While New Line Cinema continues the long, torturous process of patching things up with Peter Jackson and thereby giving us a film version of The Hobbit — a recent Entertainment Weekly cover story summarizes everything that has happened on that front over the past four years — the studio is also proceeding with its plans to make Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials the cinematic heir to Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003).
If the Italian website Queste Oscure Materie, as translated by IGN.com, is to be believed, it looks like the film version of The Golden Compass may feature Ian “Gandalf” McKellen as the voice of the armoured bear Iorek Byrnison, while Christopher “Saruman” Lee may play a member of the Magisterium described as “a grumpy man dressed in dark colours, whom we see sitting at a table with another character, whose daemon is a panther.”
UPDATE: Whoops, it looks like IGN.com might have been quoting an article from the Italian website that was already in English. BridgeToTheStars.net links to this page, which adds the news that “the final scenes in the movie have been heavily reworked . . . at the request of the producers, not of the director.” Hmmm.
OCT 9 UPDATE: Ian McKellen’s voice can now be heard in Teaser 2, which just went up at IGN.com. Meanwhile, Film Ick passes on a rumour or two concerning just how extensive the changes to the film’s ending might be. It sounds like scenes that were glimpsed in the teasers might be removed from this first film altogether.
UPPERDATE: An exclusive and more complete version of the new trailer is now up at Yahoo! Movies — and hey, look, here’s Lee:
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