Sci-Fi Storm

Check it out…the official trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man 3D!

Another Super Bowl treat was the next trailer for Peter Berg’s Battleship – looks like it is going to be a fast-paced military battle movie with some wild special effects. Inspired by Hasbro’s classic naval combat game and starring Taylor Kitsch, Brooklyn Decker, Alexander Skarsgård, Rihanna, Asano Tadanobu, and Liam Neeson, Battleship hits theaters on May 18, 2012.
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This May an all new ride at Universal Studios Hollywood will open up: Transformers: The Ride 3D, a 3D attraction themed around the Transformers movie franchise and even director Michael Bay collaborated on the original version that opened in Universal Studios Singapore.

For those that watched the Super Bowl, and stayed watching during the commercials, caught an interesting ad, that looked an awful lot like a live broadcast…
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A new trailer for The Hunger Games was released today, which you can see below – but also with just 50 days left until release, Lionsgate is celebrating by offering tickets to the premiere in LA – but through 50 different web sites, and you have to find them on Twitter! Search for hash tag #HungerGames50 to located the sites and enter!
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Prepare to have your hopes dashed…that rumored reunion of the surviving Monty Python cast for a SF comedy might not be real – at least according to Eric Idle, the only one that supposedly hadn’t signed on yet.

On Idle’s blog, the comedian said: “And by the way these Python reunion rumors are just bollocks. Some greedy bastard producer in Hollywood floating an idea. It’s annoying but there seems little we can do about this sort of thing, except to release his name for public abuse, which I am reluctant to do as he is a soccer fan. So watch it or you will be outed as a twat dear…”

Is he joking? Angling for more money? Still mad at the reaction to Spamalot by some of his Python pals? Or was it just someone floating an idea and claiming people were signed when they weren’t? No idea…but I still want to see SOME sort of reunion…

Here it is – the extended version of this year’s Volkswagen Super Bowl commercial…it may look like any other commercial, but keep watching – there’s something more than just a nod to last year’s ad, called “The Force”. The 60-econd version will air during the second quarter…

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An interesting 24 hours in the “games to screen” craze…it seems that Universal has been second-guessing its idea to bring a lot of Hasbro games to the big screen. Although Battleship is starting to generate heat, the studio has dropped plans for several others by placing them in turnaround (where other studios can pick them up), like Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering.

Stretch Armstrong has apparently landed on that list. It originally had Taylor Lautner (Twlight saga) attached to star, but Universal put it in to turnaround where it was picked up by Relativity Media – but now Lautner is out. Lautner’s people say it was their decision, but it also seems that the studio may not see Lautner as having enough draw.

Another former Universal/Hasbro project, Candy Land, was also placed in turnaround, and currently Columbia Pictures/Sony is in talks to develop the movie, with Ben Stiller (Bedtime Stories) set to star and possibly co-write the screenplay with Robert Smigel (Saturday Night Live) and directed by Kevin Lima (Enchanted).

Lockout, in theaters on April 20th, 2012, follows a falsely convicted ex- government agent (Guy Pearce, Memento, The Hurt Locker), whose one chance at obtaining freedom lies in the dangerous mission of rescuing the President’s daughter (Maggie Grace, Taken, Lost) from rioting convicts at an outer space maximum security prison.

Lockout also stars Peter Stormare (Armageddon, How I Spent My Summer Vacation), and is directed by James Mather and Stephen St. Leger.
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There are some things that seem to go together, one one seems to be that SF fans are also fans of Monty Python, and can recite any scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail spot on…I’ve even been explaining to my kids how if a woman weighs as much as a duck, she’s made of wood, and therefore a witch…ahem. So no wonder I got giddy when I heard about Absolutely Anything, a SF farce comedy being directed by former Python Terry Jones, who also directed Life of Brian and co-directed Grail, and already has John Cleese, Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin signed up – Eric Idle is in negotiations – potentially bringing the five surviving members of Monty Python together again (the sixth member, Graham Chapman, passed away in 1989 from cancer). Add in the voice of Robin Williams and just sit back and laugh…

The story, being developed by Jones and Gavin Scott (The Mists of Avalon, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles) and combining CG and live action, is about a group of aliens (voiced by the Pythons) who grant the power to do anything to a human – and watch how he screws up everything. Williams will add his voice as a talking dog named Dennis, and they are hoping to use him in a live role as well.

Well, it wasn’t the greatest news for genre features this year, despite a lot of hopes…if you followed the nominations (or my tweets), you know that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 got the snub for Best Picture despite the 10-film field (the closest to a genre film was Hugo), while the Academy again shows they don’t know how to deal with motion-capture performances and ignored Andy Serkis yet again for his work in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. But what did garner nominations?
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