My favourite part is when Muldoo, er… Indiana Jon, uh… Star-Lord becomes one with the velociraptors and leads them on an all-out assault against the hybridosaurus rex. All while riding a motorcycle, natch. Oh, and also the part where they forget about the fact that the first Jurassic Park was already about genetically modified dinosaurs.
Jurassic World hits theatres on June 12th, 2015. I’m already camping outside the theatre to get tickets.
This teaser poster for Jurassic World, revealed today at San Diego Comic-Con, is a beautiful throwback to the original Jurassic Park, featuring the iconic Jurassic Park Tour Vehicle, and a theme park under construction. Full of dystopian symbology — ruined car, city/urban environment overrun by jungle/plant life — this poster is more than just a pretty bit of imagery, there’s a lot there to confirm the rumours that Jurassic World will feature a rundown, seen-better-days version of the Jurassic Park originally imagined by John Hammond in the original film/novel. The dino-nest in the vehicle’s wheel well suggests the decay and rampant dinoism has been going on for a long time. Read More »
Richard J. Evans, knows the way to my heart. Recently, the graphic artist from Birmingham, England released a collection of art based on Studio Ghibli’s popular films, including: Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro, Ponyo, and Princess Mononoke. I’m all a-flutter with delight.
“I’ve been experimenting in different styles lately, and I’ve always loved pixel art,” Evans told Wired. “I was trying to think of what to do, and I just thought there were already loads of 8-bit superheroes. Studio Ghibli would be something a bit different.”
On his official Behance profile, where the full set of artwork can be found, Evans further described his choice to honor the work of Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki, one of Japan’s most revered film makers. “To celebrate the release of ‘The Wind Rises’, said to be the last animated feature from legendary director Hayao Miyazaki,” he said, “I wanted to pay tribute to the amazing work of Studio Ghibli by re-creating some of their most beloved characters in pixel art.”
You can find more of Evans’ art on his official website.
Buy Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris: Book/eBook
Seth Rogen, best known for those movies you either love or revile (there seems to be no middle ground) and longtime-collaborator, Evan Goldberg, are working on a film about the great Console Wars of the 1990s. Now you might be wracking your brain, trying to place the great Console Wars of the 90s, and how they resulted from the end of the Cold War and the Gulf War… but you’re overthinking it. We’re talking about the rivalry between Nintendo and Sega, two of the great videogame developers and publishers of that decade. Rogen and Goldberg acquired the rights to “Blake Harris’s Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo and the Battle that Defined a Generation, an upcoming behind-the-scenes oral history of the classic gaming industry battle,” explained Kwame Opam of The Verge, based on the original report from The Collider. Rogen and Goldberg provided a foreword for the book.
Hoping to follow in the steps of The Accidental Billionaires, which spawned Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network, a semi-ficitonal biopics about the creation of Facebook, Harris’s Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo and the Battle that Defined a Generation is “a mesmerizing, behind-the-scenes business thriller that chronicles how Sega, a small, scrappy gaming company led by an unlikely visionary and a team of rebels, took on the juggernaut Nintendo and revolutionized the video game industry.” Scott Rudin, producer of The Social Network will serve as executive producer.
The big question is who Rogen will cast as the legendary, inestimable Hiroshi Yamauchi, the Japanese businessman who, as the third president of Nintendo, turned the company from a small playing card manufacturer in the ’50s into one of Japan’s most successful multi-billion dollar companies, and defining the childhood’s of millions of people worldwide in the process. Any videogame fan above the age of 25 lived through that golden age of the industry and likely knows how fascinating the industry was during the mid-90s, as it continued to recover from the devastating crash in the 70s and began planting the roots of what would eventually become the goliath we know today.
Unfortunately for Rogen, we all have the benefit of hindsight and know that the eventual winner (and objectively more awesome/superior) game console is Nintendo’s SNES. So, uhh… spoilers for the film, I guess?
Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation is available on May 13, 2014. There is no release date for the film.
Pixar-style Ben Kenobi by Phil Postma
Another day, another Star Wars rumour. This time, reports are floating around that Pixar, those awesome folk behind some of the best films of the past decade-and-a-half, are working on a Star Wars. Not Episode VII, presumably, but something entirely separate. Count me intrigued and, well fanboyishly optimistic.
Rob Bricken of io9, however, recognizes that it might be more of a leap-of-faith than a full blown rumour. “Anyone who remembers that Disney owns Star Wars, Disney owns Pixar, and Pixar makes good movies, could probably put all the facts together and come out with the same hypothesis,” he said. “So let’s all pretend it is true, and maybe we’ll force Disney to conform reality to our wishes.”
Adam Whitehead shares his own concerns about Disney’s intentions with the Star Wars Expanded Universe that currently exists in the Star Wars books, videogames, and comic books. “Something that irritates in all of this, “No-one cares about the Star Wars games, books and comics!” stuff is how BS it is,” Whitehead said on Twitter. “The Star Wars Expanded Universe-set materials have made about $6 billion. That’s more than the theatrical gross of the 6 movies. And about a third of the combined films theatrical gross+home video/DVD/Blu-Ray sales. Still very significant.” Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy has sold nearly 20 million copies by itself, which is more than George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (which is up to five books now), which illuminates just how important the EU is to a lot of fans. However, I wonder, how many of those 20 million were sold to the children and young adults that will become obsessed with the Pixar film and fill their parents’ ears for all the associated merchandise?
