Before James Cameron got locked in for a heap of “Avatar” sequel films, he was trying to put together a remake of the 1966 body horror/sci-fi film “The Fantastic Voyage“ with producing partner Jon Landau, where he was originally planning to direct himself at 20th Century Fox and those reins would shift over to his pal Guillermo del Toro with a planned shoot in Toronto. Things fell apart, and everyone moved on to other things, suggesting “Fantastic Voyage” was thrown into limbo during the studio’s merger with Disney. There are now teases from Cameron that the remake is not only getting resurrected under Disney/20th Century Studios but could be happening in the near future.
Cameron has shared a brief update during a Q&A session at a new exhibition of his production artwork (Cameron is also an accomplished artist in his own right and goes back to his production design days) at Paris’ Cinematheque Française (via Variety), where he said their long-gestating remake of the 1966 film is about to go forward “very soon.”
“We’ve been developing it for a number of years, and we plan to go ahead with it very soon,” Cameron said at the Paris event. “Raquel Welch is not available, but we think we can make a pretty good movie.”
In order to save a scientist who has developed a blood clot in his brain, a team of Americans in a nuclear submarine is shrunk and injected into Benes’ body. They have a finite period of time to fix the clot and get out before the miniaturization wears off.
However, he didn’t exactly clarify who would be directing and if del Toro would still be involved as he’s busy shooting a “Frankenstein” adaptation for Netflix that stars Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Charles Dance, Lars Mikkelsen, Felix Kammerer, and David Bradley. Guillermo is also expected to follow-up with his stop-motion animation movie “The Buried Giant“ at the streamer too.
Cameron moving out of the way for an ambitious project to get made isn’t a new thing, as “Alita: Battle Angel” was a similar situation, where Robert Rodriguez was selected to complete Cameron’s vision for the cyberpunk anime/manga adaptation, and while being a massive creative force on “Terminator: Dark Fate” tapped Tim Miller (Deadpool”) to direct. Hypothetically, Cameron could decide to make it himself, but given his responsibility of completing “Avatar 3” and “Avatar 4,” with the studio’s schedule, it seems unlikely.
In August of next year, we’re expected to get our first new “Alien” film since 2017’s “Alien: Covenant” that focused on the David and Enigeeners. We now have a really solid idea of when in the franchise’s timeline the new film takes place along with a potentially exact location as well. A new quote from the film’s star Cailee Spaeny to Variety has revealed that the new “Alien” film is set between Ridley Scott’s “Alien” and James Cameron’s “Aliens.”
“It’s supposed to slot in between the first movie and the second movie,” Spaeny told Variety at the Gotham Awards. “They brought the same team from ‘Aliens,’ the James Cameron film. The same people who built those xenomorphs actually came on and built ours. So getting to see the original design with the original people who have been working on these films for 45-plus years and has been so much of their life has been really incredible.”
This would seemingly confirm the film about young off-world colonists is indeed a film about the outbreak at the Weyland-Yutani colony, Hadley’s Hope, on LV-426 where a “shake and bake colony” gets overrun by an army of xenomorphs and their Queen. From the sounds of things, we don’t really need much in the way of plot details because we know that Newt ends up the sole survivor of events leading somewhat directly into “Aliens.” The team of Colonial Marines arrives to find all of the colonists, minus Newt, have either been facehugged or killed.
The fate of Hadley’s Hope (the main location of “Aliens”) was simply alluded to in the original theatrical cut of the 1986 film, but later “Special Editions” would add 30-40 minutes of deleted scenes that featured Ripley being told her daughter Amanda (the protagonist of “Alien: Isolation”) has died after being lost in space for decades and how the outbreak on LV-426 had Newt’s father as the first victim of the face huggers.
Fede Alvarez (“Evil Dead”), the director, had recently talked up that his director’s cut of “Romulus” had been given the seal of approval by the extremely picky Ridley Scott, who is now one of the main stewards and producers of the franchise via Scott Free.
