Wilson Has Transformers 2 Role

Rainn Wilson (NBC's The Office) told MTV that he has been cast in DreamWorks' Transformers 2, the sequel to last year's megahit about a race of automotive automatons, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The sequel reteams director Michael Bay with returning stars Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson and John Turturro.

Wilson will reportedly have a small role in the sequel as a college professor to LaBeouf's new undergraduate. Discussions with Jonah Hill to take another small role did not pan out. The story was conceived by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, who wrote the first movie, as well as Ehren Kruger, who wrote the screenplay.

Filming began in Los Angeles in recent weeks and is moving to Pennsylvania and then overseas.

"Heroes" News

NBC announced that it will bring back Heroes on Sept. 22 with a one-hour clip show at 8 p.m. ET/PT and a two-hour season premiere at 9, Variety reported; Chuck, meanwhile, returns for a second season on Sept. 29 at 8 p.m., and Knight Rider debuts at 8 p.m. on Sept. 24.

Witchblade Movie in Development!

Platinum Studios, Top Cow Productions and Arclight Films will team on a live-action feature adaptation of Witchblade, based on the Top Cow comic-book franchise, Variety reported. The comic book introduced the Witchblade mythology, which centers on an ornate jewel-encrusted gauntlet that gives extraordinary powers to the wearer, a specially chosen female from each generation.

The comic-book franchise has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide since debuting in 1995. It spawned a 2000 telefilm that turned into a weekly series that ran for two seasons on TNT, starring Yancy Butler. Witchblade has been published in more than 21 languages and 55 countries. The most recent incarnation was an anime TV show in Japan by Gonzo Digimation in 2006. The companies are already eyeing a location shoot in Australia.

"Geneon" news from Robert's Anime Store

I'm still getting a half dozen e-mails each week from folks wondering when Geneon's old titles will be back on the market. Anime fans are consummate optimists. :-) I actually do have an update of sorts, and I have not mentioned anything up until now because I didn't want to get anyone's hopes up - but what the heck, here goes. Geneon has been in serious talks with a major US home entertainment distributor for about the past three months to get their titles back on the street. I know exactly who it is, how far along they are, and the details that are going to make or break the deal.

The trouble is I can't make any of that info public without jeopardizing our
relationship with the new company, but perhaps it's helpful to let you guys know that there is something serious in the works. Whether the deal is completed or not remains to be seen, and I would advise everyone to not get their hopes up, but I will tell you this:

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If we don't hear anything by mid-summer we probably won't hear anything.
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Even if a major deal is struck, it won't involve Geneon's entire catalog circa Sept007. The new company will cherry pick those releases like people at Ruby Tuesday pick over the salad bar.
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The 'major distributor' they are in talks with is NOT one of the existing US Anime studios. Please don't e-mail me scoping for more details, or to ask if this title or that title will be re-released soon. I don't know, and if I did, I couldn't tell you at this point anyway. If a big announcement comes through in the next few weeks, just remember you read about it here first. If it doesn't, well heck people, even space flight is 'possible'... -_^

New "Andromeda Strain" Beefed Up!

Andre Braugher, who plays the nefarious Gen. George Mancheck in A&E's upcoming SF miniseries The Andromeda Strain, told SCI FI Wire that the show goes well beyond the original Michael Crichton book and 1971 movie version. "It's very anticlimactic, the book and the film," Braugher (Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer) said in an interview at the miniseries' Hollywood premiere on May 7. He added: "You've got the Andromeda; it's suddenly somehow benign, but then you've got a reactor thing, you know? ... But that movie wouldn't have held up today, you know what I mean? So it had to be re-imagined.

" The premise remains the same: A satellite falls from the sky, and most of the townspeople of a small Utah hamlet die suddenly. A group of top scientists, led by Dr. Jeremy Stone (Benjamin Bratt), race time in the top-secret underground lab called Wildfire to uncover the mystery of the deaths before the cause--a contagious agent called Andromeda--can spread. Writer Robert Shenkkan has updated and expanded the story well beyond the parameters of the original 1969 book and Robert Wise's movie, taking a lot of the story outside Wildfire and boosting the action elements. "I think our screenwriter and [director] Mikael [Salomon] together have done a really wonderful job bringing that together," Braugher said. The movie also adds environmental, political and military storylines.

