1.) The one glimmer of hope I had for The Lone Ranger to deliver something inspired or unexpected, was Jack White making his debut as the film’s composer. However, that no longer appears to be the case as Hans Zimmer has been announced as the film’s composer due to “scheduling conflicts” arising between the rocker and the film’s July 2013 release date.
The press release mentions White has “contributed several pieces of music to the production,” whatever that means, but I was interested in seeing what he could do in terms of scoring an entire feature film. Zimmer is truly one of the best at what he does, but I’m hesitant to think he could deliver anything refreshingly different than what we already heard in The Dark Knight trilogy or (especially) Rango and the Pirates movies.
2.) Mireille Enos (“The Killing”) and Scott Speedman (Underworld) have joined the Ryan Reynolds vehicle Queen of the Night. The psychological thriller from director Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, Chloe) centers on a father who discovers a series of clues that leads him to believe his daughter, who was abducted eight years ago, might still be alive. Sounds a bit like Deadline]
3.) It sounds like we might eventually see an extended cut of Django Unchained, but Quentin Tarantino wants to give us time to let the theatrical version sink in first.
“I make these scripts that are almost novels. If I had to do this whole thing over again I would have published this as a novel and done this after the fact. Maybe next time. I could do what Kevin Costner did with the expanded edition of Dances with Wolves, and I could very well do that. Because if I put some of that in I have to change the story. But I want this version to be the story for a while.”
Tarantino also resisted Harvey Weinstein‘s suggestion to split the film into two parts. “You have to follow Django’s journey to the end,” Tarantino explains. You can read the full interview over at The Playlist.
4.) Aubrey Plaza (Safety Not Guaranteed) tells The Guardian she’ll star with John C. Reilly in the zombie comedy Life After Beth. The film will be written and directed by I Heart Huckabees co-writer and Plaza’s live-in boyfriend Jeff Baena, while Plaza simply describes the project as “a really f*cked-up movie.” The zom-com appears to be all the rage these days as Life After Beth could shoot this spring and follow Warm Bodies into theaters by 6 months or so. [via The Playlist]
5.) Mark Wahlberg had a lot to say about Transformers 4 and Ted 2. Here’s how he explained his decision to star in Transformers 4 to I Am Rogue:
I think it will be the most challenging role that I’ve played and it’s an opportunity for me to do something extremely different. It’s going to be very different from what the first ones were. I’m excited about it. I talked to Steven Spielberg and I talked to Brian Grazer and I said, ‘Don’t worry guys, this is not me taking a paycheck and running with it.’ … I liked what the guys did with like The Avengers, for instance. When I watched that movie I was not interested in seeing it at all but it was entertaining for me as well as for my kids.
Ah, so he’s taking cues from his Pain & Gain co-star Dwayne Johnson and making movies for his kids now. One film I’m guessing he won’t want his kids to see, at least for a while, is Ted 2. But he tells Collider the sequel might be ready to go when he wraps on Transformers 4:
He (Seth MacFarlane) comes from the world of episodic television so he knows how to tell the stories, man, in a way that most people don’t, like for instance The Italian Job we’ve been trying to do the sequel for 10 years. He’s a different kind of guy.
MacFarlane has already committed to the Blazing Saddles-esque Western comedy A Million Ways to Die in the West as his next project.
