The world pre­mière of Trans­form­ers 2 aired last night in Tokyo! We’ve got the pic­tures, video and most impor­tantly — movie reports to best describe the event for all those that couldn’t attend.

Reports

The first report comes via the Don Mur­phy forums — obvi­ously LOTS of spoil­ers herein!

Ok guys just got back! Don’t have much time to post, don’t wanna miss the train but here’s some quick stuff.

Movie was incred­i­ble, I liked it much more than the first! More action, more robots, less humans! Though there are some lame sex­ual innu­en­dos like Wheelie hump­ing Megan’s leg.

Any­way, Bay and the actors came right into the the­ater and intro­duced the film. I was tempted to scream “Don Mur­phy Stooges #1″ but I didn’t want to get led out by security!

The VA thing in the cred­its was way too fast, sorry guys. The Fallen was Todd some­thing. Welker does voice Sound­wave, and Dev­as­ta­tor too. Dev­as­ta­tor has one line, scream­ing his name. Sound­wave only has a few lines but he speaks Eng­lish. But he never comes down to earth and never turns into a robot. Bleah. Very lit­tle screen time, but at least he doesn’t get exploded which leaves things open for the third movie.

Mostly Eng­lish, not much cybertronian.

The Twins were lame. As in the “bust a cap in you ass” stereo­type. I could’ve done with­out them.

Jet­fire was comic relief. He has a British accent and reminded me of a Monty Python char­ac­ter. He doesn’t “com­bine” with Prime in the nor­mal sense, he gets fatally wounded and rips out his spark, killing him­self so Prime can use his parts.

Wheelie is noth­ing like G1 Wheelie. He kinda reminds me of Rattrap.

Lots of kitchen bots. One was a Samu­rai too. Bludgeon?

Only named Con­struc­ti­con is Ram­page, and he is red.

Mega­tron is revived by some Con­struc­ti­cons and “The Doctor.”

Side­ways never trans­forms, he is cut in half by Side­swipe in the first bat­tle scene in car mode. Side­swipe is cool. Rav­age is cool too.

There was a bot that looked like Black­out but he was not named. Black­out him­self was never revived so I can’t say it was him. He did not speak and was not named in the cred­its. In fact in the last bat­tle scene there were tons of, well, “repaints,” basi­cally reused ani­ma­tion. So even after Dev­as­ta­tor forms, there are still con­struc­ti­cons run­ning around. And some Proto­forms. I even saw a truck that looked like Bonecrusher…though I never saw him in robot mode. Scor­ponok is in the final bat­tle too and is killed by Jet­fire in about 2 seconds.

There are three motor­cy­cles, but they appear to be named col­lec­tively Arcee. Not much screen time/lines for them anyway.

The term “Matrix of Lead­er­ship” is used, it’s a key that oper­ates a device to draw energy from the sun.

Ok that’s enough for now, not gonna check this board again till tomor­row! I sup­pose this thread will be about 100 pages long by then so I’m sorry if I can’t answer everything.

Thanks again Night­bird for the tix!

Whilst Sora at the Michael Bay forums says,

I loved Trans­form­ers 1 so much, but I’m sure you’ll feel like the pre­vi­ous movie was just a dash of bit­ters in a glass of appe­tizer Mar­tini. Be pre­pared to be impressed!

Video of stars arriving

The stars arriv­ing and sign­ing for fans, as well as the pho­to­shoot and Bumblebee

Read the rest of this entry »

The Dark Knight shall be pre­mier­ing on HBO this Fri­day, and with it are two dif­fer­ent pre­views, each set to The Pix­ies track, “Where is my mind?”.

From the words of Michael Bay:

Hey every­one,

In Japan today. After a month and half seven days a week most days going till mid­night me and my crew have just about fin­ished Trans­form­ers. I have never seen such a level of ded­i­ca­tion from every crew mem­ber in a movie before.

Even today after the press in Japan and right before the pre­mière tonight, I have to sneak out to a dig­i­tal house to approve the last few effect shots.

It has been a long hard road, but really fun one to travel. What you will notice that is strik­ingly dif­fer­ent than Trans­form­ers 1, is the level of ani­ma­tion detail. The robot char­ac­ters (42 in all), you really can feel empa­thy for them. What is also very dif­fer­ent is the sheer scale of the movie. We have been very tight hold­ing back much of the best imagery in com­mer­cials and trailers.

The way to see this movie is on IMAX. Never before has there been 4k ren­dered char­ac­ter ani­ma­tion shot on full IMAX 70 mm film. This is a first and the results are stun­ning. You will see Opti­mus Prime in a few shots where he is actu­ally per­fectly to scale on the IMAX 50 foot tall screens.

For IMAX, I cre­ated a slightly longer cut with more robot fight­ing. Four scenes were shot on IMAX cam­eras so the screen will fill the full IMAX screen for these scenes.

Haters beware.

Michael

Lots of small Revenge of the Fallen press arti­cles and news bits are com­ing out every day now as we ramp up for the movies release. Time for a summary.

TF2 cut complete

This Fri­day actors viewed the fruits of their efforts, as reports Tyrese on his twit­ter:

What is gonna be the best part of your Fri­day?? I’m gonna go first. Today @3pm me ; the cast are gonna see the final cut of Trans­former 2!!

Chevy Camaro commercial

GM have started air­ing a new Chevy Camaro com­meri­cial that fea­tures Bum­ble­bee and a slither of new footage.

