This Week’s Ketchup includes casting rumors for Green Lantern and Thor, movie plans for two hit Broadway plays (Miss Saigon and Rock of Ages) and new roles for Angelina Jolie, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kirsten Dunst.
Long-running movie fan site AICN was the source this week of two different movie casting news stories that, at this point, have to be considered just rumors. The movies in question are also both high profile superhero projects from competitors Marvel and DC: Thor and Green Lantern. First up is Thor, which German actor Matthias Schweighöfer (Valkyrie) says he’s in the running for a role for. That, however, isn’t really the big news. The big news is who Schweighöfer claims is also in talks: Robert De Niro and Jude Law. There are two supporting characters that I could easily see both actors playing. De Niro seems like he could be a good match as Hogun the Grim, one of the Warriors Three, a trio of Norse gods that often support Thor in his battles. Jude Law might be a good choice for a different Norse god, Balder the Brave, who is often portrayed as being pretty (unusual considering the pantheon’s Viking audience). Lending the De Niro rumor a bit of weight is the fact that he’s actually worked with director Kenneth Branagh before, starring Branagh’s 1994 adaptation of Frankenstein. Dominic Cooper (Mamma Mia!) also revealed this week that he is in talks for a Thor role. As for Green Lantern, the hot rumor this week is the notion that the film’s villain, Sinestro, might be played by Jackie Earle Haley, AKA Rorschach in Watchmen and the new Freddy Krueger in next year’s Nightmare on Elm Street reboot. Someone quickly asked Haley about the rumor, and the actor said he didn’t know anything about the role, but >IGN remembered that Haley basically said the same thing about the rumors he would play Freddy Krueger. I’m not entirely convinced Haley is a great choice to play Sinestro, but that’s mostly based on the way Sinestro’s always been drawn, which doesn’t really look like Jackie Earle Haley. I’m sure Haley could bring something cool to the role if the rumor turns out to be true.
It’s another week, and so we of course have yet another movie for director Ridley Scott. Last week, I compared Scott to a World of Warcraft player obsessed with getting epic loot, but even gamers get up occasionally to get a soda (or so I’ve heard). Scott’s latest project is Gucci, a drama about the Italian fashion industry family set in the 1970s and 1980s, when they were at their prime. The focus of the film would be on grandson Maurizio Gucci, who was gunned down by his ex-wife in 1995. For the Fox 2000 film, Scott is in talks with Angelina Jolie to costar as Patrizia Reggiano, the aforementioned ex-wife, and the director has also approached his Body of Lies star Leonardo DiCaprio to play Maurizio. Fox hopes to start production in 2010, but that is probably what all of the studios that have projects with Ridley Scott hope, and the likelihood of that happening is also hampered by the fact that a new writer for the project is still being sought.
Director Adam Shankman (Hairspray, Cheaper by the Dozen 2) has signed with New Line Cinema to direct and choreograph another movie adaptation of a popular Broadway hit. Rock of Ages is a “jukebox musical” (see also: Mamma Mia!, Forever Plaid, Jersey Boys) set in the 1980s, using songs by “hair bands” like Bon Jovi, Quiet Riot, Night Ranger and Poison to tell a story of a romance set against the backdrop of a fictional Sunset Strip nightclub called Rock of Ages. Chris D’Arienzio, who created the stage musical, also wrote the movie adaptation. Shankman hopes to be able to land stars for the project, citing the success that Broadway adaptations have had in recent years. New Line, which is currently working on clearing all the song rights, hopes to start production by the summer of 2010, and to release it in 2011.
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire doesn’t open up for a few weeks yet, but the film was a big hit at this year’s Sundance. The buzz is still pretty high for the movie, so the film’s director, Lee Daniels, is in a position to line up some pretty ambitious projects for his future. The higher profile of the two that were announced this week is Miss Saigon. This would be an adaptation of the long-running stage musical about a romance between an American soldier and a Vietnamese bar girl during the days leading up to the fall of Saigon in 1975. There’s no screenwriter for the project yet, but producer Paula Wagner hopes that filming could start in 2010 for a 2011 release. The other project Daniels talked about this week is Selma, which (as you might guess from the title) revolves around the 1965 civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Daniels says that his movie will actually focus more on President Lyndon Johnson, and how King’s efforts led to Johnson changing from a racist perspective to being the man who signed the Civil Rights Act. Selma was written by Paul Webb, one of the writers of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln biopic, which is doubly interesting because Spielberg also has his own MLK biopic that he is developing with King’s heirs.
Jim Sturgess, best known for starring as Jude in the (really quite good) Beatles musical film Across the Universe, has signed to star with Kirsten Dunst in Upside Down, a $50 million science fiction romance that’s being compared to Romeo and Juliet. The details of the premise aren’t known, and the film’s director Juan Solanas has mostly done French films that aren’t really known in the USA. Upside Down is a French/Canadian coproduction, with preproduction currently underway in preparation for February, 2010. The producers are aiming for a fall, 2011 release, which suggests a fairly high amount of postproduction as well. So, although we know nothing at all about what this movie is, it’s got a pretty big budget for a non-Hollywood movie, as well as a science fiction theme, and it’s going to take about two years to get made. That’s either a recipe for something awesome, or it’ll be just another French genre flop like say, Kaena: The Prophecy, which was voiced by… Kirsten Dunst.