"Some of the themes that were added today just were not there," Braugher said. "I mean, the whole idea about the vent mining and the use of resources today in a cavalier manner that will become useful to us, you know, sometime in the future? That cautionary tale is entirely inserted. ... It's quite timely for now. We happen to be in the middle of using up and exploiting all of our resources, you know?" The four-hour miniseries also brings the investigation of an infectious disease into the 21st century, though it was a novelty in storytelling in the '60s. "[Audiences have] become very used to the idea of infectious and biological weapons and stuff," Braugher said. "And things traveling around the globe. I mean, the world just happens to be a little bit smaller today than it was in 1968, when Crichton wrote the book.

" The Andromeda Strain, which also stars Eric McCormack, Ricky Schroder, Daniel Dae Kim, Christa Miller and Viola Davis, premieres May 26 at 9 p.m. ET/PT and continues May 27 at the same time.

Twilight/Heroes News

A teaser trailer has gone live on MySpace.com for Twilight, the upcoming film version of Stephenie Meyer's best-selling book, which opens in December.

TV Guide Online's Michael Ausiello reported a rumor that Brea Grant (Friday Night Lights) will join the cast of NBC's Heroes next season as the Speedster.

Eisner Preps New Creature Feature

Director Breck Eisner told SCI FI Wire that he is preparing an update to the 1954 SF movie Creature From the Black Lagoon and has found a pristine location in the Amazon in which to film it.

"I want it to be authentic; I want it to be a sea of green rather than CG," said Eisner in an interview after a news conference on May 2 in Pasadena, Calif., to promote NBC's Fear Itself. "It is certainly easy to update the story. It was shot in modern times at the time it was originally made, and this will be shot today in the Amazon. We are updating the tone of the original."

Writer Gary Ross, who was nominated for best original screenplay for the Tom Hanks fantasy Big, has updated Creature From the Black Lagoon for Eisner.

Eisner said that a telephone pole and wire are clearly visible in some shots in the first Creature film, which was shot mostly on the Universal Studios back lot. "Of course, in those days nobody thought you'd be able to stop the film and freeze the frame," the director said with a laugh. "We had a crew in the Amazon in Peru. ... We found a place called the Forest of Mirrors, because you can see [from] overhead [that] there are so many lagoons on a thousand-mile green-carpet river, and we found the lagoon we're going to shoot in." He said the river water level drops 50 feet in the winter months.

Before focusing full attention on his version of Creature, Eisner said he is going to finish a remake of George Romero's The Crazies. He originally intended to do the SF horror thriller remake after doing Creature, but decided to reverse the projects. Both are being done for Universal.

Eisner's installment of the Fear Itself series is called "The Sacrifice," written by Mick Garris from a story by Del Howison (Dark Delicacies), about four criminals who find themselves stranded in a fort run by three seductive women and a creature. (NBC and Universal are owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.) --Michael Szymanski

'Speed Racer' leads Hollywood's latest charge: Anime adaptations

LOS ANGELES — Having snatched up virtually every comic book title to ever hit shelves, Hollywood studios are plumbing new depths in search of a blockbuster genre.
And they think they've found it in anime.

Leading the charge are the nerd kings who grew up on the Asian cartoons, Andy and Larry Wachowski, whose Speed Racer arrives in theaters May 9.

Racer marks not only a return to the brothers' filmmaking roots; it's the first of several big-budget gambles the industry is taking on a genre that remains unknown to many American moviegoers.

Still, big names are gobbling up titles:

•Leonardo DiCaprio will produce two films based on the popular anime story Akira, set in a rebuilt Tokyo after a mysterious explosion decimated the city. The first of the Warner Bros. films, to be set in "New Manhattan," is scheduled for summer 2009.

•Director M. Night Shyamalan will direct The Last Airbender, an adaptation of the popular Asian-influenced Nickelodeon series about a young hero with the power to manipulate the elements. It's due July 2, 2010.

•Steven Spielberg will adapt Ghost in the Shell, a futuristic crime thriller based on the 1989 Japanese comic, or manga, that spawned a half-dozen films and video games. No release date has been set.

