The tragic death of actor Paul Walker in a fiery car crash last month came as both a shock and a challenge to Universal. Walker had been filming Fast & Furious 7 alongside the rest of the film's cast, and his passing came after almost exactly half of his footage for the big-budget sequel was already in the can.
After lighting up the small screen on three seasons of FX's freaky horror anthology series American Horror Story, acclaimed actress Jessica Lange has landed a supporting role in a remake of the 1974 James Caan-starring drama The Gambler.
Though Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and his super-powered cohorts will already have their hands full with the sentient, near-invincible cyborg Ultron (James Spader) in 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron, director Joss Whedon is adding another antagonist to make life even more difficult for the superhero team.
I'm very excited to see next year's reboot of RoboCop. At first, Jose Padilha's remake sounded like an unquestionably terrible idea (remember 2012's relentlessly bland Total Recall retread?), but early promotional material for the sci-fi actioner has done a great job of highlighting the human side of cyborg Alex Murphy (played by Joel Kinnaman this time around) without skimping on the gritty action sequences.
The great irony of today's technologically advanced society is just how isolated our smart-phones, designed to foster interpersonal interactions, have left us. Walking along any city sidewalk, it's easy to find individuals so absorbed in the glowing screens of their hand-held devices that all attempts by others to break through would prove utterly pointless. Soon, it seems, the day will arrive when people prefer the cold company of technology to the tangible comforts that only other flesh-and-blood individuals can provide. Spike Jonze's latest effort, Her, unfolds in one of those quietly dystopian futures, where powerful technology has effectively destroyed the intimacy of human contact.
Yesterday, we brought you news that A-lister Paul Rudd was in the midst of negotiations with Marvel to play the pint-sized protagonist of Edgar Wright's upcoming Ant-Man, and now the studio has made it official.
Although Spike Lee's remake of the Korean cult classic Oldboy proved completely dead on arrival at the box-office last month, that's not enough to stop producers Adi Shankar and Spencer Silna (of 1984 Private Defense Contractors) from moving forward with another American take on a well-received Korean revenge thriller. The producers, who previously worked together on Liam Neeson action drama The Grey and Mark Wahlberg crime thriller Broken City, just picked up English-language rights to Kim Ji-woon's 2010 brutal thriller I Saw the Devil.
Heck hath no fury like a woman scorned in the disappointingly safe trailer for Nick Cassavetes' upcoming comedy The Other Woman. The preview forgets to add in much humor, but it spends a lot of time introducing the film's story while parading around a star-studded cast which includes Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann, Kate Upton, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Nicki Minaj.
No one can deny that most movie studios in Hollywood occasionally run a little low on originality. Luckily for them, there's over a century of classic films that can provide inspiration for new ones... in addition to already-formed characters, plots and dialogue, if need be. So, it's never a surprise when a remake gets the green light - this year alone, we've had many. Now and then, one of these remakes is pretty good. Other times, a remake is bad or just utterly pointless. Sometimes, they're even masquerading as original films. Join us as we count off the top five best (and bottom five worst) remakes and rip-offs from the past year.
2014 is shaping up to be a stronger year for horror than 2013 was, and though the indie haunted-house flick Haunt didn't make We Got This Covered's list of the most anticipated frightfests opening next year, a solid first trailer suggests that the film might still be worth checking out.
