Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I am recently returned from a trip to Budapest to watch a night of shooting on HELLBOY II, so I can confirm pretty much everything our new spy has to say about the project. I'll have a full report up whenever I get the okay, but I can say now that Johann looks fucking terrific. Our spy mentions his suit looking very BIOSHOCK and he's not wrong... the work the practical effects guys did on making keeping this character as CG-free as possible is fantastic. Considering that the character is essentially a cloud of gas in a suit with a glass head, that's pretty incredible that it's going mostly without CG. They have little motors built into the half-domed head of the character and a little vent that produces real smoke at the push of a button that the little motored fans blow and cause to swirl around in the glass head. Anyway, more on that later. Here's a look at a preview for a ton of Universal films, including animatics, footage and art for flicks like HELLBOY II, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, WANTED and MUMMY 3. Enjoy!
First off, we saw lots of stuff for Wanted, the adaptation of the Mark Millar graphic novel. It's to star Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy. Not sure if they've started shooting because they showed no footage from the film, but did show a hell of a lot of pre-viz stuff. Lots of animatics of McAvoy's character kicking ass. At one point, his character (or at least I'm assuming its his character) does the arms out, back-to-back gun pirouette with who I'm assuming is Jolie's character. Very Mr & Mrs Smith. Not much to say about this one other than the animatics looked solid, lots of gunplay and kicking over of tables. Next was some good stuff for The Incredible Hulk. Again, not much footage to show, but tonnes of cool concept art and pre-viz animation. The art I saw of Hulk was fairly similar to the Ang Lee hulk (i.e. green) but it looks like he wears ripped jeans (!) instead of short shorts. According to Voice Over Man, this Hulk will be 9 foot tall. Saw some ace animatics of Hulk racing through the city, hopping over cars, climbing up fire escapes and leaping off a building onto a helicopter. Also saw a cool shot of William Hurt as Thunderbolt Ross, complete with white tache. The coolest Hulk stuff was the concept art and animatics for Abomination. This dude looks awesome. He's huge (much bigger than the Hulk), kinda has clear, see-through skin, a chrome dome head and a protruding spine running up his back. There were some cool pre-viz shots of him with a car in each hand, 'clapping' them together and crushing some army guys. All the concept stuff I saw looked great, much more action-orientated than Lee's Hulk, but then I guess we knew that anyway. Saw a little bit of concept footage for The Mummy 3 – big whoop, I hear you say. But then Voice Over Man reveals that the franchise has made over a billion dollars in box office. What. The. Fuck. Anyway, saw some nice looking location art (It's all in China), some snowbound temples, and your typical Chinese bad guys. Jet Li's character – he's the Mummy of the piece – is apparently back for revenge (no!) and commands the Terracotta army, which is way cool. He also lives in a giant stone man buried halfway underground, which I guess is quite fitting if you're an evil mummy but not so much if you want to stay out of the limelight. Next up was Hellboy 2. Now I've never seen Hellboy (I own it but have never watched it) so stop me if any of this stuff is common knowledge. All of the original cast are back (Jeffrey Tambor was in the original? Get the fuck outta here!) including Perlman, obviously. Voice Over Man did mention a few new additions to the cast; Johann, a dude made entirely out of gas (decked out in a cool Bioshock-esque suit) plus a troll with one eye called Mr. Wink. Also, and this may be a rather large spoiler, but it seems there's a five storey high monster (tentacles, eyes and shit, hard to see from the concept art) that attacks the Brooklyn Bridge. Saw some concept art for the Golden Army, and they kinda look like bigger, badder, golder versions of the Destroyer druids from Episode 1, crossed with a bit of General Grievous. But not lame. Saw some other stuff too, Mamma Mia footage (looks good) and some CG mouse movie called The Tales Of Deveraux. Sadly not Chance Deveraux.
