Thompson on Hollywood

Iron Man 2 Comic-Con Footage

The Iron Man 2 footage that was screened at Comic-Con has showed up online at Worst Previews. It's shaky-cam. Looks like great smart fun to me. (Note how Don Cheadle deals with his replacing Terrence Howard.) We have to wait until May 2010. It hasn't been edited into a movie yet.

By Anne Thompson
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August 8, 2009 9:46 AM
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Downey Banks on Franchises Iron Man 2 and Sherlock Holmes

What a difference a year makes. With Iron Man and an Oscar nom for Tropic Thunder behind him, A-list movie star Robert Downey, Jr. had a good Comic-Con. Backstage after Iron Man 2, he suggested that he's uncomfortable marketing movies, although he knows he has to do it, and that he hated the whole Hall H thing. If that's true, it doesn't show. He works the crowd better than anyone. He was hawking not only Iron Man 2, which had a stellar reaction--probably the best of the annual comics confab--but he genuinely adored playing the character Sherlock Holmes.

By Anne Thompson
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August 4, 2009 9:18 AM
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Comic-Con Aids Independents

Producer-turned-director Matthew Vaughn needs a hit. Layer Cake was a great audition piece, but Stardust was a flop. Much is riding on his next indie venture, the indie-financed $45 million action picture Kick-Ass, which no studio would finance. In an unusual move, Vaughn took 11-minutes of footage of the Hard-R movie (adapted by Jane Goldman from the Mark Millar comic) to Comic-Con, to rouse the fans. From the stage in the cavernous Hall H he exhorted them to vote with their thumbs. The plan: to boost its value with a North American distributor.

By Anne Thompson
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August 3, 2009 11:46 AM
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District 9 Wows Comic-Con

The hit of Comic-Con was Peter Jackson protege Neill Blomkamp's debut movie, the sci-fi thriller District 9. When Halo fell apart, Jackson and Blomkamp assembled this movie about what happens when aliens come to earth and we treat them badly. The creatures were designed as insect-like humanoids. Jackson was disappointed that Weta was so busy with James Cameron's Avatar that he wasn't able to commandeer his own people for the VFX and had to go elsewhere. "You have to empathize with the alien characters," Jackson said. "They have to have an alien head with the human psychography of a face that you can recognize and extract emotion from. It wasn't easy on our budget."

By Anne Thompson
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August 1, 2009 11:07 AM
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Superman's Routh Talks Reboot

Twilight star Rob Pattinson is handling his new fame with grace, according to Brandon Routh, who has endured his own E-ride through the vagaries of celebrity. "He's getting much worse, more outrageous media attention than I did," says Routh. "He was in something brand new. He's handling it well. He's seems to be a sensible guy. He's not getting a big head."

By Anne Thompson
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July 30, 2009 10:00 AM
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Cameron talks Avatar

When I talked to James Cameron at Comic-Con (below), he admitted that he and producer Jon Landau know that they have a lot of heavy lifting to do before the 3D sci-fi epic Avatar hits screens on December 18. 24 minutes of footage played great at the Con, where Cameron announced that Fox will screen 15 minutes in IMAX on August 21 for free on 35 screens around the country. But the VFX-packed fantasy lacks major stars and is not based on anything (god forbid, it's an original), so the movie will need a major marketing push from Fox. Which is what the Con was all about.

By Anne Thompson
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July 30, 2009 2:58 AM
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Comic-Con: Iron Man 2

The audience in Hall H was ramped up for Iron Man 2. They booed moderator Scott Mantz of Access Hollywood, who plowed on. (I had read some Tweets complaining about him earlier today.) Sure enough, he was flustered and not in tune with the Hall H crowd, which is fairly sophisticated.

By Anne Thompson
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July 27, 2009 5:28 AM
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Comic-Con: Visionaries Jackson, Cameron Talk Future

By far the high point of the Con for me was EW editor Jeff Giles' interview with Peter Jackson and James Cameron. The two men respect each other enormously. Weta's achievement with The Lord of the Rings' Gollum convinced Cameron that he might be able to forge ahead with Avatar, which had been collecting dust for more than a decade.

By Anne Thompson
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July 26, 2009 5:23 AM
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Comic-Con: Photo Gallery

Here's a taste of Comic-Con. And I haven't even visited the exhibition floor where all the action is. I'm still behind on posting all the material I'm collecting. Stay tuned.

By Anne Thompson
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July 25, 2009 6:03 AM
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SDCC Interview: Cameron Talks Avatar

Here's my Comic-Con interview with James Cameron about how his undersea expeditions informed his return to moviemaking, Avatar. He digs into how he perfected the art of performance capture to allow the warmth of his actors to come through. He wants to do some consciousness-raising with SAG on what performance capture really involves. During Friday's panel with Cameron and Peter Jackson, the two men discussed how resistant actors have been to such acting as Andy Serkis as Gollum.