Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes will oversee the live-action reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

John Fusco (The Forbidden Kingdom) was hired last year to write the script for TMNT co-creator and executive producer Peter Laird, but Deadline reports Dunes will begin meetings with new writers next week.

Bay’s production company, along with partners Brad Fuller and Andrew Form, have focused primarily on remaking horror classics like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, and recently A Nightmare on Elm Street, so pizza-eating, ass-kicking turtles are certainly a change of pace for them.

Platinum Dunes has a track record for producing modestly-budget productions that turn an easy profit based on name recognition.  This appears to be no different.

Viacom’s Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon are also involved after the latter’s $60 million acquisition of the property rights last October to revive the characters in movies and a new, computer animated TV series for 2012.

In previous discussions, executive producer and Turtles co-creator Peter Laird hinted at the use of “face replacement technology” seen on the Where the Wild Things Are creatures.  This is further evidenced by Wild Things‘ Scott Mednick’s involvement as a producer.

Michael Bay

George Romero

by Eric Spitznagel – VanityFair.com

Zombies, as any cultural critic who’s ever written about zombie movies will tell you, are metaphors. They represent our societal and generational fears, or something. Take George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, that seminal zombie masterpiece from 1968.

The zombies aren’t just reanimated corpses who can’t resist bum-rushing a Pennsylvania farmhouse. They symbolize Cold War paranoia and homosexual repression and mainstream tensions about the counterculture and Vietnam War anxiety and a bunch of other stuff too, depending on who you ask.

But whatever you think inspired them, Romero’s hippie-era zombies are undeniably the stuff of nightmares. Sure, they’re lurchy at best, and relatively easy to outrun if you just walk at a slow pace in the other direction, but something about their unrelenting “can do” determination and flash mob–style team efforts makes them legitimately terrifying.

There’s a palpable tension among the non-zombified heroes, a growing realization that doom is inevitable and the zombies will likely prevail in the end. And any brains they don’t eat will probably be on the receiving end of a bullet, thanks to a redneck posse with orders to shoot first and ask if they were black… er, a zombie later.

 Read the rest of this great article by Eric Spitznagel of VanityFair HERE

Tom Savini and..umm..Tom Savini

from Shock Till You Drop

Irene Miracle (Midnight Express, Inferno) and students from The FACTORY Digital Filmmaking Program at the Douglas Education Center will team up to produce The Baggage Claim in late July 2010.

Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark by Tim Lucas

The film is based on a screenplay by Tim Lucas, Saturn Award-winning writer/publisher of “Video Watchdog” magazine and the epic biography “Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark.” It was announced today that Tom Savini will star.

Savini’s ties with the FACTORY run deep, as the film school is part of the Douglas Education Center in Monessen, PA, alongside the Tom Savini Special Make-up Effects Program. “Whenever possible I try to work alongside the students at DEC, but in this instance it was the material that attracted me – it was simply too good to pass up. Viewers are going to see a different side of me as an actor,” said Savini, whose next big-screen appearance is in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete alongside Robert DeNiro.

Savini will be joined by Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni of Dario Argento’s Opera and Mother of Tears.

Lucas notes: “I sat down and wrote The Baggage Claim in a single sitting, in longhand, hardly changing a word as I typed it up. Irene loved it, and when Robert Tinnell came aboard and we saw what was possible with his resources at DEC, we revised it together with an eye to those possibilities. It was one of the happiest writing experiences I’ve ever had.”

James Franco

by Christina Warren – AMCEntertainment.com

Fox will be releasing its “Planet of the Apes” prequel on June 24, 2011. That’s only 13 months away, which means its time too finish up casting!

Although Tobey Maguire was rumored to be the studios first pick for the project, it turns out that its his “Spider-man” co-star, James Franco who will get that honor!

Franco will be playing the lead in “Rise of the Apes,” which is being described as an Apes origin story set in modern day San Francisco. Basically some experiments with genetic engineering went well, terribly wrong, leading to the creation of super-intelligent apes who are now fighting the humans in a battle for supremacy.

Franco will play a scientist who becomes a crucial figure in this war between man and ape.

Drew Barrymore

By Perri Nemiroff – ShockYa.com

After decades of speculation not one, but two new Wizard of Oz films are seemingly coming together. It was recently announced that Robert Downey Jr. could star in the origin story Oz The Great and Powerful and now there are rumblings that Surrender Dorothy is taking a major step forward as well. As reported by Pajiba, Surrender Dorothy will be Drew Barrymore’s second go-around behind the lens.

The film was first announced back in 1999 with Barrymore collaborating with producer Robert Kosberg. Then, in 2002, word got out that Barrymore was set to star. The project still calls Warner Brothers and Barrymore’s Flower Films home, but there’s no word on whether or not Barrymore will keep the leading role.

As Pajiba suggests, I’d like to see Barrymore forfeit the part of Dorothy’s great granddaughter and hand it over to a younger actress, maybe even to her Whip It star Ellen Page. That character will have to harness the power of the iconic ruby red slippers in order to stop the Wicked Witch of the West from taking over Oz and Earth.

