Nemo sequel 'Finding Dory'

We’ve known since the middle of last year that Andrew Stanton and Team Pixar were planning to make a Finding Nemo sequel. Today, Disney and Pixar have announced the title, Finding Dory, and the fact that it’ll swim into US cinemas on November 25, 2015.
As the title might suggest, the new film will focus a little more on the forgetful blue tang and introduce her family. According to Stanton, Finding Dory takes place about a year after the first film, and features returning favourites Marlin, Nemo and the Tank Gang, among others. Set in part along the California coastline, the story also welcomes a host of new characters, including a few who will prove to be a very important part of Dory’s life.
“I have waited for this day for a long, long, long, long, long, long time,” says Ellen DeGeneres. “I’m not mad it took this long. I know the people at Pixar were busy creating Toy Story 16. But the time they took was worth it. The script is fantastic. And it has everything I loved about the first one: It’s got a lot of heart, it’s really funny, and the best part is — it’s got a lot more Dory.”

“There is no Dory without Ellen,” says Stanton. “She won the hearts of moviegoers all over the world — not to mention our team here at Pixar. One thing we couldn’t stop thinking about was why she was all alone in the ocean on the day she met Marlin. In Finding Dory, she will be reunited with her loved ones, learning a few things about the meaning of family along the way.”

Albert Brooks is locked in to play Marlin once again, and given the synopsis, we’d expect an announcement about other casting details soon. While this won’t do much to quell worries about Team Pixar pumping out sequels, it’s worth noting that A) the majority of their follow-ups to date have been great and B) the filmmakers have three original movies on the way versus the two sequels (Monsters University and Finding Dory) planned. There’s no official word on when Finding Dory will arrive on UK screens; hopefully we won’t have to wait too long.

(from  Empire Online)

brainstorming Indiana Jones

An original transcript of a brainstorming session for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK is now available online. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan met on Hawaii in 1978 and discussed ideas for the movie. It happens not often that transcripts of those early story conferences were published.

(The New Yorker)

MGM launches James Bond spin-off

More than ten years after the abandoned Jinx movie, MGM has again concrete plans to launch a spin-off franchise with a character of the James Bond movies - this time quartermaster Major Boothroyd, code-named Q. The screenplay by Christopher Dagger, entitled THE Q FILES, already exists since several years and is considered as one of the hottest yet unrealized screenplays, among James Camerons Fantastic Voyage or Paul Verhoevens Crusade. But due to the uncertain legal situation of the charakter Blofeld it wasn't contempable until now.

Many details of the original screenplay by Dagger are already known, since it was online available for some time. It is an origin-trilogy describing Boothroyds missions in WWII and early Cold War years. A few classic Bond villains and allies appear as younger versions, among them Captain Miles Messervy or Rosa Klebb. The first of the three screenplays is entitled WIZARD OF ICE and takes place in the mid 1930s. The British secret service has received alarming informations by an unknown whistle-blower who calls himself TATAR. According to that the Germans are developing a disastrous bioweapon with the code-name Qappa. John Boothroyd, a Welsh university lecturer, is hired together with other scientists and technicians to find out the man behind TATAR - Operation Qappa. Boothroyd identifies the intermediary of TATAR, a young Polish chess and math genius named Tov Kronsteen. He is the eponymous Wizard of Ice and suggests a game of chess with the questioned informations as stake. Boothroyd wins the game with a technical fraud.

Bond producer Barbara Broccoli with Christopher Dagger 2012

The trail leads to German biologist Dr Hans Glaub. Glaub works in a castle near Kitzbuhel and abuses prisoners to test substances, among them pregnant women. At the end of the screenplay, Boothroyd can free many of them with the help of members of the Corsican Mafia, hiding in the mountains, among them a young Marc Ange Draco. But Hans Glaub can escape by taking a newborn baby hostage. John Boothroyd falls in love with Elisa, one of the freed women. They assists with the birth of Dracos daughter Theresa. (Hans Glaub appears as a very old man in A VIEW TO A KILL under the name Carl Mortner, the baby he took hostage is Max Zorin.)

In the second part, RISE OF A SPECTRE, Boothroyd finds out near the end of the war that the informations delivered by TATAR are false and the bioweapon is far from being operational. One of the nurses working for Glaub is Irma Bunt; she escaped with specimen of the unfinished weapon to Hamburg, where she meets the man behind TATAR in a quayside bar named Old Shatterhand. Boothroyd follows both, but finally loses their trace. He can inform the British government in the nick of time that the Germans have no bioweapon, only seconds before allied bombers can drop nukes over Hamburg and Berlin. The man turns out to be the young Pole Ernst Stavro Blofeld. He escapes with the name Shatterhand, accomplishes the Qappa-weapon later and calls it Omega.

In THE FINAL CURTAIN, Boothroyd tries to get Elisa out of the Soviet sector, where she is arrested. He leads Operation Gold, a British espionage tunnel under the east-west border in Berlin. Finally, Elisa gets exchanged for a Chinese nuclear scientist who offered military secrets to the west. The scientist gets tortured by the KGB as a result, they cut off his hands. But he can escape later and changes his name to Dr Julius No.

