sam worthington Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Sony's thriller The Tourist just keeps sending its talent packing. Originally set to be a vehicle for Tom Cruise and Charlize Theron, it shifted gears last month and was re-cast with Angelina Jolie and Sam Worthington. But once again, The Tourist finds itself without travel arrangements for a male lead as Variety reports that Worthington is out due to "creative disagreements" and Johnny Depp is in.

Depp is still in talks to play the hapless American tourist, and with the way this film is going, one can't assume it's finalized. But if it is, it might just be the casting coup of 2010. A Depp-Jolie pair-up has been something dreamed about by a lot of producers and studios over the years. Once upon a time, rumor even had them attached to play Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. People want to see them having onscreen sex. It'd be the hottest thing since ... well, Brad Pitt and Jolie having sex onscreen. (And off. Hey, I'm just being honest. There was a reason everyone wanted to see their offspring.)

The Tourist is also on the hunt for a director. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck was circling the project, but departed alongside Worthington over those whispery creative differences. Reportedly, a lot of directors are interested, including Alfonso Cuaron. While shake-ups can be be a sign of a bad film, I'd like to think that a thriller that winds up with Jolie, Depp, and Cuaron came together exactly as it was meant to.

It remains to be seen what Mad Max fans will think, but the businesses of Australia are excited that work on Mad Max 4: Fury Road will begin immediately, according to a story today in the Daily Telegraph. There is no confirmation as to who will be starring in the film, but it will most likely not be Mel Gibson. The likeliest candidate as of now is Sam Worthington (Terminator: Salvation) (not Tom Hardy), with Charlize Theron as the leading lady. Original Mad Max director George Miller -- who most recently gave us Happy Feet -- will once again helm.

Either way, the locals are thrilled. Some of the locations used on the previous three films, Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2 (a.k.a. The Road Warrior) (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), have become local attractions. The owner of one such attraction, the Silverton Hotel, said, (insert Australian accent here): "This is bloody huge. Absolutely magnificent. Silverton depends on the film industry, it survives on the film industry, and if Mad Max is going to be filmed here it's going to be just tremendous."

The production is expected to provide more than 500 local jobs and funnel tens of millions of dollars into the local economy. Pre-production begins immediately, with shooting scheduled to begin next year.

UPDATE: Watch a video after the jump of director George Miller introducing some of the vehicles being used in the new Mad Max movie, as well as addressing some of the casting rumors. According to the man himself, nothing is definitive yet and he still has a lot more people to see.

Angelina Jolie's pet project The Tourist might finally have a director, according to Variety. Internationally acclaimed director and writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck "hasn't formally entered into negotiations," but it's looking likely that the man behind the critically hailed film The Lives of Others will be hopping behind the camera for this 2011 release.

Jolie reportedly turned down the sequel of Wanted in favor of The Tourist (although the rumors of her return of the sexy tattooed assassin remain at large) but she was holding out on officially signing on to The Tourist until Spyglass found a director she approved of.

Strangely enough, Tom Cruise was originally set to costar but dropped out in favor of Knight & Day with Cameron Diaz. Jolie's latest film, Salt, was originally set to star Tom Cruise, but then he backed out, the writers did a quick fix-me-up on the script, and voila -- here's Evelyn Salt!

In any case, this remake of Anthony Zimmer is about an Interpol agent hot on the trail of a former paramour and criminal; the spy makes use of an American tourist to help find her. Sam Worthington (Avatar) costars as the tourist, and according to /Film, Jolie plays the ex. On the other hand, Variety is reporting that she plays the Interpol agent. Hollywood Reporter is taking the safer route and not saying what Jolie's role will be. Yikes!

2011 sounds like one of those things where the movie keeps getting pushed back more and more until the stars and director are all like, "Whatever, I have no idea what's happening with that any more." But remember when Angelina Jolie provided us guilty pleasure movies like The Bone Collector? I would be happy to see her as the spy or the criminal; what do you think?

A lot can change in a year. Back in 2008, Charlize Theron and Tom Cruise were getting ready for the U.S. remake of The Tourist. Now Miss Theron is out, and The Hollywood Reporter's Risky Biz Blog reports that sources say Angelina Jolie is in talks to replace her. But don't worry -- this won't result in the most epically awkward and strange pairing of all time. (Can you imagine Jolie and Cruise getting busy with sex and espionage?) See, Cruise has since left the project as well, and Sam Worthington has signed on -- an actor who is quickly making a big name for himself between Terminator : Salvation and the upcoming Avatar.

The original, Anthony Zimmer, focused on a regular person pulled into a mess between a criminal, the mob, his mistress, and the law, because he resembled this criminal. When Theron signed on, however, the remake was said to focus on an "American vacationer who gets sucked into a dark world of espionage when an Interpol agent taps him to help her catch a sneaky bad guy." Not quite the same thing, but with all the changes going on, who knows how it will turn out? What Risky does say is that her role is "one-part seductress, one-part action," so it sounds like the final product will come out somewhere between the two plots.

But that's not the only changes coming to this long-in-gestation project. It seems that Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day helmer Bharat Nalluri is also out; so much for seeing him jump from retro comedy to international intrigue. I could ask who you think should replace the director, but it's not like this project is taking easy-to-guess jumps. Tom Cruise to Sam Worthington. Charlize Theron to Angelina Jolie... Stay tuned to see how it all turns out! But in the meantime, what do you think of the changes?

