Director David Yates, who helmed the final four Harry Potter films, is reportedly in final negotiations to direct Universal’s Scarface reboot.
Deadline claims Universal “has been refining the script with several screenwriters and drafts while keeping all names and details under wraps.” The studio’s said to be “very high on the current draft.”
Source: FULL ARTICLE at IGN Movies
Walt Disney Studios announced today that it’s partnered with producer Harvey Weinstein to bring Artemis Fowl to the silver screen. The movie will be based on the first and second installments in author Eoin Colfer’s best-selling children’s fiction series.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix screenwriter Michael Goldenberg will pen the screenplay adaptation. Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal will executive produce the film.
“With its balance of mystery, adventure and family appeal, Artemis Fowl is a natural fit for Disney,” said Sean Bailey, president, Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture Production. “We’re looking forward to collaborating with Harvey on this exciting project.”
Source: FULL ARTICLE at IGN Movies
The publisher who bought the German rights to a novel for a song before learning that the author was Harry Potter writer J.K. Rowling said on Sunday it was eyeing a windfall. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
Oscar-winning director Ron Howard has lined up a cast of familiar genre movie faces for his next film, In the Heart of the Sea. Namely, Thor, Scarecrow, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Mad-Eye Mooney, and now Q from Skyfall and Tom Riddle from Harry Potter.
Potter actor Frank Dillane is in negotiations to join the cast, while the filmmakers are also eying Skyfall and Cloud Atlas actor Ben Whishaw for a role.
They’d join a cast that already includes Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy, Benjamin Walker and Brendan Gleeson. Tom Holland and Sam Keeley also star.
In the Heart of the Sea is based on Nathaniel Philbrick’s book about the ill-fated whaleship Essex. The ship left Nantucket for the South Pacific in 1819, where it was attacked by an angry sperm whale. But it was what transpired after that — when the survivors were adrift at sea for months and resorted to cannibalism — that is just as frightening as the attack that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick. Hemsworth would play the first mate.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at IGN Movies
By John Johnson
Fans of Harry Potter author JK Rowling who can’t get enough might want to check out a new detective novel by Robert Galbraith. It turns out that Rowling and Galbraith are one and the same, reports the Telegraph . The 450-page crime novel called The Cuckoo’s Calling came out in April… …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
By Scott Mendelson, Contributor
As will be the case at least a few times this summer, the big box office news will be not in America but in foreign markets as major summer movies open overseas prior to their domestic debuts. As is the case with Iron Man 3. My press screening isn’t until tomorrow, but the Shane Black-directed and Robert Downey Jr./Gwyneth Paltrow-starring threequel has already made a rather stunning $195 million overseas since opening in 42 markets on Wednesday. This is even more than the $185 million The Avengers debuted with overseas last summer on this weekend in 39 markets. Iron Man 2 also opened overseas first three summers ago, earning $92 million for its trouble, while the first Iron Man earned $99 million in its overseas debut, so this is pretty much par for the course. One could argue that the 3D ticket-price bump somewhat accounts for the gap between Iron Man 3 and the first two films, but I’m not going to nitpick a $195 million five-day debut. The first two Iron Man films earned $266 million and $311 million overseas respectively, with the second film out-grossing the first ‘over there’ even as it came in slightly under the first film’s domestic gross, so Iron Man 3 will have out-grossed the overseas numbers of its predecessors probably by the end of next week. In terms of overseas debuts, it’s the eighth-biggest, behind the $199 million debut for Twilight: Breaking Dawn 2 and ahead of the $193 million debut of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. For the record, overseas openings are sometimes tough to compare because of how many markets a given film opens in and/or what day of the week a film opens, but this is still a shockingly good debut for what should be a major worldwide box office player for summer 2013. It broke opening weekend records in Singapore, Indonesia, Argentina, Vietnam, Taiwan, Philippines, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. Of note, the film earned $7.2 million on 113 IMAX screens alone (about $64,000 per screen), also the IMAX debut of The Avengers last year.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Four months ago, the Boston bombing suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed yesterday in a shootout with police, uploaded to his YouTube Channel an eight-minute lecture by the radical Australian Muslim preacher Sheikh Feiz Mohammed denouncing the Harry Potter movies for glorifying and promoting paganism.
