Because I have no doubt that many of you are exactly like me and like to know well in advance when your geeky movies are due for release (just in case you accidentally plan something minor – a holiday, major surgery, a life – across an important opening weekend) I thought I’d share with you my list of genre movie release dates for the next 12-18 months.

No doubt, like me, you’ll all find this exceptionally useful and will be scribbling dates down in your diary even as you read this (humour me here guys).

Anyway look on, ye mighty, and despair – especially any Americans out there, who’ll be wondering what the hell is going on with all these crazy dates (on which point, note that these are provision dates and open to sudden and dramatic shifts – all I’m saying is don’t plan your wedding after seeing these if you really can’t stand the thought of not being first in the queue for Resident Evil: Extinction).
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Posted August 8, 2007 Comments(1)

The days when comic publishers scrabbled for the rights to produce adaptations of the latest Hollywood blockbuster are more-or-less a thing of the past. These days it is far more likely that it will be the film executives battering down the doors of the comic book company attempting to license their properties for the big screen.

This week’s Variety leads with a big story about the next wave of comic-inspired productions to come from Hollywood. It’s not a great news story for two reasons. First it starts off with a rather specious statement about how the next wave of comic films won’t “revolve around men-in-tights. This forgets that there are plenty of non-spandex featuring comic adaptations already in the wild - Ghost World, History of Violence, Road to Perdition, Sin City, 300, Men in Black – many of which are later referred to in the article. And it glosses over the point that there are still plenty of superhero movies to come, both from the big publishers Marvel (Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Namor, Luke Cage, The Silver Surfer, Wolverine, Magneto and a fourth X-Men movie are all somewhere in the works, Spider-Man, FF and other franchises are probably not dead either) and DC (who have just refound their feet have Superman and Batman up and running and Wonder Woman, Justice League, and possibly The Green Arrow likely to follow). Even amongst the smaller publishers featured in the Variety article, there is a smattering of spandex tales on the way (Rising Stars & Fathom).

The main failing though, is that the article doesn’t really offer anything new, despite the fact that the recently concluded ComicCon must have been full of potential news. Actually it feels like this was a story written by someone struggling to justify their week of excess in San Diego – and speaking as one journalist to another, I say “fair enough”.

The Variety story is hung on the imminent release of 30 Days of Night based on IDW Publishings stories about vampires descending on an Alaskan town for a serious buffet. It’s directed by David Slade (Hard Candy) will star Josh Hartnett and original comic writer Steve Niles has a share of the screenplay credit.

There are some interesting projects highlighted by the story – though how many of these will languish forever in “development hell” waits to be seen. One shift that might shorten the time in purgatory for some of these projects is the move by Marvel and Oni Press into financing their own movies. Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk will represent Marvel’s first fully self-financed features. Oni have also moved onto this ground as well. The risks are greater, but given that the Spider-man movie trilogy has so far raked in $3 billion worldwide, the rewards look pretty tempting. And the change will give the comic publishers/creators greater say over the development of their properties.

Anyway, here’s a list of what some of the publishers have coming up:

Dark Horse – are old hands at that sort of thing with 300, Hellboy, Mystery Men and The Mask all to their credit, but I suppose there was the echo of a thwack of spandex about all of those. A sequel to 300 is unlikely (301: This Time It’s War! Anyone?) but the Sin City and Hellboy franchises will return. Dark Horse remain one of the most prolific adapters of screen material to comics – with Buffy and Star Wars books their mainstay product.

Oni Press has a film development arm (brilliantly named Closed on Mondays) and has, apparently, a dozen films at various stages of development with a variety of studios. Whiteout – thriller based on a Greg Rucka/Steve Lieber graphic novel – is being produced by Eric Glitter and will be released by Warner Bros – stars Kate Beckinsale solving a murder at the South Pole.

Devil’s Due have a deal with Rogue Pictures and are working on Drafted and Sheena: Queen of the Jungle.

Top Cow published Mark Millar’s brilliant Wanted and the story is under production with Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch, Day Watch) signed to direct and James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman. There is also a production of Rising Stars (J. Michael Straczynski’s superhero story) in the works at MGM.

Platinum Studios might not be the biggest player in the comics’ industry but it has the fantastically titled Cowboys & Aliens at Sony, Unique at Disney, Mal Chance at Miramax and Nathan Never at Dreamworks.

Virgin Comics appear to have entered the market with the specific goal of identifying comics that could be transferred to the screen – to the point where a good number of their books are being scripted by film directors – with producing kingpin Joel Silver acting as editor overseeing their director’s cut imprint. Guy Ritchie wrote and will probably direct the adaptation of The Gamekeeper and John Woo (The Brothers), Shekhar Kapur (Snake Woman) are already available and Jonathan Mostow, Terry Gilliam and Nicholas Cage are signed up for the future. Virgin have gone even further, striking a deal with Sci Fi, the US cable channel, the look to develop “cross-platform” properties.

