The jump from pro­ducer Erwin Stoff to actor Keanu Reeves was a pre­dictable one — the movies they’ve made together are numer­ous — The Matrix, A Scan­ner Darkly, The Lake House, Con­stan­tine, The Day the Earth Stool Still, The Devil’s Advo­cate — to name but a few.

Vari­ety broke the news in Jan­u­ary this year, addi­tion­ally reveal­ing that Peter Craig is set to pen the screen­play with Joshua Long as an exec­u­tive pro­ducer. Sun­rise Inc., pro­duc­ers of the animé, shall have close involve­ment with the film’s devel­op­ment with Kenji Uchida and Shinichiro Watan­abe to act as asso­ciate pro­duc­ers next to writer Keiko Nobu­moto; series pro­ducer Masahiko Minami shall act as a pro­duc­tion consultant.

Reeves will take on the role of Spike Spiegel, an adven­tur­ous bounty hunter trav­el­ing through space in 2071.

Story fol­lows the adven­tures of a group of bounty hunters trav­el­ing on their space­ship, the Bebop. Peter Craig has been tapped to write the screenplay.

On July 22nd 2008 IF Mag­a­zine posted an arti­cle reveal­ing the first news of a Live Action movie adap­ta­tion of Cow­boy Bebop — a project under the watch­ful eyes of 20th Cen­tury Fox with pro­ducer Erwin Stoff (I am Leg­end, Con­stan­tine, The Matrix) at the helm:

“I’m devel­op­ing COWBOY BEBOP for Fox, but doing it as a live-action film, so I’m work­ing on that at the moment,” Stoff tells iF. “I’m really excited to be work­ing on it, and it’s in the really early stages. We just signed it the other day.”

Stoff con­tin­ued with a state­ment of good intent in regards to a faith­ful adaptation:

“I have such an enor­mous admi­ra­tion for its cre­ators, that our first and fore­most con­cern is going to be a real degree of faith­ful­ness to the tone of the movie, to the mix of gen­res, and so on and so forth,” he says. “When I met with them in Japan, one of the first things that I brought up was the expe­ri­ence that we had on A SCANNER DARKLY, and how hard we worked to remain faith­ful to Philip K. Dick, and that was our big con­cern here.”

On the qualms of a cor­rect cast — at least in the eyes of fans, Stoff brushed aside the issue:

“Flak about choices is mean­ing­less until peo­ple see the movie,” he notes. “When peo­ple see the movie, then crit­i­cism has a place in it.”

Com­ing Soon had the oppor­tu­nity to talk with pro­ducer Don­ald De Line (Body of Lies) about the direc­tion that Green Lantern is taking:

“Our story is the Hal Jor­dan ori­gin story, but cre­at­ing the char­ac­ter of Hal Jor­dan that is a real char­ac­ter that will res­onate with the fan­base is what we need to do. You have to make him cred­i­ble and some­body to care about and tell a good story, and I think if we do that, we’ll be okay.”

“It’s going to be a series of big stakes and big action, but it absolutely has a sense of humor,” he replied when asked about the humor quo­tient of the movie. “I think peo­ple accept real life, even with really seri­ous sit­u­a­tions, with humor as part of that sit­u­a­tion, as we expe­ri­ence in life, you have to have that. That’s how peo­ple cope, so they’ve done it so well in these other movies. I think that peo­ple are absolutely ready. It doesn’t have to fall on one side of the fence vs. the other.”

Lastly, we asked him to address the rumors about them delib­er­ately going younger with Hal Jor­dan, some­thing that came out of the bogus sto­ries about Anton Yelchin audi­tion­ing, but De Line denied the inten­tion to cast younger. “Not really, late ‘20s, early ‘30s.”

The long rumored, long desired, third Ghost­busters movie has been through many iter­a­tions, scripts, con­cepts, ideas and what­not. At long last it finally looks like the film could actu­ally get made, and hence I wel­come you to the lat­est arm of Movie Chron­i­cles — our cov­er­age of the Ghost­busters III movie devel­op­ment and production.

Hell­bent, 1999

In May 1999 Dan Ack­royd scripted a 122 page first draft of the movie enti­tled “Ghost­busters 3: Hell­bent”, with plans for it to be a Real D Cin­ema Dig­i­tal 3-D fea­ture, com­pletely in CGI. “I can do all the things I wanted to do for much, much less money”. IGN have since com­mented on this script, sug­gest­ing it was too tech­ni­cal (‘more Jar­gon than jokes’) with all too sim­i­lar char­ac­ters. The out­line of the 1999 Hell­bent plot arc is described below, and it doesn’t sound all too con­vinc­ing — ulti­mately it did not go into development:

