Hey folks, Harry here with another great report from ShoWest... Wish somebody would report in about the Paramount dinner and whatever was shown for SKY CAPTAIN... however, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW and SPIDER-MAN 2 stuff sounds great. And more positive buzz for ALIEN Vs PREDATOR... Man - I sure as hell hope he doesn't fuck this up like his other flicks... Here ya go...

Harry,

On Thursday at ShoWest Fox screened their showreel and led off with 10 minutes from Roland Emmerich's environmental disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow. Along with Spider-Man 2 this was the highlight of the week, hands-down, and is the only serious challenger to Spidey (I'm assuming both will beat Passion at the box office). SLIGHT PLOT SPOILER... Sequence opened with Dennis Quaid at a research site in a remote polar region spotting a huge chasm beneath the ice and subsequently reporting it to Congress and then... BAM! Emmerich turns it up a notch with various natural disasters taking hold as massive waves surge through New York, snow drifts cover recognisable monuments and fat twisters rip through Los Angeles. All the while Quaid's son, played by Jake Gyllenhall, is stuck in Gotham and tries to find shelter. The whole thing looked incredible and was quite an intimidating sight. Emmerich (Independence Day) said he still has 150 effects shots to lock down before the movie has to be delivered in three weeks so he's got his work cut out for him.

As for the rest of the showreel, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn comedy) looks a lot of fun - think Zoolander crossed with Rollerball - and Garfield: The Movie looks like an irrelevant waste of money that won't work on the big screen.

Alien Vs Predator (which Fox is calling AVP) is going to be big one and feels like Aliens, as an Antarctic expedition discovers an undergound pyramid containing the warring monsters. Great tag too: Whoever wins... we lose. Will Smith turned up to trumpet I, Robot, which is a tough one to call. Art direction looks great but the whole thing seemed to lack dynamism. The robots are sinister, however, and if the characters are as well written as Smith says they are we could be in for a hit. If it turns out to be A.I. meets Attack of the Clones then box office will suffer after the first weekend.

You probably know this already, but yesterday the big cheese at Columbia announced that Spider-Man 3 will open on May 4 2007 and Spider-Man 2 will open June 30, two days earlier than orginally planned and probably because Columbia wants to break the Wednesday-Sunday opening record recently set by The Passion of the Christ. I heard this at a screening of the Spider-Man 2 trailer at ShoWest last night and it looked mightily impressive. Jeff Blake and Amy Pascal and several other Columbia Pictures cronies were strutting around the stage before the screening looking very pleased with themselves and then they got Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and Sam Raimi on stage to wax lyrical about the movie. The trailer looked like they've really stepped things up on with sharper production values, slicker effects and a generally more dynamic feel. It debuts in theatres April 9. Now to the juicy part...

SLIGHT PLOT SPOILER COMING UP... Then they showed a raw 10-minute battle sequence between Spidey and Dr Octopus on a subway train and it knocked the audience off their feet. The sheer pace and ingenuity of the action choreography was breathtaking and - as we'd been told several weeks ago - in one sequence a dazed Spidey's mask comes off and he's looking up at all these train commuters who look down at him and eventually hoist him up and get him back on his feet. There's a brief moment when he realises he's unmasked and you can sense the panic creeping into his eyes before the commuters reassure him they'll keep the secret. It's a great moment.

It's going to be a hot summer.

Sir Lancelot