It’s the 25th anniversary of the science fiction comedy from Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale. As you might also expect, a 3-disc Blu-Ray set is also hitting stores today featuring the original film and it’s two-sequels.
So, to go with Will Harris’s interview with Gale which includes some more interesting casting details in addition to the ones you’ve probably already heard about, Universal has made available a series of short clips from yesterday’s press conference at New York’s Waldorf Hotel featuring a lot of the cast — Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, and Mary Steenburgen (from “Back to the Future 3”) but not Crispin Glover — as well as Gale and Zemeckis. A lot of them are very brief and I would have been happier if they’d edited it into one clip, but you take what you can get.
We’ve got a bunch of more these after the flip for you diehard “Future” fans.
It used to be that screenwriters had to worry about questions like “why don’t they just go to the police?” or “why doesn’t he just tell her the truth?” Now, of course, “why they don’t just try Googling him?” is right up there. This bit of tomfoolery from College Humor — via /film — imagines the impact of easy web access on hits of the past.
By the way, the College Humor guys got themselves into the movie news today via some apparent uncomfortable similarities between their “Inception” parody and one that recently appeared on “South Park.” It seems Matt Stone and Trey Parker needed to closely mimic the film’s dialogue and weren’t actually able to see the movie again or get a hold of a screener, so they relied on online parodies to remind themselves of the actual dialogue from the film, accidentally copying the parody dialogue instead. The pair have apologized to College Humor, which is fair enough. Shortcuts have hazards, however.
A lot of fascinating things have happened in the history of movie making, but offhand I can’t think of an example of nationwide protests to keep a film in a particular country, but that’s exactly what happened today in New Zealand, where it’s actually already tomorrow. The issue, of course, are the continuing threats amid the probably inevitable hardball negotiations to move production away from the small island nation in the wake of battles with local actors unions. Here’s what’s happening as the biggest protest is led by Richard Taylor of the famed WETA workshop which did such a great job on the effects in the “Lord of the Rings” films.
It’s important to remember, I think, that as successful as he is, Richard Taylor is very much an independent entrepreneur who has to keep a steady flow of work going for WETA. I spoke to him briefly at Comic-Con as he was helping to promote what appears to be a very unpromising and very low budget effects driven production. Thinking of him as someone who has collaborated closely with a guy like Peter Jackson, I was perplexed until I realized that, for a guy like him with a payroll, it’s always about the next job. Money is money and he can’t be too proud about the projects he takes on, as long as he delivers the best he can for the money. In the case of this particular next job, an entire country, small though it is, is seriously impacted.
For a bit more background, I have a great piece of video — including a very blunt interview with Peter Jackson (that’s Sir Jackson, to you) from last week.
And one final note: Notice how New Zealand Finance Minister Gerry Brownlee assures anchor Mark Sainsbury that there was no negotiations going on between his government and Warner Brothers for improved tax incentives. If you read the THR story from today I linked to above, you’ll note that whether or not such negotiations are going on, people seem to assume they might be.
I’ve got places to go and movies to see (and other stuff to write), so I’m going to keep it short and sweet today. And things were definitely sweet for Paramount this weekend.
For starters, this week’s #1 is “Paranormal Activity 2.” It seems that prognosticators were avoiding specific numbers but this is a bit higher than expected with Anne Thompson describing the $41.5 million estimate figure as “jaw dropping.” Judging by good-to-meh reviews, the shot-on-video moc-reality-flick gave the audience what they wanted: more of the same, with maybe a bit of a new twist or two to keep things reasonably fresh. For some reason, Nikki Finke is reporting a slightly higher estimate of $43 million and also tripling the reporting budget from $1 to a whole $3 million. Is she the scoop lady or the wrongish lady this weekend? Box Office Mojo has the figure at $41.5 million also.
This week’s #2 picture is last week’s #1 and it’s also from the former home of Bob Hope on Melrose in East Hollywood. (Line from obscure 1941 Cole Porter song, “Let’s Not Talk About Love”: “Let’s talk about drugs, let’s talk about dope; let’s try to picture Paramount minus Bob Hope.”) “Jackass 3D” dropped a very-much par-for-the-youth-oriented-course 57.1% in its second week and reported a dandy $21.6 million for Paramount’s coffers. The elder-action comedy, “RED,” is in the #3 spot and looking leggy with a drop of 31.1% for $15 million in its second week.
Though it’s in the #4 spot, Clint Eastwood‘s “Hereafter,” written by Peter Morgan and starring Matt Damon, actually did better than expected according to La Finke. It earned an estimated $12 million and change and should hold reasonably well, given the strength of the names involved and some good reviews from prominent critics mixed with a lot of “meh” or worse from others.
A brief and amusing video reminder that, when it comes to censoring language from movies for airing on television, sometimes a bleep or a quick sound drop-out might be preferable to the wrong kind of creativity. Since this video provides both the original and censored versions of some pretty coarse language said rather loudly, it’s obviously on the NSFW side of things.
