Movie News

General News:

North American manga and anime publisher Viz Media is restructuring, resulting in layoffs on Friday. CEO Hidemi Fukuhara: “Viz Media is in the process of refining its focus and is restructuring to adjust to changing industry and financial market realities. VIZ feels confident that with these changes, the company will be more streamlined to face the current economic climate.”

One of Kyle Newman’s next projects is a “very non-traditional bio-pic” about Wolfman Jack, Heard it on the X. Written by Ernie Cline: “We take a look at two weeks in the Wolfman’s life, how he gets on the air down in Mexico, put the finishing touches on his radio persona. He becomes a sort of Robin Hood figure for this community of disenfranchised workers stuck in this radio station. There was a lot of shady stuff going on at this place. The staff take the station back from this Mexican warlord. In the third act, it becomes very over the top. It becomes a legend the way the Wolfman would have told it.”

Robert Rodriguez will write and direct Dimension’s science fiction thriller Nerverackers. “Set in 2085, the story centers on a character named Joe Tezca who is part of an elite unit dispatched to quell a crime wave in a theoretically perfect future society.” It has a release date of April 16, 2010.

Breckin Meyer is writing a comedy called Superguys. Based on a story by Harry Elfont and Deb Kaplan, it’s “being described as ‘Ocean’s 11 with idiots set at Comic-Con.’”

Katherine Heigl has been cast in Robert Luketic’s thriller Five Killers. Also starring Ashton Kutcher, “a woman meets the man of her dreams while on vacation. Married bliss is turned upside down when they discover that their neighbors may be assassins hired to kill them.” Shooting starts March in Atlanta and France.

Halle Berry will star in the Eunetta Boone written Who Is Doris Payne? J2 are developing the “fact-based film about an international jewel thief whose career spanned five decades.”

Chiwetel Ejiofor has been added to Angelina Jolie starrer Salt as “CIA counter intelligence officer Peabody,who is obsessed with proving that Angelina’s character Everlyn A Salt is a Russian sleeper spy.” Liev Schreiber is in talks to play “Ted Winter, Evelyn Salt’s friend and colleague in the CIA.”

John Cusack and Rob Corddry have joined, and Craig Robinson and Clark Duke are in negotiations for, Steve Pink’s comedy Hot Tub Time Machine. It’s about “a group of guys who have grown frustrated with their adult lives. They return to the ski lodge where they partied as teens to find answers and are transported to 1987 via their hot tub, a bubbly time machine”

Prequels, Sequels & Remakes:

New Moon’s new title is The Twilight Saga’s New Moon. The third movie, based off Stephenie Meyer’s Eclipse, has been given a release date of June 30, 2010.

Jon Favreau says Emily Blunt is out of Iron Man 2.

Universal will go forward with Meet the Parents’ second sequel Little Fockers. Jay Roach will not be directing, John Hamburg is rewriting the script. Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, and Owen Wilson are in talks to star.

Actor Justin Chatwin says there’s already a script for a Dragonball Evolution sequel, this comes after Jamie Chung said the actors were signed for two more movies. If green-lit, Chatwin says, “The second one goes more into the whole legacy and the genealogy of Dragonball. It goes more in-depth into a real Dragonball series, the kind of intergalactic world of Dragonball.” It’ll open in Japan March 13, the United Kingdom April 3, and America April 8.

/film reports on a synopsis for a Superman Returns sequel, now titled Superman Unleashed: “Ramping up the action of its esteemed predecessor, the sequel to ‘Superman Returns’ promises to raise the stakes and take the audience to heights of action that no other superhero movie can achieve.”

Leonardo DiCaprio is reportedly wanting to produce a reboot of 1983’s WarGames.

Wes Craven: “We’re actually talking about remaking THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS. Possibly SHOCKER also. So these ones that we’ve been remaking, especially THE HILLS HAVE EYES and THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, I own with the producer. Two different producers and both close friends. Peter Locke with The Hills Have Eyes and Sean Cunningham with Last House. So we now own them after thirty years we got them back. It’s funny because when we made those deals we thought, we’ll never be alive in thirty years, we were all like [mimicking smoking pot]… but it turns out we’re still alive. So were able to remake those. And People Under the Stairs and Shocker, although we don’t own them, Universal owns them but we have rights with Universal and myself, and the producer who is Shep Gordon to say yes or no. So if we all say yes we can do it. Universal can’t go off and make them with somebody else. So we’re talking about doing that now.”

Adaptations:

Coraline will be released May 7, in Australia under the title Coraline and the Secret Door.

Will Clark will direct Rocket Pictures’ Pride and Predator [Yes, you read that right], a mashup of Jane Austen’s book and the Predator movies. Clark wrote the script with Andrew Kemble and John Pape, “the alien will butcher the mannered protaganists, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about.” Elton John, who owns Rocket, will supervise music. Filming begins later this year in London.

Diablo Cody and Mason Novick are producing an adaptation of S. G. Browne’s upcoming novel Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament. Geoff LaTulippe will adapt, and Nanette Burstein will direct. The novel is described as such: “Meet Andy Warner, a recently deceased everyman and newly minted zombie. Resented by his parents, abandoned by his friends, and reviled by a society that no longer considers him human, Andy is having a bit of trouble adjusting to his new existence. But all that changes when he goes to an Undead Anonymous meeting and finds kindred souls in Rita, an impossibly sexy recent suicide with a taste for the formaldehyde in cosmetic products, and Jerry, a twenty-one-year-old car crash victim with an exposed brain and a penchant for Renaissance pornography. When the group meets a rogue zombie who teaches them the joys of human flesh, things start to get messy, and Andy embarks on a journey of self-discovery that will take him from his casket, to the SPCA, to a media-driven class-action lawsuit on behalf of the rights of zombies everywhere.”

Stephen Gaghan will adapt Jon Stock’s Dead Spy Running for Warner Brothers and director McG. The movie is the first in a planned trilogy “to reinvent the spy genre by telling the origin story of a newly trained spy in a tone that mixes the grittiness of ‘The Bourne Identity’ with the wittiness of John Le Carre’s oeuvre.”

William Monahan will adapt John Grisham’s The Associate for Paramount. The likely Shia LaBeouf vehicle will be about “a Yale Law School student with a sordid secret that leaves him vulnerable to blackmail. He’s manipulated into taking a job at a law firm and working on a multibillion-dollar lawsuit.”

Sandra Bullock will star in Alcon Entertainment’s John Lee Hancock written and directed The Blindside. The sports dramedy is based on Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side: Evolution of the Game, about football player Michael Oher.

Push: Based on a Novel by Sapphire has had its titled changed to PRECIOUS, Based On the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire.

Universal has “quietly entered into negotiations” with Glen A. Larson to write and produce a movie version of Battlestar Galactica. Larson produced the 1978 show, and the movie wouldn’t be connected to the Sci Fi one. It “would relaunch the story in a new medium with the characters Adama, Starbuck and Baltar.”

While nothing’s finalized, Dwayne Johnson says he’ll play Race Bannon in Warner Brothers’ Jonny Quest movie, and that it’ll be directed by Andy Fickman, with Zac Efron in talks to play Jonny.

Steve Oedekerk will write the script for the latest in the Universal/Hasbro movies, Stretch Armstrong. “The toy, a 13-inch, blond-haired muscled figure whose limbs could be stretched to nearly four feet, was launched by Kenner in the ’70s. He had a dog named Fetch Armstrong, and a sibling, Evil X-Ray Wretch Armstrong.”