Last year we heard that Crazy, Stupid, Love. producer Denise Di Novi was developing an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast alongside Guillermo del Toro, and Emma Watson was lined up to star. At the time del Toro was on-board as a producer, but now according to Variety he will also direct.

Bridget Jones’s Diary writer Andrew Davies has been hired to write the script based on a treatment by del Toro, and the director may make it his next project after he’s finished his giant monster movie Pacific Rim, which is due out next summer.

This now means there are two Beauty and the Beast adaptations in the works, as we heard yesterday that Lea Seydoux (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) and Vincent Cassel (Black Swan) will star in movie directed by Christophe Gans (Silent Hill). That is a French production, so one can assume the del Toro/Emma Watson project will be the more high-profile movie with a larger budget and Warner Bros. on-board to finance/distribute.

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The release date shifting continues, and it seems May 2013 is the place to be. Earlier today Disney gave The Lone Ranger a new date of May 31, 2013, and now Warner Bros. has set Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim for May 10.

It was originally going to hit July 12, but competition from Steven Spielberg’s Robopocalypse and Tom Cruise’s Horizons may have caused Warner Bros. to rethink (sci-fi overload).

Pacific Rim will now open a week after Iron Man 3, and two weeks before Fast Six. Filming is scheduled to begin during the first week of November, and the cast includes Charlie Hunnam, Willem Dafoe, Idris Elba, Charlie Day, Rob Kazinsky, Max Martini, Diego Klattenhoff, and Clifton Collins Jr.

The movie is set in a future where giant malevolent creatures threaten to destroy the earth, and the planet must band together and use advanced weapons technology to eradicate the growing threat. del Toro has said it will be “the biggest giant monster movie ever made”.

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Of all the movies promoted at Comic-Con 2010, I was the most surprised by Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. With the veteran hand of Guillermo del Toro writing and producing, and first time director Troy Nixey at the helm, it looked moody, atmospheric, and – most importantly for a horror film – downright scary. They showed us the opening scene, and I was captivated by what we saw; excellent production design, a frightening concept, and some well-placed sound effects worked wonders on that audience, and had me leaving the convention anticipating the film’s release. So it brings me no pleasure to report discouraging news: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is a lifeless, boring “horror” story almost completely devoid of scary moments. For me, it’s the biggest theatrical disappointment of 2011 so far.

The story is simple enough: young Sally (Bailee Madison) is sent to Rhode Island to live with her father (Guy Pearce) and his girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes). They all live in a spooky old mansion they’re renovating; it once belonged to an enigmatic artist named Emerson Blackwood who dies at the hands of little demon/fairy/mythical figures in the aforementioned prologue. The creatures demand the price of one human life every time they surface, and their diet consists solely of children’s teeth. When Sally discovers the basement where they live, they spend the entire movie trying to convince her to come “play” with them.

Sally’s a child of divorce, and an annoying one at that: she sulks around a lot doing typical divorced child things – being ice cold to dad’s new girlfriend, wandering off by herself, you get the picture. She’s intrigued by the creepy whispers she hears calling her name, and she’s so desperate for attention that she repeatedly sneaks off to meet the creatures, ignoring the orders of her workaholic father (never seen THAT character before). Bailee Madison has some good years ahead of her on the silver screen, but this is not a breakout performance from her. [I'd guess she was cast due to her striking resemblance to Katie Holmes (it's uncanny, really), but that makes no sense in the context of the movie, since Holmes' character isn't her mother.] Sally does so many stupid things – all typical haunted house movie stuff – that I couldn’t root for her. By the end, I was secretly hoping she’d die, just so the message of the movie would be one guarding against stupidity.

It’s safe to say one of the most important elements in any film bearing Guillermo del Toro’s name is creature design. In Blade II, the Hellboy franchise, and his most critically acclaimed movie, Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro has shown an affinity (and affection) for crafting interesting creatures that play important parts in the stories he tells. In Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, they were nothing more than miniature hunchback people with small fangs, less than a foot tall and not threatening in any convincing way. It would take very little effort to simply kick one in the face, and the force of such a kick would surely kill it, but apparently that concept never enters the mind of anyone in the film. The mythology of these creatures (traditionally, one of del Toro’s strengths) is wildly inconsistent in this movie, another one of the film’s many let-downs. The little things whine about how it hurts them to be in the light – occasionally they’ll scream in pain when someone shines a flashlight on them – but late in the movie there’s a scene in which a creature wanders through a brightly lit dinner party with no ill side effects, and yet another scene in which someone shines a light directly on one and it just scowls and growls without running away.

