Extras! 29 April 2015

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!

• When it comes to movie cameos, one man reigns supreme: Stan Lee. Okay so he may also have written some comic books you may have heard, but really his cameo-ing is his true legacy, right?! And now he is passing this time-honed skill of the cameo onto a new generation of people at the Stan Lee Cameo School!

• Now that he’s done giving us the news and being really dumb, its time for Jeff Daniels to show he’s true allegiance: To lame YA franchises. The Newsroom and Dumb & Dumber To star has signed on as the main bad guy in The Divergent Series: Allegiant – Part 1 & 2. The final two installments of the series will see Daniels as “David, the leader of the Bureau of Genetic Welfare. The agency behind the creation of the societies that Tris was living in and the [nefarious] reason behind their creation.”

• Thanks to WikiLeaks leaking the Sony emails, we now know two things: 1) Drew Goddard abandoning Daredevil as showrunner to go work on Sony’s Sinister Six may have had less to do with creative ambitions and more to do with wrangling over pay, and 2) former Sony head Amy Pascal writes emails worse than Darryn when he’s drunk.

• Poster of the day: The World’s End

• In its second week at the Chinese box office this weekend past, Furious 7 pulled in a staggering $72.7 million dollars. Not only does that just keep adding the already crazy amount of money the movie had made, but it now officially makes Furious 7 the highest grossing movie of all time in China. Seeing as how the Asian market has become the second biggest player in the industry, that is a gigantic achievement. The fact that it dethroned the putrid Transformers: Age of Extinction makes it even sweeter.

• It’s been rumoured previously, but now it’s been officially confirmed: Daniel Bruhl will be playing the villain Baron Zemo in Captain America: Civil War.

“I think I can tell you that without being thrown into Marvel prison. For the first few days I’ll walk around like a little boy, just amazed by the megalomania of it. It’s such a huge project. We could do 20 films with the budget.”

• I have no idea why a mashup of the True Detective season 2 trailer and Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” even exists, but I’m kind of happy that it does.

• Don’t look now, but they’re doing a remake of Don’t Look Now. Nicolas Roeg’s classic 1973 horror film is being redone by StudioCanal and producers Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman who are also behind the planned Escape From New York remake. The original Don’t Look Now starred Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as a couple who may be getting warning messages from the afterlife from their recently deceased daughter. While the film was praised for its atmospheric direction, it gained massive notoriety due to a graphic sex scene between Sutherland and Christie which is still debated to this day as to whether or not they’re engaging in actual intercourse.

• And thanks to some behind the scenes set pics, here’s our first look at the young new mutants in X-Men: Apocalypse. Got to say, Sophie Turner as Jean Grey and Lana Condor as Jubilee really feel like they stepped straight out of the classic 90’s cartoon. And I don’t think I can give them higher praise than that.

• Colin Treverow’s first film, Safety Not Guaranteed, is a quirky and charming little indie sci-fi comedy. In other words, absolutely nothing like his next directing gig, Jurassic World. So how did he get such a huge job with so little experience? Apparently it’s all Brad Bird’s fault. Lucasfilm wanted Bird to direct Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but he was already committed to Tomorrowland. So he came up with a crazy plan that would allow him to direct both simultaneously, only it (obviously) didn’t quite work out the way he wanted to. And now you’re probably wondering what Star Wars and Tomorrowland has to do with Jurassic World, right? Well, then go read the whole report, which is a little too complex to explain here, but makes for some really cool movie trivia.

• When it comes to Ang Lee’s Hulk, I’ve done my fair share of defending over the years. Yes, the movie had some silly moments (Hulk-Poodles?!! And is Hulk really fighting his dad who’s a storm cloud?!?!) but overall I enjoyed it, and think it gets a bum rap from fanboys. That being said, after watching this Honest Trailer for it, I may just start changing my tune. Why do these guys have to be so intuitive in their dissections?!

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 29, 2015