This Week’s Ketchup includes director news for X-Men: First Class, remake news for The Brood, The Borrowers and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and new roles for Leonardo DiCaprio, Mel Gibson, Laurence Fishburne, Tina Fey and Steve Carell.
Bryan Singer ended a few months of speculation this week by confirming that he will be directing X-Men: First Class, the 20th Century Fox prequel which shows the teen years of several of the characters from earlier X-Men movies when they were first students at Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Students. First up for the director, however, is likely to be Jack the Giant Killer, a modern take on the classic fairy tale for New Line Cinema. In the meantime, the script for X-Men: First Class is being rewritten from scratch for Singer by Jamie Moss (cowriter of 2008’s Street Kings). In other Marvel movie news, the casting of Thor continued with Rene Russo, who will be playing Frigga, the Norse goddess who is the mother of Thor, and wife to Odin, played by Sir Anthony Hopkins. Also joining Thor in unknown roles are Joseph Gatt (from the God of War II videogame), Troy Brenna (Avilas from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Josh Coxx (Lt. David Corwin from Babylon 5).
This was a busy week for Mel Gibson, who got both a new directing gig as well as an acting one. First up is an untitled Vikings project which will star Leonardo DiCaprio as one of the Vikings. William Monahan (The Departed, Kingdom of Heaven) is writing the Viking script, which will be produced by Gibson’s Icon Productions without studio backing, with filming expected to start in 2010; no details are known yet about what the Vikings story will actually be about. Variety reports that DiCaprio will be wearing “Viking horns,” but it’s possible that was a typo since Vikings didn’t actually wear helmets with horns. As for Gibson’s acting gig, the movie is called How I Spent My Summer Vacation, and it’s a script that Gibson himself wrote. The action drama will star Mel Gibson as “a career criminal who gets caught by Mexican authorities and is sent to a drug and crime filled prison, where he learns to survive with the help of a 9-year-old boy.” How I Spent My Summer Vacation is only Gibson’s third script, after The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, and the first that he won’t be directing himself. That job will instead go to Adrian Grunberg, who was Gibson’s first assistant director on Apocalypto and will be making his solo directing debut with this movie. Filming of How I Spent My Summer Vacation will start in March, 2010 at locations in San Diego and in Veracruz, Mexico, which was also where Gibson filmed Apocalypto.
Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio founded by acclaimed director Hayao Miyazaki has announced their next release, and it’s based on the Mary Norton children’s novel The Borrowers, which was also adapted in 1997 as a live-action movie starring John Goodman. Karigurashi no Arrietty (The Borrower Arrietty) will be the directorial debut of Yonebayashi Hiromasa, who has worked as a key animator on Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo. The theme song has been cowritten and will be performed by the French Celtic harpist/singer Cecile Corbel and is being released as a single in Japan this weekend, leading up to the release of the movie in Japan next summer, 2010. For this animated version, the setting of the story is being changed from 1950s England to modern day Tokyo, and it tells the story of a 14 year old girl named Arrietty who belongs to a race of tiny people called Borrowers and lives with her parents under the floorboards of a house of big people (or at least, that’s the story of the book the movie is based upon). If The Borrower Arrietty follows the pattern of other Studio Ghibli movies, it stands a good chance of being picked up by Walt Disney Pictures for release in the United States (although usually that’s at least what they do with Studio Ghibli movies directed by Hayao Miyazaki).
DreamWorks Animation has hired screenwriters Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, who wrote 2003’s Bulletproof Monk, and received story credit for both Kung Fu Panda and Ridley Scott’s upcoming Robin Hood, to adapt Gil’s All Fright Diner, based upon the novel of the same title by A. Lee Martinez. Gil’s All Night Fright Diner is the story of a vampire and a werewolf who are engaged in a battle to save the world from zombies after they stop at a diner in a desert that they discover is a conduit for the supernatural. DreamWorks liked “the odd couple aspect of the story, this vampire and werewolf who team to save the world from an ancient demon and his modern ally, a high school cheerleader who wants to be famous.” The director for the animated project will be Barry Sonnenfeld, who will be making his animated debut after working on such live action movies as Men in Black, Men in Black II, The Addams Family, The Addams Family Values and Wild Wild West.
