Benjamin Walker Cast In ‘X-Men: First Class’

Rumors are swirling around who will appear as which mutants in Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class, but today we finally have an official confirmation of a new cast member. According to Roger Friedman’s Showbiz 411, Benjamin Walker has joined the First Class cast as Dr. Hank McCoy, better known as the blue, furry Beast.

Walker’s involvement has been whispered for a few days, first cropping up by way of The New York Times. If you follow theater at all, you’ve probably heard of Walker’s performance in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and the production’s plans to move to Broadway. But that may now be delayed thanks to Walker’s evolution into a First Class mutant.

Walker has been kicking around movies for quite a while — you might remember him in Flags of Our Fathers and Kinsey — and is a promising young actor who just hasn’t made it big yet. He’s earned rave reviews as the titular Jackson in his flashy stage performance. I have no doubt he’ll make a good McCoy, especially since he won’t be burdened with the garish make-up Kelsey Grammer wore in X-Men: The Last Stand. As X-Men geeks know, McCoy started off relatively normal looking, but evolved into the furry fellow he is today. He’s continued to evolve into a creature that looks more like a cat than a man. McCoy is a quietly tragic character, as he lives in fear that he will lose the ability to think or practice science once burdened with animal senses and paws. I’m still not thrilled with First Class, but the idea of seeing that story — even in a truncated form — is an appealing one. McCoy is a gentle and humorous character, and he’s never gotten any time to shine in the movies.

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James McAvoy Signed To Play Professor X In ‘X-Men: First Class’

Since Fox hopes to get X-Men: First Class up and registered by this summer with Matthew Vaughn at the head of the class, you can expect a lot of furious casting between now and August. The first big pick is out now, as according to THR’s Heat Vision, James McAvoy will be Professor Charles Xavier.

McAvoy is a good pick to replace Patrick Stewart, but he’s awfully young to be teaching anyone. But remember, this isn’t really about the first class of X-Men the way we thought it would be. X-Men: First Class would be an origin story for Professor X and Magneto. In this film, young Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr will discover their powers, hone them, and take on their cool aliases. They will then join with fellow mutants “some familiar, some new” to stop a global threat. Their friendship fractures, and creates the rift between Magneto’s antagonistic Brotherhood of Mutants and Professor X’s peaceful X-Men.

It’s unclear who these mutants will be. (Beyond a Wolverine cameo, of course.) Are they actually going to be young Jean Gray, Cyclops, and Storm? If so, it’s nice to see Fox sticking to their resolve of continuing to throw their X-Men continuity out the window. You can’t exactly have a movie featuring young Jean Grey or Cyclops, if the Professor X and Magneto we saw interacting with them (in X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, respectively) were the older and wiser figures of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. Perhaps they’re going to haul out those amnesia bullets again to explain the discrepancies.

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Bryan Singer Signs For X-Men ‘First Class’ Film

No need to beat around the bush with this one: on the blue carpet for Avatar’s LA premiere earlier this evening, Bryan Singer offered up a tiny little detail about his follow-up to Jack the Giant Killer. He says he’s signed to return to the X-Men franchise, for the film that will now presumably be called X-Men Origins: First Class.

Flickchart mentioned Singer’s statement on Twitter, and it only took a few moments of combing through Ustream’s archive of the live blue carpet video feed to find the brief interview with Singer. What he says, exactly, when asked about his next project is:

I’m prepping up to do a movie called Jack the Giant Killer [at] Warner Brothers, and I just yesterday signed a deal to do an X-Men First Class Origins picture, which is kind of cool.

Here’s the video:

 

This isn’t entirely a surprise, as Singer has talked about returning to the X-Men franchise as recently as this past October “I’m still looking to possibly returning to the ‘X-Men’ franchise. I’ve been talking to Fox about it. I love Hugh Jackman. I love the cast,” he said then. He’s also said he was considering directing First Class. Seems unlikely that he’ll get to work with Jackman much in this one, however, as the film is meant to cover the team of X-Men prior to Wolverine’s arrival in the first film.

Lauren Shuler Donner has said “the movie focuses on the first class at Xavier’s school of the gifted, so only those mutants will be featured in the first movie,” by which she evidently means that we’ll see the early days of the original X-Men team. In April of this year, she described it like so:

So it’s young Scott, young Jean, young Beast and that’ll be really fun. I think (the plan) is to follow some of the characters into their own stories, and weave them back into the X-Men world. And hopefully First Class will become its own franchise and we can follow them as they grow up.

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Ryan Reynolds Updates ‘Deadpool’ Status

I know Gregory Ellwood from HitFix through Twitter, where we occasionally discuss box office numbers and not much else. So because he’s a pretty good dude - and appealing to my rarely seen sympathetic side, a Clippers fan - I’m happy to give him all the credit in the world and then some for dredging an answer about Deapool out of Ryan Reynolds…

Speaking during an interview with HitFix today for “The Proposal,” Reynolds shed more light on the project saying, “Well, I’m intimately involved with it.  We’re just trying to break a story right now and figure out who the villain is going to be and all that stuff.  But, it’s going to be just like the comic books.  I’m gonna have a messed up face and you may see some flashbacks of Wade earlier in his life, but primarily what you see is what you get in the comics and that’s the goal.  And there is no better place to draw material from then the comics which are incredible.”