“How can you allow your children to watch this?” the sheikh demands in the table-thumping lecture. “This film glorifies, magnifies, promotes paganism…What does Harry Potter do and his devilish schoolmates, what do they do? They cast spells, learn magic, brew potions, learn how to tell the future…And this is called harmless.”
He condemns the Harry Potter movies for being built on shirk — the sin of worshipping someone or something other than Allah.
Tsarnaev also uploaded Russian-language videos of the preacher Abdel al-Hamid al-Juhani, who has been influential on Jihadists in Chechnya and the Russian Caucuses.
Poignant ironies abound with the Boston bombing. Martin Richard, the eight-year-old killed in the Boston bombing, and his brother and sister used to like dressing up as movie characters. A few months before the Boston bombing we know the eight-year-old, who perished in the first blast near the finish line of the marathon, and his sister and brother did just that: a snapshot of the kids dressed up in the backyard of the Richards’ family home in Dorchester was shared with the media and shows the kids as characters from the Toy Story movies and Harry Potter.
Sheikh Mohammed appears to have been a favorite intellectual source for Chechen-born Tsarnaev. On his YouTube playlist there are 19 online videos, all are on Islamic themes and four of them are lectures by Sheikh Mohammed, who first gained international notoriety in 2005 for teaching that women who were raped only had themselves to blame.
Feiz Mohammed was born in australia in 1970 and is of Lebanese descent. He studied for four years at the Islamic University of Medinah. Later he headed an Islamic youth center in a suburb of Sydney before fleeing to Lebanon in 2005 after there was a firestorm in australia over his preaching, especially about women. He later moved to Malaysia.
In one lecture he said: “A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the world. Why? No one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the entire world…Strapless, backless, sleeveless, showing their legs, nothing but satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses, miniskirts, tight jeans: all this to tease man and appeal to his carnal nature.”
In 2007, Australian authorities explored whether his “Death Series” lectures could be prosecuted for inciting violence and terrorism after Britain’s Channel Four exposed them to a wider public and warned DVDs of his lectures were being sold by children in the parking lot of a mosque in the British city of Birmingham.
A theme he has pushed frequently is that children should be encouraged to become jihadists. “We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam… Teach them this: there is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid (martyr).” In 2010
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/national/~3/11-3kCREZoE/
By Don Sherman
To rouse its sports-car soul from a 40-year nap, Jaguar set its sights on Porsche’s 911 Carrera cabriolet, the crown prince of roadster speed and agility. With the 911 playing Draco in this pageant, Jaguar’s Harry Potter dare not be a pussyfoot. READ MORE ››
Hermione Granger sure is all grown up. Watch Emma Watson and her comrades in crime in this clip from Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, where the Harry Potter actress engages in some pole dancing.
Via MTV.
The Bling Ring opens June 14.
From: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/04/13/watch-emma-watson-pole-dance-in-this-clip-from-the-bling-ring
It was George of the Jungle who was famous for faceplanting into a wall, but now it’s the production of Warner Bros.’ Tarzan that has come to a screeching halt. The flick that was to star Alexander Skarsgard (True Blood) as Tarzan and Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty) as Jane has closed its production offices.
Harry Potter director David Yates is still attached to direct the popular Edgar Rice Burroughs story, with the hope being that things will pick back up for the project in 2014. The studio had been trying to court Jamie Foxx for the third lead but never secured the contract, a fact that might have led to the film’s delay.
Given the underwhelming financial performance of Disney’s John Carter (hey, we liked it), another pricey Burroughs adaptation featuring a shirtless adventurer, it is understandable for Warner Bros. to put production on hold until they can make good on Tarzan’s large budget.
From: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/04/11/tarzan-might-not-swing-into-theaters
By The Huffington Post News Editors
Rachel Allison knew her girlfriend, Jaquie Richards, had been a “Harry Potter” fan since 4th grade. So when Allison decided to pop the question, she turned to Hogwarts for some proposal inspiration.
