Home Entertainment Extras! Jon Snow heats up Pompeii, Steve Carrell catches a nose, Edgar Wright talks Ultron, What happened to Riddick's Underverse, Why Battleship sank, and The Ghost of Princess Di approves a movie? Plus much more!

Extras! Jon Snow heats up Pompeii, Steve Carrell catches a nose, Edgar Wright talks Ultron, What happened to Riddick's Underverse, Why Battleship sank, and The Ghost of Princess Di approves a movie? Plus much more!

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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!

It doesn’t matter whether or not you think JJ Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness isn’t really a Star Trek movie, or even that it’s the worst Star Trek movie ever, the inarguable fact remains that it sure was purdy. And now you can get a glimpse of how some some of that visual wizardry was performed in this new Behind The Scenes featurette.

So we’ve heard from the Gingerus Geekasaurus Rex, Joss Whedon, on why the villainous Ultron is showing up in his Avengers sequel first, instead of in Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man (which tells the story of Hank Pym, the guy who – in the comics – kind of invented Ultron), but how we about hear from the man himself? No, I don’t mean we’re talking to Ultron! Let’s hear from Edgar Wright!

“It was never in my script. Because even just to sort of set up what Ant-Man does is enough for one movie. It’s why I think “Iron Man” is extremely successful because it keeps it really simple. You have one sort of — the villain comes from the hero’s technology. It’s simple. So I think why that film really works and why, sometimes, superhero films fail — or they have mixed results — because they have to set up a hero and a villain at the same time. And that’s really tough. And sometimes it’s unbalanced.”

1984 Private Defense Contractors – which is easily the greatest named production company. Ever. –  has apparently picked up a pitch from director Alexandre Moors and screenwriter Ronnie Porto called Cannibal. If those names seem familiar, it’s because we featured a rather great trailer of their debut effort, Blue Caprice, just the other day. The duo will be seriously changing gears from that true story of the 2002 Washington sniper attacks though, as Cannibal is described as “a surreal crime thriller set in the world of illegal organ trading.” Lovely.

As we get told week after week of Game of Thrones, Jon Snow knows nothing. But apparently that’s not completely true, as it sure as hell looks like he knows how to get buff. This first pic has popped up of Kit Harrington in Paul W.S. Anderson’ disaster movie/love story Pompeii, and show’s “Snow” dressed in essentially a sleeve, flexing some serious muscle.

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Harrington, who in the film plays a man taken from his home and forced to become a gladiator who falls in love with Emily Browning’s character right around the time that the infamous Mt Vesuvius erupts and destroys the Italian city of Pompeii (which should make movie date night a bit difficult), revealed though that he always be this scantily clad in the film. Sorry ladies. Sorry Darryn.

“This is the first scene you see me in. It’s set in London, in fact, and it’s a scene where my character is a gladiator fighting in an arena. That’s his gladiator look. “It’s a great little fight against three masked gladiators and sets up who he is and where he’s going. You see me display my skills quite early on. [But] it’s a costume I don’t actually wear for the rest of the film, but it’s an establishing one.”

Peter Berg knows he screwed up with Battleship, and he apparently even knows how he screwed up: Trying to make this crazy big blockbuster where he spent most of the film’s $209 million budget on expensive VFX instead of a big name star.

“I felt I had a new understanding of what went into making a blockbuster [after the $625 million hit Hancock]. I got a taste of a film’s global power. But I discounted the effect of Will Smith on Hancock‘s success. I thought I could pull off Battleship without a big star.”

Yeah, sorry to break it to you, Berg, but a lack of a big name is not what made Battleship tank. Leap-frogging alien ships piloted by ET’s dressed in Tony Stark’s hand-me-downs fighting against ludicrously old ships operated by more ludicrously old crew is what made Battleship tank.

You know how we’re always complaining about bad and unnecessary movie sequels? Well, today is apparently nothing compared to 20 years ago in 1983, which according to this very strong case from AV Club was the worst year for movie sequels ever. Ever.

Dwayne Johnson has been tweeting up a storm on the set of Brett Ratner’s Hercules, but for once instead of showing us pics of his inhumanly gigantic limbs, he’s showing us some pics of the film’s gigantic set itself.

“The most amazing set I’ve ever stepped foot on. Honored to play this role.”

