After director Darren Aronosky left the project, there has been a lot of concern and speculation over who may take over for directing the next Wolverine-centric film. All that speculation may be coming to an end as Deadline is reporting that final negotiations have begun to have James Mangold helm the film:

James Mangold is 20th Century Fox’s and star Hugh Jackman’s choice to direct The Wolverine, ending one of the most competitive contests among directors for a major studio film. Negotiations are about to get underway, but I’m told that Mangold will take the helming job on the sequel to the X-Men spinoff film, a post that became vacant when Darren Aronofsky dropped out of the film in March.

Mangold has directed some pretty solid films as of late including 3:10 to Yuma, Walk the Line and more recently, Knight and Day – which wasn’t a great movie, but had some pretty fun action in it. Honesly, I really enjoyed 3:10 to Yuma and Walk the Line, so perhaps I should be more excited about him taking over directing duties for this film but my heart was so set on Aronofsky directing a Wolverine movie that any director may just seem sub-par to me. I’m willing to give another Wolverine movie a shot as I didn’t think X-Men Origins: Wolverine was complete shit, but I of course have my reservations as I’m not completely convinced that the only reason Aronofsky left the project was because of the time it was going to take him away from his family for . . .

How do you feel about Mangold taking over the directing seat for the next Wolverine film? Are you even that excited for another Wolverine film, especially with Aronofsky gone? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Coinciding with the Green Lantern release tomorrow and falling nicely in line with the Green Lantern showing tonight at Brewvies. The Muppets have released another parody trailer following Green With Envy and The Fuzzy Pack to prepare us for their Thanksgiving movie release. I didn’t see too much new footage, but I’m still pumped for this movie.  The new take on their trailer makes me want to see what the story may actually lead up to, or if it will simply be random Muppet zaniness. I’ve always lived under the ideology that if you don’t like the Muppets your soul has been ripped violently from you by corporate America… Or you simply hate children, ice cream, and warm fuzzy feelings…. Any who… trailer below, what do ya think?

Captain America is a rather ubiquitous figure these days, even though Captain America: The First Avenger doesn’t open in movie theaters until July 22.  Directed by Joe Johnston, the film stars Chris Evans as Steve Rogers (a.k.a. Captain America) and Hugo Weaving as his nemesis The Red Skull.

Yesterday, Big Shiny Robot! shared the information that the classic Captain America costume appears in the film, and today Playbill brings us the news that composers Alan Menken and David Zippel have written a song for the highly anticipated Marvel film.

The composers have also written for Broadway, which may draw some vague comparisons between the song for Captain America and the music for another production based on a Marvel supehero:  Spider-Man:  Turn Off the Dark. However, this is just one song for a film as opposed to a train wreck of a bloated and controversial Broadway musical.

This is also not Captain America’s first brush with Broadway.  In 1985, a $4 million musical was announced but never actually materialized.  The plot focused on the hero’s mid-life crisis and the rescue of his girlfriend from terrorists. I’m not sure where his “very special friend” would have fit into the plot, but a casting call searching for girls aged 10-14 can be seen in the picture below:

The song Menken and Zippel penned for Captain America is called “The Star-Spangled Man (With a Plan)” and will be hear during a movie montage.  Ah, the movie montage.  These tend to either be long and boring or incredibly entertaining, so let’s just hope it’s the latter.

In the Playbill article, Zippel explains that the song takes place in the film before Steve Rogers becomes Captain America.  He appears at war bond presentations throughout the country.

Alan Menken is perhaps best known for his work on Disney films.  He and Zippel received an Academy Award for their song “Go the Distance” from Hercules.  Menken also won Academy Awards for Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Pocahontas.  His most recent projects include adapting the film Newsies for Broadway, composing the music for last year’s Tangled, and working on Broadway productions of Aladdin and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  These follow a pattern of Disney animated films turned into musicals for the stage.

In addition to Hercules, David Zippel has worked on the Disney films Mulan and Tarzan and wrote the lyrics for the Tony Award-winning musical City of Angels. It was his first full-length musical and his most successful.

Captain America: The First Avenger opens in theaters next month.

