Robert Pattinson just can’t bear it any longer. The kitchen where they cooked, the pool where they swam, the bedroom where they… you know. There are simply “too many memories” inside the Los Angeles home the actor shared with Kristen Stewart , a source tells Us Weekly , and as a result he’s putting it on the market. The estranged couple moved in to the $6.3 million house (which was once owned by Noah Wyle) about a year ago. It sits on a half acre of land and could now make for the greatest keepsake of all-time for one very wealthy Twilight Saga fan. As for the status or Rob and Kristen? This news doesn’t bode well for their future as a couple. Pattinson has refused to discuss the scandal in public, while Stewart continues to be the victim of public scorn and ridicule . “Rob doesn’t hate her and he’s not mad,” an insider tells the tabloid. “He just doesn’t get why she did it. He loves her and thinks about her constantly.”
Movies adapted from video games are usually like video-game zombies: shambling brainless wrecks. Thanks, in part, to the vacant movie adaptation of Prince of Persia , Jake Gyllenhaal is doing theater now; the adaptation of Max Payne should have been spelled Max Pain , and the Resident Evil franchise continues to stupefy. And judging from the latest delay in the making of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune , Hollywood still struggles mightily with how to turn good games into good movies. Sadly, unlike video-game zombies, these adaptations are impossible to kill. They exist in perpetuity and will be playing on Cinemax long after your corpse resembles a rotting zombie. The best you can do is ignore them, which is increasingly easy thanks to some inspired and inspiring gamers who are solving the problem the way they’ve been trained — through countless hours of play — to solve all problems. They’re taking the controls and doing it themselves. They’re winning, too. Here are four fan-made movies inspired by video games that should have the movie industry’s total attention: 1. Dead Fantasy : Give the Gamers What They Want — Action! Video games should feature more pure action than a Terminator T-800 UFC match, so it’s weird that most game-inspired movies feature more pointless explanation than you’d find in a manual for some old-school Bond villain’s Death Laser. If someone’s going to see Street Fighter — and they really shouldn’t — they don’t need an hour of set-up explaining why people are fighting. The gamers already know the back story, and even if the filmmakers have strayed from the game to develop the plot line, the less said the better. Monty Oum, the creator of Dead Fantasy understands this principle better than most and packs more kickass per minute into Dead Fantasy than you’ll find in the entire Thai film industry. For the uninitiated, Dead Fantasy depicts a battle between the ladies of Dead or Alive and Final Fantasy , two of the most popular gaming series in existence. And while this abundance of X chromosomes might make you think it’s all about titillating fan boys, this clip is all about eye-popping choreography, not anatomy. If this video starred rotting mummies you’d still watch it five times. Dead Fantasy is able to pile on the action because it rightly trusts the intelligence of its audience. For example, the girl in blue arrives by teleport, so you know she can teleport, and it’s used in several awesome and original moments of fight choreography. In a theatrical movie there’d be an entire expository scene explaining her teleportation skills ad nauseam, and at no point would she be thrown off a collapsing bridge to save a falling gunslinger. The film-industry should be stalking this guy. 2. Escape from City 17 : Make a Movie That Honors the Game The Purchase Brothers — David and Ian — embarrassed the producers of every video game movie ever made with just $500. They filmed part 1 of Escape from City 17 — which is set in the universe of the Half-Life video game franchise — with less money than most film productions spend on mineral water. Their genius was realizing that you don’t need to design sets, clothing and a plot for a video game because that’s already been done by the video game publisher. The brothers matched the costumes of their original characters to the ones worn in Half-Life 2 and even extracted special effects directly from the game code. What you see on the screen really is in the world of the game — which is what gamers have always wanted from movies, and what video game movie directors have never understood. Escape from City 17 isn’t your typical movie inspired by a video game, which usually amounts to a film that has very little connection to the actual game except for a few key words and characters that get thrown around. (See the Resident Evil series.) It’s a live-action movie