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While I know it wasn’t to some people’s tastes, I kind of really dug Chronicles of Riddick‘s epic sci-fi feel. The mythos that writer/director David Twohy and star Vin Diesel built really appealed to me. With the new film, Riddick, though, things will be going to the more smaller scaled story of the first film, Pitch Black. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve forgotten all that that sci-fi necromonger gobbledygook they dreamt up, as Twohy explains.

“At its core [RIDDICK] is a survival story about one man, and his only way to get off this planet is to call in the mercenaries for a ride. That said, we don’t turn our backs on the mythology that we planted in the last movie, and we are actually bringing Karl [Urban] back for a  few days of filming to advance it and lay the groundwork for movie four. We’re concerned with paying off the loyal fans and think that if somebody doesn’t understand something the solution is to look at the other two movies and get up to speed. It does play in a gratifying way as a standalone movie, but there are threads that we continue to sew that we started in previous movies and will continue in future movies.”

Diesel also went on to explain that Chronicles was supposed to be the start of a trilogy/quadrology, with “Pitch Black as The Hobbit to The Lord Of The Rings,” and that they have already planned fourth and fifth Riddick movies – if they get to make them – that will be getting back to those tantalizing plot threads left dangling in Chronicles.

“You’ve got to go to the Underverse. t’s expected, it’s something I firmly believe. You’ll have to go through the Underverse to get to Furya. So, those are the two further stories that are mapped out. The Underverse is a much more costly venture. We went this direction, trying to do an R-rated movie, which is cool and even more interesting because it’s so unexpected. But yes, you will be at the Underverse and you will be at Furya sooner or later.”

In case you were wondering who the schnoz in the tracksuit was in the pic below, that’s actually our first look at Steve Carell in full prosthetics to make him resemble convicted murderer John DuPont. The pic is from Bennett “Moneyball” Miller’s upcoming true-life drama Foxcatcher, which tells the story of how wealthy heir DuPont befriended Olympic wrestler brothers Mark (Channing Tatum) and David Schultz (Mark Ruffalo) before murdering David in 1996.

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Director Bennett Miller, spoke about how you shouldn’t feel bad if you didn’t recognize Carell at first, because apparently nobody did. He also explained why he chose Carell for the role instead of somebody who already resembled DuPont.

“We just had our first test [screening], and not everybody recognized Steve. He is aged [for the film], and his face is changed, and his physicality changed.”

“If I say I’m going to make a movie about a guy who’s a schizophrenic murderer, there are probably a dozen actors who would immediately appear on anybody’s casting list. And Steve would not be on any of those lists. And that’s a good thing. Because it’s unexpected… John DuPont was a character who nobody thought was capable of doing something as horrible as he did. And I did not want to cast somebody who would feel dangerous in that way.”

According to the rumours, Charlie Hunnam is now Universal Pictures’ latest favourite to play the role of Christian Grey in “mommy porn” adaptation Fifty Shades of Grey. So from Pacific Rim to possibly Pacific Rimjob? This material just writes itself.

According to Naomi Watts, Princess Diana of Wales gave her blessing for the Oscar nominated actress to portray her onscreen in the upcoming biopic. Now there’s just one slight problem with that statement: Princess Diana has been dead for 16 years already. That apparently hasn’t stopped Watts though.

“There were definitely moments when I felt Diana’s presence – I dreamed about her a lot, too, and that’s a first. I kept wondering to myself: ‘Would she have liked it? So I found myself constantly asking for her permission to carry on. I had saturated myself with Diana and her life and I felt this enormous responsibility of playing this iconic woman. It felt like I was spending a lot of time with her. There was one particular moment when I felt her permission was granted. That won’t sound right in print, I know.”

Despite his company’s popularity and legacy, there are some who consider Steve Jobs to be a villain. A supervillain, in fact. These people – and probably the rest of you as well – will thus take great joy in this new mashup of the trailers for Despicable Me 2 and Ashton Kutcher’s Steve Jobs biopic Jobs.

Last Updated: August 21, 2013

3 Comments

  1. Not sure I’d like to be on the same set as Watts… Sounds mental.

    Reply

    • Alien Emperor Trevor

      August 22, 2013 at 08:29

      Someone should tell her it doesn’t sound right at all, never mind in print, and that there’s medication for her condition.

      Reply

      • RinceThisandbeAbsurd

        August 22, 2013 at 09:10

        I know hey! 0-O

        Reply

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