Steve Niles’ Wake the Dead lands at Holding Pictures
Holding Pictures has acquired the rights to Steve Niles’ IDW Publishing miniseries Wake the Dead, a modern-day retelling of the Frankenstein stories.
Jay Russell (Tuck Everlasting, The Water Horse) will direct from a script by James V. Hart (August Rush, Bram Stoker’s Dracula). Visual effects will be provided by Peter Jackson’s Weta.
Released in 2003-2004, Wake the Dead originally was snatched up by Dimension Films, with Michael Dougherty (Superman Returns) set to adapt. However, it never made it out of the development stage.
“Me and Jay have been working for three or four years now to get this going,” Niles tells ShockTillYouDrop.com. “All through him doing The Water Horse. And we’ve just been steadily hammering away at it. He’s always had a consistent vision and he knows this is a modern re-telling of Frankenstein. It’s grim death. It’s about as far from My Dog Skip as you can get.”
Platinum and Valhalla team up for Final Orbit adaptation
Platinum Studios’ comic-book thriller Final Orbit won’t be released until early next year, but it’s already winding its way toward the big screen.
The company is teaming with Valhalla Motion Pictures for the adaptation, with Russell Gerwitz (Inside Man) writing the script. Valhalla chair Gale Anne Hurd and Platinum Studios chairman-CEO Scott Mitchell Rosenberg will produce.
In Final Orbit, a lottery provides winners with the chance to vacation aboard the newly completed International Space Station. The trip turns bad when the station is damaged, trapping the tourists on board with no astronauts around to help.
The Ticker
• The fire at Universal Studios didn’t stop the MTV Movie Awards. Transformers rode away with Best Movie, while Iron Man won Best Summer Movie So Far. No slight to Iron Man, but that’s the worst category ever. [Reuters]
• Director Peter Segal says the Shazam movie will stay faithful to the character’s original origin story: “… There’s a new incarnation about how Billy has to win the approval of the individual gods before he can gain their powers, and that’s a completely different take from the original. So, once again, we’re staying very faithful to the source material, and we’re just continuing to work and try to make the script as good as it can be.” [Sci Fi Wire]
• The MTV Movie Awards featured new clips from Wanted, Hancock and Twilight. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can still watch them. [Coming Soon]
• Iron Man’s Robert Downey Jr. beats the hell out of Kung Fu Panda’s Jack Black in a “viral video” for Tropic Thunder. Yeah, it’s more MTV Movie Awards stuff, but Downey is funny. [IESB]
• Rob Vendetti, writer of Top Shelf’s The Surrogates, visits the movie production on location in Boston. [Top Shelf Blog]
• New photos have been released from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. [Slashfilm]
• Bryce Dallas Howard is in final negotiations to play Kate Connor in Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins, replacing Charlotte Gainsbourg as the wife of her John Connor. [The Hollywood Reporter]
• Want a spoiler-laden rundown of J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Fox thriller Fringe? [Underwire]
June 2nd, 2008 at 12:47 pm
That is a lame category, even for MTV awards… Though not nearly as lame as calling Transformers “Best Movie.” I wouldn’t even give it “Best Movie Starring Shia in 2007,” even if he didn’t appear in anything else last year.
So the Shazam! movie is still a go? That’s cool… I hope it’s fun. I’ve never been a big fan, but I think this could be a blast. I also hope they’ll cast Patrick Warburton as The Big Red Cheese. C’mon, you know he’d be great! I can’t stand The Rock, but I admit he’d look great as Black Adam.
Thanks for the HP pics, Kevin! I loved the book, so I hope this film will live up to it. I felt that the film version of Order of the Phoenix cut too many corners, cut too many great moments, and made too many changes from the book that didn’t serve a purpose.
I also hope the guy playing Dumbledore now will FINALLY deliver the goods… He’s been much too gruff and aloof compared to the great Richard Harris (whose voice I still hear in my head when I read Dumbledore). Hopefully the angrier Dumbledore will pay off in the new movie, when his darker side begins to come out.
January 17th, 2011 at 4:42 pm
I have a new visitors page – which I thought is a good idea. The link is in the menu tab.
January 17th, 2011 at 6:16 pm
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