Sam Raimi Excited to Read Spider-Man 4 Script
Don’t count director Sam Raimi out just yet. The Spider-Man series director is waiting to read James Vanderbilt’s (Zodiac) latest draft, which he says is due in a few months, before he decides if he will helm the project or not.
“I’m excited to read it,” Raimi told SciFi. “I’m hoping it’s as great as our discussions were about it and hoping it feels right for me, because I love Spider-Man, and I’m hoping I’m well-enough rested to, like, really embrace it and hoping that Sony wants me at that time to direct it. So if all those things come together, I would love, love to do it. But this is a lot of unknowns about the future.”
Raimi also reiterated that he would “hate to recast anybody” new in the key roles, and “can’t imagine that” actually happening. I have the feeling that Raimi was a little less excited to do a fourth film six months ago. It’s funny how time changes everything. I just hope that Sony gave Raimi room to develop a story with Vanderbilt that he is comfortable with. It seemed clear that Raimi wasn’t interested in including Venom in the third film, but was forced to by the studio. The overcrowding of characters was one of the main reasons the film failed with audiences. Oh yeah, and the Jazz bar sequence, which Raimi has no excuse for.
Marvel Studios and Brian K. Vaughan Developing Runaways Movie
I knew it was going to happen eventually, Marvel Studios has announced that they will be brining Brian K Vaughn’s Runaways to the big screen. Vaughn, best known for the critically acclaimed Y: The Last Man Series (also in some stage of development with DJ Caruso and possibly starring Shia LaBeouf), created Runaways in 2002 with Adrian Alphona, and is also penning the screenplay. It should be noted that Vaughn is also a co-producer and writer for LOST.
The series follows a group of teenagers discover that their parents are an organized group of super villains called The Pride. On the run from their homes, the group bands together and begin a journey of discovery, both of their parents’ origins and of their own inherited powers.
Unlike most other books in the Marvel universe, the individual Runaways story arcs are collected in small, manga-sized trade paperbacks. In 2006, the series won the Harvey Award for best continuing/limited series. Geek god Joss Whedon, a vocal fan of the book, took over the series after Vaughan and Alphona left at issue #24 of the title’s second volume.
Marvel is not ready to set a date for this latest adaptation or the previously announced Ant Man.
source: THR
Shia LaBeouf Wants to Star in Y: The Last Man?
The box office success of Disturbia has made Shia LaBeouf a bankable A-list Hollywood movie star. JoBlo is now reporting that LaBeouf is hoping to be cast in the big screen adaptation of Y: The Last Man. I agree with Shia, Y: The Last Man is the best comic book series published today.
Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man. A big screen adaptation has been in the works since early 2006. It’s currently set-up at New Line Cinema.
“I finished the screenplay a few months ago. Everybody at New Line seemed to like it,” Vaughn said at the New York Comic Con. “For Hollywood, it’s either really fast or it’s really slow, and it’s really slow right now. I’ve done my job and it’s out to directors now and it could be totally out of my control after this.”
One would think that if Shia is interested, the project will quickly be elevated from “Development Heck” to a greenlight.
Y: The Last Man follows Yorick Brown, a young amateur escape artist, and his Capuchin monkey, Ampersand, the last two men on Earth. Something (speculated to be a plague) simultaneously kills every mammal possessing a Y chromosome - including embryos, fertilized eggs, and even sperm. Society is plunged into chaos as infrastructures collapse and the surviving women everywhere try to cope with the loss of the men. Yorick goes on a mission to find his girlfriend Beth, who was on vacation in Australia.
The Y: The Last Man series will end (as planned) with a double sized issue #60 in January 2008.
Gavin Hood to Direct Wolverine
20th Century Fox has hired Gavin Hood to direct the X-Men spin-off film Wolverine. Scripted by David 25th Hour scribe Benioff, Wolverine will start Hugh Jackman, who played the character in the X-Man series. Hood is the South African director whose 2005 film Tsotsi won the best foreign film at the Academy Awards. Fox supposedly made the decision after seeing a cut of Hood’s new film Rendition, which is set to premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. X-Men: The Last Stand director Brett Ratner and Len Wiseman had expressed interest in directing the film.
Wolverine will mix action with the origin story from Frank Miller’s Weapon X book series, which told the story of how Logan escaped kidnappers and an experimental facility to become an indestructible mutant with retractable adamantium claws.
Jackman is being paid $20 million to produce and star in the film. He worked with Benioff on the script, aiming for a smaller-scale character piece. Jackman has also said that he doesn’t see the need for an R-rating, because he doesn’t want to exclude all the young fans. “We can still give it an edge though”
Wolverine starts production in November for a 2008 release.