Extras! Joss Whedon saves the Dark World, Frasier is expendable, Agent Carter infiltrates TV, Universal makes a lot of money, Sherlock is an imitation, and Everything you know about Star Trek Into Darkness is wrong?! 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!

Biggest movie surprise of the year for me thus far? Easily World War Z. Based on the insane amount of production trouble it had, I honestly just expected it be 9o minutes of a guy who kinda looks like Brad Pitt punching a smelly homeless man wearing a mo-cap suit in the face in the parking lot behind Paramount Studios. Instead it went onto not only be an decent-ish movie (despite having zero in common with it’s literary source), but also made a crap load of money. And when something is that successful, there’s only one to do: tear it apart. Enter stage left, Honest Trailers.

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP!!!!

Speaking of movies making lots of money… After counting their last shilling from the weekend’s take, Universal officially crossed the $2 billion mark in total annual revenue for the very first time in their 101 year history. They mostly had Vin Diesel driving really fast and some yellow minions to thank for that Scrooge McDuck payday.

Kelsey Grammer has joined the cast of  The Expendables 3, because why not?. He’s been tapped to play “Bonaparte, an ex-mercenary who helps the Expendables in their mission,” a role that was actually initially intended for Nicolas Cage, until somebody realized that Nicolas Cage is a f@#$ing nutjob. Probably.

Contrary to popular belief, the soundtrack to Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity actually consists of more than just people chewing their fingernails to the quick. Steven Price has put together a haunting symphony to accompany the tense thriller, which he describes below, but if you don’t believe his words, then you can listen to the soundtrack in its entirety below that.

“Alfonso was always very determined that the soundtrack be immersive. As you sit in the theatre, the score literally moves around you and seeks to complement the weightless movement of the outer space visuals. We want you to feel within the experience. In order to achieve this, we recorded separately a wide range of elements, including glass harmonicas, voices, and string and brass sections of various sizes so as to allow a lot of freedom in both movement and also post-recording processing. Elements come and go, pulsate and transform, and follow the movements onscreen in a way that will hopefully add to the total cinematic experience of Gravity.”

The world is one week away from Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD debuting on ABC (a Joss Whedon show on TV again, all is right with the world!) but already Marvel are making plans for their next phase of domination on the ol’ boob tube. They’re busy readying a series based on the Agent Carter One-Shot that will be released on the Iron Man 3 blu ray on September 24. The short film sees Hayley Atwell reprise her as role as Secret Agent Peggy Carter, one year after the events of Captain America: The First Avenger. It’s uncertain whether Atwell would still play the character in the TV series or if it will still be set in the 1940’s.

Many people disagree about many things about Star Trek Into Darkness. One thing we can all agree on though, is that the crew of the Enterprise are the good guys, right? WRONG! Just ask Peter Weller, who portrayed “bad guy” Captain Marcus, as he has some very different ideas on who was really wearing the black hat.

“Everything Marcus says in the film is true, which people forget. People go, ‘Bad guy! Bad guy!’ But why is he a bad guy? Everything he says is true: The Klingons are coming, they do need Khan, and that’s that. It’s just that he’s going to sacrifice the entire Enterprise to get the job done, because the Enterprise started to believe Khan. But if the Enterprise had not believed Khan and had done what Marcus said, then there’d be no movie, and everything would be cool.”

“The Enterprise wakes the dude up and listens to his game, and then everything goes to crap. But that’s the Enterprise’s hubris. That’s them. They screwed up, not Marcus.”

Damn you, 8-bit Cinema! You guys are too awesome! Now, all I want is a Dark Knight videogame on my old SNES!

Seems that anything EA can do, Ubisoft can do… as well, kind of sorta? News broke earlier today that Evil Dead director Fede Alvarez would be helming Universal’s adaptation of EA’s Dante’s Inferno videogame, and now Ubisoft have an announcement of their own, being the Michael Bay produced Ghost Recon adaptation has found its writers in Matthew Federman and Stephen Scaia. No, I don’t know them either. Apparently they produced the Charlie’s Angels TV show, penned a script for Zorro reboot for Sony, and are currently working on the screenplay adaptation of acclaimed comic ‘Y: The Last Man’.

Looks like 2015 is getting more survivable every week. After moving the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie back a year, Disney has done some more schedule shuffling with Pixar’s Finding Nemo sequel, Finding Dory, being pushed back from  November 25, 2015 to June 17, 2016. Another Pixar movie, The Good Dinosaur, will now also get pushed back from May 30, 2014 to November 25, 2015, making 2014 the very first year since 2005 without a Pixar release.

Here’s our first look at Benedict Cumberbatch on the set of The Imitation Game, the upcoming film about how acclaimed mathematician and father of computer science Alan Turing helped turn around WWII by helping to crack the German’s codes. Yep, that is definitely the haircut and suit of a mathematician.

Everybody needs to start somewhere, right? For example, Darryn started off here as just a lowly office monkey, making everybody’s tea and coffee. And today, after working himself up through the ranks, he’s a lowly office monkey, only making everybody’s coffee! Whoop whoop, look out Richard Branson!

The point of this colourful anecdote is that even the biggest stars in Hollywood had to get their big break somewhere, and you can learn all about some of them in Pajiba’s list of 10 Little Seen Movies That Launched the Feature Film Careers of 10 of Today’s Best Actors.

“When there’s something straaaaaange…. in your scripting-hooooood. Who you gonna call? Joss Whedon!”  Thor: The Dark World director Alan Taylor has revealed that when they ran into a bit of a creative snag on a few of the film’s scenes, they had to call in the help of The Avengers writer/director and Marvel Creative Consultant, to great success.

“Joss came in to save our lives a couple of times.We had a major scene that was not working on the page at all in London, and he basically got airlifted in, like a SWAT team or something. He came down, rewrote the scene, and before he got back to his plane I sort of grabbed him and said, ‘And this scene and this scene?’ And he rewrote two other scenes that I thought had problems. Then finally we let go of him, he took off again, and we shot the scenes; and they were just much better and much lighter on their feet. Much more fun, much more surprising than what we had been trying to do.”

Now that’s how you handle your business: Like a Joss!

Statistics have proven that approximately 78% are reading this post while playing recently released videogame monster hit Grand Theft Auto V. It’s undoubtedly the biggest thing in entertainment news right now, with the game having the second largest budget of any form of entertainment media (only pipped at the post by Pirates of the Caribbean 3′s $300 million budget), and it making an estimated $800 million on day-one sales alone.

So naturally it’s only a matter of time before somebody makes a really disappointing movie out of it, that upsets fans and bombs at the box office. If they want to avoid that fate, they may want to take some pointers from the folks over at Gritty Reboots, who dreamed up this awesome clip for a live action GTA movie called Grand Theft Auto V: Lucid, which takes a look at the “connected experience between three main characters: Michael, Trevor, and Franklin.”

Last Updated: September 19, 2013