Extras! Ridley Scott may have a Halo, JGL talks Sandman, Shia LaBeouf retires, Lee Daniels has a few pryors, and He-Man could finally be getting some direction! Plus much more!

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!

Ho, ho, ho and a bottle of rum… but enough about the last episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Let’s talk pirates, specifically Black Sails, the new pirate series produced by Michael Bay that was shot right down here in Cape Town. The show, which is a prequel of sorts to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, will be making airing on US TV network Starz in two weeks’ time (and hopefully a local release soon thereafter), and has a new featurette out in preparation for its debut, talking about how the show will be ditching a lot of the popular, but misinformed pirate mythos in favour of a more realistic approach.

Speaking of shows to look forward to this year, The Playlist has a great list up of The 20 Most Anticipated TV Shows of 2014. There are some great titles in there, several of them featuring A-list Hollywood talent either in front of or behind the camera. And before you ask, Darryn, no the latest season of 7de Laan didn’t make the cut. They just don’t share the love for Oubaas that you have.

When the news broke a short while back that Hollywood wonderboy Joseph Gordon-Levitt will be directing and possibly starring in an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s critically acclaimed comic book Sandman, many fans reacted with trepidation at the thought of the sprawling dark fantasy epic being boiled down into a generic movie. But JGL is here to reassure fans that what drew him to this material, and what he hopes to bring to the life, is that is anything but your average big budget Hollywood tale.

“Well, I love just the basic concept of it – just the concept of personifying Dream, along with all of his brothers and sisters, the seven Endless personifying Death, personifying Destruction and Delirium and Destiny and Desire and Despair. I mean, that’s just a fascinating and, I think, a really cinematic concept. You look at the art of Sandman, and it just looks spectacular. I love big, spectacular movies, but oftentimes big, spectacular movies sort of get stuck in a rut. They go down certain paths that end in big explosions or whatever. Sandman has so much opportunity to do something that’s on a grand, grand scale, but really unlike your average big, grand-scale, spectacular movie. I guess that’s the tip of the iceberg.”

You may recall that when JGL tweeted his involvement, he added a #Prelude hashtag, leaving some to theorize that he would be adapting for the comics’ first collection, titled “Preludes and Nocturnes”. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

“I honestly just wrote that as sort of a pun, because this tweet was a prelude to who knows what’s to come. Obviously “Prelude” is the title of the first issue, but… Yeah, nothing is cemented yet. But there’s so much potential in that material. It’s exciting.”

Here’s a new international poster and new still image for Robocop which feat-HOLY REBOOTED FRANCHISES, BATMAN! IS ROBOCOP A GIANT NOW?!

It takes a special kind of movie to have Josh Brolin , Michael Fassbender and John Malkovich in it and still suck more than vacuum cleaner’ convention, which is why usually the very rapidly given answer to the question “What went wrong with Jonah Hex?” is “Everything!”. Not according to Brolin though, who feels that a lot of the blame should be laid at the feet sophomore director Jimmy Hayward.

“I think it deserved that bashing for reasons that those critics will never know. We were almost ready to drop [the film] when this kid [Hayward] came up.

“He was an interesting young guy full of energy and he was obsessed with Jonah Hex. I thought, ‘This is either a really bad decision or a brilliant decision.’

“Really bad… If I’m ever really rich, I’ll do that movie again. Seriously.”

A giant robot made out spiky scrap metal couldn’t stop him, but it looks like Shia LaBeouf has finally met his match: Himself. After the events of the last few weeks, which saw LaBeouf accused of plagiarism and then suffer an ever increasing case of foot-in-mouth disease, LaBeouf has finally decided to call it quits. But put away the pom-poms and streamers all you LaBeouf haters – he’s not retiring from showbiz completely, merely from public life, and specifically social media platforms.

Mark Wahlberg wants to beat up One Direction. Whatever his reasons may be, I support this endeavour 110%.

Lee Daniels may have seen no love at the recent Golden Globes for The Butler, but that doesn’t mean that he won’t be trying to tell the story of another African American icon. Except this one didn’t hang out with many presidents and says “f–k” a WHOLE lot more. Daniels is apparently looking to make a biopic about standup comedy legend Richard Pryor, and already has 3 actors – Eddie Murphy, Michael B. Jordan and Marlon Wayans – on the short list to play the funnyman. Daniels is only the latest in a long line of filmmakers who have looked to tell the comedian’s life story, and past efforts had already seen both Murphy and Wayans attached. It’s believed that Wayans is now the right age for the story that Daniels wants to tell, but the younger Jordan impressed him so much that they may just use makeup to age him accordingly if he should get the nod.

I’m still stuck firmly in my Math Smith withdrawal phase (it’s only a matter of time before fish fingers and custard start looking appealing), but unfortunately/fortunately the Doctor Who show must go on. Production has already begun on the new season of the show with newly introduced Doctor, Peter Capaldi, and according to showrunner Steven Moffat the new man in the box is a totally different beast to Smith and David Tennant, his insanely popular predecessors.