Allison enlisted the help of artist Tony Albano to create a “Quidditch box,” filled with the bat and four balls necessary to play the mythical game featured in the “Harry Potter” series. She hid an engagement ring inside one of the balls, the “Golden Snitch,” then surprised Richards.
Allison told HuffPost Weddings that although she has never read the “Harry Potter” books, the movies have been a major source of entertainment for her and Richards since they first began dating in 2010. She was inspired to center her proposal around Quidditch because she wanted the phrase “I open at the close,” which is inscribed on the Snitch and signifies endings and new beginnings, to factor into the proposal.
Read More…
More on Gay Marriage
By The Huffington Post News Editors
On Tuesday, our favorite “Perks Of Being A Wallflower” and “Harry Potter” actress, Emma Watson, got her very own wax figure at the famous Madame Tussauds wax museum in London. “Fake Emma” stands alongside older, famous faces like Kate Winslet and Helen Mirren, but she also joins a growing group of much younger celeb life-size wax statues.
Justin Bieber, for example, made a splash when he came face-to-face with his own wax statue in March 2011, and it’s been reported that One Direction was fitted for their own set of wax figures, set to appear in London in April.
Click through the slideshow below to see nine UNCANNY wax figures of some of our favorite young celebs. Tell us: which one looks the most realistic? Sound off in the comments or tweet @HuffPostTeen.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
(Phys.org) —Up until now, the invisibility cloaks put forward by scientists have been fairly bulky contraptions – an obvious flaw for those interested in Harry Potter-style applications. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
The website dedicated to offering an interactive look at the Harry Potter universe, Pottermore, will be integrated into PlayStation Home in April.
Sony made the announcement on the PlayStation Blog and released a trailer for the experience, which you can check out below.
For those not in the know, Pottermore is a website that allows you to relive the stories from the Harry Potter books while also getting a taste of what it would be like to be a Hogwarts student (albeit in virtual form). Users are divided into houses which they can then earn points for by completing various extracurricular tasks such as potion brewing and wizards’ duels.
Warner Bros. has unveiled the new poster for The Hangover Part III, “the epic finale to the Hangover trilogy,” which spoofs the studio’s own one-sheet for Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part II.
Also, the studio has announced that the first trailer for the movie will debut online tomorrow, Thursday March 7.
…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at IGN Movies
Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain may swing into Harry Potter director David Yates‘ big screen revival of Tarzan.
The New York Post claims the Zero Dark Thirty and Lawless actress is “said to be the first choice to play Jane” in the Warner Bros. project.
True Blood’s Alexander Skarsgard will play Tarzan, who in this version will reportedly already be a fully assimilated member of British society when he’s asked by Queen Victoria to investigate trouble in the Congo.
Samuel L. Jackson will play an American mercenary who helps Tarzan in his quest to rid the Congo of a brutal warlord.
…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at IGN Movies
“Anything that reaches a sixth version,” declares actor Luke Evans on the set of the new Fast & Furious instalment, “has to be doing something right.” Hmm. Really? Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country? Decent, but hardly bold new Trekkie territory. Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare? Only for fans mourning Elm Street’s depreciation. Police Academy, Halloween, Saw… 6, 6, 6 – truly the number of the beast.
Any exceptions? Harry Potter, sure, albeit underpinned by the books’ phenomenal fanbase. Perhaps even the freak occurrence of Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning. But, almost inevitably, series that rack up multiple episodes without a face-saving/changing reboot (Bond, Bourne, every other superhero), in their desperation to squeeze the last cents from the shrivelled udders of a knackered cash cow, end up artistically and commercially bankrupt.
…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at IGN Movies
NEW YORK, Feb. 14 (UPI) — Paperback editions of the “Harry Potter” bestsellers featuring new cover art are to be released in September, U.S. publisher Scholastic announced.
Harry Potter alum Rupert Grint is set to make his network series regular debut in Super Clyde, a new CBS superhero comedy from Greg Garcia, the creator of My Name is Earl and Raising Hope, THR reports. Grint, who played Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter cinematic franchise, will star in the new series as Clyde, “a meek, unassuming fast-food worker who decides to become a super hero,” according to the outlet.
…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at IGN Movies
