Although next summer’s Incredible Hulk movie is being sold as more action driven than Ang Lee’s The Hulk, it never hurts to assemble a great cast. Liv Tyler is perhaps interchangeable with dozens of other actresses who could play Betty Ross, but Ed Norton as Bruce Banner / The Hulk is a savvy choice, and now Tim Roth is signed to played the Abomination, an old Hulk villain who is basically an evil counterpart to the Green Goliath.
This sort of casting makes a lot of sense. As with Tobey Maguire, and moreso Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark in the upcoming Iron Man movie, picking actors who a) fit the roles, b) are really good actors, and c) are not superstars who will demand huge money, only makes sense. No matter what Kirsten Dunst says, the actors don’t make these movies, it’s the characters. It’s nice to have continuity in the cast as these series progress, but hardly essential. (Look at James Bond, for heaven’s sake.)
And I’m sure everyone has seen them now, but both the proto-type Iron Man armor and the film’s main battle suit indeed look absolutely bitchin’.
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There’s word of an Eddie Murphy family comedy version film of the old Fantasy Island TV show. Murphy would, of course, play multiple roles. Wow. Wow, that’s a bad idea. (Not that it won’t necessarily make money.)
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I hope Spider-Man 3 enjoyed it’s week of being number one at the box office, because I can’t imagine it will top this week’s long-awaited Georgia Rule, in which Jane Fonda, Felicity Huffman and Lindsey Lohan star as three generations of women who teach each other valuable life lessons, ranging, presumably, from how to actively betray one’s country to sniffing lines of coke and forgoing the use of underwear. I’m sure that 23% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes is helping, too.
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Update: George Lucas is still a moron.
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Eli Roth is still hoping for another Grindhouse, which would feature films promised by the mock trailers in the first movie. Roth’s slasher movie ‘Thanksgiving’ would be one of them, along with Edgar Wright’s purposely crazy ersatz-European demon flick ‘Don’t.’ Roth, in his ’30s, would star with some of his friends as the film’s putative teenage cast, because “That’s how they did it in ’80s horror movies.” OK, that’s hilarious. Moreover, he more or less plans to work san a script, working basically off an outline he’s already whipped up. “I wouldn’t want to write it too detailed. You’ve just got to work out the kills and then see who’s around and grab a camera and have fun.”
Of course, there’s the fact that the first Grindhouse has been a box office bomb. Moreover, the fact is that Harvey Weinstein, who’s company produced the film, really is not known for a natural feel for genre movies, and is in fact best known for buying quality foreign genre fare and hacking it up to some degree or other. (His company butchered Shaolin Soccer, for instance.)
Roth and Wright’s best bet for getting this done is to hope that a) Grindhouse sells really, really well on DVD (which it might), and b) to get closer to the original model of the film than Rodriguiz and Tarantino ended up doing.
In other words, make each of the ‘features’ about an hour long (as opposed to almost an hour and a half for Planet Terror and Death Proof), and more important, keep the budget way down. The original film really did not have a huge budget, at $67 million, but to really emulate the original grindhouse films you probably want a total budget that’s a fraction of that, 20 or even 10%.
Even then, of course, getting the film into theaters isn’t likely, except for maybe a small number of prints for the arthouse or midnight movie circuits. Still, good luck to them on that.
