Damon Houx
On top of the news about two untitled Marvel movies, Disney has updated their calendar, and changed the title of 'The Muppets' sequel, which is now going by the name 'The Muppets Most Wanted.'
Even with Warner Brothers/DC’s ‘Man of Steel‘ set to open this weekend, and even with the billion dollar grosses of the last two Batman films, there’s no question that Marvel is the studio for superhero movies. To extend their legacy, they’ve set release dates for two currently untitled projects set to start the summer seasons in 2016 and 2017.
Michael Bay is now shooting 'Transformers 4,' and has added new cars and a human to the production. The film just released two pictures of Autobots in car form, and announced that comic performer T.J. Miller has joined the cast.
When the White House is under attack, a Secret Service hopeful must get the President to safety before the terrorists find him.
It was well known that -- partly to appeal to an ever-growing global audience -- Marvel thought ahead and included Chinese actors for an extended cut of 'Iron Man 3' that was made specifically for the Chinese market. Now that the film has been released in China, the content of those additional scenes have been revealed, and it turns out that the rest of the world isn't missing much.
'Thor: The Dark World' looks to be bigger and better than the original movie!
'Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story' was a pretty funny movie that was a surprise hit in 2004. It pitted Vince Vaughn and his gang of outsiders against Ben Stiller and his corporate stooges in a winner-takes-all game of dodgeball. When a film does as well as 'Dodgeball' did (it made over $100 million at the box office), a sequel is practically guaranteed, and though it took a decade, it looks like they're finally getting around to it.
Though this was rumored last year, it looks like a sequel to 2012's '21 Jump Street' is moving forward. Sony has confirmed that they're going to make the film and that it will have a release sometime in 2014.
Though DreamWorks Animation has had some hits ('Shrek 2,' believe it or not, is one of the top ten highest grossing films of all time), their last film at Paramount ,'Rise of the Guardians,' was such a flop that it caused the studio to reduce ranks. Fortunately that may have just been some bad luck as their most recent film 'The Croods' is so successful that the studio has just announced a sequel.
When 20th Century Fox was founded in 1935 (the combination of Fox Films Corporation and Twentieth Century Pictures) it's possible that the founders of the company may have joked that their name could become obsolete in sixty five years, but it seems unlikely they were thinking that far ahead. Now -- seventy-eight years later -- the company's name has been changed to reflect the times and updated to 21st Century Fox for everything but the movie side of their business.
The classic Walt Disney animated films have become ripe fodder for big budget live action remakes. They've already updated 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' twice, they've filmed a new version of 'Sleeping Beauty' ('Maleficent'), and are working on a re-imaging of 'Cinderella.' But they're far from done mining these classics, as Disney is now looking to do a new gritty version of 'Beauty and the Beast,' called 'The Beast.'
When it was announced that 'The Hobbit' would be turned from two films into three, it seemed possible that Warner Brothers and Peter Jackson could kill themselves trying to deliver an additional three hour movie only seven months after the release of the second. So it's not a big surprise that 'The Hobbit: There and Back Again' has been pushed from July 18 to December 13, 2014.