The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan’s third and final Batman film, is in production at the moment -– it’s due out in July next year. Unsurprisingly, Warner Bros. are keeping pretty much all the details under wraps, making for an infuriating wait for fans who want to know how Nolan’s going to draw his trilogy to an end. However, one intriguing piece of news has just leaked out –- apparently Liam Neeson was on set this Monday, reprising his role as Ra’s al Ghul from Batman Begins. There’s been word on the street for a while that The Social Network‘s Josh Pence is playing a younger version of the same character, but this is the first indication that Neeson is returning, and it’s interesting because as far as we can remember, Ra’s al Ghul died at the end of Batman Begins. Further details are pretty much non-existent at this point -– but for now, the plot, as they say, thickens. [via Hitfix.]
1. According to the New York Times, Bono, who was “away for much of the show’s preview period,” has now “taken a direct role” in talks about whether Julie Taymor should stay or go as director of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. The super-delayed musical was set to open on March 15th, but it looks like there’s no way that’s still happening.
2. Warner Bros. has become the first movie studio to offer movie rentals through Facebook. Currently the only film available is The Dark Knight (at the cost of 30 Facebook credits or $3), but they’re planning to offer other titles in the not-so-distant future. [via The Wrap]
3. Now that he’s been officially fired from Two and a Half Men, Charlie Sheen met with executives at Live Nation Entertainment about the possibility of doing “a series of live theatrical shows.” Says Sheen: “I need to gobble up all these fuckin’ posers and bootleggers and make them go away. Then we’re gonna deliver the real fuckin’ t-shirts and mugs and hats.” [via Deadline]
4. As if yesterday’s spoilers weren’t exciting enough, you can now see the first clip from Season 4 of True Blood, and Alexander Skarsgård is half-naked in it. [via Vulture]
5. “I love these sophisticated cities. It’s fantastic to have the possibility to work there, like when I shot Manhattan in New York, Match Point in London and Vicky Cristina Barcelona in Barcelona … Each time, it’s like a declaration of love for certain places. I project onto the big screen my feelings for places which count a lot in my life. I hope to do the same thing with Rome.” – Woody Allenis shooting his next project in Rome.
1. David Goyer and Jonah Nolan have started working on a script for their follow up to The Dark Knight. [via The Playlist]
2. The story behind that Leno-Letterman-Oprah Super Bowl promo (In other news, The Late Showhas hired its first female writer!) [via USA Today]
3. There’s a Mr. and Mrs. Smith reboot in the works, but it won’t feature Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. [via Vulture]
4. Comic book god Neil Gaiman is writing an episode of Doctor Who which will air in 2011. [via BBC]
5. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has raised $250 million in just six months, largely to help expand their space for the massive Donald Fisher Collection. [via Unbeige]
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The Kick-Ass movie posters were released earlier today, and most of the blogger world is salivating over Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Mark Millar’scomic book series of the same name. We’ll show you them after the jump, but what’s really interesting to us is the critical buzz generated by Lionsgate’s recent test screenings in London and LA. Readers wrote in to Ain’t It Cool and Slashfilm with their reviews, with one comparing it to a cross between Matrix and Shaun of the Dead and calling it “the best superhero movie ever made.” That bodes well.
Despite a relatively good US run, things have turned out a bit odd for the kids flick Monsters vs Aliens. To begin with, the Dreamworks film didn’t play so well overseas, bringing in just $177.1M in foreign markets, as opposed to the studio’s Madagascar which pulled in $339.1M overseas. Equally odd is the decision to release the film on DVD on the rather inauspicious September 29, well ahead of the Christmas-time boom. Read More »
Do we even have to say it? Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen made huge, heaping, robot-turned-dump-truck-loads of money this weekend and made Michael Bay a very happy man. Despite claims of racism, the movie raked in $112M, which, added to the $89.2M it made earlier in the week, gave it the second largest five day opening of all time — right behind The Dark Knight. And to top it off, assuming that the movie passes the $300m mark — and unless all of the copies of it spontaneously explode, it will — Shia LaBeouf will become the first star ever to appear in $300M films three summers in a row. Not bad for a guy who’s in love with his mother. Read More »
After attending a screening of the pleasant, but unremarkable, Cheri (which stars Michelle Pfeiffer and opens in theaters Friday), we got to thinking about why period pieces have a bad rap. Is it the language? The unfamiliar customs and landscapes? It’s definitely not the lack of nudity. (We’re looking at you, Jonathan Rhys Meyers.) So we decided to put together our own list of the best and worst period films — based on box office success and our personal preferences — to see if we can find a common thread. Join us, will ye? Read More »
Is it possible to cram the 100 best movie lines of all time into just 200 seconds? The video below, which we came across on Cinematical, comes pretty close, but we’d like to argue that they left out some classics. (That said, we’re amazed by how much they managed to cram in.) Watch it, and then click through for our list of the biggest omissions; feel free to add your own favorites that didn’t make the cut in the comments!
According to The Daily Telegraph, The Dark Knight has grossed $1 billion at the worldwide box office, which makes it the world’s best performing film in 2008 and Warner Brothers’ best performing film ever. (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone which brought in 976 million back in 2001 formerly held the record.)
Because normal people care a lot less about box office gold and more about gold statues, there’s more talk of whether Heath Ledger should win a posthumous Academy Award for his role as the Joker than how much money the film’s raking in. Apparently people winning Oscars from the Great Beyond is nothing novel, but from what we can tell, Ledger might stand a better chance if he was a film composer or going up in the Art Direction category. A Best Supporting Actor nominee has never posthumously won an Oscar and while nominated in consecutively for East of Eden and Giant, James Dean was passed over for a Best Actor award twice.
After the jump find a chronological list of the posthumous Academy Award winners; let us know if you think Ledger deserves a trophy for his work in the comments.
Harold Pinter takes his final pause: The famed British playwright died yesterday at 78 after suffering from cancer. As the Guardian reports, when Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature back in 2005, the committee claimed he was “generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century.” On the 40th anniversary of our favorite of Pinter’s works, The Homecoming, New Yorker critic John Lahr once wrote: “The Homecoming changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just vessels of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defense. Before, I thought theatre was about the spoken; after, I understood the eloquence of the unspoken. The position of a chair, the length of a pause, the choice of a gesture, I realized, could convey volumes.” [Guardian]
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