There will be sequels to both Star Trek and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Not only are these now officially greenlit, but they’re also what we call “likely sequels” prior to their certainty — meaning we all saw them coming way before Paramount and Fox, respectively, announced them. However, it’s not necessarily a given that a successful movie will always spawn a follow-up. For example, box office record-holder Titanic could never become a franchise.

Of course, people will always joke about the possibilities for a Titanic sequel, and that kind of humor is what makes the Twitter meme #unlikelysequels so entertaining. Unfortunately, 140 characters allows for little more than a proposed sequel title (and yes, “Titanic 2: Jack’s Back” is among them), so we have decided to expand on ten favorites by providing the synopsis and, for some, casting suggestions.
…Read more

As of this morning, DreamWorks and Universal’s engagement is off, and it’s being reported that the former may enter a relationship with Disney instead. How ironic will it be if DreamWorks’ distribution deal indeed ends up at Disney? And how pissed off will Jeff Katzenberg be? After all, he resigned from the Mouse House and then cofounded DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen and used the studio’s animation branch to parody and compete with Disney movies. Sure, DreamWorks Animation is now a separate entity from the main studio, so Katzenberg won’t have anything to do with Disney if the deal goes through. Well, except that his company will share a logo with a Disney-partnered production company. As much as Universal seemed an appropriate home for Spielberg and co., Disney seems completely inappropriate, in a way that’s like sleeping with your best friend’s ex.

Here’s what the rest of the blogosphere has to say about the potential partnership:

…Read more

There are capital-G Guys, and then there is Greg Mottola, whose semi-autobiographical “how I spent my summer vacation” comedy Adventureland insists that back in his college days, the young director was more sensitive than all those other dudes who just wanted to get laid. That would be fine and all if the big payoff the movie works toward was something other than a scene in which Mottola’s fictional stand-in (played by The Squid and the Whale’s Jesse Eisenberg) gets to ball the girl of his dreams (Kristen Stewart, operating on the other end of the chastity spectrum from her Twilight character). I mean, he’s not that special: The world is full of late-blooming virgins with the romantic notion that two people should really love each other before they have sex (Mottola already dealt with that idea quite nicely when Michael Cera’s character passes up his first time in Superbad).

More interesting than the movie’s paint-by-numbers relationship plot is the environment in which it all goes down. Coming home from his senior year in college, James Brennan learns that his dad has been demoted at work, meaning his family can’t afford to send him to Europe for the summer as planned. Instead, he’s stuck in Pittsburgh with a plastic bag full of joints and the terrifying realization that his college degree is good for nothing more than a shit job at the local amusement park.

A place like Adventureland would make the perfect stage for a Larry Clark-style look at adolescence: In theory, such venues offer a delicious contrast between the fun, clean-scrubbed surface they represent to kids and all the transgressive behavior that goes on between the hormone-addled employees, as they get high on their cigarette breaks, land their first VD from the girl who runs the Ferris wheel or what have you. But Mottola has a far tamer view of the park. Considering that he really held such a job, you’d hope for more insider insights than the fact that the concessions have sometimes passed their expiration date and the games are rigged so no one can win a “giant-ass panda bear” (among comedies, only Waiting has really nailed the borderline-depraved atmosphere of minimum-wage ennui).

…Read more

Each day this week, Christopher Campbell will take a look back at a “classic” film that played the Sundance Film Festival. Today’s installment: Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998).

Today’s story is a little shorter than the rest in this series, but it’s worth remembering because it involves another instance where one Sundance success directly resulted in the making of a later Sundance success (a la Slacker leading to Clerks). The earlier film in this case was Welcome to the Dollhouse, which Darren Aronofsky saw at the 1996 festival. In Peter Biskind’s book Down and Dirty Pictures, Aronfsky comments on the experience: “I thought it was such a unique, weird film, that it really gave me the courage to go back to New York and just try to throw something together.” That November he was in production on Pi.
…Read more

Each day this week, Christopher Campbell will take a look back at a “classic” film that played the Sundance Film Festival. Today’s installment: Scott Hicks’ Shine (1996).

1996 was a monumental year for independent film. It began with a Sundance Film Festival that, according to Peter Biskind’s book Down and Dirty Pictures “would go down as Ten Days That Shook the Indie World,” because of the tremendous buying frenzy that occurred, including the infamous acquisition of The Spitfire Grill by Castle Rock for $10 million. The year then transpired with a slew of popular specialty titles that boosted business at many arthouse multiplexes while also exposing them as being unsuited for large crowds (the boom in indie film attendance was something I experienced first hand, having that year begun my first career at NYC’s Angelika Film Center). And the year ended (in 14-month Hollywood terms) with an unprecedented number of specialty films receiving nominations for Academy Awards.

