, along with his son Richard Mattheson Jr.

There’s a new poster out for Iron Man 3, but this time it’s not snarky Tony Stark or his hi-tech alter ego that takes center stage, but rather Don Cheadle’s James Rhodes aka War Machine, and apparently also aka Iron Patriot.

Contrary to what my traumatized teacher friends in the UK tell me, the British population are apparently all delicate little snowflakes (and not just because so many of them are white and freezing). This must be why the the British Broadcasting Film Commission decided to cut all remotely mature content from A Good Day to Die Hard to get it down from a R to a 12A rating (Well, money may also have played a part). This of course upset some fans, who were really looking forward to hearing Bruce Willis swear as blood poured from bullet holes. Upset them enough to start complaining on radio stations and websites, and here’s what 20th Century Fox had to say in response.

Everyone at Fox is excited that John McClane is back on the big screen in the latest instalment of the Die Hard franchise, this time with his son and on foreign soil in Russia.

We can confirm that working with the BBFC some minor cuts were made in order to achieve a 12A certificate.

We believe the movie will delight the Die Hard fans and the 12A certificate, similar to Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall, will allow both adults and teenagers to enjoy the latest movie in the franchise.

In other words, “Deal with it, becasue we’re just happy that we can now get that kiddie money as well!”

I love bad movies. No, not because I enjoy subjecting my brain to the celluloid equivalent of brunt force trauma, but rather because bad films bring out the best in me as a film reviewer. I’m not alone in this vice, for example just take a gander at this list of the 50 Harshest Roger Ebert Movie Review Quotes.

Hey, look! We’re getting educational about Die Hard again! See, we offer more than just jokes about Twilight and Darryn’s lady-boy bits around here.

Click the pic to do what John McClane does best and blow it up!

While we now know who our Star Lord is, we haven’t heard much talk about the plans for Guardians of the Galaxy‘s non-human cast members, besides for possible rumours that Jim Carrey and/or Adam Sandler may possibly be up for voicing Rocket Raccoon and/or Groot. Well speaking to CinemaBlend, Marvel VFX producer Victoria Alonso explained that ILM were already working how to bring the anthropomorphic raccon and living giant tree to life, but that a few non-standard techniques were probably going to be used.

“You can’t do any motion capture with a raccoon – they won’t let you put the suit on [laughs]. But we will do rotomation, probably, for some of the behavior.”

For those of you not up to scratch on your VFX lingo, rotomation is the process whereby animation is done on top of a live action reference, ala A Scanner Darkly. Now you may also notice that Alonso said only “some of the behaviour”, and that’s probably becasue in general, raccoons don’t smoke cigars and wield large automatic weapons. For that you’re still going to need some human involvement.

“Rocket will have his own personality, of course, and clearly we can’t do mocap on a tree, per say, but we definitely will have performers to emulate what [director] James Gunn will lead to be the behavior and the performance. He’s very clear on where he wants to take the characters.”

If you were disappointed by Hugh Laurie pulling out of his role of lead villain in Jose Padhila’s Robocop reboot, have no fear, Dr House will still get his chance baddie it up on screen, as he has been cast opposite George Clooney in Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof’s Tomorrowland. And as with every single thing about this project, the identity of Laurie’s villain is being kept on the down low. My money is him infecting Clooney with lupus though.

We officially have our first poster for Jurassic Park 3D, easily the only 3D re-release that I actually give a prehistoric poop about, and luckily for me it features precisely the reason why I can’t wait to see it in 3 dimensions.

There’s been talk for ages, but now it’s official. Zombieland and Gangster Squad director Ruben Fleischer has confirmed that he will be helming the on-screen adaptation of classic 80’s video game Spy Hunter, the plot of which is actually summed up in that two word title: A spy hunts down other spies who ahve gone rogue.

Here’s what Fleischer had to say about the project last year, before the recent confirmatio:

“If I can make any movie, it would be a James Bond movie. I’ve always loved the genre but I don’t think they’ll hire an American to direct a James Bond movie, I’ve been told, so for me, ‘Spy Hunter’ is an opportunity to create a new spy franchise. It sounds silly but that was my favorite video game when I was a kid and it had a great title and a great theme song, but there’s no real other associations that people have with it other than a cool car, so I feel like there’s a lot of room for us to invent a new character and a new series. I think just the Spy Hunter that is the most bad-ass spy who hunts down rogue spies is a really cool launch pad for an idea and I hope that we can bring it to life.”

End of Watch director David Ayer has revealed that he’ll finally be leaving behind the mean streets of Los Angeles for his next project. So what subject matter could entice him away from his beloved City of Angels? Oh, only the biggest war the world has ever seen. Ayer will be writing and directing Fury, which will follow a 5 man tank crew in Europe during the final days of World War II.

Based on what Ayer did for cops in End of Watch, I can’t wait to see what he comes up with for this. Also, I may just be getting whiplash from trying to dodge tank rounds in my seat.

And finally, we may have seen a couple of trailers now already, but this is easily the greatest one yet for A Good To Die Hard yet. Hell, it may just be the greatest movie trailer ever, period! I mean, Tetris bombs? Motherf@#$ing genius, I tell ya!

So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I give you A Good Clay To Die Hard!

Last Updated: February 14, 2013

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