Twentieth Century Fox has set Gavin Hood to direct Hugh Jackman in “Wolverine,” the “X-Men” spin-off film that was scripted by David Benioff.
Fox has some pics it needs to push before they premiere and one of the best and most effective places to do that with increased exposure is the annual big-ticket event known at Comic Con in San Diego. Well, Fox Studio has opted out of this year’s event leaving the normal push their films like “Alien vs. Predator 2,” “Hitman,” “Jumper,” “Babylon A.D.,” “The Dark Is Rising” and “City of Ember” would get, in a promo-lurch. So the question is — Why has Fox decided to bow out of this particular Comic Con? The answer has to do with a decision the Con organizers made early on which stated that movies like “AVP” and others are just too violent to be openly viewed in the Con setting for the increased number of families and younger children that are beginning to show up for the CON each year.
Speaking of Fox, its Fox 2000 film operation, along with Scott Free have acquired the film rights to the vampire trilogy written by author Jordan Ainsley. Ridley Scott is also on board in some capacity. The deal may turn into a franchise with the first, called “The Passage,” being looked at for film adaptation. This one tells the story of a man eaten up with cancer who gets biten by South American bats and the virus they transmitted to him cures him of the life-threatening disease. As the virus is tested on others, including a test group of death-row inmates, a new breed of blood-thirsty vampires are created.
The first novel isn’t scheduled to hit book shelves until the Summer of 2009, so it will be sometime after that before full production on the movie can begin.
According to Ben Fritz over at Variety, in a first for a scripted series, SPIKE TV’s new drama “Kill Point” will have a companion online videogame that’s updated every week to match each of the skein’s episodes.
Summer says
Fox just doesn’t know how to do anything with any sense or reason, do they?
Who cares if they can’t promote AVP2 at Comic-Con? Jumper, City of Ember and The Dark is Rising are good youth oriented stories (talking the books for now) that are more than worthy of promoting there, and will probably bring in more money than AVP2 to boot!
If this “all or nothing” promo move was a Fox decision, then stupid is as stupid does, and they seem to be doing stupid at whole new levels, even by their previous track records.