Home Entertainment Extras! Martin Scorsese starts a gang fight on TV, The Saint is back, Guillermo Del Toro talks Justice League Blonde, Discover the first Star Wars, The Raid 2 breaks faces and who gave that T-Rex a lightsaber?! Plus much more!

Extras! Martin Scorsese starts a gang fight on TV, The Saint is back, Guillermo Del Toro talks Justice League Blonde, Discover the first Star Wars, The Raid 2 breaks faces and who gave that T-Rex a lightsaber?! 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!

Happy Day After The Day That You Don’t Trust Anything On The Internet Day! You may have noticed that we also got in on the April Fool’s act a bit, some clearly more obvious than others. So with every page being a potential Rick Roll, I’m certain that you missed out on a lot of news, just out of self preservation, so lets catch you up.

Firstly, did you know that somebody is making a new version of The Saint, the spy-cheesefest TV series from the 70’s (best real life death animations ever!)  that made a star out of Roger Moore and was then remade as a movie in the 90’s with Val Kilmer in a bad wig and some dodgy accents? This time around we have English actor Adam Rayner as titular hero Simon Templar, getting some assistance from Joss Whedon alumni Eliza Dushku. A pilot for the new show was shot by The Expendables 2 and Con Air director Simon West, and you can get a first look at it in the trailer below. The show has not been picked up by a network yet, but it will shopped around pretty soon.

Judy Greer is one of those actresses who specializes in playing supporting roles to other, more headlining leading ladies. Somebody whose name you probably won’t recognize, but you’ll definitely know her face. Well, you’re not even going to know that for her next gig though, as she’s landed the role of the motion captured female chimp Cornelia, a love interest for leading ape Caesar (mo-capped by Andy Serkis) in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Greer apparently landed the role by lobbying director Matt Reeves with her long list of Planet of the Apes fangirl credentials, which apparently even included having an Apes themed wedding!

Veteran actor William H. Macy has been churning out a steady stream of movies over the years, but now for the only the second time in his career (the last time was back in the 80’s) he’ll be stepping behind the camera. Apparently this change of scenery has left him rudderless. Or rather Rudderless, as that’s the name of the drama he’ll be helming which will see a grieving father starting a band after discovering some music that his late son had written.

Joining the directionally challenged director in front of the camera will be Billy Crudup, Anton Yelchin, Selena Gomez and Laurence Fishburne.

Two new posters are out for Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, the next in a ridonkulously long line of YA adaptations that hope to get themselves a whiff of that Twilight money. This time it’s Lily Collins discovering she’s a shadowhunter – a half human, half angel – that’s caught up in a battle with yadda yadda cute boy yadda yadda forbidden love. Oh, you know the drill by now.

After getting delayed due to an unexpected lawsuit(case), Marvel’s Cinematic Universe: Phase One boxset – the one in the fancy silver briefcase with all the Marvel movies released thus far as well as all kinds of insanely cool geek swag – is finally ready to launch. Collider has the lowdown on everything you can expect to find inside, and it reads like a geek dream list. Click that link only if you are either strong of will, or even stronger of credit card.

If you follow me on Twitter, well then I apologize for all the bad language and even worse jokes. Also, you may have noticed me tweeting over the weekend about a cool live-chat that Slashfilm had with a number of top film people from Rian Johnson to Damon Lindelof and much more. One such person was Juno director Jason Reitman, and he revealed that apparently after Juno, when Fox was still toying with the idea of a bunch of standalone X-Men films, he was approached and asked to reteam with his Juno scribe Diablo Cody, as well as star Ellen Page, who played phasing mutant Kitty Pryde in X-Men: The Last Stand, to do a standalone Kitty Pryde movie.

The movie simply just didn’t pan out in the end, but it would certainly have been interesting to see the tone of superhero movie he would have made. At the very least, he would probably have made Kitty Pryde smoke a pipe.

The Raid is one of the most brutal action films you will ever see. Hell, I felt like I had been beaten like a red-haired stepchild just from watching it. And judging by this first little teaser image that director Gareth Evans tweeted last night, The Raid 2 will be just as violently unforgiving.

