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Want to see a ton of behind the scenes images from The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man? Why are Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone singing? When does The Wolverine start filming? Will Loki be redeemed in Thor 2? Who is rumored to play Lobo in a new movie? What’s the link between the NBA and The Dark Knight Rises? Which site says Ant-Man has been greenlit? Has a famous comic writer created his own convention? And want to read descriptions of some scenes in Man of Steel? Read about all that and more in today’s Superhero Bits.

Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone sing a weird, funny promo for The Amazing Spider-Man via Vulture.

In that same Vulture article, Garfield said he was jealous of everyone in The Avengers:

I saw it, and I was blown away. And I’m going to see it again this weekend. I have no problem adding to the amount of money it’s making! [Laughs.] Joss Whedon is a genius, and it’s an incredible cast. I was very, very jealous, and I wanted to jump on the screen and play with them. It killed me that I wasn’t in it, but I understand why, and I’m not insulted. But hey, if Samuel L. Jackson wants to give me a shout, I’m there for the next one!

/Film reader Matthew L posted this cool Pixar/Avengers mashup on his Facebook.

Bleeding Cool reports two comic character rumors: The Enchantress will be in Thor 2 and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson could be playing Lobo in a DC Comics film.

Stuntman William Spencer (via Superhero Hype) posted some cool behind the scenes images from The Amazing Spider-Man.

starts shooting in August!!! “@MarkGreen74: @RealHughJackman Hi Hugh, any updates on the next Wolverine film for all us geeky fans? ????”

— Hugh Jackman (@RealHughJackman) May 19, 2012

The Wolverine starts shooting in August thanks to Hugh Jackman’s Twitter.

Trends International (via SHH) posted these kind of Spencers/Wal-Mart posters for The Dark Knight Rises. Really ugly.

The Dark Knight Rises started advertising during the NBA Playoffs this weekend. Here’s a commercial via SHH.

Rumblings in #Cannes are that @edgarwright‘s ANT MAN has been greenlit. #rumor

— TWITCH (@TwitchFilm) May 19, 2012

The reliable Twitchfilm says Edgar Wright‘s Ant Man might have been greenlit.

Skullboy (via CBM) posted several behind the scenes photos from The Avengers including this of a certain baddie’s throne.

Comic Book Movie has a recap of The Amazing Spider-Man footage shown at Kapow, the comic convention in London.

Continue Reading Superhero Bits >>

Due to the amount of graphics and images included in Superhero Bits, we have to split this post over THREE pages. Click the link above to continue to the second page of Superhero Bits.

• Superhero Bits: Arrow, Amazing Spider-Man, Dark Knight Rises, Man of Steel, Avengers
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• Superhero Bits: The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, Arrow, The Amazing Spider-Man
• Superhero Bits: The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises, Chronicle, Stan Lee, Iron Man 3
• Superhero Bits: The Avengers, Dark Knight Rises, Man of Steel, Amazing Spider-Man, Elektra
• Superhero Bits: The Avengers, Amazing Spider-Man, Dark Knight Rises, Wonder Woman, Arrow

Today Warner Bros. released a new poster for Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight Rises, and it is an attention-getting design that helps put the original teaser poster into perspective. Here we see the same bat-logo outline established by a crumbling Gotham City, but with the addition of a fiery explosion and tense, determined Batman (Christian Bale).

Check out the full image below.

The image comes from Facebook, and at the moment we’ve got only this not-quite high res version. We’ll update with a larger one when it is available.

The Dark Knight Rises also stars Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anne Hathaway, and Marion Cotillard. It opens on July 20.

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Three sequels, two threequels, and a TV show spinoff feature in today’s Sequel Bits. After the jump:

• Mandy Moore talks about Tangled 2 and Tron: Uprising
• A German screening of Men in Black 3 breaks a world record
• Fan Bingbing and Yang Mi join Andy Lau in Iron Man 3
• Robert Rodriguez drops hints on Machete Kills and Sin City 2

The good news for Tangled fans is that star Mandy Moore is eager to do a sequel, but the bad news is that nothing seems to be underway just yet. “I have heard things from various people, but nobody has officially said anything to me,” she told Collider. “I would love to do it. I had the best time working with everyone on that project. I would be 150% behind that.”

Until Tangled 2 gets going, though, Moore already has Disney XD’s upcoming animated series Tron: Uprising to keep her busy. While much of the marketing so far has focused on the lead character of Beck (voiced by Elijah Wood), Moore dropped lots of details about her character, Beck’s best friend Mara:

Mara is a mechanic in Able’s garage, along with Elijah Wood’s character, Beck, and Nate Corddry’s character, Zed. They are this little trifecta – this trio – of best friends. They work together and they play together, but Mara is one of the guys. She is confident and spunky and the voice of reason, I like to think, especially as the series progresses. As the series does progress, she finds herself falling in love with this masked vigilante – The Renegade. She doesn’t realize that, in fact, it is her best friend, Beck. She is in love with his moral compass and what he stands for, and she is right behind him. She is great at what she does, too. She specializes in vintage technology and older Light Cycles. She has a real affinity for the older technology, in a geeky way, unlike anybody else in the garage. But, she also works on some of the more bad-ass, harder, scary bits and pieces of machinery. She really knows her way around that garage. She is a much cooler girl than I am. The blue hair is her trademark.

