Talking 'Batman 3,' 'Indy 5,' 'Star Trek 2,' 'Wanted 2' and More

The news and rumors related to upcoming sequels has hit ludicrous speed and my brains are going into my feet! Most of these will either never come true or won’t come true for another year or two, but let’s see what they have to offer anyway.

The first story comes from The Guardian by way of the Daily Express (which is to say it is almost certainly false) saying Michael Sheen is reported to be in negotiations to play Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the 23rd official Bond picture, set for release in 2011. The news comes as a result of Peter Morgan boarding the project as screenwriter and the history Sheen and Morgan have together. Considering Morgan isn’t directing I’m not sure why that would mean Sheen would instantly be considered, but that is just me.

Next comes new quotes from Wanted director Timur Bekmabetov discussing Wanted 2 with the Russian news website RIA Novosti (via Russia InfoCentre) saying, “In July we will start preparation for the film. I think in the late autumn or winter shooting will be performed. The shooting will take place in America, India and Russia.”

Bekmabetov says they have found a way to bring back to life Angelina Jolie’s character and follows that up saying, “As for the character played by Kostya Khabenskiy, we’ll think about it. We might possibly resurrect him as well.”

This moves us to the BBC where Shia LaBeouf was asked about the possibility of an Indiana Jones 5 to which he answered, “Steven [Spielberg] just said that he cracked a story on it before I left and I think they’re gearing that up.”

Personally this doesn’t surprise me in the least since I can’t believe Spielberg and Harrison Ford would be interested in leaving the franchise on such a sour note. Then again, it is only now so many people are coming around and disliking Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull after it originally received a 76% “Certified Fresh” rating at RottenTomatoes on top of $317 million at the domestic box-office. Gotta love those folks that wait to see what the general consensus is before actually having an opinion.

One person not holding his tongue regarding Indiana Jones 4 is Year One helmer Harold Ramis who is gearing up for a return as Dr. Egon Spengler in a proposed Ghostbusters III telling Movieline, “The Star Trek reinvention worked great because they able to project back in time. We’re not going to tell an origin story of who the Ghostbusters were before you met them in the first movie. But I would hate to do Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. It didn’t seem like there was a lot new going on there — just more of the same and not as interesting.”

Speaking of Star Trek, a little bit of news regarding Star Trek XII has come out lately via an interview SCIFI Wire had with screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci in which Orci is quoted saying:

“I think the major lesson we learned is that fans were willing to accept differences and surprises, provided that they were somehow echoes or inspired by canon… We still have to be true to Star Trek the next time around, but we’ve also been blessed with being able to be unpredictable. And that doesn’t mean we can just be shocking for no good reason and just throw everything away. It still has to echo everything that Star Trek has been.”

Sounds about right if you ask me. It also helps if you simply make an entertaining film.

The site does give some reasons as to why Nolan would possibly not consider coming back including:

The death of Heath Ledger in January of 2008 rocked Mr. Nolan hard. So hard that Chris was convinced that TDK was going to be it for him and Batman on film.
The Joker was going to return in Batman 3.
“You are correct in reporting that he is developing story ideas with [Jonathan Nolan] and David Goyer, but it will be until AT LEAST 2012 before we see the Caped Crusader back [in theaters]. And that is only an EARLY ESTIMATE at best right now. They are even saying it might not be until 2013.”
Basically, the Batman film franchise is back to square one. As far as a story or a Batman 3, “Right now, there is none,” says our guy.

So, it looks like a Batman 3 may be a ways off, but one film that may be in our near future is The Haunting in Georgia, a sequel to this year’s surprise horror hit The Haunting in Connecticut, reports The Hollywood Reporter. David Coggeshall is writing the script and the new film is expected to take a similar path of the original telling the story of a family that moves to a new state and begins to experience spooky events at their home. Only this time… it’s in Georgia! Dum-dum-dum!

Finally, thanks to Michael Bay via SlashFilm we get a bunch of curious factoids related to next week’s release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen:

Robots

14 robots last time, 46 robots this time (ILM only)
If you had all the gold ever mined in the history of man, you could build a little more than half of Devastator.
Optimus Prime will be life size on IMAX screens in many forest fight shots.
Devastator’s hand is traveling 390 miles per hour when he punches the pyramid.
The pyramid destruction simulation was 8 times bigger than the old rigid simulation all-time record holder at ILM.
All robot parts laid out end to end would stretch from one side of California to the other, about 180 miles
Devastator’s parts stacked tip to tip would be as tall as 58 empire state buildings.
If all the texture maps on the show were printed on 1 square yard sheets, they would cover 13 football fields.

Disk space

TF1 took 20 Terabytes of disk space. Trans2 took 145 Terabytes. Seven times bigger!
145 terabytes would fill 35,000 DVDs. Stacked one on top of the other without storage cases, they would be 145 feet tall.

Rendering times

If you rendered the entire movie on a modern home PC, you would have had to start the renders 16,000 years ago (when cave paintings like the Hall of Bulls were being made) to finish for this year’s premiere!
A single imax shot in the movie (df250) would have taken almost 3 years to render on a top of the line home PC running nonstop.
IMAX frame render times: As high as 72 hours per frame!

Imax

Optimus Prime will be life size on IMAX screens in many forest fight shots.
Imax frames take about 6 times longer than anamorphic to render.
IMAX frame render times: As high as 72 hours per frame!

ILM screen time

ILM Screen Time is about 51 minutes.

Devastator

Devastator is as tall as a 10 story building.
Devastator has more than 10 times the number of individual parts found in an average car.
Laid out end to end, Devastator’s parts would be almost 14 miles long.

Devastator totals