Extras! Batfleck's suit is a total reinvention, The Director gets a director, Barbarella goes to the Amazon, and M for Mon Mothma?! 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!

We start off today with the first teaser trailer for Extant, a new sci-fi show produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Halle Berry as an eye-planet-baby-thing. I think. Based on the second-degree burns I received from the utterly craptastic Under the Dome, I’m not too keen on another Spielberg TV production. Also, Jurassic Park called and wants its tagline back.

Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn’s new TV take on classic sci-fi romp Barbarella has been in development for a while now, but it looks like it’s finally found a home: Amazon. No, not the river in South America, but rather Amazon Studios, the development arm of the online giant. They have picked the show for a pilot episode, which is to be produced\directed by Refn, and penned by Skyfall writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.

The original 1968 film followed Jane Fonda as a sexed up agent in the future, sent by the President of the United States to track down a scientist who has developed a new weapon. Despite the film’s poor critical reception on release, it garnered a cult following since, definitely helped along by director Roger Vadim, who was married to Fonda at the time, shooting the movie like the biggest brag reel about hot his wife looked naked, and also the film’s main scientist being the inspiration for the name of classic pop-rock group Duran Duran.

The highly anticipated Season 3 of BBC’s Sherlock finally kicks on our local screens this Friday, so you may want to bookmark this list of 25 Easter Eggs and References in the Season 3 Premier so long, so that you can return to it afterwards to and rate yourself – on a scale of Mr. Magoo to Sherlock Holmes – on just how observant you are.

I have virtually no idea what is being said in this new featurette for director Christophe Gans’ Beauty and the Beast, but I will watch nearly anything starring Vincent Cassel and made by the guy who made Crying Freeman.

We’ve previously heard from Kevin Smith how the batsuit worn by Ben Affleck in Batman vs Superman is unlike anything we’ve seen before, and while talking to Entertainment Tonight at the SAG Awards, actress Jennifer Garner reiterated that statement.

”I’ve seen the suit. The suit is unbelievably cool. It’s a total reinvention. It looks great.”

Right. So now that we’ve heard from one of Affleck’s close friends and also his wife, how about we get an impartial opinion on exactly what this thing looks like?

Speaking of Batman vs Superman, Forbes has done a brilliant breakdown of Why Batman vs Superman Had To Be Delayed by 10 Months. And I don’t mean the reasons behind the delay, but rather why specifically 10 months. And no, it wasn’t to just try and piss off Marvel.

In advance of its debut at Sundance this weekend, a new trailer for The Raid 2: Berandal will be flying kicking its way onto the internet tomorrow. But since I know that there are several of you like me, who can’t bear to wait any longer, we have the film’s synopsis, a new image and one cool gif from the film.

He thought it was over. After fighting his way out of a building filled with gangsters and madmen – a fight that left the bodies of police and gangsters alike piled in the halls – rookie Jakarta cop Rama thought it was done and he could resume a normal life. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Formidable though they may have been, Rama’s opponents in that fateful building were nothing more than small fish swimming in a pond much larger than he ever dreamed possible. And his triumph over the small fry has attracted the attention of the predators farther up the food chain. His family at risk, Rama has only one choice to protect his infant son and wife: He must go undercover to enter the criminal underworld himself and climb through the hierarchy of competing forces until it leads him to the corrupt politicians and police pulling the strings at the top of the heap.

And so Rama begins a new odyssey of violence, a journey that will force him to set aside his own life and history and take on a new identity as the violent offender “Yuda.” In prison he must gain the confidence of Uco – the son of a prominent gang kingpin – to join the gang himself, laying his own life on the line in a desperate all-or-nothing gambit to bring the whole rotten enterprise to an end.

Hey, look today is one of those day’s whose name ends in a “y”, that means it’s time for another Star Wars: Episode VII rumour. According to Big Shiny Robot, it appears that rebel leader Mon Mothma, seen planning the attack against the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi, will be showing up in the new trilogy. What’s more, she will apparently be played by James Bond’s former boss and legendary British actress Dame Judi Dench. You can take this rumour with mountain of salt though, as I don’t see why Lucasfilm would pick Dench when the original actress, Caroline Blakiston is still alive working frequently and just a year older than Dench.

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, the latest entry in the spooky franchise, opens locally this weekend coming, after failing to really scare up an audience and critical approval overseas. At the time, in response to the film’s mediocre reception, writer/director Christopher Landon responded by saying that there was an endgame that they were working towards. What endgame? Well, it seems that the The Marked Ones will be connected to the upcoming Paranormal Activity 5 in some way.

“Gregory Plotkin, who is directing [Paranormal Activity 5], he’s been the editor on all of these, and if there’s anyone who knows these movies, it’s him because he has to sit with all of the footage all day long.”

“I think he’s going to take it in a cool direction. We obviously have discussions about it because we want the movies to be connected. So, we were talking at the end of [The Marked Ones] because it’s going to be tied to what they’re doing in the fifth film.”

I still haven’t seen Disney’s Frozen yet. I know, I know, no need to tell me about how I’m missing out. It’s just that I promised to take my young niece to see it, and I’ve been putting it off because I’m just not sure she’s ready for all the foul language in the film. What foul language, you ask? Well, allow me to give you Exhibit A.

After putting Tom Hanks through hell on the high seas in Captain Phillips, writer/director Paul Greengrass is heading for that other thriving den of piracy: the internet. Greengrass has signed on to write and direct an adaptation of The Director, an upcoming cyber-thriller novel from David Ignatius. Here’s the book’s synopsis:

Graham Weber has been director of the CIA for less than a week when a Swiss kid in a dirty T-shirt walks into the American consulate in Hamburg and says the agency has been hacked, and he has a list of agents’ names to prove it. This is the moment a CIA director most dreads.

Weber isn’t sure where to turn until he meets a charismatic (and unstable) young man named James Morris who runs the Internet Operations Center. He’s the CIA’s in-house geek. Weber launches Morris on a mole hunt unlike anything in spy fiction—one that takes the reader into the hacker underground of Europe and America and ends up in a landscape of paranoia and betrayal.

I’m a huge fan of Greengrass and will watch anything and everything he does, but if anybody named Zerocool shows up and starts flying through buildings in virtual reality, I’m out.

Apparently Arnold Schwarzenegger will be one of several actors featured in some interconnected series of Bud Light commercials to be shown during this year’s NFL Superbowl. I generally don’t watch NFL and have zero idea what these commercials are about, but judging by these teaser commercials (yes, that’s a thing now), I will definitely be making a plan to check it out.

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: January 21, 2014