Latest movie news from Comic-Con, Twilight, Tron 2, Watchmen
From NYTimes:
Brad Bird, who directed both “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles” for Pixar Animation Studios, worked for years on his own version of “The Spirit” after leaving the California Institute of the Arts. Mr. Bird has said in the past that he thought the project best suited to hand-drawn animation, an approach very far from the live-action, computer-assisted, star-driven approach taken by Mr. Miller.
Just before the “Spirit” presentation, Universal Pictures warmed up the hall with a glimpse at its “Wolf Man,” a horror spectacular that stars Benicio Del Toro and is set for release next April.
Earlier in the day Zack Snyder, the director who turned Mr. Miller’s “300” into a surprise hit, teased the crowd with a glimpse at his rendering of yet another of the comics world’s sacred texts, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s “Watchmen.” The film is set for release in March by Warner Brothers, in association with Legendary Pictures, the combination behind “The Dark Knight.”
“It’s weird to have, like, a bible for the movie,” said Mr. Snyder, who for more than a year has been treading a fine line between fidelity to the truly dark source material and conventional entertainment value.
Mr. Snyder has repeatedly said he would lean toward a faithful rendering. But he said on Friday that he sometimes fretted about whether remaining true to the Moore-Gibbons vision would drive people to “slit their wrists and call it a day in the theater” when the film was finally released.
Mr. Gibbons, who shared the stage on Friday, said he wished that Mr. Moore — who has stood apart from the project — shared his own joy at seeing the film finally made after several failed attempts.
There was certainly no wrist-slitting here, just rapt attention paid to the extended trailer, with its depiction of dark and damaged superheroes. Mr. Snyder told the crowd to look especially for R-rated touches, which are highly unusual in the generally PG-13 rated superhero genre. There certainly were some, notably in a scene where an outsize blue hero, Dr. Manhattan, sends some fleeing Southeast Asian combatants to a nasty death.
In a fashion note, black T-shirts and bluejeans emerged this week as the definitive comic-book look. Mr. Miller wore them, topped by his usual fedora. Mr. Snyder — who was wry, but a little more prone to ramble on than in the past — did the jeans-and-T thing, too. So did Patrick Wilson, a “Watchmen” star, and Samuel L. Jackson, the villain in “The Spirit,” as did Thomas Tull, chairman of Legendary Pictures, and Alan F. Horn, president of Warner Brothers Entertainment. The two executives, whose companies have much riding on the picture, sat in front-row seats, keeping one eye on the fans, another on their hand-held devices.
Elsewhere at the convention, vampires lurked. In the wake of Thursday’s screamfest reception for Summit Entertainment’s coming “Twilight,” a sad-looking young man passing out leaflets outside the convention center said he represented “Vampires for Equal Rights.” Late that night, HBO got on the bloodsucker bandwagon with a presentation for “True Blood,” its modern-day vampire show, with Anna Paquin. The series is also scheduled to sponsor the annual Saturday-night masquerade, promising still more sunlight-deprived men and women in black.
What passes for big news around here also happened late Thursday, when the Walt Disney Company surprised the crowd with brief scenes from “Tron 2” — or “TR2N,” as the teaser had it. The movie is a much-rumored but hitherto unconfirmed sequel to Disney’s 1982 film “Tron,” about a hacker sucked into the world of computers that, in those days, were almost big enough to have accommodated the star, Jeff Bridges — who also shows up in the new one.