Tag: John Horn

A sci-fi movie with an elusive name — one word and one number — arrives in theaters during the summer with a relatively modest budget and special effects that, on the screen, look far bigger than their cost. There’s not a single movie star in it, though, because the project’s biggest name is its producer. The movie is called…”District 9.” Or perhaps “Super 8“? Paramount Pictures  executives are certainly hoping that Friday’s release of ”Super 8,” from director J.J. Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg, will start a success story not unlike 2009′s “District 9,” the nimble Peter Jackson-produced enterprise that posted an opening weekend of $37 million in domestic box office and went on to an Academy Award nomination for best picture. John Horn of the Los Angeles Times takes a look at the commercial aspirations and challenges of this new film; here’s an excerpt ...

The first three “Scream“ films mocked the cliches of contemporary fright flicks and manufactured a few new ones, but when the credits rolled on the  goofy third edition, everyone involved agreed it was best to send the franchise where killers never really die — the home-video shelf. This Friday, though, the team behind “Scream” takes another stab at success, but will anyone still jump? John Horn has a Calendar cover story in Thursday’s Los Angeles Times examining the brand’s box-office survival chances. Here’s a short excerpt: It’s been 11 years since “Scream 3″ arrived in theaters, and franchises don’t normally relaunch themselves after such a long hiatus. Audience tracking surveys suggest that “Scream 4″ will be eviscerated at the box office by the animated comedy “Rio,” but there are precedents that make “Scream 4″ maker Weinstein Co. optimistic about its long-term prospects. ...

Some filmmakers promise that their summer movies will have state-of-the-art special effects and big-name stars. The producer and director of the fourth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie are offering a different vow: They pledge that this edition of the franchise will actually be coherent. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer admitted this week at CinemaCon – the movie theater owners convention in Las Vegas — that the last voyage of the franchise “was a little difficult to follow,” which is a bit like saying “War and Peace” is a long book. “I always like clear storytelling,” Bruckheimer said pointedly. Following that course, May 20’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” will play more like a stand-alone story and not require that moviegoers bring a plot spreadsheet to the multiplex. If the film is a success, the next “Pirates” installment will also play as ...

John Horn checks in from CinemaCon in Las Vegas … Hugh Jackman won’t be playing Wolverine as soon as he wanted, so he’s breaking into song while he looks for a new director. Darren Aronofsky, who was scheduled to direct Jackman this summer in 20th Century Fox’s “The Wolverine,” backed out of the project this month. “He would have made a great film,” Jackman said in an interview Tuesday in Las Vegas, where he was promoting “Real Steel” at the annual  theater owners gathering called CinemaCon. “But it wasn’t the right time for him personally.” Jackman said the start of photography should only be delayed a matter of weeks. But the film also could need to change its production location, as it was originally set to be shot in Japan, which is still recovering from its catastrophic earthquake. “That’s in limbo ...

John Horn reports from New York where he went behind the scenes with Julie Taymor and her Spider-Man musical.  Jammed with computers, cables and technicians, the orchestra section inside the Foxwoods Theatre looked like the control room at a particle accelerator, yet it was a very different kind of physics experiment Julie Taymor was trying to manage. Standing in front of rows of oversized monitors staffed by her creative team inside the darkened Broadway auditorium in mid-November, Taymor was running through one of the most elaborate, gravity-defying fight sequences in “Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark,” her creatively and financially audacious musical The sequence called for the titular web slinger to battle the villainous Green Goblin as both characters zoomed around on wires anchored to the cavernous theater’s roof. The aerial system’s powerful motors, which can fly performers at speeds approaching 35 ...

My colleague John Horn has been raving about “Monsters,” Gareth Edwards’ low-budget thriller about a young couple forced to travel through some very dangerous territory. Horn says Edwards tried to shoot his film, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, on the run, relying as much on improvisation as scripted dialogue.  That approach was informed by the frustration Edwards felt when he had to deal with difficult visual-effects departments on the British television productions “End Day” and “Perfect Disaster.” “I got so frustrated with the process,” Edwards told Horn. “I have 50 people around me who are supposed to make my life easier, and they’re really making it harder. There has to be an easier way. The whole point of the digital revolution is pointless if you still need so many people following you around.” With just a ...

Los Angeles Times reporter John Horn takes a look at the box-office prospects for “Red,” Summit Entertainment’s very loose adaptation of the Warren Ellis three-issue comics miniseries. The film opens Friday.  Here’s an excerpt:   When producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura shopped “Red” around town a couple of years back, every studio but one passed on the movie. The reasons for rejection were consistent: They already had other films about the CIA, the source material (an obscure graphic novel by Warren Ellis) was overly dark, and the characters were too elderly. That final excuse has turned into “Red’s” strongest selling point, as older movie-goers — and perhaps more than a few younger ticket buyers — are poised to push the Bruce Willis action-comedy toward a first-place finish this weekend. Premiering in theaters two months after Sylvester Stallone‘s over-the-hill ensemble yarn, “The Expendables,“ generated robust business ...

John Horn, who writes about film and the film industry for the Los Angeles Times, got to sit down in the dark for a very early screening of Guillermo del Toro’s latest project. Here’s his snap judgment about “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” which reaches theaters early next year… It’s not “The Haunted Mansion.” And yet it really is. Guillermo del Toro has been hired by Disney to develop a new movie version of the company’s spooky theme-park ride, but that film is years away. In the meantime, del Toro (as a producer and co-writer) and Troy Nixey (as a first-time feature-film director) have just completed another haunted house remake in “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” an intensely scary exploration of the diminutive demons the inhabit the dark corners of a Rhode Island estate. Shot in Australia for Disney’s Miramax label and starring ...

The title suggests something like “Alien,” and the guerrilla filmmaking style will be inevitably compared to “Cloverfield” and “District 9.” Writer-director-cinematographer Gareth Edwards’ “Monsters” is simultaneously all of those movies and none of them, a hard-to-categorize hybrid. More than anything else, “Monsters” is a love story: both in how the film’s main characters fall for each other as they must travel through an alien-riddled zone, and in the obvious affection Edwards shows for unadorned cinema. Many modern us-against-them movies are loaded with so many computer tricks that the protagonists vanish under countless rendered pixels. Edwards, a British visual effects artist making his feature debut, doesn’t avoid such digital tricks entirely but endeavors to make his low-budget laptop effects look organic, not always fully revealed, while allowing the real sounds of the jungle (the eerie screams of howler monkeys, in one ...

John Horn caught up with Robert Rodriguez on Monday to talk about the success of “The Expendables” and the epic fail of “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” at the box office for an earlier article, and the conversation turned toward the filmmaker’s own plans. Robert Rodriguez sounds like he’s drawing a bead on “Deadpool.” But will he pull the trigger? “It’s a great script and a great property,” an enthusiastic Rodriguez said of the Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (“Zombieland”) screenplay that would bring the “merc with the mouth” from Marvel Comics to the screen in his own film adventure. Rodriguez says he has been in meetings with Twentieth Century Fox about directing the film, which, presumably, would star Ryan Reynolds, who portrayed the glib gunman “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.“ Reynolds is becoming a major player in comic-book cinema considering his roles in next year’s ...