This week's Ketchup includes news of a new Nicholas Sparks adaptation, new entries in the Scary Movie and The Smurfs franchises, animated movies from Pixar and the studio behind Hoodwinked, and new roles for Jennifer Lawrence, Jaden Smith and Taylor Swift.
This Week's Top Story
TRANSFORMERS WRITERS TAKE ON THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 FOR 2014
Sony Pictures has officially announced that the writers and producers of the sequel The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will be Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. Kurtzman and Orci's extensive filmography together includes creating the TV shows Fringe and Hawaii Five-0, cowriting the first two Transformers movies and Cowboys & Aliens, and receiving sole screenwriting credit for the reboot of Star Trek. No premise details are known yet for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 yet, except that Peter Parker's new origin story will continue, and is not limited to just being told in this summer's reboot starring Andrew Garfield. Production wise, the plan is The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (or whatever it ends up being called) to start filming in the first quarter of 2013, aiming for a release date of May 2, 2014.
Fresh Developments This Week
#1 PIXAR'S PLANS FOR DINOSAURS, YOUR MIND, AND DIA DE LOS MUERTOS
This week, Disney and Pixar announced new details for their upcoming films, which includes a completely new project, and a title for a previously untitled film. May 30, 2014 will see the release of the recently titled The Good Dinosaur, to be directed by Bob Peterson (codirector of Up), which tells a story set in an alternate reality in which the dinosaurs were never killed off by that giant asteroid millions of years ago. That movie is taking the old release date of the next Pixar film, which still goes by the awkward tentative title of The Untitled Pixar Movie That Takes You Inside the Mind. That film will be directed by Peterson's partner on Up, Pete Docter, who also codirected Monsters, Inc., and the film is now scheduled for June 19, 2015. Finally, there is the newly announced movie which may or may not be called Dia de los Muertos, with its subject being the popular Mexican holiday also known as The Day of the Dead. That film doesn't yet have a release date (possibly in 2015, or maybe 2016), and it will be directed by Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3, and codirector of Finding Nemo, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. This last movie puts Pixar in competition with Guillermo del Toro, who, as revealed just two months ago, is currently producing his own CGI animated horror film called Day of the Dead, also inspired by the Mexican holiday. This is far from the first time Pixar has been engaged with dueling projects with another CGI production studio (see also: Antz vs A Bug's Life, Shark Tale vs Finding Nemo, etc). These three Pixar projects all follow the June 13, 2013 release of the sequel Monsters University.
#2 WILL SMITH, DENZEL WASHINGTON, AND THE CREATOR OF ANCHORMAN LIKELY TO TEAM UP FOR UPTOWN SATURDAY NIGHT REMAKE
Director/producer Adam McKay (Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Step Brothers) is in negotiations with Warner Bros to take control of the studio's planned remake of the 1974 comedy Uptown Saturday Night. Warner Bros hopes that Will Smith and Denzel Washington will sign on to take the roles originally played by Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier (who also directed). Uptown Saturday Night told the story of two friends who get mugged, and then have to retrieve a wallet containing what they discover the next day contained a winning lottery ticket. Timothy Dowling, cowriter of Role Models, Just Go With It, and This Means War, wrote the most recent draft adapting the original 1974 comedy. The plan is for Adam McKay to start filming this Uptown Saturday Night remake at some point in 2013 or so, after wrapping up filming of the recently announced Anchorman sequel for Paramount Pictures.
#3 JENNIFER LAWRENCE TO STAR IN ANOTHER GIRL DRAMA, THE GLASS CASTLE
The movie that really propelled Jennifer Lawrence's career was the 2010 independent drama Winter's Bone, which likewise then led to her being cast by Lionsgate in The Hunger Games. This week, that same studio announced plans to work with Lawrence again in a movie called The Glass Castle, which seems to be a thematic follow up to both Winter's Bone and The Hunger Games, as all three stories are about poor girls from impoverished mountain communities. The Glass Castle will be an adaptation of a memoir by Jeannette Walls about growing up in a West Virginia mining town as the daughter of idealistic, nomadic parents. The script is being adapted by Marti Noxon (Fright Night; cowriter of I Am Number Four), who is also a prolific TV series producer best known for coproducing Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff, Angel. Actual filming of The Glass Castle will probably have to wait until after Lawrence finishes filming at least the Hunger Games sequel Catching Fire, if not the third film Mockingjay as well.
#4 TAYLOR SWIFT AND JONI MITCHELL... GIRLS LIKE US?
Country/pop singer Taylor Swift made her live action film debut in Valentine's Day, and provided one of the lead voices in this spring's The Lorax. This week, Swift took another step towards establishing a legitimate acting career as she is now in negotiations to take one of the three lead roles in an adaptation of the best-selling Sheila Weller book Girls Like Us. The subtitle of Weller's book says pretty much everything you need to know: "Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation." It is singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell that Taylor Swift would play, with the roles of Carole King and Carly Simon still to be cast. John Sayles (Lone Star, Alligator, Piranha) adapted Weller's book, but it not yet known if he will also direct (Sayles' directing credits look a lot more like this premise's style than say, Alligator or Piranha).
Rotten Ideas of the Week
#5 JADEN SMITH'S A REAL BOY NOBODY, LIVING IN HIS NOBODY, ERR... LAND...