Producer Scott Stuber, whose deal with Universal resulted in the current box office hit (and critical flop) Couples Retreat, has acquired the rights to American Rust, a debut novel by Philipp Meyer which is apparently receiving good reviews. Stuber has attached the team responsible for The Motorcycle Diaries to American Rust, with director Walter Salles’ credits also including Central Station. American Rust is the story of two best friends from an economically depressed Pennsylvania steel town whose dreams of escaping to California are jeopardized when they get involved with a crime.
Walt Disney Pictures and Robert Zemeckis’ Imagemovers are teaming up on a $150 million CGI motion capture adaptation of the fantasy novel Airman by Eion Colfer (Artemis Fowl). Airman is set in an alternate reality 19th century where Ireland is ruled by a king, and the story focuses on the teenage son of the king’s bodyguard who invents a one-man flying machine, and then gets involved with a series of royal intrigues. Gil Kenan (Monster House, City of Embers) will be directing from a script by Ann Peacock (Kit Kittredge: An American Girl). This one is only a borderline “rotten idea” because frankly, the book sounds like it might be really good, and honestly, I’d love to see a movie like this be successful. The thing is, however, that history shows a pretty terrible track record for movies like The Rocketeer, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Those attempts to bring the sort of “retro cool” that works well in comic books (in particular) just haven’t really worked on the big screen. Having said that, I guess it’s great that a studio like Disney, which got stung by both The Rocketeer and Atlantis, continues to try to make a movie like this work. Of course, Disney is also the studio behind the equally-as-retro John Carter of Mars movie (which I distinctly do not think is a rotten idea), so maybe Disney is gambling that audiences are finally ready to take chances on movies like this. So, to finish this off, I guess this is more of a “mixed idea” than truly “rotten.”
Just a few weeks away from the start of filming, a director has been found for Stomp the Yard 2, the sequel to the 2007 dance movie about a Los Angeles krump dancer who is sent to a Georgia college where he becomes deeply involved with the stepping scene, and apparently also stomps on some yards. Atlanta still has a lot of yards that need stomping, apparently, and so in early November, Columbus Short will be returning, directed by Rob Hardy, who gave us 2005’s The Gospel and both Trois and its sequel Trois 2: Pandora’s Box (he only provided the story idea for Trois 3: The Escort).
Although this is most likely technically not a remake, Disney Channel teen star Selena Gomez (The Wizards of Waverly Place) has signed to star in New Line Cinema’s What Boys Want, a movie that has both a title and premise that is very similar to the 2000 Mel Gibson comedy hit What Women Want. As one might expect, What Boys Want will be about a teenage girl who starts being able to hear what men and boys are really thinking. But unless they’re going for an NC-17 rating, the movie will probably not really, truly go for reality here, because what guys think is almost assuredly much dirtier than what they actually say or do. What Boys Want doesn’t yet have a director, as it was picked up as a comedy pitch by writers Amy Adelson (executive producer of the TV movie Murder She Purred) and production assistant and occasional movie extra Emily Meyer. What’s most surprising here is that Disney is letting one of its biggest post-Miley Cyrus stars make the transition to movies (post-Wizards; she had been in some movies before the show) outside their corporate umbrella, with Gomez also set to star in the Ramona and Beezus movie for Fox. That isn’t what makes this a Rotten Idea. It’s just everything else about this movie.
In what is hopefully not the start of another trend, Warner Bros is prepping a project called Monster Squad, which is not a remake of the 1987 movie of the same name about kids fighting monsters. Warner Bros’ movie actually got started nine years ago, and back then it was titled Nightcrawlers. Over the years the story has apparently changed quite a bit; originally a group of kids grew up to fight the monsters under their beds, then it became the story of a grown man who fights his childhood monsters, and now apparently it’s a completely different story that WB is keeping a secret for now. WB has hired director Mike Mitchell (Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, Sky High), who’s replacing McG (Terminator: Salvation). The latest draft of the script is by Brad Copeland, whose sole movie credit so far is Wild Hogs, but he’s also working on the Yogi Bear movie for WB. The studio hopes to get filming on Monster Squad started next summer, 2010. This movie gets stamped as a “Rotten Idea” for a few reasons. First, there is the whole thing about “borrowing” the title of a relatively popular older movie. To imagine where this trend (if it became one) could eventually lead, you could just take any title, like say Citizen Kane or Casablanca, and think about how a studio could use that title for a completely different movie (maybe this time around Raging Bull could be a CGI animated kids movie about a male cow with an anger management issue). Besides all that, there’s the combination of the director of Deuce Bigalow directing a kids movie from a script by the writer of Wild Hogs… need I say more?
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.