Most astonishing, certainly, was the fact that four of the five Oscar nominees for Best Picture were specialty titles, one of which had been discovered at Sundance. The film, Shine, might not have had a chance at such an honor, however, if Miramax and Harvey Weinstein had gotten their way.
…Read more

So: Miramax is suing Daily Mail columnist and chick-lit novelist Allison Pearson, alleging that in 2002 they gave her an advance and a two-year contract to produce a new book, on which they’d own the movie rights. To give some perspective: the deal was brokered during the Harvey Weinstein era, and Miramax now alleges that they haven’t even been able to get Pearson to return their calls since 2006––a year after the Weinsten’s gave over their stake in the mini-major to Disney and left to start their own company.

But: Since Pearson is married to New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, and according to Gawker, there is “speculation that critic-pandering Harvey Weinstein—when he was at Miramax—might have been inspired to buy her book because of Pearson’s husband.” Which make me wonder: totally hypothetically, if Anthony Lane was paid off to wink-wink positively review Miramax output from 2002 until the Weinsteins left the company in 2005, did he at least do a good job of it? My findings after the jump.

…Read more

• Robert Downey Jr will go straight from Iron Man victory lap to Guy Ritchie’s brave attempt to overcome his wife’s fatal pull Sherlock Holmes movie. The project is being fasttracked in order to beat that other Sherlock Holmes movie, the one with Will Farrell and Borat, to the screen.
• So much for “final offers”: the day after AFTRA ratified their deal with the studios, news breaks that the AMPTP has offered SAG a $10 million, retroactive-to-July 1 bonus if they agree to ratify the contract by August 15.
• The NY Times is getting a cash infusion by selling the development rights of their stories to Hollywood studios. The most recent story to go on the block (and the 15th in two years) is “This Strange Thing Called Prom,” a June 22 piece about students at a multi-culti Brooklyn high school preparing for the big night. Miramax bought it, but hasn’t yet attached any talent.

So Page Six has published an email from a character identified only as “The Final Nail,” claiming that a Weinstein-era Miramax tell-all book is in the works, based on records and audio recordings kept by Stuart Meltzer, an assistant to Bob Weinstein who died in the World Trade Center on September 11. Mr. Nail says his book “will detail the day-to-day . . . manipulation of the Disney company by the Weinstein Bros.”

Maybe last week, this would have seemed like a big deal. But just a couple of days ago, the Village Voice published a long story by editor-in-chief Tony Ortega, based on his “accidental” scavenging of Weinstein’s trash. Page Six couldn’t get a comment from a Weinstein on their anonymously sourced story, but Ortega was able to put together a decent profile of the current state of TWC, and even got Harvey on the record to joke about it: “You want more of my garbage? How about a couple of shirts out of my laundry?”

There’s obviously something tacky about this masked writer peddling a book based on the archives of a 9/11 victim, as if Meltzer was martyred to ensure that the truth of Miramax would someday be known. Why all the secrecy, when it’s apparently copacetic journalism to call Harvey up and tell him you’re going to publish memos that you found in his trash?

Chris Thilk points to a new trailer for Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Chris writes: “I love the music that plays, since it creates a sort of tone-poem feel to the trailer. Unfortunately that will likely be lost in the final film.” Actually, “tone poem” is a pretty dead-on description of large sections of the final film–if anything, this trailer is maybe more straightforward in terms of narrative than the full feature. Check it out above.

I’ve decided the most inspiring filmmaker since John Cassavetes is Rolf de Heer (Ten Canoes, The Tracker, Epsilon, Dingo). If there’s a filmmaker alive devoted to the belief that some films must happen and he/she is just a conduit for some bigger change, it’s de Heer. And the story behind Ten Canoes ( in theaters now) is remarkable.

Download FilmCouch #28 or subscribe in the iTunes store (search for “filmcouch” or click here to launch iTunes) and a new free episode will download every Friday. Join the FilmCouch group

Harvey Weinstein has always prided himself on being a maverick, the go-to guy for filmmakers whose visions didn’t fit within the standard Hollywood rules. And it used to work pretty well for him. “Let me see someone break my [Oscar] record,” he boasts in this week’s FORTUNE Magazine. “I’ll be the first to give them the cup. I’ll be Bobby Hull passing the baton to Wayne Gretzky.” But both Harvey’s record and his reputation were largely cultivated on Disney’s dime, and in a post-Miramax world, success-via-audacity has proven harder to come by. Here are three signs from recent press stories that the Weinstein camp is starting to look a lot like a “real” studio”

1. Harvey Sides With Powerful Politician Over Filmmaker

One of the more entertaining segments in Sicko is a montage devoted to Hillary Clinton’s attempt to reform health care in the early 1990s. Using long-forgotten TV clips and archival photos, Michael Moore first paints the first lady as a hero, a glamorous spitfire (that hair! those suits!) who gave those grumpy old men of Congress an injection of much needed “sass.” But in typical Moore style, it’s all set-up for the real volley: not only did Hillary fail to actually socialize American medicine, but as a Senator Mrs. Clinton has become the second-highest recipient of financial contributions from health care companies.

Harvey Weinstein is not only a Clinton supporter, but a family friend. According to the Washington Post, the mogul “begged” Moore to remove the second, damning part of the montage from the film. Moore refused, and Harvey eventually gave up — but does this sound like the same Harvey Weinstein whose support Moore thanked God for when Disney wouldn’t distribute his last film?

2. Quentin’s Making Sequels

You might not have noticed this, but Hollywood makes a lot of sequels (and prequels, and (gag) threequels, and ad infinitum). This is not because fine auteurs like Tim Story and Gore Verbinski really believe they need six or eight hours spread across three years in order to tell their epic stories properly–it’s because, in accordance with simple consumer theory, the studios believe that what they were able to sell once, they’ll be able to sell again.

IMDB currently knows nothing about it, but this past weekend, Kill Bill producer Bennett Walsh told press at the Shanghai Film Festival that two Bill sequels are potentially on the way. Quentin Tarantino had previously alluded to following up with several of the Bill characters years down the road, but according to Walsh, “plotlines [have] already been written”, and production could begin in China “somewhat earlier” than originally expected.

This is all speculation, but bear with me. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a much-ballyhooed director coming off a super-pricey failure, one your longtime friend/producer and his studio clearly see as an embarrassment. Would it be inconceivable for someone (maybe even that longtime friend/producer, who is under pressure to come up with a handful of hits, and fast) to suggest that your safest bet going forward would be to shore up commercial credibility by pushing up plans to revisit a past success?

3. The Weinstein Board is Hiring A CEO

That FORTUNE story also promises that the board of The Weinstein Company is looking for an outside CEO-type to come in and manage day-to-day operations, so that Harvey can get back to the business of supporting filmmakers. It would be a big deal if it actually happens, but who’s gonna want the job of telling Harvey (and Quentin and Kevin and Bob Rodriguez…) to reign in the spending? As Nikki Finke puts it, “Good luck finding, as one board director said, somebody who’s both a top-level CEO and would be compatible with the market and investors and the brothers.”

So with the Weinstein’s leaving Miramax to truly fill their movie Mogul ambitions, people like Mark Cuban are stepping in to fill the void in filmmaking that Miramax seemingly used to. With the film Bubble he is executing his plan of financing a group of films (by Steven Soderbergh this round) and then releasing them simultaneously in all three channels–theater, HD-TV, and DVD.  And now we read about this, a new Cuban venture called Truly Indie, which is a sort of self-service framework for filmmakers to essentially rent screens using Truly Indie’s established partnerships and systems with Landmark and other theaters. 

There are a number of interesting quotes in the article from "I believe the film distribution system is rather closed" to "plain and simple it’s a way for indie filmmakers to slide by the gatekeepers," both sentiments that I agree with.  I also find it interesting that they titled the venture "Truly Indie," which definitely draws attention to the truly non-indie-ness of the existing indie product out there (Garden State anyone?). So while Truly Indie is probably a good step for filmmakers, I see it as really an incremental one. On the upside, it streamlines for the filmmaker an old and risky tactic of renting theater screens on their own dime. It’s nice for a filmmaker to have a simple "plug and play" framework now, but that doesn’t change the inherent geographic limitations of theatrical release and non-existent marketing budgets that indie filmmakers must face.

The fact is that movies that are released via Truly Indie will most likely never be screened in a theater near my house. What I think will be interesting is if they combine the theatrical release with a DVD release, like Cuban is doing with Soderbergh. I think a step like that can really free a "truly indie" film from theater constraints, allowing it’s popularity to spread faster, and put some money into filmmakers’ pockets.