Toy news

New Blaze Mas­ter pic­tures (view gallery)
Deluxe Jolt pic­tures (view gallery)
Deluxe Stalker Scor­ponok pic­tures (view gallery)
Power Bots Side­swipe (view gallery)

Twins Ice Cream Truck Toy

The first pic­tures of this toy in the wild:

Michael Bay talks to Forbes

Bay has been talk­ing money with Forbes — inter­est­ing facts from the inter­view; Bay takes approx­i­mately 8% of prof­its from toys based on the movies. As a pro­ducer Bay brings in an aver­age 8% of a film’s net earn­ings. Bay also made a whop­ping $40m from the atro­cious Pearl Har­bor movie.

Trans­form­ers 2 contests

The Van­cou­ver Province news­pa­per are offer­ing two passes to a Revenge of the Fallen screen­ing two days prior to release, posters and video games for run­ners up. View con­test

Total Assault are giv­ing away a Linkin Park and Trans­form­ers 2 themed gui­tar. View con­test (Thanks Deanna!)

More video game footage from E3

New Divide Mak­ing of

Shia & TF2 secrets

Talk­ing with Yahoo movies, about injuries on and off set:

“He hurts his hand in the mid­dle of a human trans­fer,” LaBeouf explains cryp­ti­cally. “Sorry this is so mys­te­ri­ous. There’s just cer­tain words I can’t say.”

“Revenge of the Fallen” begins with LaBeouf’s char­ac­ter, Sam Witwicky, head­ing off to col­lege to dis­tance him­self from his shape-shifting robot friends. Sam’s beloved Camaro, which trans­forms into Bum­ble­bee, sits in the garage “sort of like his (parole offi­cer), his guardian,” LaBeouf said dur­ing a recent interview.

While at school, Sam starts see­ing sym­bols through “epilep­tic seizure-type fits of infor­ma­tion trans­fer,” LaBeouf said. “He just becomes a fac­tual vol­cano.” The sym­bols form a map to an energy source the robots need to con­trol sen­tient beings, LaBeouf said.

The actor becomes vis­i­bly excited when talk­ing about “Trans­form­ers,” his slight frame buzzing in a button-down shirt and skinny black tie. His left hand is wrapped in gauze, with a splint prop­ping up one fin­ger. “It’s like 11 days out of surgery,” he said, refer­ring to a pro­ce­dure to remove screws that sta­bi­lized his dig­its after the acci­dent. “It’s not bro­ken, but it’s newly not-broken,” LaBeouf said.

“There’s far more stunts this time,” he said. “Aside from the fact that I was mak­ing the whole movie with a bro­ken hand, my knee has stitches, my eye had stitches, my back was gouged.”

Dur­ing one scene, LaBeouf said he “lit­er­ally stabbed myself in the eye” and had to be treated at a mil­i­tary hos­pi­tal. Though credit may be due for tough­ness, it’s LaBeouf’s nat­ural warmth that makes him per­fect to play Sam, the film’s screen­writ­ers say.

Todd Black has been speak­ing with New York Post’s blog­ger Reed Tucker about ‘The Tak­ing of Peck­ham 123′, but in doing so also slipped in a cou­ple of Spider-man 4 ques­tions to whet our appetites.

Black con­firmed that Kirsten Dunst shall be onboard for the fourth Spider-man movie, although rumors of a wed­ding between Mary Jane and Peter Parker were shrugged off. As for the vil­lain, Black denied the Mor­bius vam­pire rumors that Raimi has thrown at us. As for com­ments on a vil­lain, he/she shall be New York based, to quote:

We’re just com­ing up with who the villain’s going to be now. We’ll be shoot­ing in New York again. Trust me, peo­ple will appre­ci­ate who we pick, because it’ll be a big part of New York.

In Kevin Feige’s (Mar­vel Stu­dios pro­ducer) most recent press con­fer­ence, he revealed a few tid­bits about the Thor adaptation.

Don­ald Blake shall not make an appear­ance in the movie, although it shall take place in con­tem­po­rary Earth, rather than the Viking era. The film shall retain a Mar­vel super­hero feel, rather than a fantasy-esque adventure.

As for the cast­ing of Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Feige said, ‘There was no question’.

Mar­vel Stu­dios pro­ducer Kevin Feige has revealed a few details about the upcom­ing Cap­tain Amer­ica movie adap­ta­tion via a recent Iron Man 2 set visit.

Pre-production shall offi­cially begin this Octo­ber, with full pro­duc­tion set to start on June 28th 2010. It is likely to con­tain a num­ber of inter­na­tional loca­tions, rather than say, just New York or LA as the focus. With it, there will be a num­ber of inter­na­tional actors. The sto­ry­line in the movie isn’t likely to fol­low the ‘Truth’ arc set out in the comics, but more likely in some far off sequel.

The topic of Will Smith was raised, Feige acknowl­edged his inter­na­tional sta­tus but didn’t directly com­ment on casting.

Some press folk were lucky enough to visit the Iron Man 2 set recently, and in doing so had a long chat with Kevin Feige, Mar­vel Stu­dios pro­ducer. A tran­script from this talk from UGO reveals a few things about upcom­ing Mar­vel movies.

Zak Penn, Avengers screen­writer, shall begin pen­ning the script next week. The movie itself shall revolve around the team sav­ing the world, with a much dif­fer­ent focus to the indi­vid­ual super­hero movies. It shall be global and epic in its scale, a threat that one sin­gle hero can­not han­dle. As such, the bud­get will likely be larger. Kevin Feige would also like to see The Hulk as part of the team, hope­fully with Ed Nor­ton play­ing the role.