The Hollywood Universe – 4/26/08

1) Mega-producer Joel Silver has announced that the Justice League film has been put on hold for the indefinite future. The embattled production lost director George Miller and has been plagued with setbacks and inner-studio/DC Comics wrangling. With Justice League out of the picture, new focus has been turned on a Wonder Woman feature, which is back in pre-development. Silver, who’s been trying to get a Wonder Woman picture going since 2001, has hired newbies Matthew Jennison and Brent Strickland to do a new script. The duo has written an earlier WWII treatment for the film that studio Warner Brothers liked, but now the pair are being asked to come up with an entirely new origin story. Previous writers on the project have included Todd Alcott, Joss Whedon, Jon Cohen, Becky Johnston, Philip Levens and Laeta Kalogridis.

2) About a decade before J.K. Rowling published the first of her Harry Potter series, in 1986, film director John Carl Buechler did a fantasy movie called Troll that featured a young character named Harry Potter Jr., played by actor Noah Hathaway, who has to enter a magical land with witches, monsters and wizards in order to save his sister. The movie spawned two sequels. Now Buechler is remaking the initial film for a 2009 release, and is keeping the original name of the character. Buechler has set up a website, troll.sharenow.com, as a casting call for kid actors to play Harry and his sister Wendy Anne. Noah Hathaway will appear in the remake film, but as a much older character named Turok. 
 
3) Madrid-based Ilion Animation Studios is producing, in a deal with New Line Cinema and Warner Brothers, an animated SF comedy Planet 51, for a fall 2009 release, with actor Dwayne Johnson as the voice of an Earth astronaut who gets stranded on a planet where the inhabitants fear alien invasion. The astronaut, Captain Charles “Chuck” Baker, befriends a young boy and gets his help to get back to his spaceship. The movie also features the voices of Seann William Scott, Jessica Biel and Justin Long, and was written by Joe Stillman, the writer on the Shrek movies. Jorge Blanco is directing.
 
4) Contributing to the remake frenzy in horror, Brian De Palma’s 1978 supernatural thriller The Fury is being remade for Fox 2000. Brian McGreevy and Lee Shipman will do the new script, centered on a young man who is abducted by the government because of his telekinetic abilities. The original movie starred Kirk Douglas and John Cassavetes and was based on John Farris’ 1976 novel, The Fury.
 
5) After coy eyelash fluttering from all sides, it has been officially announced that Guillermo del Toro will be directing New Line-MGM’s live action The Hobbit and a related sequel film, with Lord of the Rings impressario Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh acting as executive producers. Jackson was originally supposed to direct the film, based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved children’s novel that became a prequel tale for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga, but scheduling problems and a financial feud over the Rings movies between Jackson and New Line, now settled, created the need for a new director. del Toro will move to New Zealand to work with Jackson’s production teams, shooting the two movies over four years back-to-back. The sequel to The Hobbit will be set in the time period between the events in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. 
 
6) Transformers 2 is recruiting the U.S. Air Force to help with its new film shoot, based on the Transformer toys and cartoons. The movie is seeking to cast as many extras from actual Air Force personnel as possible for scenes to be shot this summer. An announcement calling for military volunteers appeared in the Air Force Times. No doubt fighting against tennis balls on sticks will be a nice change from Iraq and Afghanistan. Transformers 2 is scheduled for a June 2009 release.
 
7) Stephen King’s short story “Dolan’s Cadillac” will be adapted for the silver screen. The story, a take on Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Cask of Amontillado," concerns a man haunted by the voice of his late wife, who was murdered by a crimelord named Dolan and who wants her husband to avenge her death. The movie will star Christian Slater, Wes Bentley and Emmanuelle Vaugier, and is directed by Erik Canuel from an adaptation by Richard Dooling for a tentative 2009 release.