made by people who actually played and loved the game — and it’s a first in that respect. The brothers then made a sequel that was triple the length for half the budget in their spare time. Given their level of proficiency, if they had a real movie budget, they wouldn’t just make the best parallel-universe alien-invasion game movie ever: they’d probably be able to stage one for real. 3. Freeman’s Mind : You Don’t Always Have to Appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator The blanding of movies has a lot to do with the minimization of risk in the name of profit-making, which is a weird strategy when you’re making a movie that’s essentially about cops blowing up terrorists. The biggest budget movies need to convince everyone on the planet to watch it, and, if at all possible, sell tickets to a few alien planets as well. Small creators don’t have that problem: if they want to make something they’re already halfway there. Ross Scott’s Freeman’s Mind is genius, but its entire target market is “People who’ve played through Half-Life .” If you have, you’ll love it. If you haven’t, you might not even have read this far. The Internet connects niche productions with their perfect audience, while machinima — using video game graphics engines for filmmaking — gives them an incredibly powerful set of actors and cameras. This kind of production is popping up everywhere, as fans driven by pure love and enabled by awesome technology turn a hobby into entertainment for others. The most famous example is Red vs Blue, who turned Halo into an entire film studio, and are now building a real film studio based on that success. 4. Thousand Pounds Action Company: You Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Fancy Graphics While the Purchase Brothers showed how easy it was to match a game’s look and feel, the Thousand Pounds Action Company demonstrated that it’s possible to be true to a game without all the fancy visuals. (The company name is also much cooler.) Their three Ultra Combos clips perfectly match the feel of Street Fighter IV (with the help of some of the games smackdown sound effects) using original characters who wouldn’t exactly be welcome in an American Apparel store. Street Fighter was the only game with a more disappointing movie than Mario Bros , and its 2009 sequel of sorts, The Legend of Chun Li only made things more disappointing. These videos show what could be done with the franchise, and we’ll soon see more. Because these fan-made videos are not only fun for other fans who get to enjoy them, they’re drawing attention to skilled creators who should be working in a film industry that seems eager to make movies based on video games but then doesn’t seem to know how to go about it properly. That brings us to the fifth and final lesson; 5. Get Your Act Together Hollywood, Because Gamers Are Realizing They Don’t Need You. Dead Fantasy producer Oum has been hired by Red vs Blue. The Purchase Brothers, who are represented by William Morris Endeavor, are beavering away on a “secret feature film project”, and the Thousand Pounds Action Co are turning their fame into their future right now with a LINK Kickstarter campaign to fund their first original series. Stay tuned. Luke McKinney loves the real world, but only because it has movies and video games in it. He responds to every tweet. Follow Luke McKinney on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
It seems Ridley Scott gave himself options when it came to some of the effects in his Prometheus saga, which the forthcoming DVD/Blu-ray release (and its reportedly sprawling bonus features menu ) should handily reveal for hungry fans. Newly unveiled unused effects shots of a pivotal action scene in the film involving a certain crewmember are so drastically different than what’s seen in the theatrical version it actually is making my brain hurt more trying to figure out how this alterna-design would have made any sense. Spoilers! The character at hand is Fifield, played by Sean Harris, the mohawked geologist who gets mutated by the black goo and then spider-walks his way back to the ship where he zombie-attacks his old crew mates in one of the film’s least sense-making sequences. In the theatrical version, this was one of the first scenes that prompted SO MANY QUESTIONS . Like: Why did the goo mutate Fifield into a hulking undead killer-thingy in the first place? If you recall, Fifield looked like this pre-mutation: Then post-goo was transformed into this charming look, achieved with practical make-up: However, new effects images debuted by Cinefex show a CG design that makes Fifield look much more alien. More gelatinous. More Mars Attacks , if you will. From Cinefex via Bloody Disgusting : “To mutate Fifield beyond what was possible using practical makeup effects, Weta