legion Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Paul Bettany obviously has a thing for the sacrilegious. Fresh off playing the Archangel Michael in Legion, Bettany is reteaming with director Scott Stewart for Priest, ScreenGems' adaptation of Hyung Min-woo's popular manga series.

Bettany will play Ivan Isaacs, the warrior priest who turns his back on the Church to rescue his niece from a pack of vampires. The role once belonged to Gerard Butler, until the project fell apart sometime in 2006. ScreenGems revived the project last December with Stewart, keeping Cory Goodman's screenplay.

The casting came about not out of Bettany and Stewart's desire to reunite for religion, but due to ScreenGems president Clint Culpepper, who apparently thought Isaacs needed to be played by a former albino monk: "I knew the moment I saw Stewart's first cut of Legion that Bettany was Priest and so I mentioned it to him immediately."

Whether this Priest will make it any further into production than Andrew Douglas and Gerard Butler's will remain to be seen -- but since everyone wants their own religious pseudo-western, I bet the second time will be the charm. I still wish Butler's version would have taken off, but Bettany is probably a better physical choice for the role. He bears an uncanny resemblance to the art, anyway. I'm not a huge fan of the series, so hopefully some manga experts can weigh in with what they think of the casting.

Variety reports that Paul Bettany's Legion has just added a whole crowd of actors, including the star power of Dennis Quaid, Kate Walsh, and Tyrese Gibson. They will be headlining a cast that includes Jon Tenney, Charles S. Dutton, Lucas Black, Adrianne Palicki, Kevin Durand and Willa Holland. They've signed on just in time, as the movie is about to start shooting in New Mexico.

Legion is a thriller that stars Bettany as the archangel Michael, who is all that stands between mankind and an apocalypse after God has lost faith in humanity. But the Almighty apparently hasn't lost all hope -- a child is on the way who is the second coming of Christ, and a group of strangers who recognize the fact must band together to save it. It is director Scott Stewart's first feature film, from a script he co-wrote with Peter Schink.

I am quite intrigued by the movie, as I am a sucker for any kind of Biblical thriller. The problem is that they are almost always terrible. (Though I will always give props to The Prophecy for proving that the Devil does, in fact, wear a mullet.) The combination of Paul Bettany and Dennis Quaid gives me some hope though, since they generally pick good scripts. We'll see if this is one of them.

We might have well-meaning prophets roaming the earth in the form of Jonny Lee Miller on television, but things are about to get meaner on the big screen as God gets ticked off with Earth. I imagine this will be nothing like Two of a Kind, where John Travolta and Olivia Newton John had to fall in love for God to not wipe out the human race. Instead, there's thrills, an archangel, and the arid desert.

Variety reports that Paul Bettany has signed on to star in an upcoming thriller called Legion. From a script by Scott Stewart and Peter Schink, which Stewart will direct, the film focuses on "what happens when God loses faith in humanity and sends his legion of angels to wipe out the human race for the second time. Mankind's only hope lies in a group of misfits holed up in a diner in the desert who are aided by the archangel Michael (Bettany)." Now, I get how humans can save the day against monsters and the like, but just how do you fight God? I can only imagine that these guys will have to prove their worth to save the day, because it's not like you can point a bazooka at the sky and put the big Dude in his place.

So, apparently Stewart's script involvement was a rewrite, and Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper says: "I was so impressed with his rewrite that I took the meeting with him, and his visual presentation closed the deal. I'm sure he had the same impact on Paul." Sounds...impactful. Production begins next month in New Mexico, so I imagine we'll hear about more cast soon, and then get to see this impact for ourselves soon enough.