Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I happened to be in Vegas during CinemaCon (I'm here to moderate a panel with the great Robert Englund at Wizard World this weekend) so I'm doing my damndest to sneak into everything I can at the Con.
So far this has included a screening of Inside Out (sorry, reviewed embargoed until it premieres at Cannes, but I got a lot to say about it) and the big Sony panel. I'm gonna talk a little about the highlights of that panel below.
By now you've already heard the news that broke when Tom Rothman announced Phil Lord and Chris Miller are officially in charge of bringing an animated Spider-Man movie to the big screen. The release date is July 20th, 2018 and that's about all the info they gave at the panel, but I will say it was pretty cool to see the Spider-Man logo with the red Marvel Studios box above it.
The main thrust of the presentation was a thinly veiled attempt to assure the attending theater owners that Sony survived the big leak/hacking scandal. Words like “resurgent, reinvested, reimagined and reinvigorated” were used in the opening speech by Sony higher up Rory Bruer.
That means there was a ton on display. The studio went out of its way to show exhibitors the wide variety of projects on their slate and that they were still fighting the good fight even though they don't have a super hero movie coming out for a couple years. They do have a young adult alien invasion movie (The 5th Wave), a vulgar Christmas comedy (Seth Rogen's X-Mas), an edge of your seat vertigo inducing drama (The Walk), a goofy family horror adventure (Goosebumps), a romantic dramedy (Aloha), a romantic thriller with a predominantly black cast (The Perfect Guy), some kind of sports drama starring Will Smith (Concussion), another Oscar nom in the waiting for Meryl Streep (Ricki and the Flash), a sequel to a surprising animated hit (Hotel Transylvania 2), one of the best looking movies of the year (Money Monster) and, of course... James Bond.
My favorite two bits of footage shown today came from two radically different movies. X-Mas is Jonathan Levine's reteaming with 50/50 co-stars Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. This time they're joined by Anthony Mackie and that's a chemistry combination I'm dying to see play out. The plot seems to revolve around Rogen's character becoming a dad, which means he and his friends put an end to a long-standing Christmas Eve tradition of going nuts on this usually sacred holiday.
This is the last hurrah and there was copious drug use, puking in a church and many, many bad words. They also had the text “From the guys who almost brought you The Interview” at the start of the footage and I really, really, really hope they keep that for the theatrical trailer.
The other great bit of footage was a trailer for Jodie Foster's Money Monster, starring George Clooney as a Jim Cramer type stock news guy who is held hostage by Jack O'Connell on live TV after a bad tip caused the young man to lose everything.
It's a little Network mixed with Dog Day Afternoon in story and style. It definitely had a '70s movie feel and it went from being a movie I was keeping an eye on to one of my most anticipated movies in the pipeline.
Cameron Crowe's Aloha looked good, too. Just simple, sweet and a great glimpse at Emma Stone going full-adorable as she falls for Bradley Cooper's character. If you've seen the trailer you've seen most of the footage shown here, but we did get a few little pieces that are hard to describe, but somehow shaped a feeling of a smooth and easy charismatic tone.
Ricki and the Flash has Meryl Streep playing an aging rock star who kind of ignored her family, but tries to come back into their lives when her daughter goes through a messy divorce. The footage played a bit cloying, but Streep is always so likeable that I think the movie stands a chance of really hitting that heart-place. Plus Mamie Gummer actually playing Meryl's daughter (as she is in real life) adds a layer of believability to the footage we saw that was undeniable.
Concussion – Will Smith playing an African doctor trying to expose the damage concussions do to football players. The footage was imply Smith giving a quiet, but powerful speech about protecting our warriors and it was quality stuff from the A-lister, but other than that I don't have much of an impression of the full film itself.
The Perfect Guy – Starts off as a romantic drama that turns into a horror thriller as a woman's rebound relationship goes from sweet to stalker-y. Audience laughed at this one, but I actually think that's because the footage looked like such a well-made romantic drama that when it turned creepy it felt like a huge 180.