Tron: Uprising premieres June 7 on Disney XD.

Men in Black 3 won’t even hit U.S. theaters until this weekend, but its German premiere has already broken a world record. 6,819 movie lovers attended a screening of the film at O2 World in Berlin, making it the largest 3D movie screening of all time as confirmed by Guinness World Records. The set-up involved “an array of four Sony 4K SRX-R320′s, projecting left and right eye 3D images simultaneously onto a giant 25.9m x 14m screen.” How the movie actually performs in the normal box office, we’ll see in a few days, but for now this seems to get Men in Black 3 off to a good start. [Market Saw]

Iron Man 3 is beefing up its Chinese cast. Fan Bingbing and Yang Mi will join Andy Lau in the Marvel production, according to Hong Kong’s Apple Daily (via CBM), playing Lau’s wife and assistant, respectively. Lau is set to play a scientist who helps Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) in his fight against Ben Kingsley‘s villainous character.

The report also offers further clues as to the sequel’s shooting location and plotline:

The film will have location shooting in Beijing and Shanghai, it will narrates that the daughter of Robert Downey Jr.’s friend was kidnapped and brought to China, in order to save his friend’s daughter, he flew over from America to China to seek help from Andy to strengthen his abilities to fight The Mandarin. You will see Iron Man fly over The Great Wall of China, National Palace Museum & other landmarks in Shanghai May 2013

While Marvel has yet to confirm that Kingsley is playing The Mandarin, Apple Daily reports it as fact. The publication notes that the casting of Kingsley to play a character traditionally portrayed as Chinese in the books could be a move to keep from alienating foreign audience. “[The production] had already got approval from the State Administration of Radio Film and Television in order to be shot, all contents that harms Chinese image had been ‘removed’, this explains why the villain will be a bit different from the original comic,” it writes. Iron Man 3 opens May 3, 2013.

Robert Rodriguez has regularly mentioned Machete Kills and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For since before either film was close to becoming a reality, and now that they’re both on track to begin shooting this summer he’s happier than ever to talk them up. In a recent event at Cannes, Rodriguez offered several intriguing details about his new projects, including the warning not to believe everything you read online.

Specifically, Rodriguez told attendees that the synopsis that’s been circulating for Machete Kills is “misdirection — it’s all fake”:

Machete is recruited by the President, that’s true, but there’s no cartel leader and the weapon in space is just one of our early story ideas. That said, there is still a space element, for sure. We’ve given the character a much bigger playground. It’s going to be like a James Bond movie, with a Bond-style villain.”

Said villain (as previously reported, online even) will be played by Mel Gibson, whom Rodriguez says is “just a badass.” “This won’t just be him grinning, doing bad-guy stuff,” Rodriguez teased. “He’s going to do something with it that’ll really get people talking.” I mean, hey — if filmgoers are still having a hard time wrapping their minds around a likeable Gibson, I guess it makes sense to just make him totally, gleefully horrible.

As for Sin City, Rodriguez promises that the new follow-up will be even more stylized than the original.

I really held back the first time, because I didn’t know whether audiences would go for it. So it ended up looking like a real movie, but in black and white, with a few flourishes. This one is going to push way further towards the books. It’s going to shock and surprise people.

Rodriguez continued with some choice words about the titular Dame, femme fatale Ava Lord. “She’s completely diabolical with no mercy. She’s as evil as evil gets,” he enthused. While optimistic fans have wondered if Angelina Jolie could end up taking the part, Rodriguez would only say that it was “a great part for any actress.” Returning stars Mickey Rourke and Jessica Alba were the only names Rodriguez would confirm, though he hinted that he’d be talking to some “seriously big names” over the next couple of weeks.

Machete Kills and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For will shoot back to back this summer. [Empire]

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Cannes is a big festival when it comes to film premieres, but there are also occasionally (very occasionally) previews of titles that weren’t ready for the festival. Today the Weinstein Company showed off footage from three new films: Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master, and David O Russell‘s The Silver Linings Playbook.

Reactions to this footage preview are starting to appear, and we’ve collected the highlights below.

Let’s break things up by film, as much as possible. Since we’ve already seen some footage from The Master today, we’ll start with Django Unchained. The Weinsteins showed off seven minutes of footage from Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Southern,’ which stars Jamie Foxx as the title character, Christoph Waltz as the German bounty hunter who enlists him to track down some slavers, and Leonardo DiCaprio as the plantation owner who holds Django’s wife (Kerry Washington) in his compound.

Vulture gave a good recap of the footage:

The big surprise? How funny this potentially controversial Western has turned out to be. In particular, Leonardo DiCaprio seems to be having the time of his life dropping N-bombs and smiling rotted teeth as plantation owner Calvin Candie, whom freed slave Jamie Foxx and bounty hunter Christoph Waltz must defeat in order to save Foxx’s wife Kerry Washington. You’ll get a periwinkle-suited Foxx shooting lumpy blood chunks out of racist hicks (and an innocent snowman in one scene), and you’ll laugh! You’ll get Don Johnson dressed as Colonel Sanders! And you’ll get an instant catchphrase from a cooly underplaying Foxx, when he’s asked his name: “Django. The D is silent.”