“Alien: Romulus” is set by 20th Century Studios for a release date of August 16, 2024.
Director Robert Rodriguez has been keeping himself extremely busy over the last decade with his kid films on Netflix such as the recently released “Spy Kids” reboot “Spy Kids: Armageddon,” tackling the “Star Wars” universe with “The Mandalorian” and his own spinoff series “The Book of Boba Fett,” the Ben Affleck thriller “Hypnotic,” and had worked with James Cameron by helming his ambitious cyberpunk adventure pic “Alita: Battle Angel,” a live-action adaptation of the popular Japanese manga series.
During a recent chat with The Wrap, Rodriguez states that he would be interested in returning to his El franchise, which consists of “El Mariachi,” “Desperado,” and “Once Upon A Time In Mexico.” That action-packed trilogy focused on a gun-toting Mexican folk hero, a former musician, going up drug cartels and corrupt military leaders. However, the director is a bit uncomfortable with the idea of glorifying gun violence given the current climate of shootings and other real-life violence connected to the cartels.
“I would love to revisit the ‘Desperado’ series. I thought it was way ahead of its time. It’s really hard to do today, for me, anything with guns. Gun violence has gotten out of control. Even those are those are very tongue-in-cheek and kind of fun. It’s just hard to do. There’s always some terrible shooting and you just go, I don’t know if I can responsibly do anything with guns. I really love those films, they are so fun. They’re like ‘Spy Kids’ for grownups, with guitar cases that fired missiles and gadgets galore. It was still made by a kid. Still, the glorification of it would be hard for me to pull off responsibly.”
There is certainly some shared DNA between those fun shoot-em-up films and the four “John Wick” movies from Chad Stahelski, they both make a point to establish they’re not set in a grounded cinematic universe. Something that “Once Upon A Time In Mexico” fully leans into as it comes off more like an action film mixed with a fairytale with over-the-top characters and ridiculous plot points. Not unlike his two extremely violent “Machete” films that are glorious love letters to the exploitation genre.
Speaking of Machete, we’re still waiting on Rodriguez to round out his trilogy with “Machete In Space.”
There was also a brief update/comment on the status of the “Battle Angel” sequel. While there haven’t been any formal announcements from Disney/20th Century Studios concerning “Alita 2,” Rodriguez reiterates that he’s still been keeping in contact with Cameron about the potential sequel and is hopeful that the studio is willing to make it as post-acquisition 20th Century is making more of their own movies again.
“Yeah, Jim and I always talk about how we’d love to do another ‘Alita.’ That studio [20th Century] was bought by another studio [Disney]. They’re starting to make movies now. But that for a while 20th Century wasn’t making any of their movies. I think now you’re seeing a few rolling out. We would love to.”
Previously, there had been some indications that deals or ideas had been thrown around behind the scenes as “Alita: Battle Angel” ended on a cliffhanger revealing Edward Norton as Nova, the next big villain Alita would have to face. Originally, when Cameron was attached to direct the plan was to shoot and release a trilogy of films. The global box office take of $405 million on a budget of $170 million wasn’t exactly on the scale of “Avatar” but seemingly was still enough for the studio to consider at least making one more installment given the mostly positive reception from audiences that did end up seeing it.
Then again, it’s hard to ignore all of the would-be film projects Rodriguez has developed over the years that simply never crossed the finish line such as “Barbarella,” “Red Sonja,” “Fire & Ice,” “Escape From New York,” a revival of the animated anthology film “Heavy Metal” spearheaded by Tim Miller/David Fincher, and his live-action “Jetsons” movie. We’ll simply have to be patient to see what he does next.
