Screenhead

All right, He-Man fans, listen up, because I’ve got some good news.  Remember when I told you earlier that the live action He-Man dream was dead?  Well, apparently, it got better in rapid fashion because Sony has picked up the rights from Warner Brothers, and they’re taking that ball and running with it.  Fast points to note: Joel Silver is out and all the development that’s already happened is gone.

This means they’re basically starting over fresh, and given how little we actually knew about the title, it’s probably for the best anyway.  Hopefully they can manage to recover and get a product ready to show, because I’m dying to see if they actually manage to get one right and NOT completely turn my childhood into a smoking ruin of profit driven remakes.

So needless to say, discount video renter extraordinaire Redbox is NOT happy with Warner Brothers‘ edict that there will be a mammoth twenty eight day speed bump between the releases of their material and their availability at Redbox kiosks.

Redbox is fighting back with every tool in their arsenal–they’re not just calling in the lawyers, who already are primed and ready with nasty words like “antitrust” and variants on  “market manipulation”, but they’re also launching a bit of a charm offensive.

Redbox set up a link, savelowcostdvds.com, to show you where the many many MANY Redbox kiosks out there can be found.  And indeed there are many–I know of two of them just in the little town I live in.  And considering that both Sony and Lions Gate both just recently signed deals with Redbox to get their material in the kiosks, I think Warner is likely to knuckle under and cut out the twenty eight day wait.

The big news of the day, folks, is that The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has actually found a distributor!  Heath Ledger’s actual last movie (he died midway through this one) is being carried by Sony Pictures Classics.

And that, sadly, is the bad news.

Basically, if Sony Pictures Classics lays hands on this one, there’s a real good chance that The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is going to get dumped into a really, REALLY limited release in a handful of art house theatres.

As far as strategy goes, this is a hugely bad idea.  Considering Heath Ledger just managed to pull off a nigh-impossibility by winning a POSTHUMOUS OSCAR (seriously, this is almost never done, and only fellow Australian Peter Finch had managed to do it before Ledger), Sony’s passing up a serious opportunity to really pull off a win.  Especially if they can stack the deck in their favor by dropping it into a weekend that doesn’t have much going for it, like, say pretty much anything in January.  January is commonly regarded in movie circles as a “dumping ground” month, where box office receipts are most likely to be down, often due to inclement weather.  If a movie fails in January it can be explained away: “Oh, what do you WANT?” the beleaguered exec can say in defense of his own job. “Half of Podunk was frozen solid last weekend!  That’s why it only made a couple thousand bucks!  It has nothing to do with the fact that it was a godawful movie!”

But looking for logic out of the studios is like looking for an aardvark on Neptune.  It just plain old don’t happen.

Smurfs

Raja Gosnell has been approached to direct Sony’s live-action/animated “Smurfs.” The film is scheduled to be released in 3-D and 2-D formats on Dec. 17, 2010. “Smurfs” will be produced by Jordan Kerner, J. David Stem and David N. Weiss while Audrey Wells wrote the script.

Sony announced in June 2008 that it had launched the “Smurfs” movie project after receiving film rights to the blue-colored characters from Lafig Belgium thru Kerner and signing Stem and Weiss to write the screenplay. Kerner secured film rights to the Smurfs property back in 2002.

In today’s most unsurprising bit of news, STYD reports that Sony is planning on releasing a fourth Resident Evil movie dubbed Resident Evil: Afterlife in theaters by September 17, 2010. The site notes that the date is from an internal memo circulating around Sony’s offices. They later updated their article with confirmation that the release date is real.

It’s not surprising to expect a fourth movie after the third one’s ending left the door wide open. As can be inferred from the ending, Afterlife will take place in Tokyo, Japan and possibly a few other international locales with multiple copies of Mila Jovovich fighting it out.

However, it is still not known if W.S. Anderson is onboard to direct, and whether Jovovich herself will reprise her role. But then again, seeing as how all three have been successful so far, everyone is likely to return for a fourth film.

Paramount Pictures has laid off of 31 production staffers, including some division heads. Among the execs leaving the Melrose lot are Georgia Kacandes, head of physical production and Guy Stodel, head of the Paramount Vantage unit. Ben Cosgrove, Senior V.P. of production and Dan Levine, Exec V.P. of production, were also let go, along with casting chief Gail Levin and Aimee Shieh, head of Paramount’s New York literary office.

The focus on cost-cutting within Paramount was noticeable in the staff cuts as well in Tuesday’s report by the Financial Times that Paramount has approached Sony and Fox about a potential partnership with either studio that would unite the production and distribution functions of their home video operations however, the studios would maintain separate sales and marketing teams.

While the Spanish original was a classic, the Hollywood remake was a travesty to watch. Despite that, Sony’s Screen Gems has officially started work on a sequel to Quarantine, which was a box office success last October.

The Hollywood remake was a shot-for-shot remake of Spanish horror film [REC]. A sequel has already been shot in Europe for release later this year, but Screen Gems is looking for a totally original pitch for the Hollywood sequel.

Hopefully it will turn out to be better than the original remake. Now, that was severely disappointing.

Vacancy 2: The First Cut represents part of a growing and unsettlingly awful trend in which movies that really shouldn’t have a sequel are given them, and get them send directly to video.  There is, however, a strange side to this new and growing trend—sometimes, the direct to video sequels are actually watchable.  That may be the scariest part about this suspense / thriller from Sony.

