Following Brett Ratner’s resignation as a producer of the 84th annual Academy Awards, Eddie Murphy has withdrawn as host.

Murphy was confirmed as host in September and was said to be Ratner’s only choice. But with Ratner gone, Murphy obviously feels no reason to stick around.

Here’s the press release:

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Tom Sherak announced that Eddie Murphy has withdrawn as host of the 84th Academy Awards. “I appreciate how Eddie feels about losing his creative partner, Brett Ratner, and we all wish him well,” said Sherak.

Commented Murphy, “First and foremost I want to say that I completely understand and support each party’s decision with regard to a change of producers for this year’s Academy Awards ceremony. I was truly looking forward to being a part of the show that our production team and writers were just starting to develop, but I’m sure that the new production team and host will do an equally great job.”

Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2011 will be presented on Sunday, February 26, 2012, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center®, and televised live by the ABC Television Network. The Oscar® presentation also will be televised live in more than 200 countries worldwide.

The Academy now has just over three months until the main event, so finding a new producer and host will likely happen sooner rather than later. I imagine Murphy’s approach would have been heavy on comedy, so The Academy may opt for another comedian. Any suggestions for the new host?

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The Academy has released a statement stating that Brett Ratner “has submitted his resignation as a producer of the 84th annual Academy Awards to Academy President Tom Sherak”.

Ratner was hired to produce the upcoming ceremony in August and assigned Eddie Murphy as host, but at a Q&A session and screening for their latest movie Tower Heist Ratner said “rehearsal is for fags” when asked how actors prepared for the film.

Here’s the full statement from the Academy:

This morning, Brett Ratner submitted his resignation as a producer of the 84th annual Academy Awards to Academy President Tom Sherak. Ratner then issued an open letter to the entertainment industry in which he explained his decision.

“He did the right thing for the Academy and for himself,” Sherak said. “Words have meaning, and they have consequences. Brett is a good person, but his comments were unacceptable. We all hope this will be an opportunity to raise awareness about the harm that is caused by reckless and insensitive remarks, regardless of the intent.”

…and here’s Ratner’s statement in full:

Dear Colleagues,

Over the last few days, I’ve gotten a well-deserved earful from many of the people I admire most in this industry expressing their outrage and disappointment over the hurtful and stupid things I said in a number of recent media appearances. To them, and to everyone I’ve hurt and offended, I’d like to apologize publicly and unreservedly.

As difficult as the last few days have been for me, they cannot compare to the experience of any young man or woman who has been the target of offensive slurs or derogatory comments. And they pale in comparison to what any gay, lesbian, or transgender individual must deal with as they confront the many inequalities that continue to plague our world.

So many artists and craftspeople in our business are members of the LGBT community, and it pains me deeply that I may have hurt them. I should have known this all along, but at least I know it now: words do matter. Having love in your heart doesn’t count for much if what comes out of your mouth is ugly and bigoted. With this in mind, and to all those who understandably feel that apologies are not enough, please know that I will be taking real action over the coming weeks and months in an effort to do everything I can both professionally and personally to help stamp out the kind of thoughtless bigotry I’ve so foolishly perpetuated.

As a first step, I called Tom Sherak this morning and resigned as a producer of the 84th Academy Awards telecast. Being asked to help put on the Oscar show was the proudest moment of my career. But as painful as this may be for me, it would be worse if my association with the show were to be a distraction from the Academy and the high ideals it represents.

I am grateful to GLAAD for engaging me in a dialogue about what we can do together to increase awareness of the important and troubling issues this episode has raised and I look forward to working with them. I am incredibly lucky to have a career in this business that I love with all of my heart and to be able to work alongside so many of my heroes. I deeply regret my actions and I am determined to learn from this experience.

Sincerely, Brett Ratner

Eddie Murphy is said to be unhappy with Ratner’s departure, and at present it’s still uncertain whether he’ll remain as host. The Academy is currently looking for another producer to take over.

The 84th annual Academy Awards will take place on Sunday, February 26, 2012

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Actress Milla Jovovich took to her Twitter account today to express her frustration about the apparent lack of promotion The Three Musketeers has recieved from Summit Entertainment. The movie hits today in the US but is expected to make half the amount of Paranormal Activity 3 this weekend, and Jovovich thinks Summit is to blame.

