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!
- So the BBC released the first teaser trailer for Season 8 of Doctor Who over the weekend, which may leave you wondering as to why with us being such unashamed Whovians, we haven’t made any mention of it. It’s simple. No, really, the teaser trailer is just too simple. It’s essentially just some shadows and a title card; hardly worth mentioning, if you ask me. This beautiful fan-created teaser trailer is a whole different matter though.
- We’ve known for a while that John Wesley Shipp, the actor who played the styrofoam muscled Flash aka Barry Allen in the original 1990’s TV series, would also be appearing in CW’s upcoming new Arrow spinoff, The Flash, which sees Grant Gustin now don the scarlet duds of the superhero speedster. What we didn’t know was exactly who he was going to play, but that’s all changed now as producer Greg Berlanti has unveiled Shipp’s very fitting role:
“Given his history with The Flash, [executive producers] Andrew [Kreisberg], Geoff [Johns] and I could only think of one person we wanted to play Barry’s father and that was John Wesley Shipp. He gives a fantastic and emotional performance in the pilot and we are looking forward to his presence in many more episodes. Also, personally, it was just wonderful to work with him again since my days at Dawson’s Creek. He’s a great actor and a great guy.”
- Poster of the day: Tombstone
- So, erm, I’m just going to leave this one over here for to peruse at your own leisure: The 5 Funniest Porn Parodies (Don’t worry, it’s Safe For Work. And also hilarious).
- Did you know that when Bryan Singer was handed the reins on the X-Men franchise back in the late 1990’s, he didn’t go off and read 75 years of comics to get himself up to speed. No, he went and watched all 76 episodes of the classic, fan-favourite X-Men animated series. The reason being that the show was an existing template of how to modernise, condense and adapt decades of continuity into a shiny new format.
And with X-Men: Days of Future Past – which was famously adapted by the animated series in its first season – currently ruling the box-office, Vulture has taken the time to chat with the show’s original writers and producers on how they went about tackling the classic tales and just how the show became an influence on what Singer would eventually do.
- Hey, looks like Jack Nicholson has lost a bit of w-ait a minute! That’s not Jack Nicholson! That’s the first look at Johnny Depp in costume for Black Mass, in which he plays real life convicted gangster Whitey Bulger.
- And speaking of Johnny Depp pretending to be notorious real life people, the Lone Ranger star is apparently in negotiations to star in director Dean “Red 2” Parisot’s The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero. The film will supposedly “be in the vein of Indiana Jones” and will recast the legendary escape artist as “an investigator of the world of the occult” who goes up against “a group of fanatical Spiritualists led by esteemed British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle”. Because reasons.
- Here are some new pics from The Book of Life, the Guillermo Del Toro produced animated comedy-musical film starring the voices of Channing Tatum and Zoe Saldana among others. The film, which as you can see has a very distinctive visual style, follows “Manolo, a young man who is torn between fulfilling the expectations of his family and following his heart” who goes on “an incredible adventure that spans three fantastical worlds”.
- Despite a lot of the stories we do on a daily basis being based around celebrities, we generally don’t bother with celebrity news/facts itself. But we will make an exception today for this little clips showing off 9 celebrity facts you may not have known.
- We may not have ever had a female Doctor in Doctor Who before now (well, at least not in an incarnation we’ve actually seen on screen and can verify), but chances are that sometime down the line it’s bound to happen (I mean, can you just imagine Dame Judi Dench as a Doctor?!). This is a sentiment that current showrunner Steven Moffat – who endured plenty of fan request for a lady Doctor at the end of Matt Smith’s run in Season 7 – certainly shares, but he believes that this is not an issue that should be forced just for the sake of it.
“I don’t know why I’m the one who gets the grief for this. I’m the one who put the dialogue into the show to say it can happen…Do you know how it will happen? It will not happen that somebody sits down and says we must turn the Doctor into a woman. That is not how you cast the Doctor.”
“A person will pop into the showrunner’s head and they’ll think. ‘Oh, my God, what if it was that person?’ And when that person is a woman, that’s the day it will happen…Casting is the dark arts of television. It is everything. That decision is central and absolute to everything you do. It’s the difference between a television programme and a sensation.
“So you don’t mess around with that; you don’t cast for any other reason than for passion and for aesthetics. It’s not a political decision, it’s an aesthetic decision and will always be.”
- Hey, guys! I managed to get my hands on this exclusive clip from Transformers: Age of Extinction that shows just how awesome the team-up of Mark Wahlberg and Optimus Prime is going to be!
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 28, 2014