But for now, all eyes are on Racer, seen by many as a barometer of audiences' appetites for big-screen anime adaptations.

Domestic box office for Japanese anime features has been mixed. While the Pokémon franchise has proved appealing to kids, little anime has caught on with broader audiences. According to Box Office Mojo, the highest-grossing anime film geared to older moviegoers is 2002's Spirited Away, which took in $10.1 million.

That won't cut it when your budget is $120 million, the reported cost of Racer.

Filmmakers and fans are quick to point out that most of the anime adaptations will be live action — a much easier sell at theaters. And unlike the dark and violent tone of many anime stories, Racer is a family-friendly PG.

But they also acknowledge that the genre appeals to a select group. "Generation X is very familiar with anime," says Zac Bertschy, executive editor of the Anime News Network, a website dedicated to the genre. "But if you're not in that age group, there may be a learning curve."

Racer won't suffer from a lack of fan familiarity. The question, says Michael Pinto of anime.com, is whether the Wachowskis have the craftsmanship they demonstrated in 1999's The Matrix, which was partly inspired by Akira and Shell.

"They won over a lot of anime fans with the first one, and disappointed a lot of them with the sequels," Pinto says. "They're obviously fanboys. People want them to regain that touch, because it could open the door for more anime."

Reloading for 'Racer'

The brothers have opened doors before. Despite tough reviews for 2003's Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, the films made more than $1.6 billion worldwide and redefined the standard of Hollywood special effects.

"There are two scenes in Reloaded that people kept talking," says Joel Silver, producer of Racer and the Matrix trilogy and the Wachowskis' unofficial spokesman.

"One is when the camera seems to fly through this impossibly small space beneath a truck," he says. "The other is when Trinity (played by Carrie-Anne Moss) is speeding the wrong way down the highway and missing cars by inches. Nobody had seen computer effects like that before, and the brothers wanted to do an entire movie that way."

And they did, essentially dropping actors into a computer-generated world. The Wachowskis packed up their cast, which includes Emile Hirsch as Speed, Matthew Fox as Racer X and Christina Ricci as Trixie, and sequestered them on a Berlin sound stage, where nearly the entire film was shot.

"It's a racing movie, and there's not a real car in the whole thing," Hirsch says. "It was a little like living in the Matrix."

The filmmakers shot still pictures in Morocco, Greece, Italy, France, Germany and California to create backdrops for the movie's elaborate races. For those scenes, actors sat in a rotating gimbal that the brothers worked with a remote control while animators created a landscape whipping by.

The brothers rigged a special monitor that let actors see themselves in the artificial backgrounds so they'd know if they were racing through the desert or speeding through the Alps.

"You're sitting there in this little cage, thinking there's no way it's going to look real," Fox says. "Then they'd bring us behind the camera to look at the shot, and we're racing through a mountain pass. That's the reason I wanted to do this movie, to work with them. They try things few directors would."

The film, Hirsch says, was initially a jarring adjustment from the months he spent in the Alaskan wilderness for last year's Into the Wild. "But it's worth it to see the brothers work," he says. "You've got all these monitors, computers, monkeys. You feel like you're getting to listen in on geniuses — who went a little mad."

Ricci prefers to think of their films as the product of geekiness than madness.

"You know they still play Dungeons and Dragons?" Ricci asks. "You'll be sitting around on set, listening to them go on and on about why they hate the concept of time travel. I love that. There's all this mystery around them because they don't talk to press. But they're really very sweet, kind of sensitive guys who happen to have a nerdy side."

Kinder, gentler anime

It's that combination, Silver says, that's key to the success of Racer — and anime overall.

"If it's all just effects and style, it isn't going to work," he says. "Audiences see right through that. But the brothers really loved Speed Racer. And they wanted to make a family movie, something they've never done."

Indeed, those looking for the body count and dark themes of the Wachowskis' earlier films such as The Matrix and V for Vendetta won't find it in Racer, an homage to the show they watched religiously as children.

The original 1967 series, Mahha GoGoGo, became the first Japanese anime to succeed on U.S. television, running for two years and spawning toys and clothes. And like that show, the film doesn't have an ironic bone in its body.

