12.8.2008 | By Mack Chico |
With the annual post-Thanksgiving multiplex malaise setting in and just one big new movie (Punisher: War Zone, which I’ll get to later…uh, much later) in theaters, the box office results remarkably resembled those of a week ago.
So, yep, you guessed it: Four Christmases was No. 1 with $18.2 million, according to Sunday’s estimates. That brings the holiday comedy’s two-week sum to a sweet $70.8 mil–and it restores my confidence in Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon as box office draws. For now, at least.
The rest of the top five was comprised of the same movies we’ve been seeing for a while now. Twilight moved back up to the No. 2 spot with a tidy $13.2 mil haul; its three-week sum is $138.6 mil. Bolt (No. 3) followed with $9.7 mil, a huge and surprising 64 percent decline from its impressive Thanksgiving weekend sum. Australia declined 53 percent to bank $7 mil at No. 4. And Quantum of Solace (No. 5) grossed $6.6 mil and crossed the $500 mil mark worldwide.
Among major new releases, the biggest was hardly the baddest: Punisher: War Zone (No. 8) grossed a mere $4 mil in 2,508 theaters, a tally that’s way off from the $13.8 mil that The Punisher premiered with in 2004. More punishment: The Marvel franchise reboot failed to defeat even last week’s action disappointment, Transporter 3 (which was No. 7 with $4.5 mil). Ouch! Meanwhile, the other sorta-substantial new movie, Cadillac Records (No. 9), fared a bit better, bringing in a decent $3.5 mil in 686 locations. But the indie drama Nobel Son failed to take any prize (except, perhaps, that of Box Office Flop of the Week), grossing just $370,575 in 893 venues–a redonkulously low average of $415 per theater.
Nay, the only real news of note came in the ultra-limited-release sphere, where the buzzy drama Frost/Nixon debuted with a tremendous $60,049 average in three theaters in New York, L.A., and Toronto. The Oscar contender will roll out wider in the coming weeks.
Overall, the slow box office was actually up more than 6 percent from the same (even slower) frame a year ago, when The Golden Compass bowed to disappointing returns. That makes this the fifth straight “up” weekend of the fall season, and all things considered, it should be enough to spread some holiday cheer in Hollywood.
12.2.2008 | By Jack Rico |
Paramount Pictures has set Shia LaBeouf to play the title role in the bigscreen version of John Grisham‘s upcoming legal thriller “The Associate,” which the studio has just acquired rights to.
Lorenzo di Bonaventura is producing.
LaBeouf will play a student who’s about to graduate from Yale Law School when he’s manipulated into accepting a job at a prestige law firm and given privileged information about a multibillion-dollar lawsuit.
The novel, Grisham’s first legal thriller since 2005’s “The Broker,” will be published in January by Random House.
Grisham’s longtime rep, David Gernert, shopped the book by giving it to four producers. While some felt that lessened the book’s chances to find a suitor in a tight marketplace, the strategy worked.
Par-based Di Bonaventura, who as an exec worked on the Grisham films “A Time to Kill” and “The Client,” received the book in the Middle East, where he and LaBeouf were shooting “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” There, they agreed to do it together.
Deal gives Paramount another LaBeouf vehicle to follow the “Transformers” films, on which the studio partners with DreamWorks. He last starred for the studio in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”
11.20.2008 | By Jack Rico |
Set in Italy, but currently being shot in the UK, the star-studded film tells the story of a middle-aged film director distracted by the many women in his life.
The director Guido Contini, played by Lewis, is experiencing something of a mid-life crisis as he struggles to finish his latest film in 1960s Venice.
Cruz plays his mistress Carla, who is vying for Contini’s attention with his wife Louisa, played by La Vie En Rose star, Marion Cotillard, and his muse Claudia, played by Nicole Kidman.
Nine was originally a hit on Broadway in 1982 and ran for 729 performances, making a star out of the Puerto Rican actor Raul Julia.
The film version is being directed Rob Marshall, who directed the acclaimed screen version of the musical Chicago.
Nine’s impressive cast also includes Judi Dench, Kate Hudson and the Black Eyed Peas singer Fergie, who is said to be putting on weight for her role as prostitute Saraghina.
Cruz and Lewis were photographed on set in the Nene Valley Railway in Peterborough, but the Spanish actress appeared to suffer from the cold, shivering as Lewis wrapped his overcoat around her.
Filming is expected to finish in January.
11.16.2008 | By Mack Chico |
A new version of “Pinocchio” is on its way to the big screen, this one to be co-directed by acclaimed children’s book illustrator Gris Grimly and executive produced by Guillermo del Toro.
The adaptation, being made by the Jim Henson Co., will be done as a stop-motion animated feature. Henson co-CEOs Brian Henson and Lisa Henson and senior vp feature films Jason Lust are producing.
The aim is to make a dark, twisted retelling of the famous Carlo Collodi fairy tale about the wooden puppet who dreams of becoming a real boy. In the retelling, when Pinocchio comes to life, he turns out not to be that nice of a boy, creating mischief and playing mean tricks. He eventually learns a few lessons. The story and the look of the feature will be based on the 2002 children’s book illustrated by Grimly, who is repped by Gotham Group.
Sitting with Grimly in the director’s chair will be Adam Parrish King, whose “The Wraith of Cobble Hill” won the short filmmaking award at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award in the shorts category.
News of del Toro’s involvement initially broke on the horror Web site Bloody-Disgusting.
The new incarnation of “Pinocchio” looks to have better luck than the previous attempt, which involved Francis Ford Coppola. In 1991, Coppola tried to set up a live-action version at Warners; after an impasse emerged, he tried to set it up at Columbia. The project disintegrated in a costly lawsuit.