The guy asking Foxx his name there is played by Franco Nero, who starred in the Django series of films produced decades ago. Quint at AICN notes that, and also expresses surprise at the amount of humor in the movie. He also said,

Again, this thing just looks like a ton of fun and while I was already excited for the movie I’m not officially giddy. All the location work makes the film look huge, Foxx is at the top of his game it appears, Waltz is loveable, funny and dangerous all at once and it just feels like everybody is having a blast.

Anne Thompson notes that there are 62 days of shooting left on Django Unchained, and so it isn’t likely to hit the fall festival circuit. The film already has a release date — Christmas Day of this year — and so the Weinsteins are likely to just let it wait until then. She also says,

Weinstein Co. is selling this as a bang-up western, packed with physical comedy and bloody action and hell-bent revenge. And yes, it looks like a classic widescreen Sergio Leone western, even if the setting is New Orleans and Mississippi two years before the Civil War. (The music on the trailer ranged from classic Johnny Cash to James Brown. No Ennio Morricone here. As yet.)… Tarantino is taking the revenge western to a whole new level as the two bounty hunters shoot their way through the unsuspecting South. It looks like the first Leone-esque section of “Inglourious Basterds,” and it’s about fighting injustice, except that this time it’s not Brad Pitt against the Nazis in World War II–it’s an angry black man getting his own back from racist white southerners before the Civil War… This is not your ordinary movie to sell overseas or domestically — or to the Academy. (I will not be surprised if the movie gets pushed back out of 2012.) But when Tarantino breaks the rules with style and panache, critics and audiences follow.

And there are very positive echoes from Twitter:

Django Unchained looks f’n badass…7 minute trailer ending with Jamie Foxx shooting his pistol to James Brown ‘Payback’ “The D is Silent” — Raffi Asdourian (@zaffi) May 21, 2012

Harvey Weinstein just presented 7 mins of Django Unchained. Looks ace. We’re tipping Fritz the nodding horse to be a breakout star. #Cannes — Empire Magazine (@empiremagazine) May 21, 2012

DJANGO gets the most whoops. Plenty of blood, plenty of laughs. Looks like it will be the Cristophe Waltz show. “The D is silent.” #Cannes — TWITCH (@TwitchFilm) May 21, 2012

OMFG, “Django Unchained” looks so good. SO GOOD. #Cannes — Drew McWeeny (@DrewAtHitFix) May 21, 2012

Reactions to The Master have also been quite good, and we’ll just hit a few quick points right now, since there’s already some footage that you can see, as linked above.

The Playlist notes that Joaquin Phoenix’s character name is Freddie Queel, and that “Freddie Sutton in the script leaked last year, is now named Freddie Quell. Falling along the general plot we already know, Freddie comes into the orbit of the enigmatic leader of a — religion? cult? — led by Philip Seymour Hoffman. And let’s be clear — while the name Scientology isn’t mentioned, this is clearly very inspired by the religion. While in recent months the production has taken steps — perhaps for legal reasons — to avoid drawing direct parallels, it’s something that’s going to be very hard to deny.”

The site also said,

Visually, it looks fantastic with a graininess and color scheme that seems inspired by Technicolor/’50s film. And remember, this was shot on 65mm stock which is why we’re seeing the kind of texture we get less of in this increasingly digital world. The footage we saw also opens with a great, slow dolly shot down a hallway that was immediately reminiscent of something Stanley Kubrick might have done. The score throughout was the same as was heard in the teaser trailer, though with some added strings in the same atonal universe as “There Will Be Blood.”

Rope of Silicon says The Master made the best impression of the three films shown today, and adds,

The footage not seen in the teaser includes co-star Amy Adams and lead actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd, the titular “master”, a man claiming to be many things including writer, doctor and philosopher and he has attracted Freddie’s attention. Dodd is a man who’s witnessed the horrors of World War II and tries to rediscover who he is in post-war America and creates a belief system, something that catches on with other lost souls…  I found several of the shots to be interesting as Anderson and his cinematographer, Mihai Malaimare Jr. (Tetro), seem to focus heavily on close-ups, particularly a nearly hypnotic moment featuring Adams speaking directly into camera saying, “Look into my eyes.”

Finally, there isn’t as much about David O Russell’s The Silver Linings Playbook, in part because it doesn’t enjoy nearly the level of anticipation of the other two films. As Alex at FirstShowing noted in a video blog, part of the problem is that, when a film like Russell’s is sandwiched between new PTA and Tarantino films, it is bound to look a little, well, normal.

The film features Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, and Chris Rock, adapting the novel by Matthew Quick. Jeff Wells offers,

The Silver Linings Playbook looks fast and sharp — a raggedy-jazz comedy about caustic humor, family, sex, anxiety, therapy, hurt, healing…all of that. Directed and written by Russell, and adapted from the serio-comic novel by Matthew Quick. Agitated and lacking-in-people-skills Bradley Cooper falls in love with Jennifer Lawrence. It feels edgy and crackling and push-pushy and what-tge-fucky. Robert De Niro, Julia Stiles, Jacki Weaver and Chris Tucker costar.

And AwardsDaily notes,

[David O Russell's] gift is with actors, nimble dialogue, unpredictable reactions and you see all of that here. Bradley Cooper stars in Silver Linings as a man who’s just spent five years in a mental hospital and must move home with his mother and try to sort out his life, and stars opposite beautiful Jennifer Lawrence, who continues to light up the screen. They talk about taking drugs and flirt with each other a lot. It’s chaos but funny chaos. You can imagine that O. Russell is especially good with awkward parent scenarios — Flirting with Disaster, especially, which is his best film to date, I think. Plenty of Oscar potential there too, but that is one that will have to be seen all the way through to know for sure. If it’s a Best Picture contender, the rest of the nominations will follow.

