Voices From Krypton

BATMAN YEAR ONE: Official Announcement

Comics legend Frank Miller’s classic retelling of Batman’s gritty, formative days makes its full-length animated debut in Batman: Year One, the next entry in the popular, ongoing series of DC Universe Animated Original Movies. Produced by Warner Premiere, DC Entertainment and Warner Bros. Animation, the all-new, PG-13 rated film arrives October 18, 2011 from Warner Home Video as a Blu-ray™ Combo Pack ($24.98 SRP) and DVD ($19.98 SRP), On Demand and for Download. Order due date is September 13, 2011. 
   Batman: Year One is based on the landmark 1987 DC Comics titles from 12-time Eisner Award winner Frank Miller and illustrator David Mazzucchelli. The film depicts young Bruce Wayne’s return to Gotham City in his first attempts to fight injustice as a costumed vigilante. The playboy billionaire chooses the guise of a giant bat to combat crime, creates an early bond with a young Lieutenant James Gordon (who is already battling corruption from inside the police department), inadvertently plays a role in the birth of Catwoman, and helps to bring down a crooked political system that infests Gotham.
   Primetime television stars Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad), Ben McKenzie (Southland, The O.C.), Eliza Dushku (Dollhouse, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar Galactica) provide the core voices for Batman: Year One. Three-time Emmy® Award winner Cranston gives voice to young Jim Gordon, while McKenzie makes his animated voiceover debut as Bruce Wayne/Batman. Fanboy favorites Dushku and Sackhoff fill the roles of Selina Kyle/Catwoman and Detective Sarah Essen, respectively. Alex Rocco (The Godfather) is the voice of crime lord Carmine Falcone. Animation master Bruce Timm is executive producer of Batman: Year One. Directors are Lauren Montgomery (Superman/Batman: Apocalypse) and Sam Liu (All-Star Superman) from a script penned by Academy Award® nominee Tab Murphy (Gorillas in the Mist, Superman/Batman: Apocalypse).
   “Batman: Year One offers fans and newcomers alike an animated perspective on one of the true benchmark works in Batman comics history,” said Hersin Magante, Warner Home Video Marketing Manager, Family &, Animation.. “Bruce Timm and the Warner Bros. Animation team have gone to great lengths to realize Frank Miller’s ground-breaking, influential vision. Batman: Year One stands tall as the next DC Universe Animated Original Movie.” 

FALLING SKIES: 2nd Season Renewal

As much as it was exciting to hear that TNT was teaming up with Steven Spielberg for a new alien invasion series called Falling Skies, there was also a healthy amount of accompanying skepticism. After all, ABC had debuted the revival of "V" to great fanfare and that show struggled through two seasons, while NBC's The Event proved not to be one despite the incredible hyping it received. Yet Falling Skies has not only scored in its first four airings -- averaging about 6.4 million viewers per episode -- but it's secured a 10-episode second season for itself. The audience, it would seem is intrigued by the notion of the remnants of humanity doing their best to pick up the pieces and fight back against what has to be considered a conquering alien force. Season two is expected to debut next summer.

JOHN CARTER: 3 of 5 Things Learned on the Set

Moviefone was one of a number of websites invited into the production of Andrew Stanton's John Carter, based on the character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs and the first live action film from Pixar. Today the site offered up a breakdown of five things learned on the set, of which we're sharing three.

1. Title Change Controversy: First off, the title change was addressed. The film will be called merely 'John Carter.' Stanton told us that character was the important thing here but acknowledged that it was a controversial decision: I know I'm going to get this question all day and probably for the rest of my frickin' life: Why 'John Carter'? This has had quite an evolution of me figuring out what was the best thing to do for this book to preserve what I thought was timeless about it, what I thought were the resonant elements about it, but not be afraid to tweak or alter things for the benefit of it, so that it would translate the best it could to screen." "I've tried really hard to capture what I thought was universal and timeless about this book that is above and beyond the genre itself. I don't want to exclude anybody from a wrong first impression assumption about this movie or this property, so I didn't want to lie and say it isn't what it is, so I said, 'Let's sell the character that we put all our efforts towards.' Believe me, Mars is going to come into this thing, title and everything, before this whole journey's over. You've just got to be patient. There was a grand design to all this thing. That's the most I want to say, because I don't want to spoil it even for you guys."

Warehouse 13: Saul Rubinek Talks About the New Guy

Tonight Aaron Ashmore makes his debut on Warehouse 13 as agent Steve Jinks, obstensibly to take the place of Myka who quit the service at the end of year two. Everyone knows, of course, that Myka's coming back, but Steve is sticking around — which pleases Saul Rubinek, who portrays Warehouse 13 "manager," Artie Nielsen.
   "It's about how you're going to get out of the pickle," the actor relates to TV Fanatic.com. "That's what's so fun about it. [The Myka storyline] has allowed the show to introduce someone new and to see how that affects everyone. It affects everyone differently. Pete doesn't want a new partner, Claudia expects a promotion. Artie just wants to know if the chemistry will actually work in order to accomplish what has to get done."
   As to the casting of Ashmore, who played Jimmy Olsen on Smallville, Rubinek offers, "You need someone deft. You don't really know what you're gonna get on this show from week to week, aside from an artifact hunt. We jump from tone to tone, sometimes in scene to scene or even moment to moment — we go from suspense to comedy to Three Stooges land sometimes, and he really fit in."
   For the rest of the interview, click HERE.

Wargames Reboot: An Interview With Director Seth Gordon

Horrible Bosses director Seth Gordon sat down for an interview with Aint It Cool News.com, and during the course of that conversation the focus shifted from his current project to the next one on his agenda: a remake of John Badham's 1983 film, Wargames.

In that film, a teenager inadvertently hacks into a military computer and nearly causes World War III. That film starred Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy and was one of the box office hits of that summer. What follows is the Wargames-related portion of that interview. For the full interview, click HERE.

BEAKS:
It sounds like you are about to shift gears fairly dramatically with Wargames. That could be perilous. It’s a movie that our generation knows front to back. How do you approach Wargames in a way that I guess honors the original, but is also very much its own thing?

GORDON:
I think that’s obviously the goal of what we are going to try and do, which is to honor everything about the original. I think it all comes down to the fact that the world has changed a lot. Technology has changed a lot, and the world of hackers has changed a lot; that somebody would accidentally hack into some part of the government that they didn’t mean to is actually a lot more plausible now. To trigger something that they didn’t mean to, just because they were poking around… it’s a weekly news story that somebody got into the NSA or LulzSec. It’s everywhere now, and, essentially, that story is a lot more plausible in 2011, ‘12, ’13, than it was in 1983. That’s essentially how we are approaching it.