The headline pretty much says it all. So far, in every promotional picture, trailer, piece of art, and whatever else have you that we’ve seen for Captain America: The First Avenger has had Chris Evans in a militarized version of the familiar Cap costume, reminisceint of his duds from The Ultimates. However, thanks to the intrepid work of Bleeding Cool, we now know that won’t be the only Cap costume in the flick.

It seems at one point in the film, Cap show up in an outfit resembling the one we know from the comics at a USO show. This actually makes a lot of sense to me. I’m sure Uncle Sam wants to show off their new “Super Soldier” to boost morale for both the troops and the general populace, but you can’t rightly show him cracking Nazi skulls in front of an audience, so I bet that’s where this “sanitized” version of the Star-Spangled Avenger comes from. Yeah, the costume looks a little cheesy, but honestly, I think it’s meant to. And hey, at least we didn’t get this monstrosity…

Any costume where you have visible panty lines is a mistake, end of story.

You may not be aware of this, but 2013 is starting to look like the year of giant monster movies. Both Guillermo del Toro and Tim Burton have giant monster movies in the works titled Pacific Rim and Monsterpocalypse respectively, and there is another US attempt at a Godzilla movie coming that same year (or, possibly 2014 depending on which of the 517 random sources you’re looking at). Well, to keep up, Sony has bought the rights to the Japanese cult hit from 2007, Big Man Japan, a film about a man who can grow to 10-stories tall who takes over the duties of protecting Japan from giant monsters. Oh, and he pretty much just wears a diaper while performing said monster-fighting duties. And these montsters are weird as shit, one of which has an eyeball-penis it uses as a weapon.

Excited yet? I know I am.

Set in a world where monsters wreak havoc, there’s one man who can protect the citizenry: Big Man Japan, who runs the Department of Monster Prevention. Using electricity, he can grow to be 10 stories tall and fight off the most menacing of monsters. The problem is that he’s not very good at his job and often causes as much damage as he prevents. The people believe he’s a joke – and not nearly as good at the job as his father and grandfather were before he took over the family business.

Sony has tapped Fast Five‘s Neal H. Moritz to produce, and Clash of the Titans writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi to write the screenplay.

Unfortunately, America isn’t as progressive as Japan when it comes to putting monsters weilding giant eyeball penis’ as weapons to film, so this American adaptation is already going to be not as good. That being said though, if our version is even half as bat-shit crazy as this Japanese version appears to be, it still may be worth checking out – emphasis on the “may”.

Source: Deadline

Now, so you can experience some of the craziness youself and have your “WTF Moment” of the day, here is the trailer for the original Big Man Japan:

So last week’s cliffhanger was one of those slow build ups where the suspense mounts until there’s literally an explosion of excitement. This time it didn’t ring true for me, as we clearly see FauxCap fiddling with the door before the factory goes up in flames. If you didn’t think he’d find his way out, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you. Actually, even though Cap gets out of this scrap, what about the bad guys that he just had one of his trademark brawls with? It’s the heat of the moment, Cap is trying to save his own skin, so I don’t think the thugs are going to make it. Normally the heroes take the bad guys to justice, but if this is the way Cap operates, the Scarab better watch out! And on that note, let’s watch this week’s ominous-sounding chapter: Cremation in the Clouds!

This week’s supplement is pretty much nothing more than a glorified screenshot, but it does look rather nice, and has a good resolution to it. I promise next week I’ll have another chapter poster! Until then, Thumbs up, soldier!

Cap comes out of the closet after mopping up a bad guy!

Apparently, there are a bunch of movie studios out there looking to turn old board games into films, including Risk, Candyland, and Battleship. Believe it or not, Battleship is actually currently in post-preduction and is due out next year – and somehow they got Liam Neeson to star in it along side Taylor Kitsch, Brooklyn Decker and Rihanna. Yeah, I can’t figure that one out either, but I digress. . .

The latest board game to be put on the track to movie obscurity theaters is the board game Risk. If for some reason you don’t remember this game – or have just never played it – it’s “the game of world domination” in which players try to take over the world with their armies doing battle by rolling dice. Or, as I remember it, “the game of losing friends because the same game has gone on for six weeks now while one of your asshole friends has holed up in Australia with a massive army and refuses to surrender despite the fact he is only prolonging the inevitable”, seriously, give it up Jimmy, you dick!

