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!
- In this video, Batman fights Darth Vader with lightsabers. I don’t think I’ve ever written a sentence as perfect as the one before this.
- Looks like we have Mel Brooks to blame for unleashing the plague that is Adam Sandler on the world. Well, at least in one animated movie, that is. The veteran funnyman will be joining Sandler in Genddy Tartakovsky’s Hotel Transylvania 2, the follow-up to his 2012 3D animated hit, where he will be playing Vlad, the cranky ancient vampire father of Sandler’s Dracula. Here’s a first look at the character:
- Do you talk during a movie in the cinema, use your cell phone, chew excessively loudly, maybe even allow your sugar-rushing kid to treat the hallowed cinema like a McDonalds Play Zone? Well, then you better go read this this post on cinema etiquette (with add Nic Cage!) before I give you the same lesson, but in a lot more physical variation.
- Remember Wanted, that comic-book adaptation that was virtually nothing like the actual comic book it was based on, but hey we got to see Angelina Jolie’s butt and young Charles Xavier made bullets curve so we totally forgave them? Well, that movie was supposed to have a sequel. I say supposed to, because it’s been a very, very long time since it was announced. But now producer Marc Platt has finally given an update, saying that it was all about waiting until they had the script just right:
“We have a script that’s getting pretty good. To do a sequel when it wasn’t really set up for a sequel–one of our main characters dies in it. You don’t want to just retread a similar story, but when we get the script to a certain bar, there will be a sequel. It’s taken a while because it’s challenging, as I said, because we lost a main, main character, so where that James McAvoy character goes now… we have good ideas though. It’s coming along.”
- Poster of the day: Cabin in the Woods
- We’ve already heard that The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies’ Peter Jackson it out pull a.. well, pull a Peter Jackson with that film’s climactic battle sequence that will make the crazy big fight in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers look like a minor kerfuffle about somebody leaving the toilet seat up again. But according to Jackson, the battle – which is said to be 20-25 minutes long – is not just going to be composed of people hitting each other.
“[One] of the things we did with the Battle of the Five Armies in particular, and in designing the script and the narrative, is that we made sure that the story that we’re telling in this third movie, that the story is continuing through the battle. So in other words, you don’t get the story to a point where everyone’s suddenly, ‘Oh, stop, we’re going to launch into a huge battle now,’ and then the battle’s over and you do a denouement in the end. We actually have a lot of conflict happening between characters, we have people in different places that are needing to get to each other… And some of it’s not all battle-related, some of it is personal stuff that’s there. And so we kind of pushed the story where the battle kind of interrupts the story, it gets in the way of the story, but the story kind of punches its way through the battle, and that’s what we’ve deliberately tried to do with this. So you’re literally seeing it through the eyes of multiple characters as they are still doing what they need to do to fulfill their journey on the movie.”
- If you’re a big Star Wars fan with two hours to spare, then you’re in for quite a treat. Since 2005, Star Wars megafan Garret Gilchrist has worked on “Star Wars: Deleted Magic”, a documentary-styled video that compiles all the deleted videos, images and featurettes that Lucasfilm have occasionally unveiled over the years, but never included in any official release. Here are tons of stuff in here that a lot of people have probably never seen before, so enjoy as you get yourself pumped up for this weekend’s trailer reveal for The Force Awakens.
- So we’ve heard how The Expendables 3‘s PG-13 rating was “a horrible miscalculation” but that wasn’t the only reason why the film ended up underperforming at the box office. No, it seems some scurvy seadogs had something to do with it, as the film was leaked online (and subsequently pirated a stupid amount of times) just before the film’s release. This prompted distributor Lionsgate to start legal proceedings in trying to bring to book the folks responsible for their lost revenue. And it seems that long and very musclebound arm of the law has struck, as the London police have arrested two thirty-something men apparently responsible for initally leaking the film online.
- The game is afoot – and possibly also a-moustache, and maybe even a-hat! – in this first image from the upcoming fourth series of Sherlock, that will see Benedict Cumberbatch reprise his role as the famous detective opposite Martin Freeman’s ever more impressive facial hair.
- It looks like the sequel to illusionist heist flick Now You See Me got very close to going all Sharknado: The Second One. No they didn’t cast Ian Zeiring or employ a CGI budget smaller than my shoe size, but the sequel will now officially be titled Now You See Me: The Second Act.
- Despite its flaws, I can never stop enjoying Richard Curtis’ Love Actually. Maybe it’s Hugh Grant’s snark or Bill Nighy’s devil-may-care attitude or maybe it’s appeal of seeing Sheriff Rick Grimes before he started stabbing the undead in the brain on a regular basis. Whatever the case, I can honestly say that I love the film. So let’s take another honest look at it.
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: November 26, 2014
