When Tron: Legacy hit screens in December its opening weekend wasn’t that great ($44 million), which gave the impressions it would under-perform for Disney, but in the end it made $400 million worldwide, and in April director Joseph Kosinski said “we are working on the story now” for the sequel.

This was followed by the hiring of David DiGilio (Eight Below) in June to get started on the script, and now Bruce Boxleitner (Alan Bradley/Tron) has suggested the sequel could hit in 2013.

Here’s Boxleitner talking to fan at Disney’s D23 Expo last week (via AICN):

Director Joseph Kosinski has previously said he’d love to return, but his next movie will be Horizons with Tom Cruise which is expected to start shooting later this year, so if he is returning to direct production on the sequel won’t begin until after he’s completed that (Horizons‘ release date is July 19, 2013).

The story for the sequel will likely start off with Quorra (Olivia Wilde) and Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) in the real world, and hopefully Cillian Murphy can return for a larger (potentially villainous) role as Dillinger Jr.

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After Disney dropped Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion Universal picked up the project, set Tom Cruise to star, and set a July 19, 2013 release date. Now according to Variety the studio has changed the title to Horizons (something Disney considered when it was with them) and they’re now searching for two female leads.

As we’ve come to expect with big budget tentpoles, none of the actresses are above the age of 35 and it’s all very vanilla. The names said to be testing soon include Brit Marling, Olivia Wilde, Jessica Chastain, Noomi Rapace and Olga Kurylenko.

Wilde being considered makes sense since she worked with Kosinski on Tron: Legacy, and Cruise met with Noomi Rapace for Mission Impossible 4 but she decided to appear in Sherlock Holmes 2 instead. Chastain is hot property at the moment after starring in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life and The Help, while Marling was the breakout star of this year’s Sundance Film Festival having co-written and starred in both Another Earth and Sound of My Voice. Olga Kurylenko is best known for playing Bond girl Camille in Quantum of Solace.

The graphic novel on which the movie is based is set “in a future where the Earth’s surface has been irradiated beyond recognition and the remnants of humanity live above the clouds, safe from the brutal alien Scavengers that stalk the ruins. But when surface drone repairman Jack discovers a mysterious woman in a crash-landed pod, it sets off an unstoppable chain of events that will force him to question everything he knows.”

The two key female characters include Victoria, Jack’s right-hand woman and lover who serves as his eyes and ears while he’s on repair missions, and Julia, his fiancee on Earth before the alien invasion.

Read similar posts to Actresses testing to star opposite Tom Cruise in Horizons at Filmonic

Jon Favreau continues to prove himself as an excellent director with Cowboys & Aliens, a movie that is a good summer flick that ends up being not quite as good as the sum of its parts. It’s got a ton of energy, the cast is solid, and the effects are great, so even though the final product is missing that extra “spark,” it’s still a serviceable summer crowd-pleaser.

Favreau and his massive writing squad (Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Otsby) are clearly passionate fans of the western genre, and their love for the material comes through on screen. The director takes a modern approach to framing vintage character archetypes, and his history of fantastic visual effects from the Iron Man films serves him well yet again. This is much more western than sci-fi, and that’s to the film’s benefit; the characters take this alien invasion seriously, and there’s no joking tone or winking at the camera. It’s a big world, full of similar vistas, gorges, and sweeping plains that you might find in an old John Ford movie. Favreau also battled the studio when they wanted the movie shot in 3D; he held his ground and shot it on film to capture the texture of those classic westerns that came before.

Daniel Craig is stoic, rugged, and dirty throughout – in other words, he makes a great cowboy. Taking a page from Eastwood’s playbook, he lets his actions do most of the talking; his wandering amnesiac is a total badass, reminiscent (in attitude) of Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp in Tombstone. Harrison Ford gives one of his most inspired performances in years as the ridiculously-named Woodrow Dolarhyde, a hardass father with a good heart. The supporting cast does a good job, but ultimately their parts seb a bit undeserving of their talents. Guys like Sam Rockwell, Clancy Brown, Paul Dano, and Walton Goggins have earned a bit more than what they were given here.