Digital generated a digital character with elongated limbs and an engorged, transluscent head, incorporating a semblance of Harris’ face. Scott filmed the sequence both with the actor in makeup and without, providing clean plates that would allow for the insertion of the digital character. The final cut featured mostly makeup effects, which Weta enhanced with digital wire removal, bullet hits, and one shot of the digital creature’s body blended to the actor.” The alternate design is more terrifying in its own way, but doesn’t necessarily seem to fit the world of Prometheus . For starters, I’d have had even less of an idea who the heck Fifield-Zombie was during his undead attack if he looked like this. So, good call? Now, if there’s a CG version of Old Guy Pearce out there floating around in the WETA digital trash bins, I’d be curious… [ Cinefex via Bloody Disgusting , Movies.com ]
Actor admits he tried to learn surfing ‘on the biggest waves possible.’ By Kara Warner Jonny Weston and Gerard Butler in “Chasing Mavericks” Photo: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
He’s a good guy, that Robert Pattinson. Faced with numerous opportunities to bash Kristen Stewart over the past couple weeks, the actor has refrained, most recently appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live and discussing everything in his life except the woman that broke his heart. And now comes the following news: Sources tell The Sun that Pattinson has volunteered to walk the red carpet alongside Stewart at November’s Breaking Dawn premiere. For what reason? “To save her from embarrassment and any female fans booing her,” according to the insider. “He is being professional and taking the higher moral ground.” That’s for sure. Stewart is reportedly breaking down herself over the couple’s split, and we can understand why: Pattinson really does appear to be just that awesome. The costars also expected to present together at the MTV Video Music Awards on September 6. Will that go down as scheduled? Stay tuned.
Yes, yes, I know Mr. Eko has a real name. But who doesn’t like imagining Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje ‘s LOST alter ego duking it out with Dr. Who (okay, Chris Eccleston) and Thor (FINE, the Huntsman the jock the Wolverine Chris Hemsworth) in an epic Thor 2 Norse space brawl? Per Variety , Akinnuoye-Agbaje has landed the role of Dark Elf bruiser Algrim the Strong in Thor 2 (AKA Thor: The Dark World ). The nerdy details: In the comicbooks, Algrim the Strong was the most powerful of a race of Dark Elves, who is coerced by Malekith to fight Thor. After he’s betrayed by Malekith and injured during a battle, Algrim is healed and transformed into a much more powerful being called Kurse, who is twice as a strong as Thor. Alan Taylor has taken over directing duties from Kenneth Branagh, with cast members Natalie Portman, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hiddleston, Idris Elba, Jaimie Alexander, Stellan Skarsgard, Rene Russo and Kat Dennings returning. Thor 2 hits theaters November 8, 2013. [ Variety ]
I know none of you David Cronenberg fans out there are super juiced about the Videodrome remake at Universal first time feature director Adam Berg is in talks to helm. Many of you may even be straight up livid . But there’s a silver lining to this latest move on Hollywood’s part to unnecessarily remake our best-loved film classics… That would be “Carousel,” the 2009 commercial directed by Berg, commissioned to promote the company’s Philips Cinema 21:9 LCD televisions. If you recall, “Carousel” was a visual marvel of a short that maneuvered its way through a cops vs. clown robber shoot-out in one glorious continuous CG-aided tracking shot; it went on to win the prestigious Grand Prix award at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival and, apparently, earned Swedish music video veteran Berg Hollywood notice. So sure, it might make your cinephile skin crawl to hear that Universal’s Videodrome update aims “to modernize the concept, infusing it with the possibilities of nano-technology and blow it up into a large-scale sci-fi action thriller.” I mean, whatever. And yes, Michael Bay’s frequent Transformers scribe Ehren Kruger ( The Ring , Scream 3 , Reindeer Games ) is writing the screenplay. You probably can’t expect anything really resembling Cronenberg’s totally ’80s VHS/cable TV techno-paranoia thriller in Videodrome 2.0. , but on the bright side, it could be a watch-worthy directorial debut. Long live the new flesh? [ Deadline ]
