Extras! 21 May 2014

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!

• Here’s a really cool look at a note that writer/director JJ Abrams penned to the cast and crew of Star Wars: Episode VII before they commenced production.

And for those of you who aren’t fluent in ancient hieroglyphics, here’s the much more legible transcript:

“Dearest Cast and Crew – What an honour it is to work beside all of you, on Star Wars Ep VII. I can’t thank you enough, for all work past and future. Let’s take good care of not just ourselves, but of each other. Amazing, but true: the world awaits this film. Let’s give ‘em something GREAT. xo JJ.”

• Are you one of those people that are always asking when Marvel’s The Avengers will cross-over with Fox’s X-Men franchise? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one, because Wolverine also wants the answer to that question.

“Mate, I ask the same question.  I literally asked the same question the other day to Tom from Marvel who works with all the other studios, he works with Sony and Fox, that’s his job to liaise.  I said, ‘Man, can this happen?’ and he goes ‘Look, it’s not gonna be easy because you’re working with different studios and they’re their properties.’  But I believe—maybe I’m optimistic, I understand at Marvel they’ve got The Avengers, they’ve got a lot of big things going on, but at some point I just find it almost impossible that there’s not a way to bring Iron Man, all the Avengers characters, Wolverine, the X-Men characters, Spider-Man, and somehow get them in together.

• Poster of the Day: The Live

• If you looked at that teaser trailer for Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut, Lost River, that came out this morning, and went “What the effing effity eff?!”, then you’ll be happy to know that you’ve found some compatriots of similar sentiment over in Cannes. Lost River debuted at the vaunted film festival to a flood of scathing reviews with most of them making use of the letters “W”, “T” and “F” quite liberally.

Palme d’Or? More like Palme d’Awful, am I right?!

• And because clearly the names of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks are not high profile enough for a project, it’s been revealed that the Oscar winning Coen Bros will be penning the script for Spielberg/Hanks’ upcoming Cold War drama about the true story of James Donavan (played by Hanks), “the American attorney enlisted by the CIA during the Cold War to surreptitiously negotiate the 1962 release of Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 spy plane pilot who was shot down over Russia two years earlier”.

• The trailer for Disney’s first Marvel animated adaptation, Big Hero 6, will be dropping tomorrow evening, but Empire has managed to score an early look thanks to these new still images showing young Hiro Hamada, turning his robotic friend Baymax into the kickass mech he eventually becomes.

• Hey look, somebody is defending Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s Godzilla from 1998. Yes, people are actually allowed to do that, you know.

• I can pretty much guarantee that after this weekend, there are going to be quite a few Quicksilver fanboys among you. So before you start screaming for more of the speedy mutant, I’m here to happily report that that’s exactly what will happen as X-Men: Days of Future Past writer/producer Simon Kinberg has confirmed that Quicksilver will also be in the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse. Kinberg also commented on the internet brouhaha about the fact that the character is being used by Fox in their X-Men movies, as well as by Marvel in the upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron.

“It wasn’t something we anticipated, because we didn’t know they were using him in The Avengers movie. It got publicized weeks after we made the decision that we had done it, and then after that even, I think it was a little while before the controversy started in terms of them using him too.”

• With the current trial that’s happening over in Game of Thrones, there’s only one thing that Westeros needs: Law & Order! DUHN DUHN!

[Spoiler warning if you’re not up to date with the episodes]

• Easily the best part of Marc Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man movies is the casting of Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker/Spider-Man (I could make a list of the worst parts, but then we would be here till next week), and it seems that the folks over at Sony have realized this. Garfield is already signed up to do another two Spider-Man movies, but he has now reportedly been offered a new contract that would see him playing the web-head a further four times.

What’s more, as part of this new contract, he may also have been offered a box office profits sharing deal for the next six years. That’s similar to the arrangement that Robert Downey Jr had with Marvel/Disney which eventually netted him a reported $50 million paycheck for The Avengers. I think our friendly, neighbourhood Spider-Man, just became our filthy stinking rich Spider-Man.

• Can’t wait for A Million Ways To Die In The West after that hilarious last trailer? Well, then go play the 8-Bit browser video-game so long! And no, this one luckily did not come out of my penis!

• And finally, an argument for the ages can be settled in under two minutes, as Superman and Goku from Dragonball Z finally go head to head in an epic rap battle!

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 21, 2014