Monthly Archive: December 2008

‘Jennifer’s Body’ gets September Berth

Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body, has been given a September 18, 2009 release date by Fox Atomic.  The movie, directed by Jason Reitman (Juno), stars Megan Fox (Transformers), Amanda Seyfried (Mama Mia), Adam Brody (The OC), and J.K. Simmons (Spider-Man).

The official plot synopsis follows: “When small-town high school hottie Jennifer (Megan Fox) is possessed by a hungry demon, guys who never stood a chance with her, take on new luster in the light of Jennifer’s insatiable appetite.”

The thriller’s competition that weekend will include the Matt Damon/Melanie Lynskey crime thriller The Informant and Sony Pictures’ animated adaptation of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

Stephen Chow Confuses Media

Depending on which report you read, Stephen Chow is Kato but will not direct The Green Hornet.  Maybe the Shaolin Soccer star will direct but not act in the Sony film, starring Seth Rogen. He may exit altogether, leaving the June 25, 2010 release without a director or co-star with production set to begin in the spring.

Moviehole was among the first to report that Chow is considering not playing Kato. “He’s blaming it on scheduling (saying he wants to film some Jack Black-Superhero film) – but that sounds like a tug,” they note.

An Associated Press story confirms that report, quoting Chow as saying, "If I direct The Green Hornet, the superhero comedy will have to be delayed for two years. The timing might not be right for a superhero comedy in two years. And I want to make a movie based on an original idea."

Stay tuned for post-holiday developments

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Santa vs. Superman

Man, they’re weird up in Nova Scotia.

If only they had the budget for that climactic battle at the Fortress of Solitude.

Related: this essay as to who’s faster: Superman, the Flash, or Santa Claus:

Even moving at an amazing 1 million miles per hour, Santa simply is no match for Superman or Flash, yet the latter two don’t stuff their faces with sugary cookies and whole milk 2,700.6 times per second.

‘Star Trek: A Comics History’ Coming for Spring

hermesstartrek-lg-2-4892970Hermes Press recently signed a deal to publish Star Trek: A Comics History, described as “the complete saga of the Star Trek universe in comic books and comic strips.” The March release is being written by Alan J. Porter, best known for his James Bond: The History Of The Illustrated 007. The 208-page, all color, large format deluxe trade paperback is expected to chronicle the four-color history of Star Trek from the first Gold Key comics to the English newspaper strip, to Marvel and DC’s Star Trek titles and the present-day comic and manga iterations.

Star Trek: A Comics History promises creator interviews, unpublished art work, and a detailed checklist of Star Trek comic publications.  At the TrekkBBS, Porter said, “My intention is to include an index of the various comics by Stardate. At least I’m compiling one as I do the research and writing. I probably won’t have the time to create a full timeline (ouch – sorry about the pun), so if a story spans several time periods it will most likely only be listed by the establishing introductory Stardate. – But this is a work in progress so who knows.”

He also defended the steep $39.99 for a trade paperback, noting that Hermes Press books are “all published on very high quality glossy archival paper and designed to last. They aren’t mass market paperbacks, they are closer to glossy art books – hence the price point.”
 

Disney Leaves ‘Dawn Treader’ at the Dock

Disney has officially withdrawn from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader  just as the film was preparing to shoot in early 2009.  The Hollywood Reporter said Disney and Walden declined to say why but it’s been known for some time that the studio has had qualms about the budget given the lackluster $141 million box office performance of Prince Caspian.

Whole Prince Caspian cost $200 million, Dawn Treader was seen as a $100 million production and recently relocated principal photography from Mexico to Australia as a nod towards keeping costs down. Disney had the film, to be directed by Michael Apted from Steven Knight’s script, pencilled in for a May 2010 release.

Contracts with the returning cast — Ben Barnes, Georgie Henley, William Moseley and Anna Popplewell – may now be in jeopardy if a new studio doesn’t sep in quickly. The trade speculates 20th-Century Fox may step in since not only do they need tentpole pictures, but they release Walden’s other fare.

While the Chronicles of Narnia spans seven books, the films were seen as a trilogy with the hope of getting every one of C.S. Lewis’ book adapted.  For Disney to pull out after two films is quite unusual for a series. It’s not the first though, with New Line abandoning Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials after the poor performance of pricey The Golden Compass.
 

American McGee’s Grimm Comes to IDW

Celebrated game designer American McGee’s Grimm, an episodic videogame that debuted on GameTap, offers gamers the chance to create darkness across traditionally lighter fairy tales. And now Grimm, the game’s macabre dwarf who wreaks havoc on these fairy-tale tableaus, will be unleashed in a new comic book series coming from IDW Publishing in April 2009.