James Cameron is finally back after delivering audiences one of the biggest box office blockbusters in cinematic history with Avatar: The Way of Water crushing it and surpassing other massively successful films such as Spider-Man: No Way Home, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and most recently Avengers: Infinity War. Making this the third film from Cameron to cross $2 billion globally, quite the feat. Well, with the second film out of the way producer Jon Landau is already hyping up the sequels after previous teases from Cameron what the next three chapters will explore and what we can expect with new villains.
While speaking with Empire Magazine (via Variety) the producer confirms that actress Oona Chaplin (Game of Thrones, Taboo) is set to play Varang, starting with Avatar 3. The character is said to be the leader of The Ash People, a group of Fire Na’vi that are expected to be more villainous than previous tribes on Pandora and being referred to as “an aggressive, volcanic race.”
“There are good humans and there are bad humans,” Landau told Empire. “It’s the same thing on the Na’vi side. Oftentimes, people don’t see themselves as bad. What is the root cause of how they evolve into what we perceive as bad? Maybe there are other factors there that we aren’t aware of.”
There have been some telegraphing that The Ash People could end up aligning themselves with RDA as they continue with their colonization plans to more humans onto Pandora in subsequent installments as Earth is dying. We’re equally curious if the new Recom version of Miles Quaritch might be the one who is sent in to potentially make that alliance with the Ash People, to help them thwart Jake Sully and other the Na’vi tribes that will need to be eliminated before the mass exodus of humanity to Pandora happens.
Disney/20th Century Studios have already etched-out a release date for Avatar 3 (potentially titled Avtar: The Seed Bearer) on December 20th, 2024 and likely means we’re a year away from a solid marketing campaign from the studio. However, given that the film was shot alongside Avatar: The Way of Water we could end up seeing images and footage a little earlier than expected.
Signing up to direct four sequels to the hit Avatar must be a daunting task for James Cameron and while there has been “some” work done on Avatar 4 (spill over from the Avatar 3 shoot), it hasn’t been completed and during a new chat with Empire Magazine, the filmmaker might end up pivoting to other things instead of doing the next two Avatar films or beyond the fifth installment.
“The Avatar films themselves are kind of all-consuming,” Cameron admits to Empire. “I’ve got some other things I’m developing as well that are exciting. I think eventually over time – I don’t know if that’s after three or after four – I’ll want to pass the baton to a director that I trust to take over, so I can go do some other stuff that I’m also interested in. Or maybe not. I don’t know.”
Cameron also mentioned what is happening with the later installments.
“Everything I need to say about family, about sustainability, about climate, about the natural world, the themes that are important to me in real life and in my cinematic life, I can say on this canvas,” he explains. “I got more excited as I went along. Movie four is a corker. It’s a motherfucker. I actually hope I get to make it. But it depends on market forces. Three is in the can so it’s coming out regardless. I really hope that we get to make four and five because it’s one big story, ultimately.”
This wouldn’t be the first time that Cameron would have stepped aside to let someone else direct one of his projects. He had been originally developing Alita: Battle Angel as the first in a trilogy of films Cameron would direct based on the manga/anime, but to focus on his Avatar sequels he enlisted the help of Robert Rodriguez instead.
It’s unknown what those other things will be, however, he has been sharing a bunch of artwork of his unmade epic sci-fi film Xenogenesis, which had been turned into a short film and has been taking elements from for all sorts of movies such as Terminator 1-2 and Avatar.
Avatar: The Way of Water and Avatar 3 have completed their shoots but when Avatar 4/Avatar 5 begins is a little unclear given their massive budgets.
Could he ask Rodriguez to help with the next two Avatar films after tackling Alita, The Mandalorian, and The Book of Boba Fett? That remains to be seen but he seemingly does have a foot in the door already.
Writer/director James Cameron has helped change the landscape of the blockbuster going back to the 1980s with his landmark films Aliens and T2: Judgment Day changing the way we see studio sequels. With that in mind, Cameron is behind four massive sequels to his $2.7 billion hit, Avatar, and expectations couldn’t be higher.
