Michael Arndt Tagged Articles at Cinematical

You will see this headline pass through your Google readers and your Twitter feeds today: "Mike Mitchell to Helm Monster Squad." Your heart will race, your skin will flush with fury, and you'll set off to your favorite site (hopefully it's Cinematical) to pound out your anger via your keyboard. Not another remake! Not The Monster Squad! But here's where I can reassure you. Calm down. It's not Fred Dekker and Shane Black's Monster Squad.

Let's let your heart rate settle back to normal. Is it? All right then. According to The Hollywood Reporter and its misleading headline, Mike Mitchell is indeed directing a film called Monster Squad for Warner Bros. Like Dekker's film, it too is a supernatural comedy. But unlike Dekker's film, it once boasted the title Nightcrawlers, and was based on a spec by Brian Lynch.

It's reportedly changed plotlines numerous times. Variety notes that it was once centered on an international organization of children who have made it their mission to combat the monsters under the bed. (Familiar!) Michael Arndt rewrote the script to star a neurotic father who must face down childhood monsters. Warner Bros is keeping the current version by Brad Copeland under tight wraps, but it doesn't take much to suppose it deals with "monsters" and a "squad" that deals with them on some level. All teasing aside, this is good news because it means Warner Bros has opted for an original (but undoubtedly reminiscent) idea over their rival Paramount, who was toying with a remake as of last year.

It has been over a year since the director and screenwriter were named for Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich and Michael Arndt). Finally, it seems that we're getting some plot details, but there's a case of dueling summaries going on. Over at Empire, they say that The Wall Street Journal got a bit loose-lipped in an article they recently ran about Disney Pixar stopping the outsourcing of their movies' video games. The Journal says: "Woody the cowboy and his toy-box friends are dumped in a day-care center after their owner, Andy, leaves for college." That makes sense. It's been 11 years since the last film, so a whole lot of time has gone by (not that time really matters in the film world).

Now, the twist comes in over at IMDb. Just the other day, the plot summary was updated and it says: "In this new adventure, Buzz Lightyear has encountered a malfunction and is being sent to Taiwan to be fixed. It appears that these malfunctions are occurring with toys all around the world! Now, Woody and a group of his friends are on a mission to save Buzz's destruction."

So, did the Journal really leak something? Is Disney/Pixar putting up a bunch of different summaries to mess with our minds? Or, is this summary on IMDb just b-s?

More importantly: Which would you prefer?

Whenever I see "McG," I imagine what it will be like for the guy years from now. Only having to write out 3 letters for your full name is pretty handy, but will he still prefer to be called that years from now? I imagine this old, brittle 90-something man hobbling around the old folks' home and getting incensed when nurses call him Joseph. Channeling Fisher Stevens in Hackers, I see him saying: "My name is The McG." Anyway, that future is long-off, and right now, the man is smoking. He just signed a 3-year, first-look deal for his Wonderland Sound and Vision banner with Warner Brothers.

Hoping to tap into the success his company has found in television, the McG says: "We want to produce three movies a year. I want to direct one of them every year, and we want to go into a run of extreme productivity with Wonderland-branded pictures. We've had success on the TV front, and we want to match that profile in the film space." First up, potentially in November, is a VR-heavy action comedy called Nightcrawlers -- penned by Little Miss Sunshine writer Michael Arndt. The film is about a neurotic dad who must face his childhood tormentor to get over his fear of the dark and the monsters who haunt him. McG describes it as "a buddy comedy where what kids are afraid of turns out to be real, and our guys have to go into these fearscapes and battle all these monsters." Now that is a jump from child models and horny grandpas.

The other film gearing up will be directed by the man himself -- Yucatan. The film is based on a whopping 1,700 or so pages of notes and storyboards made by the late Steve McQueen that were recently found. It's a heist drama set in the Yucatan Peninsula, and WB has picked up Paul Scheuring (Prison Break) to write the script. Why'd he pick this one? As McG* so eloquently says: "Like any suburban pussy, I'm infatuated with Steve McQueen."

*Thanks for spotting that, Stewart! MB

Since winning the Best Actress Oscar for role as June Carter in Walk the Line, and splitting from Ryan Philippe, Reese Witherspoon has been lying low. She took up a stint in Penelope, but that wasn't half as high-profile as some of her recent, previous work like Sweet Home Alabama and Just Like Heaven. Now she's got a thriller with Jake Gyllenhaal in post-production, a Delia Ephron comedy to star in and from Variety today -- a classic remake. Universal Pictures has secured the actress for the starring role in a remake of Claudette Colbert's 1939 film, Midnight.

The original is about an American, ex-showgirl in Paris who pretends that she's Hungarian royalty to get into the Parisian elite and find a man with money, rather than love. She uses the title Baroness Czerny -- coming from the name of a poor cab driver she rejected for his lack of money. Eve meets Georges Flammarion, who will keep her secret if she woos his wife's lover away. Of course, while she's being wooed by big money, that ol' cab driver is still after her. Imagining this remade makes me a bit nervous, since it could easily slide into the terrible realm of eye-gouging romcoms, but this flick has a twist -- it's the adapted brainchild of Michael Arndt, the guy who won an Oscar for writing Little Miss Sunshine. According to him, the film has "long been one of my favorite films, and it is easily one of the best comedies of the '30's. Being given the chance to update the film with Reese in the lead is simply a dream come true." If the re-made Midnight has any of the spunk of his spastic Sunshine family, this little project might just work.