Movie mavens IMDb have revealed their top ten most-viewed/searched-for stars, movies, TV shows, and anticipated in-production titles over the past decade. The lists celebrates ten years of the company’s industry database IMDb Pro and offers some surprising — and not so shocking — looks at trends centering on our film tastes. The Dark Knight Rises grabbed a number one spot as most-anticipated project, which shouldn’t be news to you, but the number two film of the past ten years — Donnie Darko — was a bit of a surprise.
We zeroed in on the top stars list and provided some subliminal insight into where movie audiences’ minds must have been for the last decade. Give us your explanations below after you check out the list past the break.
Let’s put this right out front: nobody’s looking forward to The Dark Knight Rises more than we are. It led off our list of 2012′s most anticipated movies; we sing the praises of every new teaser they put out in our weekly “Trailer Park” roundups. This is a movie we’re really, really looking forward to. But you have to draw a line somewhere, and we think this might be it.
According to Variety, tickets are now available for the first, midnight IMAX screenings of The Dark Knight Rises — that’s right, six full months in advance. So if you’re one hundred percent certain that you won’t have anywhere to be at 12:01am on the night of Thursday, July 19th, you can hop on over to Fandango (here’s the link for my fellow New Yorkers — that IMAX screen at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 is a peach), plop down your $20, and have yourself a ticket right now. You might wanna choose the “print at kiosk” option, though, because the chances of misplacing the “print at home” ticket within the next six months are pretty high. Borderline astronomical, we’d say.
Oh wait, you can’t. The midnight screening six months from now is already sold out.
So, seriously, how out of control is the Hollywood Hype Machine these days?
This holiday season, Patrón Tequila came up with a great way to give something to your friends without emptying your wallet. With the “If” Tag app, you can select from a variety of hypothetical scenarios (such as, “If aliens invade, zombies attack, or the robots rise up, you’d be the John Connor to my Kyle Reese), and then select a friend who gets the honor of being your first choice for the gig. You can add a personal message, and then post the whole award right to your friend’s Facebook wall. We were having so much fun with it, in fact, that we decided to take it one step further and pick our top celebrity choices for a number of the “If” scenarios. Click through to see who came out on top for our editors, and why each pop-culture pick made the grade. And if you want to play too, just choose a scenario yourself and tell us who you want in on it in the comments.
1. Celebrated journalist, lifelong contrarian, and staunch atheist Christopher Hitchens has died from complications of esophageal cancer at the age of 62. “I personally want to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive,” he wrote in his recent memoir Hitch-22, “and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.” Read an anecdote-filled eulogy by his friend Christopher Buckley over at the New Yorker.
2. Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien says that the band is rehearsing “four or five new songs” to play at their live shows next year in a world tour that includes 10 dates in North America and five shows across Europe. [via NME]
3. Christian Bale, who in China promoting his new film The Flowers of War (the most expensive Chinese film ever made), was forcefully prevented by government-backed guards from visiting Chen Guangcheng, a blind activist currently living under house arrest. [via NYP]
4. Phil Spector, who is currently serving 19 years to life for the 2003 murder of actress Lana Clarkson, is asking the US Supreme Court to review his 2009 conviction, claiming that the judge violated his constitutional rights by providing his opinion on expert testimony. [via Zap2it]
5. Have you seen the promo for the new Lifetime Original that features Rob Lowe as accused murderer Drew Peterson? You’re welcome.
There’s been talk about a possible updating of Mary Harron’s American Psycho — based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis — for some time now. Word has arrived that Lionsgate is actually pushing forward with a remake of the twisted classic. The studio has brought on screenwriting unknown Noble Jones to update the story about yuppie psychotic, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), who slaughters his way through the 1980s. The studio will be hard-pressed to find another actor that can fill Bale’s (very expensive) shoes for the now famous role that became the symbol of cultural narcissism, materialism, and greed. Bale’s performance embodies everything Ellis set forth in his novel so perfectly, we think it will be impossible to top. What other iconic movie roles can never be remade? Click through to check out our picks, and leave yours in the comments below. Read More »
The filmmaker notorious for his meticulous and slow-moving filmography now has four movies in the making, with two recently announced titles both starring Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett. Tree of Life director Terrence Malick is currently working on IMAX documentary Voyage of Time — which will undoubtedly be some major cosmic eye candy — and a project called The Burial (for now, anyway) with Javier Bardem amongst other topliners. Now, the Thin Red Line director is setting his sights on Lawless and Knight of Cups, both featuring a stellar cast.
