Extras! 07 April 2014

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!

• Some sad news today, as we have to say goodbye to a tiny star who made a gigantic impact on Hollywood. Movie legend Mickey Rooney has passed away at the age of 93 after being in ill health for some time. Rooney, star of such productions as The Black Stallion, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Bold and the Brave and Babes in Arms, garnered four Oscar nominations in his career, and was awarded two special Oscars.

• Oh, come now, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, now you’re just taking the piss. After what seemed like a bajillionty one different trailers for the superhero sequel, Sony finally released a “Final Trailer” a few weeks back. And then released another two TV spots. And now they’ve released an “alternate version of the Final Trailer”, which would be funny if it wasn’t so damn infuriating.

• Oh that sneaky JJ Abrams! Looks like he’s outsneaked us again! Remember those reports of Star Wars: Episode VII starting shooting in 6 weeks on May 14? Well, that’s total bantha poodoo because according to Disney Studios Chairman Alan Horn, the much anticipated movie has already begun shooting! And Horn confirms that production has kicked off without all the casting in place, though they have “most of it” done already. Horn explained that the main reason for the holdup on everything was that they were emphatic about getting the screenplay perfect, which it now apparently is.

• Most movies began life with a very different title to the one they eventually ended up with, and by “different” I mean a ginormous improvement. For example, the original title of Annie Hall was the It Had to be Jew, Unforgiven was The Cut-Whore Killings, and American Pie was Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made For Under $10 Million That Your Reader Will Love But The Executive Will Hate. Seriously. And you can read all about it and more in Pajiba’s list of The Less Than Impressive Working Titles of 25 Memorable Films.

• George R.R. Martin is the most prolific mass murderer of recent times. As evidence, I present this video of all 5719 on-screen deaths in the first three seasons of Game of Thrones, shown in just 3 minutes.

• One person who had a fair hand in adding to that grim death tally is Gwendolyn Christie, who plays the towering Lady Brienne of Tarth on Game of Thrones. Christie will be tackling a very different role soon though, as she will be replacing Lily Rabe in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 as Commander Lyme, one of the new rebellion leaders. Lyme is also an ex-champion of District 2, and thanks to Christie now playing the role, actually looks like somebody who could definitely kicked the living crap out of some other tributes. Rabe has had to pull out of the production due to a scheduling conflict.

• Poster of the day: Blue Ruin

• There are many great mysteries in the universe: What existed before the Big Bang? Can we ever travel faster than light? Are we truly alone in the galaxy? And now the guys over at GeekTyrant have added one more to that list: Why the Hell Hasn’t Disney Ever Made Plans To Make a Live Action Gargoyles movie?! If you have no idea what Gargoyles is, then I have to just point out that clearly you had an inferior childhood. But you can make up for all that, as Disney has at least legally released all 3 seasons of the absolutely fantastic 1990’s animated show on Youtube.

• If there was one aspect of Noah that really stood out for me – besides the rock monster, stop motion, fallen angels, of course – it was Clint Mansell’s epic score. And now a new featurette for the film is out, dealing with just that.

• If you’ve seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier (and really, it calls our friendship into question if you haven’t), you may have noticed that Hawkeye was nowhere to be found. Danny Pudi, in one of the film’s cameos, does very briefly mention something about Barton being out of the country, but you would think that SHIELD’s other top agent would have somehow been involved in the massive shakedown that was happening over in Washington DC. According to Marvel Studios Exec Kevin Feige, there’s a very good reason why he wasn’t there, besides for the fact that they just didn’t want to stuff the movie full of costumed Avengers.
  

  “We will discover, later, the answers to that question. But it really came down to how many players can you have on the field at this time? We really wanted to bring in Falcon, we really wanted to team [Captain America] up with Black Widow, we really wanted Fury to have more of a part than he’s ever had in any of the other movies before. We wanted, ever so briefly, to introduce Sharon Carter. And we had a fun place for Maria Hill to be involved. So we didn’t want to just have, “Hey, I’m Hawkeye! Hey, I’m Iron Man!” We want to avoid the brief cameos of the week….Not every character from every movie is going to be in Age of Ultron, for sure. But Joss [Whedon] is excited and, for the characters you haven’t seen since the first Avengers – like Hawkeye, like Hulk – there’s a reason for that, and that gets showcased quite prominently in Age of Ultron.”

• So with Kevin Tancharoen back doing Mortal Kombat Legacy, maybe the opportunity is once again there for a new Mortal Kombat movie to be made. And if it does happen, I hope they take a much more fair and realist approach to how they match up who’s fighting who.

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: April 7, 2014