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 Don’t Breathe 2, The Green Hornet (again), Sesame Street, and Wedding Crashers 2.
New movie projects are announced all the time, and they collectively outnumber the movies released during an average week. In other words, a lot of the movies put into development never actually get made. For whatever reason, this was not a great week for fans of a few different (relatively) high profile films that made the news within the last few years. Perhaps most surprisingly, DreamWorks Animation announced this week that they have stopped production of The Croods 2, the sequel which had at one point been scheduled first for 2017, and then 2018. The Croods was one of the biggest box office hits (#13) of 2013, earning $587 million globally from a budget of $135 million, and it even inspired an animated spinoff TV series Dawn of the Croods, which recently premiered its second season on Netflix. There was no clear reason offered for its cancellation, but the recent purchase of DreamWorks by Universal Pictures, and the crowded slate along with Illumination Entertainment (Despicable Me, Sing, etc), might have been a big factor. Another movie project that we now know is dead is the reboot/remake of the 1994 sci-fi hit Stargate (which also inspired three TV series spinoffs). The apparent reason for that one being halted is that many of the same people had also been working on this summer’s Independence Day: Resurgence, and that film’s box office disappointment was therefore also bad news for Stargate. Producer/director Dean Devlin is now moving from the Stargate remake to a family sci-fi drama called Countdown, about a boy who turns to a NASA engineer to help save his father’s life. Another project now at a standstill is the video game adaptation The Last of Us, according to an interview given this week by producer Sam Raimi. Finally, there was also news this week about the remake of The Crow leaving the production company that had been developing it for years, but in this case, a new company is reportedly picking it up, so we may yet see that one happen sometime soon.
Part of the problem with studios like Marvel announcing their films years ahead of time (like they did with Phase 3 two years ago) is that film development is still somewhat fluid even for a group like Marvel Studios. In October, 2014, they didn’t know they would also announce 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp and next summer’s Spider-Man: Homecoming. The movie from that big announcement event that suffered the most was Marvel’s The Inhumans, which was eventually yanked from its 2018 release slot (which went to Ant-Man and the Wasp). In the meantime, however, Marvel’s TV crew at ABC had already started to lay the groundwork for The Inhumans, as most of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s third season focused on them (and it remains an element on the show in season 4). The funny thing about the Inhumans on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. through all of that, however, is that the show never introduced the Inhumans’ “Royal Family,” which is comprised of some of the more famous and classic Inhumans, including Black Bolt, Triton, Gorgon, Karnak (who currently has his own comic series), and Fantastic Four members Medusa and Crystal. Well, fans of The Inhumans got great news this week in the announcement that ABC has greenlit their own series for the 2017-2018 season. In addition to that, the first two episodes will be adapted as a two week special event on IMAX screens, to be screened for two weeks in early September, 2017, leading up to the show’s premiere later that month. What we don’t know right now is… basically anything else, but it sounds like most of the classic Inhumans will be on the show (and hopefully, their adorable teleporting dog Lockjaw too!).
While studios continue to swing for the fences each summer/year with films in the $100 million range that don’t always work out (e.g. Warcraft, Ghostbusters, etc), one genre that continues to be a safe bet is horror. A movie like August’s Don’t Breathe can be made on a budget just shy of $10 million, and still go on to earn over $80 million, which makes it a relative box office “grand slam.” That being true, the corresponding logic leads straight to this week’s news — via an interview with the first film’s director — that yes, there will be a Don’t Breathe sequel. Director Fede Alvarez didn’t disclose what the sequel would entail, but there’s a good chance that Avatar costar Stephen Lang will be returning to once again terrorize young people as the burgeoning franchise’s eyesight-deprived boogeyman. What is less clear is whether Alvarez will direct the sequel, since he is expected to be directing Sony Pictures’ The Girl in the Spider’s Web, the English-language sequel to David Fincher’s 2011 film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (Sony Pictures will be skipping over English language versions of The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.)
Some potential movie franchises spend decades in film development before eventually making their way to the big screen. One such project is the adaptation of Jeff Smith’s popular indie fantasy comic book series Bone, which has been in development since the 1990s (when it would have been a Nickelodeon/Paramount release). Well, the three Bone cousins (Fone, Phoney, and Smiley) are now in development as not just an animated movie, but as a potentially ambitious animated trilogy of films. To that end, Warner Bros has now recruited director and producer Mark Osborne as both the first film’s director and the new franchise trilogy’s executive producer. The Bone trilogy at Warner Bros now joins the studio’s other animated franchises, namely the various LEGO Movies, Minecraft (more on that below), and their various Looney Tunes or Hanna Barbera adaptations. Osborne’s two previous films as director are both Certified Fresh: Kung Fu Panda and The Little Prince.