It’s a prequel, in case you weren’t aware, and it’s set several years before the first film, where the managers of the Meadow View Inn have a lucrative but waning side business selling voyeuristic porn to truckers.  To that end, the Meadow View Inn has a network of cameras throughout the property, taping people’s most intimate moments for resale.  But like I said, the porn business is falling off, and that’s threatening to put a serious crimp into the managers’ lives.  Until one day when a random couple takes a room—and the male half kills the female half.  Faced with a strange dilemma, the management decides not to call the cops on the killer, but rather bring him on board to occasionally kill guests and market the resulting snuff films, which have always before been regarded as something of an urban myth.  Jump ahead a little bit, to where a young newlywed couple and their friend are on their way to the bride’s hometown when they decide they’re going to stop for the night…at the Meadow View Inn.

What follows is an onslaught of bloodshed, horror and mayhem.

The thing that surprised me most about this whole thing was that it turned out to be downright watchable.  I was shocked.  I expected this thing to be a warmed-over crap sandwich, but no.  I got a good if somewhat scaled-down romp that featured plenty of interesting plot twists and suspenseful moments.  In fact, what I got was almost a carbon copy of the original.

It’s hard to believe—it’s INCREDIBLY hard to believe, in fact—because I’ve seen plenty of these.  Joy Ride 2, Wrong Turn 2, Urban Legend 3…and every one of them has been a sad and sorry entrant into the overall scheme of things.  I’ve regretted watching every one of them, in all honesty, and this may be the first one that I didn’t actively regret.

I understand how weird this is.  I’m actually going to recommend it if you’re into the suspense / thriller subgenre of movies and doubly so if you liked the original Vacancy because it’s so similar to the original that liking this prequel, which turns out to be pretty much a rehash of the first with new characters, isn’t at all far fetched.

I guess that, at the end of the day, even a broken clock is right twice a day.  Vacancy 2: The First Cut is proof of just that.  Sometimes, not all of these surprise direct to video sequels are completely unwatchable.  Sometimes, there’s a halfway decent one.  Vacancy 2 is one of the rare ones.  Oh, sure, it may not be as good as some, but it will be better than many.  This puts it—and me—in an unusual position, as I can safely recommend this one.

I’m not sure why I enjoy Anne Hathaway’s work as much as I do.  Maybe it’s that innocent quality to her, that wide-eyed almost naivete that’s just so unaccountably charming.  Maybe it’s just that she’s hotter than stolen plutonium.

Anyway, when I first heard about Passengers, all I could think was, great, yet another Sixth Sense knockoff.  Sadly, I was more right than I cared to admit, but frankly, it’d be spoilering to tell you how.  Besides…you can probably draw the inferences yourself based on what I just said.  Simple logic’ll let you draw THAT connection.

As for the plot, it’s rather straightforward—Anne Hathaway will play Claire Summers, a psychologist who’s just received one doozy of an assignment: take psychological care of about half a dozen survivors of a plane crash.  They’ve all got wildly different stories about what happened on that crash, and that’s got our Claire very concerned.  What’s got Claire even MORE concerned, however, is that her new patients are starting to disappear.  Not just miss sessions, but actually vanish off the face of the earth.  Sometimes, they even disappear within seconds of her speaking to them.  And to further complicate matters, she’s actually falling for one of her patients, who forces her to see a whole new side of herself in the midst of the therapy.  And as she proceeds through the therapy, and the rash of missing persons cases, she discovers a whole lot more than she ever expected to find.

Yes, it’s got “thriller” stamped all over it, even if it’s a little short on the thrills and a whole lot longer than you’d expect on the romance and drama.  In fact, I’m feeling pretty cheated that they even CALLED this thing a thriller.  The plotline is basic thriller material but it’s like they left all the thrills out of it.  I know I just said that, but I’m downright baffled.  Where did they GO?  There’s almost nothing scary in here at ALL.  You might as well just call this a romance drama and have done with it because I got like one good jump scare and one good shock out of the whole thing.  The rest of the time it was just Anne Hathaway carrying on a romance with Patrick Wilson and acting like she’s going insane.  Worse, it’s not even in a really convincing fashion.  I spent half the movie convinced that Anne Hathaway needs to do more horror movies, and the OTHER half convinced that she needs to stick to romantic comedies.  Maybe a little more time on the darker side of film would give her some extra punch and range.  I’d LOVE to see her take on a haunted house or go up against a Pennywise the Dancing Clown or something.  That’d be just awesome.  Because right now, she is sorely lacking in the horror chops department.  She’s got chops enough to be good in most anything, but suspense, thrillers, horror—the darker stuff—is clearly not something she’s well-acquainted with.  It shows.

I did get some fun out of it, even if the ending was a pretty big disappointment in retrospect.  I’d never buy a copy of Passengers, but it makes a decent rental, and isn’t a bad date movie either.  It’s a bit weak, but it’s solid enough that it’s not a complete loss.  So go ahead and give it a try, especially on those nights when you can’t find anything better to rent.

Though a month is still left before the release of Angels & Demons, the second film adaptation of Dan Brown’s works, Sony Pictures is already moving forward with the third.

Brown earlier announced that “The Lost Symbol”, his third book featuring the character of Robert Langdon, will hit bookstores on September 15.

As a result, Sony is moving forward with its plan to adapt the property and is certain to get director Ron Howard and star Tom Hanks to reprise their roles.

Details of the book are unknown at the moment, but it has been revealed that it takes place over a twelve-hour period.