After handling visual effects for such blockbusters as Watchmen, Avatar and Terminator: Salvation, Dan Blank is aiming to showcase his directing chops in Invisible, a sci-fi feature that he just successfully pitched to Fox.
Apparently, even the White House wasn't enough. Hot off his acclaimed turn as dastardly politician Frank Underwood on the second season of Netflix's hit drama House of Cards, Kevin Spacey has signed on to play former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a biopic titled Captain of the Gate.
With a star-studded adapation of his bestseller The Fault In Our Stars, about the unusual romance between two teen cancer patients, primed to light up the box office this June, it's safe to say that novelist John Green is having a pretty phenomenal 2014. Today, Green got even more great news, with Fox 2000's announcement that the studio has picked up his book Paper Towns and is planning to reteam with The Fault In Our Stars writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, producers Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen, and co-star Nat Wolff, for the adaptation.
As a fan of Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas thrillers, I was tremendously excited when The Mummy director Stephen Sommers latched onto the story and took steps to turn it into a major film franchise. My anticipation only grew when Anton Yelchin, previously the star of the horrifically underrated Fright Night remake, was cast in the lead role. Though I never would have pegged Yelchin for the part, I honestly couldn't imagine anyone else in the role once his name came up. Then, just as fans were preparing to mark their calendars, something odd happened, and not in a punny way. Legal disputes killed the film's marketing campaign and left it lying dormant on Sommers' shelf, for months on end. Earlier this year, the film did see a theatrical run, albeit a shockingly brief one, and I regrettably missed it then. Luckily, with Odd Thomas now hitting Blu-Ray, I was finally able to see the fruits of Sommers' labor.
Scottish actress Karen Gillan stole the hearts of geeks everywhere after starring as fiery redhead Amy Pond on BBC America's time-travelling smash Doctor Who for three wonderful seasons, but her next role may endear her to an entirely different but just as rabid fanbase. The actress has endured hours in the makeup chair to portray villainous space pirate Nebula in Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, arriving this summer, and director James Gunn (Slither) recently shared an image of the actress in costume to assure us that all her suffering has not been for naught.
FX's anthology series American Horror Story is surely one of the wildest shows on television today. Over the past three seasons, viewers have explored a haunted house, a wacky 1960s insane asylum and (in the show's strongest outing yet) a coven of modern-day witches. And along the way, showrunner Ryan Murphy has pushed buttons with ghosts in fetish suits, psychotic Santas, minotaur sex and just about every other bizarre twist in between.
Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. That's certainly the case in Rob the Mob, Raymond De Felitta's jaunty, disarmingly human crime caper about Tommy and Rosemarie Uva, a real Queens couple who brazenly stuck up social clubs habited by members of two major New York crime families, and got away with it - until they didn't.
Whether we actually needed an update of the classic Roman Polanski chiller Rosemary's Baby is still unclear, but NBC is nevertheless sending one our way later this year. Starring Avatar actress Zoe Saldana in the lead role of a newlywed mother-to-be who begins to suspect that her husband and new neighbors may have dark plans for her unborn child, the four-hour miniseries, now filming in Paris, will find its way to the small screen this May.
It's been almost 30 years since Mel Gibson last stepped into the role of Mad Max in 1985's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, so it's honestly surprising that a Hollywood reboot of the post-apocalyptic action franchise took this long to come around. Next summer, The Dark Knight Rises actor Tom Hardy will step into the iconic role for Mad Max: Fury Road, a remake that finds the character fleeing across the Wasteland (a devastated Australia) with a group of people in a vehicle called a War Rig, driven by the Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron).
One of the horror films I'm most curious about this year is Ti West's found footage thriller The Sacrament, set for release in May. AJ Bowen (pictured at top), who broke out in last summer's You're Next as Crispian, is set to star as one of several photographers who uncovers a sinister presence at play inside the seemingly idyllic commune of Eden Parish. Bowen will face off with Gene Jones (pictured at bottom), playing the commune's creepy but charismatic leader, known only as Father. Buzz on the project is very positive (with a lot of early praise going to those two performances), and evidently the two enjoyed working together so much that they've now found another film to star in: the psychological horror flick Dementia.
