News Round-Up April 30th – May 4th

Monday

We started the week on a high with the sumptuous new trailer for Prometheus, released on Sunday night amid a barrage of ill-advised attempts to bend Twitter to Ridley Scott’s will; still, the crappy hashtags didn’t count for much next to the gleaming, terrifying spectacle of Fassbender et al exploring an alien civilisation which might not be as abandoned as they think. It’s gorgeous. We were also pleased to see Avengers Assemble breaking all sorts of records as it took a richly deserved $178m on its opening weekend – it finally hit US cinemas yesterday, so expect more of the same from the States in a few days. That Men in Black 3 poster was a bit of a waste of time, but the warm fuzzy news that Henry ‘Coraline‘ Selick will be directing an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book made everything okay.

Tuesday

The big news on Tuesday was OH MY SHIT NEW BATMAN TRAILER WATCH IT WATCH IT NOW, but apart from that things were distinctly space-flavoured – beautiful bicycle Benedict Cumberbatch’s role in the forthcoming sequel to J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek has been revealed to be none other than classic villain Khan! Pretty good going, considering he won the part with an audition filmed on an iPhone… The rest of the day was pretty much all about photos, because nobody could quite stop thinking about Benedict for long enough to read anything. New images of JGL in Looper? Spider-Man with his leotard all torn? Charlize Theron turning into a great big bird? We’ve got it all.

Wednesday

In keeping with ancient tradition (probably), Wednesday this week was saturated with villains. First we heard that Sharlto Copley had finally drunk from the poisoned chalice that is Spike Lee’s Oldboy remake, signing up to play the baddie that literally every other actor in Hollywood has already turned down. And Luke Evans, who’s basically what you’d get if you ordered a James McAvoy doll from the shopping channel, is probably going to be running around Fast & Furious 6 trying (and failing) to shoot Vin Diesel. Blah. In other news, Mark Ruffalo scooped a well-deserved six movie deal with Marvel, Tom Cruise inexplicably decided to get involved in a Van Helsing reboot and Amanda Seyfried failed to get her tits out in the first poster for Lovelace.

Thursday

Oh hi, Thursday. How d’you feel about not hitting us with DOUBLE R-PATTZ NEWS next week? Thanks. The first delicious, intriguing clip from David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis landed on Thursday along with the news that Twilight star Pattinson will be hopping, skipping and jumping straight from Dave’s grasp into the loving arms of Saddam Hussein for Mission Blacklist, a drama about the Iraqi dictator’s capture. Sounds pretty disparate, but only until you’ve done some real comparisons – how about BEARS AND LIZARDS? They featured pretty heavily in masses of glossy new stills for, respectively, Pixar’s Brave and Marvel’s The Amazing Spider-Man. Boom.

Friday

Yesterday’s biggest news was the unexpected revelation that Warner Bros. is considering Joseph Gordon-Levitt for a remake of cult 80s musical Little Shop of Horrors – we’re only onboard if Nicolas Cage is first into Audrey II’s hungry maw. We also drooled over a flashy and funny new Spider-Man trailer (“You’ve found my weakness – it’s SMALL KNIVES!”) and sat down quietly with a headache after enduring the audiovisual violation that is the first full trailer for The Expendables 2. No small knives there, Spidey, just huge egos. And just to ease us gently into the weekend, Danish comedy Klown presented two middle-aged men negotiating the politics of fingering some girl’s bottom while she’s shagging your mate. Classy.

Try not to think about that all weekend, won’t you? See you next week!

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