Posted August 7, 2007 Comments(1)

Sometimes, as a press officer, you find yourself answering questions you really never expected to have to face.

Personal highlights include: “What should people do if they think they’ve got the plague?” and “Is it true that there is a national shortage of dwarves?”

But I’m guessing Major Mike Shearer might have just one-upped us all when he answered the question: “Are the British Army releasing man-eating badgers in Iraq?”

If only he could have been able to answer “Yes!” and cackled maniacally.

Posted July 13, 2007 Comments(0)

The latest news from the round of LA Screenings highlights where some of this season’s new American sf shows will find their UK home (for those of you without the broadband to bittorrent them…)

 ITV has bought Bionic Woman and Bryan Fuller’s Pushing Daisies (and extended the ITV2 run of Supernatural by two more seasons).

Channel 4 has bought Reaper, a comedy about a “21 year old slacker” who is recruited as Satan’s bounty hunter. This is most interesting because Kevin Smith directed the pilot.

Sky One has bought Journeyman.

Virgin Media TV (probably Bravo and eventually Ftn [probably new freeview channel Virgin 1 - which is going heavy on the Star Trek too] has bought The Sarah Connor Chronicles (for £400,000 per episode, which may well be the station’s entire budget).

Posted June 29, 2007 Comments(0)

I have been on holiday – far from broadband, wi-fi or any of the things I take for granted – hence the prolonged silence on the blog. Not dead, just resting.

I went back to Ireland for my cousin’s wedding. And a fine time was had by all.

There are lots of clichés about Ireland – greenness, friendliness, drunken beeriness etc. – and like most clichés there is both crude generalisation and accuracy in all of these.

The latest in that long list of clichés – but, in my opinion, by far the best – is the burbling from ex-pats returning home and marvelling about how much things have changed.

We visited Belturbet – which is the village where my mother grew up. My memory of the town – based on my last visit in the mid-80s – was of a place where the description “sleepy” would have been a serious exaggeration. Comatose might have been closer. There were few jobs and precious little to do anywhere in the town. I remember it being a pretty bleak place.Today things seem far friskier. There’s a good selection of restaurants opening around the town, there are holiday cottages being built all over the place, there’s a new marina and the River Erne has become a big tourist attraction for anglers and the boating crowd. There are big hotels and – perhaps it’s because of the wonderful, wonderful smoking ban – but even the pubs seem happier, lighter places.

And my home town, Dungannon, is almost unrecognisable. Though sadly part of that change has been to drain “The Lines” – the big, muddy field across the road from where I lived where I spent a lot of my boyhood playing, catching frogs, dodging Army patrols and annoying cows. There was a moment when I almost said “I remember when all this was just fields…”

While we were in Ireland I saw Dara O’Briain interviewed on Parkinson. He said that the new Ireland – north and south – was the perfect antidote for nostalgia. Things might be changing fast, but there wasn’t anyone who looked back at the changes and wished things could go back to the way they were.

There was, also, a fantastic science fiction moment during our trip. I was sitting in The Seven Horse Shoes watching the ould fellas at the bar and thinking about my grandfather – who probably stood there many times wearing the same uniform of Irish men of previous generations (a smart jacket and respectable trousers- maybe even a suit - shirt and tie, a pair of shiny black shoes (always well polished) and a tweedy flat cap – and I almost found myself feeling nostalgic. Maybe not that much had changed afterall?…

Then one of those ould fellas pulled out his ultra-thin mobile phone and starts thumbing away a text message.

And welcome back to the twenty-first century, amadán!

Posted June 18, 2007 Comments(0)

I can be pretty cynical about the Internet. Well, not cynical exactly but I have never been suspend my disbelief about the capability of technology to overcome fundamentals of human nature that’s been ground into our genes and our society for a quarter of a million years, or whatever it is.

Then, some days, something happens that make you wonder whether there is really a chance that this Internet thing could be more than porn and people blathering on about how much they hate Jar Jar Binks.

Like today. Apple, god bless ‘em, today released iTunes 7.2, which not only introduces support for non-DRMed mp3s but they also introduce iTunes U – a series of freely available lectures. Right now I’m watching some guy from a US seminary doing an introductory lecture on Greek and have my finger wavering over the Amazon purchase button on the text book for the entire course… By the way, his favourite letter is zeta (or dzzzz) and his second favourite is eta. Good to know.

At the minute there aren’t many courses online, but this is fantastic.

I want a course in quantum physics for the mathematically challenged, and some greek and roman ancient history, a decent course on early 20^th century philosophy up to Satre, and… ooh the possibilities

Congratulations to Apple. Now come on universities of the world – educate me!

Posted May 30, 2007 Comments(2)

It’s that time of the year when the American networks start letting us know what we’ll be scouring bit-torrent sites to download for the rest of the year.

NBC – home of the inestimable Heroes has confirmed a second season of the hit show – no surprise – but also that intermingled with the regular show will be episodes of a spin-off called Heroes: Origins – a series of one-off adventures set in the Heroes universe featuring previously unseen characters. One of those characters will be selected by the audience to return in the third season. Cool.

