Bryan Singer Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Oh, the obvious jokes you can make about Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci being involved with a project called License to Steal. Considering they penned both of Michael Bay's robot-gasm installments, and Star Trek, plus produced The Proposal, one could say that this was their Hollywood life story.

But it's not. According to Variety, License to Steal is actually based on Marc Weingarten's Salon.com article The Learjeat Repo Man, which examines world of repo men. Not just any repo men that come after your flatscreen or your Prius, but the "big game" hunter who steal / repossess private jets, yachts, helicopters, and whatever else it is rich, corrupt people own. For the dangers they face (and oh, do they face dangers) they receive a cut of the overall value.

The script is being penned by Shane Salerno, Kurtzman and Orci are its executive producers. The project was shopped around by WME to three major studios, all with directors lined up to bid, and Salerno pitching it each and every time. McG took the project to Warner Bros., Timur Bekmambetov took it to Universal, and Bryan Singer took it to Sony. But Paramount snapped it up before anyone else had a chance to bid, and without a director attached. But Paramount has the dynamic duo pulling the strings, so they'll undoubtedly pull some major name in to tell the story they describe as "a smart, lighthearted action movie ... with a lot of unexpected plot twists." As you wait for the talent to hook themselves up, you can read the Salon piece, and dream of success and adventure ... either those enjoyed by Weingarten's repo men, or that of Kurtzman and Orci.

(Oversight! Thanks to ScreenRant for the photo up there! -- Weinberg)

Poor Bryan Singer. He may have X-Men and X2 under his belt, but a lot of fans will never forgive him for selling out the mutants in favor of Superman ... and we won't go into the Superman thing again.

But Singer is sorry. Very sorry. In fact, he told Total Film that he made a terrible mistake and that he regretted not directing X3 "before I was watching it, during watching it, after watching it." (Join the club, Singer.) He was quick to amend his longing with praise for a little praise for Brett Ratner, though. "It's weird for me to watch it, because I'm so close to the universe. And also Brett is a good friend of mine. But, of course, I would love to return to that universe." How to return is a problem now that the series has devolved into spin-offs and prequels, and he's understandably reluctant to return through one of the avenues open to him: a Magneto origin story. "The only thing that concerns me about Magneto is that if the prequel were to follow the track I used in X-Men, which is Magneto's history in the concentration camp, then I've lived in that world. Apt Pupil, X-Men and now Valkyrie ... I've lived in that Nazi universe for quite a while. I just might need to take a little break before I do something like that."

Now that J.J. Abrams has reinvented, and especially, reinvigorated Star Trek for an all new generation of fake-pointy-eared fans, it would be unfair to let the filmmaker simply take time off to garden or crochet, much less celebrate the film's projected $72 million opening weekend. Especially since there are just so many other franchises and film series that deserve – or perhaps more accurately – need his golden touch. As such, we've thoughtfully assembled a short list of franchises that Abrams could and should take over, tackle, and reboot. And while we tailored our selections to suit the filmmaker's writing and directing strengths, we encourage you to leave your comments and suggestions which films and franchises you think might be better suited to Abrams' cinematic style.

In no particular order:

Sometimes the movie business seems like a giant game of Jenga doesn't it? Just when you think you have a solid little tower on your hands, boom! Some jerk yanks out the support beam and suddenly you're looking at a bunch of wood. But one of the hottest spec scripts in Hollywood right now has gotten one very high-profile block added to the pile. The Hollywood Reporter's Risky Biz Blog is reporting that Christian Bale has unofficially "attached" himself to star alongside Mark "Say hi to your mother for me" Wahlberg in the thriller, Prisoners.

There aren't many details about Aaron Guzikowski's script, but here's the official synopsis so far: "After his 6-year-old daughter and her friend are kidnapped, a small-town carpenter butts heads with a young, brash detective in charge of the investigation. The father is a Bible-reading, deer-hunting survivalist. The cop, meanwhile, can't wait to get to the city. Feeling failed by the law, the father captures the man he believes responsible and begins to torture him in a desperate attempt to find out what he did with the girls, whom he's convinced are still alive." When Wahlberg first signed on, there was no mention of his role in the film, but I'd like to play fantasy casting director if I may and suggest Bale as the bible-thumping survivalist and Wahlberg as the cop?

Okay, so what are we going to do about Superman? Obviously Bryan Singer is done with the Man of Steel; he's moved on to other projects. Meanwhile, Mark Millar (the brains behind Wanted and Kick-Ass) has been extremely vocal in his quest to take over the superhero franchise ... but his (and our) cries and screams seem to have been ignored by Warner Bros. Now, however, Millar has returned to update fans on his blog and unfortunately it doesn't sound very promising. He says, "Warner's talked to us and a few other writer/ director teams, but things seem to be in stasis right now. As far as I understand, nothing is happening with Superman at the moment and so the director and I are just working on another project. If it happens, great. If it doesn't, no biggie."

