Rumours

Sony has acquired the rights for Ubisoft's historical sci-fi hit "Assassin's Creed" with plans to bring it to a multiplex near you. With more than 30 million copies of the game sold worldwide (with the fourth installment hitting stores next month), it's no shocker that the videogame publisher had more than one interested party as they shopped the game around Hollywood for the past few months.


(IndieWire)

Before he started his landmark Song of Ice and Fire series of novels, which would spawn the Game of Thrones TV series, George R.R. Martin devised and edited Wild Cards, an ongoing anthology that built a gritty, realistic world of superpowered heroes and villains. Now Syfy Films will be bringing it to life at the movies!

The theatrical-movie partner between Syfy and Universal is developing Wild Cards as a feature film that will be written by Star Trek: The Next Generation veteran (and Wild Cards contributor) Melinda Snodgrass. Wild Cards tells of an alien virus that infects the populace of New York City just after World War II, killing 90 percent of the populace. The survivors mostly fall into two categories: Aces (a rare breed of people with enhanced abilities) and Jokers (who are twisted and deformed).

Since Wild Cards' first publication in 1987, the shared universe has seen 21 interwoven books hit shelves, all overseen by Martin but written by some of sci-fi's finest, from Martin himself and Roger Zelazny to frequent Doctor Who writer Paul Cornell. As Martin told The Hollywood Reporter:

"We had a love of comics books and superheroes that we grew up on... But we approached the material differently. We wanted to do it in a grittier, more adult manner than what we were seeing in the '80s. It's something that many other people have been doing in the decades ever since.


"One of the things we have going is the sense of history.... The comics in the mainstream are doing retcons [retroactive continuity] all the time. [Heroes] get married, then one day, the publisher changes his mind, and then they're no longer married. To my mind, it's very frustrating. [Our stories] are in real time. It's a world that is changing in parallel to our own."




Which of the dozens of Wild Cards stories will form the spine of the feature film remains to be seen. When Heroes premiered—and, to a certain extent, when shows like Syfy's own Alphas followed—lots of fans felt it owed more than a little to the ideas first set forth in Wild Cards.

Let's see what happens when Hollywood goes straight to the source.

(Hollywood Reporter)

Red Dawn remake gets new distributor, release date. FilmDistrict has bought the long-delayed movie, starring Chris Hemsworth, and scheduled it for a November 2, 2012 release. (boxofficemojo)

‘Star Trek’ 3D Sequel To Open May 17, 2013



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We've been waiting for five years to hear something good about the American remake of the bloody Japanese sci-fi classic Battle Royale, but the hits to the project just keep coming. As if development hell weren't enough, it now looks like another fight-to-the-death dystopia picture—The Hunger Games, set to hit theaters next year—has dealt a serious blow to interest in the project.

Producers Neal Moritz and Roy Lee, whose credits include the American versions of the franchises The Ring and The Grudge, have been working since 2006 to get an American version of the flick off the ground.

Among the bumps in the road were things like the iffy status of New Line Cinema (before it merged with Warner Bros. in 2008) and issues surrounding movie violence that stemmed from the tragic Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 that Lee said left the project "seriously shaken."

Now the project is contending with a new threat: another popular dystopian film franchise. See, Battle Royale is the story of a group of students who, through a tyrannical new Japanese law, are forced to kill each other over a period of three days on a remote island. Meanwhile, The Hunger Games—an adaptation of Suzanne Collins' blockbuster young-adult novel—is the story of a group of teenagers who, through a tyrannical future government, are forced to kill each other in an arena on live television.

Hunger Games is easily one of the most anticipated genre films of 2012, and Lee says it's that kind of high-profile attention that means bad news for Battle Royale.

"The Hunger Games definitely took a lot of wind out of the sails, because it definitely has a very similar storyline, and so I'm not even sure if before The Hunger Games any studio would have been able to take the creative risks you need to make the movie right," he said.

Of course, if The Hunger Games hits big enough, that might be all the more reason to make a more "grown-up" version of the same kind of thing with Battle Royale. Still, even if it doesn't work out, Lee's got plenty of other remake/reboot projects lying around to tackle, including a new take on The Grudge, a new take on The Ring and a new take on a haunted-house classic that some of us would probably rather not see remade.

"I'd say the one I'm most excited about updating is the Poltergeist reboot," Lee said. "That is probably something, hopefully next year, that somebody will be able to accomplish."

(MovieWeb)

We've been hearing rumors for a while that those crazy alien clowns would be back in theaters terrorizing Earth again sometime soon. Now it seems all the elements have come together at last, and the original creators are preparing for another Killer Klowns flick in 2012.

The Chiodo Brothers (Charles, Edward & Stephen) have been talking up the possibility of a Klowns sequel at horror conventions all year, and the film just keeps getting more real. The brothers have deemed their new film a "requel," calling it a sort of melding between reboot and sequel, and it seems the new movie is marching toward a release sometime soon.

