Guillermo Del Toro loves animation. At one point he had a deal at Disney, which for various reasons fell apart and didn’t lead to any movies. Then he signed up to help oversee Dreamworks Animation movies such as Megamind and Rise Of The Guardians.
Now THR has revealed he’s moving over to Fox Animation, as he’s set up a deal there to make Book Of Life (formerly known as Day Of The Dead), which already has a US release date set of October 10th, 2014. Del Toro will produce, and he’s handpicked TV toon director Jorge Gutierrez to direct the movie.
The THR report has no news on the plot, but when rumours of the movie were first revealed back in February, it was said to be a Romeo and Juliet style love story set against a Mexican Day of the Dead backdrop. There’s also said to be a musical element.
It’ll be interesting to see what this does to Lee Unkrich’s Dia de los Muertos over at Pixar, which is also based around the Day Of The Dead. That movie has no released date, and Del Toro’s film may thrown a spanner in its works.
A few weeks ago it was revealed that Johnny Depp had signed up to star in Transcendence, the directorial debut of Christopher Nolan’s longtime cinematographer, Wally Pfister. However as the time there was no info on the plot.
Penn Badgley (Greetings from Tim Buckley), Teresa Palmer (I Am Number Four), Alexis Bledel (Gilmore Girls) and Hill Harper (CSI: NY) have joined the already pretty good ensemble cast for writer/director Brian Horiuchi’s indie flick Parts Per Billion.
Peter Jackson is going to be a very, very busy man in 2013, as he’s already got two more Hobbit films to prepare for release in December 2013 and July 2014, and now he’s revealed that he plans to shoot the motion capture elements for a sequel to Tintin next year too.
Mark Wahlberg seems to like movies based on magazine articles at the moment, as he’s got Pain & Gain coming to cinemas next year and now THR reports that he has signed up to produce an untitled hacker-themed project for Universal Pictures, loosely based on a January article in GQ Magazine by David Kushner.
I have to admit I wasn’t that impressed with the recent Jack The Giant Slayer trailer, which came across as a little silly, but I still have hope that director Bryan Singer can pull off this fantastical fairytale. This latest poster certainly makes it look a little more cool, with a man (presumably Nicholas Hoult’s Jack) preparing to enter the watery mouth of a stone giant.
Another Earth may not have become a massive success at the box office, but it certainly got director Mike Cahill noticed when it debuted at Sundance in 2011. Now he’s planning his follow-up film, i Origins.
The spy thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy may not have been a massive box office success, but it was nominated for three Oscars and took home a couple of BAFTAs. While it only grossed just over $80 million worldwide, it cost very little much to make,and so producer Eric Fellner has revealed, via 
John McNaughton’s directing career has been pretty sporadic. He first broke out with 1986’s Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, got people hot under the collar with 1998’s Wild Things, but he hasn’t helmed a movie since Speaking Of Sex in 2002.