This is ForceWatch, your as-needed check-in with the upcoming Star Wars reboot, including but not limited to Star Wars Episode VII. Full disclosure: Disney owns Grantland, and the rest of the universe.
Two bits of possible Star Wars news are making their way around the Internet this week: one big, highly questionable one, and one smaller, slightly more likely one. Let's break them down and be thankful that they don't have anything to do with an out-of-work bit player from the original trilogy making a cameo appearance in Episode VII for the benefit of exactly six sweaty nerds in the front row.
Let's start with the big one: Podcasters The Schmoes got this bit of news from an unnamed "reliable source" who has seen part of an Episode VII casting breakdown that will supposedly be sent out soon. Read it and speculate:
This is ForceWatch, your as-needed check-in with the upcoming Star Wars reboot, including but not limited to Star Wars Episode VII. Full disclosure: Disney owns Grantland, and the rest of the universe.
Ever since J.J. Abrams was given the keys to the future of the Disney/Lucasfilm cultural property know as Star Wars, every subsequent piece of news about the 2015-slated sequel has started to feel less like the details of the movie event of the decade and more like press releases for a 40th-anniversary Great Performances Reunion Revue/Telethon. Harrison Ford's onboard. Sweet. So are Carrie and Mark. Radical. John Williams was eyeing that villa in Majorca and finally thinking about calling it a (decades-spanning, unparalleled) career when Abrams called him up and was like "A blood oath's a blood oath, man." Far out. But do we have any new ideas, gentlemen?
1. Kidz Bop Kids, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" (Kidz Bop 23)
They did it! They made it more annoying! Congratulations to the Kidz Bop team of scientists for their tireless efforts at making the hardest possible things to listen to. They shouldn't play Metallica at Guantanamo Bay. They should play this. (Just kidding, they shouldn't torture people!) Not annoying enough for you? There's always the chipmunk version for super extreme masochists.
Grade: F
Best YouTube Comment: "Sounds better than taylor swift. Sorry swifties." — balayamegalaya
In its 47 years, the Super Bowl halftime show has become something of a definitive stage for American entertainment; a pop-cultural barometer, albeit a wildly unreliable one. It has created larger-than-life onstage moments that have inspired millions and ruined careers and prompted legislation. This Sunday, Beyoncé will take the stage at the Superdome in a halftime show that, for once, promises to be pretty damn good. Which is great, because as we learned this week at the YouTube HOF, when it comes to Super Bowl halftimes, sometimes we're lucky, and sometimes the Black Eyed Peas are there.
When I wrote about George Lucas last year, I called up J.J. Abrams. There wasn’t a hint that Abrams was going to be directing the next Star Wars movie, as The Wrap reported yesterday. There wasn’t even that much of known relationship between Abrams and Lucas. In the movie world, Lucas doesn’t do hands-on, Spielbergian mentorships. But, as Abrams explained, he’d recently sat at Lucas’s knee, like Luke with Yoda, and had learned from the master.
Yesterday, in a development only marginally less surprising than if Jabba the Hutt landed on Earth and declared he was the new Republican nominee for next week's presidential election, Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger announced the company had acquired Lucasfilm for over $4 billion, and with it, the once-sacred Star Wars franchise. And then he announced a seventh Star Wars film is coming in 2015, followed by more every two to three years. And then he announced he is really Luke Skywalker's father. (He said a lot of things; it's already too hard to remember them all.) Nevertheless, the Grantland staff has assembled to sift through the still-smoldering wreckage of our mental Death Stars in search of some answers, or, at the very least, a new hope. Join us as we collectively work through our daddy-who-is-as-much-spare-evil-robot-parts-as-human issues. Usual disclosure: Disney owns us too. Hi, George!
George Returns to the Magic Kingdom
Bryan Curtis: I’ve never really thought much about George Lucas or Star Wars … haha, just kidding. It’s my whole life.
A Lone Ranger Hollywood adaptation has been kicking around for so long that its Wikipedia entry actually contains the phrase "The tone was to be similar to The Mask of Zorro." Even its current iteration, with Armie Hammer as the title character and Johnny Depp as Tonto, almost died a bunch of times, its own bloated budget threatening to capsize it over and over. But, hey, look: The Lone Ranger was actually shot, edited, and produced into a major motion picture! To commemorate the occasion, five thoughts on the trailer:
Guess what's getting a reboot? Why, it's little-remembered 1991 adventure movie The Rocketeer! Vulture reports that Disney is looking for a second crack at the flick, which starred Billy Campbell — last seen running for mayor of Seattle, with some slight complications, in The Killing — as a pilot who accidentally steals a jet pack from some gangsters and quickly turns to crime-fighting and girl-saving. As Vulture also points out, this thing bears some similarities to the flying suited hero of Iron Man fame, which has found its fair share of success with Disney's Marvel branch. So was it Robert Downey Jr.'s oceans of charms and the years of groundwork laid down by Ghostface Killah that catapulted the Iron Man franchise into billion-dollar success? Or can movie audiences simply not get enough of people with homemade flying contraptions? It'll be a little while until we find out conclusively, as the project is just going to writers now.
Like a binge-drinker rousing himself from an 8 a.m. Coors puddle and staggering to the nearest AA meeting, Hollywood may have finally sobered up over the weekend. How else to characterize Disney putting the kibosh on its planned big-screen adaptation of The Lone Ranger, with Pirates of the Caribbean helmer Gore Verbinski behind the camera and Johnny Depp behind the brown facepaint as Tonto? Until Friday evening, the long-gestating picture seemed as close to a sure thing as exists in the industry these days, mainly because it ticked the two necessary boxes for a contemporary blockbuster: a pre-existing property paired with a massive celebrity. Without these two key ingredients, it’s notoriously hard to get anything made in Hollywood — soaring CGI budgets are dependent on expensive stars whose involvement is, in turn, dependent on said budgets. More than anything, it’s the forward momentum of clearing that conundrum that’s responsible for green-lighting DOA stinkers like Green Lantern and, especially, Cowboys & Aliens. But after a summer of bomb-dropping reminiscent of the London Blitz, it was clear that something had to give, and Disney’s shocking rebuff of regular cash-cow Jerry Bruckheimer — coupled with the surprise steeliness of other studios in turning down Ron Howard’s planned adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and Eminem’s boxing flick Southpaw — raises the question: has Hollywood finally come to its senses?
