Twilight Director For Beauty And The Beast
Twilight Breaking Dawn Director Bill Condon will direct a live action version of Beauty and The Beast for Disney, following in the wake of the box office success of Sleeping Beauty inspired Maleficent.
With Cinderella and The Jungle Book also in various stages of development and production, Disney seems determined to fully exploit their back catalog of animated classics.
Evan Spiliotopoulos is currently working on a script for the live action Beauty and the Beast, having previously penned a number of Disney’s straight to DVD sequels such as The Jungle Book 2.
Hayley Atwell Agent Carter Interview
Beautiful British actress Hayley Atwell talked to Red Carpet News last night at the prestigious Baileys Women’s Prize For Fiction awards ceremony at Royal Festival Hall in London. Hayley gives us an update on the new Peggy Carter TV series Agent Carter, set to hit small screens January 2015.
Hayley talks about reprising her Captain America role as secret agent Peggy Carter and her hopes for the new tv show. In particular she admits she’s hoping for a cast packed with British talent and maybe even a cameo from her big screen co-star Tommy Lee Jones.
Hayley also talks about the kind of villains in store for the series, training and how it feels to be one of the new wave of Marvel action heroines.
Video Interview Below:
Eimear McBride Wins Fiction Prize
Irish novelist Eimear McBride won this year’s Bailey’s Women’s Prize For Fiction with her debut novel ‘A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing’. It took McBride nine years to get the finished book published and she took home the £30,000 prize at tonight’s awards ceremony.
McBride beat out stiff competition from the other shortlisted titles, which included Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize winning bestseller The Goldfinch. The judging panel included Cambridge professor Mary Beard, newsreader Sophie Raworth, columnist and author Caitlin Moran and the writer Denise Mina.
Accepting the award McBride said:
“I hope that it will serve as an incentive to publishers everywhere to take a look at difficult books and to think again. There is a contract between publisher and reader that needs to be honoured and a reader must not be underestimated.”
This year’s 19th annual awards took place at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s Southbank, with liquer company Bailey’s replacing former sponsor Orange for the first time. VIP guests on the night also included Author Helen Fielding, Sheila Hancock and Hayley Atwell.
An exclusive Video Interview below with winner Eimear McBride:
Maleficent soars to top of US Box Office
Maleficent Disney’s live action re-imagining of Sleeping Beauty has topped the box office in North America on it’s debut, taking $70 million, officially giving star Angelina Jolie her biggest box office opening yet. The film successfully knocked X-Men sequel Days of Future past into second place and overcame mixed reviews from critics.
Seth MacFarlane’s western comedy A Million Ways To Die In The West also opened with $17.1 million. Despite being enough to secure a comfortable entry near the top of the box office charts it actually represents a disappointment in comparison to the impressive $54 million opening numbers for Ted.
Maleficent’s success also did not actually match that of Disney’s other recent re-imagined fairytales, Alice in Wonderland, which opened with $116m in 2010, and Oz the Great and Powerful which took $79m in its debut weekend last year.
Maleficent Interview with Angelina Jolie below:
Josh Brolin To Voice Marvel Villain Thanos
Josh Brolin will apparently be providing the voice of Marvel villain Thanos in Guardians of the Galaxy and likely beyond. The character will feature in Guardians and Avengers: Age of Ultron, inevitably setting up prime villain duties for the climatic Avengers 3.
Comic book fans will already be very familiar with the intergalactic super villain who was teasingly introduced during the final moments of Avengers Assemble. Facing off against Mavel’s entire universe of heroes Thanos is a god like nemesis who wields the power of the Infinity Gauntlet. A weapon closely connected with various artifacts that have already featured in the past Marvel films.