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Paramount Makes ‘Flight’ Official; Robert Zemeckis Directs Denzel Washington Starting In October By Russ Fischer/Sept. 9, 2011 2:15 pm EST HOLLYWOOD, CA (September 9, 2011) – Paramount Pictures announced today that Academy Award ® winner Denzel Washington will star, and Academy Award ® winning director Robert Zemeckis will helm, FLIGHT for the studio. Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald will produce under the Parkes/MacDonald production banner along with Zemeckis, Steve Starkey, and Jack Rapke under their ImageMovers banner....

Portia And Octavia Cast In ‘The Hunger Games’ By Germain Lussier/May 20, 2011 11:00 am EST No, there aren’t any strippers in The Hunger Games, they’re just named that way. The roles of Portia and Octavia have been filled in Gary Ross’ adaptation of the popular Suzanne Collins young adult novel and the lucky actresses are Latarsha Rose and Brooke Bundy who’ll play Portia and Octavia respectively (Above Rose is on the left, Bundy is on the right)....

Rachel Weisz Is An Evil Witch In ‘Oz: The Great And Powerful’ By Russ Fischer/May 3, 2011 5:23 pm EST Sam Raimi’s semi-prequel to The Wizard of Oz has a villainess. Oz: The Great and Powerful already had James Franco set to play the man who becomes the wizard, and Mila Kunis as the witch Theodora. (Spelled ‘Theadora’ in today’s trade break.) That character has an evil sister, Evanora, and that is the role that Rachel Weisz is now negotiating to take....

Read A ‘Dark Knight Rises’ Deleted Scene Featuring Miranda Tate And Lucius Fox By Germain Lussier/July 27, 2012 2:30 pm EST Thanks to Comic Book Movie and their reader @antovolk for the heads up on this script page: SPOILER DISCUSSION BELOW. Note: This was mentioned in today’s Superhero Bits, but deserved a longer write up.

Robert Zemeckis To Team Up With Denzel Washington For ‘Flight’ By Angie Han/June 6, 2011 12:00 pm EST A couple of months ago, we reported that Robert Zemeckis might be ditching the whole motion capture thing — at least temporarily — to direct Flight, a drama about a hero pilot. Denzel Washington was attached to play the lead at the time. Now, a couple of sources “familiar with the project” have confirmed that Zemeckis will indeed be helming the project — and that Washington is expected to sign a deal soon....

Shawn Ryan And Eddie Murphy’s ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ Series Lands At CBS By Angie Han/Sept. 4, 2012 2:01 pm EST CBS has emerged victorious in the “very competitive” bidding war over Eddie Murphy and Shawn Ryan’s small-screen Beverly Hills Cop reboot, giving a pilot production commitment to the Sony TV-produced project. Murphy and Ryan will executive produce, with Ryan also serving as showrunner. Murphy is set to reprise his role as wisecracking Detroit cop Axel Foley in the pilot, and may guest star on future episodes if the pilot goes to series....

Sony Buys Rights To Remake Austrian-German Heist Film ‘The Robber’ By Russ Fischer/Dec. 22, 2010 12:00 pm EST The Robber, from Austrian director Benjamin Heisenberg, hasn’t had time to establish a presence in the States — it just opened in Germany in March after a premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. A few local festival appearances, like ones at the Seattle and New York Film Festivals, is all the release the movie has had here....

Soundtracks: Dan Deacon Scoring Coppola’s ‘Twixt Now And Sunrise;’ Basement Jaxx Scoring ‘Attack The Block;’ Craig Wedren Scoring ‘Wanderlust’ By Russ Fischer/Jan. 12, 2011 8:00 pm EST I was surprised to hear last year that Francis Ford Coppola had quietly gone into production on a gothic dream/nightmare horror story called Twixt Now and Sunrise. I’m a hell of a lot more surprised to hear that Dan Deacon is scoring it. Dan Deacon is a guy whose basic appearance will cause anyone who casually spits out the word ‘hipster’ to recoil in horror....

Sundance 2011 First Look: Morgan Spurlock’s ‘The Greatest Movie Ever Sold’ By Peter Sciretta/Dec. 28, 2010 4:00 pm EST One of the movies which immediately caught my eye when looking at the line-up for the 2011 Sundance Film Festival is Morgan Spurlock’s new documentary The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Spurlock shot to fame at the 2004 festival with his feature doc Super Size Me, and has since produced two seasons of the underrated reality cable series 30 Days....

Teaser Trailer: ‘There Be Dragons,’ From Roland Joffe By Russ Fischer/Sept. 14, 2010 5:00 pm EST Fair warning: this teaser trailer for Roland Joffe’s Spanish Civil War tale There Be Dragons has actually been online since the summer, but we’d completely missed its existence until the recent launch of a new website to promote the film. Joffe’s film sounds superficially like it falls right into the middle of a classic conceit: we see two brothers, one of whome becomes a priest, the other a fascist spy....

The Critic/Audience Divide Expands Further With ‘Transformers 3’ By Peter Sciretta/July 1, 2011 2:00 pm EST Film critics have been overwhelmingly negative towards Michael Bay’s latest film Transformers: Dark of the Moon, yet average moviegoers seem to love the film. Transformers 3 earned a rotten 38% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with 186 critic reviews counted, yet 90% of the 60,137 Flixter users liked the threequel. It should be noted that the user rating on IMDb is 7....

UK Release Date For ‘The Tree Of Life’ Leads To Legal Entanglement By Russ Fischer/April 1, 2011 11:00 am EST Jeff Wells chimes in with a statement from Summit, And Anne Thompson says that, despite Summit’s insistence that Icon holds no rights, Icon bought rights to the movie for a “high minimum guarantee, and was trying to get out of releasing the film.” In other words, Icon has to pay financier Bill Pohlad a lot of money no matter how well the film does, and the company is just now realizing that a multi-generational Terrence Malick film about family, man’s place in the world and the universe in general might not be the most commercial prospect....

Video: Director Jon Favreau Interviews Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard And Brian Grazer By Peter Sciretta/July 7, 2011 3:00 pm EST On his latest film Cowboys and Aliens, director Jon Favreau has decided to take the EPK interviews into his own hands and record conversations with the cast and crew. I love that Favreau is doing this, my only complaint is that I wish he would release the interview in long form, not broken up into highlight clips....

VOTD: 36 Hitchcock Death Scenes, Timed To Climax In Unison By Germain Lussier/March 9, 2011 7:00 am EST The master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, loved to kill people. On film, that is. Murder was pretty much Hitchcock’s calling card and in this video by UltraCulture, we see 36 of them happen simultaneously, all timed so the death’s happen at the same time. Besides the brilliance behind all of these films, what a viewer really culls from this video was how important pacing and editing was to make a death truly memorable, and Hitchcock remains the master....

VOTD: The Star Wars Trilogy Retold Using LEGO In 2 Minutes By Peter Sciretta/May 5, 2010 8:00 am EST “The original Star Wars saga as told by a kid with one heck of a LEGO collection.” This stop-motion animated video is extensive, covering the entire original trilogy in just two minutes and thirteen seconds, and featuring many of the sets, locations, props, creatures, and vehicles recreated using real LEGO. Believe me, it’s a lot cooler than it sounds....

Watch 3 Minutes Of Joe Wright’s ‘Hanna,’ Plus New Images And Poster By Germain Lussier/Feb. 16, 2011 11:00 am EST One of the soon-to-be-released films that’s currently flying under the radar is Hanna, directed by Joe Wright and starring Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett. Focusing on a young girl trained as an assassin by her father, we’ve already seen a domestic and international trailer and now we’ve got two clips adding up to three minutes of footage and a slew of slick new images including an upgraded poster....

‘Green Lantern’ Scribe Marc Guggenheim In Talks To Pen Robert Downey Jr.’s ‘Perry Mason’ Reboot By Angie Han/Feb. 21, 2012 1:30 pm EST It’s been nearly two decades since the last time Perry Mason graced the screen, but considering Hollywood’s current obsession with making everything old new again, it’s probably not so surprising that the beloved defense attorney is slated for a big-screen revival. Last fall, Robert Downey, Jr., his wife/partner Susan Downey, and Warner Bros....

‘Real Steel’ Plot Details Revealed In Script Review By Russ Fischer/Dec. 7, 2010 6:38 pm EST We’ve known the basics about Real Steel for a while: Shawn Levy directs the Disney/DreamWorks picture that stars Hugh Jackman as an ex-fighter who reinvents himself as a robot boxing mechanic/coach/promoter when human boxing is outlawed. Now thanks to a script review, there are more details available about the film. Two warnings: first, some of this might have changed, as the film has been shot and the script draft referenced is not the final version....

‘The King’s Speech’ Director Tom Hooper Was Offered ‘Iron Man 3,’ Could Direct ‘Les Miserables’? By Russ Fischer/Feb. 24, 2011 10:00 am EST The King’s Speech director Tom Hooper didn’t come out of nowhere. He made The Damned United and directed all of the John Adams mini-series starring Paul Giamatti. But his race to the top of the possible Best Director heap has been nothing short of meteoric. So what will he do next?...

‘The World’s End’ Teaser Poster: Edgar Wright And Simon Pegg Go Bar Hopping By Germain Lussier/July 13, 2012 12:30 pm EST The first tease of the spiritual sequel to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz is now online. Universal just officially green-lit The World’s End, the Edgar Wright directed, Simon Pegg co-written and starring, Nick Frost co-starring third film in the Cornetta trilogy and released a teaser poster along with the announcement....