With­out reveal­ing too many spoil­ers, Ghost­busters 3: Hell­bent sug­gests that hell (por­trayed as a sty­gian mir­ror image of The Big Apple dubbed “Man­hell­ton”) has grown over­crowded and con­gested. As a result, hell is lit­er­ally evict­ing peo­ple back into the world of the liv­ing in order to alle­vi­ate their con­ges­tion problem.Obviously, this isn’t good for our world so the Ghost­busters must use their lat­est tech­nol­ogy to lit­er­ally go to hell and ask the devil why he’s doing this and to see what they can do to make him stop. Nat­u­rally, the devil – por­trayed here as a Don­ald Trump-like mogul named Sif­fler – has a secret agenda that leads to a grand con­flict with our tit­u­lar heroes. The Ghost­busters must once again save New York City from the evil forces of the after­life. There is indeed a younger crop of Ghost­busters (or, as the script abbre­vi­ates it, GBs) intro­duced that per­form much of the oth­er­worldly leg­work here. This new crew includes: Franky, a body-pierced, tough New Jer­sey punker; Lovell, a dread-locked dude; Moira, a pretty but uptight gym­nast and sci­ence grad; and Carla, a Latino beauty. There’s also Nat, a pre­pu­bes­cent genius whose pow­er­ful brain has made his head abnor­mally large. Despite his youth, Nat serves as a super­vi­sor for the new GBs. That’s all we ever get to know about these char­ac­ters (we don’t even learn their last names!) and they’re our guides through­out most of the story.

Ghost­busters in Hell, 2005

This con­cept entered the news again in 2005 as Harold Ramis and Ack­royd attempted to get the ball rolling again. Ramis suggested:

“the dream plan is that Danny and I would pro­duce it, I would direct it, and we would recruit some newer, younger, pop­u­lar Ghost­busters to star.”

One of those young new stars could have been Ben Stiller as a Venkeman-esque replace­ment, as reported Hol​ly​wood​.com.

Whilst the story stills keeps much of the 1999 draft; the Ghost­busters were still going to hell:

“We go to the hell side of Man­hat­tan, down­town, Foley Square. It’s all where the cops are–they are all blue mino­taurs. Cen­tral Park is this huge peat mine with green demons there, sur­rounded by black onyx thousand-foot high apart­ment build­ings with clas­sic red dev­ils, very wealthy. We go and visit a Don­ald Trump-like char­ac­ter who is Mr. Sifler. Luke Sifler. Lu-cifer. So we meet the devil inside”

New Script, 2008

In Sep­tem­ber 2008, Colum­bia Pic­tures hired Office writ­ers Lee Eisen­berg and Gene Stup­nit­sky to script a third Ghost­busters movie (Vari­ety),

The stu­dio has set “The Office” co-exec pro­duc­ers Lee Eisen­berg and Gene Stup­nit­sky to write a script for a film designed to bring back together the orig­i­nal cast of Harold Ramis, Bill Mur­ray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson.

Eisen­berg and Stup­nit­sky have just fin­ished work­ing on “Year One”, a com­edy directed by Harold Ramis and star­ring Michael Cera and Jack Black. The arti­cle also gives a fresh angle on the devel­op­ment ‘hell’ GB3 has seen,

An attempt to make a third install­ment of the fran­chise was stymied in the deal­mak­ing stage. Sources said so much gross was pledged to the par­tic­i­pants that it was next to impos­si­ble for the stu­dio to make any money on a third installment.

As a result, until this script has been com­pleted, the orig­i­nal cast will not be offered a new deal. Dan Akroyd, Harold Ramis and Ivan Reit­man are all con­sult­ing on the project whilst Bill Mur­ray has expressed an inter­est in repris­ing his role, AICN report from City of Ember screening:

But tonight he said that he knew “some writ­ers from THE OFFICE” were tak­ing a stab at the script right now (which we already knew) and that he thinks that’s a good start. He paused for a few sec­onds then said that he thinks enough time has passed and that “the wounds from GHOSTBUSTERS 2 are healed” and that he would def­i­nitely be into doing another GHOSTBUSTERS movie, stat­ing that the first 40 min­utes of the orig­i­nal film is some of the best stuff he’s been asso­ci­ated with and the whole shoot was an amaz­ing amount of fun.

He also went on to say that his enthu­si­asm for Ghost­busters was height­ened after record­ing the voice of Peter Venkman for the video game over the sum­mer. In fact, he said he found him­self walk­ing down the street singing the Ghost­busters theme song and then thought peo­ple walk­ing around him were going to start yelling at him to “get over your­self, Bill,” so he stopped… But the enthu­si­asm was there.

