Newsbites: The ’80s live forever edition!

Newsbites: The ’80s live forever edition! April 26, 2009

1. Arnold Schwarzenegger has confirmed that he may very well appear in Terminator Salvation when it opens May 21 … but because the Governor of California is busy with other things at the moment, he has done no acting for the new film. Rather, his performance will be an entirely digital creation, based on a body-cast mold that was made for the first movie in 1984. If you ask me, this is all for the good, as Schwarzenegger’s physical appearance did change somewhat over the course of the first three films — which, when you think about it, is a little odd, since all three of his characters were supposed to have come off an assembly line at the exact same time in the future. — Los Angeles Times, Variety, WENN

2. Robert Rodriguez is developing a “reboot” of the Predator franchise called Predators. The original film came out in 1987 and spawned either one sequel or three, depending on whether you count the Alien Vs. Predator cross-overs (2004-2007) as part of the original canon. At any rate, 20th Century Fox has already given the new film a release date, namely July 7, 2010. — IESB.net, Ain’t It Cool News (x2), Variety, ComingSoon.net

3. Leonard Nimoy provided the voice of Galvatron in the animated Transformers movie that came out back in 1986. So naturally, the guys who’ve been writing the live-action movies want him to come back and voice one of the characters in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which comes out June 24. And since those guys also happened to write the upcoming Star Trek movie, they’ve had a chance to talk to Nimoy about this personally. What makes the whole thing even stranger and even more inter-connected is that Nimoy’s wife, Susan Bay, is a cousin to Transformers director Michael Bay — but the director says he hasn’t approached Nimoy about doing the part directly yet; for now, he prefers to let his mother serve as a go-between. — Sci Fi Wire, MTV Movies Blog

4. Photos from the Vancouver set of Tron 2.0 have begun to pop up on the internet. Meanwhile, a number of blogs recently discovered this story that the Vancouver Sun ran three months ago, which claims that Tron 2.0 has a budget of $300 million. That figure was later revealed to be in Canadian dollars, but even so, that still comes to something like $240 million in American money. That seems like an awful lot to spend on a sequel to a movie that came out 27 years ago and didn’t even rank among the Top 20 films at the box office that year. — SlashFilm, Ain’t It Cool News, TrekMovie.com

5. Rooney Mara, sister of Kate Mara, will play the female lead in next year’s “re-imagining” of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). — Bloody-Disgusting.com, Hollywood Reporter

6. Eric Heisserer, who did some work on the Nightmare on Elm Street script, has been hired to do a rewrite “from scratch” of the prequel to The Thing (1982). The previous draft was by Battlestar Galactica producer Ronald D. Moore. — Bloody-Disgusting.com, Eric Heisserer

7. New Line Cinema is developing a feature film version of the 1980s TV series MacGyver. — Hollywood Reporter


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