Zac Efron Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The biggest enemy of the Footloose remake isn't a music-hating preacher, but its own Creative Differences. After it finally recovered from the loss of Zac Efron by recruiting Chace Crawford and Julianne Hough, Variety reports that Footloose has now lost its captain. Director Kenny Oretega has left the project due to "differences over tone and budget."

Reportedly, Ortega's vision included elaborate dance sequences and a budget of $30 million or more. But Paramount's Adam Goodwin had something different in mind. He saw Footloose with a little less dancing, a little less music, and a lot more edge. He was also hoping the budget would come in around $25 million. Who is right? I don't know. If you want something closer to the original, I'd say Goodwin is spot on. Kevin Bacon did his lithe dance moves in barns and car washes. It was on the cheap. It was also pretty edgy (relatively speaking) in its handling of teenage sexuality. Is any remake going to feature its heroine yelling "I'm not even a virgin!" in the middle of a church? Nah. They'll just dress her sexy.

Paramount is now on the hunt for a new director in order to kick off its Sunday shoes and begin filming by 2010. I was going to say "Maybe this'll be the end of this silly remake" but there's no way that'll happen. Instead, I vote that this Footloose be made with two simultaneous storylines. As they tell the story of the repressive Midwest, we'll also learn about the behind the scenes drama that mirrors the onstage action. Will Ortega's lush vision of music and dance win out? Or will the repressive Goodman crush his freedom of expression? It would be like The French Lieutenant's Woman for high schoolers.

Click image below to view full poster

In Me and Orson Welles, Zac Efron plays a scrappy young actor who manages to get on Orson Welles' good side and earn himself a part in Welles' stage production of Julius Caesar. For a while, anyway. The film, set in the '30s, is directed by Richard Linklater and offers plenty of talent, both big name -- Claire Danes and Efron, natch -- and smaller ones that are on the rise, like Zoe Kazan.

James Rocchi reviewed Me and Orson Welles at TIFF in 2008, and had plenty of good things to say about it: "Linklater gets the tone of a behind-the-scenes comedy drama just right, the flurry of activity on-stage and the "noises off," the parts played when the lights are up and the roles played when the theater is empty.... Me and Orson Welles won't find a mass audience, but the audience that does will find it has a lot to recommend it."

Check out the exclusive poster premiere for Me and Orson Welles by clicking below, and make sure to check out the film when it hits theaters on November 25th. You can also watch the trailer after the jump. Enjoy!

It looks like our beloved tween king really wants to move on from the glitz and glamor of tweendom. They grow up so quickly! Remember when Zac Efron bowed out of Footloose hoping to stop the neverending roll of typecasting after the High School Musicals and Hairspray? Well, he's taken his next step towards making that possible. The Hollywood Reporter posts that Efron will star in an upcoming untitled thriller for Mandate Pictures, one that he will also executive produce.

We're not getting any plot details yet, except for three words. It will be "a sexy thriller." Something along the lines of Basic Instinct? Mulholland Drive? I'm more inclined to believe that it's just an adult thriller, and Mr. Executive Producer wanted some sort of description released to alert us to the more adult fare. As we all know very well by now, "sex," "sexy," "stripper," and those other saucy s-words are essential when Disney alums try to break out of the fluff and into the meaty adult roles.

Leslie Dixon, the multifaceted writer behind films like The Thomas Crown Affair, Overboard, and Zac's own Hairspray remake will write the script, and as of now, there's no director attached. I'm just trying to imagine the dude in a sexy movie, but any film I slip him into makes me giggle, so I turn the question over to you: Are you ready for sexy Efron thrills?

When you can't get Zac Efron to bring Footloose's Ren McCormack into the singing and dancing twenty-first century, who do you get? Do you twist the race? Grab a girl? Get creative and go in an entirely different direction? Naw. You go for the guy who looks the most like the High School Musical star!

Two months after Efron exited from the musical Footloose remake, fearing the woes of a type-casted life, Cinematical has received a press release that reports that the rumors are true -- Gossip Girl's Chace Crawford has nabbed the gig. Along with this casting announcement, Paramount said that no female lead has been picked yet. However, EW sources are throwing around names like Hayden Panettiere and Julianne Hough. Production will begin in March, 2010.

Beyond smooching Blair on GG, Crawford has got a slew of thrillers and horror under his belt, from The Haunting of Molly Hartley to the upcoming Twelve. And now he's moving to the smile-heavy world of musicals, taking on a role that Zac Efron backed out of, and doing so as a look-alike. Am I missing something? I'm going to assume this gig has a huge paycheck, because I can see no other reason Crawford would want to make himself an Efron replacement -- especially when he's already got some solid gigs.

Is the lure of cutting loose really that powerful?

(Note: Possible spoilers ahead for 17 Again.)

Before all the spring movies get pushed completely out of the way by the summer blockbusters, here's a question for you: Did the star of High School Musical make a movie in favor of teen pregnancy? Conceding that she may be taking Zac Efron and 17 Again way too seriously, actress Elizabeth Banks (The Uninvited, Zack and Miri Make a Porno) writes in The Huffington Post: "The message of the movie seemed to be ... knocking up your high school sweetheart is A-OK! Especially if you give up that Syracuse scholarship to marry her! F College!"

