— Hugh Jackman is getting ready to strap on some metal claws again. Speaking backstage at the People’s Choice Awards, the actor revealed that, “Wolverine’s going to be back. He’s going to Japan. We shoot that probably in a year, year-and-a-half, something like that.” So there you have it. We’re going to guess with Hollywood currently losing their mind over “Avatar” this one will be in 3D. Christopher McQuarrie will be writing the script, as the production searches for a director.
— Fans have been clamoring for a movie of the video game series “Metal Gear Solid” since the original was released in 1998, despite the fact that the plot is essentially that of a mid 90s “Die Hard” rip off, but stupider. (Here’s the thing about turning video games into movies – the medium is, so far, almost entirely influenced by cinema, so by the time they hit the big screen, they almost always read like rip-offs of better films). Collider spoke to producer Mike DeLuca, who’s been behind the attempt to bring Solid Snake to screens, and he told them that it looks like it won’t happen for the moment, due to interference from Konami, the company behind the game: “The video game companies are very protective of their property and there are certain things a studio requires freedom-wise to market and distribute a movie effectively in a global marketplace and sometimes getting those two things to match up is really hard.” No big loss…
— We caught Jonathan Mostow’s “Surrogates” on a plane recently. Oh, boy… The “Terminator 3” director, unbowed, has written the story for a new psychological thriller, “House at the End of the World,” which will be directed by Mark Tonderai, who was behind the decent British kidnapping thriller “Hush,” and written by David Loucka (“The Dream Team”). The movie will apparently do for “Psycho,” what “Disturbia” did for “Rear Window” – ie, gut it, dumb it down, and cast some eminently slappable flavor-of-the-month in the lead.
— From the same production company, A Bigger Boat, comes the hotly-tipped British thriller “The Disappearance of Alice Creed,” which picked up some strong reviews at the Toronto and London festivals last year, and stars the wonderful Eddie Marsan and Martin Compston (“Red Road”) as two criminals who kidnap a rich girl (Gemma Arterton). Anchor Bay have picked it up for US distribution, so we’ll be able to see for ourselves if it’s as taut and twisty as it’s meant to be.
— Producer Mike Lobell has a couple of retro-ish thrillers on the way. Nicholas Meyer (“The Wrath of Khan”) will rewrite the Hitchockian thriller “Playing Joe,” a romantic thriller set in Rio, from a script from Jeff Miller. More interestingly, he’s also attempting to set up “Gambit,” a remake of the Michael Caine/Shirley MacLaine starrer from 1966, with a script by the Coen Brothers – one of the few circumstances in which the idea of a remake doesn’t set us on edge immediately.