Here’s what she had to say to her 825,000 followers: (excuse the spelling, it’s hard to rant with a 140 character limit)

Also, “3 musketeers” opens in the US 2night! Do you think ppl know abt the movie? Ask your friends! Do they know it’s a fun family film?

Are “summit” promoting it as a family adventure movie? Or are they resting on their laurels from “twilight” n making no effort? Let me know!

I think “summit” hve swept “3 Musketeers”, a grt family adventure film, under the rug in the US. Shame on them. SHAME ON YOU “SUMMIT”.

Basically, Jovovich thinks Summit isn’t giving The Three Musketeers the marketing push it deserves because they’re releasing The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 in less than a month and are going to be flooded with money anyway. While a valid concern, a closer inspection reveals the movie, directed by her husband Paul W.S. Anderson, is getting pretty shoddy reviews (currently 24% on Rotten Tomatoes) so perhaps Summit don’t want to spend marketing money on a bad movie?

The Three Musketeers has earned $50m worldwide so far, but with a budget said to be around $80m it still has a long way to go before it’s considered a financial success (with the decline in DVD sales movies generally have to make double the budget at the box office to be worthwhile). It certainly isn’t a critical success, regardless of how Summit Entertainment is marketing it.

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Earlier this month we heard that Warner Bros. may have to alter the tattoo on Ed Helms’ face for the DVD and Blu-ray release of The Hangover: Part 2 due to a copyright lawsuit. Well fortunately for the studio they won’t, as the lawsuit has now been settled.

Tattoo artist S. Victor Whitmill tried to prevent the release of film because he claimed he owns a copyright on the unique tattoo worn by former boxer Mike Tyson, which was copied by the filmmakers and placed on the face of Ed Helms in the sequel. He obviously didn’t stop the movie from being released, but Warner Bros. told a judge that if they couldn’t resolve the case soon the studio would digitally alter the tattoo by the time it comes out on DVD/Blu-ray.

From THR:

Warner Bros. has settled the lawsuit brought by Missouri tattoo artist S. Victor Whitmill over the mark on Helms’ face, which Whitmill claimed infringed a copyrighted tattoo he created for boxer Mike Tyson.

Terms of the settlment were not disclosed. When asked for comment, Whitmill attorney Geoff Gerber provided THR the following statement: “Warner Bros. and Mr. Whitmill have amicably resolved their dispute. No other information will be provided.”

Sources say the deal was hammered out during an all-day mediation in St. Louis on Friday that was attended by Whitmill and his lawyers, as well as the Warners legal team.

Somewhere a visual effects team is breathing a sigh of relief. While i’m sure they would have been paid handsomely, digitally altering the tattoo which is featured on 75% of all frames in the movie would have been tedious.

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More good news for The Hobbit. Following last week’s greenlight the New Zealand actors union, who previously told their members not to take roles in the The Hobbit movies following a dispute over contracts for wages and working conditions, has announced that they will no longer be boycotting the production. But will it be enough for Warner Bros. to keep The Hobbit in New Zealand?

Mere hours before the union announcement director Peter Jackson issued another statement suggesting the movies could be filmed elsewhere. From Variety:

“Next week Warner Bros. is coming down to New Zealand to make arrangements to move the production off-shore,” Jackson said in a joint release with Fran Walsh, with whom he is producing the two “Hobbit” films.

Jackson said the dispute with actors’ unions has “undermined Warner Brothers’ confidence in New Zealand as a stable employment environment,” and that the studio is “very concerned about the security of their $500 million investment.” In a separate interview with New Zealand National Radio, Walsh suggested the production could move to the same studio in the U.K. where the “Harry Potter” pics were shot.

“There is the Harry Potter studio there that they say would be perfect for us,” Walsh said.

So while it appears all the major obstacals holding The Hobbit up are now to one side, Warner Bros. has still to decide where the films will be shot. The union announcement was obviously a ploy to prevent the production shooting outside New Zealand, but can the original home of Middle Earth compete with more attractive tax breaks in places such as the UK or Eastern Europe?

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Over the weekend the International Federation of Actors (FIA), which represents unions in the US, Australia, the UK and Canada, told their members not to take roles in the The Hobbit movies because actors in New Zealand had “struggled on non-union contracts” for some years and those contracts “provide no minimum guarantees of wages or working conditions”.