NBC’s SF will also include two new hour-longs well 44 minutes what with those damn adverts) Journeyman (about a newspaper reporter “who inexplicably begins to travel through time and change people’s lives”. Okay, it sounds like Quantum Leap, but it does feature Kevin McKidd who was the dog’s bollocks in Rome. Another Brit will front NBC’s other new SF show. Bionic Woman will (somewhat inexplicably) star Michelle Ryan who (apparently) used to be in EastEnders. The only thing I can see that this has going for it is that David Eick – the producer of the new BSG – is also on board Bionic Woman.

Fox, meanwhile, will also give a start to two new sf hour-long shows this year. The Sarah Connor Chronicles tells the story of the Terminator movie’s mother of the revolution between episodes two and three of the movie series. David Nutter (Smallville, Supernatural) directed the pilot by writer Josh Friedman (The Black Dahlia, War of the Worlds). The best news about this is that Summer Glau of Firefly/Serenity plays a terminator called Cameron (geddit!).

Fox’s other new genre show is New Amsterdam, about a 400 year old cop in New York. Why? What? Huh?

Fox might yet pick up Them – based on the graphic novel Six – for mid-season – it’s a show about an “extraterrestrial sleeper cell that goes native” – actually in the Michael Avon Oeming graphic novel they’re from another dimension, and the book is weirder than I can imagine a Fox show doing justice to.

ABC, meanwhile is offering Pushing Daisies – from Bryan Fuller. I have to confess I loved Fuller’s work on both the first season of Dead Like Me and the half season of Wonderfalls that eventually appeared on DVD, so I have high hopes for this, but the premise (a comedy about an investigator who can reanimate the dead, but only for a few seconds) sounds absurd – as well as oddly familiar. Didn’t Torchwood have something like this? Who’d steal and idea from Torchwood?

Sci-Fi Channel in the US are going to bring back Eureka for a second season – a show which I came to like in a “not committed to sitting and down and seeing every episode but not turning over if one happened to be on” kind of way. They’ve also committed to 22 hour-long episodes of Flash Gordon – staring Eric Johnson (?) and produced by Robert Halmi Snr & Jnr (who were behind the atrocious Tales of Earthsea adaptation Sci-Fi broadcast a couple of years ago). Don’t look for anything like a BSG revamp, this looks set to be aiming for silly rather than smart.

More interesting (and by that I mean potentially disastrous) from Sci-Fi is a six-hour mini-series called Tin Man (working title) which is a “wildly re-imagined fantasy take on Frank Baum’s classic book, The Wizard of Oz” due to hit screens in the US in December. With Zooey Deschanel, Alan Cumming and Richard Dreyfuss all cast, it sounds interesting but once again the presence of the Halmis as producers dampens expectations and details of the production – the Scarecrow will be called Glitch and will have half his brain missing, Lion will be called Raw “a powerful wolverine like creature” and the Tin Man will be called Cain and be a heroic former policeman and they’ll all follow DG (!!) on her journey through the Outer Zone (OZ – see what they did there?) to meet the Mystic Man. Jesus. H. Christ. On. A. Bike.

Posted May 14, 2007 Comments(3)

I saw this at A Welsh View via Underwired while looking for something completely different. That’s what I really love about the Internet.

Anyway, it made me smile.

Posted May 5, 2007 Comments(0)

So my copy of British Journal of Politics and International Relations drops through my door this morning and I shove it in my bag on the way out the door and forget about it until I get home. Off comes the plastic wrapper, and there in the back cover is a review by Christina Rowley from Briston University of, of all things, Firefly and Serenity. The article is entitled “Firefly/Serenity: Gendered Space and Gendered Bodies” and it isn’t particularly good (being a quick run through the female characters of Firefly explaining how they’re challenging gender stereotypes backed up with a very brief look at the use of violence in the show. The conclusion being that while Firefly’s gendering of its characters is atypical of media stereotyping there remain problems (Inara’s still a prostitute, no matter how high falutin’,  Kaylee’s still mooning over a doctor, even is she is a competent engineer with a sexuality of her own, etc.) – which is hardly startling.

Still, despite my reservations about the article itself, it was a pleasant surprise to see sf discussed seriously in a political journal without a single “as others see us” moment.

Posted April 17, 2007 Comments(0)

Looks like I only just jumped on this blogging thing in the nick of time!

Esteemed futurologist, co-parent of cyberpunk, and generally Mr Cutting Edge, reckons the whole phenomenon only has ten years to live – he reckons that the 55 million (plus one!) bloggers in the world will give it all up when we realise the basic futility of the past time.

I’m not disagreeing, he might have a point. But then that chrome and sunglasses look didn’t last long as the future, did it? And whatever happened to steampunk.
Read for yourself at The Register.

Posted March 26, 2007 Comments(0)