Showing posts with label Lorenzo diBonaventura. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lorenzo diBonaventura. Show all posts

Thursday, February 16, 2012

New Michael Bay "Transformers" in 2014



Grab your earplugs and bet the farm on bikini wax futures, Producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura has announced that Michael Bay will direct the next Transformers movie that is currently scheduled to hit theaters on June 29th, 2014. The first three Transformers movies have earned over $2.6 billion at the worldwide box office, making it far and away Paramount’s top franchise and insuring that it will survive in some form to assault theaters in coming years.

Di Bonaventura told MTV News, “I think we are really going to do a reboot,” before indicating that he and Bay had not decided exactly how much surgery they were prepared to perform on the highly successful franchise, “It’s a hybrid because there is still continuity going on, but there will be a lot of new cast members. Whether there’s anybody from the first cast, we don’t even know yet. But it’s going to be a whole new story.”

The producer was referring to the “human” actors, whose escalating salaries add considerably to a movie’s cost as a franchise continues, and fortunately not to film’s real stars, the robots---Di Bonaventura made sure to let fans know, “But the characters that would come along would be Optimus (Prime) and Bumblebee.”

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Paramount Narrows Search for G.I. Helmer


G.I. Joe producer Lorenzo diBonaventura is meeting with directors and attempting to find the right helmer for a sequel to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, the special effects heavy live action movie that earned $302 million worldwide in 2009. Since it sold distribution rights to the Avengers movie back to Disney, Paramount has a dearth of live-action tentpole movies for the summer of 2012, with only Star Trek 2 on the slate—and it’s still not clear that a final script for the Trek sequel is anywhere close to fruition.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the leading candidates to replace Stephen Sommers and direct the G.I. Joe sequel are F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job, Law Abiding Citizen) and Jon M. Chu (Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, Step Up 2: The Streets, Step Up 3D). Expect a decision soon, Paramount is looking to have production underway this June, which would make a late summer 2012 release possible.

The G.I. Joe franchise is, in Hollywood parlance, “extremely toyetic,” and it also tends to stimulate sales of comics and graphic novel collections as well as action figures and vehicles.