Grown Ups, the Adam Sandler-starring vehicle which reunited him with friends Kevin James, Rob Schnieder, Chris Rock and David Spade made a lot of money. $162 Million, point of fact, making it the second highest grossing Sandler film, just about two million shy of Big Daddy. Which is exactly why Sony has greenlit a sequel, and it’s now expected to hit theaters July 12, 2013. Aren’t we lucky.
And now the more cutting edge side of 2012 Sundance Film Festival with it’s line-up for their Spotlight Films, Park City at Midnight, <=Next=>, and New Frontier films! All of the films sans a couple of the New Frontier films will be world premieres of some of the best, most inventive and (likely) insane films from around the globe. If you’re looking for the best of avant-garde filmmaking, horror films, foreign films, and overall, things you don’t see everyday in theaters, then look to further and check out the impressive line-up below…
With John Carter‘s release date fast approaching, Disney is gearing up for the March 9 release of one of their most expensive films of 2012. And so far… they haven’t gotten much traction with their teasers and posters. The film is based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, and stars Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins. Yeah, they need to sell something to get people hooked. Here’s a teaser from the latest trailer, which finally starts selling the spectacle.
Clint Eastwood has been working so hard and so much, it’s easy to be bowled over that an 81-year-old has churned out nearly a film a year for over two decades (generally if he takes a year off it’s because he directed two the year previous). For his latest he’s assembled Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Watts, and Armie Hammer for a portrait of one of the most important and powerful men of the 20th Century: J. Edgar Hoover, who developed the Federal Bureau of Investigations into the complicated and powerful organization it is now. But J. Edgar is sadly undercooked, with all the juicy tales of Hoover and none congealing.
Oh, for the love of… Sigh. Because Die Harder, Die Hard with a Vengeance, and Live Free or Die Hard weren’t stupid enough titles for unnecessary sequels to a great film (and, let’s face it, Die Hard itself is kind of a goofy title, too), it was announced today by Fox CEO Tom Rothman that Die Hard 5 will be entitled A Good Day to Die Hard. Seriously. A… Good… Day… to… Die… Hard. A group of grown men and women, adults, came up with and approved of that title for a film. Really.
Well, the casting news for Quentin Tarantino’s highly anticipated Civil War epic, Django Unchained, just keeps on coming. After announcing that Jamie Foxx would nab the hero role, and that Christoph Waltz would join him as King Shultz (a “dentist turned bounty hunter”), we’ve learned that Sam Jackson, Dennis Christopher, Gerald McRaney and M.C. Gainey would all be in the film. Even Kevin Costner was going to show up as an evil slave trainer, before having to drop out due to his commitments to The Hatfields and the McCoys, leaving Kurt Russell to take his place. And now another addition to the cast has taken place, one that will satiate all manner of Miami Vice fans.
One of the most interesting films of next year is John Carter, the Andrew Stanton-directed film starring Taylor Kitsch and Willem Dafoe. The long-in-gestation project (which has had Harry Knowles, Kerry Conran and Jon Favreau attached at different points) is hoped to be the first in a franchise. Stanton talked to the New Yorker about the film, and told them the film needs to make $700 Million at the box office to generate a sequel. As large a number as that is, we’re moving into a period of very risky projects, including films like The Avengers – where we’re seeing bigger and bigger budgets for films that are not sure things.
Well… that was quick. Just five days after Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple Inc. and creator of everything awesome in your life ever, passed away due to pancreatic cancer, Sony is already on the move to buy the rights to Jobs’ life story and make a film about his life, which is in no way capitalizing on his death. Not at all. Despite the fact that this movie could have been developed anytime over the past four or five years. Nope, nothing exploitative about this at all, especially since Jobs’ name isn’t, like, trending everywhere right now.
After playing such luminaries of literature as Hunter Thompson, Roald Dahl, and Willy Wonka, Johnny Depp is taking a break from earning 100 jillion dollars pretending to be Keith Richards in pirate garb in order to produce and star in a biopic about beloved children’s book author, Dr. Seuss.
