Sci-Fi Storm

Here is the first trailer for Ender’s Game, based on the book by Orson Scott Card and starring Asa Butterfield (Hugo) as a boy who finds he is being trained to fight off an alien invasion. The movie also stars Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley, Abigail Breslin and Viola Davis.

Can Warner Bros cast remove curse and break the spell that seems to dictate that a Dungeons & Dragons movie can’t be good? It appears they are ready to bet they can, as they acquired the movie rights to the venerable game franchise. And it appears they are moving forward quickly, looking to adapt a script already written by David Leslie Johnson (Wrath Of The Titans). Interestingly, that script was based not on D&D but it’s precursor, Chainmail, a miniatures game which Gary Gygax helped create first before teaming with Dave Arneson on D&D.

Roy Lee (The Woman In Black) will produce with Courtney Solomon, who produced the first two attempts at D&D movies, 2000’s Dungeons & Dragons and the 2005 direct-to-video sequel, Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God. The former was critically panned, while the latter took itself a bit more seriously, producing a moderate effort but nothing to appeal to non-D&D fans.

A third production, Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness, was released last year, appears unrelated to the first two, and I don’t know much about it.

Update 5/10: It appears there is already a snag…it seems Hasbro claims they own the rights, and are working with Universal. They do essentially own the game, as they own Wizards of the Coast, which bought TSR in 1997.

My prediction? Whether movie gets made by WB, Universal, or not at all…the lawyers will get richer.

This commercial for the 2013 Audi S7 is “fascinating”, and could have been the king of the Super Bowl ads – if it played during the Super Bowl…

Here we get the “old” Spock in Leonard Nimoy, competing against “new” Spock Zachary Quinto, with the younger trying to beat the older at something. So he challenges Nimoy – last person to the country club buys lunch.

Plenty of chuckles along the way…but listen for the infamous little ditty that Nimoy sings as he drives…

[Video was removed by source]

I just heard the sad news that visual effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen, who made stop-motion an art form that was used in many fantasy movies, passed away today in London at the age of 92. He is perhaps best known for the work on 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts and 1981’s Clash of the Titans.

From the official Facebook page:

Raymond Frederick Harryhausen
Born: Los Angeles 29th June 1920
Died: London 7th May 2013.

The Harryhausen family regret to announce the death of Ray Harryhausen, Visual Effects pioneer and stop-motion model animator. He was a multi-award winner which includes a special Oscar and BAFTA. Ray’s influence on today’s film makers was enormous, with luminaries; Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, John Landis and the UK’s own Nick Park have cited Harryhausen as being the man whose work inspired their own creations.

Harryhausen’s fascination with animated models began when he first saw Willis O’Brien’s creations in KING KONG with his boyhood friend, the author Ray Bradbury in 1933, and he made his first foray into filmmaking in 1935 with home-movies that featured his youthful attempts at model animation. Over the period of the next 46 years, he made some of the genres best known movies – MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949), IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955), 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957), MYSTERIUOUS ISLAND (1961), ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1966), THER VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969), three films based on the adventures of SINBAD and CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981). He is perhaps best remembered for his extraordinary animation of seven skeletons in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963) which took him three months to film.

Harryhausen’s genius was in being able to bring his models alive. Whether they were prehistoric dinosaurs or mythological creatures, in Ray’s hands they were no longer puppets but became instead characters in their own right, just as important as the actors they played against and in most cases even more so.

Today The Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation, a charitable Trust set up by Ray on the 10th April 1986, is devoted to the protection of Ray’s name and body of work as well as archiving, preserving and restoring Ray’s extensive Collection.

Tributes have been heaped upon Harryhausen for his work by his peers in recent years.

“Ray has been a great inspiration to us all in special visual industry. The art of his earlier films, which most of us grew up on, inspired us so much.” “Without Ray Harryhausen, there would likely have been no STAR WARS”
George Lucas.