No one could ever call Guillermo del Toro lazy – he’s one of the busiest people in Hollywood. He’s got more projects in development than anyone else I can think of (except for maybe DiCaprio), and he even spent two years developing The Hobbit before stepping down and letting Peter Jackson take the reins. But Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark seems to be a result of del Toro’s time and attention being stretched too thin. The movie has no pulse, the pacing is terrible, and it’s not actually scary. That last aspect is what I found particularly insulting, considering del Toro’s talks about how the MPAA gave the film an R rating for “pervasive scariness” even though they didn’t have to rely on torture and gore. The MPAA apparently consists of a few hyper-sensitive seven-year-old children, because I doubt anyone from another age group would find this movie so devastatingly frightening that they’d give it an R rating.

Perhaps the biggest flaw of the movie is that almost nothing relevant happens for the majority of the run time. After the opening sequence, nothing happens for a solid hour. Then there’s one jump scare, and nothing happens for a while. There’s even a potentially scary scene in a bathtub, but because these creatures hardly ever do anything worth being scared of, it’s next to impossible to see them as a serious threat. That’s the main reason this movie is the biggest disappointment of the year: squandered potential. With the talent involved here, this should have been a home run. But a lazy script and mediocre direction result in a movie that just doesn’t sustain interest. Until next time…

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Last month we heard that Emma Watson was attached to an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast which is set to be produced by Denise Di Novi (Crazy, Stupid, Love.) and Guillermo del Toro.

In a recent interview del Toro said Watson is ‘perfect for the part’, and revealed he actually hopes to direct it himself.

From MTV:

“It’s one of those landmarks, one of those holy grails, and I really hope to do it,” del Toro said. “We’re just starting the process.”

Del Toro didn’t have a timeline yet for when his first draft on “Beauty and the Beast” would be done, but he said it should be within the next few years. After all, he’d need it to be done by then for leading lady Watson to still be a prime choice for the role of the titular beauty.

“It’s a movie that you have to make in the next few years for Emma to be perfect for the part,” he said. “I think she is the perfect character to do that movie.”

Guillermo del Toro is currently preparing to shoot his epic monster movie Pacific Rim, so if he plans to direct Beauty and the Beast it would be unlikely to move forward until 2013.

Emma Watson has already started carving out a career for herself post-Harry Potter with a supporting role in My Week with Marilyn alongside Kenneth Branagh and Michelle Williams, and she recently finished shooting romance/drama The Perks of Being a Wallflower with Logan Lerman and Paul Rudd.

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With filming on Pacific Rim scheduled to begin during the first week of November director Guillermo del Toro is continuing to fill out the cast. Charlie Hunnam, Charlie Day, Rinko Kikuchi, Max Martini and Idris Elba are on-board so far, and they will now be joined by Willem Dafoe and Rob Kazinsky.

Willem Dafoe, best known for playing the Green Goblin in Spider-Man, “is being eyed as a rogue scientist with expertise on alien creatures” according to Variety.

British actor Rob Kazinsky was set to appear in The Hobbit as Fili the dwarf, but he had to pull out in April due to personal/health reasons. Luckily for the actor Guillermo del Toro may have remembered him from his time on The Hobbit, and has cast him as “a member of the team trying to defeat the invaders.”

Pacific Rim currently has a release date set for July 12th, 2013, and del Toro has said it will be “the biggest giant monster movie ever made”.

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Emma Watson has already started carving out a career for herself post-Harry Potter with a supporting role in My Week with Marilyn alongside Kenneth Branagh and Michelle Williams, and she recently finished shooting romance/drama The Perks of Being a Wallflower with Logan Lerman and Paul Rudd.

Now ComingSoon has word that Watson is attached to another project. The site recently spoke to Crazy, Stupid, Love. producer Denise Di Novi and she revealed she’s developing an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast alongside Guillermo del Toro, and Emma Watson is lined up to star.

del Toro is currently preparing to shoot his epic monster movie Pacific Rim, so if he plans to direct Beauty and the Beast it would be unlikely to move forward until 2013. Last month the director expressed interest in directing Disney’s Maleficent, a live-action take on the wicked fairy godmother who cast the original spell on Sleeping Beauty, but with that unlikely to happen having Emma Watson hook up with a beast may give him his Disney-esque fantasy fill.

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Guillermo del Toro said last week that his monster movie Pacific Rim was “the greatest experience of” his life and mentioned filming was scheduled to begin during the first week of November.

Now THR has word that the movie, which so far only has Charlie Hunnam, Charlie Day and Idris Elba on-board, has booked itself into Pinewood Toronto Studios with the working title Still Seas for a six month shoot until April 2012.

Plot details for Pacific Rim emerged back in March and the monster movie will give del Toro the opportunity to create two worlds.