The next installment is heading to theaters this December and Cameron is already hyping up the string of sequels while speaking to Empire Magazine. Stating that when he pitched the movies to 20th Century Fox, he imagined them as similar to the Lord of The Rings novels, but would have to write them first which sort of explains why he waited until he completed the four scripts before even shooting Avatar 2.
“What I said to the Fox regime at the time was, ‘I’ll do it, but we’ve got to play a larger game here. I don’t want to just do a movie and do a movie and do a movie. I want to tell a bigger story,” he explains. That meant a comparison with a certain literary saga. “I said, ‘Imagine a series of novels like The Lord of The Rings existed, and we’re adapting them.’ Now, that was great in theory, but then I had to go create the frickin’ novels from which to adapt it.”
“I had to think long and hard whether I even wanted to make another Avatar film because it was kind of ours to lose,” Cameron explains. “When you’ve done something that’s been that transcendent in terms of success, do you really want to go try and do that again? There’s a lot of pressure on it. I thought about it for a good two years before we finally made a deal.”
Hopefully, with all the time and energy put into the scripts, we will see much stronger writing with these sequels. The biggest critique of the first film was how thin the plot was and how it mirrored things like Dances With Wolves and the 1992 animated environmentalist film Ferngully: The Last Rainforest.
Some of the more interesting aspects of the sequel see Stephen Lang playing a Na’vi avatar of his dead character Colonel Quaritch and Sigourney Weaver playing a completely different role as she plays Kiri, the adoptive daughter of Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully, and Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri.
Avatar: The Way of Water is set to be released by Disney on December 16.
A True Lies sequel series was originally being pitched to Disney+ by McG (Terminator: Salvation) with an expectation that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis potentially reprising their roles from the James Cameron action film.
Sadly, the project was passed-over and headed to CBS as a pilot with Arnold Schwarzenegger being replaced with television/character actor Steve Howey (Shameless) as the new Harry Tasker.
Now, Variety has a casting update that comedic actress Ginger Gonzaga (She-Hulk) is taking over the Helen Tasker role, that was previously played by Jamie Lee Curtis, the wife of secret spy Harry Tasker (Howey).
Helen is described as Harry’s supportive wife, mother of two teenage kids and a linguistics professor who is getting annoyed by Harry’s constant business trips away from home. Increasingly angered, she feels as if she’s been robbed of the life she once envisioned for herself. Thrilled when Harry invites her along for a trip to Paris, Helen is in for a rude shock when she sees a very different side to her husband, learning that he is in fact a world-class spy.
Matt Nix (Burn Notice) is writing the pilot with Anthony Hemingway (The Wire, Red Tails) directing. It sounds like CBS could turn the project into a generic mid-budget series that likely won’t be terribly exciting in any real way, but Hemingway directing is giving me a slight glimmer of hope.
McG and James Cameron will executive produce.
Interestingly enough, True Lies is based on a French film La Totale! that was released back in 1991.
TRUE LIES – Secretly a spy but thought by his family to be a dull salesman, Harry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is tracking down nuclear missiles in the possession of Islamic jihadist Aziz (Art Malik). Harry’s mission is complicated when he realizes his neglected wife, Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), is contemplating an affair with Simon (Bill Paxton), a used-car salesman who claims he’s a spy. When Aziz kidnaps Harry and Helen, the secret agent must save the world and patch up his marriage at the same time.
James Cameron’s True Lies is considered to be one of the highlights of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s action film career as it allowed him to play a government spy alongside a family man, although, the latter part was not really the focus of the film.
McG (Terminator: Salvation) had been trying to develop a sequel series at Disney+ with the hopes to have both Jamie Lee Curtis and Arnold Schwarzenegger reprising their roles, a good idea since Jamie’s profile had been recently amplified with the success of Knives Out and the Halloween soft-reboot.