They said the producers of The Hobbit had refused to negotiate a deal with them, and therefore they are urging actors not to work on the films. Naturally, potential director Peter Jackson isn’t happy about this, and has fired back.

From Deadline:

Personally speaking, I’m not anti-Union in the slightest. I’m a very proud and loyal member of three Hollywood Unions – the Directors Guild, the Producers Guild and the Writers Guild. I support the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). All these organisations (I must confess I’m not entirely sure what the difference is between a “Guild” and a “Union”) do terrific work on behalf of their members.

For the Hobbit, Warner Brothers have agreed to create a separate pot of profit participation, which will be divided up amongst non-SAG actors who are cast in the film. This was not done because of any pressure from Guilds or Unions – it was actually Warners doing the decent thing, and New Zealand and Australian actors will be the principle beneficiaries.

We have done better in recent years, with attracting overseas movies — and the Australians would like a greater slice of the pie, which begins with them using The Hobbit to gain control of our film industry. There is a twisted logic to seeing NZ humiliated on the world stage, by losing the Hobbit to Eastern Europe. Warners would take a financial hit that would cause other studios to steer clear of New Zealand.

Seriously, if the Hobbit goes east (Eastern Europe in fact) — look forward to a long dry big budget movie drought in this country.

You can read Jackson’s full statement here.

New Zealand is a beautiful country and was the perfect setting for Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings. I would hate to see filming moved elsewhere, for continuity sake, and I just hope this situation and the MGM situation are resolved soon. The last thing we heard they were planning for a January shoot, preferably with the involvement of actors.

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Whenever we go to see a movie it is common place to see advertisements before the showing. Personally i’m not too bothered by them as they only last around 5 minutes and then we get to see the latest trailers, but it seems not everyone is happy about them.

According to The Calgary Herald a Chinese woman is suing the distributors of earthquake movie Aftershocks and the place she saw the movie “for wasting her time by showing 20 minutes of commercials” and claims they “should have told her how long the pre-movie advertisements lasted”.

Chen Xiaomei is demanding the companies refund her 35-yuan ticket (5.20 dollars), pay her 35 yuan in compensation and one yuan for emotional damages and write her an apology, the report said. She has also advised the cinema to publish the advertisement times on its website, in the lobby or on its customer hotline and asked Huayi Brothers to cut the length of commercials to less than five minutes.

20 minutes is rather excessive, although if I were emotionally damaged as a result i’d want more than one yuan (0.147262 U.S. dollars).

After doing a little research on the movie I can understand why she was annoyed with the 20 minute wait. Aftershocks is the first IMAX film made in China and has become the highest-grossing domestic film, raking in 650 million yuan ($95 million). It’s the Chinese Avatar basically.

The film is based on the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which killed 240,000 people in Tangshan in northern China. The story centers on a mother who has to decide which of her two children to save from the rubble. Between the twin boy and girl, she opts for the boy. The mother is unaware her daughter is still alive and hears the decision. (And she isn’t suing for emotional damage from this!?)

You can watch the cool trailer below. It looks like 2012, just not a comedy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QntkZ1R9yTM

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Last week we got our first look at Skyline in the form of a teaser trailer which showed humans being vacuumed into the sky by hovering space ships. For a sci-fi movie without a major studio involved in the production the special effects looked pretty impressive, which is probably due to directors Greg and Colin Strause who own visual effects house Hydraulx (2012, Iron Man 2 and Avatar, among other blockbusters).

Hydraulx is also working on Sony’s Battle: Los Angeles, which is another upcoming sci-fi movie which involves aliens invading Los Angeles. Sony probably weren’t happy about a rival project being released 4 months before their movie, but following the release of the Skyline trailer Sony are bringing out the legal team as Greg and Colin Strause worked on both and didn’t tell them.

From Deadline:

At issue: Greg and Colin Strause, the owners of visual effects house Hydraulx, were paid millions of dollars to generate visual effects work for Battle: Los Angeles. But Hydraulx never informed SPE the siblings were directing a VFX-driven rival alien invasion feature that will hit theaters four months before SPE’s March 12, 2011 release. SPE higher-ups discovered it was in a real horse race after Universal Pictures released a trailer that showed Los Angeles denizens being vacuumed into the sky by hovering space ships.

