Movie Muser

While 2013’s A Good Day To Die Hard was a bit of a flop, Fox obviously thinks there’s still mileage in the franchise, as they’ve enlisted Die Hard 4 director Len Wiseman for a prequel, taking us into the life of a young John McLane.

Bruce Willis is likely to return though, as if he likes the script he’ll pop up as the famed action here, with the rest of the movie taking place in flashback.

Deadline reports that the movie largely takes place ‘in 1979, when McClane was a cop in gritty New York City and showing how he became a die hard kind of guy.’

Wiseman will now help develop the movie alongside an as yet unhired screenwriter, with the hope it’ll be in cinemas in 2017.

For over 15 years James Cameron has been talking about making Battle Angel Alita. He was going to make it before Avatar, and then he promised it would be his follow-up, but then his commitment to Avatar 2 & 3 pushed it back. He still said it was coming though, although not for a long time.

Now though he’s decided that as he’ll be in Avatar-land for several more years, he’s going to hand the directing reins to someone else, with THR reporting that Robert Rodriguez is in talks to take the film on.

Battle Angel is a Manga adaptation about a damaged female cyborg who is revived but has no memories. Once rebuilt, she discovers she has instinctive knowledge of martial arts and sets out to discover more about her past, which takes her into a world of brutal sports and organised crime.

Cameron comments, “Robert and I have been looking for a film to do together for years, so I was pumped when he said he wanted to do Battle Angel. “He’s very collaborative and we’re already like two kids building a go-kart, just having fun riffing creatively and technically. This project is near and dear to me, and there’s nobody I trust more than Robert, with his technical virtuosity and rebel style, to take over the directing reins. We’re looking forward to learning a lot from each other while we make a kick-ass epic.”

Rodriguez adds,”Battle Angel is an incredibly rich and vibrant epic in the tradition of Jim Cameron’s spectacular, character-driven films. Getting to work from Jim’s terrific and visionary script while learning the cutting edge techniques he’s pioneered is a master class in filmmaking. It’s an honor to explore the world of Alita along with Jim and Jon, whose films have impacted me for decades.”

Cameron will still produce, alongside his Lightstorm Entertainment partner Jon Landau

Kate Winslet is heading back into biopic territory as THR reports she’s moving from playing Joanna Hoffman in Danny Boyle’s awards contender Steve Jobs, to an untitled film about American fashion model, artist and war correspondent Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller.

Based on The Lives of Lee Miller by Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, with movie look at the packed like of Miller, who became ‘a model as a teen then the muse and lover to artist Man Ray, moving in circles that included Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau. She became an art photographer, but during World War II became a pre-eminent war photographer for Vogue.’

It’s not clear when it might go into production.

Dallas Buyers Club and You’ve Got Mail actor Steve Zahn is one of those people it feels should have broken out bigger, but never quite has. Now he’s scored a new role, but we’ll only sort of be seeing him in it.

THR reports he’ll don a motion capture suit to play an ape in War For The Planet Of The Apes. Andy Serkis will once more be ape leader Caesar, with Gabriel Chavarria and Woody Harrelson as the two human leads.

Not a vast amount is known about the movie, but returning director Matt Reeves has said, “As this story continues, we know that war is not avoided by the end of DAWN. That is going to take us into the world of what he is grappling with. Where he is going to be thrust into circumstances that he never, ever wanted to deal with, and was hoping he could avoid. And now he is right in the middle of it. The things that happen in that story test him in huge ways, in the ways in which his relationship with Koba haunts him deeply. It’s going to be an epic story. I think you’ve probably read that I sort of described it where in the first film was very much about his rise from humble beginnings to being a revolutionary. The second movie was about having to rise to the challenge of being a great leader in the most difficult of times. This is going to be the story that is going to cement his status as a seminal figure in ape history, and sort of leads to an almost biblical status. He is going to become like a mythic ape figure, like Moses.”