In any case, looks like Columbia Pictures has hired John Hlavin (The Shield, Underworld: New Dawn) to pen this “Cold War-era action thriller”:

Screenwriter John Hlavin is angling for world domination — in the form of the classic Parker Brothers board game Risk.

Columbia Pictures is developing an action thriller based on the Cold War-era strategy game, in which players form armies and use them to attack the territories belonging to other players, and the studio is hiring Hlavin to pen the adaptation. The game, now owned by Hasbro (also home of Transformers and G.I. Joe–both at Paramount), was launched in the 1950s by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse (The Red Balloon). –THR

What? Columbia Pictures should save some of that money in their budget and just hire me to write the screenplay for Risk, I would do it for five dollars. As an aspiring film-writer guy who writes down drunken ideas on a napkin in a bar, this is how I would tackle this film:

The film opens up, Ang Lee split-screen style, four world leaders are looking at a map of the world from the war-room in their respective home countries, each planning for world domination. As the film goes on, battles take place all over the world as these leaders strategically position and advance their armies around the globe with their forces growing in numbers with each country they take over. Over the course of several years and seemingly never-ending battles, one leader has taken over the entire world – except for the island of Australia where one leader with an army the island can barely support makes his final stand. The final six hours of the film will be the would-be world conquerer sending wave after wave of men into Australia slowly chipping away at this coward’s numbers of men in battle sequences in the style of Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Saving Private Ryan, and Shoot ’em Up. As Australia is finally overwhelmed and taken over, the new President of the World sits back in his chair and lights up a cigar in victory as celebrations occur in the streets outside his palace – but he doesn’t seem 100% pleased, and this is where we discover the twist! SPOILER ALERT: It turns out that these four men vying for world domination were once friends. But now their not. Because the game of world domination makes you lose friends because assholes named Jimmy just build an army in Australia, cornering themselves for the entire game but managing to build a pile of armies that takes forever to conquer. This is a bullshit game, and no one likes it.

Boom. Done. I just wrote the outline for a movie based on the board game, Risk. Total movie run-time: 47 hours.

You’re welcome Hollywood.

I’m not even sure where to begin with Super 8. I don’t want to tell you too much about the story of this film since knowing next to nothing about it was what helped make it so magical. All you need to know about the film is what you saw in the trailer. It’s about some kids making a zombie movie on Super 8mm film. There’s a train wreck and something gets let loose. That’s what you need to know.

Knowing too much about this movie will not help you in any way. It is good and the images in the trailer are enough.

JJ Abrams knocked this out of the park. Steven Spielberg is one of my favorite filmmakers and aside from Abrams’ signature use of lens flares and the lack of John Williams music it would be indiscernable from an actual Spielberg picture. But not today’s Spielberg. This was the self-assured director of the early eighties. Super 8 is equal parts Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial and I couldn’t have been more happy about that.

Everything about this film worked. The kids were perfect. The acting was top notch. The script was efficient and well-conceived. The special effects were fantastic. The mood and energy were kinetic, keeping you well entertained. It captured the spirit of those 80s Spielberg pictures so well that I hope this causes a resurgence of them.

The two main kids, though, are incredible. Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney are two of the most believable kids on screen I’ve seen in a long time. And above that, Elle Fanning is incredible in this movie. She’s mesmerizing in a way I don’t understand. She’s only 13 years old and, like her older sister, has a command of the screen I just don’t comprehend.

Add to that a story that stokes so much nostalgia for my childhood, the movies of my youth, and great cinema and you have something that’s truly special.

I can’t communicate how thoroughly I enjoyed this movie. In fact, my only complaint is that John Williams didn’t do the score. The score that was in the movie was adequate, I suppose, but it was slightly distracting toward the end of the movie and you could almost imagine the heights Williams would have taken it. I love Michael Giacchino and to be honest I was pretty surprised to see that he did the score. There was just something about it that left me wanting. But I fully admit that this is too nit-picky.