The first is an alternate version of Earth in the near future, decades after a historic date in November 2012 when the first kaiju, a towering Godzilla-like beast, emerged from a hole in the Pacific Ocean and attacked the city of Osaka, Japan. The second is “The Anteverse,” another universe on the other side of that gaping portal, 5 miles below our ocean’s surface.

Since the first attack, the rim has been “spitting out” a variety of gigantic monsters at an increasing rate, which then stride out of the ocean and begin destroying sea-bordering cities, like Tokyo and Los Angeles. In order to combat these monstrous, otherworldly menaces, the military developed the “Jaeger” program, which trains teams of two pilots to jointly operate massive, building-sized mechanized suits of armor and high-tech weaponry

Pacific Rim currently has a release date set for July 12th, 2013.

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With Charlie Hunnam and Idris Elba all but signed to lead Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim, Warner Bros. has set a release date of July 12th, 2013 for the monster movie.

del Toro recently told Collider that pre-production on Pacific Rim is going “fantastic”:

I mean so far, knock on wood, it’s the greatest experience of my life. I’m having a blast, designing like crazy. I’m now hiring actors, which is always a good sign, always a great sign when you’re casting. We’re announcing a release date today or tomorrow, which makes it real also. The other thing that we’re heading towards is an impeding start date the first week in November, so we have 20 weeks to start shooting the biggest giant monster movie ever made.

Pacific Rim currently has little compeition in July 2013. There’s Despicable Me 2 set for July 3 and Tom Cruise’s Oblivion set for July 19. Cruise was actually circling a role in Pacific Rim but scheduling clashed with Oblivion, so his role went to Idris Elba.

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At the beginning of the month Idris Elba (Thor, Luther) tweeted that he was on his way to a meeting about an upcoming part for a controversial director. Some thought it was for Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (and it could very well have been) but according to Deadline Elba has instead just signed on to lead Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim.

Elba is apparently playing the role originally developed for Tom Cruise, and will be joining fellow Brit Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy) who was last month cast as Raleigh Antrobus, a skilled pilot who is still wrestling emotionally with the loss of his co-pilot and biological brother.

Plot details for Pacific Rim emerged back in March and the monster movie will give del Toro the opportunity to create two worlds.

The first is an alternate version of Earth in the near future, decades after a historic date in November 2012 when the first kaiju, a towering Godzilla-like beast, emerged from a hole in the Pacific Ocean and attacked the city of Osaka, Japan. The second is “The Anteverse,” another universe on the other side of that gaping portal, 5 miles below our ocean’s surface.

Since the first attack, the rim has been “spitting out” a variety of gigantic monsters at an increasing rate, which then stride out of the ocean and begin destroying sea-bordering cities, like Tokyo and Los Angeles. In order to combat these monstrous, otherworldly menaces, the military developed the “Jaeger” program, which trains teams of two pilots to jointly operate massive, building-sized mechanized suits of armor and high-tech weaponry

Guillermo Del Toro is currently deep in pre-production and aims to begin shooting in November for a 2013 release.

Idris Elba will be seen in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance next year and is currently filming Ridley Scott’s Prometheus.

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Since Tim Burton decided against directing Angelina Jolie in Disney’s Maleficent, a live-action take on the wicked fairy godmother who cast the original spell on Sleeping Beauty, a number of potential directors have mentioned as a replacement.

First there was Harry Potter director David Yates, then Darren Aronofsky, and last week The Fighter director David O. Russell was said to be circling the project. However one director Disney hasn’t approached, who “would love to” direct, is Guillermo del Toro.

From Hero Complex:

“Let me put it this way, if they ask I’ll take the meeting,” Del Toro said, speaking by phone from Toronto. “I think Maleficent’s dragon is the only design with the wings separate from the front legs, the only time that design has ever worked. And let me tell you how much of a fan I am. I have a collection of over two or three dozen Maleficent figures, some of them four or five feet tall. I own about 10 pieces of conceptual art from ‘Sleeping Beauty’ that include the dragon and a lot more pieces that are just from ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ It’s one of my three favorite Disney films. I would love to. But I don’t want to put too many hopes on it. They’re probably on a fast track and I cannot take any more projects on a fast track. “

del Toro was close to making a movie featuring a dragon when he was attached to direct The Hobbit, but as we know that wasn’t meant to be. The director is currently working on his epic monster movie Pacific Rim which has already entered pre-production, and is aiming to begin principal photography later this year for a summer 2013 release.

If Disney wanted del Toro (why wouldn’t they?) Maleficent would be unlikely to move forward until 2013, so the chances are the studio will find a director who isn’t booked up for the next two years. It’s a shame though, as Guillermo del Toro’s take on Maleficent would definitely be worth the wait.

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