Most of the movie news stories you hear originate from the traditional “trades” like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter (they account for probably 66%). The rest tend to come from movie blogs like Deadline, The Wrap, Collider, etc. Every once in a while, however, it comes from something — or someone — comfortably outside those two media categories. Like, you know, when Isla Fisher goes on The Today Show to talk about Nocturnal Animals, and ends up breaking the news about Wedding Crashers 2 instead. What Fisher specifically said is that she heard from Wedding Crashers star Vince Vaughn that a sequel is now in the works. Besides that, well, we know pretty much nothing. Will it be about Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson still creepily stalking weddings as they push their 50s? Will it be about their own weddings being crashed? Will it be about a new generation of Wedding Crashers being trained by their characters? Will it end in a cliffhanger a la The Empire Strikes Back? Who knows?
A lot of Scarlett Johansson’s time these days is spent costarring in Marvel movies (like Captain America: Civil War), providing her voice to animated roles (The Jungle Book, next month’s Sing), or starring in the anime adaptation Ghost in the Shell. In between all that, Johansson also stars in movies like the Coen Bros’ Hail! Caesar or next summer’s comedy Rock That Body. This week, we learned that her next role, beyond all that, will be in an adaptation of an upcoming debut novel called Tangerine. That novel hasn’t been published yet, so we don’t know many details about it, except that it will be “a psychological thriller set against the simmering political climate of 1950s Morocco.” If this really is Scarlett Johansson’s next movie to be filmed (despite not having a screenwriter or a director), then it’s possible that it could be released around the same time the novel is published.
Warner Bros really is amping up their animation efforts. As noted up above, they’ve got all of those LEGO-related movies, the Bone trilogy, and various Looney Tunes or Hanna Barbera adaptations. On top of that, the studio has also scheduled an adaptation of the popular video game Minecraft for May 25, 2019 (which is a very ambitious Memorial Day weekend release date). Though that day is still two and a half years away, we learned the name of one of the actors who will be lending his voice to Minecraft. That movie star is Steve Carell, whose most famous work in animation is as the voice of Gru in the various Despicable Me movies. We don’t know yet if Carell will be the movie’s main star, or just part of an as-yet-to-be-announced ensemble voice cast.
Since it was first published in 1968, Don Freeman’s children’s book Corduroy, about a little teddy bear on a department store toy shelf, has become something of a modern classic. It’s been adapted as a TV movie and two different TV shows, but so far, there has never been a Corduroy feature film. That’s all about to change, as CBS Films has begun development on a Corduroy feature film (possibly as an animated/live action hybrid). To that end, CBS has recruited director Tim Story, whose Tomatometer ranges from Fresh films like Barbershop and the two Kevin Hart concert films to Rotten scores like the 2005 and 2007 Fantastic Four movies (27 percent and 37 percent), and the first two Ride Along movies (19 percent and 14 percent).
Sesame Street has been helping kids learn the childhood basics since the early 1970s, and by now we have multiple generations who consider the various characters an important part of their background. Put another way, millions of people really, really want any Sesame Street movie to not be disappointing. Warner Bros is now indeed working on a new live action adaptation of Sesame Street, and this week we learned the names of the two screenwriters hired to do the job, namely David Guion and Michael Handelman, whose three produced films to date all earned Rotten Tomatomer scores: The Ex (19 percent), Dinner for Schmucks (42 percent), and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (49 percent).
It was only five years ago that Seth Rogen starred in the very-long-in-development adaptation of the 1960s TV show The Green Hornet, which originally starred the late Bruce Lee as the titular hero’s sidekick Kato. Few seemed to care much for the result, which received a Rotten score of 43 percent and earned a global box office of just $98 million (far less than its $120 million budget). The assumption at Paramount Pictures (which picked up the rights from Sony) apparently is that the 2011 movie just wasn’t “badass” enough, so they’re now developing a new movie, and they’ve recruited director Gavin O’Connor to helm it. O’Connor’s last two films both received Rotten Tomatometer scores (40 percent for Jane Got a Gun, and 51 percent for this fall’s The Accountant). The Accountant was also a box office disappointment, earning just $79 million (so far) against a budget of $44 million.
