SFFWorld News - 9/7/08

 
SFFWorld News – 9/7/08

1) Author Stephanie Meyer has decided to table her latest novel, Midnight Sun, which tells the same story as Twilight, the first novel in her YA vampire series, but from the perspective of Edward the vampire. Meyer had written around twelve chapters of the new novel for her publisher Little, Brown, when the partial, draft manuscript was illegally leaked onto the Web. Meyer has since put up the chapters on her website for loyal fans to peruse, since she will not be continuing the novel for now. ( www.stepheniemeyer.com)

2) Columbia Pictures is gearing up for a new Ghostbusters movie and has hired Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, executive producers of the American version of the television series The Office to write a script. Eisenberg and Stupnitsky recently wrote the script for the film comedy Year One, which was directed by Harold Ramis, who starred in the first two Ghostbusters films and co-wrote them with fellow star Dan Aykroyd. Columbia is supposedly hoping to reunite Ramis, Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson to reprise their characters from the two movies, but no overtures have apparently been yet made and Columbia refused to release any details about the project. No, we are not going to make any “who you gonna call” jokes.

3) Actor Denzel Washington will star in Book of Eli, a post-apocalyptic drama to be directed by Allen and Albert Hughes for Joel Silver, Alcon Entertainment and Warner Brothers. Washington will portray a man in a broken near-future world who must fight his way across the former U.S. to deliver knowledge that may mean the country’s redemption. Gary Whitta and Anthony Peckham wrote the script.

4) Not content with the Hellboy franchise, Pan’s Labryinth and directing J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit for New Line and MGM, under the aegis of producer Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro is lining up the SFF projects and may well be booked as a director for the next decade. Universal Pictures, which has a first-look deal with del Toro, has set him up to direct their versions of Frankenstein, based on the novel by Mary Shelley, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, based on the story by Robert Louis Stevenson, and Slaughterhouse-Five, the SF novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. In addition to these classics, del Toro will direct the film adaptation of Drood, the up-coming historical dark fantasy novel by SFF legend Dan Simmons, based on the life of writer Charles Dickens, due out from Little, Brown in early 2009. But wait, there’s more! Universal is also interested in helping del Toro launch his pet project, an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s story At the Mountains of Madness. del Toro will also produce but not direct a film version of David Moody’s apocalypse novel Hater, and produce but not direct a gothic romance story he wrote with collaborator Matthew Robbins called Crimson Peak.

5) ABC network in the U.S. cancelled their alien scifi show Invasion, but remained interested in the idea. Now they’ll try out new series The Return, from Greg Berlanti and Rene Echevarria. The show centers on what happens when aliens land at the White House and say howdy.

6) Star Tobey McGuire and director/writer/producer Sam Raimi have agreed to do Spiderman 4 and Spiderman 5 for Columbia Pictures and Marvel. The two next films about the web crawling comics superhero may possibly be shot back to back, starting in the fall of 2009. Spiderman 4 has a tentative release date for summer 2011, which would be nine years after the first in the series starring McGuire as Spiderman debuted. Jamie Vanderbilt has been hired to write the screenplay for it. The first three Spiderman films, all helmed by Raimi, have grossed $2.5 billion U.S. worldwide. The studio has indicated that they are hoping to also get actress Kirsten Dunst to reprise her role as Peter Parker’s true love Mary Jane Watson.