Back in June, actor Grant Cramer (who played Mike Tobacco in the first Killer Klowns) told blogger Freddy in Space that he will reprise his role, and play a kind of mentor figure to two younger characters. He also provided an update on where production was headed at the time.

"We have a script and a commitment for all our funding but the money can't be spent until we have a distribution deal in place so that's where we are - talking to distributors," he said.

Cramer also noted that the Chiodos are putting together a new batch of Killer Klowns for the occasion. The project also has a title: The Return of the Killer Klowns from Outer Space in 3D.

(SyFy)

20 Top Grossing Movies of 2011


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Look ahead to 2012 :


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It seems like director Marc Forster's adaptation of Max Brooks' oral history of the zombie war is diverging from the text even more than we thought—apparently it's being configured to allow for a couple of head-chopping sequels.

A piece on Pitt's evolving career in the L.A. Times had this little nugget buried in it, talking about what World War Z could mean for both Pitt and the studio releasing it:

For Pitt, the big sci-fi thriller also represents his strongest bid to have a big film franchise of his own, which might be viewed as the missing piece of his career jigsaw puzzle. Forster and Paramount Pictures each view World War Z as a trilogy that would have the grounded, gun-metal realism of, say, [Matt] Damon's Jason Bourne series tethered to the unsettling end-times vibe of AMC's The Walking Dead.
It makes sense: Paramount is spending more on World War Z—which now follows Pitt's United Nations fact finder who races, Contagion-style, to stop the spread of the zombie pandemic—than anyone's ever spent on a zombie movie before. They're going to want to milk it for as much as they can.

(Collider)

The Artist wins four prizes at Critics' Choice Awards



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Adam Sandler leads Razzie nominations



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Now that they've got their Amazing Spider-Man reboot up and running (and hitting theaters this summer), Sony is looking to expand on their little corner of the Marvel Universe, and they're giving one of the webslinger's Big Bads—one whose already been on the big screen—a shot at solo glory.

The L.A. Times is reporting that Sony's gung-ho on making a Venom movie—one of the 82 villains that poor Sam Raimi stuffed into Spider-Man 3—and they're in discussions with Chronicle director John Trank to call the shots.

This isn't the first time that Sony's tried to extend the Spidey franchise with Venom: They hired Zombieland's Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick to craft a script, and then they gave it to Pleasantville director Gary Ross to write and direct.

Will it come together? Who knows? But it's an interesting reminder of how Marvel's non-Avengers characters are scattered all over Hollywood: Spider-Man and Ghost Rider at Sony; the X-Men, Daredevil and the Fantastic Four at Fox; the Punisher loitering at Lionsgate; and poor Blade forgotten at Warner Bros.



(Total Film)

For Their New Movie, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Apparently Won’t Even Be Mutant Turtles



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Update on BIOSHOCK and HIGHLANDER from director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo



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The Uncharted Trilogy—Edited into Feature-Length Films



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What if the Avengers movie was made in 1978?



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I`d watch.

A live-action take on Snow White has been in the works at Disney for years, and production was set to start up in a few months—that is, until the network pulled the plug. Why? Mostly because of John Carter's epic fail at the box office.

Dubbed Order of the Seven, the Asia-set period flick would have followed a group of warriors tasked with protecting a young woman. Actress Saoirse Ronan (Hanna, The Lovely Bones) was already lined up to star, with Michael Gracey directing.

The film was in preproduction and was set to start filming by the end of the year. That is, until John Carter made Disney even more gun shy about risky projects.


Order of the Seven was described as a 19th-century fantasy-action adventure tale, centered on a young woman in Hong Kong who runs away from her stepmother and takes refuge with "seven men belonging to an ancient order dedicated to fighting demons and dragons."


( The Hollywood Reporter)

Beall writing 'Justice League' for Warner Bros



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Folks have been trying to bring Stephen King's creepy clown novel It to the big screen for decades, and now that it's finally moving ahead at Warner Bros., the studio has decided that one film just isn't enough to contain the murderous insanity.

Realizing just how dense the 1986 horror tome is, the studio now plans to split the story into two films, breaking up the frightening tale of Pennywise over a few more hours.

Warner Bros. seems primed to get the project moving They've just signed Cary Fukunaga (Jane Eyre) to direct, and he'll co-write the script with Chase Palmer (who most recently took a crack at Frank Herbert's Dune).

In case you've forgotten—or have never seen the rather decent 1990 ABC miniseries—here's the book's official description:

They were just kids when they stumbled upon the horror within their hometown. Now, as adults, none of them can withstand the force that has drawn them all back to Derry, Maine, to face the nightmare without end, and the evil without a name ....


(The Hollywood Reporter)