Tommy Lee Jones was supposed to return to the director’s chair for an adaptation of Michael Connelly’s legal thriller “The Lincoln Lawyer,” about an ambulance-chasing, bottom-of-the-ladder criminal attorney who is chosen to represent a Beverley Hills playboy in a murder case. Matthew McConaughey is supposed to star and that’s still happening, but Tommy Lee Jones has apparently walked off the project due to “creative differences.” Lakeshore Entertainment, who are producing, are seeking a new director and are still trying to shoot by next spring.
Hugh Jackman will star in “Real Steel.” A project that we have so little enthusiasm for it’s hard to muster the energy to write anything about it. It’s a Dreamworks picture and it’s a futuristic “Rocky”-esque boxing film which just sounds utterly ridiculous. Even better: it’ll be directed by Shawn Levy the auteur behind genius works like, “Night Of The Museum” and the newest “The Pink Panther” with Steve Martin. It has a $80 million dollar budget (small for what sci-fi films need unless you’re inventive like Duncan Jones), and fanboys seem to be excited. We have no clue why aside from they get a hard-on for anything mildly futuristic. Yes, Steven Spielberg co-owns Dreamworks, but it’s not like he’s directing.
Olivia Thirlby will star alongside Marcia Gay Harden and Shohreh Aghdashloo on Sherry Hormann’s drama “The No Game.” The film is about an Upper West Side Jewish girl who discovers on a trip to Israel with her boyfriend that her birth parents were Palestinian. Shooting will commence in in New York and Israel in March 2010.
FX has nabbed the rights to the “Twilight Saga.” Meaning, they’ve scored TV rights for all four films from Summit Entertainment. This suggests that talk/rumors of a fifth “Twilight” film — breaking the final fourth book, “Breaking Dawn” into two separate pictures to milk this thing for even more twi-hard tweener dollars — are false. That is unless Summit can just turn around to FX and go, “Hey, btw, fifth film you only have rights to four!” Meanwhile, in just one weekend and a few days, “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” has amassed $274 million worldwide. That’s some crazy money. It’s likely conceivable that it could top $500 million worldwide after all is said and done. “Twilight” the original film made $384 million worldwide total and at the going rate, especially with Thanksgiving around the corner, it feels that ‘New Moon’ could loop that figure soon. Then again, drop off could be incredibly high. We’ll see.
Trying to illustrate that, “yes, some critics, actually like this dour film!,” The Weinstein Company has unveiled a new plaudit-heavy poster for John Hillcoat’s “The Road” with a big fact quote from Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers. Yes, we’re part of that “some critics,” but even we can admit it’s not perfect and that lots of people have issues with the film tonally. Also, we’re not sure Peter Travers is really going to change anyone’s mind, but more power to you, we suppose.
David Fincher’s animated “Goon” project is apparently just waiting for him to finish “The Social Network” Facebook film. “I just finished writing the script a few months back, and Blur is working on a lot of test stuff. Fincher is working on a film right now, so we’re waiting for him to get some space so we can start showing some of this stuff off. I’m pretty happy with everything so far. We’ve just got to work to get to the next point. This is a slow, long process.” Ok, that’s not much of anything. Something tells us Fincher will just produce.
Anthony Peckham (“Invictus”) is rewriting the script for the Dreamworks Pictures thriller “Deep Sea Cowboys.” Meh, it’s based on a Wired magazine article about a salvage crew trying to save a capsized Japanese cargo ship and worse, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are producing. We’re sick of those two.
“Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World” actors have been going on about how good the movie is. Jason Schwartzman has already waxed effu and next is Anna Kendrick. Look, we’re as excited as the next person, but what are they going to say, “oh, I’ve seen footage, it sucks”? Also every report in the world says Kendrick is dating director Edgar Wright, so what else could she say? However? The one big plus for us is that everyone keeps calling ‘Pilgrim’ “emotional” which is great to hear, because a) that element was present in the original script, b) while we’re sure it’ll look amazing, we just don’t want to see a live-action video game and the graphic novel has a lot of heartache that should be onscreen as well. Now if we could just find out if Wright changed the original script that’s been floating around? Most fans seem to hate it cause there really wasn’t a clearly defined forward narrative, but dunno, we really loved it as is: really funny, clever, veered off-book in a good way and had heart. Plus it didn’t feel like the emphasis was on visuals or effects. That stuff’s nice, but should never be the focus.