I was very happy with this film and it was a perfect summer blockbuster. It was original, had plenty of heart, and was incredibly well made. We need more like this one, please. This had no big name actors in it but is going to make tons of money at the box-office, proving that original stories well told trump big name stars and gimmicks.

This film ups the ante on the Summer of 2011. As long as Captain America is as good as we’re all hoping and Green Lantern doesn’t suck, this might go down in history as one of the best summer movie seasons in a long, long time.

I’ve seen Super 8. There will be a review up tonight at midnight. It was very, very good though. And you definitely want to jump at the chance to see it early.

Because the advanced screenings are selling so well, Paramount and Twitter decided to release it a day early, mostly in IMAX. And they’re giving you free popcorn. That means you can see it TOMORROW. It’s really good. You really want to see this movie.

Here’s the release I got today with all of the details:

PARAMOUNT AND TWITTER TEAM UP FOR FIRST-EVER ‘TWEET MOVIE SNEAK PREVIEW’ OF “SUPER 8” ON JUNE 9th

MOVIE FROM J.J. ABRAMS AND STEVEN SPIELBERG SET TO PLAY ON OVER 300 IMAX® AND OTHER SELECT PREMIUM SCREENS ACROSS THE COUNTRY ONE DAY AHEAD OF ITS NATIONWIDE RELEASE

HOLLYWOOD, CA (June 8, 2011) – Paramount Pictures and Twitter jointly announced today sneak preview showings of the movie SUPER 8 for 1-day only on Thursday, June 9th, in advance of the film’s scheduled nationwide release on Friday, June 10th. To promote the sneak previews, the companies have designated the hashtag #Super8Secret, which Paramount has also sponsored as a Promoted Trend, allowing Twitter’s global user base a direct link to buy tickets to the advanced previews. At select, participating theatres in the United States, Super 8 Sneak Preview moviegoers will be treated to a free popcorn (with a concession purchase) at each sneak preview show. Hosting movie sneak previews marks a first for Twitter. This promotion continues a key partnership between Paramount and Twitter on SUPER 8. The duo joined forces in March for the movie’s exclusive trailer premiere via Twitter, another exciting first for the site.

SUPER 8, from writer/director J.J. Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg, will open exclusively tomorrow, June 9th, on over 300 screens nationwide, featuring all 239 IMAX playdates in the U.S. and Canada. Fans can go to www.Twitter.com/Super8Movieand use #Super8Secret to share information about the movie with friends. To be among the first to see SUPER 8, visit www.Super8-Movie.com/Sneakfor tickets and show times.

“With SUPER 8, J.J. and Steven have created a really fun and engaging movie for all ages,” said Rob Moore, Vice Chairman of Paramount Pictures. “We are excited to finally get it out into the marketplace and using this sneak preview promotion with Twitter to kick start the film’s release, is an unprecedented way to get people into theaters and talking about the movie.”

If you’re near one of the 300 screens doing this, you owe it to yourself to go.

Shia LeBeouf told MTV at their Movie Awards that another Indiana Jones film isn’t that far off.

He said:

“I talked to [Harrison Ford],” LaBeouf told MTV News when we got together with him at the 2011 MTV Movie Awards this past weekend. “He said he’s staying in the gym, he said he’s heard no word, but he does know that [George Lucas] is out there looking for a MacGuffin. He said he’s staying in the gym, so it means [the movie is] not so far off.”

That’s far from certain. And to be honest, it sounds more like it’s quite a ways off, but I’d welcome a new Indiana Jones movie sooner rather than later, and with open arms.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull got a very bad rap. Sure, it wasn’t the best of the Indiana Jones movies, but neither was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and people still love that. I know some people had a hard time with the part about aliens being involved, and others really hated bringing Mutt Williams into it, but it was a kick-ass send up of those 50 sci-fi movies we all love so much and it was fun as hell. Spielberg, Lucas, Ford, and even LeBeouf back to make another movie can only be a good thing.

So, I’m anxiously awaiting more solid news, but at this point I’ll take what scraps I can get.

(Thanks to Club Jade for tipping us off to this.)