There’s also this, from Twitter:

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK looks to b somewhat standard romcom w/ Bradley Cooper as mentally unstable. Jennifer Lawrence stole trailer. #Cannes — TWITCH (@TwitchFilm) May 21, 2012

• ‘The Master’ Teaser Clip – Paul Thomas Anderson’s Latest Stars an Unstable Joaquin Phoenix
• Film Negative Gives Obscure First Look at Philip Seymour Hoffman in ‘The Master’
• Kurt Russell and Sacha Baron Cohen Exit ‘Django Unchained’
• First Official Look at Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Django Unchained’
• ‘Django Unchained’ Synopsis Explains Tarantino’s Latest for the Spoiler-Averse
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Like many great dramas in television history, each season of Breaking Bad has left audiences with their jaws on the floor and questions on their mind. This past year, season four, was no different and fans have been waiting since October to see the results of those chilling last few minutes. The wait is almost over.

AMC just revealed that the fifth and final season of Breaking Bad will begin July 15. The sixteen episode season will be split in two: Eight episodes will air this year and then we’ll have to wait a whole other year, Summer 2013, for the final eight. Talk about your good news, bad news scenario.

There’s more after the jump including clearly marked spoiler-filled speculation.

Variety along with several other places reported this news, which also came with the announcement that a new reality show (following Comic Book Men and The Pitch) will air after Breaking Bad. It’s called Small Town Security and is about a family owned, small town security business. Hell on Wheels will also be back this summer, on August 12.

The rest of this post will contain spoilers for Breaking Bad because I feel like doing a little speculating. But if you’re a Breaking Bad fan, don’t forget the art project that’s currently going on. Awesome stuff is afoot.

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MAJOR SPOILERS

With Gus gone and Walt comfortable enough to kill Jesse’s friend, Breaking Bad is well on its way to truly embracing its name. There’s nothing stopping Walt now, with Gus out of the picture and Jesse firmly in his pocket. Well, except for Mike, Gus’s personal fixer. That’ll be a problem. And of course Hank.

I feel like season five will likely see Walt begin to thrive even more, which will continue to raise the suspicion and interest of Hank, his brother in law. That relationship and revelation has to be the center of this final season. I’d imagine Hank will discover Walt is Heisenberg at the end of the first eight episodes and the last eight will be the result and aftermath leading, ultimately, to Walt’s incarceration or death.

That’s what I think, what about you?

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When writers visit film sets, they’re generally embargoed from discussing what they’ve seen. It’s just impossible to judge a film while it’s still in production, far from its final look and studios would ideally like impressions to come out closer to a film’s release date. Apparently that embargo doesn’t hold true if you are the person who created the property being put to film.

Orson Scott Card, the author of Ender’s Game, recently visited the set of the in-production film, written and directed by Gavin Hood, and took to the Internet to give his thoughts and reveal some new information. He talked about the chemistry between stars Harrison Ford and Asa Butterfield as well as answered one of the biggest questions surrounding the movie: How is Hood going to handle the massive battles that take place in a zero gravity room? He also reveals he has a cameo in the 2013 release. Read his quotes and more after the jump.

All of the below quotes come from Card’s blog post at Rhino Times. These are just selections, head there for much more.

First up, Card said the following about his cameo:

Speaking of movies, I was on the set of Ender’s Game last week to record my one line in the movie – a voiceover of a pilot making an announcement to his passengers.

He then talks in detail about his thoughts concerning a scene with Harrison Ford, as General Graff, and Asa Butterfield, as Ender Wiggin himself:

The scene does not come from the book – very few of the scenes in this movie do – so it was amusing when others asked me how it felt to have my book brought to life. My book was already alive in the mind of every reader. This is writer-director Gavin Hood’s movie, so they were his words, and it was his scene.

He expand on that, discusses some of the sets, then talks about how traditional wires such as in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon rely too much on gravity to be used for his zero gravity battle school. That’s when he discusses how the filmmakers plan on pulling this off:

Stunt coordinator Garrett Warren took what he learned from the weightless work he did on Avatar built on it.

There is a mechanism used for training gymnasts – a wheel they wear around their waists that allows them to rotate in space while suspended from wires. Warren used this on Avatar, which allows a great deal of apparent freedom of movement in space – once the computer artists have erased the wheel rig, you can’t tell that there’s any way a wire could have been attached.

But this is only the beginning. The illusion of freefall depends on the actors’ moving correctly. Where gravity naturally draws their limbs downward, in zero-gravity the arms and legs and heads continue in the direction of the last movement, until something stops them.

For the most difficult stunts, Warren brought in dancers from Cirque de Soleil. Being gymnasts by training, they tend to be small – they can bring off the illusion of children’s bodies.

And they have the strength and training to do constant movements and poses that defy gravity, without ever looking as if they’re working hard.

But all the children playing these roles had to do wire work themselves. Fitted with the wheel rigs, they were being moved through space like puppets – and at every moment, they had to make sure their “nonvolitional” movements followed the rules of inertia-driven rather than gravity-driven motion.

It was agonizing. Human muscles aren’t meant to work like that. And Warren was watching everything, playing it back again and again, catching any false movements.

There’s more on the blog, but Card says the following about Warren’s work on the film:

If Garrett Warren doesn’t get a special technical Oscar for his achievement on this film, then there truly ain’t no justice. I’ve seen enough of the result to know that he has brought off the miracle of filming zero-gravity while still on planet Earth.

And almost everything you’ll see in that battle room, real people did. The computers didn’t animate it – they merely made the wires and rigs invisible.

We’ll have much (much) more on Ender’s Game, and specifically the zero gravity battles, in the months leading up to its November 1, 2013 release. What do you think about Card’s revelations?

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After years of talk, Kick-Ass 2 finally made some real progress earlier this month as Jeff Wadlow (Never Back Down) signed on to write and direct, and it’s now on track to shoot this year for a 2013 release date. At a Kapow! Comic Convention event, Wadlow spoke out about the sequel, even addressing the little matter of getting in-demand young star Chloë Grace Moretz back on board.

Hit the jump to read his comments and his status update on Moretz’ possible involvement — and while he gets that casting issue sorted out, check out some unused marketing materials from the first Kick-Ass film that could actually be cooler than the actual marketing materials that Lionsgate wound up using.

At Kapow! this past weekend, Wadlow told fans that he’d arrived in London “about a week ago” and was planning to stick around for “about a year” to do Kick-Ass 2. “It’s happening. Our first day of photography is in September,” he said. “It’s all moving forward. I wrote the script over the holidays.”

Wadlow then offered some clues as to the direction of the upcoming sequel, and how it’d differ from original author Mark Millar‘s own follow-up to the first volume of his Kick-Ass comic book:

It’s been an interesting process because for those of you who know the property really well, the movie takes some significant liberties with the first comic book. So then Mark did the sequel to the comic book which is Kick-Ass 2. So I had sort of this movie and the comic book and I had to find the intersection. An adaptation was quite a challenge, but one that I really enjoyed and loved. I think the most important thing that’s gonna change from the Kick-Ass 2 comic to Kick-Ass 2 the movie was just really finding an emotional story to tell. Because what I certainly loved about the first film, and what I think elevated it above most comic book adaptations, is the heart and the emotion in the film. It was sort of my challenge as the film maker and storyteller to find something as emotional in the second film and I think we have some stuff that people are gonna really respond to.

One of the biggest changes, Wadlow said, had to do with the story’s treatment of Moretz’ character Hit-Girl (spoilers follow):

If you’ve read the comic, you know, she gives up being Hit-Girl, which was a brilliant idea I thought on Mark’s part. It’s something I explore something quiet deeply in the movie because what happens in the comic is she sort of steps away from the story in many ways and she’s sort of sidelined while Dave is working with Justice Forever and Chris is becoming the Mother[frick]er. But I was quite interested in what happens to her when she’s not being Hit-Girl.

Probably a smart move on Wadlow’s part. Kick-Ass (Aaron Johnson) may have been the protagonist, but I found that it was the character of Hit-Girl who really stuck with me, and that it was her relationship with Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) that really gave the film its heart. Regardless of what happens in Millar’s comics, it’d be disappointing to see a Kick-Ass 2 movie with no room for Hit-Girl.

Of course, expanding Hit-Girl’s role in the film means trying to find a way to get Moretz to sign on, which is easier said than done. In the two years since the release of the first movie, Moretz’ star has only gotten bigger, and she’s already got a handful of projects lined up for her near future. That includes the Dennis Wilson biopic The Drummer, which shoots this summer — just before Moretz would be due to shoot Kick-Ass 2, if she were to sign on.

But happily, Wadlow says he’s already started discussing the role with Moretz, and that the star is very much interested. “Well, nothing is official yet. But I had breakfast with Chloë two weeks ago and she’s read the script and she’s very excited about what we’re doing with Hit-Girl,” he said. “Her story is a major, major part of the film and she’s excited about the ideas and we’re in talks.”

No doubt we’ll be hearing much more about that soon. In the meantime, as we wait for Kick-Ass 2 to get underway, take a gander at some unused marketing from the first Kick-Ass film. The idea behind it is pretty cool, but the execution leaves something to be desired. For one thing, whoever designed these seems to have forgotten to line up the characters’ eyes, so everyone but Kick-Ass himself just looks off. Like, really off, in the case of Big Daddy:

Clumsy Photoshop aside, though, the unused art actually looks more striking to me than the character sheets that Lionsgate actually did end up using — click here to refresh your memory. Which do you prefer?

• Universal In Talks To Make ‘Kick-Ass 2;’ Jeff Wadlow To Write And Direct
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A highly underrated moment in the history of The Simpsons was in 2006 when 20th Century Fox sneakily placed the first teaser trailer/announcement of The Simpsons Movie in front of Ice Age: The Meltdown. That relationship between Homer and Scrat continues next month as a 3D Simpsons short film will play in front of Ice Age: Continental Drift. It’s called The Longest Daycare and will star Maggie Simpson. Check out a teaser clip below.

Thanks to Cartoon Brew for the heads up. The following clip played during Sunday’s season finale of The Simpsons.

Will a Simpsons short film be enough to get you into Ice Age: Continental Drift? The film opens July 13.

