I’m finding the best way to start my morning is to take a peek under the hood of Hollywood and find out what is percolating.  Today, it’s a dose of Spider-Man 4, Star Trek, Ghostbuster, and Dragonball news. Yup, Dragonball, with a bit of A-Team news to boot.
Variety is reporting Robert Rodriguez is taking the Machete trailer from his Grindhouse film, and turning it into a feature length movie. Danny Trejo will play the lead character, with Rodriguez expected to start filming in June.
Machete is a Mexican ex-Federale with a gift for wielding a blade, who hides out as a day laborer, who is double-crossed by a corrupt state senator.
In addition to that bit of news, Variety also reports that the producer/director/editor/graphic artist/musician/grip/gaffer/catterer/fill in any other job Rodriguez does himself here has written the script for the relaunch of the Predator series for 20th Century Fox. This I find really interesting, because the last round of Aliens vs. Predator didn’t totally suck balls, and in fact made quite a bit of money for the studio.
For now it looks like Rodriguez is only writing the Predator script.
This past weekend, Andrew Stanton, the man behind many of the best animated movies of the last 15 years, said the upcoming John Carter of Mars movie will not be a Pixar movie, but will be firmly under the Disney banner. Stanton also dismissed rumors that the film would be entirely 3D in nature.
The look of the film will be “very real,” and not highly-stylized, due to what Stanton sees as the way the original story has been ripped off by many different movies over the years; it’ll also be a faithful retelling, with Carter remaining the Civil War soldier that he was in Burroughs’ original. Again, despite what many have been saying, the film will be both live action and not shot in 3-D (although he feels that Disney may end up disagreeing with him on that latter point), and he’s suitably daunted by the prospect of live action directing, commenting that, “It is huge, it is exciting, it scares the crap out of me. It’s either going to make me or break me.”
If Stanton is really going to be true to the original story, does that mean audiences will be subjected the wild wang of John Carter as he runs across the Martian landscape naked? Will Deja Thoris be nude the entire time? It’s Disney, I doubt it, which means this won’t be a faithful adaptation as Burroughs had the inhabitants of Mars running around naked the entire time. It would be interesting to see some Frank Frazetta stylings going on though.
Readers should also keep in mind that this film has been bounced around from studio to studio for almost a decade as everyone from Harry Knowles from Ain’t it Cool News and Robert Rodriguez have been attached as producers at one point. With the property now in the hands of Disney, this could go one of two ways; it’ll get done in the saccharine Disney way, or it will get shelved because it will be too expensive for the company to undertake in these economic times (and the fact they’ll have to cover up boobies).
According to Variety, Mickey Rourke is in talks with Marvel Studios for a part in the upcoming Iron Man 2 sequel.
…Rourke is in discussions to play the Crimson Dynamo, a heavily tattooed Russian arms dealer. He’s considered to be an evil version of Iron Man because he battles the superhero in a nuclear-powered suit of armor.
Interesting choice if it plays out. Rourke is on a high recently after his stellar performance in The Wrestler. Major Spoilers fans will remember Rourke in his performance as Marv in the the Robert Rodriguez/Frank Miller adaptation of Sin City.
It’s official, Rose McGowen and Robert Rodriguez are indeed set to work on the Red Sonja movie. For those of you who made it through the latest Major Spoilers Podcast, where we talk to Mark Finn about Robert E. Howard (creator of Red Sonya), the story direction of the movie is now perfectly clear; this is definitely going to be Roy Thomas’ Red Sonja than Howard’s creation(s).
Full press release (and plenty of Red Sonja images) after the jump
According to the USA Today, Robert Rodriguez and Rose McGowan are once again teaming up to bring the metal bikini clad red haired she-devil with a swoard to the big screen.
“I was surprised when Rose brought me a script of Red Sonja that she liked,” Rodriguez says from his home base of Austin, where he is shooting Shorts, a family film with James Spader and Jon Cryer. “I found it very entertaining. Sonja was strong, smart, cunning — just about everything she’d have to be to survive.”
Thankfully, Rodriguez and McGowan are using material from the comics and from the works of Robert E. Howard, and are steering clear for the first Red Sonja movie.
Robert E. Howard…we might have something on that soon…
I think Frank Miller is high on the fumes from the making of The Spirit, because he now wants to direct the film adaptation of his own Hard Boiled comic that he wrote with art by Geoff Darrow.
“I’m in love with directing,†he gushed. “I’ve found a way to expand my career. Comics and directing are really two sides of the same coin. That’s what Robert Rodriguez taught me…good drama is good drama.â€
Carl Seltz is a suburban insurance investigator, a loving husband, and devoted father. Nixon is a berserk, homicidal tax collector racking up mind-boggling body counts in a diseased urban slaughterhouse. Unit Four is the ultimate robot killing machine – and the last hope of the future’s enslaved mechanical servants. And they’re all the same psychotic entity.
via MTV and Amazon.com