TAGGED AS: Marvel, Superheroes
This week’s Ketchup brings you another ten headlines from the world of film development news (those stories about what movies Hollywood is working on for you next). Included in the mix this time around are stories about such titles as A Christmas Carol, Death Wish, Ghost in the Shell, and Venom.
When it was revealed last year that Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios were collaborating to reunite Spider-Man with the rest of the MCU (The Avengers, Captain America, Iron Man, etc), it left in question the other Marvel movies that Sony Pictures had in development, that there were going to be Spider-Man spinoffs, such as The Sinister Six, and a female-centric spinoff movie (rumored to be Black Cat). This week, Sony Pictures announced that they are indeed moving forward with plans for Venom, though exactly how they are doing it may come as a surprise. Instead of directly spinning off of Spider-Man (Venom actually started off as Peter Parker’s alien symbiote costume in the comics), Sony’s new Venom will be a standalone film which the studio is hoping will start a whole new franchise separate from Spider-Man (and ostensibly, likely the MCU as well). It is not yet known which version of Venom will form the basis of Sony’s first film, though the two most obvious candidates are reporter Eddie Brock and longtime Peter Parker adversary Flash Thompson, AKA Agent Venom. Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios have scheduled their first Spider-Man movie, played by Tom Holland, for next summer, July 7, 2017.
This week, perhaps quite coincidentally, two of the biggest newest announced movies are both adaptations of classic Christmas stories. First off, Walt Disney Pictures is now developing a live action adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffman’s 1816 story, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which was the inspiration for Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, which Disney previously adapted as part of the 1940 film Fantasia. This new live-action adaptation will be called The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, and it will be directed by Lasse Hallström, the Swedish director of such films as Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? As a direct adaptation of the story, rather than adapting the ballet, Hallstrom’s film is expected to be a more direct adaptation of the story of a young girl whose discovery of a Nutcracker doll leads to an adventure opposing the evil seven-headed Mouse King. The other Christmas movie announced this week is a new adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which will be directed by Bennett Miller, whose previous films were The Cruise, Capote, Moneyball, and Foxcatcher. Miller’s A Christmas Carol will be adapted by screenwriter Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love, Tulip Fever, Anna Karenina) as a 19th century story, instead of the more contemporary approach Hollywood sometimes uses.
Jean-Paul Sartre may have written in his play No Exit that “Hell is other people” (finally, a real use of this writer’s Philosophy degree!), but in the upcoming film, the title will refer to a much more literal form of earthly hell. That’s because No Exit is the title of an action movie about the group of firefighters called the Granite Mountain Hotshots, who in 2013 lost 19 members while attempting to save a town in Arizona. Two of the film’s leads will be played by Josh Brolin and Miles Teller, leading what is expected to be an ensemble cast. No Exit will also be the next film for director Joseph Kosinski, who is moving to more realistic subject matter after his first two films, TRON: Legacy and Oblivion, both of which were science fiction.
Previous casting news about the Hollywood live action remake of the anime classic Ghost in the Shell has been very much part of the ongoing discussion of the practice referred to as “whitewashing” (Caucasian actors being cast in roles that could, or arguably, “should” have been played by other races). Specifically, this allegation was made on social media when Scarlett Johansson and Michael Pitt were announced as playing the lead (called Motoko Kusanagi in the original) and The Laughing Man, respectively. This week’s news from DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures could then be seen as something of a reaction to that, as the new Ghost in the Shell now has its first Japanese actor. Takeshi Kitano (AKA Beat Kitano) has been cast in Ghost in the Shell as Chief Aramaki, the leader of the elite “Section 9” taskforce which unites humans and cyborgs in the fight against the world’s most dangerous technological threats. Ghost in the Shell will be directed by Rupert Sanders, who made his feature film debut in 2012 with Snow White and the Huntsman. This will be the first time that Beat Kitano has appeared as an actor in a Hollywood film since 1995’s Johnny Mnemonic, which was also a cyberpunk action movie.
As common, catchy, and portentous as the phrase World War III is, you would think that by 2016, Hollywood would have long since made a big tentpole type movie with that title, and yet, such a movie has never happened… yet. If this week’s news pans out, that may finally change within the next few years. That’s because director Sam Raimi (Spider-Man, Evil Dead 2) is now attached to direct a movie called World War 3. Raimi’s film will be an adaptation of the non-fiction book The Next 100 Years: A Forecast of the 21st Century, by George Friedman. Friedman’s book makes a series of bold predictions, including a new Cold War between the USA and Russia, changes in fortune for China and Mexico, a new Space Race, and indeed, a global war between the United States and other nations. Sam Raimi’s World War 3 will be distributed by Warner Bros.
