Home Entertainment Extras! Joss Whedon is thinking of killing off people, Vin Diesel wasn't supposed to be Groot, A mass cast exodus, A dog gets animated, World War Z needs a little money, and Lex Luthor is not breaking bad! Plus much more!

Extras! Joss Whedon is thinking of killing off people, Vin Diesel wasn't supposed to be Groot, A mass cast exodus, A dog gets animated, World War Z needs a little money, and Lex Luthor is not breaking bad! Plus much more!

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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!

Stop me if you know this one: “Joss Whedon, George R.R. Martin and Steven Moffat walk into a bar. Every character you’ve ever loved dies”. Now I don’t know if the makers of this next video, which sees 5 top showrunners locked in a cabin in the woods and forced to create the ultimate TV series, had heard this joke before, but either way, it turned out pretty damn funny.

Oh, would you look at that? What a co-inky-dink. Here’s Joss Whedon talking about killing people off, specifically murderlizing a couple of heroes in The Avengers: Age of Ultron.

“I’m always joking about that. Um…maybe? But I’d have to have a really good reason, a really great sequence for [Marvel executives] to go, ‘We’ll cut off a potential franchise, that’s fine!’ They know as any good studio does, that without some stakes, some real danger, how involved can we get? We don’t just rule it out across the board, but neither is the mission statement ‘Who can we kill?’ We try to build the story organically and go, ‘How hard can we make it on these people?’ You go to the movies to see people you love suffer-that’s why you go to the movies.

Yeah… Black Widow, Hawkeye and the rest of you non-franchise leading characters, I suggest that you get all your insurance policies in order.

Right, PSA time: There is a story going around that Breaking Bad‘s Bryan Cranston has been cast as Lex Luthor for the upcoming Man of Steel sequel. If you’re wondering why we haven’t covered it when the likes of Rolling Stone already has it down as fact, it’s because of one simple reason: It’s not true. Journalists are being lazy and not doing any research of their own, but instead are just all quoting an article on Cosmic Book News which states that Cranston has been cast. The problem is that according to the CBM article, they only got this story through “a source”.

That should have put off some people from running the story as being confirmed, but apparently not even the ludicrous claim that Cranston has signed a 7-picture deal (Really? The villain is going to be in 7 films?) has thrown up enough red flags. So now the internet  is full of a story that I admittedly wish would be true, but it simply isn’t.

If you suffer from an irrational fear of falling… away from George Clooney… on a space station… in space… Then you probably shouldn’t watch these two new TV spots for Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity.

Hang onto your jinkies, as it seems that everybody’s favourite mystery solving dog, his clearly drug addled master/best friend and their cheesy pals will be heading to a cinema near you. And this time, you won’t have to constantly battle the urge to punch Freddie Prinze Jr in the face. Despite the massive box office success of the two live-action Scooby Doo movies (incidentally, both penned by Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn), Warner Bros are in the process of developing an animated feature film based on the classic Hanna Barbera cartoon. Matt Lieberman, who also wrote the planned Short Circuit remake, will be providing the script.

So remember that meeting Vin Diesel had with Marvel that led to all the rampant speculation of him playing everybody from Vision to Thanos, but then it turned out that he was actually just voicing the tree-like Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy? Yeah, that actually didn’t happen quite like that. Turns out that Diesel was actually approached by Marvel to star in a “fresh IP” set to launch their Phase 3 in  2016 or 2017. But when he was at Comic-Con in July to promote Riddick and fans were clamouring for details on his involvement in the Marvel universe, Marvel and Diesel realized that fans wouldn’t want to wait that long to see him in action. Except there was the problem that Diesel’s busy schedule wouldn’t allow him to do a lengthy shoot right now. Doing voiceover and some motion capture work though…

“I guess after they watched ‘Iron Giant’ or whatever, they came up with this idea of taking kind of the strangest Marvel character that’s ever hit film, and thought what I could do with that, with motion capture and with my voice. That’s what they presented. I thought it was a really great idea on behalf of Marvel, and now it’s just up to my reps to allow that to happen.”

So now the question remains, what the hell were Marvel hoping to launch in 2016 with Diesel in the lead? He doesn’t fit with any of the known Phase 3 projects, so what could it have been?

So earlier today, we discussed whether or not you guys want to see Ben Affleck in the role of Batman. If you’re still on the Battfleck fence, then maybe this fan-made Man of Steel 2 trailer can convince you differently. It is a little too dark in places, and it features Bryan Cranston as Luthor (RAAAAAGE!) but otherwise, it paints a very convincing picture.

The South African accent sucks. If you’re a non-South African actor/actress trying to do it, that is. Just ask the guys over on Hollywood.com’s list of Worst Movie Accents, Ever: South African Edition. Oh Val Kilmer, you so crazy.

Despite a production so disastrous that it makes ANN7 look like a Pulitzer winning news network, World War Z went on to make a fair amount of money. Paramount is kind of desperate for it make a little bit more though. About $2 million more, to be exact. The film’s domestic gross is currently sitting on about $198 million, and they’re frantically trying different tactics to get it pass the $200 million mark. Tactics like re-releasing it on IMAX and even pairing it with Star Trek Into Darkness for a double-bill feature (two movies for the price of one). And they’re not just doing all of this to make more money. Well, actually they are, just not where you would expect.

See once the film crosses the $200 million mark at the box office, it allows Paramount to charge way more, tens of millions of dollars more, for any TV networks, like HBO, AMC etc, who want to air the film in the future.

This new poster for beat generation biopic Kill Your Darlings is yellow. Very yellow. It also features two Harry’s in Harry Osborn and Harry Potter. I have no idea if these things are related, but this is the way my brain works. Sorry.

Kill-Your-Darlings-Poster-640x947

Looks like Christian Bale’s Moses won’t be making the trip out of Egypt alone. Well, besides for the whole Hebrew nation, I mean. Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley, Aaron Paul and John Turturro are apparently in the process of joining the Ridley Scott directed Biblical epic, Exodus. Variety reports that Paul will play Joshua, who leads the Israelites after [SPOILER ALERT] Moses’ death, while Weaver and Turturro will respectively play Tuya and Seti, the parents of Joel Edgerton’s Pharaoh Ramses. Deadline indicates that Kingsley is currently talks to join the flick as a drunk English actor named Trevor as a yet unnamed Hebrew scholar.

Do you suffer from daddy issues, and/or enjoy looking out of dusty windows? Well then you may just be in a Steven Spielberg movie. Better check this list to see if you match the other criteria.

I’m having a tough time writing up some for this new clip from Will Ferrell’s Funny or Die, where he looks at the movie spoofs they’ve got planned for the rest of the year. No, this isn’t writer’s block. It’s just really hard to type coherent sentences when you can’t stop giggling your not-so-little behind off at the hilarity of this video.

I know this is the furthest thing from intelligent humor, but ooh whee, I’m still cracking up from that Benjamin Button gag.

Last Updated: August 28, 2013

3 Comments

  1. signs on for 7 more films, and these ‘journalists’ report that bullshit?! Bwahahahah! Glad you have not been duped into it man.

    Reply

    • Gustav Willem Diedericks

      August 28, 2013 at 20:21

      Booohya!

      Reply

  2. Gustav Willem Diedericks

    August 28, 2013 at 20:21

    Damn that Superman VS Batman preview is gooooood!

    Reply

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