Banks is careful to note that she really enjoyed the movie and everyone in it before expressing her concerns: "This movie pretty much glamorizes teenage parenting. ... The problem with this message is that, according to unreliable online sources and my own anecdotal evidence collected over my 3?-something years: this is crap. ... Seriously, this film is a fun ride. I just wish the flick had explicitly mentioned, just mentioned, that it might not be cool to have a kid when you're 18 so for G-D's sake, use birth control!"

Unlike Banks, I am not "inappropriately lustful" for Efron and have no great desire to see the movie. (Jette Kernion reviewed it for Cinematical.) But 17 Again has made a good deal of money, which obviously means a lot of you have seen it. So is Elizabeth Banks really taking the movie too seriously? Are comedies exempt from serious consideration? Do movies aimed specifically at teens have a greater responsibility to include information that reflects real-life consequences of the actions depicted?

Each time I close my eyes I hear the faraway beating of drums and see the visions -- those visions of phantasms older than time itself that penetrate through my conscious mind and to the very core of my soul. It began three years ago, when the Ancient Ones emerged from the darkest depths of the sea to reclaim dominion over this world, which is older and more terrifying than the mind could theretofore comprehend. One of them called itself "Za'c Efron" -- but that was a crude approximation, for the human tongue cannot hope to speak the dread language of the Ancient Ones.

It was the children who first saw the visions. The dreams' cheerful, musical exterior obscured their sinister, unspeakable true nature, driving thousands to insanity and some to death. Toward the end, the children congregated in Temples -- perversely called "Theaters" by their bedeviled constructors -- to worship Za'c Efron, and 90 million dollars was spent. Even now, millions of children play and replay these awful sights in their very homes, paying further tribute. And still, having slumbered for untold millenia, Za'c Efron hungers for more. Always more.

Even now, restless crowds -- the children who remain, yes, but now adults and the old, too -- clamor through the dark streets to behold Za'c Efron's latest writhing triumph, an alien horror called 17 Again. In a mere three days, $24.1 million of tribute was collected, and all fell before Za'c Efron. Russell Crowe and State of Play were content with $14.1 million, and Crank: High Voltage received only $6.5 million, $4 million less than even the Crank that came three years ago. Such was the terrible power of the Ancient Ones -- the detestable gargoyles from the black sea of the cosmos who grip us and carry us, inexorably, toward madness.

With apologies to H.P. Lovecraft, check out the weekend top 10 after the jump.

This is difficult for me to confess, but I'm starting to like Zac Efron ... although not in a crushworthy way, because at my age, that would be creepy. High School Musical 3 was not my thing, and he didn't make an impression on me in Hairspray, but I thought he was wonderfully energetic and fun in Me and Orson Welles when I saw Richard Linklater's film at SXSW last month. And now Efron is starring in 17 Again, a run-of-the-mill family comedy that would be tiresome if not for Efron and a few of the other cast members. Together, these actors kept me from digging through my purse continually for my phone so I could see how many minutes were left in the movie.

17 Again drags out every cliche from body-changing movies -- if you don't know them, check out Christopher Campbell's hilariously accurate list on SpoutBlog -- and unfortunately, doesn't try anything new or suspenseful. In this particular variation, Mike (Matthew Perry) is still reliving his high-school days, when he was the BMOC and a basketball star and everything was perfect, until he made a choice that has landed him with a dead-end job, two kids in high school who practically ignore him, and a wife (Leslie Mann) who's divorcing him because she's justifiably tired of his eternal whininess. So he wishes he were his teenage self again, and does so in front of a Clarence-esque janitor (Brian Doyle-Murray) -- and whammo! He's 17, but everyone else stayed the same age. Now he can go back to high school and help his kids and shoot lots of hoops and make it all better.

Get ready folks, because if there's a movie from the 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s that was popular and featured a teenage male in the lead role, there's a good chance Zac Efron's name will be mentioned with regards to a remake. Dude was real close to starring in a Footloose reboot, and now folks are beginning to go near a film I deem untouchable (mainly because it's right up there with my favorite movies of all time): Back to the Future.

Teen Hollywood claims Efron really wants to play Marty McFly in a new Back to the Future movie. However, they seem to have dreamt that up because the only Efron quote presented in their article shows he's a fan of the series, but doesn't necessarily want to take over the role held by Michael J. Fox for three films. He says, "Growing up, my favourite thing to do was to climb into the car and play Back To the Future. I would pretend I was Marty McFly." We all did that, Zac, but what most of us didn't do was grow up and buy manage to snag ourselves an actual DeLorean. Yup, Zac owns one (see photo above), and you should see what happens when he gets her up to 88mph.

So he's obviously a huge Back to the Future nut, which, honestly, makes me like him a little bit more now -- but does that mean he'd also jump to play McFly if a studio presented it to him? Or, like a true fan, would he yell, scream, hiss and throw flaming piles of monkey poop at any studio henchman who does so little as hold a conversation about taking on the role in either a sequel or a remake? That's the multi-million dollar question, and I bet you a shiny stack of marbles it crosses his desk sometime soon (if it hasn't already ...).

[via Moviehole]