It’s the year of Jack Black over at Paramount, where the whirling dervish comedian has both Tropic Thunder and the animated flick Kung Fu Panda on the release schedule. The latter hits theaters June 6, and saw the release of this new photo at ShoWest.
Man, it’s too bad pandas can’t make films about humans. I’d love to see what they’d come up with…
Per Variety, director Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus — whose title already unpleasantly connotes Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium — has resumed filming in Vancouver this weekend, with Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law all stepping into the void created by the death of star Heath Ledger. “What, what, what?” you ask. Well, apparently the decision to use three actors to replace Ledger was made possible
because of the typically Gilliam-esque fantastical nature of the story, in which characters
pass from contemporary London through a magic mirror into parallel realms of the imagination. For more, click here.
In advance of its apocalyptic, not-screening-for-critics Doomsday, which I’ll now likely be catching opening day, comes word, per Variety, that The Descent writer-director Neil Marshall has been inked by Doomsday‘s distributor and Universal’s genre arm, Rogue Pictures, to write and direct a Western-horror hybrid entitled Sacrilege. Marshall grew up in England watching oaters and horror films in equal measure, and calls his movie “Unforgiven by way of H.P. Lovecraft, with that grim, gritty setting and a horror element nobody has seen before.” One thing is likely… critics won’t see that horror element in advance, either.
On the heels of its first photo and red-band teaser trailer releasing in the past week, Paramount/DreamWorks’ Tropic Thunder has released a couple more pictures, courtesy of its big promotional unveiling at the annual ShoWest exhibitors convention in Las Vegas, where footage from the movie was screened at a private event hosted by two of its stars, Ben Stiller and Robert Downey, Jr.
The film’s story centers on a group of actors shooting a big-budget war movie who, through a series of freak occurrences, are forced to become the soldiers they are
portraying. Left to right, above, Jay Baruchel plays novice actor Sandusky; Brandon T.
Jackson portrays rap star Alpa Chino; Stiller plays pampered action superstar Tugg Speedman; Downey, Jr. plays Kirk
Lazarus, an over-the-top, Australian-born method
actor who goes to extremes getting into character; and Jack Black portrays gross-out comedy
star Jeff Portnoy. Steve Coogan (far right), meanwhile, plays the film’s director, Damien Cockburn.
