While waiting for the Iron-Man 2 panel I was able to sit in on a few other panels before it started. Some of them intrigued me (Zombieland and Extract) and some made me laugh out loud. (Legion)
First I’ll talk about Legion which looks like a disaster movie with angels. It stars Dennis Quaid (who wasn’t there), Paul Bettany, Tyrese Gibson, and Doug Jones. The director of the film, Scott Stewart, came out on stage and showed a first look at the trailer. It kind of looks like a blend between Terminator and Twister, which I can’t say is really good or bad. The movie looks really cheesy. Cheesy, and bad, but maybe so bad that it might be good. Although I’m leaning towards bad because the director seemed like a simpleton and Tyrese Gibson is in it.
When the director was asked what he was going to do next he said, “Vampires.” And apparently the director already has another movie coming out in 2010 called “Priest” based on the comic book released by Tokyopop. The one sentence plot from IMDB is “A priest disobeys church law to track down the vampires who kidnapped his niece.” So that might be good?
Next up is Extract, which is the new Mike Judge film. (Office Space, Idiocracy) It stars, Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis, J.K. Simmons, and Ben Affleck. The trailer looks pretty okay. Mike Judge said it was made in the same vein as Office Space, and I can tell he’s not lying. It feels like it has the same air about it, but it just doesn’t look as funny. They showed a few scenes from it, I’m not that big of a Jason Bateman fan since Hancock, but it does look funny. I’m certain I’ll make it to the theatre to watch this if it gets a wider release than Idiocracy.
Jason Bateman announced that he and the rest of the cast of Arrested Development would love to do an Arrested Development movie, it’s just a matter of getting a script out. Mike Judge made a similar comment about the possibility of a second Beavis and Butthead movie. Which literally got tens of fans out of their seats clapping.
Ruben Fleischer showed up to show the trailer and a few clips of his new film Zombieland. I went into this panel completely ignorant of the creation of this project whatsoever. Not having heard another thing, the footage actually got me interested to watch it. It stars Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, and Emma Stone.
It’s based in a world taken over by zombies and the main characters seem to be just about the last humans on the planet and it looks really funny. But it only looks funny because of excessive gore, the scenes they showed weren’t as funny as the violence in them, although the scenes themselves didn’t seem completely without merit. Jesse Eisenberg’s voice over narration was really annoying. Other than that it kind of reminds me of an old Sam Raimi film.
The director seemed pretty fair about the movie, declaring, “Shawn of the Dead set the bar for this type of film really high, I just hope you like this movie too.” I can’t make up my mind one way or the other, this movie might really suck, or it might be pretty okay. I won’t know until I watch it when it comes out October 9th.