The WonderCon convention happened over the weekend, and during a panel for his mosters vs mech smackdown, Pacific Rim, writer/director Guillermo Del Toro also shed some light on the dark. Dark Universe, to be exact. The film is set to be a superhero team-up movie starring some of DC Comics’ more supernaturally inclined heroes, a la the current Justice League Dark comic. It seems like the movie will take more than just inspiration from that source though, as Del Toro hinted that that may also end up being the film’s final title. He also revealed that he’s not about to pull a Keanu Reeves on us, and that the chain smoking, fast talking, leading magic man John Constantine will not only be the star of the show, but will definitely not be the dark haired Reeves version we saw in 2005’s Constantine.

“On Justice League Dark, or Dark Universe, what we’re doing is we finished the [story] bible. Then we’re going to start the screenplay with a writer we hope we can announce very soon. What I’m doing is the lead character that guides us through that is Constantine. Blonde. He is basically trying to recruit these guys. On Etrigan, I’m using Jason Blood in the time of Merlin. We get to their origin through the story. We don’t make the origin story at the top. We find it out as they each have mysteries to solve. Swamp Thing is at peace with who he is, but Deadman still needs to figure out who shot him. It’s all woven in. When I was a kid, my two favorite characters in the whole DC Universe were Etrigan and Swamp Thing, so I’m in heaven.”

As Justice League Dark is one of my favourite things coming out of the DC stable, on an excitement scale of 1 to 10, I’m currently hovering at a Nicki Minaj.

Looks like Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla is going old school. Literally the oldest school there is. Star of the original 1956 Godzilla, Akira Takarada, will apparently be joining the production. Edwards tweeted a pic of himself and the actor on set, but didn’t mention if this was just a cameo role or whether it was more involved.

Before George Lucas’ great beard dreamed up Star Wars, there was The Star Wars. Notice that “the”? That wasn’t the only difference in this idea progenitor for the super successful sci-fi franchise. The original lead was rebel Anakin Starkiller, Luke Skywalker was an old military man and Darth Vader was merely a ruthless general sans helmet and Force chokes. And now, thanks to Dark Horse Comics, we’re finally going to see this version brought to life, as the publisher has announced an 8-issue comic book adaptation of Lucas’ original concepts. It will be penned by Jonathan Rinzler with art by Mike Mayhew, some examples of which you can see below (with more at the link).

Looks like you folks sure do love your Fast & Furious…es. And apparently Universal Pictures love giving them to you. Star and professional Rogaine “before” picture model, Vin Diesel, took to his Facebook page about the status of the soon to be released Fast & Furious 6 and what is happening with Fast & Furious 7.

“There was an early screening in LA this week of Fast 6. The crowd reaction was surreal… and their demand for the continuation was powerful… It’s remarkable to think I first embodied this character in 1999… and the evolution continues.

P.S. Filming begins this summer in LA, where it all started… talk about a studio in sync with the audience…”

Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York is an incredible film, not only for Daniel Day-Lewis’ snarling, mustachioed performance tour de force, or because it was the first time I could really take Cameron Diaz seriously as a dramatic actress or take Leonardo DiCaprio seriously as actually possessing the body and face of somebody who has gone through puberty already. The film was a decades long obsession of the acclaimed director after he first read a book twenty years prior about the vicious gangs that ruled 19th century New York.

In all those years of development, he uncovered a lot of possible material, but naturally most of it never made it into the film due to time and dramatic constraints, but now Scorsese will get his chance to tell those stories as Gangs of New York will now be receiving the TV treatment. Here’s the director explaining it all.

“This time and era of America’s history and heritage is rich with characters and stories that we could not fully explore in a two hour film. A television series allows us the time and creative freedom to bring this colorful world, and all the implications it had and still does on our society, to life.”

Although no deal has been set up yet with a specific network, it’s a safe bet that HBO, for whom Scorsese is executive producer of and filmed the opening episode of hit show Boardwalk Empire, will be interested.

And it boggles my mind that it’s taken this long for somebody to go “Hey, dinosaurs are cool! Know what’s also cool? Lightsabers!” but luckily that day has finally arrived in the form of the this funny Jurassic Park/Star Wars mash-up. Jedi dinosaurs for the mother-effing win!

Last Updated: April 2, 2013

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