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What a wonderful day it is for a wide variety of film lovers: we’ve had teaser footage for films as disparate as the James Bond film Skyfall, the sequel to Anchorman, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s hotly-anticipated film The Master. And now there is new footage from Wong Kar Wai, whose short film Déjà Vu is being unveiled at Cannes.

The film is sponsored by Chivas Regal, and accordingly is essentially an ad for the company’s whiskey. But there’s a narrative here, a romance between two characters. And as anyone familiar with the director’s work knows, he does romance in a way that is unlike anyone else.

Ad or not, the footage from Déjà Vu is gorgeous, and you should take a look below.

So, the narrative there may ultimately be “whiskey is great!” (and it is) but I can live with this as a new glimpse at work from Wong Kar Wai. We’re still waiting to see more from the director’s new feature, The Grandmasters, which tells his own account of the legendary martial arts teacher and political activist Ip Man. That one is set to debut in December, and while we’ve seen a couple teasers over the past year or so, hopefully we’ll see a more finished and pointed trailer for the film in the next couple months. [Twitch]

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We can probably blame the Bruce Willis sci-fi film Surrogates for the fact that Fox Searchlight has changed the title of the John Hawkes-starring Sundance fave The Surrogate. The Willis film was pretty forgettable, but not quite forgettable enough that Searchlight wanted to go with the original title for the film about a sex surrogate (Helen Hunt) hired to, er, ‘work with’ a bedridden man played by Hawkes.

The film is now called Six Sessions, and it will be released on October 26 of this year.

Germain called Six Sessions a sure Oscar contender when he reviewed the film out of Sundance, saying,

[Six Sessions is] hilarious, brave and frank about both disabilities and sexuality… [Writer/director Ben Lewin] and the actors handle the touchy subject matter (pun intended) with the utmost maturity, poise and thoughtfulness… As Mark, Hawkes gives a career-making performance. He turns a man who many might pity into a role model without lifting a finger. Or leg. Or torso. And while Hunt’s performance as Cheryl requires her to be nude for a large majority of the film, she’s not only beautiful, but incredibly confident with a sublayer of vulnerability.

The October date is a pretty prime one; competition comes from Alex Cross; Fun Size; Of Men and Mavericks; and Silent Hill: Revelation 3D. Which is to say that if things stay the way they are now, Six Sessions will have a clear path to the arthouse audience. [BoxOfficeMojo]

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After much talk, Bridesmaids director Paul Feig and breakout star Melissa McCarthy have finally settled on a project to bring them back together. The pair are set to team with Sandra Bullock for an untitled new comedy from Parks & Recreation writer Katie Dippold, which will see the two actresses playing a mismatched law-enforcement duo. More details after the jump.

According to Variety, Bullock is set to play an uptight FBI agent, while McCarthy will play an “unconventional” Boston police officer. The two cross paths when they must team up to go after a Russian gangster. So I’m thinking it’ll be like the pre-transformation section of Miss Congeniality combined with the Megan parts of Bridesmaids, which… sounds pretty promising, actually. Count me in.

The deal reportedly comes after weeks of difficult discussions over salary and scheduling, but the trio are now set to shoot during McCarthy’s next hiatus from her CBS series Mike and Molly. That means it won’t get going for a little while yet — though the series is on break right now, McCarthy’s currently using her off time to shoot Seth Gordon’s Identity Theft. McCarthy also has a handful of other projects simmering at the moment, including her passion project Tammy, a possible Bridesmaids sequel, and a Stanley Cup comedy with Bridesmaids writer Annie Mumolo.

Feig has apparently become the go-to guy for female-led comedies ever since the success of Bridesmaids. Though he’s no longer on board for Bridget Jones’ Baby, he is set for the Reese Witherspoon vehicle Wish List, and has been attached at various points to the Amy Sherman-Palladino-scripted The Better Woman and HBO’s The Viagra Diaries.

But it’s really Bullock I’m curious to see here. She’s just coming off of a trio of dramatic turns, in The Blind Side, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity (due out next year); the untitled Feig picture will be Bullock’s first comedy since 2009′s All About Steve and The Proposal. If their last team-up is any indication, Feig and McCarthy’s sense of humor may be a little ruder and more offbeat than Bullock’s used to, but I look forward to seeing her stretch her comedy horizons.

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Kevin Smith and film criticism haven’t always had the most friendly relationship. A few years back he lashed out at critics due to the reaction to Cop Out. The battle continued when Red State was released, as the director refused to show it to critics. On the flip side, great reviews certainly assisted in making films like Clerks and Chasing Amy such long lasting hits.

Smith has now found a way to blend his two ideologies with an internet TV show called Spoilers, which premieres June 4 on Hulu. He calls it an ”anti-movie review show” where the filmmaker will take a bunch of fans to see ten summer blockbusters on opening day, forgoing the early critic screenings he abhors so much, and then have an in-depth discussion about its merits. “We don’t review movies, we revere movies,” he says.

After the jump, read more about the show and watch a few teaser clips.

Here’s the official show description from the Hulu press release:

For fans of: “Inside the Actors’ Studio,” “Comic Book Men,” “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “Conan,” “The Late Show with Jimmy Fallon.” New episodes premiere every Monday beginning on June 4; Entire ten-episode series (produced by SModCo) available on August 6. Kevin Smith’s Movie “Revue” – This multi-act film extravaganza mixes lively group chats, interviews with movie and pop culture icons and animated shorts. Each week, Kevin, special guests and movie lovers passionately sound off on the year’s most anticipated summer blockbusters, gushing over their favorite scenes and debating the details frame by frame.