Sony Pictures and Will Smith's Overbrook Entertainment have acquired the film rights to an upcoming 2013 young adult book called Boy Nobody as a starring vehicle for Will's son, Jaden Smith. Although the first book is still a year away from publication, the book's author Allen Zadoff already has plans for it to be the first of a planned trilogy of books. Compared to a "Teenage Jason Bourne" by its author, Boy Nobody is the story of a "brainwashed teenage assassin who starts to regain his emotions." There's not any writer or director attached to Boy Nobody yet, so this is really more of a borderline Rotten Idea... mostly because it sounds a bit too much like Abduction.
#4 THE BROTHERS WEINSTEIN AMP UP THEIR ANIMATION SLATE FOR 2013
Harvey and Bob Weinstein, formerly founders of Miramax, made their names on the independent movement of the 1990s, Oscar bait movies, and (mostly Bob) relatively inexpensive genre fare. Both Miramax and The Weinstein Company have in the past released some animated movies ("you know, for kids!"), such as TMNT and the two Hoodwinked movies. It's going to be in 2013, however, that the Weinsteins really go all in with animation, however, as this week, TWC announced that there will be a total of four TWC animated releases in 2013. The first, called Escape from Planet Earth, and scheduled for 2/14/13, has been known about for a while, but the other three are entirely new revelations. And at that, all we really have at this point are titles, very basic premises and release dates. Leo the Lion (8/20/13) is "the story of a young vegetarian lion who is seen as an outcast among his fellow lions." The Trick or Treaters (10/25/13) is "a tale of villains pilfering from the countryside until they are charmed by a young orphan girl." Santapprentice (12/6/13) is "the story of a young orphan who is chosen to replace Santa when he retires." As for why these films are "Rotten Ideas" this week, it mostly has to do with the possible perception that these suddenly revealed animated movies might be produced on the cheap, and end up being critically and popularly received like the Hoodwinked movies were.
#3 JOSH DUHAMEL WILL BE THE LATEST NICHOLAS SPARKS HEARTTHROB IN SAFE HAVEN
We're currently in the middle of a period awash in film adaptations of novels by Nicholas Sparks akin to earlier periods when novelists like Stephen King, John Grisham and Michael Crichton were all the rage. To date, we have thus far seen seven such films released, and three of those were all within the last two years (Dear John, The Last Song and The Lucky One). With a Valentine's Day-friendly release date of 2/8/13 already set, the next Nicholas Sparks adaptation is likely to be Safe Haven. This week, Josh Duhamel (Transformers, TV's Las Vegas) was revealed as being in talks to take the male lead, with his confirmation likely to come when the female lead is announced. Safe Haven is described as being about how, "when a young woman escaping her past moves to a small North Carolina town, and falls for a loving widowed father, he heals her heart, and helps her escape the danger that threatens her." Director Lasse Hallstr?m (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules) will be making this his second Nicholas Sparks adaptation, after also directing Dear John. Safe Haven will be released by the relatively new distributor Relativity Media, whose other recent releases include Immortals, Shark Night 3D, Haywire, Act of Valor and Mirror Mirror. Safe Haven is one of the week's Rotten Ideas based upon the consistently low RT Tomatometer scores for the other seven movies based upon books or scripts by Nicholas Sparks (most of which are in the 21-33% range, with only The Notebook getting as high as 52%).
#2 CHRISTINA RICCI WILL BE THE EVIL SMURFETTE IN THE SMURFS 2
Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation announced this week that production has officially started on The Smurfs 2, which the studio has already scheduled for release on July 31, 2013. Almost all of the first movie's live action and animated cast are signed to return for the sequel. They will be joined by new cast members Brendan Gleeson (as Neil Patrick Harris' uncle), JB Smoothe and Christina Ricci, who will provide the voice of Vexy, "a new evil version of Smurfette." Singer-turned-voice-actress Katy Perry will also reprise her role as the old, non-evil version of Smurfette. Anyway, so yeah, The Smurfs was a movie that existed, and that people went to. And so there will be a sequel. But the fallout from that series of events doesn't stop there. Screenwriters David Stem and David Weiss, who wrote The Smurfs, also made the news this week for something completely un-Smurfy. Paramount Pictures has hired them to start work on a family friendly movie about the circus business family The Ringling Brothers>. The Ringling Brothers is being conceived as "a family adventure in the spirit of Night at the Museum and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." There's also a studio history at work here, as Paramount took home the Oscar for Best Picture back in 1952 for Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, which was also set within the big top tents of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
#1 SCARIE MOVIE 5 IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING
Dimension Films has announced that it is moving ahead with plans for Scary Movie 5, which makes it the first new movie in that franchise since 2006's Scary Movie 4, regardless of whether anyone really wants to see another Scary Movie... movie. This time around, the directing job is going to Malcolm Lee, whose previous films include Undercover Brother, Soul Men and Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins. There's no word yet as to what films will be spoofed in Scary Movie 5, but it's probably an easy guess that "found footage" films like Paranormal Activity are an easy target, especially since it's a popular genre that was almost unheard of back in 2006. Scary Movie 5 is the week's Most Rotten Idea based on the RT Tomatometer scores for the first four movies.
For more Weekly Ketchup columns by Greg Dean Schmitz, check out the WK archive, and you can contact GDS via Facebook or a RT forum message.
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