NBC's apocalyptic drama Day One is not supposed to debut until after the winter Olympics, but someone leaked a super-rough trailer onto the internet that was originally cut for the network's advertiser presentations in New York. What's embedded below is... pretty intriguing. The conceit is hardly as inspired as, say, ABC's upcoming Flashforward (in which the victims of a strange, global occurrence get a freaky, two-minute peekaboo of their future), but Day, for its part, follows a group of California apartment dwellers as they attempt to rebound after a strange, global occurrence. Yes, it all sounds very V -- another apocalyptic-type drama in the works for ABC this season. But Day has a couple of things going for it that the other doomsday dramas don't: It's from the brilliant mind of Jesse Alexander, a former Lost and Alias scribe who, together with Jeph Loeb, gave Heroes its zeitgeist-capturing appeal before they were regrettably canned last November; and two, it has some pretty cool-looking smoke columns that rise from the city. Okay, so maybe our own Doc Jensen thinks they look awfully similar to the monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but they're bitchin' nonetheless.
Like I said, we won't see Alexander's final work until midseason -- heck, he and NBC/Universal haven't even finished the pilot, which is why they were understandably annoyed when the early trailer got out -- but it's proof enough that good things can come to those who wait. What do you think of the trailer? Are you looking forward to Day One?
Much has been made of the frenzied casting of Hal Jordan, the former fighter pilot who gets enlisted into an interstellar peacekeeping corps and protects Earth from enemies at home and abroad as Green Lantern. For, like, half an hour, it was the hottest role in Hollywood -- names like Justin Timberlake, Bradley Cooper, Jared Leto were bandied around -- and Ryan Reynolds snagged it. Hot off both his role as Deadpool in Wolverine (which showed he could walk the superhero walk) and Sandra Bullock's love interest in The Proposal (proving his cache with female audiences), Reynolds made sense. Plus, I think he's a decent actor, one who's come a long way from Van Wilder.
But the apparent movement on Green Lantern has me asking another superhero movie question. It's not "How are they gonna explain to civilians the differences between Green Lantern and Seth Rogen's Green Hornet?" or "What's gonna happen to the Deadpool spin-off?" or "Why didn't they give the role to Nathan Fillion, who'd have crushed it?" No, I want to know where that Wonder Woman movie is.
Here's a character you don't have to educate the layperson about, one who has immediate name recognition, and one who still stands as a feminine icon. Plus, she's one of DC Comics' "trinity" -- along with Superman and Batman, she stands as a pillar of that universe; a heavy-hitter in every comic book she appears in. Joss Whedon was tapped to bring her to life a few years back, but that went...badly. Since he left the project, it's just been lying fallow.
Money on the table, if you ask me. If you cast that movie right, get a creative team passionate about the character, and put some promotional muscle behind it, the potential is there for a Wonder Woman film to make more money than four Green Lanterns put together. And, not to be chauvinistic, but from a body-part marketing perspective, abs will always be trumped by boobs.
Which would you rather see? Green Lantern or Wonder Woman? And was Reynolds a good choice?
We interrupt your regularly scheduled Monday to bring you this update on EW's Sci-fi Hotties of '09 polls. Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles' Summer Glau is currently topping the ladies' list with 35 percent of the vote. Smallville's Erica Durance sits in second place with 16 percent. (WALL-E's Eve, for the record, finds herself in 10th -- behind Lost's Evangeline Lilly but in front of Terminator Salvation's Moon Bloodgood. Ouch.)
Supernatural's Jensen Ackles, meanwhile, is dominating the men's side, with 44 percent of the vote, followed by my pickStar Trek's Zachary Quinto (19 percent).
If Triumph the Insult Comic Dog was narrating a documentary about the San Diego Comic-Con, he'd greet the announcement of the con's programming -- which lists all the panel-related goodies -- with something like, "And with these directions entered into the navicomputer, the March of the Nerdguins can begin."
The Comic-Con masterminds don't just drop their programming infodump in one fell swoop like some eager teenager, they parcel it out over a few days. All the better to whet eager appetites. Yesterday, Wednesday and Thursday's schedules went public, and we're gonna whittle it down to the stuff that sounds the awesomeist. Okay, here we go:
Once upon a time, Peter Jackson was hired by Universal and Fox to oversee Halo, the film version of Microsoft's killer military/sci-fi videogame. Exhausted from shooting the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong, Jackson opted to executive produce. The man he wanted to direct Halo was Neill Blomkamp, who had nary a feature credit to his name but had shot a stunning short called Alive in Joburg, about aliens living a segregated life in South Africa. Halo eventually fell apart: the stated reason was that the budget had spiraled out of control, but underneath that was the fact that no one wanted to spend ungodly sums of money on a Halo movie that Jackson himself didn't direct. No one wanted to be in the Neill Blomkamp business. Something tells me that District 9 might change some minds.
A feature-length faux-verite exploration of the themes Blomkamp touched on in Alive in Joburg -- segregation, alienation, supression -- District also looks like it kicks its fair share of ass. Flamethrowers, mech suits, snatching missiles right out of the air? Hot damn, I'm in.
What about you? And wouldn't you go see a Halo movie done with the same kind of grit? I know I would.
I missed last night's premiere of the newly minted Syfy Channel's Warehouse 13 -- though judging by Ken Tucker's take, I didn't miss much -- in favor of catching up with a couple of DVR'd episodes of Kings. You remember Kings, don't you? That fantastic NBC show that reconceptualizes and recontexualizes the story of David, he who slew Goliath? The one that has Ian McShane melting a hole through the screen with sheer acting luminescence? The one nobody watched and is now being unceremoniously burned off on Saturday nights?
