Extras! 04 May 2015

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!

• Happy Star Wars Day, everybody! And to celebrate May the Fourth, have a bunch of Star Wars goodies in today’s Extras. And we’re kicking things off by asking a very serious question that I’m sure has been on every one’s mind: What if Star Wars: The Force Awakens had come out in 1986, was made by Tony Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer and starred Tom Cruise?

• Starship Troopers may be resurrected as a TV series! Do you want to know more?

• Yes, Paul Feig really is making a Play-Doh movie. That wasn’t just something you hallucinated after eating that bad pork. And now, thanks to Feig’s explanation for why he decided to get on-board with the movie, I’m actually kind of interested to see it.

“We’re moving forward [with the film]… My company was approached by Hasbro with this property and at first I was like, ‘How do you make a Play-Doh movie?’ and then I was like, ‘Wait, it’s colored clay. It’s Claymation!’ So then we had an idea that we really liked and then we brought [screenwriter] JasonMicallef in and kind of kicked it around with him, he went away and put together a pitch, came back, and it’s the funniest—I just think it’s hilarious. Let’s just say it’s gonna be a big movie, big in scope.”

What can I say? I’m a sucker for claymation.

• Posters of the day: Star Wars

• Usually the words “naked tattooed Jaimie Alexander” is how most of Nick’s fantasies start, but today it’s actually a description of the first pic for the Thor actresses’ new TV series. Blindspot will see Alexander playing “a beautiful Jane Doe [who] is discovered naked in Times Square, completely covered in mysterious, intricate tattoos with no memory of who she is or how she got there. There’s one thing that’s very clear, however: the name of FBI agent Kurt Weller, emblazoned across her back. ‘Jane,’ Agent Weller and rest of the FBI quickly realize that each mark on her body is a crime to solve, leading them closer to the truth about her identity and the mysteries to be revealed.”

• Devin Faraci over at Birth.Death.Movies (which is the new name for Badass Digest) had read an early draft of the Avengers: Age of Ultron script, which apparently contained “a Hulk moment that was so good it would have been THE fist-pumping moment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe”. A scene that never made it into the movie. So why was it cut? Devin spoke to writer-director Joss Whedon about it, who explained his reasoning (although he didn’t reveal the scene itself, because he told Marvel to use it in a later film).

“Sometimes what seems like a moment [- an organic culmination of events] turns out to be a move – [a forced series of events just to get a payoff]. That turned out to be a move.

It’s a great gag, but I couldn’t justify it. We were building a lot of the final battle around it, and it was killing us. Even when we were shooting. We had to stutter-step everything else, and eventually in post I convinced them we need to jettison this concept. I knew I could write a conclusion for Bruce and Natasha that I thought would be much better storytelling, and would be a real moment.”

Now I NEED to know what this scene is!

• And staying with Avengers, Chris Evans has possibly just answered the greatest mystery around Captain America: Is he still a virgin?

“It’s funny when you think about it – he’s probably a virgin. He’s probably a virgin! I don’t know when it would’ve happened. He was on tour [and might have hooked up with one of the USO Girls on tour during World War II]. That’s true. Maybe one of those [dancing] girls blew his mind. [Laughs] He’s probably just a good guy. He was probably holding out for Peggy Carter and he’s a little more old-fashioned in that sense. These are a lot of things that I think are giant conflicts, but they’re also very personal conflicts. He’s a very human guy. That’s why I like him.”

• James Bond’s latest flick, Spectre, is currently busy in production, and by “in production” I actually mean driving some really sweet cars really fast.

• If you’re a die-hard Star Wars fan then you probably know the name Biggs Darklighter quite well. Casual fans will probably draw a blank though. But that may not have been the case had George Lucas actually stuck to his original script which featured several scenes with Luke Skywalker’s childhood friend, and didn’t just relegate Biggs to the role of “that guy Luke greets when he joins the Rebellion”.

• And seeing as it is Star Wars Day, we had to end on this video which imagines the unthinkable horror of “What if Jar-Jar Binks was in The Force Awakens?”

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 4, 2015