The alien design is pretty by-the-numbers (although better than the atrocious designs in Battle: Los Angeles), and their excuse for invading is laughably bad. Olivia Wilde’s exposition gets a bit dreary at times, but it’s evened out by some memorable chase sequences across stark scenery via land, air, and sea. The climax also features some memorable shots, including one in particular that was clearly influenced by Neill Blomkamp’s District 9.

Listen, I liked this movie. It won’t be among my favorites of the year or anything, but the structure and predictability is exactly the kind of “turn off your brain” entertainment that most people go to the movies for in the first place. It’s well put-together, Favreau puts some style in it, and Craig and Ford go toe-to-toe in entertaining roles. But I still can’t shake the feeling that it was too predictable, the script suffers from its familiarity, and ultimately the movie just ends up coming up short. For summer fluff, Cowboys & Aliens is fine. Looking for anything more? Keep searchin’, cowboy. Until next time…

Read similar posts to Review: Cowboys & Aliens at Filmonic

We’ve had a number of trailers and TV spots for Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens over the past few months, and Universal will no doubt be releasing a few more as we enter July.

Today sees the release of the third trailer, which contains even more awesome looking footage. Cowboys & Aliens is a fairly unknown property compared to other movies being released next month so I can understand why Universal would want to push the marketing. I just hope they follow the Super 8 route by not revealing the mystery before its release.

You can watch the trailer below:

In the movie cowboy Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) has no memory of his past, and stumbles into the desert town of Absolution in 1800s Arizona with a mysterious shackle that encircles one wrist. As the gunslinger slowly starts to remember who he is and where he’s been, he realizes he holds a secret that could give the town a fighting chance against an invading alien force.

Cowboys & Aliens also stars Olivia Wilde as elusive traveller Ella and Harrison Ford as Colonel Dolarhyde, and will be released July 29th 2011

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At the Spike Guys Choice Awards on Friday Universal Pictures released a new extended sneak peek from director Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens. The trailer contains some new footage, including more from Sam Rockwell which is always welcomed.

Watch below:

In the movie cowboy Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) has no memory of his past, and stumbles into the desert town of Absolution in 1800s Arizona with a mysterious shackle that encircles one wrist. As the gunslinger slowly starts to remember who he is and where he’s been, he realizes he holds a secret that could give the town a fighting chance against an invading alien force.

Cowboys & Aliens stars Olivia Wilde as elusive traveller Ella and Harrison Ford as Colonel Dolarhyde, and will be released July 29th 2011

Read similar posts to Extended sneak peek at Cowboys & Aliens at Filmonic

Two months after we see Ryan Reynolds in Green Lantern we will see the actor swapping lives with Jason Bateman in The Change-Up.

In the movie, directed by David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers) and written by Jon Lucas & Scott Moore (The Hangover), single guy Mitch (Reynolds) and overworked lawyer Dave (Bateman) embark on drunken night out together, and end up switch bodies and lives after urinating in a fountain (it’s a comedy, and therefore doesn’t need to make sense).

The first red band trailer has appeared online, and you can watch it below:

Here’s the official synopsis:

Growing up together, Mitch (Reynolds) and Dave (Bateman) were inseparable best friends, but as the years have passed they’ve slowly drifted apart. While Dave is an overworked lawyer, husband and father of three, Mitch has remained a single, quasi-employed man-child who has never met a responsibility he liked. To Mitch, Dave has it all: beautiful wife Jamie (Leslie Mann), kids who adore him and a high-paying job at a prestigious law firm. To Dave, living Mitch’s stress free life without obligation or consequence would be a dream come true.

Following a drunken night out together, Mitch and Dave’s worlds are turned upside down when they wake up in each other’s bodies and proceed to freak the &*#@ out.

Despite the freedom from their normal routines and habits, the guys soon discover that each other’s lives are nowhere near as rosy as they once seemed. Further complicating matters are Dave’s sexy legal associate, Sabrina (Olivia Wilde), and Mitch’s estranged father (Alan Arkin). With time not on their side, Mitch and Dave comically struggle to avoid completely destroying each other’s lives before they can find a way to get their old ones back.

The Change-Up will be released August 5th, 2011.

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Universal have released the second full trailer for Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens. It’s a lot like the previous trailer, just with more plot details, more of Olivia Wilde, and more footage of the aliens attacking (we don’t actually see the aliens, that’ll probably be something they save for the movie itself).

You can watch the trailer below: (Is that an alien hand we see at 1:58?)

From the trailer it looks like Favreau has delivered another fun movie, but it’ll be interesting to see how general audiences respond to this. It’s not a well known property, but has a strong cast. It could go either way.

In the movie cowboy Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) has no memory of his past, and stumbles into the desert town of Absolution in 1800s Arizona with a mysterious shackle that encircles one wrist. As the gunslinger slowly starts to remember who he is and where he’s been, he realizes he holds a secret that could give the town a fighting chance against an invading alien force.

Cowboys & Aliens stars Olivia Wilde as elusive traveller Ella and Harrison Ford as Colonel Dolarhyde, and will be released July 29th 2011

Read similar posts to New trailer for Cowboys & Aliens at Filmonic

Universal has released the Super Bowl TV spot for Jon Favreau’s Cowboys and Aliens. The ad contains plenty of new footage, include more of those aliens and a shot of Olivia Wilde naked in front of a bonfire and 500 Apache warriors.

Watch below:

In the movie cowboy Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) has no memory of his past, and stumbles into the desert town of Absolution in 1800s Arizona with a mysterious shackle that encircles one wrist. As the gunslinger slowly starts to remember who he is and where he’s been, he realizes he holds a secret that could give the town a fighting chance against an invading alien force.

Cowboys and Aliens stars Olivia Wilde as elusive traveller Ella and Harrison Ford as Colonel Dolarhyde, and will be released July 29th 2011

Read similar posts to Cowboys and Aliens Super Bowl TV Ad at Filmonic

Just over a week ago Tron Legacy hit to mixed-negative reviews and a fairly mild box office. Critics argue that behind the cool visuals and booming Daft Punk soundtrack lies a weak story and, while I agree with them, I had a lot of fun watching it and hope it makes enough to warrant a sequel.

Critics have also commented on the CG used on Jeff Bridges to make him appear younger for flashback scenes and for his portrayal of Clu (some have described Clu as looking “dead-faced” with “an animated death mask”). When recently questioned on the issue Bridges didn’t address it directly, but he did offer an excuse of sorts.

From Hero Complex:

Bridges seemed to search for the right words when asked about the face-to-face issue. There have been some fairly harsh appraisals of the appearance of CLU in some sequences, and he wasn’t prepared to argue with them, but he did look for a bright side. “It does change the way you watch a movie. But for that thing you’re talking about, what greases that a little bit is that in this movie it is a computer world. Things are off a little bit. You’re looking into a different reality. Not everything looks human there.”

When watching the movie I noticed it looked a little off in places, but it wasn’t a huge distraction that reduced my enjoyment in any way. De-aging is still a fairly new technology, and it’s always harder to make someone appear younger than older.

In other Tron Legacy news Olivia Wilde spoke to MTV about her hopes for a sequel, and what she wants to see from her character.

[Spoilers for those who haven't seen the movie]

“I’m so thrilled to play with Quorra in the human world. It would be sort of like ‘Splash,’ ” she said, referring to the ’80s comedy starring Daryl Hannah as a mermaid unleashed in Manhattan. “I want to see her whispering to laptops and hugging toasters… There’s a whole other chapter ahead.”

Disney hired writers to get started on a script for a sequel back in April, but the studio will no doubt be waiting to see how Tron Legacy fares at the box office over the upcoming weeks before moving forward. It may be a similar case to G.I. Joe whereby the movie made average numbers, but made a lot of money from toys and merchandising, prompting a sequel.

What did you think of the de-aging CG in Tron Legacy? Do you want a sequel?

Read similar posts to Jeff Bridges on his CG face, Olivia Wilde on Tron sequel ideas at Filmonic

In 2008, test footage for TRON: Legacy surprised audiences at San Diego Comic-Con and the enthusiastic reaction from fans helped greenlight the sequel to the 1982 original.* This footage prompted me to see TRON for the first time, and while I enjoyed the movie, more than anything it raised my anticipation for Legacy. This is one of those rare sequels that is totally justified due to drastic updates in filmmaking technology and a story that is served by exploring those technological possibilities.

