After teasing us over the past few days 20th Century Fox has released the first official trailer for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus which stars Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Logan Marshall-Green, Patrick Wilson, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce and Rafe Spall.

You can watch the trailer below. It definitely has an Alien-vibe to it, and meets the hype that’s been building. Hopefully the actual movie does too.

Visionary filmmaker Ridley Scott returns to the genre he helped define, creating an original science fiction epic set in the most dangerous corners of the universe. The film takes a team of scientists and explorers on a thrilling journey that will test their physical and mental limits and strand them on a distant world, where they will discover the answers to our most profound questions and to life’s ultimate mystery.

20th Century Fox will release Prometheus on June 8th 2012.

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The latest issue of Entertainment Weekly contains our first good look at Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, which stars Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Noomi Rapace, Idris Elba, Patrick Wilson, Guy Pearce and Logan Marshall-Green.

In the image below we see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo‘s Noomi Rapace as Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, a researcher and archaeologist. In an interview last month Rapace said Shaw was the “most complete person” she’s ever played, and she “turns into a fighter” halfway through the film after “a lot of things happen”.

Also in the image is Logan Marshall-Green (Devil) who plays a crewman onboard the space ship and the love interest of Elizabeth Shaw. A blonde Michael Fassbender plays an android named David.

Other images show us the characters of Charlize Theron and Idris Elba.

Ridley Scott, director of “Alien” and “Blade Runner,” returns to the genre he helped define. With PROMETHEUS, he creates a groundbreaking mythology, in which a team of explorers discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a thrilling journey to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race.

With 20th Century Fox’s marketing campaign seemingly under-way we can probably expect the teaser trailer to hit sometime soon. Ridley Scott’s return to sci-fi hits June 8, 2012.

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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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The U.S. rights for the Guillermo del Toro-produced Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (starring Guy Pearce and Katie Holmes) have finally been picked up, by FilmDistrict. At one point, the film was set to open last month, but it has now been given an August 12th, 2011 release date.

The film was one of those “orphaned” when Disney’s Miramax label was shut down last year, and has since been floating around, trying to find a home – luckily it’s found one. It received an incredibly positive response when it was screened at Comic-Con 2010.

Hopefully you haven’t forgotten about this project in the time it was in limbo – in case you don’t already know, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is a remake of the 1983 TV movie of the same name. The new version was written and shot with the intention of receiving a PG-13 rating, but instead received a non-negiotable R. Nice. A press release for the film described it as such:

Sally Hurst (Bailee Madison), a lonely, withdrawn child, has just arrived in Rhode Island to live with her father Alex (Guy Pearce) and his new girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes) at the 19th-century mansion they are restoring. While exploring the sprawling estate, the young girl discovers a hidden basement, undisturbed since the strange disappearance of the mansion’s builder a century ago. When Sally unwittingly lets loose a race of ancient, dark-dwelling creatures who conspire to drag her down into the mysterious house’s bottomless depths, she must convince Alex and Kim that it’s not a fantasy—before the evil lurking in the dark consumes them all.

And back in August, a teaser was released for the film, which you can watch below:

This is one of my most anticipated movies of the year. The last fantastic films that del Toro was involved with were Pan’s Labyrinth (which he directed, of course) in 2006, and The Orphanage (which he produced) in 2007. That’s a while ago. I love his visual style, and while he has a huge number of productions lined up, getting people excited for them, most of them are aeons into the future. We won’t see his next directing gig, At the Mountains of Madness, until late in 2012 at the earliest, but hopefully Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark will provide a small tide-over. It looks great.

FilmDistrict is a newly-founded distribution outfit, and its first film will be Insidious, directed by James Wan (the original, brilliant Saw) and written be Leigh Whannell (Saw I-III). Insidious is opening April 1st.

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The Hollywood Reporter announced yesterday that Gary Oldman, Jason Clarke, Guy Pearce and Mia Wasikowska (just in case you didn’t see that above) have all joined the cast of the novel adaptation The Wettest County in the World, the next film from director John Hillcoat (The Proposition, The Road). Read more after the break.

The four newcomers to the project join the previously cast Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy.

The Wettest County in the World is based on the novel of the same name by Matt Borundant, who in turn based his book on the true story of his relatives. I’ll reprint the synopsis of the book from our previous article on Hardy and LaBeouf’s casting; thanks to /Film:

In 1928, a pair of thieves accost Bondurant’s real life great-uncle Forrest at his Franklin County, Va., restaurant. They’re after a large cache of bootlegging money and end up cutting Forrest’s throat. The story of his survival and his trek to a hospital 12 miles away has taken on mythical proportions by the time Sherwood Anderson arrives in Franklin County in 1934 to research a magazine piece on the area’s prolific moonshiners. Soon after Anderson’s arrival, two anonymous men appear at the same hospital, one with legs meticulously shattered from ankle to hip, the other one castrated, with the by-products of the deed deposited in a jar of moonshine. The arc of the story lies between the attack on Forrest and that on the two men.

