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 start off today’s Extras with an ending. Possibly the greatest ending in movie history, if you ask me!
- So you probably heard that Hugh Jackman is once again talking about retiring from playing Wolverine on screen. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he once nearly sliced up his crown jewels with his Wolverine claws while appearing naked on set.
- Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four appears to have landed another cast member in Tim Blake Nelson, who’s no stranger to comic book movie reboots. Nelson played nerdish scientist Dr Samuel Sterns who was set up to become the villainous Leader in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. For Fox’s upcoming Fantastic Four reboot, Sterns will be playing nerdish scientist Dr Harvey Elder, who is being set up to become the villainous Mole Man in future franchise installments…. Wait a minute…
- Poster of the Day: Fan-made Interstellar poster
- Bashing your rivals’ products is usually par for the course, but things have been kept pretty amicable between Marvel Studios and DC/WB. That may just have changed. During an interview with CBM, Marvel’s Chief Creative Office Joe Quesada totally slammed Man of Steel, and honestly – as much as there are things about that movie that I really love – I cannot say that he’s wrong here.
“As a comic book fan, I wanted to love that movie so much. I wanted to love it so much, and I didn’t love it so much. Again, there are little things here and there that you could pick at and things like that, but I just think at the end of the day, Zod was the hero of the movie to me… He wanted to save his race, and Superman didn’t let him.
“Zod, in this particular incarnation, struck me as not necessarily an evil man, but a man of… he had a particular… he had his orders, he had a mission. He was a zealot of sorts, but he was a zealot… again, correct me if I’m wrong… but he didn’t say, ‘I want to rebuild Krypton, and then come back and destroy this little planet. All I want is to rebuild this planet. And the only reason I’m blowing everything to bits here is because you’ve got what I want, and you’re not giving it to me. So please, give me my people, and I’ll leave.’… When Superman said Krypton had its chance, I was like, ‘Will you just f***ing kill him, Zod?’”
“You probably could have written a way around it. You could have had a better solution if you had written a better problem. So I see things like that, and I’m like, ‘Aww, man.’ It was one of some things in the movie, that I just ended up feeling disappointed in it.”
- Ever wonder what happens to these vast, lavishly designed sets constructed just for movies? Unfortunately, the answer is “mostly nothing” as this fascinating pictorials shows. Some of these abandoned constructs, like the Mos Espa set in Tunisia where several scenes from Star Wars was shot, are now in danger of being reclaimed by nature.
- And SyFy just keeps getting their groove back! After the recent announcement that they were once again going back to their roots with some epic space operas, the NBC-Universal cable channel have added even more genre fare to their roster by lining up comic book adaptations of Frank Miller’s “Ronin”, Oni Press’ “Letter 44” and Image’s “Clone”, as well as adaptations of Lev Grossman’s novel series “The Magicians” and Jonathan Hickman’s comic book miniseries “Pax Romana”.
Ronin has been pitched as a mini-series and will follow a 13th century samurai reborn in the future, in order to avenge his master’s death at the hands of a demon. SyFy is still looking for a writer to adapt it. Letter 44 follows a newly elected US President, who upon his taking office learns of a mission begun 7 years earlier to investigate a seemingly extraterrestrial construction in a nearby asteroid belt, and will be produced by Terminator 3‘s Jonathan Mostow, who will also write and direct the pilot. Clone, which will be produced by The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, is about a man who uncovers a government conspiracy when his house is burgled by a clone of himself (Orphan Black anybody?)
The Magicians follows “a group of 20-somethings in New York who study magic and discover that the magical fantasy world they read about as children is real and poses a grave danger to Earth”, while Pax Romana follows a Special Forces team being sent back in time to Ancient Rome to change history and avert a modern disaster.
- Did you see/take your kids to see Dreamworks Animation’s Mr Peabody & Sherman? I’m guessing not, seeing as the studio is reportedly set to make a $57 million loss on the failed picture. Ouch.
- With The Amazing Spider-Man 2 now finally opening everywhere today (yes, we got to see it before the Yanks!), what better time to revisit Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire’s original trilogy of films than now. With an Honest Trailer.
- The sexual abuse lawsuit against X-Men director Bryan Singer just took a very big turn for the worst, if this latest statement from screenwriter Brett Easton Ellis is to be believed. He’s essentially just outed all of Singer and co’s supposedly dirty secrets, saying that Singer used to host “underage sex parties” all the time, and that this was fairly common knowledge among the Hollywood elite. Singer’s not the only name he mentions, saying that Roland Emmerich also used to host these orgies.
Fox has already pulled Singer from all upcoming press tours, and his name has been taken off a couple of the TV shows he was helping to develop. Whether all this turns out to be true or not, I’ve got a feeling that we may soon be seeing an announcement about a replacement director for X-Men: Apocalypse.
- So there’s been a lot of hoopla around Star Wars: Episode VII‘s casting, specifically Disney’s rather weird decision to mostly cast a bunch of white dudes in a movie where people can literally be any colour or gender. There’s supposedly another female role still be unveiled and Pajiba has drawn up a list of 10 female actors that they think need to feel the Force now.
- Seeing as how we started with an awesome ending, we may as well finish with an awesome ending. Specifically, how The LEGO Movie should have ended!
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: May 2, 2014