The film’s Smith and friends will review for these 10 episodes are as follows:

• Snow White and the Huntsman
• Prometheus
• Rock of Ages
• Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
• Magic Mike
• The Amazing Spider-Man
• Ice Age: Continental Drift
• The Dark Knight Rises
• The Watch
• The Bourne Legacy
• Total Recall

Basically the meat of June, July and early August. Here’s the teaser for the show:

And here Smith gets a bit more detailed:

There’s another clip on the show’s Hulu page too.

Since Smith calls Spoilers an “anti-movie review” show, I’m going to be really interested to see how in-depth he and his audience get if they dislike a film. I’m sure they’ll geek out over Prometheus or The Dark Knight Rises, but I can’t see Ice Age: Continental Draft getting a glowing review from a bunch of Smith-fan movie nerds.

For more on the Smith vs. critic controversy, check out this post from our own Dave Chen.

Are you going to check this out? Do you feel Smith is going back on his previous stance?

Additional source: Indiewire

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The first teaser trailer for a sequel to Adam McKay‘s Anchorman hit last week, and bootlegs have been floating around for a few days. Now there’s an official release of an all-new teaser trailer for Anchorman: The Legend Continues, aka Anchorman 2, as well as a good online version of the theatrical cut.

Both teasers are pretty simple stuff, but some of the essential goofiness that made Anchorman a favorite is there: namely, Steve Carell gets right back into character as Brick Tamland as the rest of the Action News Team (Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, and Dave Joechner) spew their own brands of nonsensical idiom.

Check out the new teaser below, along with the one that has been in theaters for a few days.

This one hit Funny or Die today:

That teaser features a completely different script from the one that has been around in bootleg form since last week. What gives? Ah, who cares — they’re both funny. Here’s the theatrical teaser that hit theaters last week:

The sequel to Anchorman is being written now and is expected to shoot later this year for a 2013 release.

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A week after getting our first glimpse of Philip Seymour Hoffman as religious leader Lancaster Dodd in Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master, we now have a first teaser to go with it. We don’t get to see much more of Hoffman here, but what we do get is a nice long look at Joaquin Phoenix, who plays a charismatic young drifter named Freddie who becomes Hoffman’s second in command. Watch it after the jump.

[via Megan Ellison]

Also starring Amy Adams, Jesse Plemons, Laura Dern, and more, Anderson’s first film since 2007′s There Will Be Blood sails into theaters October 12.

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What is Page 2? Page 2 is a compilation of stories and news tidbits, which for whatever reason, didn’t make the front page of /Film. After the jump we’ve included 48 different items, fun images, videos, casting tidbits, articles of interest and more. It’s like a mystery grab bag of movie web related goodness. If you have any interesting items that we might’ve missed that you think should go in /Film’s Page 2 – email us!

Header Photo: Nathan Fillion Meets a Tiny Captain Reynolds cosplayer

Top 30 Movies Coming In 2013

/Film reader Matt G spotted this Terminator flyer posted in the Lower East Side.

Peter Weller: Modern movies can’t replicate morality of ‘RoboCop’

Video: Chewbacca, Slave Leia & more dance to LMFAO in Star Wars Weekend‘s Dance-Off with the Star Wars Stars 2012

Men In Black 3 Arrives As Sony, Cinemas Still At Odds Over Who Pays For 3D Glasses

12 Board Games We Want to Pitch as Movies/TV Shows

Top 10 Kristen Wiig SNL Sketches.

Star Wars-inspired street art.

Director’s Cut of ‘Little Shop of Horrors‘ to Include Infamous Original Ending?

Continue Reading Page 2 >>

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Jackie Chan brought his 100th film, Chinese Zodiac, to the Cannes Film Festival this year, but he also arrived with some news that has been a few years coming: he’s done with bit death-defying action movie setpieces. But that news got a bit garbled over the weekend, with many thinking that Chan is done with action movies for good. Today, the multi-hyphenate clarified that while he’s too old to do some of the action he’s known for, he isn’t done by a long shot.

Chan told AP about Chinese Zodiac, which he wrote, produced, directed, and choreographed over seven years:

For the last ten years I’ve been choosing the director to direct me. This one I direct myself. I hope this movie, 20 years later, people still remember it. For me, for the audience, for my future, for my history — it’s very important.

But the action has started to take a real toll on him.

It hurts, it really hurts. The shoulder, the ankle, it really hurts. You don’t know because I still look healthy… They say ‘no, you’re still young, you can still do it,’ but I have to stop one day.

That led to a broad assumption that Chan is done with action movies altogether. So he clarified via Facebook that, in fact, he’s still soldiering on:

Hello all my friends and fans,

Yesterday in my press conference in Cannes for Chinese 12 Zodiac I said that this movie was my last big action movie.

Today I was shocked when I woke up to read all the news coverage that I was retiring from doing Action movies.

I just want to let everyone know that I am not retiring from doing action movies. What I meant to say is that I need to do less of the life risking stunts on my movies. After all these years of doing so many stunts and breaking so many bones, I need to take better care of my body so I can keep working.

I will continue to do international action movies. And I will keep improving my English :-)

I love all of you!

