You know, I was so proud of Zack Snyder. After doing a George Romero remake (Dawn Of The Dead) and two comic book adaptations (300 and Watchmen) I was happy to hear that he was finally doing an original film, Sucker Punch, before he got started on the next Superman film.
Of course, then I found out that he’s just remaking Disney animation…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQYKfw4fBhM[/youtube]
Hat tip: Jennifer Heddle.
We started hearing about director Zack Snyder working on adapting Kathryn Lasky’s Guardians of Ga’Hoole as his first foray into animation as his work on The Watchmen was concluding. Legend of the Guardians is finally opening on September 24 and Warner Bros. just released the first one-sheet for the feature.
Here are the other vital stats:
Cast: Emily Barclay, Abbie Cornish, Ryan Kwanten, Anthony LaPaglia,
Miriam Margolyes, Helen Mirren, Sam Neill, Geoffrey Rush, Jim Sturgess,
Hugo Weaving, Richard Roxburgh, David Wenham
Writers: John Orloff and Emil Stern
Producer: Zareh Nalbandian
Executive Producers: Donald De Line, Deborah Snyder, Lionel Wigram, Chris DeFaria, Kathryn Lasky, Bruce Berman
Fantasy Adventure. Acclaimed filmmaker Zack Snyder makes his animation debut with the fantasy family adventure. The film follows Soren, a young owl enthralled by his father’s epic stories of the Guardians of Ga’Hoole, a mythic band of winged warriors who had fought a great battle to save all of owlkind from the evil Pure Ones. While Soren dreams of someday joining his heroes, his older brother, Kludd, scoffs at the notion, and yearns to hunt, fly and steal his father’s favor from his younger sibling. But Kludd’s jealousy has terrible consequences—causing both owlets to fall from their treetop home and right into the talons of the Pure Ones. Now it is up to Soren to make a daring escape with the help of other brave young owls. Together they soar across the sea and through the mist to find the Great Tree, home of the legendary Guardians of Ga’Hoole—Soren’s only hope of defeating the Pure Ones and saving the owl kingdoms.
A new Watchmen featurette has gone live over at MySpace, which we note is owned by News Corp., parent company to 20th-Century Fox, the studio suing to gain control over the feature film. Zack Snyder narrates and is worth a look.
Warner Bros and 20th-Century Fox attorneys met with U.S. District Court Judge Gary Feess on Monday for a conference in the wake of the Christmas Eve ruling saying 20th had rights to The Watchmen after all.
Fox’s lawyer indicated that the studio would seek to delay the schedule March 6 release which has sent fans awaiting the Zack Snyder-directed feature into despair.
Warner’s attorney, Stephen A. Marenberg, made it clear they were ready to go to trial, as scheduled for January 20 and remain defiant of the ruling. "We respectfully but vigorously disagree with the court’s ruling and are exploring all of our appellate options. We continue to believe that Fox’s claims have no merit and that we will ultimately prevail, whether at trial or in the Court of Appeals. We have no plans to move the release date of the film," the studio said according to The Hollywood Reporter. "We continue to believe that Fox’s claims have no merit and that we will ultimately prevail, whether at trial or in the Court of Appeals."
When he steered the argument back to the core issues, Feess said, “I have spent more time than I think you can imagine working on your case at a time when I didn’t expect to be working on it.” As a result, he was looking for remedies not rehashing.
"We are gratified by the recognition of our rights in the Judge’s order, which speaks for itself," Fox said in a statement.
Fox’s contention has been that their agreement with producer Lawrence Gordon required him to offer them first dibs on the feature each time it was reconfigured. They claim the Zack Snyder version, which was ultimately filmed, was never offered to them. Gordon, who has not been named in the lawsuit, did not testify during the hearings to date and Feess said Monday that his silence hurt Warners’ case. “The court takes a dim view of this conduct,” Feess wrote as a footnote to his December 24 ruling, according to The New York Times. “The court will not, during the remainder of this case, receive any evidence from Gordon that attempts to contradict any aspect of this court’s ruling on the copyright issues under discussion.”
Warner has said when they signed with Gordon, he never mentioned his obligation to Fox and if anyone owes the studio money, it should be the producer not Warner Bros.
Zack Snyder spoke with Dark Horizons about the recent sneak of The Watchmen and the audience’s reaction, especially to the altered ending.
"We had the best test scores in the history of Warner Bros. with 300 and I kept telling them look the movie is not like 300, don’t think that it is – it’s not going to be the same experience,” Snyder said. “Some people are going to go ‘what the f**k is this’ and I go that’s ok. That’s the thing that you fight… The one thing that was cool was that anyone who had read the graphic novel who was at the screening rated the film ‘excellent’, for me I’m like ‘I’m done’."
So about the squid and the ending?
"The fans, god love ’em, they’re all up in arms about the squid,” he said. “What they should be up in arms about are things like shooting the pregnant woman, ‘God is real and he’s American’, whether that‘s in the movie. That’s my point of view, maybe I’m crazy.
"The squid was not in the movie when I got the script, the squid was never in any draft that I saw. My point is only that there was this elegant solution to the squid problem that I kind of embraced. I’m a fan of the thing as much as anyone, I was saying what are we going to do about this before I even read the script."
He confirmed a second trailer will be released this coming Friday when Quantum of Solace hits theaters in America. "I just saw the final version of it this morning… it’s a little bit more story, a teeny bit more like a full trailer. This is much more like ‘someone’s picking off costume heroes’. You’ll get a sense of the characters plight you know, ‘we were supposed to make the world a better place… what happened to the American Dream’."
A third trailer will be released in early 2009, prior to the March 6 release date.