Harold Ramis also wrote to the Chicago Tri­bune:

“yes, colum­bia is devel­op­ing a script for GB3 with my year one writ­ing part­ners, gene stup­nit­sky and lee eisen­berg. judd apa­tow is co-producing year one and has made sev­eral other films for sony, so of course the stu­dio is hop­ing to tap into some of the same act­ing tal­ent. aykroyd, ivan reit­man and i are con­sult­ing at this point, and accord­ing to dan, bill mur­ray is will­ing to be involved on some level. he did record his dia­logue for the new ghost­busters video game, as did danny and i, and ernie hud­son. the con­cept is that the old ghost­busters would appear in the film in some men­tor capac­ity. not much else to say at this point. every­one is con­fi­dent a decent script can be writ­ten and i guess we’ll take it from there.
best,
harold

More recently, that Judd Apa­tow com­ment has been in con­tention, with Pro­duc­tion Weekly (Via /Film) recently sug­gest­ing that Apa­tow had offi­cially signed on to pro­duce, but this rumor has since been debunked by Doug Bel­grad, pres­i­dent of Colum­bia Pic­tures (Via LATimes):

We have some great new writ­ers work­ing on a new script, but Judd isn’t involved. Judg­ing from the frenzy on the Inter­net, there still seems to be plenty of inter­est in the idea of doing another film, so we’re cer­tainly tak­ing that as a good sign.

It is still hoped that the movie shall enter pro­duc­tion in late 2009. And that’s where we are now! The next step is word of the green-light on The Office scribes new script.

Via TFW2005 and eBay we have more images of the Bum­ble­bee and Sound­wave toy pack­ag­ing, this time giv­ing us their char­ac­ter descrip­tions, and another oppor­tu­nity to pur­chase the toys. It also reveals that Soundwave’s pro­jec­tile is the Decep­ti­con Ravage.

Sound­wave

eBay Auc­tion

Sta­tioned in orbit above Earth, Sound­wave swiftly taps into every satel­lite in range. Within min­utes, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, data traf­fic, weather infor­ma­tion, and high-resolution spy pho­tog­ra­phy flood his sen­sor net. The spill of data fills him with plea­sure, and one by one, the humans’ sys­tems come under his com­plete con­trol. From his seat on high, he is in a posi­tion to con­trol the des­tiny of mankind with­out their knowledge…or to run their civ­i­liza­tion into the ground.

The pack­ag­ing also reveals that the pro­jec­tile that Sound­wave can launch is in fact Rav­age! Note the text above the bot­tom right configuration:

Bum­ble­bee

eBay Auc­tion

Hav­ing cho­sen to stay with Sam after the end of the bat­tle for the AllSpark, Bum­ble­bee made arrange­ments to stay close to hm at all times. It’s been a pretty good deal. He gets reg­u­lar detail­ing, and as much high-grade fuel as he needs. Plus, he gets to spend time with Sam and Mikaela. His vocal proces­sors still aren’t fully up to snuff, but he and his friends com­mu­ni­cate just fine. IF he ever misses the action of bat­tle, he can always give Iron­hide a call and go Decep­ti­con hunting.

The Huff­in­g­ton Post has nabbed some images of Jake Gyl­len­haal, top­less again, as Das­tan, the Prince of Per­sia. This is yet another look for the Prince, although Jake is once again look­ing buff, with a scar on left arm and abdomen. Which of the Das­tan video game por­tray­als do these images fit into? The descrip­tion that comes along­side the images, and reads as an offi­cial blurb, states:

“an adven­tur­ous prince who teams up with a rival princess [Tam­ina, played by Gemma Arter­ton] to stop an angry ruler from unleash­ing a sand­storm that could destroy the world.”

If you look closely, you can also see peo­ple behind Jake, pos­si­bly work­ing on the set, sug­gest­ing these shots are not lifted directly from the movie. These images link to two very large res­o­lu­tion ver­sions which come via Jake Gyl­len­haal .nl

This was a short lived rumor, and as our instincts told us, it was best not to trust the Sun’s news story how­ever plau­si­ble it seemed. Last week The Sun broke the news, amidst a flurry of Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire atten­tion, that Boyle was inline to take the helm of James Bond 23. In response, a spokesper­son for Boyle recently announced to WENN:

‘While Danny says he always has and always will enjoy the Bond movies he has no plans to direct one. Danny is nat­u­rally flat­tered to be thought of!’

Before speak­ing directly with Enter­tain­ment Weekly:

‘I enjoy the Bond movies, always have and always will, but I have no plans to direct one. I don’t know who came up with the story, but please tell them I’m very flat­tered to be thought of!’

After TF08 released images of Wheelie’s robot and alt mode in toy form, there is now a video review of the blue RC truck. It illus­trates the size of the toy and the trans­for­ma­tion from alt mode to robot mode. It’s head comes out from the rear of the truck whilst the wheels split open to reveal the spindly limbs and claws, the cabin opens up to reveal the auto­bot logo. After pos­ing the crea­ture is returned to his truck like state, (to the tune of the Trans­form­ers score).