Extras! Russel Brand checks out Pierre Pierre, Another Hobbit name, Jon Favreau wanted a smaller John Carter, Ralph Wrecks the Olympics, Vince Vaughn joins The Brady Bunch and How Prometheus should have ended! Plus much more!

Welcome to The Extras! A daily dose of all the smaller movie related news, clips and just plain cool stuff that you might have missed!

My recent personal brand of crack is the Olympics. I’m going to bed in the early hours of the morning watching random sports I would never even give a second thought to (Why do I suddenly find showjumping riveting? It’s just horses. Jumping!). And it seems that even Disney has gone just as Olympics crazy as I have, as they’ve released this new Olympic-themed TV spot for upcoming animated film Wreck-it Ralph.

According to The One Ring, we may just have another contender for the title of the recently announced third Hobbit film. Along with the previously discovered  Riddles in the Dark and The Desolation of Smaug, we now also have The Battle of Five Armies popping up as a registered domain. If were up to me, I’d give the newcomer the gold. Yes, that’s another Olympics reference.

I can completely understand if your brain was reduced to having the computational power of a moist sponge after viewing the first full Skyfall trailer, so you might just have missed out on a few things. No fear though, as The Guardian has a nice (and pretty funny) write-up on What The Skyfall Trailer Reveals About the New Bond.

You might recall that when The Matrix first hit the scene, it was promoted as the creation of the Wachowski Brothers. Since then though, things haven’t been quite so “brotherly” as Larry Wachowski eventually went under the knife to become Lana Wachowski. Since the operation though, she has been avoiding the spotlight, much to the tabloids’ ire. But now she’s made a very rare onscreen appearance alongside her brother Andy, and director Tom Wyker to introduce their latest epic, Cloud Atlas.

Looks like Marc Webb may only be returning to helm a second Spider-Man film for Sony, if he does a second film for FOX. Yes, you read that right.

In a move that makes about as much sense as the rules to fencing (Priority? Ripostes? Let me just stab people’s livers!), Vince Vaughn will serve as executive producer on a new modern remake of classic American sitcom The Brady Bunch for CBS.

We normally don’t do comic strips around here, but this is just too good to not share.

A copy of Margaret Mitchell’s 1938 novel Gone With the Wind, signed by the entire cast, including stars Clark Gable and Vivienne Leigh, and some of the crew of the 1939 film adaptation, has been sold at an auction for $135,300. Apparently, somebody actually did give a damn.

When you’re the most successful and richest author of all time, and your two children want a playhouse, you don’t muck about. Harry Potter creator JK Rowling is apparently building a Hogwarts inspired playhouse for her kids that cost an estimated $236,000, and is so large that it required planning permission from the City of Edinburgh council.

No, this is not that new Synchronized Head Banging event you’ve heard about at the Olympics, this is actually the first official image for new horror film, The Possession.

Russell Brand is looking to replace Jim Carrey in the lead role of the raunchy comedy Pierre Pierre. If he takes the role, Brand will play an obnoxious Frenchman who has to transport a stolen painting from Paris to London. Russel Brand playing an obnoxious person? How ever will he pull that off?

Did you know that before becoming part of the geek elite with 2008’s Iron Man, director Jon Favreau was also looking at adapting John Carter of Mars? But unlike Andrew Stanton’s version, which was released earlier this year, Favreau would have kept things much smaller in scope.

“I probably wouldn’t have been as ambitious. I think both of us really appreciated the source material. Stanton started to weave in elements from the later books. I probably would’ve told a smaller story.

As we were developing the script it was much more the experience of John Carter being found in this new world and him coming up in a Man Called Horse kind of way among the Tharks and then opening up the world slowly.”

Stanton’s film eventually ended up dividing audiences (I found myself on the “loving it” side of the spectrum), so do you think Favreau could have done it better?

Matt Damon and Michael Douglas are almost unrecognizable in their retro chic looks in this first image from Steven Soderbergh’s Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra. Damon will play Scott Thomson, the young lover of Douglas’ Liberace.

If you recall, we had a couple teensy weenie little problems with the last act of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. We apparently weren’t alone in this sentiment, with half the internet intent on destroying their keyboards as they vented their nerd rage.

Now voicing their opinion are the guys from How It Should Have Ended, and they’ve come up with a pretty nice wrap-up to Scott’s film.

Last Updated: August 1, 2012