Dark Horizons

Fincher wants a “European look” for the film and is planning to shoot all the exteriors in Sweden. Due to tax incentives though, studio work will be done in other countries.

Surprisingly Fincher also wants to keep Swedish locations intact instead of shifting the action to the U.S. like so many remakes. The move will draw further comparisons with the already released and acclaimed Swedish-language film trilogy which shot in several of the locations mentioned in Larsson’s novels.

The Swedish shoot also brings up the question of language – will all the characters talk in English or only some, and will Lisbeth Salander or Mikael Blomqvist be changed into being British or American characters (the casting has yet to be locked down)?

Shooting will kick off in October.

“Snabba cash” is based on a novel by author Jens Lapidus and was a major hit in its home country this year. The thriller follows three interconnected storylines involving drugs and organized crime, with the main character a young man (played in the original by Joel Kinnaman) who hopes to strike it rich quickly by becoming a runner for a coke dealer. Efron would play the runner in the WB version.

Many producers and companies were vying for remake rights. The buzz began at the Berlin Film Festival, and UTA and Magnolia Entertainment threw a reception for the movie’s filmmaker Daniel Espinosa at the Hammer Museum in March and screened his movie. From then, offers started to pour in like easy money (which is what “snabba cash” means in Swedish) from Universal, Summit, Paramount, Fox, the Weinstein Co., Mandate and Warners.

This is a great opportunity for Efron to grow beyond the teen roles that made him a star. The project, the first acquisition for Efron’s shingle, also sends a signal as to the sort of high-level material with which Efron wants to be associated.

Den of Geek

Still, there is a lot of fans out there and many are wondering what Mulcahy’s plans are. Let’s hear what he had to say about the remake:

“…Let me assure you – I mean we are not screwing around with the obviously very much beloved 80s Michael J. Fox classic, we are not doing that. Obviously it’s inspired by it, but the new MTV Teen Wolf takes out a totally different slant, taking more of the slant of “The Lost Boys,” so to speak. It still has humor, but it’s basically got horror and humor. The humor is in the characters and the real situations and the teenagers, it’s very real and not played for any obvious laughs – they come from the situation. So there is definitely humor and horror, we really, really wanted to go for that and also the reality. Also it’s obviously pumped up with not only a good scary score, but it’s also pumped up with great music…”

Anyway, I welcome a remake. I don’t believe it takes anything away from the original. Besides, we all know that Michael J. Fox is the one and only Teen Wolf.

Harold Howard: Listen son. You’re going to be able to do a lot of things the other guys aren’t.
Scott Howard: Oh yeah, like chase cars, and bite the mailman?

Dark Horizons

The general story has a doctor trying to find the cure for Alzheimer. After his research is shut down, he takes home and raises Caesar, the child of his most promising chimp experiment subject. Caesar continues to evolve and soon leads an army of apes in an uprising around the same time humanity is hit by a catastrophe.

One of the more interesting touches are numerous references to the launch and disappearance of the Icarus led by Colonel Taylor, the lead character and ship which crashed on the future Earth in the original 1968 ‘Apes’. The other is that the cataclysm that hits humanity ties in to the genetic mutation and explains not just how the apes evolve enough to lead an uprising, but why the apes in the original series looked nothing like the modern apes of today.

Vulture posts that New Line Cinema is quickly moving forward with plans to remake John Carpenter’s 1981 action classic “Escape From New York“, thanks to the creative writing of Allan Loeb. He nailed the humor in Plissken without slipping into camp, and he changed Snake’s rescue-mission target from a president to a female senator, thereby upping the banter quotient. But just as big a factor was economic: They found a much cheaper way to turn Manhattan into a giant prison.

In the original, set at the end of World War III, New York City was a husk of itself after being turned into a giant prison, but that kind of destruction gets pricey.  So in the remake, the Big Apple that the as-yet-uncast Snake Plissken is dropped into, will be geographically undesirable, but intact. This Manhattan was evacuated and turned into a privately run penal colony after the detonation of a crude radioactive dirty bomb on the outskirts of the city. “It is not a disaster movie,” says a source close to the project. “It is an exposé of an ecosystem, if you put a huge wall around Manhattan and then dropped in the most f****d-up, dangerous criminals on Earth.” This means New York will still be recognizable to audiences, à la “I Am Legend“, rather than an entirely new Armageddon Island.

Much like in the original movie, the authorities have set up shop in the Statue of Liberty (though this time it’s not the police, it’s a private, KBR-like security company), and now new prisoners are being processed through Ellis Island. And more importantly, good ol’ Snake remains largely the same. Legally, he has to be. We learned that in order to land the rights, New Line had to sign a contract with John Carpenter stipulating, among other things, that Plissken “must be called ‘Snake’“; “must wear an eye patch”; and that he would — and we’re not making this up — “always be a bad-ass.”

Well of course he must! You go Carpenter!

Originally a serialized graphic novel, “Cowboys and Aliens” focuses on outer-space creatures who land in Arizona circa the mid-19th century intent on enslaving the local population until a group of cowboys and Apache Indians fight back.

Downey was set to play the gunslinger Zeke Jackson, who leads the anti-alien revolt. But scheduling issues forced a re-think. The project would have marked a third potential franchise a resurgent Downey would have been involved with, after “Iron Man” and “Sherlock Holmes,” which is expected to spawn a sequel.

