'Bond 23' Stalled Due to MGM's Financial Woes

With debt-burdened studio MGM still facing an uncertain future, it's been announced that work has been halted on the next James Bond movie.

"Bond 23" had been slated for a 2011/2012 release with star Daniel Craig saying production would start later this year.

In a joint statement, producers Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli said: "Due to the continuing uncertainty surrounding the future of MGM and the failure to close a sale of the studio, we have suspended development on 'Bond 23' indefinitely. We do not know when development will resume and do not have a date for the release of 'Bond 23.'"

The duo took over EON Productions in 1995 from Albert R 'Cubby' Broccoli, Barbara's father and Michael's stepfather. EON has produced 22 Bond films since 1962.

Director Sam Mendes was attached to helm the latest Bond film, but MGM's troubles have now become our own as the longest running film franchise in history can't get off the ground.

Of course, such a decision may be exactly what is necessary to get things moving as drastic measures can light more fires once people see things have gone from just being talk to actually showing some real world effect. However, will the troubles at MGM affect more than just 007?

In a recent interview with Moviefone, Peter Jackson spoke of the expected adaptation of "The Hobbit" to be directed by Guillermo del Toro saying, "Well, it's not really been delayed, because we've never announced the date. I mean it's sort of interesting because [MGM] has never greenlit 'The Hobbit,' so therefore 'The Hobbit' has never been officially announced as a 'go' project, nor have we ever announced a date."

As a big fan of both the Bond franchise and anything related to "Lord of the Rings," I hope something gets worked out so these films can get into production.

I’m sure we’ll be seeing 007 drinking a martini on the big screen again – it’s only a matter of time.

More news to come! Catch ya' later!
Sources: The Geek Files, First Showing, Rope of Silicon

Sam Mendes Directing 'Bond 23'

MGM has announced that Oscar winning British filmmaker Sam Mendes ("American Beauty") has been hired to direct the upcoming "23rd James Bond" movie.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, despite recent concerns that the production was temporarily on hold, MGM is on track to release "Bond 23" in late 2011.

This announcement was probably being held, but with the recent rumors the production had been delayed due to a possible sale of MGM it most likely meant the producers wanted to clear the air.

"Bond" regulars Neal Purvis and Robert Wade are writing, along with "Frost/Nixon" scribe Peter Morgan. Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli are producing. Daniel Craig will, of course, reprise his role as 007.

As far as story goes there are no details other than a quote from Morgan saying it was a "shocking story."

Mendes landing the job is a victory for "Bond" fans, but what exactly does it mean for Mendes' involvement with "Preacher"?

Certainly, if Mendes is on board and MGM is seriously eyeing a June production start, "Preacher" will not be the director's next film. Given the amount of time it takes to work on a movie, its highly unlikely that Mendes would be able to work on "Preacher" until sometime in mid to late 2011. And even that is questionable as Mendes was was talking about putting "Preacher" aside for another film anyway.

Mendes' ascension to the Bond director's seat is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's a great move towards the quality of 007's next adventure, but on the other it's problematic for the fans of "Preacher."

What do you think about Mendes directing the next "Bond" film? Do you think he should direct "Preacher" instead?

More news to come! Catch ya' later!
Sources: Rope of Silicon, First Showing, MTV News

Box Office Results and Weekly Movie News

Movies coming out this week!

Monsters vs. Aliens - After being hit by a meteorite on her wedding day, Susan Murphy (Witherspoon) is transformed into a monster named Ginormica and subsequently whisked away to a secret government compound where others like her have been rounded up over the years. When the Earth comes under attack by an alien commander known as Gallaxhar (Wilson), however, Ginormica and her new allies are set free to save the planet.

The Haunting in Connecticut - For reasons related to their son's health, Peter and Sara Campbell (Donovan and Madsen) relocate their family to Northern Connecticut. As they settle into their new Victorian home, however, they come face to face with their abode's unsettling history and the supernatural forces who share the space.

12 Rounds - Detective Danny Fisher (Cena) discovers his girlfriend (Scott) has been kidnapped by a ex-con tied to Baxter's past, and he'll have to successfully complete 12 challenges in order to secure her safe release.

Movies coming out on DVD!

Quantum of Solace
Tales of the Black Freighter
Bolt

Box Office results for the weekend!

1 Knowing$24.8 M

2 I Love You, Man$18.0 M

3Duplicity$14.4 M

4 Race to Witch Mountain $13.0 M

5Watchmen $6.7 M

6 The Last House on the Left (2009) $5.9 M

7 Taken $4.1 M

8Slumdog Millionaire $2.7 M

9Tyler Perry's Madea Goes To Jail $2.5 M

10Coraline $2.1 M

Wow. "Knowing" is the No. 1 movie in America. Who knew that? Nick Cage knew.
"Paul Blart: Mall Cop" is no longer in the Top Ten. That is a good sign.
Next week, "Monsters vs. Aliens" will dominate at No. 1. Why? Because as one of my friends keeps telling me, family movies win out all the time.

