Extras! New Amazing Spider-Man 2 cast member may suck, HBO is changing the game again, Harry Potter cast filming a mini-movie and Deadpool could have looked even dumber in X-Men Origins! 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!

There’s a lot that was wrong with X-Men Origins: Wolverine, from the CGI that looks like it was done in MS Paint, to the… Well, actually pretty much everything from the moment Taylor Kitsch’s Gambit shows up on screen. But the worst of the lot has to be the final reveal that Ryan Reynold’s mutant merc with a mouth, has been turned into some weird, mute, teleporting, eye-beaming test tube baby. It was just a ridiculous incarnation of a fan favourite character, and while watching it I remember thinking “C’mon! Surely they could have come up with something better than this?!” But apparently, no, they couldn’t.

This new video has popped up online, giving a quick rundown of all the various designs that were considered for Deadpool, and with the exception of one or two that are decent, the rest is just one massive slideshow of WTF.

And yeah, I also thought that looked like ex-UFC fighter Tito Ortiz at 0:20.

Did you know that while still in development, The Lord of the Rings trilogy came very close to actually being taken away from Peter Jackson and instead being made as a single film by Shakespeare In Love director John Madden? Luckily for us film fans though, Peter Jackson knows how to lie his way out of a jam.

Spinoff Online is asking Do We Really Need To See Norman Osborn In Amazing Spider-Man 2? “No!”, I shout back emphatically.

Know who we might see in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 though? None other than the bloodsucking Morbius. That’s if actor Asim Ahmad is to be believed. The actor tweeted that he got the part of Michael Morbius, who in the comics was an award winning scientist who turns himself into a vampire like creature when an experiment using Electro-shock therapy and bats (who does that?) to cure him of a rare blood disease goes awry. But before you get too excited, the actor also states that “Morbius is only mentioned in two pages, not a big part,” which means that either it’s just a fan service cameo, or Marc Webb and co are setting up for something bigger down the line.

Now while I thought that The Amazing Spider-Man had some major improvements over the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire trilogy, I did find a few flaws. But apparently I need to learn to stop munching on popcorn and start paying attention, as there were more than just a few mistakes. 53 mistakes, to be exact. How do I know that? Because CinemaSins went and made a video showing all of them.

Consider those nits well and truly picked.

X-Files alum Gillian Anderson will be trying to get inside the mind of the man who has a hobby of getting inside people’s minds. With a scalpel and a spoon, that is. Anderson has joined the cast of Hannibal, the new NBC drama series based on the early, pre-serial killer days of Richard Harris’ literary character, Hannibal Lecter, most famously portrayed on screen of course by Sir Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs.

If you’ve never seen Game Change, the Emmy Award winning HBO movie about Sarah Palin’s failed campaign as John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 US Presidential Elections, you’ve done yourself a horrible disservice. Not only great filmmaking, but quite the eye-opener on some behind the scenes antics made Game Change one of my favourite films of the year. And now HBO is looking to have lightning strike twice, as they are planning a new movie focused on the 2012 Presidential Elections between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The new film will be based on the novel “Double Down: Game Change 2012” from Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, the journalist duo who also wrote the book that Game Change was based.

Hold on to your butterbeers, folks! There’s another Harry Potter movie in the works!……………………………… And now that you’ve had enough time to lose your mind, let me bring you right back down to planet Reality. While the cast of the blockbusting magical franchise are indeed recording brand new footage right now, it will be for a mini-movie that will screen exclusively at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park at Universal Studios in Florida, California, and Japan.

As to what the movie will be about, well if you’re hoping to see the adventures of older, married Harry, well then you might be disappointed again as Helena Bonham Carter has also been cast, and since her character Bellatrix Lestrange passed away in the final film, this mini-movie will probably be set before that.

Here are stars Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Tom Felton as well as Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling checking out the new theme park.

Michael Bay’s Transformers 4 has found it’s two young leads, and amazingly neither of them have toes for thumbs or are in the habit of running around like a rabbit on E. The Last Airbender‘s Nicola Peltz has been cast as Mark Wahlberg’s daughter and Brenton Thwaites, who will soon be seen in the upcoming re-imagined fairytale Malificent, will be playing biker boyfriend.

Seeing as how the original Transformers launched the careers of Shia Lebeouf and Megan Fox straight into the stratosphere, it might be worth your while to take note of their names.

The nominees for the first of the big movie awards, the Screen Actor’s Guild Awards, are in and there’s some serious snubbery afoot. And no that’s not a spelling mistake. While there are plenty of expected nods like Daniel Day-Lewis for Lincoln and Anne Hathaway for Les Miserables, there are also a few rather surprising choices. Firm favourites like Amour‘s Emmanuelle Riva, and Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams, both of whose performances in The Master drew rave reviews all round, are nowhere to be seen, while Nicole Kidman instead gets a nod for The Paperboy. Which just proves that being willing to pee on man for real will always get you noticed.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey released locally yesterday, and despite a bit of a meh reception by critics, the film seems to be appeasing most fans. This should greatly please Leonard Nimoy. Why Leonard Nimoy, you ask? Well clearly the veteran Star Trek actor has an unrivaled love of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. Why else would he be willing to unleash this on the world?

Last Updated: December 13, 2012