Home Entertainment Extras (Comic-Con Edition)! 28 July 2014

Extras (Comic-Con Edition)! 28 July 2014

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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!

  • Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed that San Diego Comic-Con went down this weekend. While we’ve already written about the weekend’s biggest news stories, there are a few smaller nuggets that sort of fell through the cracks, which is where this supersized edition of Extras come in. And speaking of rocks and cracks, this pic popped up online (from a Twitter account that has since been deleted), giving us what appears to be our first look at Ben Grimm aka The Thing from Fox’s upcoming Fantastic Four reboot. Or at least the reference bust of The Thing used on set during film. The legitimacy of this pic hasn’t been ascertained 100% yet, but it seems to be legit, and implies that actor Jamie Bell will probably be motion-capturing the character entirely.

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While the design is definite improvement over the previous movie version of the character, I think ol’ Ben Grimm needs to hang out at Jersey Shore more, because that’s not orange enough for my liking.

  • In a 3:50 long video clip that went on about 3:00 minutes too long to still be funny, Patton Oswalt teased season 2 of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. by also announcing that Barbara “Bobbi” Morse, aka Agent Mockingbird would be joining the show. In the comics she’s a sexy and badass superhero/agent who also happens to be the frequent romantic partner of Clint “Hawkeye” Barton. No word on whether that will also be addressed here.

Other casting confirmations was that the previously reported Luce Lawless will play knife wielding SHIELD veteran Isabelle Hartley (not in the comics), Nick Blood will play a mercenary named Lance Hunter who helps SHIELD, while Reed Diamond (Moneyball) will be the show’s new central villain, Daniel Whitehall, also known in the comics as the legendary Hydra warrior Kraken.

  • And now for something completely different, as the crowd during the Game of Thrones panel was treated to blooper reel for the show’s fouth season.

  • Edgar Wright is making a movie about “six-foot-tall praying mantises with insatiable appetites for food and sex”. For reals, yo. Wright has been tapped to direct Grasshopper Jungle, an adaptation of Andrew Smith’s YA novel of the same which sounds completely bonkers and thus perfectly suited to Wright’s wacky sensibilities. Here’s the crazy synopsis for the book:

Simmering within Ealing, Iowa, is a deadly genetically engineered plague capable of unleashing unstoppable soldiers—six-foot-tall praying mantises with insatiable appetites for food and sex. No one knows it, of course, until Austin and his best friend Robby accidentally release it on the world. An ever-growing plague of giant, flesh-hungry insects is bad enough, but Austin is also up to his eyeballs in sexual confusion—is he in love with Robby or his girlfriend, Shann? Both of them make him horny, but most things do. In an admittedly futile attempt to capture the truth of his history, painfully honest Austin narrates the events of the apocalypse intermingled with a detailed account of the “connections that spiderweb through time and place,” leading from his great-great-great-grandfather Andrzej in Poland to Shann’s lucky discovery of an apocalypse-proof bunker in her new backyard.

  • Poster of the day: Left Behind (which is absolutely hilarious, because Nicolas Cage still looks as completely baffled about being in this movie as he did on the first poster, he’s now just baffled on his own and in a different direction).

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  • World Champion Movie-In-Development Juggler Guillermo Del Toro gave some updates at Comic-Con about the status of his long gestating Dark Universe film for DC. The film focuses on DC Comic’s darker, more supernatural side, including John Constantine, who just recently got his own show on NBC. Del Toro though, indicated that his movie will be totally independent of that show, and will also be separate from the other DC Comics superhero movies… for now.

“I’m still working on it. Sandman doesn’t figure in the Dark Universe. We have Deadman, we have the Demon, we have Swamp Thing, we have Zatana, we have Constantine, but DC and Warners have been very clear that they are trying to keep those properties separate so when the time comes they can unite them, once they know they’re quantifiable. Batman, Superman, Green Lantern… everyone eventually will come together. Right now, they’re allowing us independence.”

“I had that conversation when the Constantine show was pitched. I said, ‘Do I have to have continuity with that?’ and they said, ‘No, feel free to continue the way you’re going.”

