Released in the summer of 2008, chick flick Sex And The City did surprisingly well at the box office against such summer blockbuster powerhouses like The Dark Knight. The film was set to be the finale of HBO’s long running cable series of the same name and featured Sarah Jessica Parker’s writer character Carrie Bradshaw and her friends having one last glorious romantic Manhattan adventure before riding off in to the sunset. And the film actually delivered a nice sense of closure to the quartet and their trials and tribulations with relationships and their adoration of all things shoes. But in the wake of the film’s $415 million worldwide box office gross, studio brass at Warner Brothers were of course quick to order up a sequel. The new film opens next summer, but the first teaser poster (below) has just been unveiled. Also, Warners has just released a picture of the film’s four stars- Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall and Kristin Davis. Why are they on a stage singing? Is perhaps karaoke a major plot point?
It still doesn’t have a US distributor yet, but director Michael J. Bassett’s big screen adaptation of writer Robert E. Howard’s pulp hero Solomon Kane is getting ready to hit theaters in Europe later this month. As part of the pre-release publicity for the film’s December 23 French release, we get the below poster. For those of you who took Spanish or German in high school instead of French, the tag line translates to “Combating evil with evil.” (Click on the poster for a biiger view.)
As to why the film hasn’t gotten picked up by a United States distributor, who can say? The film got some encouraging reviews when it screened at the Toronto Film Fest and the Austin Fantastic Fest this past September. Our own Howard expert, Rich Zeszotarski, liked the script alot and felt it held true to the character’s creator’s intent. Hopefully, the film will do good box office and encourage someone on this side of the Atlantic to pony up.
If there are any sweeter assemblage of words in the English language than “A Film By Terry Gilliam,” I don’t know. I mean look at them there, right smack dab in the middle of the new US poster below for the director’s upcoming The Imaginarium Of Dr. Parnassus. They jazz up the otherwise lackluster composition of the piece, even helping to distract from the awkward picture of stars Heath Ledger and Lily Cole towards the top.
To be fair, from all accounts, The Imaginarium Of Dr. Parnassus sounds like a tough film to synopsize on a poster. And while this US poster is certainly not as good as the Lily Cole-centric United Kingdom poster we brought to you a few weeks ago, it certainly isn’t as cringe inducingly bad as the John Neville’s-head-as-hot-air-balloon monstrosity that Columbia put together for Gilliam’s 1989 masterpiece The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen.
Robert Rodriguez is working right now at completing Machette, his feature length expansion of his fake trailer from 2007′s Grindhouse and the publicity machine is already starting to crank up in anticipation of the film’s release next year. Coming Soon has spotted a new character poster for the film featuring Jessica Alba as Sartana, an ICE agent who is interested in talking with Danny Trejo’s titular former Mexican Federale. (Click on the image below for the full view.)
I have to say that I am still pleasantly surprised that Rodriguez has gotten this film off the ground, considering how poorly Grindhouse did at the box office. If Machette succeeds, will we see more of Grindhouse‘s faux trailers getting the feature length treatment? Ely Roth has stated wanting to do a full-length version of Thanksgiving. And I really want to see Nic Cage as Fu Manchu in Werewolf Women Of The SS!
And here’s the “original,” Not Safe For Work Machette trailer.
There’s a new poster for Guy Ritchie’s upcoming Sherlock Holmes film. In addition to standard shots of Robert Downey Jr. (whose head looks photoshopped on here) as Holmes and Jude Law as trusty assistant Dr. Watson, we can see co-stars Rachel McAdams (as Irene Adler) and Mark Strong (as the villainous Lord Blackwood) lurking amongst the background images.Also in the background images are a bottle of cyanide, a street lamp bearing Holmes’ legendary street address, a gun and a bulldog. (Click on the images below for a bigger view.) Do they have some significance in the story? We’ll find out when the film opens on December 25. (But, really Warner Brothers promotional depart… “Holmes For The Holidays”? That is one of the worse tag lines I’ve seen in a long while.)
With its debut a Cannes looming later this month and a Stateside release scheduled for the end of teh summer, I guess it is time for the pr machine to start ramping up on director Quentin Tarantino’s World War Two epic Inglorious Basterds. The first two character posters released are of Brad Pitt and Eli Roth. While character posters don’t excite me all that much in general, check out that scar on Pitt’s throat. He is definitely not a man to be triffled with here.
Paramount has released the final theatrical poster (below, click to enlarge) for J. J. Abrahm’s upcoming Star Trek, and I have to say t hat I’m of two minds on it.
Deep inside me, the old school Trek fan that wasn’t quite killed off by the franchise’s decline through the 1990s likes the poster alot. It conveys a sense of speed and is just a touch abstract.I would definitely be tempted to hand this on the wall of my office.
But I wonder if the approach that brings the poster out of the realm of ordinary film posters towards a more serious artistic approach will possibly turn off the average ticket buyer. The franchise has a lot of goodwill to win back after the dismalness that was Star Trek: Nemesis and the publicity for the film that we’ve seen so far hints that this return to the franchise’s roots could be just the thing it needed. I’m noit sure that this poster, as beautiful as it is, will help to contribute to that .
Here’s a few more of those wonderful teaser posters for this Friday’s release of the 3D animated film Coraline. As always, click on each one for a bigger view.
Also, we’d like to wish Neil Gaiman, the author of the original Coraline children’s book the movie is based on congratulations for winning the Newbury Medal for his most recent novel The Graveyard Book.