Reviews From Spring Break

Spring Break was a blast and I was able to watch quite a few movies. Just getting back to school was pretty busy, but now it is the weekend and I can write up some of the reviews of movies I saw while over Spring Break last week.

Slumdog Millionaire - What makes this movie truly unique (besides winning eight Oscars including Best Picture) is that it correctly portrays life in India. Keep in mind there is a great plot that may be confusing for people who aren't used to being brought from present to past over and over. It definitely is worth a watch and has a happy dance number at the end!
8.5/10

Quantum of Solace - I still don't like the new Bond that is being done by Daniel Craig. Sean Connery is shaking his head somewhere after seeing this movie. "Casino Royale" was a pretty good action thriller but not a good Bond movie. "Quantum of Solace" is just action without anything else. I do not like the new Bond. I admit this and I want to go back to the cheesy gadgets and women with silly names and having Bond not be a pissed off vigilante anymore.
6.0/10

Changeling - Based on a story of a terrible police scandal against a woman (and just society against women in general in the 1920's), this film deals with the loss of a child and a mother's devotion to find him. Angelina Jolie shows off her acting skills in this movie and was nominated for Best Actress for her role in this film. It is a hard movie to watch not because it is bad, but because it is so good but also depressing.
7.5/10

Coraline - Some people just hate claymation films. "A Nightmare Before Christmas" was good, but never drew me in as a cult classic as many people I know swear it is THE movie. "Coraline" looks a whole lot better than "A Nightmare Before Christmas" and I think it has a better story to boot. I could see it being too scary for kids but I think that was a part of the director's intent. One of the last parts of the film kind of felt like a video game quest to me, searching for objects to complete her mission, but that was the only part I kind of shook my head at. Overall, a decent film.
8.3/10

Bond 23

Whether you liked "Quantum of Solace" or not, Bond will return to the screen someday and Daniel Craig will don his dark and gritty Bond persona.
But pray tell, what are Craig's thoughts on the next Bond?
Forster, director of "Quantum," wanted it to be the mid-part of a trilogy. Collider got to talk to Craig and asked if that was going to be the case.

“No f***ing way. I’m done with that story. I want to lie on a beach for the first half an hour of the next movie drinking a cocktail.”

Okay Mr. Craig. So you are down with Bond having sequels and want to start a new story. Bond origins have been told and he is ready to start something new. Craig had some more thoughts on where Bond should go next.

“We’ve finished this story as far as I’m concerned. We’ve got a great set of bad guys. There is an organization that we can use whenever we want to. The relationship between Bond and M is secure and Felix is secure. Let’s try and find where Moneypenny came from and where Q comes from. Let’s do all that and have some fun with it.”

So Mr. Craig, fans have been disappointed in not seeing Moneypenny and Q in these past Bond films, so you are suggesting bringing them in. The origins of Bond are told, now tell the origins of these characters. Sounds lovely. Wonder if we will ever learn the origins of M.

“We don’t know when we’re going to do the next Bond. Nobody’s thinking about it at the moment. We’re giving it a rest for the moment. If I can squeeze something in next year I will…but I haven’t figured out what that’ll be yet. But nothing in the cold.”

Great, can't wait for the next Bond movie even though I have yet to see Quantum. I enjoy the campy style of Connery and Brosnan, so "Casino Royale" was not high on my favorite Bond film lists. We will have to wait to hear more about Bond 23.
More news to come! Catch ya' later!

Other sources: FirstShowing.net, Screen Rant

Box Office Results and Weekly Movie News

Movies coming out this Friday! Plot summaries thanks to IMDB!

The Day the Earth Stood Still - Aliens land on Earth with an important message for its citizens. A remake of the classic 1951 sci-fi film directed by Robert Wise.

Nothing Like the Holidays - The scattered members of the Rodriguez family return to their parents' home in Chicago to celebrate the holiday season, as well as their youngest's safe return from combat overseas. But when old tensions surface, the pressure is on the individuals to truly come together as a family.

Delgo - When Delgo (voice of Prinze, Jr.), a troubled teenager, is framed for a crime he didn't commit, his subsequent prison escape leads him and a group of unlikely friends on adventure to save two sparring races from a common enemy.

Movies coming out on DVD!

The Dark Knight
Horton Hears a Who!

Box Office results for the weekend!