I’ll come right out and say it: I was disappointed with the movie. There were aspects I really dug – I’ll get to those in a minute – but taking Disney’s overkill marketing approach out of the equation and looking directly at the trailer, I was half-expecting a transcendent experience. Unfortunately, what I ended up with is just a shell of a movie. The world of the Grid, strangely enough, is a good metaphor for the film itself: it’s sleek, sexy, gorgeous to look at, and unlike anything we’ve seen before – but it’s also cold, harsh, and unforgiving, a world made up solely of 1′s and 0′s incapable of convincing anyone that a heart beats inside its mechanical chest.

If you’re looking for eye candy, you’ve hit the jackpot. Director Joseph Kosinski makes his feature debut here, and his past experience as an architect is on glorious full display here, highlighting the expanse of the Grid with a wondrous originality and dynamic visual flair never before seen in movies. It’s easily the sexiest city I’ve ever seen, and with its dichotomy of dark glassy panes and bright LED light strips embedded everywhere, the movie serves as a shining beacon of what is possible with today’s technology. All the staples of the original are updated with pizazz: the disc war sequence is exciting enough, but the light cycle race was the highlight of the film for me. Watching Hedlund speed through Kosinski’s world really allowed us to bask in the glory of what the director and his production designers created.

Kosinski is capable of handling the action – as Zack Snyder will tell you, slickness and style will get you a long way in this industry – but when he has to settle down and actually tell a story, that’s when the problems begin. Based on the stunning visuals we’d seen over the years, I’d (perhaps unfairly) hoped the quality of the story would meet or exceed the quality of those images. Due to a lackluster script, it doesn’t quite play out like that. I can easily see two scenarios here: if Legacy fails to meet box office expectations and turns into a financial disaster, I can see Kosinski returning to the commercial world and never directing another feature. But if it does gangbusters over this holiday season, it’s easy to imagine Disney latching onto him for future franchises. (They’ve already got him signed for a remake of The Black Hole.) Enough speculation – let’s get back to the movie at hand.

Jeff Bridges reprises his dual roles as Kevin Flynn and Clu. Flynn, older and trapped in the Grid for years, has developed as one might expect for the character, but with one semi-distracting exception: his dialogue seems intent on reminding us that he was once The Dude.  Drew McWeeny at HitFix brilliantly summed up the elder Flynn in TRON: Legacy: “he’s Obi-Wan Lebowski.” His affability works with this character (if you watch the original, you’ll essentially see a young hacker version of The Dude), but with lines like “it’s biodigital jazz, man,” and “you’re messing with my zen thing, man,” the writers are relying a bit too much on our outside knowledge of Jeff Bridges and not giving us enough Kevin Flynn. Those are direct quotes, too – no exaggeration, that’s exactly how they were stated in the film. My audience openly laughed at lines like that on more than one occasion.

With Clu, Flynn’s computer counterpart designed to help build a perfect system capable of shepherding the world into a new digital age, the filmmakers opted to take a motion-captured approach to the character, meaning that he appears as a younger version of Bridges in the final product. Unfortunately, this CG Bridges looks completely unconvincing (save for some brief moments) and took me out of the movie entirely. I can see why they’d need that version inside the world of the Grid, but in the film’s opening minutes (set in the “real world”) they choose to show that version of Bridges in a flashback sequence that absolutely does not fit into anything aiming for reality.

Early rumors warned of a terrible performance from Garrett Hedlund (an actor I’ve actually liked in a number of things), but I found no issue with his performance. He’s the “tech geek badass” prototype here, able to infiltrate a Fortune 500 company, base jump, and ride a motorcycle with equal ease. He does a fine job at all of the above, and while the writing may force some questionable dialogue out of him every few minutes, for the most part he sells and it and totally worked for me as the action hero of this movie.

Olivia Wilde looked stunning, and brought a kind of wide-eyed naivety to her character that was endearing but ultimately didn’t make a lot of sense. When the true nature of her character is revealed, some of her actions don’t hold up under scrutiny – again, a writing issue, nothing having to do with her acting. For my money, she was one of the more enjoyable aspects of the film, questionable character or not; her willingness to commit to the role seemed a bit more genuine than Hedlund’s performance, which seemed tired at times. Michael Sheen, aside from being almost unrecognizable covered in white makeup, seemed to have more fun than everyone else on set combined. He played the flamboyant character of Castor as a brash loudmouth who loves to be the center of attention. While grating as a character, Sheen gave a memorable performance and shows a willingness to go from British royalty films like The Queen to big budget blockbuster with no problems in between.