"The film’s pretty much done in my book. There’s still some visual effects shots which I’m reviewing… there’s probably close to 2000 effects shots in the film" he added.
Snyder’s next film will be his first animated project, Guardians of Ga’Hoole, coming in 2010.
With the wild success of Zack Snyder’s 300, it’s hardly a surprise that there’s a sequel in the works. Yes, most of the cast is dead by story’s end, but before you call call madness, remember that this, is, SPARTA!! we’re talking about here.
IESB caught up with Snyder at a Watchmen event in Hollywood the other day, and got his two cents on the film’s follow-up. According to the director, development on the film project will only occur when Frank Miller has finished writing and illustrating the graphic novel’s sequel. Snyder wants Miller to have full creative control of the novel’s story, as was the case with 300.
It’s hard to imagine a sequel to 300 with Leonidas and the gang considering the film’s ending. There’s been speculation that the project would be a prequel rather than a sequel, thereby allowing Leonidas to return to fight again. Snyder set the record straight by pegging the film’s timeline between the Battle of Thermopylae and the Battle of Platea. In the film’s final narration, which takes place just before the Battle of Platea, Dilios reveals that Leonidas "died barely a year ago." Snyder says that the sequel will take place during this time, so the odds of Leonidas returning are pretty slim unless it’s in rotting carcass form.
300, based on a graphic novel of the same name by Frank Miller, is a dramatization of the famous Battle of Thermopylae where 300 Spartan warriors battled against the Persian Empire. The film, released in March 2007, was the biggest March opening weekend of all time and the third biggest opening for an R-rated picture. The untitled sequel will be based on an as yet completed graphic novel, also by Frank Miller.
It used to be that Hollywood types were found slumming by writing comic books but the new option for creators between films may be creating video games. Slashfilm reports that Zack Snyder has signed with Electronic Arts to create three games for the company. EA, interestingly, will own the intellectual property, but Snyder’s production entity, Cruel & Unusual Films, would make any films based no the games.
EA had a similar deal with Steven Spielberg, signed in 2005 and the first effort, Boom Blox for the Nintendo Wii finally arrived this summer proving that Spielberg is a very good film director. Despite good reviews and his name, sales have been sluggish at best.
“A dialogue needs to be established between filmmakers and game producers,’ Snyder said at Comic-Con International. “It’s not marketing; it can’t be an afterthought.”
Snyder’s adaptation of the Watchmen is scheduled for March 6 release. After that, he has been announced as directing three different projects, all pencilled in for 2010 release. The first, Guardians of Ga’Hoole, is his first animated effort. Another is The Last Photograph but perhaps most interesting is his recently mentioned 300 prequel notion.
In the sixth production diary to be released, director Zack Snyder and his gang reveal some of the techniques utilized in filming Watchmen. In related Watchmen news, DC Comics has printed nearly one million new copies of the collected edition and you can barely enter a retail outlet of any kidn without seeing it on sale. Speaking of sales, Tower Records is offering it at less than 50% cover price while Things From Another World has it for exactly 50% off. Its sales remain brisk and it remains the number one graphic novel and number two book in Literature & Fiction at Amazon.
In news that can only be classified as weird and off-putting while still bordering on cool, there is a new blog entry on the Watchmen official site. In the latest entry, titled "A Mysterious Discovery in New York," production designer Alex McDowell recounts a story where he and director Zack Snyder received a call from a location scout in New York about a house that they "just needed to see." They then rush to a brownstone in Chelsea, to an abandoned building that was days away from destruction. Here’s part of the post:
“The scout tells us that the tunnel and chamber was once a spur of a forgotten subway, an underground maintenance area for the cars, built in the 1920’s. In 1955, the tunnel suffered a collapse that flooded this section of the system, and the lower portions of the track were abandoned. 100 yards from the repair yard the tunnel now opens up directly to the East River.”
“Clearly someone had broken into the chamber from above, probably in the sixties, and build the steel stair that connected directly the basement we’d stumbled into.”
Director Zack Snyder has said he’s trying to stay faithful to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen graphic novel, but that has left Snyder with a whole lot of material and a whole lot of cutting ahead of him.
Slash Film does a good job of sorting through Snyder’s comments about his film adaptation, leading to some speculation on what could be in store for future director’s cut releases.
It was already announced that there would be an animated Black Freighter movie being released around the time when Watchmen hits cinemas, but apparently the extent of its involvement in the Watchmen mythology won’t end there. Snyder made mention that they’ve also filmed the transitions featured in the graphic novel that take the main storyline into the Freighter comic. So even though those wouldn’t be a part of the theatrical cut, they would show up the “super duper director’s cut,” as would the other creations they’ve been working on.
Being that the film is already running at about 3 hours, and Warner Bros. wants to cut it down to 2 and a half, this makes me wonder if they’ll actually be releasing two different director’s cuts: one with the original cut of the film, and one with the extended new cut. If that were the case, that would mean the extended version would probably be running at about 5 hours or more. As much as I love all things Watchmen related, that does not sound ideal. I would love to see Snyder’s full 3 hour cut, but adding in more content beyond that seems excessive. I understand the desire to incorporate the outside footage, but I don’t want to see the flow of the storyline get repeatedly chopped up by hopping between that and stuff that’s only thematically related. I assume it’s issues like these that made creator Alan Moore claim the graphic novel was unfilmable. Some of the things he did with the comic are things you just cannot translate straight to a movie. Which isn’t to say I’m not excited to see the extra footage; I just think the segments will operate more smoothly as its own entity.
Much more at the link, including quotes from Snyder.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
January 20, 2023
The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
February 24, 2022
