Skyfall packed some punch at the British box office, becoming the biggest U.K. weekend for any James Bond film. The film is the 23rd putting for 007 and the debonaire spy displayed his ticket selling prowess, taking in £20.1 million ($32.36 million) after opening Friday at 587 theaters in the U.K. and Ireland. “We are absolutely overwhelmed with the reaction to Skyfall this weekend,” producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli said in a statement. “It is particularly thrilling as the UK is home to James Bond and it being the 50th anniversary year.” Still, Bond did not quite match the magic of fellow Brit Harry Potter. The final installment of the boy wizard’s saga, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 charmed audiences to the tune of £23 million ($36.865 million) in its first weekend. James Bond is the longest-running film franchise ever. The film was also number one in 24 other overseas markets and is due to open the U.S. November 9th. Starring Daniel Craig, Dame Judi Dench and Javier Bardem, Skyfall marked Sam Mendes’ James Bond debut. It is also Craig’s third turn as 007, following box office successes for Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace He will do at least two more 007 features. THR (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/hugo-scribe-john-logan-james-bond-383477) reported last week that one of Skyfall ‘s co-writers, John Logan, has begun to tackle the script for a two-part original Bond story, not based on the series’ original author, Iam Fleming. [ Sources: Reuters , BBC , The Guardian ]
Now that the scariest parts of Silent Hill: Revelation 3D are proving to be the grisly reviews and box-office results, it’ s a good time to look at a handful of choice video games that have much greater potential than the Konami franchise to be blockbuster horror movies. In at least two of the examples I cite below, along with the pros and cons of adapting them, the film industry apparently agrees — or did at one point — that the game titles would translate well to the big screen. Actually making the movies adaptations of the games has not worked so well. 5. BioShock In 2009, BioShock looked like it was destined to be a movie. Pirates of the Caribbean franchise master Gore Verbinski was slated to direct the visually stunning game in which a plane-crash survivor in 1960 finds himself in the underwater Art Deco-style city of Rapture and its mutated inhabitants to survive. When the project ran into budget issues, Verbinski turned over the director’s reins to 28 Weeks Later filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and agreed to serve as a producer. Last May, however, Fresnadillo told Playlist he was no longer involved and that the project was on hold because Universal Studios and the game’s creator couldn’t agree on a budget or whether the project should have an R rating or a PG-13, which would attract a broader audience. With the much-delayed third game of the franchise, BioShock Infinite due out in February 2013, and set, this time, in a floating sky-city called Columbia, it’s time to revive this project. Pros: BioShock is beautiful. Simply seeing the steampunk city of Rapture on the big screen would be worth the ticket. With more than 4 million copies of the game sold and a plot that a) is better than most fantasy/horror movies and b) has actually driven the argument of videogames as art, it’s remarkable that it’s not already a movie. Cons: Video games inevitably lose their interactive components when they’re adapted into feature films, but these elements are so integral to the telling of the story that removing them could prove problematic. Videogame tropes such as highlighted objectives and extended cut-scenes aren’t optional extras in this case: they’re built into the plot the same way your heart is built in to you. 4. Left 4 Dead Pros: Valve’s multiplayer masterpiece — and its sequel, Left 4 Dead 2 — are the most viciously fun co-operative games ever made. Four very different characters must team up to survive the zombie apocalypse, or at least make it a little bit further. In addition to the teamwork element, which would translate well to the big screen, Left 4 Dead has some of the best incidental writing in games. Valve understands that writing dialogue is just as important as writing code, because nobody cares if a character’s hair is beautifully rendered when they can’t stand to spend the time with him. Added bonus: the game treats each level as a movie, complete with loading screen posters. Cons: Since there isn’t exactly a shortage of zombie projects out there in movie land, the writing and direction have got to be exceptional. Done properly, the combination of white-knuckle action and well-developed characters could make zombie movies exciting again. Maybe Hollywood should give Valve a lot of money and ask it to produce a script.
Don Coscarelli and Ridley Scott don’t have a helluva lot in common as filmmakers, but watching the new trailer for the former director’s long-gestating movie John Dies at the End put me in mind of Scott’s Prometheus . Coscarelli’s film, which is based on a David Wong novel, has to do with a drug called “Soy Sauce” that gives its users access to another dimension. Check out the trailer at the 55-second mark where a drop of the soy sauce hangs from the needle of the syringe. Now tell me that its spiky black appearance doesn’t remind you of the scene in Prometheus where Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) — the morning after having unwittingly been fed some of that creepy black goo from the Engineers’ship by the android David — looks in the mirror and sees some scary weird tendrils projecting from his eyeball. As you might expect from the director of Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep , the trailer also has jumping Tarantulas, pills that turn into fly-like creatures and a monster that consists of various cuts of raw meat. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