(Very minor spoiler in the next paragraph.)

Like most blockbusters these days, TRON: Legacy borrows heavily from other sources, but this one regularly strayed from paying homage into more dicey territory of quasi-theft that caused me to wince a few times. Cillian Murphy makes an uncredited surprise appearance in the beginning of the film as the son of Flynn’s nemesis Dillinger, the villain from the first film. He now heads up the technical operations at ENCOM, the company made famous by Kevin Flynn years before. But his appearance is limited to about five minutes of screen time (if that), and then he’s never seen or mentioned again. As if blatant set-up for sequels wasn’t a big enough sin, writers Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis actually have Murphy utter a famous line from another franchise sequel in which he made a tiny appearance: The Dark Knight. “It’s all part of the plan,” the younger Dillinger says, with a hint of Heath Ledger in his voice. Immediately following this scene, there’s an epic helicopter shot of Sam Flynn standing on top of a building at night that looked suspiciously similar to TDK even before Sam base-jumps from the roof.

Using The Wizard of Oz as inspiration, the movie stays in 2D for the “real world” aspects until switching into 3D as soon as we enter the Grid, just as Dorothy and Toto stayed black-and-white until they hit full color in Oz. (Incidentally, I think Avatar would have benefited by using this same approach.) Like the first TRON, there are plenty of Star Wars rip offs here (the gunner battles are near identical in all three films, actually) and also a visual callback to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, hearkening back to James Cameron’s T-1000 innovation when programs are “derezzed” in the Grid. Even the notion of Castor and Zeus being the same person dates was notably featured in science fiction in Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall.

Musical duo Daft Punk composed the score for the movie, sending shock waves through the online film world when it was announced. I won’t pretend to know anything at all about Daft Punk, but from what I can gather, the original movie was a massive influence on them as artists; it’s fitting, then, that they would provide the score for the sequel. Trouble is, the score sounded an awful lot like Hans Zimmer’s already-iconic score for Inception, with the same frenzied strings and intermittent bursts of loud horns. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great score – it certainly was – but I don’t think it reached the groundbreaking level many assumed it would reach when they heard DP were on board. Daft Punk even made a cameo in the film as the DJ’s at The End of the Line Club.

Over at GeekTyrant, we recorded a video of our initial thoughts right after we left the theater. After I expressed disappointment with the storyline, Mazer wondered what I (we, anyone) would have done to change it. I didn’t have an answer right then, but after a few hours to think it over, I’ve got a couple of ideas. For starters, I actually liked the look of the movie outside of the Grid, so I would have featured more of the “real world” in the film. Not in the way the movie was hinting, in which Clu would lead an army out into the world to cleanse it of its imperfections in an updated Nazi storytelling device that we’ve seen dozens of times before, but perhaps feature Bruce Boxleitner’s returning Alan Bradley character more on the outside, helping Sam out or working behind the scenes to cause trouble for the corporate hackjobs who have taken over ENCOM since Kevin’s disappearance. Sure, now that sequels are being planned and an animated series is in the works, I’m sure we’ll find out all sorts of different ways to tell a story within this franchise. I just wish we would have seen a better one here to get it all started again.

TRON: Legacy is a mindless action movie, and I take issue with that because more than many other blockbusters, this one had the potential to offer us something to think about instead of just something to look at. Though the first film looks cheesy now, there was a definite sense of something deeper going on under the surface; concepts and ideas about the digital world were highlighted with CGI and wrapped in a new and exciting story. Here, the world has been retrofitted with better tech, but all of the heart from the original is gone. It devolves into the exact cliches longtime movie-watchers will see coming from light-years away (“he’s building an army!” “Get to the portal!”), but it does a great job of making me want to ride a light cycle. And hey – any movie that features Journey’s “Separate Ways” can’t be all bad. Until next time…

*A similar tactic was used to convince Frank Miller that a movie version of Sin City would work, with Robert Rodriguez shooting the opening scene as a test and shopping the concept footage to Miller and the rest of the soon-to-be lead actors.

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