This week included St. Patrick’s Day, the start of March Madness, three Rotten movies opening in wide release, and a lot less big news stories than we’re usually used to seeing. So, Fraggle Rock was the biggest confirmed news story, though there was also a big Star Wars rumor, news about remakes of Blue Thunder and Little Women, and new roles for Josh Gad, Jim Carrey, and Keanu Reeves.
First off, we should note that, after a week full of big news items, this week was sort of the exact opposite. And so, seven days after the top story was the Frozen sequel, the top story this week might have been the news that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is going to produce and star in Fraggle Rock. (Fraggle Rock was, of course, a Jim Henson-produced show that ran on HBO for five seasons from 1983 to 1987). The Fraggle Rock movie is being described as “live action” but presumably, the Fraggles, Doozers and Gorgs will themselves continue to be muppets (though this point is unclear). The Fraggle Rock movie has been in development since 2011, and currently has no director or screenwriter.
This story is, at this point, a straight-up rumor, so take it as such. Having said that, the site it’s from (Latino Review) has been scoring more hits than misses lately (such as that crazy story about Spider-Man joining the MCU), so that’s also worth considering. It’s a simple concept to report, too: Lucasfilm is considering having J.J. Abrams also direct Star Wars Episode IX (expected in 2019) after also directing this December’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens (AKA Episode VII). Considering how little we know about Episode VII, it would be sort of crazy to start speculating what the movie two episodes after it might be about.
We’ve known for a while that Jason Momoa (AKA Aquaman, Conan, and Khal Drogo) was going to be starring in a “dystopian Texas” drama called The Bad Batch. This week, however, the size of the known cast was quintupled. Keanu Reeves will follow his comeback in John Wick playing “The Dream,” and Jim Carrey will follow his would-be-comeback in Dumb and Dumber To by playing “The Hermit.” Diego Luna (Y Tu Mama Tambien) and Suki Waterhouse (The Divergent Series: Insurgent) have also landed roles. The Bad Batch will be directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, whose film A Girl Walks Home at Night was billed as the world’s first Iranian vampire movie western. Filming begins next month in Los Angeles, so now we know what a “dystopian Texas” would look like.
It’s only been a few months since former Sony CEO Amy Pascal departed following the hacking scandal surrounding The Interview, but in that time, she’s been busy arguably making more female-centric decisions than a similar amount of time in her old job would have produced. Among the movies Amy Pascal is now producing for Sony are the female-centric Ghostbusters, the Barbie franchise, and the musical Girls Like Us, about the early careers of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon. Pascal’s latest project was revealed this week to be a new adaptation of the classic Louisa May Alcott novel, Little Women, coming over 20 years since the 1994 movie featuring Winona Ryder and Kirsten Dunst. This new Little Women will be adapted by Sarah Polley (Away from Her, Take This Waltz, Stories We Tell), who may eventually also sign on to direct (though she hasn’t yet). Another new literary adaptation for Sony this week is Verona, which is described as a retelling of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet “through a lens of an epic, 300-style world.” Yes, as in Zack Snyder and Frank Miller’s 300.
In addition to recently helping 20th Century Fox with their adaptations of Marvel’s X-Men and Fantastic Four, comic book writer Mark Millar has developed a fairly impressive filmography of adaptations of his own comics. This has included Wanted, Kick-Ass, Kick-Ass 2, and recently, Kingsman: The Secret Service. Those titles were joined this week by Chrononauts, about a pair of time travelling adventurers, which is now in development at Universal Pictures by producer Chris Morgan, who previously worked with Mark Millar on Wanted. Mark Millar also has adaptations of his comics Starlight and Superior in development at 20th Century Fox.
Canadian director Kim Nguyen first really made his mark with the 2012/2013 indie film War Witch, and he’s now preparing for his next film, this time with two more famous stars. Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black) and Dane DeHaan (Chronicle, The Amazing Spider-Man 2) have signed to play the titular lovers in Two Lovers and a Bear. DeHaan and Maslany will play a romantic couple who are forced to battle the elements in Canada’s remote Arctic wilderness. A fourth season of Orphan Black hasn’t been announced yet, but if there is one, it would start filming after Tatiana Maslany wraps filming of Two Lovers and a Bear.
Walt Disney Pictures is spacing out casting announcements for their live action remake of Beauty and the Beast. First, there was Emma Watson as Belle, and then Dan Stevens as the Beast, and Luke Evans as Gaston. This week, things sped up considerably, starting with the news that Frozen star Josh Gad has been cast as Gaston’s fumbling sidekick Le Fou. A few days later, this was joined by the news of Emma Thompson being cast as Mrs. Potts, and Kevin Kline as Belle’s father Maurice. Walt Disney Pictures has scheduled Bill Condon’s live action remake of their musical Beauty and the Beast for St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2017.
Perhaps it’s because YA adaptations are so popular these days, but Hollywood retains something of a fascination with acquiring the feature film rights to classic science fiction novels. Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation series and Fantastic Voyage have been in development for years at 20th Century Fox, and just two weeks ago, the same studio made the news with plans for Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. This week, Paramount Pictures jumped in the game with plans for an adaptation of the 1957 Alfred Bester novel The Stars My Destination. Paramount has signed director Jordan Vogt-Roberts to adapt the novel, after he finishes work on next year’s Kong: Skull Island for Universal Pictures. The Stars My Destination is something like The Count of Monte Cristo set in the solar system of the 25th century, as a man who is the sole survivor of an attack, inspiring him to engage in an ambitious plot of revenge. This isn’t, however, the first time someone has tried to make a movie out of The Stars My Destination, as Richard Gere had the rights back in the early 1990s.
Although MGM is normally the studio that is most associated with remakes, Sony Pictures is definitely stepping up their game when it comes to revisiting old movie properties. One such example this week is Sony’s new plan to remake the 1983 cop movie Blue Thunder, in which Roy Scheider starred as the pilot of a military helicopter operated by the Los Angeles Police Department. Sony’s remake will reimagine the concept to be about a drone helicopter. The Blue Thunder remake script will be adapted by Craig Kyle, a former Marvel producer who will make his feature film debut as a screenwriter with 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok. The remake will also be produced by Dana Brunetti, whose films include The Social Network, Captain Phillips, and Fifty Shades of Grey.
Nature may abhor a vacuum, but what Hollywood really abhors is a vacuum-plus-one. That dictum may seem to apply to sequels (and it does), but in the context of this story, we’re talking about dueling movies. “Dueling Movies” is that phenomenon where competing studios make very similar movies at nearly the same time, and release them near each other. The world has known for a while now that Guy Ritchie and Warner Bros have ambitious plans for a six-movie franchise that will start on July 22, 2016 with Knights of the Round Table: King Arthur, but such a movie also takes a long time to produce. Enough time, that is, for a competitor to rush a less expensive movie through production and actually potentially beat Guy Ritchie’s movie to the cineplex. That may (or may not, admittedly) be what is in the works this week as we learned that director Jonathan Liebesman is attached to direct Man at Arms, about Sir Lancelot as an older man attempting to make up for totally ruining that whole Camelot thing by messing around with Guinevere. Liebesman’s filmography includes such gems as Darkness Falls (9%), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (12%), Battle: Los Angeles (35%), and last year’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (21%). Now all we need is for Sony to finally get Masters of the Universe going for 2016 so Man at Arms can get competition from this guy.