That Kings. So, as I was sitting there, basking in the plummy, almost Arthurian dialogue and the stentorian production design, I had an epiphany: Why doesn't Syfy pick up Kings? Given that part of their whole name-change raison d'etre is to be able to program beyond the sci-fi spectrum, they could do far worse than roll the dice on a show as well-produced as this one.
Yes, I know, there is the whole "Kings had less viewers than my honeymoon video" problem. I firmly believe that isn't the show's fault; it's NBC's. They had no idea how to market Kings, so they mismarketed it: all those mysterious butterfly posters and trailers that told you nothing about the show besides that it was pretty and it had McShane in nice suits. Was it science fiction? An alternate reality? A soap opera? All of the above? John Rogers, executive producer of TNT's Leverage, summed up the misfire -- and missed opportunity -- quite succinctly: "After years of the cultural Right bitching and moaning about how Hollywood doesn't provide for them, NBC could have gone to every evangelical church in America and said 'We're serializing the story of King David in a modern, very relatable way. Here you go, a multi-million dollar series, in prime time, based on a Bible story. You're frikkin' welcome.'"
That's still money left on the table, Syfy. Money that could be yours. The stink of failure would fade, in time, and you'd be left with one of the best shows on television, one that could fill the sucking vacuum left by Battlestar Galactica, and you could sell those DVD sets to church congregations, Sunday schools, and synagogues until kingdom come.
Just look at this clip; listen to the words, watch McShane work like the devil himself, and wonder why you don't deserve more of this on TV:
Did you know about Kings while it was on? Would you watch it if someone levied some confidence behind it?
Well, everyone, the day you totally forgot to mark on your calendar is here: The Sci Fi Channel is no more. It's been body-snatched by Syfy. It looks the same. Sounds the same. Does much of the same stuff. Just with a distinct lack of vowels.
We commented on the apparent silliness of the name change back when it was announced, a few months ago. And all of that logic still applies. But time has reduced the level of outrage to the equivalent of a pebble in the sneaker: kind of annoying, but not catastrophic.
Time will tell if this branding experiment will pay off, or if "Syfy" will, eventually, go the way of Crystal Pepsi or The WB's frog mascot. All I want is more quality science fiction on television. If they'll give me that, they can call themselves the Brenda Network for all I care.
And you, P-Dubbies? Does the name Syfy make you more or less likely to tune in to the Warehouse 13 premiere tonight?
Apparently, there was some kind of insane Hollywood bidding war to get the rights to make a movie based on the classic Asteroids videogame. You remember, the one barely rendered in straight lines that had the player trying to survive an onslaught by stellar debris? For what it was, Asteroids could be a tense game -- but a movie? And, what's more, a movie that needed underlying rights? Couldn't Universal -- who won that four-way bidding scrum -- just make a movie about noble men and women tasked with blowing up rocks from space without needing a game to base it on?
And even more than that, wasn't that movie already made? You know, Armageddon -- with Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck flying in a spaceship blowing up rocks from space. Some days, Hollywood just...flummoxes.
Does the fact that this movie is based on Asteroids make your more or less likely to go see it? Or does it matter at all?
It's actually a sci-fi thriller starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. (Remember him from New Amsterdam? Oh. Well, that's okay. He's hot and can stare right through your skull.) But you'd never know it based on this preview clip alone. Even the bumpin' beat is total speed-freak home makeover music. Dalton Ross just walked by and begged me to turn it off. I turned it up.
Virtuality airs tonight from 8-10 ET on Fox -- an on-air promo just reminded me, so I thought I'd remind you. Clark Collis thinks the stand-alone special "screams 'failed pilot' loud
enough to be heard in space," but Battlestar Galactica fans will probably want to record this anyway because executive producer Ron Moore is behind it. Good enough for me. For you, too?
To be clear right up top: We at Entertainment Weekly were not present at Cinema Expo in Amsterdam to see James Cameron's unveiling of 24 minutes of footage from Avatar, his latest film that will change the world. So we can't speak to it's relative crap-my-pants awesomeness. Though, by reading the online reports from those who did see the 3-D presentation, Avatar will, indeed, fill your pantaloons.
I've no problem with Avatar being awesome. James Cameron is one of my favorite filmmakers of all time -- I think his Aliens is the perfect action movie -- and I want nothing more than for his story of a bloody culture clash on the idyllic planet Pandora to be phenomenal. I just have a problem when the hype machine gets to work so early, and so hard, that it inflates our expectations to a point where they could never possibly be met.
Besides, it's impossible to judge a film by less than a half hour of footage. A few years ago, some of us got to see the first act of The Island, that Michael Bay-directed sci-fi fiasco. But the thing of it was, those first 30 minutes or so seemed promising; they even had us thinking, for a fleeting moment or two, that Bay had actually made a film with intellectual content. And then we saw the rest of it. The same thing happened, to a lesser degree with Jamie Foxx's sci-fighter dud, Stealth: We were mildly intrigued, and then totally deflated by the finished product.
All I want to do is offer a word of caution. Ask for people to cool their jets before proclaiming Avatar the second coming of 2001, sight (mostly) unseen. Because that kind of hyperbole may get a lot of traffic, but it only, at the end of the day, hurts the moviegoing experience.
Are you tired, as I am, of the relentless overhyping of today's movies, or is this part of the fun for you, getting as much info as early as possible?
