Danny Boyle’s eagerly anticipated Sunshine, which has been pushed back several times, has launched a new website and a new trailer to go with it. It has been gathering favourable early reviews which we have reported on before. The trailer shows a snippet from an Empire review which says:

“…a knuckle gnawingly tense, glorious action thriller. 4 stars.”

The film opens April 5 in the UK.

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Posted in Movies •

John Simm has revealed that his young son pressured him to accept a role in Doctor Who.

Simm, who will play politician Mr Saxon in the new series told The Times newspaper how his five-year-old’s fandom persuaded him to become involved ‘He’s Doctor Who mad. He’s got the lunch-box, the dolls, the screwdriver. As the dad of a small boy, you kind of have a moral duty to be a baddie on Doctor Who if you can, don’t you?‘

Simm also explained that Executive Producers Julia Gardner and Russell T. Davies went so far as to travel on midnight trains up to Manchester to the set of Life on Mars to ask him to accept. Simm first came to attention in the BBC1 Jimmy McGovern drama The Lakes, before going on to star in State Of Play and Crime and Punishment on TV, as well as the movie 24 Hour Party People.

Doctor Who returns to BBC One this Saturday at 7pm.

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Posted in Doctor Who, Television •

DreamWorks has set the release date for Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd to January 11, 2008. The film will get a limited release three weeks earlier on December 21, which means the studio is putting in the Oscar window.

Tim Burton’s film - starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen and Christopher Lee - is an adaptation of the award winning musical-thriller by Steven Sondheim. It tells the story of a man unjustly sent to prison, who vows revenge not only for that cruel punishment but for the devastating consequences of what happened to his wife and daughter. When he returns to reopen his barber shop, he becomes the Demon Barber of Fleet Street who “shaved the heads of gentleman who never thereafter were heard from again.”

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Posted in Movies •

M. Night Shyamalan’s (The Sixth Sense, Lady in the Water) next film The Happening has landed its lead actor: Mark Wahlberg (The Departed, Shooter), reports Variety.

The paranoid thriller will star Wahlberg as a man who takes his family on the run from a large-scale environmental crisis which threatens to end the world. ‘Mark has a unique blend of charisma, humanity, authenticity and skillfulness as an actor,’ Shyamalan said, ‘all of which coalesced at this moment in his career, making him the perfect person to take on the role of Eliot Moore, the science teacher at the center of this event.’

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Posted in Movies •

While both segments of Grindhouse, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, premiere in US cinemas as one film starting next week (April 6), other territories will see a separate release of the two.

Variety today reports that Tarantino is looking to cut an extended version of the currently 87 minute-long Death Proof to be screened at the Cannes film festival (which won the director the Palm D’Or for Pulp Fiction in 1994), which takes place May 16-27. Added scenes may involve more character development and extended action. Rumours even indicate that Tarantino will try to land a competition slot for his film (while previous works like Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill were debuted out of competition). It will be interesting to learn if this longer cut will be the separated version released outside of the US (beginning May 31).

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Posted in Movies •

The first trailer for Paul Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum is now online on Yahoo! UK & Ireland. The clip from the third and final adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne (played in the films by Matt Damon) series seems to be the special international trailer. The US will get its own edit.

The Bourne Ultimatum sees Jason Bourne trying to hunt down his past in order to find a future. He must travel from Moscow, Paris, Madrid and London to Tangier and New York City as he continues his quest to find the real Jason Bourne–all the while trying to outmaneuver the scores of cops, federal officers and Interpol agents with him in their crosshairs. 

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Posted in Movies •

During a Bank of America conference on Wednesday, Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg told Wall Street analysts that 3D is the future of cinema.

Katzenberg predicted that moviegoers will some day own their own glasses for 3-D viewing much like they own sunglasses today and explained that moviegoers will gladly pay up to a 50% premium to watch 3-D films in a theater. Mentioning the added bonus of protection from piracy, Katzenberg explained that every major studio now has a 3-D movie in production.

Disney-Pixar also is planning Toy Story 3 in 3-D, Katzenberg said and reeled off a list major recent releases that would have benefited immensely from 3-D, including Casino Royale and The Departed. He then suggested that rereleases of 3-D versions of such classics as The Godfather, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia would be profitable.

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Posted in Movies •

Writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson has responded to reports that he has abandoned work on the video-game inspired Castlevania movie in favour of a Death Race 2000 remake.

‘Both Death Race and Castlevania are set up at Universal‘ Anderson told IGN. ‘The studio wants to make both films, but obviously there is a scheduling conflict, which we are trying to resolve. I am very passionate about Castlevania, and whatever happens, I will remain actively involved in my role as writer and producer.‘

Anderson also hinted that the story will be a fresh interpretation of the Dracula story, saying ‘You could almost call this movie Dracula Begins‘.

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Posted in Movies •

The X-Realms is excited to exclusively publish the new episode of Mitch Watley’s stunning webcomic, Sundang the Slaybot.

In the latest issue, three prisoners of the evil Orgoi Trillipede known as Shankrust have decided their time to make an escape attempt has come, but they soon discover that getting out of the prison facility of Qufell is going to be much more difficult than they had envisioned. The Prison Warden is hot on their heels, and they will be fortunate even to survive this jailbreak!

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Posted in Books & Comics, X-Realms •

Sci-Fi Wire reports that Rosario Dawson will likely reprise the role of Gail in the upcoming Sin City prequel, based on Frank Miller’s graphic-novel A Dame to Kill For.

‘Luckily for me, or maybe not luckily for me, Frank really loved drawing that outfit, so he pretty much put Gail in all of his books‘ said Dawson ‘It’ll only be [based on] one book, as opposed to three [that were the basis for the first film], so we’ll actually have a full story arc.  I think that’ll pretty much be the only thing that makes it like a regular film. Otherwise, … it’s going to be very interesting now that all of us know the technology.‘

Sin City 2 begins filming this summer with a scheduled 2008 release date.

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Posted in Movies •