The 5th Wave – This one was completely new to me. Felt a little Hunger Games-ish mixed with Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Chloe Grace Moretz stars as a young girl flirting with young guys (Nick Robinson in this case) and then an alien invasion comes in. We don't ever see it in any form, but the waves are described for us. Technology fails (we see an airplane fall from the sky), disease spreads, some other stuff I can't remember and then the aliens attack. Again we never see it, but we do see Liev Schreiber as a concerned military guy, some deserted Walking Dead-looking devastated highways and people in body bags.
The Walk – An extended series of clips that was introduced by Robert Zemeckis (who came into the room to the Back to the Future score, by the way) showed off a very charming and French-accented Joseph Gordon-Levitt planning and executing said plan to walk across a tightrope stretched between the two towers of the World Trade Center. The footage came across like a bit of a heist film as they plan their sneaky set-up and are under pressure to get it set up in time for him to sneak up and complete the walk.
Zemeckis was very happy that this film was going to be shown big and in 3D as that sense of vertigo is real important to the story. He wants audiences to get nervous while watching this and if the last shot of the footage was any indication (on overhead shot of Joe halfway out, LAYING DOWN ON THE WIRE) he'll get just that.
Pixels – Much of this footage has been seen in the trailers. Still have no idea if this is going to be the best movie of the year or the worst, but I can say that mulleted Billy Mitchell-inspired Peter Dinklage is my spirit animal.
Hotel Transylvania 2 – I love Genndy Tartakovsky, but I'm gonna admit I'm a bad geek and didn't see Hotel Transylvania, so I don't have a good point of reference for this footage other than it focused on Dracula in charge of looking after his brand new grandson who was born from his vampire daughter and human son-in-law. They don't know if the little guy will turn out to be a vampire or not, but Drac really wants him to be one, so he tries to get him to fly by dropping him off of a very, very, very tall ladder. That doesn't go so well. Looks cute. I heard the first was better than the trailers made them out to be and I'll have to finally catch up with it soon.
Goosebumps – Gotta say this one doesn't look like it's my cup of tea, which is a shame because scary kids movies is a particular favorite subgenre of mine. Goosebumps just kind of looks like Jumanji without any improvement to its CGI and missing Robin Williams' beating heart at the center of it. I kind of like the angle on the movie, where Jack Black plays the actual RL Stine and the creatures he wrote about come out of his pages. Very Dark Tower/Stephen Kingy... but the tone is just too winky-wink to have me excited. But I'll keep an open mind. Would love to be surprised by this one.
Billy Lynn's Long Half Time Walk – No footage was shown, but Ang Lee recorded a bit to tell us that this movie is shooting in native 3-D and will be the first film to shoot in 120 frames per second. 48fps is not my favorite thing in the world, so I can't imagine 120fps will be either, but Lee sure seemed excited by it. Things got a cool cast, though. Vin Diesel, Steve Martin (yes, really), Kristin Stewart, Chris Tucker and Garrett Hedlund.
Spectre – The presentation ended with a clip from Spectre, which was simply a conversation between Bond and Moneypenny in Bond's London flat. It seems like MI6 thinks Bond has lost it because he went off and killed a dude in Mexico and Moneypenny is there to check up on him. He reveals why he killed that person to her, but Mendes recorded a video begging us not to reveal this particular plot point. I know everybody assumes it confirms that Christoph Waltz is playing Blofeld and while I think that rumor is true it's not the secret they're trying to keep in the footage shown. It's an interesting reveal, but not one that shakes the pillars of the Bond universe or anything and that's all I'll say about that.
And there you have it. Tons of stuff with Sony eager to put the hack behind them and show off their wares to the distributors.
Still got one day of CinemaCon stuff left. For sure catching the Fox presentation tomorrow (good bet on a bunch of Fantastic Four stuff there) and hopefully the Universal panel as well. Will be back with more fun stuffs tomorrow!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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