For me, the real problem with X-Men Origins: Wolverine is that it only sets up the first X-Men movie, as far as Wolverine is concerned. I’m sure you can wring two gawdawful action movies out in between this and that, but you don’t really need to; the stage is set. Instead of a real origin story about Wolverine worth a damn, Fox used it as a the first domino to fall, kicking off a possible slew of spin-offs, which would begin with Deadpool.

The only problems with doing a Deadpool movie are A) He was barely in the damn Wolverine flick, and B) Ryan Reynolds is not a bankable star. Because Deadpool is not a very well-known character outside the real inner circle of comic book fans, those two factors really come into play. It would be like spinning off fairly regular bar patron Paul from Cheers instead of Frasier, or that other guy from Wham! releasing a solo album. The last one happened, by the way, so see what I mean?

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‘Wolverine’ Pulls In $87 Million In Opening Weekend

Even though X-Men Origins: Wolverine has been beaten up by critics and its opening weekend doesn’t compare with last summer’s big superhero movies, the $87 million it earned this weekend is still the 18th best debut ever. But what matters at this point is how much more it can makes this month, in possibly the busiest box office month ever.

The daily figures from Box Office Mojo point to a slight reduction in audience on Saturday and Sunday, but all and all, it was a pretty strong opening weekend. But what happens when Star Trek opens? Can it hold half of the audience from this weekend? Fox would definitely love this to make $200 million, and that’s still likely depending on what happens in the next seven days. But the bad reviews might make $225 million the ceiling rather than the basement, so it’s clearly not going to be the success Iron Man was.

The week’s other two releases, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and Terra, barely made headlines. The McConaughey romantic comedy did roughly what was expected and as the only film of its type in theaters all month, should continue to bottom feed to earn some cash.

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Latest X-Men Origins: Wolverine Update

It’s been an interesting week for 20th Century Fox and its May 1st release, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. As you may know by now, an unfinished workprint of the film was leaked onto the internet. We’ve debated whether we should even mention the leak, as it in turn gets people to search for it, but with the news so widespread we’re pretty sure you’ve heard about it elsewhere by now. We do think, however, that it’s important to post Fox’s official statement on the matter:

Last night, a stolen, incomplete and early version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine was posted illegally on websites. It was without many effects and had missing scenes and temporary sound and music. We immediately contacted the appropriate legal authorities and had it removed. We forensically mark our content so we can identify sources that make it available or download it. The source of the initial leak and any subsequent postings will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law — the courts have handed down significant criminal sentences for such acts. The FBI and MPAA are also actively investigating the crime.

We are encouraged by the support of fansites condemning piracy and this illegal posting and pointing out that such theft undermines the enormous efforts of the filmmakers and actors and, above all, hurts fans of the film.

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‘Dark X-Men’ Teaser Image Revealed

Where does this draw the line when there are so many X-Men titles on the shelf now?  Yes, a cross-over is always cool if the story carries the title, but if you walk into a comic book store and browse the shelves, how many X-men titles take up space there?

I am going to wait to see if the book lives up to the hype it’s generating now.

Marvel released this teaser image by Terry Dodson today, calling it the “all-new, all-deadly Dark X-Men.” No other explanation was provided, leading to lots of speculation on message boards.

One of the most popular guesses is that the image has something to do with the Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men crossover this summer.

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New Comics Shipping For The Week Of 2/11/2009

BATMAN #686
CAPTAIN BRITAIN AND MI 13 #10
DOC SAVAGE LOST RADIO SCRIPTS OF LESTER DENT SC
MIRRORS EDGE #4 (OF 6)
STEEL FIST RIKU VOL 03
THOR #600
WALKING DEAD #58
X-MEN ORIGINS SABRETOOTH

New Comics Shipping For The Week Of 2/4/2009

AGENTS OF ATLAS #1 DKR
ASTONISHING TALES #1
BLACK PANTHER 2 #1 DKR
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAG SPECIAL SENTINEL
CONAN THE CIMMERIAN #7
MARVEL YOUR UNIVERSE #1
SERENITY LITTLE DAMN HEROES MAL ANIMATED MAQUETTE
X-MEN FIRST CLASS FINALS #1 (OF 4)
ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE TP

Video - Hugh Jackman Talks About ‘Wolverine’

The Hollywood Reporter has posted a clip of an interview with Hugh Jackman where he speaks about X-Men Origins: Wolverine. He’s very excited about the movie and I’m really looking forward to seeing it.

He tells THR why making “Wolverine” makes him feel “pretty badass” and which X-Men mutant might be even more popular than his.

Opening May 1st, the Gavin Hood-directed action-thriller stars Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Ryan Reynolds, Taylor Kitsch, Will.i.am, Danny Huston, Dominic Monaghan, Daniel Henney and Lynn Collins. The prequel tells the story of Wolverine’s epically violent and romantic past, his complex relationship with Victor Creed, and the ominous Weapon X program. Read more

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