Barbossa's back for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. I would've bet on that early on (in fact, I could've sworn it had already been announced), but all the focus on casting Blackbeard and his daughter made me wonder if Barbossa was out. Glad to see he's not. By At World's End, I liked him even better than Sparrow. [/Film]
Voyage of the Dawn Treader trailer
The quality of the trailer isn't real good, but the movie looks fantastic. As I've said before, this ought to be my favorite in the series. [/Film]
Cleopatra
Angelina Jolie is working with producer Scott Rudin to develop (and most likely star in) a movie about everyone's favorite Egyptian queen. Apparently, this is of some concern to people who don't recall that Cleopatra was, in fact, Greek and not African. [/Film]
After the break: Musketeers, Spies, Oz, and rock'em sock'em robots.
Three Less Musketeers?
It's always been a race to see who could get their Three Musketeers film going first: Paul WS Anderson or the producer of Sherlock Holmes. Anderson already had a nice head start with all the casting he's been doing, but now the other project is falling even farther behind due to its director pulling out to do a scifi flick instead. [/Film]
The Equalizer movie
I'm really torn about the idea of Russell Crowe's playing the Equalizer in a movie version. On the one hand, I really like Crowe and would love to see him play that kind of character. On the other, I have a hard time imagining anyone but Edward Woodward in the role
. I suspect that I'll gradually get used to the idea though and will end up liking it just fine. [/Film]Knockout now Haywire
Steven Soderbergh's spy movie starring mixed martial artist Gina Carano is being retitled Haywire. /Film has a brief plot description, but it's nothing that we haven't seen before: a black ops soldier is betrayed on a mission and seeks revenge. In fact, we've seen it twice in the last couple of months with The Losers and The A-Team. As /Film observes, where the movie looks interesting is in its supporting cast (Bill Paxton, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, and Antonio Banderas among others) and its potential to have some real fight sequences instead of tiresome, heavily-edited, shaky-cam montages of impressionistic battle.
Beckett goes undercover
Stana Katic from Castle
has signed on to play "a feisty Russian prostitute who fiercely protects key information" in an upcoming Richard Gere/Topher Grace spy movie called The Double. Thanks to Double O Section for the report and for pointing out that Katic also played the compromised Canadian agent at the end of Quantum of Solace
. As I commented at Double O Section's post, it's obviously been way too long since I've seen QoS if I didn't realize that was Kate Beckett.Scott Pilgrim vs The World trailer
As a comic geek (though one who's yet to read the much-praised Scott Pilgrim
series), I was interested in seeing the movie version of Scott Pilgrim mostly for academic reasons. After this trailer, I want to see it because it looks like it's going to kick every other movie ever made right in the face.Oz movie roundup
And I thought it was tough keeping all the Three Musketeers and Captain Nemo movies straight. /Film counts three Wizard of Oz-related projects so far. There's the Drew Barrymore one we've already talked about, a Sam Raimi/Robert Downey Jr. one that I should have mentioned, but didn't. And now there's a third one by indie writer-producer-directors the Polish Brothers.
I've only seen one film by Michael and Mark Polish and it made my head hurt. I'm not sure how excited I am by their tackling Oz, a fantasy world that's already a bit complex and nonsensical.
Real Steel
/Film has pictures from Hugh Jackman's movie about Maybe Not Giant, But Still Really Big Robots fighting each other.
