Sci-Fi Storm

BBC America has renewed Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency for a second season of 10 episodes, up from 8 episodes for the current season, which will air sometime in 2017.

According to BBC America President Sarah Barnett, “Outlandishly different, Dirk Gently has hit a sweet spot with BBCA fans/ With Elijah Wood and Samuel Barnett’s chemistry as oddball detective/sidekick duo, and our creators promising ever greater genius-weird cosmic mystery in the next case, we’re happy to announce more of this truly original and entertaining show.”

The show is based on the Dirk Gently novels from the late Douglas Adams, best known for the crazy Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series of novels, and follows the eccentric Holistic Detective Dirk Gently (Samuel Barnett) and his reluctant bellboy-turned-assistant Todd (Elijah Wood) as they try and unravel a strange mystery.

The Harry Potter spinoff film Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, expected to lead another run in the franchise with up to 5 films, handily won the weekend box office with a $75 million opening take domestically and over $218 million globally. But this may have been a tad below expectations given that it was a Harry Potter film, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 having done more than twice that at $169.2m, and the lowest opening of any of the films was $77.1m for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

We don’t know if this is a disappointment yet for Warner Bros, who might have been happier with a bigger haul, but this still seems respectable take and should insure the franchise moving forward. As fans get comfortable with the new characters and setting, I expect more heat to generate for the openings of future installments.

Quick editorial note – apologies for the broken links on social media…I had to switch methods due to API changes, and unbeknownst to be a combinations of plugins produced bad social media links. That’s all fixed now. I’m also getting my head above water again after being involved in a local theater production and attending Rhode Island Comic Con last weekend…

Deadpool 2 now has a new director in David Leitch, the former stuntman who directed 2014’s John Wick. He’s currently working on The Coldest City, starring Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman and Sofia Boutella. Original directory Tim Miller left the project after creative differences with star Ryan Reynolds.

The CW has elected not to pick up back-end orders for its two freshman shows Frequency and No Tomorrow. This is unusual as the CW has generally given back end orders to nearly all of its new series. While they aren’t necessarily dead yet, hopes are very minimal as the ratings were extremely low. However, under the deal with Netflix, the shows will be on the streaming provider 8 days after the finale ends, so if it does well there, there could be enough impetus to pick them up.

Syfy, with Paramount Television and Universal Cable Productions, is developing a series based on Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land, about a man born and raised on Mars who comes to Earth.

Here is the complete sneak peek from BBC’s Children In Need special for the upcoming Doctor Who Christmas Special, “The Return Of Doctor Mysterio”…can’t wait!

And give if you can…

This was our third year in a row attending Rhode Island Comic Con, which is easily the largest comic and media convention in New England, and likely second in the northeast U.S. behind New York Comic Con. Two years ago they outgrew their venue at the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence after scoring most of the surviving cast of the original Star Trek to headline the event. So they immediately planned to expand to to the Dunkin’ Donuts Center arena located next door and last year, but a new venue presented new challenges in how to organize all the dozens of celebrities, the hundreds of vendors and the thousands of fans, resulting in other issues with finding where some celebrities were and not enough space for the lines.

Now this year’s guest list – Stan Lee?!? You could probably fill a convention on just that. But add other hot guests like Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who had just proven himself as one of the meanest, craziest bat-wielding psychos on The Walking Dead, Millie Bobby Brown from Stranger Things, Gal Gadot who plays Wonder Woman…that’s filling up fast. And that’s just a few. How about Billy Dee Williams, Alice Cooper, Christian Slater, Summer Glau, Arthur Darvill, John Ratzenberger, Ric Flair…and I’m still only a fraction of the way through the list.

The convention opened on Friday, but due to other commitments we weren’t able to arrive until early Saturday. From all accounts, Friday went quite well. I was able to enter early and see the new setup, and the changes I saw made a lot of sense…more line space and corrals for guests in line for celebrity meets, better layout for vendors on the main floor, etc. The one gotcha – there is only one indoor path between the arena and convention center, via a narrow sky bridge, and due to crowd control and regulations they needed to make that a one-way corridor from the arena to the center. To get back to the arena for some of the headline guests and photo ops, you actually had to exit (and scan out your badge, so they had a better idea on the number of people inside) and walk back to the arena and enter via a special “re-entry” entrance.

I would never see the place that empty again. 🙂
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So that Inhumans movie that was announced for 2018? Not happening – at least, not exactly.

Marvel.com announced that The Inhumans will in fact be a TV series in ABC, starting in September 2017, which at least brings it a whole year sooner. But it WILL get a big screen treatment, in the form of the first two episodes debuting on IMAX screens late in the summer prior to the network run. The first two episodes will be filmed entirely with IMAX cameras to facilitate this.