Lawless will star Bale and Blanchett, along with Ryan Gosling, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s Rooney Mara, and newbie Haley Bennett (Marley & Me). Knight of Cups has Bale and Blanchett, plus Isabel Lucas from Tarsem Singh’s upcoming Immortals. No plot details have been released, but both projects will shoot back-to-back in 2012. Pretty amazing for a man who only made four films in 32 years before Tree of Life arrived in theaters, as EW points out. Malick fans: mind blown?
Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. We’ve got seven new trailers this week, mostly of the artsie-indie breed, though there’s a couple of genre picks in there as well. Check ‘em out after the jump.
1. According to TMZ, Charlie Sheen’s people are in “deep negotiations” with a major network (we’re guessing it’s probably Fox) for a new sitcom that’s being written specifically for him and could air as early as next January. There aren’t many other details, but we’ll go ahead and guess that Chuck Lorre is not involved.
2. Vulture reports that Darren Aronofsky is trying to secure Christian Bale as the star of his film adaptation of Noah’s Ark, a move which should also help him secure financial backing for the project.
3. Among the notable winners at The 15th Annual Webby Awards, which was held last night at at Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City, were Watson (the computer that won on Jeopardy!) for Webby Person of the Year; LCD Soundsystem which was named Webby Artist of the Year; and Dan Savage, who was honored for his work on the “It Gets Better Project.” [via The Wrap]
4. “It’s strange how that character has been co-opted into the culture in a way that he absolutely wasn’t in 1991. Patrick Bateman seems to embody something about masculinity that was blooming at a certain point in the late ’80s to early ’90s. This kind of damnification of the male. This obsession with male narcissism and beauty. Men being looked at in a way that women had been looked at for decades. American Psycho was probably the first novel about a metrosexual. And of course that’s now everywhere.” – Bret Easton Ellistalks about American Psycho 20 years later
5. If you were as impressed by Neil Patrick Harris’ rap recap at the end of Sunday night’s Tony Awards as we were, then you might find this behind-the-scenes video of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Thomas Kail scrambling to get the closing number written in time interesting.
We’ve been excited about Hesher ever since we first heard about the film, which debuted at Sundance last year. So we’re definitely planning to see it when it makes its theatrical debut this weekend. But despite our anticipation, we do have one worry: that we’ll never be able to look at Joseph Gordon-Levitt the same way again. You see, he plays Hesher‘s title character, a greasy, ratty-haired, tattooed metal guy with bad teeth and penchant for farting. Thankfully, Gordon-Levitt is hardly the first actor to sacrifice beauty or likability for a good role. After the jump, we recall ten more roles that killed our crushes, on everyone from Charlize Theron to Christian Bale.
Today at Flavorpill, we saw the first official image from the Cartoon Network’s Thundercats reboot, which is set to debut later this year. We were intrigued by a rumor that Christian Bale is up for the part of Roland in Ron Howard’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. We almost hurled on discovering that Lady Gaga’s fragrance will be inspired by the smell of blood and semen. We found it telling that for most Americans, the most memorable part of last night’s State of the Union address was President Obama’s salmon joke. We wondered how long we’ll have to wait to have a Martin Amis sighting in Brooklyn. We watched Ron English kill Kenny. We listened to the Portland Cello Project perform an instrumental cover of Kanye West’s “All of the Lights.” And finally, we were excited to hear that Nabakov’s theory about the evolution of the Polyommatus blues — long dismissed by scientists — was actually right!