While Downey has not committed to anything new (he will star in the Todd Phillips comedy “Due Date” opposite Zach Galifianakis, which has wrapped), his parting with “Cowboys” could re-ignite speculation that a “Sherlock” sequel is on the fast track. He also has been associated with the “Harvey” remake at DreamWorks (at least before Steven Spielberg opted out) but right now it’s a guessing game.

Variety

Although Cameron has never expressed interest in helming the pic (Roland Emmerich had been attached to the project before he set his sights on the apocalyptic “2012”) — which centers on a dying scientist whose only chance for survival rests with five colleagues who are miniaturized and injected into his bloodstream — he would employ the same pricey 3-D and digital technology on “Fantastic” that was used in “Avatar,” insiders say.

Fox will probably launch several pics in the coming years in an effort to amortize the millions invested in “Avatar’s” technology. Most likely a pair of new “Avatars” is already in the development queue. That’s right – sequels. What a shocker! Cameron talked up two potential sequels during a press conference before Thursday’s London premiere.

“When I pitched it to Fox, they said, ‘We’ve spent a lot of money creating all these assets, all these CG mountains, plants, trees, leaves, flowers, bugs’ — everything you saw up there on screen had been made by people at workstations over a period of years and so they have value,” said Cameron. “So in terms of the pitch it was: OK, you’ve spent a lot of money on the first one; on the second one we’ll be able to amortize it and focus on the story and all that … and they bought that.”

While Fox said the property clearly has sequel potential, the studio would not confirm any definitive plans on future “Avatar” installments.

The film is an adaptation of Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a man who befriends a six and a half foot tall invisible rabbit. Cool huh? The project has been a challenge to pull together since Spielberg committed to it last August. One of the biggest challenges has been setting a star to play Elwood P. Dowd, the character played by James Stewart in the 1950 film.

Spielberg’s first choice was Tom Hanks, but the actor who is often regarded as a modern day Stewart wanted no part of taking over a role played by the iconic star. Spielberg and Fox spent several months courting Robert Downey Jr. While the star didn’t commit, he made suggestions on rewrites of the Jonathan Tropper script. He and Spielberg never found themselves in creative sync on the script, and the director finally called the whole thing off. (Guys, can’t we all just get along?) Fox 2000 will continue working on “Harvey” and could re-approach Spielberg and Downey.

It wasn’t immediately clear which picture Spielberg will direct instead. I’m thinking “Indiana Jones V”… He completed production last March on “The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn,” and though he has been preoccupied godfathering projects like “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” Spielberg is certainly itching to direct a film again. I’m guessing Spielberg will be reading a lot of scripts over the holidays…

“So far, it’s been great, and I think that the fans who may have been underwhelmed by the last two AVP films, I think they’re in for a very pleasant surprise,” he told us tentatively when asked how it was going.

Since the movie’s title seemingly will include Robert Rodriguez’s name even though the Austin-based filmmaker isn’t directing, we were curious how involved Rodriguez was in the actual making of the movie. “Robert hired me, so obviously I’m very grateful for him giving me a shot. He is involved in the screenplay and we’ve had a lot of conversations, and any big decisions I want to make, I always speak to him about, but he’s been very gracious and he’s been letting me do my thing. He’s really let me perform and he’s let me dance, so again, I’m grateful to him for that.”

While Rodriguez has embraced doing things using CG animation, Antal has preferred the aesthetics of doing things practical and in-camera over the years, so we wondered whether they were able to find a happy balance there. “I think we both recognize that the original film was as good as it was because of the practical, because it was a guy in a suit, because it was the jungle, so we stay true to that. We were in Hawaii for a month in the jungle, so there’s going to be some pretty impressive locations.”

When asked about the somewhat eyebrow-raising casting, he answered: “I think when we cast Adrien Brody, there were a lot of people going, ‘What?’ but at the same time, if we cast a Vin Diesel in that role or if we cast anyone who is Arnold-esque, we would have been attacked for doing that. So we decided early on to go in a very different direction as far as the casting process, but it turned out fantastic. He plays a mercenary in the film and if you look at the guys in Iraq and Afghanistan today, they’re not ‘yolked-out’ Schwarzenegger-looking guys. They’re all very wiry and thin guys, and I think it’s going to play well.”

When asked whether Arnold Schwarzenegger himself might make an appearance, Antal remained coy, only saying, “Time will tell. We’ll see, but we are trying to stay with the original as far as the monster and the atmosphere and the tone of the film, but we are trying to do something new and contemporary and feels fresh.”

As far as I’m concerned it’s about the tone and the setting of the movie. Less CG and more hands on aesthetic sounds very promising. Schwarzenegger or no Schwarzenegger, I’m not sure that’s pivotal to the film. Just show some respect to McTiernan’s vision and you’ll be fine.

Anyway, Variety reports that the werewolf franchise “Howling” gets a re-launch next year. Indie producers Joel Kastelberg and Etchie Stroh are re-launching the werewolf franchise as “The Howling: Reborn.” Former studio marketing exec Joe Nimziki, who worked at New Line, MGM and Sony, will make his feature directorial debut from his own script.

The original “Howling,” directed by Joe Dante from a script by John Sayles, was released in 1981 and spawned six sequels. Dee Wallace-Stone starred as a news anchor stalked by a serial killer who turns out to be a werewolf. Steve Lane and Robert Pringle, who served as exec producers on the original, will also exec produce “The Howling: Reborn.”

The film starts shooting in February for a Halloween release, with plot details under wraps.