And word on who’s playing who:

Pearce will play an overly violent deputy who comes down hard on the Bondurants while Oldman will play a gangster who engages the boys to deliver alcohol.

Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland and The Kids Are All Right) plays LeBeouf’s love interest, a local Mennonite girl. Clarke (TV’s Chicago Code) is playing the brother to LaBeouf and Hardy.

This sounds like a great new film for Hillcoat; The Proposition is one of the best Westerns I’ve seen, and The Road was a calm, thoughtful take on the over-done post-apocalypse genre (although fell victim to some rather misleading trailers). A gangster film will add to a nice sense of variety. He’s getting together a hell of a cast here, with some great actors; but as usual, I’m mostly looking forward to seeing what the brilliant Gary Oldman will bring to his role.

The Wettest County in the World is being adapted for the screen by musician Nick Cave, who also co-wrote Hillcoat’s debut Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, and scripted The Proposition. He composed the scores for The Proposition and The Road too (the latter of which was beautiful).

This is yet another film to get excited for, I guess. Filming is scheduled to begin on February 28th.

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Who wants to see Taken in space? There’s really almost no other way to describe Lock Out, the new film* set to be produced by Luc Besson. The Wrap reports Guy Pearce, Maggie Grace, Peter Stormare, and Tom Hollander will star in the film, which will be co-directed by Stephen St. Leger and James Mather. Hit the jump for more details.

The plot synopsis sounds an awful lot like material we’ve seen before:

The film takes place in a prison that is orbiting 50 miles above Earth and houses 500 of the world’s most dangerous prisoners who are kept asleep by sophisticated methods until they suddenly awaken, causing all hell to break loose.

Deadline provides a bit more detail on Pearce’s character:

Guy Pearce is attached to play a man wrongly convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage against the U.S. He’s offered his freedom if he can rescue the president’s daughter from an outer space prison taken over by violent inmates.

Maggie Grace starred in Besson’s surprise hit Taken opposite Liam Neeson and is attached to that film’s eventual sequel, so it makes sense she would want to remain in the EuropaCorp family for a while; she seems to have a solid working relationship with them.

St. Leger and Mather don’t have many films under their belt as directors – they’ve only collaborated on one project before, 2004′s Prey Alone – but Besson is known for setting up new talent and taking fresh-faced directors under his wing. The pair co-wrote the script with Besson, and the budget for the film is expected to be around 30 million dollars. Filming starts September 7th of this year.

What do you think about the potential of Lock Out?

*Deadline types the title as Lockout, but IMDB currently has it listed as two words.

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Disney’s remake of the 1983 TV movie Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark will hit screens under the Miramax banner on January 21st 2011. The new movie was co-written and produced by horror-fantasy mastermind Guillermo del Toro, and stars Katie Holmes and Guy Pearce.

According to The Hollywood Reporter:

…the thriller centers on a young girl (Bailee Madison) who is sent to live with her father (Pearce) and his girlfriend (Holmes) in the old mansion they are renovating, where she unwittingly unleashes malevolent creatures bent on destroying all of them.

I guess it sounds interesting enough, but with this sort of thing it’s hard to tell until we see a trailer or similar (which shouldn’t be too far away, considering the release date). A large chunk of del Toro’s wonderful imagination comes across on the visual side of things, so I hope that the creative team working on this have transferred his script to screen well.

Troy Nixey is directing the film, having only previously written and directed a short film called Latchkey’s Lament. You can watch the trailer for Latchkey on YouTube here, along with the full film. It’s definitely clear why del Toro picked Nixey for the project, what with all the clockwork imagery and everything. Hopefully Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark will contain a similar level of originality. The creatures from the original TV movie look creepily awesome anyway, and with luck, they still will in the remake.

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A great first trailer for The Road has appeared online. The Road is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son across a barren landscape that was blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed civilization and most life on earth. The cast includes Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Guy Pearce.

The Road will be released in October in the US.

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USA Today got our first look at The Road, which stars Viggo Mortensen, Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce and Kodi Smit McPhee (who would have played a young Wolverine in X-Men Origins: Wolverine if filming didn’t get pushed back)

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food–and each other.

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