1 Four Christmases$18.2 M

2 Twilight $13.2 M

3 Bolt $9.7 M

4 Australia $7.0 M

5 Quantum of Solace$6.6 M

6 Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa $5.1 M

7 Transporter 3$4.5 M

8 Punisher: War Zone $4.0 M

9 Cadillac Records$3.5 M

10 Role Models $2.6 M

"Four Christmases" continues to be the #1 movie in America for two weeks in a row. Darn holiday films always come out during the holidays! Coincidence? I think not.
"Bolt" and "Quantum of Solace" fell down a few ranks as "Australia" stayed alive. "Twilight" still makes the big bucks, but the big news on that movie I will post about later (director stuff).
Other films continue to stay alive (mad props goes to "Role Models" for staying in the top 10), but the biggest upset of the weekend was the bombing of "Punisher: War Zone." This movie flopped and that makes me sad because we might not see Punisher in theaters again for a long time now...if ever.

Box Office Results and Weekly Movie News

Movies coming out this Friday! Plot summaries thanks to IMDB!

Four Christmases - A comedy about a married couple (Witherspoon and Vaughn) from two divorced families who are tasked with attending four Christmas Day celebrations.

Transporter 3 - Frank Martin (Statham) puts the driving gloves on for a third mission: To deliver Valentina (Rudakova), the kidnapped daughter of a Ukranian government official, from Marseilles to Odessa on the Black Sea. En route, he'll have to contend with thugs who want to intercept Valentina's safe delivery and not let his personal feelings get in the way of his dangerous objective.

Australia - Set in northern Australia before World War II, an English aristocrat (Kidman) who inherits a sprawling ranch reluctantly pacts with a stock-man (Jackman) in order to protect her new property from a takeover plot. As the pair drive 2,000 head of cattle over unforgiving landscape, they experience the bombing of Darwin, Australia, by Japanese forces firsthand.

Milk - A chronicle of Harvey Milk's (Penn) ascent to become San Francisco's first openly gay city supervisor in 1977, and the political fallout that led to his assassination, as well as Mayor George Moscone's, the following year.

Movies coming out on DVD!

Hancock
Fred Claus
Space Chimps
Superman:Doomsday

Box Office Results for the Weekend!

1 Twilight$70.5 M

2 Quantum of Solace $27.4 M

3 Bolt $27.0 M

4 Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa $16.0 M

5 Role Models $7.2 M

No doubt that "Twilight" would take the prize for #1 movie in America this weekend. "Quantum of Solace" still holds strong, beating out the opening for "Bolt," showing Bond can still kick butt in theaters.

Box Office results for the weekend.

1 Quantum of Solace $70.4 M

2 Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa $36.1 M

3 Role Models $11.7 M

4 High School Musical 3: Senior Year $5.8 M

5 Changeling $4.2 M

6 Zack and Miri Make A Porno $3.2 M

"Quantum of Solace" hit it big this weekend, smashing all previous opening weekend records for other Bond movies.
All the other films, ranging from one week ago to two weeks ago, are still holding strong.

More Quantum of Solace

Watch these interesting interviews and gain more insight on the world of Bond!

News about this week + Box Office Results

I considered making this a single post instead of having the doubling effect, so here it is.

Movies coming out this Friday! Plot summaries thanks to IMDB!

Quantum of Solace - Picking up where Casino Royale left off, James Bond (Craig) sets his sights on the organization behind Vesper Lynd's betrayal. The mission puts him on a collision course with Dominic Greene (Amalric), a ruthless businessman who, Bond soon learns, is brokering a deal to take total control of one of the world's most precious resources. Relying on allies new and old -- including Camille (Kurylenko), a beautiful woman with her own agenda -- Agent 007 looks to bring down Greene and his conspirators.

Slumdog Millionaire - The story of how impoverished Indian teen Jamal Malik (Patel) became a contestant on the Hindi version of "Who Wants to be A Millionaire?" -- an endeavor made without prize money in mind, rather, an effort to prove his love for his friend Latika (Pinto), who is an ardent fan of the show.

Movies coming out on DVD tomorrow!

Hellboy II: The Golden Army
This Christmas
Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Box Office Results for the weekend.

1 Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa $63.5 M

2 Role Models $19.2 M

3 High School Musical 3: Senior Year $9.3 M

4 Changeling $7.3 M

5 Zack and Miri Make A Porno $6.5 M

6 Soul Men $5.6 M

The Future of Bond

Bond news that will affect his future.

Marc Forster, director of Quantum of Solace, says he will not return to direct the next Bond film.

Forster, 38, said: "I was happy to make Quantum of Solace. They asked me to do the next one. I was very honest. I passed because I'm working on something else."

Judi Dench, playing the role of M in the past several Bond films, makes her remarks about the future of Bond. ""He will move with the times."

Dench also commented on her character M. "The character of her is strong and bossy. I don't like being in an office all the time."