Millar went on to vent a little more, adding a cheap shot or two ("The idea of taking notes from the guys who liked the idea of Superman lying in bed for the final act of Returns doesn't sound good to me"), and looks to be just about out of the running for a reboot that really needs to succeed this time around. And that's probably why Warners is taking so much time with it -- they desperately need to get Superman right, and they desperately want that one-two punch of Supes and Batman. As Millar notes, "I think Avika Goldsman (Batman and Robin dude) has been charged with rethinking them to match the Marvel juggernaut."

But how do you reboot Superman in an age where folks want their superheroes dark and a little bit dirty? Do you start from the beginning or pick it up somewhere in the middle, like Singer did? What do you want to see? Which villains should they include? And who the hell do you get to play the big S?

Last summer, Bryan Singer was still in the Superman chair, toying with the idea of producing Capeshooters. Now? He's looking at directing an adaptation of Radical Comics' Freedom Formula for New Regency, according to Variety.

The five-issue series was launched at last year's ComicCon, which is also when Singer and Radical's Barry Levine became interested in Edmund Shern's series.
Michael Finch has been hired to write the script -- and according to Levine, he "came up with an incredible take that goes deeper into the mythology of the source material."

I wish I could say I really see what they did with the premise. It's set in a future where the government is run by corporations, and fighter jets have been replaced by genetically engineered pilots who race in "exosuits." The racers are slaves, held captive by their bloodline, until one young man named Zee who discovers that his bloodline has the power to change society. It's like Spartacus by way of the Thunderdome and podracing on Tatooine.

Admittedly, I haven't read the series, just a preview. Several comic blogs have reviewed it favorably, for what it's worth. Perhaps it's excellent, and miles away from something that belongs in the 1980s. You can judge for yourself, as CBR has a preview of the first issue, and Radical has a trailer up.

My main (and only big) problem with Bryan Singer's Valkyrie is the same problem I have with "movie stars" in general. For example, I believe that Tom Cruise is a very fine actor, or at least a generally underrated one, but since he's a Movie Star before he's an Actor (and yes, he is), I find it almost impossible to LOSE him in a role. Sean Penn gets lost in a role. He just vanishes! Johnny Depp does it a lot, too. (Or at least he used to before the Pirate flicks came along.) Julia Roberts as a Victorian Queen is still Julia Roberts to me, which is why I prefer those chameleon-ish character players like Gary Oldman and John Malkovich.

In other words, I never once (for a second) "bought" Tom Cruise as a grizzled, burnt-out, one-armed German army officer in the new wartime thriller Valkyrie -- but because he's a movie star who knows how to carry a flick, he still anchors the tale with a strong and crisp screen presence. And while, yeah, it is a little distracting to hear high-ranking German soldiers speaking with American, British and Irish accents, the simple fact is that Valkyrie is a very slick old-school-style adventure movie. In some ways it feels like a perfectly enjoyable mid-'50s war movie that's been re-made with only the finest in modern cinematic technology. The plot is pure potboiler, but the look is grade-A Hollywood.

Best known as the writer of The Usual Suspects, Christopher McQuarrie has an impressive number of films on his resume (including his criminally overlooked directorial debut, The Way of the Gun), but Valkyrie -- opening nationwide this week -- saw him also serve as a producer alongside director Bryan Singer and star Tom Cruise. A thriller about the 1944 plot inside the German military to try and assassinate Adolph Hitler, Valkyrie turns one of history's nightmares into a taut modern thriller -- a tricky balancing act that the film pulls off: "What we tried to do was to always maintain the focus that this was a movie about an event, that this was a movie about the events of July 20th (1944), and remain focused on that. We weren't making a bio-pic, we weren't making a film about the Holocaust -- all of those things were happening ... (but) this movie is about this incredible event that happened. ... And at the same time, maintaining a sense of responsibility."

McQuarrie spoke with Cinematical from New York about working alongside the German government, how producing a mega-million war film was like "drinking from a firehose," forgoing German accents, his possible future take on superheroic franchise The Champions and much more. You can listen to the podcast here at Cinematical by clicking below:



You can also download the interview in full right here -- and those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.

I don't need much of an excuse to visit Austin, Texas. Find me an event that A) strings more than four movies together, and B) takes place at one of the Alamo Drafthouse movie theaters, and there's a good chance I'm checking my bank account, desperately scrambling for flight money. But despite the fact that I've done five SXSW visits, three Fantastic Fest trips, and a few more Austin journeys just for the heck of it ... I'd never attended a BNAT shindig. But I made it to the tenth annual Butt-Numb-a-Thon, and of course I had a damn good time once it got rolling.

Let's just do a quick run-through, chronologically speaking, and I'm listing just the FULL movies here. At the end I'll go over the various clips we were treated to...