Home Entertainment Extras! The Fifth Estate is the first failure, Ant-Man can't go to London, Why World War Z's ending was changed, Spider-Man vs the Sinister Three, and Doctor Who's bank balance is bigger on the inside! Plus much more!

Extras! The Fifth Estate is the first failure, Ant-Man can't go to London, Why World War Z's ending was changed, Spider-Man vs the Sinister Three, and Doctor Who's bank balance is bigger on the inside! 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!

As is the tradition around here, we like to show you the Japanese versions of trailer, because everything sounds better in Japanese. It’s a fact. Don’t bother looking it up, I would never lie to you. And what could be a better fit for a Japanese trailer than one featuring a cyborg policeman engaging mechs in hand-to-hand combat?

You may have noticed that movie news is bit a scarce today. And that’s because most of America is still recovering from the effects of Death By Turkey, otherwise known as Thanksgiving. Besides for just being a holiday dreaded by most birds, it has also become the start of generally the second biggest movie weekend of the year in the States. Years ago, that wasn’t the case at all, with the end of November generally being a Hollywood dumping ground, but that all changed in 1984 when Supergirl was released.

The movie is generally accepted as having very few redeeming features, bar one: It made a crap load of money on it’s opening weekend and changed the face of US cinema forever.

If you have some time to spare, I would suggest you guys give this absolutely fascinating Marc Foster interview a read. The director has had a incredibly storied and varied career (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland and Stranger Than Fiction are just some of the diverse titles he’s helmed) that saw him genre hopping like few other Hollywood filmmakers out there , and he dishes on all of the trials and tribulations he went through, from how he was forced to shoot Quantum of Solace without having a proper script in place, to being suspected of starting an uprising in Western China during the production on The Kite Runner.

And true to form his latest film, World War Z, was a widely publicized production catastrophe. And yet somehow the film didn’t just turn out be decent, it also became the highest grossing pic of star/producer Brad Pitt’s career. But the film we saw was very different to the film they set out to make, most notably featuring a far more low-key ending than the all-out battle royale in Russia shown in the original novel on which it was based, and which was originally in the script. Now Forster finally explains why that change was made.

“Basically, originally there was a third act that I thought didn’t work. As we were shooting we were discussing it and rewriting and rewriting it.”

“…It was the same story outline that is now in the movie, the same story device. The only difference was that the WHO… The World Health Organisation, they went into Russia for a big battle [with the zombies].”

“The reason I felt it wouldn’t work is that by that time you have a certain battle fatigue after Israel. After Israel and the plane crash, trying to trump that and make it even bigger wasn’t working in our favour. The problem with a lot of these big movies is you start production and the script isn’t finished; we had the same problem with Quantum [Of Solace]. The third act wasn’t fully fleshed out, but we had to rush in to meet the release date.”

“I was very happy that we didn’t finish the third act with visual effects and everything, because that would’ve been a huge number, and we used that money to shoot a much simpler ending.”

According to this new international poster for Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit “intelligence is a weapon”. I disagree. I’ve been brutally attacked by people wielding stupidity far more often.

JackRyan77530

London is not calling for Ant-Man, it seems. With most of Marvel’s and other studios’ major blockbusters being shot over in the UK, you would think that one being directed by a famous, very British director would get the same treatment, right? But according to fan-favourite director Edgar Wright, his long in development superhero pic, Ant-Man, is not so lucky.

“Ironically, Ant-Man was meant to shoot in London, but London is full because I guess that Pinewood extension got turned down.”

That extension he’s referring to was a $300 million plan to add 15 more studios to the famed Pinewood lot, which was rejected by the local council in May. And with no extra space, but Hollywood studios still flocking to shoot in London due to the tax incentives they get, it’s bad news for some film productions.

“While the tax break is good for Hollywood films shooting here, it’s probably not that great for British films shooting in the UK. Some middle-to-low budget films are going to find themselves without crew because all the American films are shooting here.”