However, things fell apart and Schwarzenegger went off to make a father-daughter spy series for Skydance/Netflix co-starring Monica Barbaro (Top Gun: Maverick) that certainly feels/sounds like a surrogate for the True Lies project that never came together.
Today, Variety reports that not only is a pilot moving forward at CBS for that True Lies series, but they’ve sadly replaced Arnold Schwarzenegger with television/character actor Steve Howey (Shameless) as the new Harry Tasker.
Who exactly is playing Helen Tasker has yet to be announced.
Matt Nix (Burn Notice) is writing the pilot with Anthony Hemingway (The Wire, Red Tails) directing. It sounds like CBS could turn the project into a generic mid-budget series that likely won’t be terribly exciting in any real way, but Hemingway directing is giving me a slight glimmer of hope.
Interestingly enough, True Lies is based on a French film La Totale! that was released back in 1991.
TRUE LIES – Secretly a spy but thought by his family to be a dull salesman, Harry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is tracking down nuclear missiles in the possession of Islamic jihadist Aziz (Art Malik). Harry’s mission is complicated when he realizes his neglected wife, Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), is contemplating an affair with Simon (Bill Paxton), a used-car salesman who claims he’s a spy. When Aziz kidnaps Harry and Helen, the secret agent must save the world and patch up his marriage at the same time.
According to James Cameron and producer Jon Landau, principal photography has wrapped on Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 (both motion-capture and live-action portions), but there are two more films to be made with their attention moving on to Avatar 4 an Avatar 5.
One of the unanswered questions of these four upcoming sequels is how they’ll be bringing back Stephen Lang’s villainous Colonel Miles Quaritch, as he died in the original movie. However, they have the ability of to clone Na’vi bodies, aka, avatars and there is assumption that Quaritch could simply be a clone or RDA having multiple versions Quaritch all over their off-world operations.
Lang recently spoke to Collider while promoting his horror film Breathe 2 and dished about his reaction to reading the Avatar 5 script (a bulk of the scripts were written before filming on Avatar 2 started). Highlighting his emotional reaction and calling it “beautiful” multiple times.
“When I finished the last script, I was weeping. I just thought it was so beautiful. Yeah, the final script, because he’s telling a great, great story, an original story, a beautiful, beautiful story, and I was just incredibly moved by it. I hope and I trust and believe that audiences will be too, because one of the things that he does really, really well is he moves it from the page to the stage in a way that that is very literal. You know what I mean? You really see it. What you read is what you get from him, I think, and more.”
Even more interesting than Quaritch’s resurrection, is how the dynamic will look like with Edie Falco’s (Sopranos) General Ardmore joining the franchise as the new head of RDA operations on Pandora and how compelling that new villain will be.
Baring any other delays, Avatar 2 will be released on December 22, 2022.
Friday marked the 25th anniversary of German director Roland Emmerich‘s alien invasion film “Independence Day,” but it wasn’t the only big sci-fi spectacle he had been working on for 20th Century Fox.
In the wake of David Fincher‘s “Alien 3,” it felt like 20th Century Fox was over the “Alien” franchise, and Sigourney Weaver leading it. Ellen Ripley had killed herself at the end of the film making subsequent sequels seemingly moot after their lead character’s death and flopping at the box office. Thinking they were done with the Ripley saga, between “Alien 3” and “Alien Resurrection” the studio tried to develop an early incarnation of an “Alien vs. Predator” movie years before the Paul W.S. Anderson version.
A rumor appeared in 1992 (same year that “Universal Soldier” is released) that Emmerich was going to direct an “AVP” film based on the popular Dark Horse Comics run, this wasn’t hard to imagine because 1990’s “Predator 2” had given audiences a nod to the comic book crossover as they added a xenomorph skull on a wall of trophies in the predator ship at the end of the film. In 1994, “Stargate” is released and that success leads to another original humans vs. aliens project with the 1996 box office juggernaut “Independence Day,” Toho and TriStar Pictures feel confident enough to allow Roland Emmerich to direct a modern “Godzilla” reboot using CGI special effects.