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  • Now that Wesley Snipes is back on the streets, he wants to trade up that ol’ orange prison uniform for some black leather and reprise his role as vampire hunter Blade once again. And based on his latest idea for the character, I think the 51-year old actor will get a lot of support from the fans.

“‘Blade’ chasing the ‘Twilight’ kids around? Hey man, there’s always a possibility, and I’m open to it. There have been rumors around that we may explore the opportunity, so give me one more shot!”

  • If you, like me, were a tad bit miffed when Iron Man 3‘s Mandarin turned out to be nothing but a toilet-wrecking, Man U supporting, alcoholic actor named Trevor, then Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige may just have made your day. Maybe. While speaking to IGN about the return of some villains like the Red Skull (which is probably an inevitability), Feige explained that we still see the Mandarin – the REAL Mandarin – on screen after all.

“There have been [talks]. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to do the fun short that Drew Pearce wrote and directed. That was to clarify, ‘Hey, just because we did this thing doesn’t mean this other thing doesn’t exist’. And as we were making Iron Man 3 — and I think Drew’s spoken about this — that was always our intention, was that Aldrich Killian was perverting the notion of these things he’s heard.

“There’s a little bit of that when he’s doing his detective work in his lab after Happy’s been injured outside the Chinese Theater. He’s talking about, ‘Okay, the Mandarin is taken from various iconographies and mythologies from across the world.’ The idea was always there was somebody like this. There had been rumors of somebody like this, and Aldrich Killian just built on that, to make his version.”

Don’t play with my feelings like this, Feige!

  • So Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has been challenging people to eat and train the way he did for Hercules. After reading this hilarious article on Guardian journo Stuart Heritage’s attempt as well this video of another person giving the challenge a go, I think we can all agree that The Rock is actually half man, half trash compactor.

  • I have feeling that even if you were a lifelong Trekkie who always wished you could join Captain Picard and co on their outer space adventures, you will probably doing an about-face on that dream the moment you read about these 6 Horrifying Facts About STAR TREK: TNG’s Uniforms.
  • You think you can watch another live-action Street Fighter web series? SHORYUKEN! Get it? Shoryuken like ” Sure you ca-” You know what? It isn’t funny if I have to explain it. Something else that isn’t funny but should still leave you grinning like an idiot if you were a fan of Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist, is that video game developer Capcom have officially greenlit a sequel titled Street Fighter: World Warrior.
  • How’s this for some cool movie magic? Despite their characters interacting quite physically during Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, it was revealed during the film’s Comic-Con panel that Josh Brolin and Mickey Rourke actually never acted together for any of the scenes. Even one in which one character was carrying the other! SlashFilm has the deal on a couple of other interesting facts about the upcoming sequel, including how co-writer/director Robert Rodriguez composed most of the film’s score on his iPhone.
  • Believe it or not, but Comic-Con actually still has to do with comics as well, and one big announcement got a real big “F@#$, yeah! Comics!” out of me. Okay, so it is a movie-comics kind of thing, but I don’t care because this is still cool. Marvel, who recently acquired the Star Wars comics rights again after Dark Horse took over from them nearly 3 decades ago, have announced their first three Star Wars comic book titles. The books, which all have some MAJOR comic book talent working on them, will all debut early 2015 and will all follow on from the end of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, and establishing new official canon between that film and Empire Strikes Back. 

The 3 titles will be Star Wars, an ongoing series written by Jason Aaron and drawn by John Cassaday, following the main cast of heroes just two weeks after the end of Episode IVStar Wars: Darth Vader, an ongoing series written by Kieron Gillen and drawn by Salvador Larroca, following “the fall and rise of Darth Vader” after the Death Star gets destroyed; and finally Star Wars: Princess Leia, a 5-issue limited series written by Mark Waid and drawn by Terry Dodson, following the famous Princess as deals with the aftermath of the destruction of her homeworld Alderaan.

  • While most of us had our eyes and ears fixed on the happenings of Comic-Con, a whole lot of other people had their eyes and ears fixed on the computer screens watching The Expendables 3. That’s because a DVD-quality copy of the upcoming movie leaked onto the internet and was downloaded nearly 200 000 times in just 24 hours!
  • And after all that news, I think it’s time to just sit back, and look at people dressed all funny.

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: July 28, 2014

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