April, 2009

‘Wall Street 2′: Oliver Stone, Michael Douglas to return for sequel, Shia LaBeouf in negotiations

POSTED IN Movie News, Read April 29, 2009

The much-discussed Wall Street sequel is a go, EW has learned. Michael Douglas will return as corporate raider Gordon Gekko, the role for which he won the 1987 Best Actor Oscar, and Oliver Stone will be back as the director of the followup to the movie that put the phrase “Greed is good” into the popular lexicon. Shia LaBeouf is in negotiations to play a young trader in Wall Street 2, which is set 20 years after the first installment and features Gekko’s life after he gets out of jail. Edward R. Pressman is producing the film, whose latest screenplay draft was written by Allan Loeb

Fox, CBS top Monday’s ratings race

POSTED IN Read, TV News April 28, 2009

Fox and CBS waged a tight battle for Monday’s primetime lead among young adults, with the Eye’s “Two and a Half Men” and Fox’s “House” standing as the night’s top programs in key demo categories.

NBC, meanwhile, failed to see any uptick for the season finales of “Chuck” and “Heroes,” with both placing fourth in their timeslots on this competitive night. ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” was once again easily Monday’s most-watched program overall.

At Fox, “House” (4.5 rating/12 share in adults 18-49, 11.4 million viewers overall) won the 8 o’clock hour in all key demos, and was especially dominant among adults 18-34, where it won by 4 shares over runner-up CBS’ comedies. “24″ fell off from there (3.4/8 in 18-49, 10.6 million viewers overall) but moved up to second in 18-49 in its second half-hour.

CBS once again received double-digit share performances from each of its comedies: “The Big Bang Theory” (3.4/10 in 18-49, 9.3 million viewers overall), “How I Met Your Mother” (3.7/10 in 18-49, 8.9 million viewers overall), “Two and a Half Men” (4.9/12 in 18-49, 14.1 million viewers overall) and “Rules of Engagement” (3.9/10 in 18-49, 11.3 million viewers overall), with the latter pair winning in 18-49 from 9 to 10 o’clock. Closing out the night, “CSI: Miami” prevailed in its 10 p.m. timeslot (3.3/9 in 18-49, 12.0 million viewers overall) but with a season low, as auds didn’t seem to take to the crime drama’s tale of murder behind the scenes of a “Bachelor”-like reality contest.

NBC was led by “Heroes” (3.0/7 in 178-49, 6.4 million viewers overall), which finishes its third season as a shadow of its former hit self. Both it and leadoff show “Chuck” (2.3/6 in 18-49, 6.1 million viewers overall) were in line with their previous week’s averages. Down week to week was “Medium” (2.2/6 in 18-49, 6.7 million viewers overall), which placed second in most categories at 10.

ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” was below average (4.3/12 in 18-49, 19.3 million viewers overall) but placed first or second in key demos with each of its three half-hours. First-year series “Surviving Suburbia” (2.3/6 in 18-49, 9.7 million viewers overall) and “Castle” (2.1/6 in 18-49, 8.4 million viewers overall) again didn’t do much in closing out the night.

CW’s “Gossip Girl” (1.0/3 in 18-49, 2.0 million viewers overall) continues to perform sluggishly, with the net then picking up a tad at 9 p.m. with “One Tree Hill” (1.1/3 in 18-49, 2.2 million viewers overall). In adults 18-34, both “Hill” (1.6/4) and “Gossip” (1.4/4) ranked fifth in their hours among the English-language broadcast networks.

Preliminary 18-49 averages for the night: Fox, 3.9/10; CBS< 3.8/10; ABC, 3.2/9; NBC, 2.5/7; Univision, 1.6/4; CW, 1.0/3.

In total viewers: ABC, 14.0 million; CBS, 11.3 million; Fox, 11.0 million; NBC, 6.4 million; Univision, 4.1 million; CW, 2.1 million.

Source: Variety

Amanda Peet Joins ‘Gulliver’s Travels’

POSTED IN Movie News, Read | TAGS : Amanda Peet April 28, 2009

Amanda Peet has joined the cast of the Jack Black-led adventure comedy, Gulliver’s Travels.

Based (very) loosely on Jonathan Swift’s classic tale, the updated Gulliver’s sees Black play ace travel writer, Lemuel Gulliver, who goes on assignment to the Bermuda Triangle and ends up on the island of Lilliput, populated by people so tiny they could come as free gifts in boxes of cereal.