“Our vague idea is… the last two Doctors have been brilliant, and have been your ‘good boyfriend’ Doctors. But the Doctor isn’t always like that. There is the sort of Tom Baker, Christopher Eccelston end of the spectrum, where he is mad and dangerous and difficult.”

Here’s some new pics for Captain America: The Winter Soldier which not only gives us our first proper look at both Chris Evans back in the retro costume and Anthony Mackie as Falcon, but also confirms my suspicion that the only reason The Avengers: Age of Ultron is having scenes shot in Cape Town is so that Cap can get another lerrah jeckit at the warruhfrunn*

We’ve very little about the new big screen reboot of He-Man and The Masters of the Universe after director Jon M. Chu bailed on the project last year, but according to the usually reliable sources of the guys at Schmoes Know, a pretty impressive short list of replacement directors has now been drawn up. According to Schmoes, Sony has been meeting with Joe Cornish (Attack the Block), Rian Johnson (Looper, The Brothers Bloom), Andy Muschietti (Mama), Kirk DeMicco & Chris Sanders (The Croods) and Phil Lord and Chris Miller (21 Jump Street, The LEGO Movie).

I’d actually be happy with any of those guys, but Cornish and Johnson would definitely get me singing He-Man’s favourite song in joy.

Hey you, egghead! Do you have an overabundance of brain cells? Are you able to think in coherent sentences made up of polysyllabic words without the smell of burning rubber emanating from your cranium? Well, then I have just the thing to get rid off all those pesky smarts: A new spoof of The Walking Dead titled Walking With the Dead has just been announced! Here’s the IQ lowering blurb:

A month into the zombie apocalypse, a group of survivors, including four who “for safety reasons” go by the names of their favorite cities–Green Bay, Chicago, Brooklyn, and Harlem–a Sheriff fresh off a nice, relaxing, six-week coma, his small-business-owner 10 year old son, and a voiceover-prone zombie, Romeo, who has convinced the group that he’s not dead, just a little slow, are forced from the safety of their mall-camp in hopes of finding a rumored safe-haven.

Unless you’re watching movies in South Central LA, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re not a fan of movie hecklers. But what if movie hecklers had more to offer than just shouts of “Ooh don’t go in there, he gon’ git ya!”?

As a stupidly gigantic fan of Microsoft’s Halo videogame franchise, I very nearly cried like Darryn in the front row of a One Direction concert when the Peter Jackson produced, Neill Blomkamp directed Halo movie got scrapped a few years ago. Since then we’ve heard some rumblings about having Master Chief’s tale translated to screen, but most fans have just about given up at this point at seeing these hints become something concrete. Well, this latest news is about as concrete as a bowl of jelly, but it also happens to be damn exciting. According to a tweet from Production Weekly – which was removed shortly after it was posted – it seems that a new untitled Halo feature film is indeed in the works with none other director Ridley Scott (Alien, Gladiator, Prometheus) set to produce it, while Paul Scheuring (Prison Break, A Man Apart, Zero Hour) will be writing it.

According to Production Weekly’s follow-up tweet, this definitely is a new live-action feature film and has nothing to do with the Halo TV series that Steven Spielberg is producing for Microsoft. Thus far, there’s been no other confirmation about this anywhere, but you’d have to think that Halo is just too big a franchise, with far too much cinematic potential for Microsoft to just sit on – last time I checked, they were not in the habit of not making money – and seeing as how Halo takes so many cues from Alien, having Ridley Scott being the one to shepherd this project could just be an inspired choice.

I’m not too sure on Scheuring though. While very few people will deny the brilliance of the first season of Prison Break, it rapidly went off the rails thereafter. He did manage to reignite a lot of that initial spark again in the later seasons, but it was a bumpy road getting there.

Too cheap, oops I mean frugal to purchase Jonathan W. Rinzler’s The Making of Star Wars book? Then just head on over to the Twitter account of Chewwbacca actor Peter Mayhew, who has posted a sarlacc pit full of “never been seen before” – clearly Mayhew never bought the book either – behind-the-scenes photos from the original Star Wars trilogy.

Have you seen Frozen? Did you find yourself singing along to “Let It Go”, the Golden Globe nominated original song from the Disney animation? Oh, wait let me rephrase that: croak along to “Let it Go” because you’re neither a prepubescent girl nor a eunuch and can’t hit all the stupidly high notes that Disney is always putting in their music. One female Youtuber who happens to be a natural alto singer has had enough of all this high-note shenanigans, and has something to say/sing about it in this brilliant “Let it Go” parody titled “Here I Go (Despair of an Alto)”.

(Warning: this contains some explicit lyrics)

*No, this is not gibberish, but a joke from the popular stage production “Joe Barber”.

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: January 13, 2014