Extras! Star Wars spinoff origin story movies confirmed, Khan was nearly canned, Robocop shows some moves, Djimon Hounsou gets Fast 'n Furious, Bad Boys 3 could be coming for you, and Batman is tired? 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!

Settle down, children! Film school has begun. And for today’s bit of educationalizing (that’s a real word, right?) we get to learn about how technicolour classic Wizard of OZ – the oldest film to ever undergo the process – was converted to IMAX 3D. Oh and Darryn please see me after class.

So remember how some of the people involved in Star Trek Into Darkness initially said that a certain classic villain (who if you don’t know who I’m talking ab0ut then you probably shouldn’t read further, because SPOILERS) wasn’t going to be in the film, and then that he was, and then wasn’t, and then totally was again? Well, looks like that flip-flopping may in fact not have been due to the normal JJ Abrams production smokescreen, but rather because they really were just indecisive, as co-writer Roberto Orci explains.

“Khan was in our mind. When we were doing the ’09 one (‘Star Trek’), we can’t help but fantasize about a sequel, like W.O.K. — the Wrath of Kirk… We started with Khan, went away from Khan, and then went back to him.”

They then came up with a “Heart of Darkness” styled story of Kirk and co being sent to bring in the villain but then having to team up with him in the end. Except that angle brought it’s own problems with it.

“We felt like we were falling into the trap of using a villain based on previous knowledge of the villain, and we were somehow relying on the audience’s expectation to love or hate Khan to make that work.”

So they simply took him out of the picture entirely. Until they put him back again.

“There is a cancer within Starfleet, and it’s a story you can pitch without saying anyone’s name prior. Once we had that story, then it became, ‘Now can it be Khan?'”

“You can’t do Batman without The Joker. We knew it would be tricky, and we knew it would lead to a vocal outcry by some fans. But, you know, you have to make tough decisions, when you do something like this.”

Oh my gods, it’s Cylon-Cop and he wants to challenge you to chess or something on this new poster!

We were told not too long ago that WB wanted a “mature” Batman for the Man of Steel sequel, and as anybody like myself, who’s just realized that he’s no longer a young man, will tell you, “mature” is just another word for tired. And that’s apparently exactly what Ben Affleck’s Batman will be according to Warner Bros CEO Kevin Tsujihara, who told investors at a recent conference that Batfleck will be “kind of tired and weary and seasoned and been doing it for a while.” Apparently Affleck has this down pat, as Tsujihara described him as being “perfect for the vision….We think it’s going to be huge.”

Downloaded, the Napster documentary from Alex “Bill & Ted” Winters, is now available online to stream for free in its entirety. If you live in America. Or know your way around a web proxy. Yes, the irony about a documentary about media being readily available for everybody, not being readily available for everybody was not lost on me.

Djimon Hounsou will be joining his Guardians of the Galaxy co-star Vin Diesel in Fast & Furious 7. There’s no word on what role he’ll be playing, but I’m holding out hope that he’ll be a slave convicted of driving too fast, who gives an impassioned cry in a courtroom by repeatedly shouting out “GIVE US SPEED!”

Too soon?

Speaking of speed and the need for it, EW has scored a brace of pics from the videogame adaptation Need For Speed. The first shows the film’s baddie Dominic Cooper and Dakota Johnson loungin’ around, while the second has leading man Aaron Paul not quite liking whatever it is that Scott ‘Kid Cudi” Mescudi is looking at and enjoying. I think.

And the production on Beverly Hills Cop 4 is moving swiftly along as Variety reports that Jerry Bruckheimer will return as the fourth’s installment’s producer. But that’s not the big deal here, no that’s buried in the story with a single line about how “Bruckheimer is helping to develop the script for Bad Boys 3.”

It’s been about 3 years since we’ve heard anything on the development of the threequel, so it looks like something is finally starting to come together. Just barely, but still. If director Michael Bay can go back to what made the first film work, and not just the destruction porn of the second, then I will definitely be on board for more.

So you probably saw the news that morning that author JK Rowling will be taking us back to the wizarding world of Harry Potter thanks to the adventures of Newt Scamander. If the above sentence makes about as much sense to you as a Jean Paul Gaultier haute couture fashion show, then you may need to read THR’s article on Fantastic Beasts: 4 Things You Should Know.

I’ve learnt many things from movies, but the one lesson that I keep getting over and over is that the future sucks more than a vacuum cleaner convention. It seems like around every corner there’s some kind of dystopian/post-apocalyptic era, and now you check out a whole bunch of them in this supercut video. Head over to Movies.com for the full, really really long list of all the movies found in here.

Looks like those rumours were true. Early this year it was revealed that besides for the main Episodes in the new Star Wars trilogy, Lawrence Kasdan and Simon Kinberg would be working on standalone spinoff movies, each focusing on a particular character. These will be alternating annual releases with the main trilogy, starting with JJ Abrams’ Episode VII in 2015. At the time it was rumoured that these spinoffs would in fact be showing the beginnings of set characters, and that’s now been confirmed with Disney CFO Jay Rasulo describing the projects as “origin story film[s]”.

Right, so who do I have to sleep with to make sure that Garrett Hedlund gets cast as a young Han Solo in the inevitable movie?

So I’m currently making amends for my grievous, inhuman crime of never having seen Breaking Bad (Yes, yes, I’m a Stupid McDoodoo-Head and I know it). I’m just barely starting on it, so it could be that I missed some of the gags in Joking Bad, Jimmy Fallon’s parody of the fan favourite show. Even if that is the case, this is still bloody hilarious though.

Last Updated: September 13, 2013