Just a day after a new trailer was released for Hercules: The Legend Begins, one of two films about the demigod currently in production (this one having the distinction of it featuring an anthropomorphic piece of pine in the lead role), Summit has announced that the film will be getting the new title of The Legend of Hercules.

We’re just a couple days away (December 5) from the first trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man 2, so you can probably expect a veritable spider-nami of marketing materials to come flooding in soon. And one of those, may just have leaked a bit early. Spotted by a fan in the Red Rock Casino in Las Vegas (via CBM) was this poster for the film, which appears to show Spidey facing off against Jamie Foxx’s Electro, Paul Giamatti’s Rhino (looking far more robotic than anything we’ve ever seen thus far) and the Green Goblin (whose identity is still not confirmed yet).

The pic is a bit low res (you can still click to enlarge it though), but it clearly shows all 3 villains, confirming for the first time that we will actually see Green Goblin in here, and perhaps also alluding to them teaming up and starting what will become the Sinister Six.

spidey-2-poster-tease-smaller2

Feeling Cagey is a new site that offers a live, real-time stream of any selfies uploaded onto Instagram. It then takes all those selfies, and automatically replaces the face of the subject with that of Nicolas Cage. Congratulations, Internet. You’ve weirded me out once more.

Yes, we’re still talking about the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, Day of the Doctor. No, we don’t plan on stopping any time soon. And now that we have that out of the way… While we got to watch the special in a simulcast with the rest of the world, folks over the pond got the opportunity to actually watch it on the big screen in 3D. How many people, you ask. Well quite a lot it seems, based on the fact that it raked in $10.2 million globally over the weekend that it played, actually making it the second highest earner behind The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

That’s a whole lot of fez, if you ask me.

SyFy – who are still sticking with that silly name after all these years – have released a new trailer for Ron D. “Battlestar Galactic” Moore’s new sci-fi series Helix, which stars Billy Campbell and 47 Ronin and The Wolverine star Hiroyuki Sanada.

Due to a prior personal commitment, I missed the press screening for The Fifth Estate last week. That’s my excuse for not seeing it, I’m not so sure what the rest of the world has to say for themselves though, as the film is now officially the biggest flop of the year. The Benedict Cumberbatch starring Julian Assange/Wikileaks biopic tops Forbes’ list of 2013’s biggest financial disasters, having brought in only $6 million globally off a $28 million budget. Ouch. Seems that not even the chance to see Sherlock Holmes with an old lady hairdo was enough to entice people.

According to director Bill Condon though, the film’s clear cut bomb status is a tiny blessing.

“We were all so excited because it was just in the news recently, but the opposite might be true, that it simply wore out its welcome and that there is something about Assange. I do think there’s something about him that does not suggest an evening’s entertainment.

It’s so interesting because when something doesn’t live up to expectations then, God, you really start second guessing if it was this little thing you missed, but when something is as big a rout as this is — I mean truly there turned out to be no audience for it in a major way — it’s kind of extreme, you know? It really does make you look at the bigger picture.”

Did you know that before Sir Ian McKellen got the job, Sean Connery was being considered for the role of Gandalf in The Lord of Rings? Yeah, I don’t think “Yoush shall not paahsh” would have had quite the same effect. But if somebody else got the job? Like Morgan Freeman, or Michael Caine or perhaps even, oh I don’t know, a certain crime solving dog? That’s what Youtuber Charlie Hopkinson proposes in this brilliantly funny (and talented) audition tape he calls The Hobbit: An Unexpected Recasting.

If you have anything you would like to contribute to Extras, whether it be interesting stories, funny videos, or artistic photos of yourself in morally questionable poses, feel free to drop a mail to kervyn@themovies.co.za.

Last Updated: November 29, 2013

2 Comments

  1. The Fifth Estate might have done better if Assange himself didn’t tell them way beforehand that he doesn’t approve of it.

    Reply

  2. Skyblue

    December 2, 2013 at 09:10

    That Hobbit recasting vid is epic!

    Reply

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