Jackie

Here’s a trailer for Chinese Zodiac. Those who’ve seen many other Chan action films will recognize a spirit that calls back to his classic Armor of God series. And there are some set pieces here that look great, particularly the couch fight:

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Even as EON Productions pulls the wrapper off the first trailer for the twenty-third James Bond film, Skyfall, another company is planning to chronicle the life of the man who created Bond.

In fact, there are some who say that Ian Fleming was Bond. Born into a wealthy family, Fleming was educated abroad, spent time as a writer for Reuters (a job his mother landed for him) and worked in banking and finance for a time before being recruited into the Royal Navy in 1939. There he flourished, forming a group of specialized intelligence troops, among many other accomplishments. He worked again in journalism after the war, and in the early ’50s began to write the James Bond novels from his Jamaican home.

Now Duncan Jones, who directed Moon and Source Code, will make a film about the writer. Called Fleming, the movie is based on Andrew Lycett‘s biography Ian Fleming, the Man Behind James Bond, and scripted by Matt Brown.

There has been another Ian Fleming biopic in development, based at Appian Way, with Leonardo DiCaprio attached to play the author and a script by JOhn Orloff and Damian Stevenson. But Variety reports that this incarnation of the film will be financed by a company called K5, with K5 Film’s Oliver Simon and Daniel Baur producing alongside PalmStar Media Capital’s Kevin Frakes and Liberty Films’ Stuart Fenegan.

In a statement, Jones said,

Fleming lived through one of the most perilous periods in world history, in a position that allowed him a unique vantage point of all the players, all the stakes. He witnessed true heroism first-hand. And he saw the evil men could do. Then, when the war ended, he went off to write fiction. The essential question for me is: Where did Ian Fleming end and Bond begin?

Variety reports that Jones is casting the film now and that the production plans to shoot this year.

From his family to the war, to his fiery and complicated personal relationships after the war, Fleming is a fascinating character even without the fact of having written the Bond novels. Those books were really a way to distill all the experiences Fleming had in life; his formative years could be just as thrilling on screen as Bond’s adventures.

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If you aren’t totally caught up with AMC’s Breaking Bad, I urge you not to check out the latest piece of art from the Breaking Bad Art Project. It’s of a major, major spoiler concerning that happens in the latest season’s finale. However, if you are caught up, I’m sure you have an idea exactly what awaits you below if I say it concerns Gus (Giancarlo Esposito). The above image is just a small, non-spoiler, sliver.

The Breaking Bad Art Project is a viral campaign that’s revealing one piece of art per week leading up to this summer’s final season premiere of Breaking Bad. This third poster is by relative newcomer Anthony Petrie, who just so happened to do my favorite piece in the recent Avengers Assemble art show as well. He’s one to watch, as is this show. Check out the poster below.

The third poster should be available sometime Monday afternooon at the website http://wevegotworktodo.com/. That site was revealed on the latest Comedy Bang Bang podcast featuring everyone’s favorite scumbag lawyer, Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk). For Breaking Bad fans, hearing Saul podcast is a must listen.

And here’s your last warning, if you haven’t caught up on Breaking Bad, don’t look at Petrie’s image. Here it is.

Pretty striking, no? I love that it draws a parallel I didn’t think of between the blown off face of the teddy bear from a few seasons ago with the blown off face of Gus thanks to Walt.

As for Petrie, the guy has some major talent and if the success of some of the first time screenprint artists from the last viral, for Lost, is any indication (Olly Moss, Eric Tan) this might be one to pick up.

What do you think of the image? What has been your favorite so far?

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"Some men are coming to kill us... I'm going to kill them first." It has arrived. Eon Productions has unveiled the first teaser trailer for James Bond's Skyfall, the 23rd Bond film and third to star Daniel Craig as Agent 007 (following Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace). This is just an early tease and it doesn't reveal too much, but it does show us plenty of footage and it's a fantastic first teaser trailer. Intriguing, thrilling, badass, everyone should be much more excited after seeing this, especially huge Bond fans like myself. Sam Mendes seems to be the perfect choice as director and it shows even in the glimpses we get here. Enjoy! ›››

Continue reading: Must Watch: First Fantastic James Bond's 'Skyfall' Teaser Trailer Hits

The world has long wondered what a Sam Mendes directed James Bond movie might look like and today we have our answer. Sony has just released the first trailer for Skyfall, Daniel Craig‘s third Bond film, this time under the watchful eye of the Oscar-winning American Beauty director.

Scheduled for domestic release November 9 (and European release October 26) the film also features Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney, Berenice Malohe and Naomie Harris. Check out the teaser trailer (as well as a “super” trailer) below.

Here’s the first trailer for Sam Mendes’ Skyfall. You can also see the first poster here.

Here’s the bare bones plot description that’s been released in the past to give you a better idea of some of the teases above.

Bond’s loyalty to M is tested as her past comes back to haunt her. As MI6 comes under attack, 007 must track down and destroy the threat, no matter how personal the cost.

Sony also released a “Super” trailer for Skyfall but, before you get too excited, it’s just the teaser trailer you saw above followed by a trailer for a new James Bond video game called 007: Legends. That game, however, looks pretty bad ass.

Back to the trailer at hand, there are some great visuals there. Really stunning work by Roger Deakins, but not much in the way of story. It’s a scope and tone trailer which, six months away from release, is fine by me.

What do you think of the first trailer for Skyfall?

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