“THE LORD OF THE RINGS is my ‘Ray Harryhausen movie’. Without his life-long love of his wondrous images and storytelling it would never have been made – not by me at least”
Peter Jackson

“In my mind he will always be the king of stop-motion animation”
Nick Park

“His legacy of course is in good hands
Because it’s carried in the DNA of so many film fans.”
Randy Cook

“You know I’m always saying to the guys that I work with now on computer graphics “do it like Ray Harryhausen”
Phil Tippett

“What we do now digitally with computers, Ray did digitally long before but without computers. Only with his digits.”
Terry Gilliam.

“His patience, his endurance have inspired so many of us.”
Peter Jackson

“Ray, your inspiration goes with us forever.”
Steven Spielberg

“I think all of us who are practioners in the arts of science fiction and fantasy movies now all feel that we’re standing on the shoulders of a giant.
If not for Ray’s contribution to the collective dreamscape, we wouldn’t be who we are.”
James Cameron

After having closed down LucasArts, who produced a lot of the games in the Star Wars universe along with others, Disney has signed an exclusive multi-year deal with EA to produce future Star Wars games, who will farm them out to its game studios.

This follows the “licensing model” that Disney announced when it closed LucasArts. LucasArts already did some licensing – including to EA, whose BioWare division produced the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic.

From the press release:

BURBANK and REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 6, 2013 — The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) and Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) today announced a new multi-year exclusive licensing agreement to develop and publish globally new games based on Star Wars characters and storylines.

Under the agreement, EA will develop and publish new Star Wars titles for a core gaming audience, spanning all interactive platforms and the most popular game genres, while Disney will retain certain rights to develop new titles within the mobile, social, tablet and online game categories.

“This agreement demonstrates our commitment to creating quality game experiences that drive the popularity of the Star Wars franchise for years to come,” said John Pleasants, Co-President of Disney Interactive. “Collaborating with one of the world’s premier game developers will allow us to bring an amazing portfolio of new Star Wars titles to our fans around the world.”

“Every developer dreams of creating games for the Star Wars universe,” said EA Labels President Frank Gibeau. “Three of our top studios will fulfill that dream, crafting epic adventures for Star Wars fans. DICE and Visceral will produce new games, joining the BioWare team which continues to develop for the Star Wars franchise. The new experiences we create may borrow from films, but the games will be entirely original with all new stories and gameplay.”

Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

I know we’ve all been wanted new Star Wars – quality Star Wars at least – but is Disney getting a little too crazy? Reports abound that Disney is planning to release a new Star Wars feature every year. Starting with Episode VII in 2015, and alternating with standalone efforts at least until the third trilogy is done.

Is this too aggressive? Could this flood the market, so to speak, and give too much supply for the demand?

I guess it’s better than betting everything on a single feature, and it does seem to explain how they’ve redirected pretty much every single resource available at Lucasfilm at the features at the expense of other projects like Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the games…

Just a month and a day away from the release of Star Trek: Into Darkness. Seriously, this James T. Kirk destroys the Enterprise in just his second stint? The old one at least got three seasons of episodes and two movies in before blowing it up himself… 🙂

Here is the first full trailer for the upcoming Hunger Games: Catching Fire, where you can get a full sense of the basic plot – Katniss has become a symbol to the Districts, and that is a dangerous thing.
(continue reading…)

Now we have an idea of what Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium is about, through the trailer you can watch below.

Elysium appears to be an orbital station, similar to a Ringworld/Halo construct, although in some scenes it looks open and others more like the old “wheel in space” space stations. On board live the rich elite, while those left on earth suffer in poverty on a devastated Earth…but it looks like the peace of Elysium won’t last long. Reminds me a bit of “The Cloud Minders” in Star Trek…

In another I’m-not-dead-yet production, Disney’s remake of it’s own 1980 critical failure The Black Hole, which we last caught wind of in 2009, is still a work in progress. Scribe Jon Spaihts, who wrote the pre-Lindelof script of Prometheus and is also attached to a remake of The Mummy, is now working on the script previously written by Travis Beacham (Clash of the Titans).

Joseph Kosinski (TRON Legacy and the upcoming Oblivion) is still attached to direct.