(”Stop. Hammer time.”)
Good news, everyone: I wrote a humorous headline. Also, Steven Spielberg and Will Smith’s planned remake of Park Chan-Wook’s Old Boy (actually, if you want to get technical, it was supposed to be a separate adaptation of the original Old Boy manga) is dead. Latino Review reports that it was killed when Dreamworks couldn’t come to a deal with Mandate pictures.
So now if you want to see Old Boy, you’ll just have to watch Old Boy. And to get your fill of Will, you’ll have to satisfy yourself with his remake of Karate Kid, Flowers for Algernon, I Am Legend 2, Hancock 2, Men in Black 3, Bad Boys 3, that street magician movie, the Hurricane Katrina movie, and God knows what else. Will Smith is basically the Michael Jordan of acting, in that no one knows his actual personality, which as it turns out is really good for business. That’s why publicists coach actors and athletes to answer all questions with variations on the same clichés. That, and Tom Cruise is a succubus. It’s true, I read it in Science Magazine.
(Poor Will, nobody told him he didn’t win anything.)
A Hollywood actor is poised to go full retard, and this time, the blackface won’t be necessary.
According to our inside source, The Hollywood Cog, Smith is set to produce and star in Flowers for Algernon, a modern-day adaptation of the Daniel Keyes’ novel.
Flowers for Algernon has been adapted several times since it was originally published in 1959, most famously Ralph Nelson’s Charly, which won Cliff Robertson an Academy Award in 1969. The short story (and the subsequent novel) is about Charlie, a mentally retarded man who is the first human test subject for an experimental surgery that artificially increases intelligence. The experiment had already been performed successfully on Algernon, a lab mouse. Charlie’s newfound intelligence (his IQ skyrockets from 68 to 185), however, comes at the cost of his ability to socialize normally, as he becomes increasingly alienated from those around him. Emotional consequences are involved when Charlie learns the truth of the experiment. [Pajiba]
A guy alienates everyone he works after he suddenly becomes smart? Sounds like a metaphor for the movie business. Seriously, I tried to recommend a book to Jerry Bruckheimer one time, and he just shrieked like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and threw his poop at me.
(MIB was a groundbreaking comedy that took the novel approach of teaming a white cop with a black cop.)
Yep, Sony’s going forward with Men in Black 3. From Hollywood Reporter:
“Tropic Thunder” writer Etan Cohen is penning the script, and Barry Sonnenfeld, who helmed the first two films, is said to be attached to the new installment, though there is no formal deal or offer as yet.
I love it when journalists use a phrase like “is said”. What, who says? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to find out? “Legend has it, Old McConnagle’s ghost is said to haunt the old mill to this day.” Great work.
The X-factor remains Will Smith. The A-lister, who starred with Tommy Lee Jones in the first two, has not committed to the pic, though in recent days the buzz in development circles has been that he is now interested in returning. Smith does not currently have a go movie lined up.Tommy Lee Jones’ involvement is uncertain.
They better hope Will Smith is involved, because without him, you have a follow-up to a movie no one liked (not the first one, the first one was good) from a forgotten franchise, to possibly be directed by the guy whose last movie was RV. But if they need to recast Edgar, the man possessed by a giant bug, I know one guy who’d be perfect:
(Welcome to Earff! You’re under arrest.)
Good news, folks, Columbia pictures just put Bad Boys 3 into development. The only real question is whether Martin Lawrence is too big of a star since the grand slam of Big Momma’s House 2, Wild Hogs, College Road Trip, and Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins.
Columbia Pictures is developing a third installment of the high-octane “Bad Boys” franchise, tapping Peter Craig [Sally Field's son - really] to pen the screenplay.
The hope is to have a script that would reunite director Michael Bay, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. At this point, with the project in the early stages, none has a deal to return. The “Boys” movies feature Smith and Lawrence as Miami detectives Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett, caught up in cases involving car chases and explosions. [THR]
“Captain? We’ve received word that some terrorists are planning to take over the esplanade. The case could get… explosive. And we’ll need someone with… car chase experience. But who? Ever since we started the Connecticut program, our only recruits are wannabe desk jockeys and snot-nosed pencil pushers.”
FirstShowing interviewed the writers of Zombieland, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. One of the projects they are trying to get greenlit is Earth vs. Moon, “a big, epic, sci-fi war movie”. They say the script was inspired by a Stephen Hawking speech about the need to colonize space as a back-up plan for humanity.
Wernick describes it as a “hardcore, 300-style [Ed.- so hot right now *cuts self*] movie with some comic relief to it, but about the Earth and a colony on the moon essentially in a civil war.”
Reese explains that it’s “set about 300 or 400 years in the future [....] It’s about two societies at war, but it’s also about a family, not at war, but a fractured family. Half of them have gone to the moon and the other half are still on Earth and so they are on opposite sides of this conflict and we wanted to make sure that as big of movie as it’s going to be, it works on a small level.”