Robert Sean Leonard is young Major Boothroyd

Shooting the first part of THE Q FILES is scheduled to start this fall in the German studio Babelsberg as well as in Hamburg, Prague and in the Austrian castle Hohenwerfen. MGM wants to bring in to theaters in September 2014 for the 100th birthday of Desmond Llewellyn. A few names have already been dropped, first and foremost Robert Sean Leonard (Dead Poets Society, House) in the title role. A few German actors are apparently also aboard, such as Ulrich Tukur (The Life of Others) as Dr Hans Glaub and Johanna Wokalek (Pope Joan) as young Rosa Klebb. Edward Norton is rumoured to play Blofeld.

Subsequently, some informations about the rumoured cast!

British actor Joseph Mawle is young Tov Kronsteen, a Polish math wizard of ice.

Ulrich Tukur (The Life of Others) is Nazi scientist Dr Hans Glaub, who calls himself later Carl Mortner.

Josh Lucas is Secret Service commander John Strangways, who follows the trail of the disappeared Blofeld to the Carribbean. (He is killed in the beginning of DR. NO)

German actress Johanna Wokalek (Pope Joan) is young Rosa Klebb. The original screenplay by Chris Dagger describes her as a "fanatic Stalin groupie who kills traitors with poison darts out of her Mao bible". Wokalek played RAF terrorist Gudrun Ensslin in Der Baader Meinhof Komplex.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Dr Henry Bu. The nuclear scientist offers his services to the west, but gets exchanged and tortured by the KGB. Later he adopts the name Julius from his father and calls himself Dr No.

(The Hollywood Spectator)

New Matthew Vauhgn project

It seems Vaughn (X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, KICK-ASS) will direct THE SECRET SERVICE, based on a comic by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. The comic and the movie follow an older secret service agent who is a mentor to a new recruit. That means that Vaughn is out for the next James Bond movie, unfortunately. However, we suggest Timothy Dalton for the role of the older agent.



(Deadline Hollywood)

The Real Reason Will Smith Turned Down Django Unchained

It was way back in the spring of 2011 when word emerged that Quentin Tarantino wanted Will Smith to play the title character in Django Unchained. As an international star with box office drawing power, Smith might have seemed an obvious choice. But considering this story was of a freed slave wreaking bloody revenge against cruel plantation owners, Django was a role that would be more brutal than any Smith had taken on before. It spurred a lot of debate from movie lovers online. Could the oft-affable Smith believably play a Tarantino-level badass?

We never got to find out. By June, Jamie Foxx was the frontrunner, and in the end he snagged the role coveted by many, though not Smith. A year went by before Smith offered an explanation as to why he turned down the role, saying that he couldn't do it because of Men in Black 3's shooting schedule. However, as he begins promoting his upcoming vehicle with son Jaden, After Earth, Smith revealed the real reason he rejected Django Unchained. To EW, he explains:

“Django wasn’t the lead, so it was like, I need to be the lead. The other character was the lead!”

The other character he refers to is Dr. King Schultz, the role that won Christoph Waltz his second Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

Smith went on to recount a discussion he had with Tarantino about the script's finale. (Spoilers ahead.) He says, "I was like, ‘No, Quentin, please, I need to kill the bad guy!’” Because Tarantino refused to change that element of the script (when Schultz shoots Candie), Smith walked away from the project, despite calling it a "genius screenplay." Asked what he thought of finished film, Smith was complimentary maybe even magnanimous (depending on your point of view), saying, "I thought it was brilliant. Just not for me.”  

(source: cinemablend.com)

I must say, this is exactly what I felt when I saw DJANGO UNCHAINED for the first time. King-Shultz may be called supporting character on the paper, but he was by far the more interesting und cool character! I'm looking forward to Will Smith in the new Shyamalan AFTER EARTH.

'White House Down' first Teaser Poster!

The new Roland Emmerich blockbuster WHITE HOUSE DOWN, starring Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, Maggie Gyllenhaal, James Woods, Richard Jenkins, Joey King and Rachelle Lefevre, has a teaser poster. The thriller centers around a paramilitary takeover of the White House.

Hitchcocks 'Rebecca' gets Remake

EXCLUSIVE: Dreamworks has set Nikolaj Arcel to direct Rebecca, a remake of the 1940 Alfred Hitchcock film. The picture, which has a script draft by Eastern Promises scribe Steven Knight, is being produced by Working Title partners Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner.

Arcel is coming off A Royal Affair, a film that was Oscar nominated for  Best Foreign Language Film, about the queen of an erratic king of Denmark who carries on with her husband’s private doctor in a dangerous affair. Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg also scripted the Swedish The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Based on the Daphne Du Maurier novel, the original Rebecca focused on a naive young woman who marries a rich widower and moves into his mansion, only to discover that the memory of the first wife is maintaining a grip on her husband and the servants. It starred Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, and it won the Best Picture Oscar. Arcel and Heisterberg are also attached to helm and write an adaptation of the Don Winslow bestseller The Power Of The Dog, which is expected to be their next film. Rebecca would follow.
There will likely be one quick rewrite, but Arcel’s hire has young actresses already beginning to circle the film. Arcel is repped by WME and United Agents.

(source: deadline.com)