Also in Wednesday afternoon’s round-up of news briefs, Toronto 2012 Sci-Fi horror John Dies at the End heads for theatrical release. Also headed to theaters is Ernest Borgnine’s final film. Ellen DeGeneres is in talks to reprise a Pixar favorite. And Tribeca Film Institute gives $400K in grants for transmedia projects. Toronto 2012 Sci-Fi Horror John Dies at the End Heads for Release Magnet Releasing will bring cult filmmaker Don Coscarelli’s John Dies at the End to theaters and VOD. The genre label of distribution company Magnolia Pictures will release the title via VOD in late December, followed by a theatrical release in early 2013. The feature will screen in the Midnight Madness section of the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival. Check out the film’s description here . Anti-Obama Doc Tops Online Ticketer Fandango 2016: Obama’s America is selling more advanced tickets than any other film, Fandango said. The feature, which is based on conservative author Dinesh D’Souza’s book The Roots of Obama’s Rage , expands nationwide Friday after posting solid numbers in limited release. Ernest Borgnine’s Final Film Vicente Fernandez Heading to Theaters Academy Award winner Ernest Borgnine’s final film, The Man Who Shook the Hand of Vicente Fernández will head for theatrical release via Indican Pictures which acquired North American rights to the title. The film will open in Los Angeles this October, with additional select cities to follow, and will launch an awards campaign centered on Borgnine’s final performance. The pic debuted at this year’s Newport Beach Film Festival where the actor won the Acting Prize. He passed away in July. Tribeca Film Institute Grants $400K to Transmedia Projects The program is in partnership with the Ford Foundation. Six interactive non-fiction projects explores a range of topics ranging from Guatemalan street gangs in Alma, A Tale of Violence to rural West Virginia issues in Hollow . Question Bridge explores black male identity. New Day New Standard centers on workers’ rights, while Laika’s Adventure is an educational story revolving around Connected Sparks, an online social change platform for children. And Immigrant Nation involves personal stories and multiple entry points surrounding U.S. immigrants. The TFI New Media Fund supports non-fiction film projects that go beyond traditional screens, exploring storytelling that is interactive, multi-platform and participatory. Around the ‘net… Ellen Page Set to Star in Pic Based on Landmark Gay Rights Case Ellen Page will play Stacie Andree who was denied pension benefits from her longtime partner Laurel Hester, a New Jersey police detective who became terminally ill. The story is based on the Oscar-winning short documentary Freeheld , which production company Incognito Pictures is developing, Deadline reports . Ellen DeGeneres Eyes Finding Nemo Sequel The comedian is in talks to reprise her role in the wildly popular underwater animated feature from Disney/Pixar. She would again voice Dory, the blue tang fish with the short-term memory challenge that she played in the 2003 original, THR reports .
Also in Monday morning’s round-up of news briefs, Cosmopolis lead a weekend of specialty release titles in the box office. Samuel L. Jackson is joining an upcoming Spike Lee project. And remembering Gregory Peck’s widow who has passed away. Huge Crowds to Buy Hunger Games DVD Fans turned out in droves for the weekend release of The Hunger Games DVD. Cast members made appearances at select Walmarts in various cities, signing DVDs and Blu-rays, Deadline reports . Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis Strong in Deubt, Robot & Frank Solid: Specialty Box Office Cosmopolis launched its run in the U.S. and qualified as a master of the specialty universe – at least this weekend. After a blitz of media coverage worthy of a studio blockbuster, the David Cronenberg-directed, Robert Pattinson-starrer averaged a fairly impressive $24K-plus in three locations Stateside, Deadline reports . Samuel L. Jackson Boards Spike Lee’s Oldboy After a 21 year gap, Jackson will play a small but important part in Lee’s adaptation of the second part of Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s trilogy Oldboy . He’ll play a man who is tortured by the film’s hero, played by Josh Brolin in a key revenge scene, the Playlist reports via The Los Angeles Times . James Gunn Eyes Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Gunn is Marvel Studios’ choice to direct its upcoming space superhero saga Guardians of the Galaxy . The official log line for the film says it is centered on a “U.S. pilot who ends up in space in the middle of a universal conflict and goes on the run with futuristic ex-cons who have something everyone wants,” THR reports . Gregory Peck’s Widow Dies at 80 Veronique Passani, widow of Oscar-winning actor Gregory Peck, died of heart failure at her home in Los Angeles. Born in Paris, Passani met the actor when he was traveling to star in Roman Holiday and interviewed him for French paper, France Soir , THR reports .