In 1996, “Alien Resurrection” begins shooting in Los Angeles with French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet overseeing the sequel and Ellen Ripley is brought back via the wonders of cloning (originally going to be a clone of Newt), thanks “Jurassic Park.” The film ends with the survivors landing in Paris and leaves the door open for a fifth installment.
In the November 1997 issue of Starlog Magazine, screenwriter Dean Devlin (“Stargate,” “Independence Day,” “Godzilla“) was interviewed about his Fox Television series “The Visitor” and asked about the status with “Alien vs. Predator” he replied, “For the time being, it’s dead. We wanted to do it if they had not just decided to do ‘Alien Resurrection,’ and now we’re all just waiting around to see how that film does. If it really works, the studio is going to want to continue the franchise with just the alien. If that were to happen, then we won’t be involved at all.”
This interview taking place before “Alien Resurrection”s late November release and while the sequel made slightly more than “Alien 3,” it still didn’t meet studio expectations. The following year, Roland and Dean released their critical disaster “Godzilla,” which was ridiculed and likely could have been a reason why 20th Century Fox ultimately didn’t want them handling a crossover to their two lucrative sci-fi franchises.
Speaking of “Predator 2,” Arnold Schwarzenegger was originally going to return as Dutch in the sequel before the role was reworked as Peter Keyes for actor Gary Busey and there has been a longstanding rumor that Arnold was going to star in this “AVP” movie, there might be something behind that.
In 1991, before Emmerich’s “Universal Soldier” starring Jean-Claude Van Damme was released in 1992, Schwarzenegger visited the film’s set, and we have a bunch of photos that documented that visit. There is a possibility that Arnold was there to get a read on Roland Emmerich and speak to Jean-Claude Van Damme about his experience working with him.
JCVD’s star was rising in the 1990s and had played the first incarnation of the alien hunter in “Predator” before leaving during Stan Winston‘s redesign of the creature (with some help from James Cameron) to lead his action film “Bloodsport” instead of being hidden behind a predator costume.
Producers had been trying to lure him back to the “Predator” franchise every chance they got and a crossover with a huge budget along with the right director could be attractive enough for Arnold to get involved. A reminder, the studio was looking to move past Weaver since Ripley was dead and Schwarzenegger was hot as a pistol at the box office, Dutch was theoretically still alive and every “Predator” sequel since there have been attempts to have him appear.
“Something similar to what we did with Aliens. A bunch of great characters, and of course Sigourney [Weaver]. I’ve even discussed the possibility of putting him [Arnold Schwarzenegger] into the Alien movie,” Cameron told the BBC in 2003 about the possibility of adding Schwarzenegger to his “Alien 5.”
Paul W.S. Anderson begins shooting “Alien vs. Predator” in Prague at the end of 2003 and essentially kills “Alien 5,” finally ending the Ellen Ripley saga for good.
James Cameron pivots to “Avatar” and the film still holds the global box office record thanks to a re-release with four sequels on the horizon.
The original version of “Alien 5” would see Ridley Scott direct with Cameron producing and co-writing (possibly with “Alien Resurrection” screenwriter Joss Whedon writing too) and would take Ripley to the homeworld of the xenomorph. The project was never made, but Ridley Scott returned to tackle his prequel “Prometheus” attempting to explore the origin of Space Jockey (engineers) and was a producer on Neill Blomkamp‘s new “Alien 5” incarnation (approved by James Cameron) that would have acted as a direct sequel to “Aliens” (ignoring the other two sequels) before that also stalled, “Alien: Covenant” stepping in to fill the void.
Scott is currently producing Noah Hawley‘s “Alien” series at FX that will be set on Earth and return the franchise to its class warfare root. He’s also talked-up a third prequel film still being in the works that has previously used the working title of “Alien: Awakening.”
THE RONIN 