42, the new feature film about first African-American baseball player Jackie Robinson, hit the ball out of the park this weekend with $27.3 million for the weekend – the most successful opening weekend of any baseball movie ever made. (And of course, the press is having a field day with this grand-slam opportunity to raise their punning average by a few points.) Read more box office news here.
Anglophiles rejoice: Michael Caine has signed on to Eliza Graves, upcoming adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, directed by Bran Anderson. Ben Kingsley will also feature in this Mel Gibson-produced film. Read more details here.
Morgan Freeman is in final talks to star in Transcendence, a scifi movie in the vein of Inception that marks the directorial debut of Wally Pfister. Why do we care about Pfister? Because he’s Christopher Nolan's go-to cinematographer. Why else are we excited about this movie? Because Johnny Depp is in it. And Christopher Nolan is producing. And . . . look, just read more about the film here and here.
Can’t get a studio to finance your movie? Cut out the middle man and take it straight to the people. At least, that’s what Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell did to finance the Veronica Mars movie. Their record-breaking Kickstarter campaign garnered $5.7 million, almost three times its original goal. Read the story details here and more about why this is history in the making here.
I’m less than convinced that Pain and Gain is going to be a good movie. At the very least, looking at those steroid-fueled bodies makes me queasy—whether from jealousy or a noble sense of bioethics, who knows. But misgivings aside, the film raises some interesting moral dilemmas—the real-life businessman, who was a crook, is less than happy about the movies’ trailers portraying him as deserving of kidnapping and torture. See the interview here.