American McGee’s Grimm is a five-issue miniseries that takes the games’ high concept and tweaks it a bit, allowing Grimm to unleash his dark magic across five familiar comic-book universes. In issue one, Grimm exits the latest fairy tale he darkened only to discover bright and sunny superhero comics. He enters the world, kick-starting a "Crisis on Earth 57," where he launches a secret invasion crisis into a domain where villains are doomed to fail… until he gets involved!

Subsequent issues of the series, written by Dwight MacPherson and illustrated by Grant Bond, will find Grimm invading — and forever changing — the worlds of romance comics, westerns, teenage high-school comics, and anthropomorphic comics. In each issue, Bond’s art style will reflect the archetypal art form of these traditional universes before Grimm’s dark influence fully takes over the comic.

About the comic series, creator American McGee said in a release, "It’s great fun to see the transformative ‘Grimm effect’ applied to narrative universes outside the Brothers Grimm tales. The world needs more of this — exposure to the gritty, sometimes painful truth of the human condition — be it in Red Riding Hood’s well-earned demise, or the reversal of ‘good guys win’ scenarios that we all know to be far from everyday reality."
 

Russell Davies Promises More than 2 Doctors

Doctor Who producer Russell T. Davies was interviewed on BBC Radio 5, chatting about Thursday’s Doctor Who Christmas Special. Entitled “The Next Doctor”, the special was described as "nice and scary, but healthily scary". Practically confirming word the previous incarnations will be glimpsed in the story, he said, “It’s not just the next Doctor you get to see, you get to see some old ones as well, which is rather exciting… It’s a Doctorfest.”

The inevitable question was asked about David Tennant’s successor as the Time Lord and all he would say was, “Steven Moffat and the series 5 team are casting the next Doctor, the eleventh Doctor and it’s literally nothing to do with me. Everyone keeps asking me, begging me, the money I could make out of this, but I do not know what they are planning.”

‘Land of the Lost’ One-Sheet Debuts

The first one-sheet for Land of the Lost was posted over at Cinematical, The live-action feature, based on the 1974-1976 NBC Saturday morning series, gets the big screen treatment.  The film stars Will Ferrell (Talladega Nights), Danny McBride (Underworld), Anna Friel (Pushing Daisies), and Jorma Taccone (Saturday Night Live). It’s being directed by Brad Silberling (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events) and the plot, according to USA Today, “involves three adults (not a dad and two kids as on TV) accidentally thrust into a realm ruled by dinosaurs, monkey-men called Pakuni and the murderous Sleestak”

Land of the Lost
arrives in theaters on June 5, 2009.
 

First Look: ‘Lone Justice: Crash’

Robert Tinnell has spent the last half decade racking up credits as a graphic novelist with The Black Forest, The Wicked West, and Sight Unseen splashing blood across the comic book pages.  Now, Mark Wheatley and Robert Tinnell, the creative team behind last year’s Harvey-nominated webcomic/graphic novel EZ Street, follow up with Lone Justice: CrashLJ:C, like EZ Street, will run for free right here at ComicMix beginning Jnuary 12, but that’s not where the similaritites end.

In EZ Street, central characters Scott and Danny Fletcher set to work on a comic book project featuring their character, Lone Justice.  Lone Justice: Crash is in fact Wheatley and Tinnell’s take on what that book would be.  Featuring the art of Wheatley (Frankenstein Mobster, Mars) and co-scripted by Tinnell (Feast of the Seven Fishes), Lone Justice: Crash takes place during the Depression, but given this era’s economic troubles will most certainly resonate with the modern reader.

Lone Justice: Crash
follows the exploits of the titular character, who was first introduced as the creation of Scott and Danny Fletcher, themselves characters in Tinnell and Wheatley’s EZ Street. Occupied for years successfully battling crime as Lone Justice, millionaire Octavius Brown has let his own finances slip to the point of ruin.  Now destitute, unable to even effectively re-arm his weaponry, Brown must live amongst the masses of homeless in the city. It is there that he learns the true face of evil, and from nothing is reborn as a true defender of the innocent.  Combining the thrills of two-fisted pulp action with a storyline that parallels much of our nation’s current socio-economic struggles, Lone Justice: Crash represents a sincere effort to deliver what comics can do at their best: an entertaining message.

Our friends over at FearNet posted this trailer: