This weekend TrekMovie splits its genre news up with all the TV news yesterday and movie news today. We start off with all the latest on the next big summer movie, Transformers 2. We also have updates the third entries from the Ghostbusters and Spider-man franchises, plus tons of new video and image previews for more summer movies.
MOVIE NEWS
Transformers Revenge of the Fallen interviews & previews
Writers/executive producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci chat about "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" in an interview with Newsarama. Here’s an excerpt:
NRAMA: Looking at another one of your projects, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is one of the summer’s most highly anticipated movies. Did the success of the first one allow you to go even bigger with this installment?
Kurtzman: Certainly the movie is bigger, but that is definitely not how we thought about it. We feel like the action scenes in these movies are a given to some degree, but they always have to have a serious emotional context or they mean nothing. That means you have to have a small character story at the heart of whatever movie you’re making. For us, it was really coming up with an emotional story that we believed in and felt was sequel worthy.
Orci: And yes, it’s bigger. We have more resources for effects and some of the locations which are just gorgeous and amazing.
Read the rest of the interview at Newsarama. Meanwhile, Michael Bay screened about 25-30 minutes of the film for the LA Times Hero Complex blog. Here’s an excerpt, including a brief description of the film’s opening scene [LIGHT SPOILERS]:
There was the first scene in the film for the nubile Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox) and of course she was wearing very little and posed like a grease-monkey hottie on a garage pin-up poster. "Of course we had to get that out of the way," Bay said with mock resignation. There was plenty more of Fox in seductive mode and a romantic rival as well — at Princeton, a curvy mystery girl pounces on Sam in his dorm-room but there’s something a little alien about her. Maybe it’s the nasty steel tail that suddenly emerges from under her skirt like a scorpion’s stinger.
For more scene descriptions and more thoughts from director Michael Bay, head on over to the LA Times. And rounding out this week’s "Transformers" news, the new single from Linkin Park ("New Divide") is out and can be be downloaded at LinkinPark.com and Apple iTunes.
New images and videos
[MichaelBay.com — more Cinematical and Yahoo! Movies]
Set images with director Michael Bay [one more at MichaelBay.com]
Sideways [MichaelBay.com]
Ravage 2GB USB Drive [via Gizmodo]
Trailer
Clip
Sam Raimi Talks Spider-Man 4 and Regrets on Spider-Man 3
Director Sam Raimi told press that he has taken the criticism leveled at "Spider-Man 3" to heart and intends to correct those mistakes for the fourth installment:
Do I take the criticism into consideration? Yeah, absolutely. I don’t make an artistic type of picture that I can say to myself, "Even if this crowd doesn’t like it, it stands as a work of art and will be appreciated years later or has meaning without the audience." I simply am an entertainer, and I make films for audience appreciation. When they don’t like it, I don’t have a leg to stand on. You really want to please people.
Raimi added that he’ll have a better handle on what corrections he’ll be making on the fourth film once he reads the script, which writer David Lyndsay-Abaire should be done with "in about four weeks". Raimi expressed his regrets more forcefully in an interview with the LA Times, saying that if he had it to do all over again he "would have done everything differently, every single shot." Meanwhile the director chatted with FearNET and hinted at the possibility of Morbius showing up in "Spider-Man 4". Head on over to CHUD to watch the clip.
Ghostbusters 3 May Start Shooting This Winter
Dan Aykroyd told the LA Times that Sigourney Weaver is now on board "Ghostbusters 3", she’ll join Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson as the other originals on board the project. Murray’s involvement was the most important since he holds a one-fifth controlling interest in the property rights:
"I don’t put not making the third movie on Billy. We can’t do that. I’ve been very busy. Harold’s been busy, Ivan’s been busy. And a third script really didn’t coalesce properly. And Billy, you can’t blame an artist for not wanting to do the same thing again. He did two of them, for God’s sake. Although I’m the biggest cheerleader as the originator of the concept but I’ve never begrudged Billy not doing a third movie. I never said he held it up or that he refused. Hey, listen, he’s an artist."
Aykroyd believes that things are moving along nicely and that they "could be in production by winter." Aykroyd threw out two names as possible directors (first choice Ivan Reitman, second choice Harold Ramis), but admits that both may be too busy to take on the project. In regards to story details, Aykroyd said he’s hoping for a five-member "new generation" team with some female members:
"I’d like it to be a passing-of-the-torch movie. Let’s revisit the old characters briefly and happily and have them there as family but let’s pass it on to a new generation."
He mentioned two names, Alyssa Milano (who voiced a character in the upcoming "Ghostbusters" video game) and Eliza Dushku: "I think they’re amazing," he said. "And I’m excited about the whole idea of getting this done." Both actresses responded to Aykroyd’s interview via Twitter:
Alyssa Milano: "Can’t speak for @ElizaPatricia (Hi, pretty lady)but this is the first I’m hearing of Ghostbusters 3. Did the VO in the game tho."
Eliza Dushku: "Ghost-rumor-buster in a big way @Alyssa_milano (hey girlene) it’s nuthin’ I know of." and "Ahh, just saw the article, Danny A’s genius! There are so many ways I’d ‘suit’ up. GB’s IS hot :)"
Night at the Museum Beats Terminator at Box Office
As reported earlier in our ST09 weekend box office report,
"Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian" is estimated to have a $53.5M three-day opening weekend, beating "Terminator Salvation" which brought in $43.0M over the three-day frame ($56.4M including Thursday). "Terminator Salvation" should be at about $62M for the five-day holiday weekend (Thur-Mon), while ‘Battle of the Smithsonian’ should have a bit more through Monday ($70M). More "Terminator" coverage below:
- Moon Bloodgood talks about her deleted topless scene. [io9]
- [SPOILERS–highlight to view]. McG says that Kate Connor’s pregnancy will "be explored in the prospective second and third picture," adding "Now, I would never be so bold to presume that there will be another [‘Terminator’ sequel]. But we’ve arced out a story that includes that child and its fate and what it becomes in this world of man versus machine." [MTV]
- Watch the Episode 1 preview of "Terminator Salvation: The Machinima":
Director McG interviews star Common
Artist on Artist interview with McG and Common
3D Holographic Display
Clip [one more at MTV]
“Fascinating!” :3
Hahaha I just noticed that Stuart Baird was not in the poll for best Start Trek director!!!
I want that USB Ravage. And I want him now.
Oh good. The Warriors Three will be in Thor. Damn, those guys are a riot!
And you guys forgot Stuart Baird in your directors poll…
I just came back from seeing Terminator: Salvation. What a huge disappointment it was. I was expecting something bigger and better. I should have spend my money seeing Trek yet again.
Transformers is a non-sequitur for me. I simply do not get it. Here’s a film that with a similar $150M budget to Star Trek made a mind boggling $708.2M at the box office ($263M domestically by its 3rd weekend), WITH a 57% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and earning it a $200M sequel. It’s a movie about bloody morphing cars! I saw it on cable and could barely watch it.
Yet here Trek is with all of its intelligence, action and positive reviews and yet it is already waning at the box office on its 3rd weekend. How does this make any sense?
RE: Baird
He has been added to the new poll
can’t imagine why he slipped my mind
And much thanks for that awesome pic of Megan “can she possibly be anymore sexy?” Fox.
6. RD
I wouldn’t say that Trek was waning. It past Angels and Demons to move to third instead of 4th in the box office. It is doing incredible well and in league with some other huge movies. Waning? Not even close buddy.
Thats just a damn shame, such a beautiful girl Lucy was. I just dont understand it.
Surrogates looks pretty good actually…
Ghostbusters: The Next Generation? Really? Does this sound lame to anyone else? But, hey, I thought the first thing when I was a kid TOS fan and first heard of TNG.
6.
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but as a G1 Transformers fan I went because Transformers was a big part of my childhood. It’s a toy-driven franchise, and when I saw it in the theater the crowd was split pretty evenly between people around my age and kids.
And even then I thought the film was all wrong. Yeah, they got Optimus Prime right (and the “One shall stand, one shall fall.” is still a CMOA for Transfans)…but you do a Transformers movie and most of the Transformers don’t appear until nearly an hour in? And they’re so blandly colored that you can’t tell who’s who in the fight sequences?
It was weighed in the balance, and found wanting. I’m not gonna see the sequel in theaters because I just don’t think they’ve got the handle on it.
Sid and Marty Croft are still with us. That’s great. You go guys.
I want to ask something. I know there are some people out there who liked these movies and shows, because they were by legal standards successful. Speak up. It seems the only people who ever write anything down here are haters.
#7 – LOL. I can’t imagine why either. >;>}
#7 bahaha
Eminem looks like hell in the Joker getup.
I loved the first Transformers movie and I can’t wait for the second one.
I was too old in the 80’s to be into the cartoons or toys, so I was going in knowing nothing about Transformers. Help or hurt, I don’t know, but the movie was awesome.
I don’t understand all these film snobs who talk smack about Michael Bay. I like movies with hotties and sh*t that explodes. Bring it on! :D
Okay, what goofball voted for Stuart Baird instead of (at least) David Carson???
#6 RD
The same way ST DS9 was beaten soundly in the syndicated TV series Nielson’s by that engrossing, thought-provoking epic adventure series called…Baywatch.
FZ: Success in America is based upon ignorance.
Of course, ask any moviegoer if they can name a dozen politicians or living scientists and you’ll get a lot of fails…but ask them to name a dozen pro athletes or entertainers and you’ll get folks who can name ’em by the hundreds.
All told, the buzz around Termie is such that I won’t see it, as it seems to have that same dystopic themata that so many series have. It’s much easier to sink in decadence than rise in inventiveness.
That Ghostbusters concept might work if they had the right actors for the new GBs. I like the idea of Eliza Dushku as a GB. I know the G4 special didn’t have the budget that Terminator Salvation, which I think will be amazing by the way, did but the prosthetics on the hosts were horrible. They don’t look like cyborgs, they just look like what Two-Face would look like if his bad side were metal.
I mean, no offense to the G4 people but the prosthetics were terrible.
The prosthetics in the G4 special were terrible that is.
The prosthetics that the hosts wore in the G4 special were terrible. It’s too bad the effects guys from Terminator Salvation didn’t do the effects for the G4 special.
#6: “Yet here Trek is with all of its intelligence, action and positive reviews and yet it is already waning at the box office on its 3rd weekend. How does this make any sense?”
I wouldn’t call 22 million dollars waning, especially facing two new and big movies this week + A&D still on the screen.
I would say I expect TREK will draw respectable figures for at least another week, maybe two, and marginal numbers for a few additional weeks after that. I think it will be a good summer for Paramount and for TREK.
I’m excited to hear that “UFO” is being eyed as a feature film. The 1969 TV series was intriguing and it might be interesting to see a more modern view on the series (gee, what’s next? a Space 1999 remake… uh, I’d have mixed emotions about that one).
Now that Stephen Sommers is basically finished with his chores for “GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra” now he can get back to preparing “When Worlds Collide,” which has been on hold for … like, forever. one can certainly hope!
Jeez, is Robert Zemekis EVER going to make another real movie again???
Guy used to make some of the coolest scifi movies ever, and now all he does are those creepy performance-capture kids movies.
Transformers is giant robots beating the crap out of each other. Whats not to like. Also Megan Fox doesn’t hurt the eyes any. Not every movie can be Shakespeare. Its based on a pretty silly American cartoon after all.
Unfortunately the wife wont go with me for this one. She doesn’t like Giant robots or Megan fox. A pity really. LOL
So I guess We can start calling the next one ST11 or XI ? Hope ST11 is as good or better then this one!
I once saw a Superman Comic where he goes to the future and the first thing he sees is a electronic Billboard for Star Trek XXI? somebody had or has high hopes for Trek! He is to hoping ST XI works first!
#9 & #26, I guess I meant waning in comparison to Transformers. That film grossed over $20M/day for the first week, then averaged over $10M/day for the second week, then around $8M/day for the third week and only dropped below $4M in the 4th week. In the end it earned over $319M US and $390M foreign! Trek will definitely not make that kind of money foreign, and it’s not likely to make it domestically. Also, A&D is breathing down Trek’s neck, not to mention A&D is further ahead worldwide than Trek was after its first two weekends. Plus A&D is following DVC’s pattern as a slow steady earner, whereas Trek is following Batman Begins. which barely cleared $200M and saw all of its box office action in the first two weeks with repeat fan viewings.
UFO… Wow, I loved watching that Space:1999 predecessor as a kid. It’s so dated looking but still has charm.
I liked Spider-Man 3…wassup with the criticism??
I liked Spider-Man 3…wassup with the criticism?? I disliked the Green Goblin’s face plate mask in the earlier films, if you want to
Friend of mine recommended UFO to me once. Compared some of my writing to the music in it. I just recently discovered it. If they do a movie of it I hope they use that grooooooovy theme song. Too much fun.
Might I say again, I’m continually pleased with “Thor” developments.
“UFO” was producer Gerry Anderson’s first attempt at doing live action SF, getting away from his marionette origins. Some would say his live action shows were as wooden as the puppets he directed.
Like TOS, I have a lot of nostalgic feelings attached to the show. Sure, the show seems dated now, but I think it could be fun revisiting it; I hope it gets a better treatment than the live-action version of “Thunderbirds.”
Does anyone remember actor Brian Bloom being a cast member in the 1983 TV miniseries ‘V?’
It seems to me he was in a Jewish family (a teen) who became a member of the youth league that mirrored the youth party in Nazis Germany.
I cannot find any proof of it on IMBD or wiki, but I could swear he was in it.
37
Yeah, again,…I’ve just discovered UFO. Was funny to see all the groovy purple chicks and the guys in the (clearly miniature ships) flying around. They even seemed to have been directed the same way the marionettes were. But again,…that theme song – too groovy. Even my two yr old loves it. Despite how that sounds, I think that’s a good barometer.
Who is this Baird we don’t seem to think much of?
#39 Stuart Baird was the director who pretty much ruined Star Trek Nemesis.
I enjoyed Transformers because I think it was exactly what it promised to be. Come on, fuzzy childhood feelings aside, it was a cartoon about robots from outer space that turn into cars. How ‘smart’ did anyone expect it to be?
#32
I guarantee you A&D will not equal DVC’s box office take, not by a long shot. It’s sitting at about $81 million domestic right now, and DVC had made nearly 2 x that by the 2 week mark. The bad word-of-mouth is putting the hurt on A&D in a serious way. As it likely will for TS, which really puts a nail in the Terminator franchise. They should have stopped at #2, but someone got greedy.
I’d say A&D will end up around $400-450 million. A far cry from the nearly $800 million the DVC did. Not too shabby, really.
#39; “Who is this Baird we don’t seem to think much of?”
I would assume it is Stuart Baird, director of Star Trek – Nemesis” who ill-directed the send-off for the Next Gen crew.
You know, it isn’t that acting is bad in Nemesis. It clearly is not. It is not that that it is a bad story, it just has elements that just do NOT belong (the dune buggy scenes, for example)…
Shinzon, not for one minute, convinced me he was capable of destroying the Romulan senate. I did not buy his rage, his naked hatred nor his ability to lead such a rebellion. This, to me, was the biggest flaw to the movie. Tom Hardy was woefully miscast. He didn’t look like, sound like, Jean Luc Picard.
It’s funny. As I recall this movie was TNG’s attempt at retelling TWOK. Why is it that TREK producers seem to feel a need to retell Khan?
Lastly, I think the character moments that Baird excised from the final cut gutted the film’s heart.
Sid & Marty are behind the feature film of Land Of The Lost ?
I didn’t know that.
– W –
* Ponders *
Words cannot properly express how much I hate Michael Bay.
The thing I remember most about INS and NEM is how little I remember about those films. They offered little above or beyond what any tv episode did, and I think whoever approved those projects should have known better, or deliberately sank the ship, as crazy as that sounds.
If nothing else, the new film showed how to make Star Trek work on the big screen better than any of the other films. When the dvd comes out, we can watch ST09 and TWOK back to back. I still say, as good as TWOK was, it was not a “movie” in the same way ST09 is… but I suppose that is splitting hairs…
Didn’t Michael Bay direct “Pearl Harbor?”
The movie was okay, but just merely okay.
As a former history teacher and enthusiast, I was not overly impressed. Movies like this and “Titanic,” for example, cheapen the event with the storytelling style utilized.
With all the horror of both events, an honest-to-goodness movie, retelling the courage and valor of each events could have been told with pathos and true emotion without embedding a fictitious love story.
But oh wait, real history doesn’t sell popcorn, does it?
Michael Bay couldn’t make a good movie if his life depended on it.
Luckily for him he’ll never have to test that theory.