Random News of the Week (July 28 - August 3, 2008)

Sony has announced plans to do a VENOM spin-off movie from SPIDER-MAN 3. Supposedly, this film will focus more on VENOM as a "villain" film. Topher Grace played the character in the last Spider-man movie but Sony is concerned that he won't be able to carry a tentpole film like this as the lead.

The COWBOY BEEBOP live action film is on the fast track. Word is that Keanu Reeves is in talks to play the title character of Spike. There is quite a big budget for the film and it is looking for a 2010 release.

We've heard this one many times before but supposedly Warner Bros. is getting things rolling to adapt Asimov's THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY into a trilogy of films. Many attempts have been made before but this one looks pretty serious. THE FOUNDATION is my favorite sci-fi trilogy just behind the DUNE series. It was highly influential in my writing style and opened my mind to whole new story directions.

Ridley Scott's highly anticipated NOTTINGHAM which was a different take on the traditional Robin Hood story is now on hold. Concerns about the script, the actor's strike possibilities, and other factors contributed to the stop time. No word on when things will start back up.

Sam Raimi actually mentioned a 4th EVIL DEAD film this week. He and his brother are getting together in the next month to work on a few pages of a script for the sequel to ARMY OF DARKNESS.

Mike Myers has started work on a 4th AUSTIN POWERS film. The movie will reportedly be "an homage to Myer's father". It will focus more on Dr. Evil and his son's relationship which provided most of the big laughs in the first film. It's no surprise that Myer's has lost some of his magic touch as his THE GURU film absolutely bombed this summer. So it looks like he's going back to the well one more time with AUSTIN POWERS.

In what sounds like disasterous news, Alicia Keys and Jack White of the White Stripes will be duet singing the theme song to the next Bond film QUANTUM OF SOLICE. Jack White wrote and produced the song and also plays drums on the track. This will be the first duet ever in the Bond series history.

In a casting decision that EVERYONE on this planet saw coming, Johnny Depp has been asked by Tim Burton to play the Mad Hatter in Burton's upcoming ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

Unbelievably, somehow they got John Carpenter to stop playing SPLINTER CELL and eating buckets of chicken in his easy chair to come out of pseudo retirement and actually direct a new film. The film is SCARED STRAIGHT. The story follows a group of juvenile delinquents who are trapped inside a prison as part of the "Scared Straight" program when a large-scale riot breaks out, and it is up to inmate Karl Rix to save the kids. Nicolas Cage plays the title character. Shooting begins this Fall and it is being produced by Millinium Films.

The new ROBOCOP reboot that is on the fast track had a bit of talk this week. Producer Brad Fischer likened the film to BATMAN BEGINS. Saying that it was not so much a sequel as a reimagining.

George Lucas let slip some details on the inner turmoil that produced INDIANA JONES 4 to a giant thud. Lucas said, "Indiana Jones only becomes complicated when you have another two people saying ‘I want it this way’ and ‘I want it that way’, whereas, when I first did Jones, I just said, ‘We’ll do it this way’ — and that was much easier. But now I have to accommodate everybody, because they are all big, successful guys, too, so it’s a little hard on a practical level." Lucas went on to say, "Really, with the last one, Steven wasn’t that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we’d like to take. I’m in the future; Steven’s in the past. He’s trying to drag it back to the way they were, I’m trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension. This recent one came out of that." Now it makes more sense why the whole film feels a bit disjointed.