"They aren't smirking when they made this," Silver says. "It meant a lot to them. It showed them that animation wasn't just The Flintstones. You could push the envelope."

Of course, envelope-pushing isn't typically Hollywood's style, and anime fans may be wondering whether big studios will retain the themes and tone of their favorite stories.

"There was no pathos in the original Speed Racer, so I don't think that's a concern for fans," Bertschy says. "But a lot of anime is dark. It deals with existential philosophy. It doesn't always end happily. Fans are glad anime is getting its day, but people are holding their breaths to see what the movies are like."

Order of the Phoenix coming to HBO in June

HBO will begin airing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on June 22 at 9 PM EST. Additionally, HBO's inside look at the making of OOTP will begin re-airing on June 19 at 8:45 AM EST.

Joel Silver Talks Speed's Wachowski Brothers

Uber-producer Joel Silver, who worked with writing and directing team Andy and Larry Wachowski on the Matrix trilogy and the upcoming Speed Racer, told SCI FI Wire that the famously reclusive brothers aren't as enigmatic as the media makes them out to be.

"The only part they don't want to engage in is [promotion]," Silver said in an interview. "That's the only part. ... But, you know, they are the greatest guys I've ever worked with. They're funny. They're smart. They know what they want. They plan everything out to perfection, and everybody here--Susan [Sarandon], Emile [Hirsch], John [Goodman], Christina [Ricci]--they'll tell you the same thing, that they're the greatest, fun guys."

Silver said the Wachowski brothers did publicity for the first Matrix movie. "They did everything," he said. "They did the junkets and the tours and the one-on-one [interviews], and they did everything. And they just said, 'We just don't like this, and if you make us do this, we aren't going to make any more movies.' And I said, 'OK.'"

Silver is happy to speak for the Wachowskis, whom he credits with changing the process of filmmaking with the Matrix trilogy. He went on to say that their new film, Speed Racer, is just as groundbreaking.

"They've changed the system again on how to make pictures," Silver said. "The camera loses its physical self. ... So you have a scene where the camera zooms into Speed's face, and then zooms past him to Trixie. and then past her to Rex. Where is the camera? What is the camera? The camera can't do that, but the computer can. We put our people on gimbals, in a cockpit, on a green stage, and once we get that, capture that image, then we can manipulate it any way we want and make the camera see what you want it to see, which I think is going to change the way we make movies."

The next collaboration between Silver and the Wachowskis will be Ninja Assassin, a martial-arts film being directed by James McTeigue (V for Vendetta). As for when the brothers will return to directing themselves, even Silver doesn't know that yet.

"If this movie works, they may want to do a sequel," Silver said. "They may not. When they immerse themselves in a movie, they work literally seven days a week for, like, seven months to finish this movie. It's really grueling. These guys don't phone anything in. There's a book coming out, I think coming out in a few weeks, which is called The Art of Speed Racer. You can actually see in that book how the drawings became [pre-visusalization and] became finished shots. You're realizing, I mean, this is created from nothing. I mean, you're not shooting anything. It's all in their heads. And it's a really grueling thing to do. And they take time off, and then they go back to work. And when they want to, they call me--I hope they call me--and say, 'We want to do something.'" Speed Racer opens May 9. --Cindy White

"Descent" Sequel In The Works

The independent British production company Celador Films is reuniting with French-owned and U.K.-based Pathe on a sequel to Neil Marshall's low-budget SF horror hit The Descent, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The first movie claimed $57 million at the box office, a sizable return on the original investment on a movie budgeted at less than $10 million, the trade paper reported.

Produced by Marshall and Christian Colson, Descent 2 marks the directorial debut for its predecessor's editor, Jon Harris.

Based on a script by James Watkins (My Little Eye), the $10 million sequel will shoot more than eight weeks on location in Scotland and at London's Ealing Studios.

The stars of the original film, Shauna MacDonald and Natalie Mendoza, will reprise their roles, alongside Gavan O'Herlihy, Joshua Dallas, Anna Skellern, Douglas Hodge and Krysten Cummings.

The script sees the survivor forced back into the system of caves she battled her way out of in the first film in a bid to locate the rest of her group, who were assailed by blind man-eating mutant cave dwellers.