The new project comes from Marvel Television and ABC Studios, and follows a race of superhumans with diverse and singularly unique powers, were first introduced in Marvel Comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1965. The Inhumans were already introduced in the cinematic universe in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D..

ABC, IMAX and Marvel Television also intend to work together to create a joint marketing and promotion plan for the series across their proprietary media platforms–which would be the first such cross-platform marketing launch of a television series. Today’s agreement also marks IMAX’s first time as a financing participant in a TV pilot and series.

“This first-of-its-kind multi-platform production, distribution and marketing agreement brings together Marvel Television’s unique brand of entertainment, ABC’s unparalleled audience and IMAX’s brand and global fanboy demographic,” said IMAX CEO, Rich Gelfond. “It also takes our decades-long relationship with The Walt Disney Company to a whole new level, jointly breaking new ground in the industry. We are confident our exhibition partners will be excited to work with us on this innovative launch of a series across the IMAX network.”

“We’re happy to see this unique deal come together, working with our partners,” said Dan Buckley, President, Marvel Television, Publishing & Brand. “In an ever-changing world of distribution and consumption, it’s very exciting to be part of a groundbreaking initiative that takes us to the forefront of this evolution.”

Syfy has announced the Season 2 premiere dates for both The Magicians and The Expanse, two of the most intriguing series from the channel in a while.

Season two of The Magicians will premiere on Wednesday, January 25 at 9/8c. Based on the bestselling novels from Lev Grossman, Syfy’s hit drama The Magicians centers on Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) and his 20-something friends as they discover their magical abilities at Brakebills University, a secret grad school specializing in magic. While there, they come to the realization that the fantasies they read about as children are all too real, and unwittingly invite a malevolent entity from the other side into their lives. Heading into Season 2, this group of unlikely heroes have been thrust into even more dangerous and unfamiliar territory, and must draw upon their novice skills to defeat a threat that could destroy the magical world itself. Driven by power, revenge and survival, they learn that those who entered the hauntingly beautiful world of Fillory will never be the same as those who leave.

Season two of The Expanse will begin with a double episode on Wednesday, February 1st at 10/9c. The story of The Expanse unfolds across a colonized galaxy 200 years in the future, when two strangers – a hardened detective, Joe Miller (Thomas Jane), and a rogue ship’s captain, James Holden (Steven Strait) – become unwittingly swept up in a vast conspiracy to cover up a horrific human experiment. As Season 2 kicks off with interplanetary tensions at an all-time high, the cold war between Earth and Mars is on the brink of an all-out battle. The series is based on the New York Times bestselling book series collectively known as “The Expanse,” written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (under the pen name James S. A. Corey).

[An earlier version of this article had The Expanse premiere on February 8th, but Syfy amended the premiere date after publishing]

Monty Python member, writer and director Terry Gilliam did a webchat for The Guardian on Monday, and as part of it, Gilliam mentioned an old favorite, Time Bandits, as well as another possible project:

“Yes I am! We are involved in two possibilities – one, a TV series based on Time Bandits, another based on a script by Richard LaGravanese and I wrote after Fisher King, called The Defective Detective. We’re currently adapting a two hour film into a six hour series. It’s about a middle aged New York cop who was once a hero who has grown fat and cynical and is in the middle of a breakdown, ending up in a child’s fantasy world where the rules of the mean streets of New York no longer apply. The best way to kill a dragon is no longer a gun, but a tree branch you think is a sword.”

Time Bandits was one of the films that played frequently on cable TV when we first got it, and I watched it frequently. It’s still one of my favorite films. It follows 11 year old Kevin (Craig Warnock), who suddenly finds himself on a journey through history with six dwarves who have stolen a map to all the time portals so they can travel through time and steal valuable items. Sean Connery, John Cleese, Shelley Duvall, Ian Holm, David Warner and more all appeared in the film.

The Dark Tower, the first film of the epic project from Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment, Sony Pictures and MRC, based on Stephen King’s series of post-apocalyptic fantasy novels, is getting the release date pushed back from February to June 28th, 2017. According to EW, this is to allow more time in post-production to complete the visual effects, but also will give then more time to market the film.

No official trailer has been released, while principle photography completed on schedule in July.

The film follows gunslinger Roland Deschain (Idris Elba) and the sorcerer known as the Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey) who are on a quest to reach the mystical tower that stands at the nexus of countless dimensions, in a post-apocaplyptic Earth.

The project is intended to be multiple films AND at least one TV miniseries, which is currently being developed for 10-13 episodes, although no outlet has been announced yet.

At last! The first official trailer to Wonder Woman! In theaters June 2nd, 2017