Grantland

Resize Font: A- A+

GRADING THE TRADES

Winona Ryder Gets Iced

By Amos Barshad on
Ryder
AP Photo/Matt Sayles

Winona Ryder has signed up for The Iceman as the wife of Richard Kuklinski (played by Michael Shannon), a mafia assassin who managed to keep his gruesome day job from his family. This is unrelated, but it just dawned on me that Winona Ryder should have gotten name-checked in way more rap lyrics over the years, via the "rider like Winona" construction. What is going on here? Is the hip-hop community not a fan of Mermaids? Grade: B [Deadline]

Production on Paradise Lost, a high-profile Milton adaptation starring Bradley Cooper as Lucifer and Benjamin Walker as the archangel Michael, has been postponed in order to cut down the $120 million budget. You’d think this type of delay wouldn’t bode well for the movie actually being made but, as the stop-and-start Lone Ranger attests, the budget-reduction thing does work out. First step on the cost-cutting: a campaign to have everyone bring their own mayo for the on-set sandwiches. Grade: C [Deadline]

Netflix has picked up its latest series, its fourth, with a 13-episode order of Hemlock Grove, an adaptation of Brian McGreevy’s upcoming gothic-horror monster novel being executive produced and directed by Eli Roth. Unconfirmed rumors suggest that Netflix felt compelled to hand over the greenlight when it noticed Eli Roth had brought a baseball bat to the negotiations. Grade: B- [Deadline]

Mike Myers will write, but will not star in, an Austin Powers Broadway musical that will serve as a prequel to the movies. Casey Nicholaw, the co-director of The Book of Mormon, will direct; also, the music of Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello will be featured. Well, this very well might be the worst thing to happen on Broadway since that time I tried to go to the Shake Shack on 44th but it was closed. Grade: D [HR]

Sarah Palin is pitching a new reality show with reality don Mark Burnett, this time focused on her husband Todd’s famed love of snowmobiling (really). So far, A&E and TLC have passed. Even the Snowmobile Channel — motto: “All snow-based motorized transportation vehicles, all the time!” — is like, “ooh, not sure if it’s right for our brand development, you know?” Grade: D [HR]

Russell Brand may create an animated series with Bob’s Burgers writers Dan Fybel and Rich Rinaldi, under a deal in which the duo would come up with a pilot script and the three would then share "created by" credit. If I knew creating stuff could be farmed out like this, I’d have been creating stuff years ago! Grade: C [Vulture]

Disney is launching a new princess, Sofia the First, via a 2012 TV movie and a 2013 Disney Channel show. This one is about a little girl who gets wrapped up in the princess stuff when her mom marries the king, and is a nod toward Disney’s classic material in the midst of the more adventurous current child-entertainment field. You know what that means? There are currently 6-year-olds out there already dismissing Sofia as "too retro." Grade: B [Deadline]

Top Stories

MOST POPULAR

  1. Looking at Daft Punk's new album, 'Random Access Memories'
  2. The not-so-true story of the 2012-13 Golden State Warriors
  3. The excellence of Matt Harvey and the misery of the Mets
  4. Bob Cousy, Elgin Baylor, Walt Frazier, Tommy Heinsohn, and others talk about travel in the NBA - Gra
  5. Jalen Rose dunks on Michael Jordan