The Expendables 2 bumped last week’s number one film The Bourne Legacy to number two over the weekend. The latest installment of the action pic grossed over $28.7 million in its first roll out, averaging a solid $8,670 screens. Bourne dropped 55% in its second round, while Focus Features’ Paranorman rounded out the top three in its initial run. 1. The Expendables 2 Gross: $28,750,000 Screens: $3,316 (PSA: $8,670) Week: 1 The first round of The Expendables opened with $34,825,135 when it debuted in theaters in August 2010, averaging $10,650 in 3,270 theaters. The second round is decidedly less heavy-hitting in terms of box office, but nevertheless a solid start for the action title starring Sylvester Stallone, who gave the director’s chair over to Simon West for the latest installment. 2. The Bourne Legacy Gross: $17,019,855 (Cume: $69,580,935) Screens: 3,753 (PSA: $4,535) Week: 2 (Change – 55%) The Jeremy Renner starter added just eight theaters in the U.S. and its drop from its first weekend roll out was a fairly acceptable 55%, though the pic landed in the second spot in the overall box office. The Bourne Legacy debuted in 3,745 theaters, averaging $10,752. Internationally, Legacy added five international territories, bringing the title to 18 abroad. it’s worldwide gross is now at $97.7 million. 3. Paranorman (3-D, Animation) Gross: $14,008,498 Screens: 3,429 (PSA: $4,085) Week: 1 The stop-action animated feature landed in the third place in the overall box office with just over $14 million with a so-so $4,085 average in 3,429 screens. The pic was produced by Coraline creators Laika and their latest effort performed similarly, grossing $16.8 million in a third place bow in February, 2009. 4. The Campaign Gross: $13,385,000 (Cume: $51,694,000) Screens: 3,255 (PSA: $4,112) Week: 2 (Change: – 50%) The comedy added 50 locations in its second weekend and its 50% drop was in the realm of acceptable. Internationally, The Campaign has added another $2.1 million so far. 5. Sparkle Gross: $12 million Screens: 3,255 (PSA: $5,348) Week: 1 With a $14 million budget, the film had a solid debut, landing in the top five of the overall box office. 6. The Dark Knight Rises Gross: $11,140,000 (Cume: $409,916,000) Screens: 3,157 (PSA: $3,529) Week: 5 (Change: – 41%) TDKR hit the $400 million milestone on Friday after 29 days of release. Overseas, the pic has grossed nearly $489 million bringing its worldwide total to just under $900 million. 7. The Odd Life of Timothy Green (opened Wednesday) Gross: $10,909,000 (Cume: $15,187,000) Screens: 2,598 (PSA: $4,199) Week: 1 The feature debuted Wednesday in 2,551 theaters with a head-start total of $2.3 million ahead of the weekend. It is the weekend’s fourth debut in the top 10. 8. Hope Springs Gross: $9.1 million (Cume: $35,051,000) Screens: 2,361 (PSA: $3,854) Week: 2 (Change: -38%) The comedy opened in the fourth spot when it debuted in theaters last weekend. The title stayed in the same number of locations, averaging a decent $3,854 vs its $6,607 opener. 9. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days Gross: $3,850,000 (Cume: $38,762,321) Screens: 2,737 (PSA: $1,407) Week: 3 (Change: – 52%) The title lost 664 locations in its third weekend, averaging $1,407 vs $2,411 in its second round last week when it placed fifth in the overall box office. 10. Total Recall Gross: $3.5 million (Cume: $51,782,000) Screens: 2,434 (Average: $1,438) Week: 3 (Change: – 56%) This is likely the final weekend for the title in the top ten. Total Recall lost 1,167 screens compared to its second round last week. Watch the full video on YouTube . [ Sources: Box Office Mojo , Hollywood.com ]