Katie Cassidy

In the reboot of Nightmare on Elm Street, Katie Cassidy got to recreate a classic Freddy Krueger kill. Like Tina in the Wes Craven original, Cassidy gets dragged on the ceiling by Freddy in her dream. “The sequence of me in the bedroom, Kris being tossed around this room, shooting it was physically draining, but after seeing it it’s definitely well worth it,” Cassidy said. “It’s going to look incredible. Jackie scaring the sh*t out of me in all of these dream sequences was fun.”

There are two other actors who have performed that sequence before. It was also recreated in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, but Cassidy didn’t reach out to her predecessors. “I hadn’t but I also wanted to keep it fresh and make it my own interpretation of Kris as a character. I invented her, so I kind of wanted to keep that and live with that.”

Click here to read the rest of Fred Topels’ great article at CanMag.com!

Sharlto Copley

by Rob Frappier – ScreenRant.com

Timothy Olyphant has replaced Sharlto Copley in DJ Caruso’s teen sci-fi film I Am Number Four over creative differences related to his character’s look. According to an exclusive report from Film Drunk, Copley wanted his character to look more like an alien, complete with a prosthetic nose and Spock ears. In a recent interview with MTV however, Copley dismissed that report as a rumor, explaining that he left the film strictly because of his busy schedule.

In the MTV interview, Copley says that the scheduling conflict revolved around his publicity responsibilities for The A-Team and that, while the production team worked on ways to accomodate him, he felt it was damaging to the movie to remain involved.

 “They were really trying to be as accommodating as possible to even rewrite certain scenes, to write me out of stuff, so it would deal with the schedule. But it just wasn’t working in terms of what was coming together. It was like, ‘Guys, you’re harming the movie and the character’s function in the film to accommodate the schedule’s requirements.’ Obviously, they knew it would be tricky up front, so we were really trying to work that out. We just realized that in the best interest of the film, it wasn’t right for us to try and do it.”

Timothy Olyphant

by Ethan Anderton – FirstShowing.net    Source: Deadline

Over two years ago we heard about a brand new Judge Dredd film which we heard last September was set to be written by Alex Garland, who’s responsible for writing Danny Boyle’s Sunshine and the screenplay for the adaptation of the video game Halo which just can’t seem to get off the ground. Well, more information has come to light as Deadline reports the film has just gained some financing in a big pre-sale at the Cannes Film Festival where it was revealed that Pete Travis (Vantage Point) would be directing a 3D adaptation of the comic book, which is poised to distance itself from the Sylvester Stallone attempt from 1995.

One thing that Stallone got right in his adaptation is that Judge Dredd really is the law in a future where law enforcement officers are given the power to act as judge, jury and executioner to dish out justice. This isn’t a huge budget film (only about $50 million from non-Hollywood investors), but Fox let it slip away, so we’ll find out if they’ll be kicking themselves in the asses down the road once the project starts picking up steam. Maybe Andrew Macdonald’s DNA Films deal with India-based Reliance Big Entertainment & IM Global will mean more creative freedom for a more loyal adaptation of the comic.

Director Pete Travis

from HollywoodReporter.com

Fox has closed a deal with Matthew Vaughn to direct “X-Men: First Class” and has set a date of June 3, 2011, for the film.

Vaughn’s involvement had been on and off, with negotiations resuming yesterday thanks to the involvement of producer Bryan Singer. Another factor had been Fox’s desire of wanting to have a finished film for next summer, making the search for a director who can deliver a quality film a priority.

Director Matthew Vaughn

On top of that, Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz, who worked on Marvel’s “Thor” movie, did a rewrite on the “First Class” script that convinced execs that making a movie for next year was possible.

Singer, who conceived the story for “First Class” and was to initially direct the movie before choosing to focus on “Jack the Giant Killer” for Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures, is producing along with Lauren Shuler Donner and Simon Kinberg.

According to Fox, “First Class” will “chart the epic beginning of the X-Men saga. Before Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr took the names Professor X and Magneto, they were two young men discovering their powers for the first time. Before they were archenemies, they were the closest of friends, working together, with other Mutants (some familiar, some new), to stop the greatest threat the world has ever known. In the process, a rift between them opened, which began the eternal war between Magneto’s Brotherhood and Professor X’s X-Men.”

The June 3 date sets “First Class” in a box office battle with DreamWorks Animation’s “Kung Fu Panda: The Kaboom of Doom.” Warners’ comic book movie “Green Lantern” opens two weeks later, June 17. And the sequel to “The Hangover” opens June 5.

Hugo Weaving

By Josh Winning – TotalFilm.com

After months of speculation and half-confirmed reports, Hugo Weaving has finally been announced as the villain in First Avenger: Captain America.

As expected, he will play evil Nazi Red Skull, who uses the Dust of Death to kill his victims – leaving them with a parched red skull. All while whistling Chopin’s funeral march.

According to the official press release, the character “will be updated for the feature adaptation”, which basically means he’ll probably get a bit of a feature film make-over.

Captain America will be an origins story of sorts, focusing on the early days of the Marvel Universe when Steve Rogers is turned into a Super Soldier after participating in an experimental program.

Here’s the storyline: After being deemed unfit for military service, Steve Rogers volunteers for a top secret research project that turns him into Captain America, a superhero dedicated to defending America’s ideals.

First Avenger: Captain America hits US screens on 22 July, 2011.

Chris Evans will play Steve Rogers / Captain America