Poozers need not apply: The Hollywood Reporter says that Michael Clarke Duncan, he of The Green Mile fame, is in negotiations to voice storied corps member trainer Kilowog in this summer’s Green Lantern film. Duncan has previous comic book movie experience as the Kingpin in 2003′s Daredevil, and Manute in 2005′s Sin City adaptation. Heck, it’s not even his first time voicing a comic book character — he reprised his role as Kingpin in the 2003 MTV Spider-Man animated series.
Though the movie’s out in just more than two months — June 17 — it’s still (clearly) in post-production. On March 30, The King’s Speech actor Geoffrey Rush was announced as the voice of Tomar Re; footage of the character voiced by Rush was shown two days later at WonderCon in San Francisco.
April 12th, 2011 at 7:21 pm
cool.
April 12th, 2011 at 7:46 pm
Man, now I want to hear Michael Clarke Duncan and Geoffrey Rush deliver the GL oath…
April 12th, 2011 at 8:14 pm
2 months to go…. cutting this a little close, aren’t they…?
April 13th, 2011 at 8:41 am
I was going to say the exact same thing!
April 13th, 2011 at 9:45 am
I guess CGI movies don’t work like The Simpsons, where the voice is recorded way before anything else.
Then again, this is basically just ADR, and that is often done late.
April 13th, 2011 at 12:13 pm
Voice recording, especially on characters like Kilowog and Tomar Re, are some of the easiest stuff to do, and can be done the latest. Because they are not humans, lip sync is actually easier (we expect Gollum, a human-like creature, to have similar mouth movements. But Tomar has a beak, and thus it merely needs to be close). Also, since they are merely providing the voices, and not driving the performances (IE motion capture) much of the voice sync can be done before they even show up to read the lines…the producers will be making the actors read as they want them too. Infact, if you want a good demonstration of how it will be, watch the voice-work feature on the God of War 2 bonus disc that actually features Michael Clarke Duncan doing the voice of Atlas.
April 13th, 2011 at 3:44 pm
Wow, talking about waiting until the last minute. Seems like 2 months is a pretty narrow window to sign an actor, get them in the studio, and also deliver a quality performance that gels with the film. Fanboys are going nuts over GL footage, but something about it still seems “off” to me. Reading that they don’t even know who the voice of a key character is going to be at this stage reinforces that.
April 13th, 2011 at 7:23 pm
Surprised they didn’t take care of the voice work much earlier. Seems like something they could have had finished well before they were this deep into post-production.
I’m wondering: how much animation and rendering time will this take, and would they have saved some time and effort if they finished the voice work a while back?
April 15th, 2011 at 12:03 pm
They probably just paid a professional voice actor like Kevin Michale Richardson (Who I believe provides the voice for the video game) months ago to provide the “scratch” voice that has been animated to. Then they bring in a “name” celebrity that will get people buzzing to come in, and repeat not just the lines, but match the timing and intonation. (and any ad libs the “scratch” voicecame up with.)
This happens a lot according to Billy West who has spoken at length on the crappy practice.