Guest TSMAdmin Report post Posted June 23, 2003 TSM Movie News Round-Up Compiled by Jason "Lethargic" Castleman Besides doing movie reviews here on TSM I will also be doing this weekly movie news roundup column every Friday. Or at least every Friday which features enough news to bother doing it. This is my first go around so take it easy on me. Has Superman finally found a director? The most doomed movie in Hollywood still doesn't have a director but there appears to be a new frontrunner and I don't think a single person in the world saw this one coming. Jonathan Frakes (yes, THAT one, the one from "Star Trek") is said to have met several times with the studio about taking over the movie during the filming of his current movie, Thunderbirds, in London. I don't know what to think about that. I guess he's never done anything to piss me off so that's a good thing. I just don't know if I would want to hand possibly my biggest franchise over to a guy like Jonathan Frakes though. It's really amazing that they can't find a fairly decent name-brand director for this thing. Fantastic Four is coming A real Fantastic Four movie is finally on it's way. The movie is set for release on November 4th, 2004 with George Clooney starring as Reed Richards. Releasing it in November instead of in the summer? I guess they have high hopes for this one huh? Do we really need ANOTHER F4 movie when we already have the awesome Roger Corman version? Just put that one out! The movie's director, Peyton Reed, says that he hopes to tell a different kind of superhero story. "I didn't want to do a giant superhero movie, because there are a million of them now," Reed said in an interview. "Those Marvel properties all inherently have similar thematic stuff going on." Reed said that he believes he and screenwriter Mark Frost have tapped into something that would make a F4 movie "interesting and worth doing," but added that he was not at liberty to discuss specifics. "We're still so early on," Reed said. "We have to get the script done." Reed's biggest movie so far was a cheerleading movie, so it scares me to consider what changes he's making that would make F4 "interesting and worth doing" to him. No Rush Hour 3 for a while The biggest hack in Hollywood, Brett Ratner, who appeared to leave Superman so he could do Rush Hour 3, now appears to be leaving THAT as well. New Line has been having a lot of difficulty getting Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan signed for the third film so Ratner is looking into directing Be Cool instead, the sequel to Get Shorty. The biggest shock in this story is that Ratner actually has the chance to choose between two movies. If it was up to me he'd be choosing between working at McDonalds or working at Burger King. Dawn of the Dead remake gets a cast Ving Rhames and Sarah Polley are in final negotiations to star in the remake of Dawn of the Dead which goes into production next month with Zack Snyder directing from a script by James Gunn. Dead is about a mysterious plague that causes the newly dead to rise from their graves and begin to eat the living. During the chaos, a core group of remaining humans takes refuge in a shopping mall. These include a young nurse (Polley), a cop (Rhames), a Best Buy employee, a gangbanger and his pregnant Russian girlfriend. Two things jump out right here... 1. A Best Buy employee? You know it's bad when you even got product placement in the SCRIPT! 2. The early drafts of the script sounded nothing like this. They sounded very, very good and original. It appears that those scripts have been scrapped and they've moved on to being more of a straight remake of the original movie. That's not a good thing. X2 Box Office Box Office Mojo reports that X2 earned another $4,602,146 on Thursday to make it's first week total over $107 million already. With no real competition at the box office this coming weekend, except another huge weekend. This thing could be pushing $200 after only two weeks which would make it pretty hard to be beaten by the likes of The Matrix and The Hulk. Think about this. Daredevil only made $101 in it's entire run. X2 beat that in 6 days. Wonder Woman's latest writer A new screenwriter has come on board WB's third biggest failure, the Wonder Woman movie. "Smallville" writer Philip Levens has decided to leave "Smallville" for the next year to concentrate on writing the 573rd draft of Wonder Woman to be passed on by the studio. Worst News Item Of the Week: Rob Zombie is set to write and direct a sequel to his very unsuccessful horror film House of 1000 Corpses, for Lions Gate Films, it was announced by Mike Paseornek, Lions Gate President of Production. That's all for this week. If this sucked and was too short, sorry, but I only started writing it an hour ago. Now that I've started doing it I'm gonna spend more time on it in the future so hopefully it'll be better next week. If it's not better next week, well, I guess I just suck at it then. If anybody has a better sounding idea for a name than the generic Movie News Round-Up crap, let me know. haha Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
