"Mad Men" star Jon Hamm (Don Draper) at the Emmys.
By Jason Apuzzo. • You couldn’t ask for a better weekend: Mad Men pulled off a rare 3-peat, winning the Best Drama Emmy for the third consecutive year, while James Cameron’s Avatar: Special Edition tanked at the box office, finishing at the #12 spot. Making this failure all the more delicious is the fact that Avatar finished behind Piranha 3D (at #11), even after Cameron recently bad-mouthed Piranha 3D (“[E]xactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s”) … even going so far as to distance himself – unconvincingly, I might add – from having directed the Piranha 2: The Spawning!
Hey, Jim, what really “cheapens the medium” is the political propagandizing you’re doing in Avatar.
• We’re apparently about to get a huge, heaping dose of World War II action coming our way because Warner Brothers has apparently greenlit a $200 million 3D Battle of Midway film, and John Woo’s Flying Tigers movie will indeed be going forward in the IMAX format, as we previously reported. We look forward to both projects.
• On the 3D front by the way, the great Werner Herzog has apparently just done a 3D documentary on the Chauvet cave paintings of southern France, called Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I’m really looking forward this – I hope there’s an LA screening in the near future. What a perfect use for the 3D medium.
• If Machete isn’t enough for you … there appears to be a new genre forming: alien invasion movies set on the border … about illegal aliens of the extraterrestrial variety! Go figure. We’ve reported previously on Monsters (see an intriguing new production still for that here), and now comes the new Mexican alien invasion thriller, Seres: Genesis. The Hollywood Reporter has the new trailer for it here. Are we starting to reach the shark-jumping point in this burgeoning alien invasion genre?
The girls of "Mad Men" at The Emmys.
In related sci-fi news, there’s an interesting new rumor out about the storyline for the J.J. Abrams/Steven Spielberg alien invasion thriller, Super 8. According to Dark Horizons, the story for the film “revolves around a 14-year-old boy growing up in a steel town in 1979 where a train crash forces the town to come together.” The weblink from which Dark Horizons discovered this information has mysteriously vanished …
• In other random news and notes, YouTube is apparently investigating the idea of doing pay-per-view movie downloads (they’re actually already doing this for some indie projects); available for free right now on YouTube, however, is a new documentary that follows Taliban fighters as they clash with U.S. forces (why is YouTube hosting this?); and speaking of getting things for free, William Hurt will be playing Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in HBO’s new movie Too Big to Fail about the 2008 financial crisis.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … wags at the LA Times ask today whether Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks (along with TV’s Sofia Vergara, and a few other gals) more or less made the case at the Emmys for 3D TVs. Answer: yes.
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
Posted on August 30th, 2010 at 2:32pm.
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Ha ha that is so funny about the “Avatar” rerelease tanking. I guess once people got over the hype from eight months ago they just didn’t want to sit through it again. Or maybe Cameron mouthing off about the political message so much finally turned off all those people who were too clueless to get how anti-American it was the first time around. (Believe me I knew a few.)
a $200 million 3D Battle of Midway film
Just as long as they get Michael Bay to do his “Pearl Harbor” magic on it. Can hardly wait to discover all kinds of interesting scenes the history books missed. Transforming submarines perhaps or flying Wildcat fighters through the Japanese carrier hanger decks.
What’s sad is if Midway were done correctly, it could be a very interesting film. A desperate battle against long odds, going to war with horribly obsolete aircraft, tactics and equipment (Brewster Buffalo, Douglas TBD Devastators)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Gay,_Jr.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT-8
It was funny to see the AP force Avatar into the story; to them, the rerelease didn’t crash — it made a whopping $4 million!
I’m a newspaper editor, and I had to design the page with the box office story this week, When I realized Avatar wasn’t even in the top ten, I cut out all the Avatar love from the story.
The story was so pathetic. The writer tried so hard to keep Avatar relevant, but the way he wrote the story would’ve been like if you covered a Yankees game and lead the story with Derek Jeter’s first-inning single.
That’s hilarious, Vince – I didn’t notice that!