When Sony decided not to pursue a fourth Spider-Man film with fan favourite Sam Raimi there was always going to be a huge interest in who got handed the reins for the £1.5billion franchise. However, when they announced a reboot would be helmed by second time director Marc Webb there was a mixture of anger and bemusement from Spidey fans. Coming off the back of his debut feature, quirkily successful rom-com 500 Days of Summer, how could this sophomore director possibly emulate the success of Raimi's trilogy? Many seemed content to assume the studio execs had seen his surname and decided hiring him was a no-brainer.
Amidst all the summer blockbusters on the way, it's easy to forget some of the less explosive films out this year. To jog our memories though, the trailer and poster for Joe Wright's upcoming period drama, Anna Karenina, have arrived online.
As casting continues for Catching Fire: the sequel to box office smash The Hunger Games, Mia Wasikowska (Alice In Wonderland, Jane Eyre) and model-turned-actress Zoe Aggeliki are said to be in the mix for the role of Johanna.
In an interview with the LA Times, Michael Bay has hinted that the final instalment of his god-awful Transformers franchise may take the Autobots to outer space, although mercifully they will be leaving Shia LaBeouf behind.
There is good news for fans of franchise reboots (they allegedly exist) as Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, the scribes responsible for last year’s excellent revival of the Planet Of The Apes franchise, have been signed to write the screenplay for the belated fourth entry in the Jurassic Park series.
Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ “The Dark Knight Rises” is the epic conclusion to filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.
The BFI Southbank recently held a screening and Q&A for Searching for Sugar Man, with the film’s affable director Malik Bendjelloul present together with the subject of the feature length documentary, the Detroit musician Rodriguez. Total Film’s deputy editor Jamie Graham hosted the event and introduced Bendjelloul as a director who has worked on short films with musicians such as Rod Stewart and Sting. Paraphrasing, Graham noted that Bendjelloul had asserted that if a story couldn’t be told in ten minutes then it wasn’t worth telling. This is Bendjelloul’s first feature length film, however, and when asked if it seemed like an immediate ‘no brainer’ that this story needed to be a feature Bendjelloul simply answered with a smiling ‘Yes.’
Prometheus, Men in Black 3 and Snow White all hold onto the top of the charts. Too bad, new releases.
Christopher Nolan brings his triumphant Batman trilogy to a close with next month's release of The Dark Knight Rises. The series has given superhero movies a shot in the arm, showing that the medium is adult and mature enough to sustain serious, realistic storytelling while simultaneously bagging monstrous box office returns. It will come as no surprise to anyone that we are very big fans of Nolan's work at Lost in the Multiplex and, in order to celebrate the conclusion of arguably the most successful superhero franchise ever, we are going to be running a lot - and I mean a lot - of coverage.
Biblical epics are on the cusp of a return to mainstream cinema with Darren Aronofsky's Noah heading into production, Ridley Scott and Steven Spielberg developing the Moses story into Exodus and now it looks like plans for Paul Verhoeven's project, Jesus of Nazareth, is set to move forward.