Since making his feature film debut four years ago with Chronicle, screenwriter Max Landis has a string of three critical failures (which seems unlikely to be broken next year by Power Rangers, which Max Landis is also credited on). This week, Max Landis made the news for a spec script called Bright which already has a few big names attached to it. Two of them are director David Ayer (Fury, Sabotage) and actor Will Smith, both of whom worked together on this summer’s Suicide Squad, making Bright a reunion project. Joel Edgerton (The Great Gatsby, Exodus: Gods and Kings) is also attached to star in the contemporary cop thriller with “fantastical elements” (the nature of which we don’t know yet). The plan is for Bright to start filming in late 2016 so that David Ayer will be ready to start filming a Suicide Squad sequel possibly as early as next year, 2017.
When Deadpool opened to over $130 million domestically , its success seemed to demolish for many fans what Hollywood had long been telling fans about the box office feasibility of R-rated superhero movies. Obviously, not every superhero is as popular as Deadpool, and not every superhero should or could benefit from having an R rating. But still, this has led to much speculation the last few movies that perhaps Marvel Studios could give some of their more “adult themed” superheroes an R rating in a post-Deadpool climate (such as say, Moon Knight, The Punisher, or Carnage). Well, this week, Disney CEO Bob Iger seemed to be nipping that notion right in the bud, as he was quoted as saying, “We don’t have any plans to make R-rated Marvel movies.” Of course, that may play out to be a good thing on the small screen, as Netflix is continuing to make exactly those sort of Marvel Comics adaptations with their adaptations of titles like Daredevil, Alias (Jessica Jones), Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Defenders (and possibly soon, The Punisher).
Although many studios have dabbled in remakes and reboots, the studio that arguably remakes more of its classic films than any other these days is MGM. Recent examples include Carrie, RoboCop, Hercules, Poltergeist, and this year’s Ben-Hur and The Magnificent Seven. And MGM is showing no sign of ever slowing down their remakes, which includes this week’s news. Paramount Pictures (the original studio) and MGM (the current rights owner) are partnering on a remake of the 1974 Charles Bronson thriller Death Wish, about a man who goes on a gun-crazy rampage after his daughter and wife are attacked. For the remake, the two studios have recruited Bruce Willis to take over the role first played by Charles Bronson. Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, the Israeli directors behind the 2013 film Big Bad Wolves are expected to make their Hollywood debuts with this Death Wish remake, which like the first 1974 film, is also an adaptation of the novel of the same title by Brian Garfield.
Hollywood doesn’t always learn the right lessons from its collective successes (or failures). Take, for example, The LEGO Movie. Hollywood in the last two years has ignored the dozens of properties in which LEGO was adapted narratively (including a few DTV movies), and instead sees LEGO as a non-narrative license. Therefore, the reasoning goes, any such popular non-narrative toy license can be adapted as a hugely successful feature film. That’s arguably why we now have Playmobil, Minecraft, and Play-Doh movies in development. This week brought news of another such license movie deal, and it’s the brand called Kidrobot (which directly involves neither kids nor robots). Instead, Kidrobot is a franchise of toys and figures that frequently adapts other popular licenses, sometimes in a stylized “bunny” form. MGM is the studio behind the Kidrobot movie, and the lead producer is Scott Aversano, whose filmography includes The Last Airbender, Safe House, and That Awkward Moment. Unlike most of the previously mentioned examples, MGM’s Kidrobot will be live-action, and will be about robots. This week, MGM signed director Robert Rugan to direct Kidrobot as his second feature film after making his debut in 2004 with the low-budget Alice’s Misadventures in Wonderland. The Kidrobot script was adapted by the team of screenwriters Matt Ember and Tom J. Astle, whose filmography includes cowriting duties on the animated movies Home and Epic.
In the realm of film development news, sometimes traditional media sources “bury the lead.” Something like that happened this week when Bloomberg Business ran a 20+ paragraph profile on director Zack Snyder (three weeks before Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice comes out). Zack Snyder is currently almost halfway through the four DC Comics movies he’s expected to direct (the first being Man of Steel, and the two Justice League movies are the second half). But what will Zack Snyder do in 2020 or so, when he might be wanting to direct something other than superheroes? Apparently, one of Snyder’s dream films involves General George Washington, and his inspiration comes from what might be the most famous painting of him. That’s because a print of Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware that hangs in Snyder’s office may be inspiring him to make a George Washington action movie about the Battle of Trenton, “in the style of 300.” Although 300 was a box office hit (and just barely “Fresh” with 60%), it’s the sort of movie that when evoked, might conjure unintended imagery. What exactly would George Washington “in the style of 300” even look like? Would half the movie be in slo-mo, including the actual river crossing that inspired the painting? We’re calling this the week’s Most Rotten Idea because the idea of giving George Washington that sort of overly stylized action movie treatment just seems so far afield. (And there’s also Snyder’s RT Tomatometer, the last three films on which have all had “Rotten” scores.