11.15.2008 | By Mack Chico |
Mark Wahlberg says a possible sequel to The Departed may feature an appearance by either Robert De Niro or Brad Pitt.
The Boogie Nights star, who received an Oscar nomination for his performance as cop Dignam in Martin Scorsese‘s version of the Hong Kong crime drama, told Digital Spy that big names have been bandied about for a sequel.
“They were talking about bringing in a couple of new guys like De Niro, maybe Brad Pitt or someone like that playing the bad guy, a corrupt politician or something,” he said. “Then, like the Hong Kong [Infernal Affairs] trilogy that the movie is based on, come back and do a prequel and bring everyone else back who was in the first.”
Wahlberg added that he would only be interested in appearing in the sequel, “If we can make it better than the first and people are willing to see it”.
11.6.2008 | By Mack Chico |
Antonio Banderas is in final negotiations to play Salvador Dali in the Simon West-helmed indie biopic “Dali.”
Media 8 Entertainment (“Monster”) is producing alongside West’s shingle, which has been developing the project since 2003, when West optioned the feature film rights to Jeremy Walters’ spec script for low- to mid-six figures.
Film will blend music with CGI sequences in an effort to capture the inventiveness and color of the painter. Story will explore how Dali conquered America and the world with sex, sin and surrealism only to succumb later to worldwide scandal and misfortune.
At least two other Dali biopics are in the works: Al Pacino is attached to play the artist in “Dali & I: The Surreal Story,” with Andrew Niccol directing; and “Twilight’s” Robert Pattinson stars as Dali in the upcoming “Little Ashes,” which chronicles the young life and loves of the painter as well as filmmaker Luis Bunuel and writer Federico Garcia Lorca.
West is producing “Dali” alongside Jib Polhemus (“Lara Croft: Tomb Raider”). Media 8 is handling worldwide sales, with pre-sales beginning this week at the American Film Market.
Media 8 has already sold the film in Eastern Europe to Revolutionary Releasing, which is comprised of some of the territory’s leading companies, including Monolith, Blitz, Bonton, Forum and MediaPro.
West added that the project will focus not only on Dali’s outrageous lifestyle but his lifelong love affair with Gala, his wife, muse and manipulative manager.
Shooting is scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2009 in Spain and England. The film will be an international co-production.
10.23.2008 | By Mack Chico |
Javier Bardem will star in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s “Biutiful,” the Mexican helmer’s first project after his much-publicized bust-up with former screenwriting partner Guillermo Arriaga.
Spanish-language pic “Biutiful,” which Gonzalez Inarritu wrote, shoots on location in Barcelona next week.
Pic is about a man embroiled in shady dealings who is confronted by a childhood friend, now a policeman.
Arriaga and Gonzalez Inarritu were Mexico’s most successful filmmaking duo, starting with their breakout hit “Amores Perros” in 2000 and the subsequent leap into Hollywood with English-language pics “21 Grams” and “Babel” that formed a trilogy.
Quibbles over writing credits on the three films came to a head with “Babel” when Arriaga was reportedly shut out from attending its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006.
“Biutiful” will be co-produced by Fernando Bovaira‘s Mod shingle and Cha Cha Cha, Gonzalez Inarritu’s three-way partnership with Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro.
Cha Cha Cha is a $100 million, five-feature production partnership with financing, distribution and international sales handled by Universal Pictures and Focus Features Intl.
Arriaga recently helmed “The Burning Plain,” based on his own screenplay, starring Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
10.17.2008 | By Mack Chico |
After turning Homer’s epic poem “The Iliad” into the 2004 film “Troy,” Warner Bros. and Brad Pitt are teaming with George Miller to adapt the Greek poet’s other masterwork, “The Odyssey.” Their intention is to transfer the tale to a futuristic setting in outer space. Warner Bros. has quietly set up “The Odyssey,” and the early hope is that Pitt will star and Miller will direct, with Pitt’s Plan B producing. Read More
09.3.2008 | By Mack Chico |
He’s already tackled Huckleberry Finn and Mowgli, so let’s see what Stephen Sommers can do with Tarzan.
The “Jungle Book” director is in negotiations with Warner Bros. to bring a new version of the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs creation “Tarzan, Lord of the Apes,” to the big screen. “Collateral” screenwriter Stu Beattie will write the project with Sommers.
Jerry Weintraub (“Ocean’s Eleven”) is producing through his Jerry Weintraub Prods. Jessica Goodman and Jesse Ehrman will oversee for the studio.
Guillermo del Toro had been attached to direct a script written by John Collee (“Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World”) when the project was announced two years ago. But “The Mummy” director will get his shot now that Del Toro is committed to a four-year stint choreographing dwarves in New Zealand for the MGM-Warner Bros. two-fer of “The Hobbit.”
With the first two “Mummy” movies, “The Scorpion King” and “Van Helsing,” Sommers, who is repped by WMA, has become a connoisseur of the big-budget, effects-driven spectacle. He recently finished shooting the summer 2009 Paramount tentpole, “G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra,” which Beattie came in to write for him.
Over the decades, Tarzan has come in for any number of epic treatments, from John Derek’s 1981 Jane-driven “Tarzan, the Ape Man,” to the 1984 drama “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes,” which famously earned pseudonymous screenwriter Robert Towne’s dog, P.H. Vazak, an Oscar nomination. Disney released its take on the jungle king in 1999, replete with an incongruous (but Oscar-winning) Phil Collins soundtrack.
Beattie and Sommers do not plan to work from the original 1914 Burroughs tome or any previous film. An entirely new approach is in the works, though more details beyond that are being kept under wraps tighter than Tarzan’s loincloth.
Beattie, has “Australia” coming out in November, which he co-wrote with director Baz Luhrmann.