And when asked whether she preferred working with Daniel Craig or Pierce Brosnan, she said: "I can't choose, they have both got a huge sense of humour. You must not take yourself too seriously."

Source: The Geek Files

Quantum of Solace review

Peter Bradshaw over at The Guardian has seen Quantum of Solace. He did not like it as much as Casino Royale.

"I've got to admit that this didn't excite me as much as Casino Royale and the villain is especially underpowered. But Craig personally has the chops, as they say in Hollywood. He's made the part his own, every inch the coolly ruthless agent-cum-killer, nursing a broken heart and coldly suppressed rage. If the Savile Row suit with the Beretta shoulder holster fits, wear it. And he's wearing it.

This is a crash-bang Bond, high on action, low on quips, long on location glamour, short on product placement.

Under the direction of Marc Forster, the movie ladles out the adrenalin in a string of deafening episodes: car chases, plane wrecks, motor boat collisions. If it's got an engine, and runs on fuel, and can crash into another similarly powered vehicle, with Bond at the wheel, and preferably with a delicious female companion in the passenger seat - well, it goes in the movie.

Bond has hardly got his 007 spurs, when he's infuriating M, Judi Dench, with his insolence and insubordination. Out in the field, he's whacking enemy agents in short, sharp, bone-cracking bursts of violence when he should be bringing them in for questioning.

In theory, he is out to nail a sinister international business type: Dominic Greene, played by French star Mathieu Amalric, who under a spurious ecological cover plans to buy up swaths of South American desert and a portfolio of Latin American governments to control the water supply of an entire continent.

Clearly, Bond has to take this fellow down. But he also wants to track down the man who took his beloved Vesper away from him in the previous movie: he is pathologically seeking payback, and to the fury of his superiors, this is getting personal. But it hasn't stopped him cultivating female company in the traditional, fantastically supercilious manner. His companions are as demurely submissive as ever. Olga Kurylenko plays Camille, a mysterious, smouldering figure, out to wreak vengeance on the corrupt Bolivian dictators who killed her family.

Britain's Gemma Arterton plays Agent Fields; she greets 007 wearing a trenchcoat with apparently little underneath, like some sort of MI6 strippogram. And she is the recipient of his ardour in the luxury hotel suite - that quintessential Bond habitat. This movie is, in fact, a reminder of how vital hotels are in Bond films, providing the essential narrative grammar: the checking in, the fight with the stranger in the room, the messages left at reception, the luxury cars lovingly photographed outside."

In the end, the movie doesn't look like it will be as thrilling as Casino Royale, but it is Bond and people will see it.

The Bourne (add name of Fourth movie here)

According to Latino Review, Universal Pictures is going to make a fourth Bourne film.

The trilogy is based on the three books written by Robert Ludlum. Now that all the stories are used from Ludlum, the fourth film will be based on an original story.

Reminds me how the Bond films leaped from the Ian Fleming novels to original stories as well.

George Nolfi will write the script. He was co-writer of the third Bourne film.

Latino Review reported, "Studio toppers Marc Shmuger, David Linde and Donna Langley are making the continuation of the Bourne franchise a top priority in their effort to mount tentpoles, and they've secured director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon to attach themselves to a new film."

James Bond: Quantum of Solace

What do you think of when you think about James Bond?
Maybe some famous lines.
"Bond, James Bond."
"Shaken, not stirred."

Quantum of Solace shall do away with those famous lines just as Casino Royale did away with most of the cool gadgets Bond is used to having around.

"There was a 'Bond, James Bond' in the script," director, Marc Forster told The Independent. "There are several places where we shot it as well, but it never worked as we hoped. I just felt we should cut it out, and Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson [the film's producers] agreed, and Daniel [Craig, who plays Bond] agreed, too. It's nice to be open-minded about the Bond formula. You can always go back to them later on."

The online 007 Magazine editor Graham Rye is quoted in the article saying, "The Bond films had become tired and needed reinvigorating. Rather than going away from Fleming I think the producers have gone back to him." He continued, "His announcing of himself had become a bit corny,. Casino Royale gets back to the spirit of the books, rather than all the silliness."

Quantum of Solace will also feature a homage to the 1964 Bond film Goldfinger. New bond girl Gemma Arterton's character is drowned in crude oil and her lifeless body is left draped over a bed in a scene deliberately reminiscent of the 1964 Bond classic Goldfinger.


Casino Royale, the 21st Bond film, was a reboot of the other 20 films. Quantum of Solace will continue to reboot as a direct sequel of Casino Royale. While all of the other Bond films have been stand-alone stories, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace feature a continuing story. Who knows how long this story will last.

One last tid-bit. There are rumors that there will actually be gadgets in this next Bond film.

Quantum of Solace hits theaters on November 14.
More news to come! Catch ya' later!