Peet will play Black’s editor, and potential love interest. She joins the already-cast Jason Segel and Emily Blunt, who turned down the role of the Black Widow in Iron Man 2 because of a scheduling conflict with this.

First Look at Megan Fox on the Jonah Hex Set

POSTED IN Photos | TAGS : Megan Fox April 28, 2009

Almodovar To Make A TV Show

POSTED IN Movie News, Read, TV News | TAGS : Pedro Almodovar April 28, 2009

Pedro Almodovar, the director of Volver and this year’s Cannes effort Broken Embraces, is set to turn one of his early hits into a TV show. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, a farcical story about love, infidelity, terrorism, sleeping pills and gazpacho, was a massive hit for the director in 1988, and is now going to be an English-language show.

The original film starred Carmen Maura, Rossy de Palma and a young Antonio Banderas, in a story about Maura’s Pepa, an actress who dubs commercials and whose life goes into a tailspin when her lover leaves her. While she goes a bit nuts (puts her apartment up for sale, makes a large jug of sleeping-pill laced gazpacho) and searches Madrid for him, a series of misunderstandings between her friends and acquaintances make everything very complicated, very silly and totally bizarre.

The TV show will be based around a group of suburban women who have known each other their whole lives, and who are “looking at the second half of their lives” says writer and co-producer Mimi Schmir. It will keep the humour of the original, we’re told, and also the gazpacho gag.

Michael Caine Set For Chris Nolan’s sci-fi Inception

POSTED IN Movie News, Read | TAGS : Christopher Nolan April 28, 2009

Sir Maurice Micklewhite has indeed signed on to join the cast of Nolan’s mysterious sci-fi, Inception.The movie will be the fourth in a row for the Caine/Nolan team, following Batman Begins, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight.

As has been the case with Inception since, well, its inception, Caine hasn’t been able to spill word one about the project or his character. “I have a little part in it, yes,” he told InContention.com. “I think I’ll work about three days. It’ll be extraordinary, wait until you see this one. I think if I say another word he’s going to kill me!”

Caine joins an already pretty damned impressive cast, including Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy (his third Nolan flick), Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Leonardo DiCaprio.

The sci-fi thriller, which takes place within the architecture of the mind, is set for release next July.

Box Office – Obsessed wins with $28.5 mil

POSTED IN Movie News April 28, 2009

Beyoncé Knowles thriller Obsessed(Watch Trailer), which raked in an estimated $28.5 million and left the competition behind. Despite a widespread critical drubbing (Metacritic smacked it with a 22 score), Obsessed clearly tapped into a female-driven audience bloodlusting for some schlocky, catfighting fun with its story of a woman (Knowles) battling to keep a mentally unhinged secretary (Ali Larter) from stealing her husband (Idris Elba). Knowles pulled in her biggest three-day opening since 2002′s Austin Powers in Goldmember.

Zac Efron managed to keep his matinee-idol face relatively unharmed, meanwhile, with 17 Again dropping a respectable 51 percent to come in second with $11.7 million, for a 10-day total of $39.9 million. Hot on Efron’s heels, however, was the weekend’s second donnybrook-ing flick. Fighting, starring Channing Tatum as, well, a fighter, made a higher-than-expected $11.4 million, and very well may end up passing 17 Again for the No. 2 slot when final numbers come out on Monday.

The Soloist, alas, suffered the worst beating, banking just $9.7 million for fourth place, an anemic number for the already enfeebled adult drama. Critical indifference — just a 61 on Metacritic — probably didn’t help the film’s cause, and the film may have never recovered from Paramount’s decision to move the film from its prestige picture slot last fall to the far dicier spring season.

The Disneynature doc Earth landed a fifth-place finish with $8.5 million, and its $4 million opening on Wednesday (a.k.a. Earth Day) lifted the film to a $14.2 million five-day total. Although those numbers are shy of what some thought the film could do, it remains the second-best opening weekend ever for a documentary, next to just Fahrenheit 9/11.

Finally, The Informers, based on the Bret Easton Ellis novel, opened in limited release to a puny $300,000, or just $622 a theater. The highly regarded Mike Tyson documentary Tyson, by contrast, debuted at $86,000 on just 11 screens for a vigorous $7,818 per-theater average, one of the best of the weekend. It seems fisticuffs of any stripe were your best bet for this weekend, which, according to figures from Box Office Mojo, was up a whopping 30 percent from last year, when the significantly less violent Baby Mama was tops.