Laurence Fishburne has joined the cast of Predators as a mysterious character named Roland that is discovered to have been living for years on the dangerous tropical planet that the Predators use as a sort of wildlife hunting preserve. The latest addition to the reserve is a group of killers that includes the already cast Adrien Brody, Topher Grace and Danny Trejo. Predators is currently being filmed at producer Robert Rodriguez’s Austin studio by director Nimrod Antal (Vacancy, Armored). 20th Century Fox will be releasing this third movie in the franchise (not counting the AVP movies) on July 7, 2010.
Director Kenny Ortega (Michael Jackson’s This Is It, the High School Musical movies) has signed with Universal for their adaptation of the Tony-winning Broadway musical In the Heights. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who composed and wrote the musical and also starred in it will also star in and produce the movie adaptation, and Quiara Alegria Hudes, who wrote the play’s book is writing the screenplay. In the Heights is an ensemble cast musical set across three days in the Dominican-American neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York City, and features a blend of hip hop, salsa, merengue and soul music. The play was also the winner of 4 prizes at the 2008 Tony Awards: Best Musical, Best Original Score Written for the Theatre, Best Choreography and Best Orchestrations.
Tina Fey and Steve Carell, who are costarring together this April in Date Night, are expected to star in Mail-Order Groom, a Warner Bros romantic comedy about a lonely woman who ends up with an Eastern European husband she brings to the United States. There’s no director for the project yet, and if it is to happen in 2010, it will have to be while both Fey and Carell are on hiatus from starring in 30 Rock and The Office. That, however, wasn’t the only deal that Warner Bros cooked up this week involving Steve Carell, as the studio also purchased an untitled spec script for $2+ million by Dan Fogelman (Fred Claus; cowriter of Bolt) that is said to have a tone similar to Love Actually. The untitled story is about “a father whose life unravels while he deals with a marital crisis and tries to manage his relationship with his children.”
Summit Entertainment is once again teaming up with Taylor Lautner, one of the young stars of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, on a movie called Cancun which Lautner will produce and star in. Cancun is an action script by Eric Champnella (cowriter of Mr. 3000) and Grant Thompson (debut) about a college kid who goes on a spring break vacation in Cancun, Mexico with his girlfriend, where she and her friends are kidnapped by a drug cartel and he is forced to save them. The script was chosen in part because it is an opportunity for Lautner to show off his martial arts abilities. Filming is expected to start by June, 2010 before Lautner starts filming in the fall as Jacob in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn. This story almost was labeled a Rotten Idea, but the Twilight kids have spent so much time there over the last month that I figured I’d give Taylor the week off (it’s probably still a Rotten Idea anyway).
Paramount Pictures has picked up a spec script called The Further Adventures of Doc Holliday by screenwriter Chad St. John, who doesn’t yet have a produced movie to his credit, but who has also worked on the future-set version of Sgt. Rock (also a Rotten Idea a few weeks back) and the remake of Outland. The approach of this Doc Holliday movie is to turn the real life “tuberculosis-ridden gunfighter” (played famously by Val Kilmer in Tombstone) into the star of a history-based action adventure in the style of Pirates of the Caribbean. The comparison probably comes in no small part because of the similarities between the characters of Doc Holliday and Jack Sparrow, who are both rogueish types with unhealthy lifestyles and complexions (and bad teeth). This story is a Rotten Idea because the idea of turning Doc Holliday into a family movie action hero just seems patently wrong on so many levels.
Earlier this year, director Breck Eisner (Sahara) left Universal’s remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon to concentrate on his upcoming remake of George Romero’s The Crazies. The studio has now, however, found another director the project in the form of Carl Rinsch, a commercials director who will be making his feature length debut with Universal’s 47 Ronin, in which Keanu Reeves will be playing a Japanese samurai warrior. Eisner, however, is still very much continuing to remake horror movies, as he has now signed on to remake David Cronenberg’s The Brood, about a woman who gives asexual birth to a group of murderous young children. As for The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the studio is currently looking for a new screenwriter, and they have time to find one as Rinsch works on 47 Ronin. This makes the Rotten Ideas list because Universal’s track record with reviving their classic monsters is not particularly great, and The Brood doesn’t really need to be remade, as it is still quite creepy in that classic Cronenberg way.
For more Weekly Ketchup columns by Greg Dean Schmitz, check out the WK archive, and you can contact GDS through his MySpace page or via a RT forum message.
