Warner Bros.

"The Dark Knight Rises" easily won the box office race this weekend, as according to Film.com, the final installment in Christopher Nolan's epic Batman trilogy earned an...

Despite the fact that it arrived in November across the pond, Disney’s latest ‘toon Wreck-It Ralph has had to cool its digital heels until the school holidays over here. But if you’ve heard good things about the short film Paperman that plays before Ralph, and you're itching to see it, you’re in luck: Disney has put it online, and you can see it below. 

It might be part of the studio’s strategy now that John Kahrs’ film has been nominated in the Animated Short Oscar category, but it’s still great to have it where more people can watch it.

Because Paperman is really something special. Kahrs and his team have blended computer and hand drawn animation for a beautiful little tale of boy-meets-girl that takes place in a 40s’-style universe but looks like nothing you’ve seen before.

We won’t spoil what happens, but suffice to say there’s a big heart, a quick fit and just the tiniest dash of Terry Gilliam on display here. And though you can see it now, we also recommend checking it out on the big screen when Wreck-It Ralph lands February 8.

67854.jpg

Read more at Empire Magazine

Warner Bros.

The word epic gets tossed around a lot these days, to the point where it barely seems to mean anything any more. That sandwich I had was epic!...

If warbling, ginger orphan Annie is to be believed, it’s a hard knock life. That could very well describe the experience of movies trying to make their way through development, hoping that the studios’ various Daddy Warbucks replace a genial rich guy with cold corporations) will make their screen dreams a reality. The Annie remake has found it slow going, but now Will Gluck will direct the film.

Originally developed by Will Smith and Jay-Z as a potential starring vehicle for Smith’s pop poppet daughter Willow, it has been through the scripting keyboards of Emma Thompson and Aline Brosh McKenna, with the writers updating Thomas Meehan, Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin’s musical.

But though Smith Jr had been the focus for the lead – she was nine when the idea was first hatched – the long delays mean she’s now too old to take it on.

Eat Pray Love’s Ryan Murphy had been considering the director’s chair, but now Gluck, who has had success with movies such as Easy A and Friends With Benefits for Annie studio Sony, will give the screenplay another tweak and start looking for the right youngster to belt out the songs. All being well, he’ll kick off shooting this autumn for a release in 2014. All together now, “Tomorrow, tomorrow…”

61542.jpg

Read more at Empire Magazine

Troublemaker Studios

Really, at this point you could tell us that our third grade teacher is in "Machete Kills" and we wouldn't bat an eye.

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, aka...

One of several writers (Frank Darabont, David Goyer, David Callahan and Drew Pearce are the others) to take a crack at Gareth Edwards' developing Godzilla, Max Borenstein is now turning his attention to Mona. The project, a sort of sci-fi cyber political thriller (and not to be confused with William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive), is an adaptation of a novel by Dan Sehlberg, and it's coming together at studio New Regency.

It isn't published yet, so details of the book are only so much hearsay and press release so far, but the thrust seems to be the pursuit of a Lebanese cyber-terrorist. University professor Samir Mustaf's daughter Mona is killed by an Israeli cluster bomb, and he develops a sophisticated computer virus - named after the deceased - to cripple Israel's financial system.

Unfortunately for Mustaf however, the virus gets into a Swedish academic's prototype system designed to allow disabled people to surf the Internet using mind control. Eric S'derquist's wife was testing the equipment when the saboteur hit, and is now gravely ill, with her only hope of survival the man who created the virus in the first place. Cue a pursuit of Mustaf by S'derquist, which attracts the dangerous attentions of both Mossad and Hezbollah.

The political players involved in that synopsis lead us to suspect there's little chance it'll reach the screen in that particular form, so don't be surprised if some of the principal players are changed. Still, at root it has the potential to be a decent international thriller, and the official line is that its sci-fi seeming technologies are actually based on real cutting-edge "developments in the fields of thought control systems and cyber warfare". We'll see about that in due course.

Michael London and Janice Williams are producing, with Niclas Salomonnson acting as executive producer. While the film has no start date yet, the book is published in July. Godzilla meanwhile, is slated to finally go before Edwards' caneras in May.

67857.jpg

Read more at Empire Magazine

As soon as Kristen Stewart apologized for cheating on Robert Pattinson, the internet exploded (not literally, though that would have been awesome). We had our good friend Phee scour the...

The much-delayed Jack Ryan reboot finally shot at the end of last year, with Kenneth Branagh both directing and taking on the villainous role of Russian oligarch Viktor Cherevin. Chris Pine is the youthful Mr Ryan, with Kevin Costner on mentor duties as CIA veteran William Harper. To tide us over until the marketing machine really starts to kick in, a couple of new images have just surfaced at USA today.

There's something about that first image that really does ram home how young Ryan is this time. This is very much not the action dad of previous outings; he's even more fresh-faced than Ben Affleck in The Sum Of All Fears. The story finds Ryan just out of the Marines, before he joins the CIA, working as a financial consultant and getting framed in a terrorist plot. It's not based on any of Tom Clancy's novels, but is still striving to remain canonical, and apparently does feature the NATO-exercise helicopter crash mentioned in The Hunt For Red October, which saw Ryan invalided out of the Marine Corps.

The other shot meanwhile, gives us another look at a uniformed Costner. Could he be in recruitment mode here, proferring a welcome-to-the-agency handshake? Costner, incidentally, was enthusiastically courted by Paramount to play the original Jack Ryan in Red October, but his commitment to Dances With Wolves meant the role went to Alec Baldwin. So in another universe, this shot would almost look like a torch-passing moment. Costner may also show up as Harper in another Clancy adaptation, the non-Ryan Without Remorse, although he was cagey about this when Empire spoke to him on set...

Jack Ryan's screenplay went through the hands of Hossein Amini, Adam Cozad, Anthony Peckham, Steve Zaillian, and David Koepp, who was still holding it when the music stopped. Lorenzo di Bonaventura is among the producers, and the film is scheduled to hit cinemas next Christmas.

{First Look At Jack Ryan}

67858.jpg

Read more at Empire Magazine

Sony Pictures Classics

You'd be veryhard-pressed to find a more crowd-pleasing documentary this year than the Sundance award-winner, "Searching for Sugar Man."

Ever since kicking off this year's festival...