SPE lawyers have just started digging into the matter. This can be viewed as a Goliath vs. David story considering that the Strause brothers shot most of their film in an apartment, with the entire film costing a fraction of what SPE has spent for a full-scale alien battle film. But Skyline created strong buzz at Comic-Con that will give it a wide release through Relativity and Universal Pictures. Battle: Los Angeles could certainly have its thunder stolen. At issue: did Hydraulx and its owners owe SPE a heads-up?

I’m told the questions that SPE legal are asking include whether Hydraulx’s work on Battle: Los Angeles served as a springboard for Skyline, or gave the Strause brothers access to equipment that helped bolster the visual effects on their small budget film. SPE’s position is that at minimum, the Hydraulx principals should have disclosed their intention to make the rival project, to avoid any conflict of interest issues. Expect the legal letters to begin flying shortly.

I can understand why Sony are annoyed, but will they have the legal weight to have Skyline pushed back? It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Here’s the Skyline trailer which kick-started all this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDJfue-Aanw

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When news first broke on Deadline Hollywood that Megan Fox would not be appearing in Transformers 3 it was said that director Michael Bay made the decision not to bring her back, and Paramount didn’t pick up her option as a result. This was a bit fishy as Fox was spotted on set just 2 weeks ago and Bay said in November that Megan had “a great part” in the next film. Why would Bay drop the actress a few weeks before filming was set to begin after writing her into the script?

Well the latest speculation suggests that it was actually Fox who decided to quit the film, instead of Paramount dropping her.

From The Wrap:

Megan Fox walked away from “Transformers 3″ because director Michael Bay was “verbally abusive” toward her and “she had enough and decided to get out early,” an individual close to the actress has told TheWrap.

Given that the [original] story broke Wednesday on Deadline, it’s highly plausible that Paramount studio chairman Brad Grey’s well-known relationship with editor-in-chief Nikki Finke played a part in how the story was initially spun.

The studio stood by that position on Thursday with the statement: “Paramount had the unilateral right to exercise an option for Megan Fox to appear in ‘Transformers 3.’ Paramount at its sole election allowed the option to lapse.”

While Deal Central was skeptical at first that Fox would walk away from such a lucrative role, persistent whispers around Hollywood indicated that there was another side of the story. Bay has a history of demeaning his leading ladies, including “Pearl Harbor” star Kate Beckinsale; an individual close to the actress recalled that the director “wasn’t very nice” to her on the set, either.

Another individual close to the sequel’s production told TheWrap that Bay “wants his actresses to look a certain way, and if they can’t meet his absurd standards of beauty, he gets rid of them.”

I can see why the studio would want to spin it in their favor, but I think it is most likely that Fox bailed rather than Paramount/Bay firing her. If your $200+ million film is mere weeks away from filming (some filming had actually begun) you don’t fire one of your leads, causing a re-write of the script and further problems (although it has been known to happen before).

I guess we’ll hear more on this during the rounds for Jonah Hex next month, which Fox stars in.

What do you think happened? Do you even care?

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Update: It’s official. Megan Fox won’t be returning according to a Paramount spokeswoman. No official reason why yet.

___

Some potential Transformers 3 drama has been reported on Deadline Hollywood. Apparently Paramount won’t be picking up Megan Fox’s option on Transformers 3 “and that it was ultimately director Michael Bay’s decision.”

If Fox has been dropped it must have been be a very recent (and last minute) decision. The actress was spotted on set doing previz shots (visualizing scenes before filming begins) just 2 weeks ago and Bay said in November that Megan had “a great part” in the next film.

If Megan has been dropped i’m sure we’ll find out why in good time. Some are suggesting that she may have been let go because of her digs at the director in the press, apparently referred to Michael Bay as a “nightmare” and “Hitler” during a few interviews last year. I doubt that will be the sole reason though, if it were Bay would have just eliminated her from the script from the start. It could be the case that Fox and Bay haven’t been getting along and the prospect of spending the next 5 months together doesn’t appeal to them.

Deadline say that:

Right now Bay et al are finishing up the script for the threequel and “giving Shia a new love interest makes more sense for the story,” an insider tells me. Bay will start casting immediately for the new female co-star.

Thoughts?

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