Last night saw attendees of the Real D-sponsored Fantastic Fest greeted with an extended look at footage from James Cameron's forthcoming Avatar, and with it (for me at least) a more defined shift in expectations for the long-awaited film. The footage -- more often than not composed of extended scenes from Avatar Day -- still looks terrifically realized in 3-D, but the bits and pieces of story filled in by producer Jon Landau between scenes and the voice-over of Sam Worthington's character during them suggest something a little less... rapturous.

While some folks were partaking in Avatar Day across the country, a very dusty Sam Worthington was chatting up a group of journalists across the pond on the set of Clash of the Titans. (Who, uh, missed seeing Avatar on the big screen.) The Aussie actor has been reading our reactions to the trailer and the IMAX/3D experience, and he wants you to know that Avatar is built for the theater and not your laptop. But will James Cameron's plan to get people back into theaters work?

And it's a lot of pressure for the hot young star, whose done five blockbuster projects in a row and is ready to "take four months off and just do f*ckin' nothing... hang out with my mates."

Worthington said, "Man, it's got a hell of a lot of hype to it. I read all what was said yesterday about the trailer and I can see their point. As I said, it's not meant to be [seen] on an Apple Mac. It's built for IMAX. It's built for 3D. That's what [James Cameron] designed it for. He's designed it to bring people back to the cinema. It's interesting that he's released that trailer, that Jim's gone and done that, and then the next day shows it in IMAX. One extreme to the other. We get the criticism and then we get the rave reviews of what it looks like in its own formula. That's obviously going to get people to think and go, "Damn right! I'm going to go and see this at the cinema!" Jim has always said to me he wants to bring people back to the movies, and he's a smart enough man for that to be tactical."

It was a roundabout trip that led me to my local IMAX for Avatar day. For starters, I'm not a big fan of 'sneak peeks' -- I'm all for teasers and trailers, but I'm a firm believer in going in to a movie with as much as a blank slate as possible, and that's not always easy in this job. But the thing is, I love a cultural phenomenon, and brother -- Avatar is one of 'em. So I decided to put up with stalled servers at Fox and multiple confirmation emails with threats of everything short of a cavity search to watch a 16 minute commercial. Add to the fact that while I admire the technical stylings of James Cameron, I've never counted myself as one of the devoted. So as you can see, I was hardly the perfect audience for his experiment and I went in to that theater with an open mind, but very few expectations.

Now, thankfully, I tend to be little high strung about these things, and so I showed up an hour early with email and ID in hand -- and judging by Elisabeth's experience with Fox flacks, boy am I glad I did. So there I was in my seat, and as I looked around I kept thinking: what was with the half empty theater? After listening to horror stories of line-ups and sold out shows this made no sense to me. So I have to wonder if all that talk of sold out showings were an attempt by Fox to limit 'exposure' of the film (and piracy). Maybe they just wanted to beef up the hype surrounding the event by touting sold out tickets. But if that was their plan, then it might have backfired because to me, a half-empty theater made the movie look like the bloated, over-hyped flick that some detractors were calling it in the first place. That said, after a brief intro from the man himself (and in 3D no less!) it was time to get on with the show.

After the jump: my two cents on what I saw...

UPDATE 3: The Apple links work now. Watch it in HD right over here.

UPDATE 2: Here's a link that works! It's the French trailer, but since there's only one line of dialogue in the whole thing, it'll do until Apple fixes their glitch.

UPDATE: 15 minutes in and it appears Apple is having issues with the trailer launch. Stay tuned ...


Come one, come all -- the long-awaited trailer for James Cameron's much buzzed-about Avatar has finally arrived online over at Apple. The debut trailer -- which is the first footage from the film to be shown to a mass audience outside a convention-like atmosphere -- is part of a larger marketing push for the film this week, which includes the release of several new photos (see gallery below) and a special presentation of an extended 16-minute trailer in 3D to be screened at IMAX theaters across the globe tomorrow.

In the meantime, though, prepare to feast your eyes on what some say is a film that could change the way we watch, well, film. The big-budgeted sci-fi flick follows a paraplegic war veteran (Sam Worthington) who is unwillingly sent to the distant planet of Pandora to help establish a human settlement. It's there that he'll find himself in the midst of a battle between humans and the planet's indigenous Na'vi race. Tack on marvelous, out-of-this-world special effects -- coupled with 3D like you've never seen it before -- and you get the most anticipated film of 2009 that no one seems to know anything about.

Enough babbling ... watch the trailer right over here and then let us know what you think. Does Avatar look like it can live up to the hype? The film drops in theaters on December 18.

Finally! A new photo from James Cameron's Avatar has been released online via Fox International and it's a pretty cool one featuring the film's star Sam Worthington sitting in front of his Avatar. Worthington plays a paraplegic war veteran who's asked to travel to the distant planet of Pandora on a mining operation. But because the planet is too harsh for humans, they've developed a cloning program that mixes human DNA with that of the planet's resident creatures, the Na'vi -- thus allowing our paraplegic to walk again inside the body of his Avatar, which also houses his consciousness. It's all rather freaky, but very cool nonetheless.

Check out the rest -- including the full image -- over on SciFi Squad

Despite the fact that James Cameron took 12 years to produce a fiction follow-up to his blockbuster, award-winning Titanic, he has wasted no time letting folks know that the forthcoming Avatar is destined to be a masterpiece. And yet, given what he showed today at the San Diego Comic-Con, one can hardly blame him for a surplus of confidence. Screening some 25 minutes of material to a capacity crowd for the first time anywhere, Cameron proved that recent interviews, public appearances and hype opportunities are more than just big talk.

Among the information revealed or exposed about Avatar: