jj abrams (16 posts)

Stephen Vaughan/ Paramount Pictures

Didn't see this coming.

Tom Cruise and J.J. Abrams have signed on with Paramount Pictures to produce the fourth installment of Mission: Impossible, according to Variety.

As you may recall, couch-jumping and other circumstances surrounding the previous film in the series helped precipitate a very public rift between Cruise and Viacom's Sumner Redstone, which ended the megastar's 14-year-long relationship with Paramount.

At the time Redstone told the Wall Street Journal, "[Cruise]'s recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount."

But that's so 2006. These days Redstone is sounding highly complimentary about the celeb, Abrams is hot off Paramount's Star Trek and Cruise remains one of the most bankable stars on the planet.

So when you put it that way, this seems totally possible. Look for it in 2011.

• Reese Witherspoon is looking to make a drug comedy. No, not like Half-Baked. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Pharm Girl is an "aspirational comedy" by the Bad Santa screenwriters about a woman and the pharmaceutical industry, which does make it sound a bit like Half-Baked.

• Jerry Seinfeld wants to help your relationship. Variety reports the comedian has made a deal to create and distribute multiple localized versions of a reality series called The Marriage Ref, in which couples put their problems in the hands of people who truly understand emotional pain: comedians and celebrities. Let the healing begin.

Zachary Quinto's Spock tells us, "You will experience fear."

Actually, we just felt pumped.

The latest trailer for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot has all the stuff you'd hope for and more in a trailer: epic battles, bloody barfights, deep-space couplings, family drama and plenty of gleaming hardware. Oh, and a well-cast bunch of actors to replace the iconic original crew.

What's this trailer like? Eric Bana's villain says it best: "Fire everything!" That pretty much sums up the plan here: Resistance is futile to the onslaught of awesomeness.

But that's just us. What do you think?

Entertainment Weekly

J.J. Abrams and William Shatnerstill aren't on the same hailing frequency. 

This time in the maddening, media-enabled relationship between the Star Trek reinventor and the Star Trek icon, it's Abrams talking to Entertainment Weekly about Shatner talking to him, Abrams, via the William Shatner channel.

"I don't know how my life has become a thing where William Shatner talks to me through YouTube," Abrams tells the magazine, which scored a cover photo of the filmmaker's new Trek stars, Zachary Quinto as the young Mr. Spock and Chris Pine as the young James T. Kirk. 

Keep Reading

Rena Durham/ZUMAPRess.com, CBS

Don't worry: Chris Pine, who plays a young James T. Kirk in J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek movie, won't be pulling a Shatner. As in, he won't be imitating the famous...dramatic....pauses...of his '60s predecessor.

"Really what [William] Shatner did was very specific and very unique to him," Pine told E! News this week, while promoting Bottle Shock, an indie about Napa Valley vintners. "I think if I went to mimic-ville, I went to try to do Shatner, it would not have been smart."

It looks like Pine will, however, take Shatner's example when it comes to getting it on with alien ladies. Keep reading for scoop on interplanetary love, Trek technology and more:

Keep Reading

EW.com/ Paramount Pictures

The new Star Trek movie isn't due out until next May, but director J.J. Abrams recently dropped a few scoopy tidbits to E! News. And fans attending Comic-Con in San Diego next week can get their hands on four new posters (at left, all put together), with slick pics of Eric Bana, Zoe Saldana, Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine.

When we caught Abrams at the Television Critics Association tour this week, he talked about his franchise reboot and the early days of Spock, Kirk, Uhura and the Enterprise. Here's the deal:

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The revamped USS Enterprise won't be docking anywhere soon this Christmas.  

Paramount has pushed the release of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek from Dec. 25 to May 8, 2009, part of a larger scheduling shift now that the writers' strike is over and producers can look realistically at their films' ETAs. 

Abrams' much anticipated addition to the franchise, which will take fans back to Kirk and Spock's formative years, is now due out on the Thursday before Mother's Day. 

To date, no other film jockeying for the same audience is slated to be released at the same time. The only possible eyeball-stealers at the moment are 20th Century Fox's X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which is due in theaters May 1, 2009, and Sony's Da Vinci Code prequel Angels and Demons. 

So, while moviegoers couldn't turn around during the summer of '07 without smacking into a threequel, the summer of 2009 is shaping up to be the season of the prequel. 

And there are plenty of Trekkies out there displeased to find their Christmas Day plans have been turned asunder, although plenty like the fact that Paramount seems confident enough in its product to make it a warm-weather movie.

"I'm psyched that this gives them more time to do their stuff to make as good a film as possible, but also, I can't help thinking 'Dammit' because I'm already dying to see this movie as it is," wrote Kamen Rider Blade on a trekweb.com message board. 

The Star Trek teaser trailer, which premiered last month before Cloverfield and which features Leonard Nimoy's familiar voice intoning over images of an under-construction Enterprise, stoked fan interest.

"It means Paramount has great faith in the film," added timmer33. "They're seeing the dailies and know it has the potential to be huge. May is the time for BIG releases." 

The prequel's cast is certainly big—rich with both newcomers and familiar Vulcan faces. 

Among those venturing to the final frontier are Winona Ryder, playing Mr. Spock's Vulcan mother (a twist on the original); Zachary Quinto, playing young Spock (Nimoy will also appear as the older version); Chris Pine as Kirk; Karl Urban as Dr. McCoy; Simon Pegg as Scotty; John Cho as Sulu; Zoe Saldana as Uhura; Anton Yelchin as Chekov; and Eric Bana, playing the villainous Nero.

Paramount shuffled a few other high-profile projects, as well:

• David Fincher's take on the F. Scott Fitzgerald story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring Brad Pitt as a man who's aging in the wrong direction, is moving from Nov. 26 to Dec. 19. 
• The Renée Zellweger thriller Case 39 has been bumped from Aug. 22 to Apr. 10, 2009.
• Eddie Murphy's latest foray into family-friendly territory, Nowhereland (which had to shut down production for a day when filming was interrupted by WGA picketers), originally scheduled for Sept. 26, will have to wait until June 12, 2009.

If you know what the Cloverfield monster is, don't tell Dennis Acevedo.

Where the upcoming, under-wraps JJ Abrams production is concerned, the Kentucky man wants to make like it's going on 1958 not 2008.

"I hopefully can make to the end [opening day], and be surprised," Acevedo says of the movie due out next month.

He is not alone.

Even as some fanboys pour over Cloverfield trailers as if they were the Zapruder film, there are others who only want to know so much.

"I think the person who's very involved in this type of movie is deeply split," says UGO.com movies editor Jordan Hoffman, "because they know the movie will be that much better if they wait."

The wait began in earnest back in July when the first Cloverfield trailer debuted before screenings of Transformers. The clip was such a tease there wasn't even a title, only a release date. For a while Cloverfield was known simply as 1-18-08.

On the off chance you saw the shot of the Statue of Liberty's severed head and decided the film was a romantic comedy, Abrams, the genre icon behind Lost and Alias, confirmed it was a monster movie. But he didn't say, and he hasn't said, what kind of monster.

Five months later—an eternity in the blog age—the secret still isn't definitively out.

Says Acevedo: "It's incredible."

Even members of the Ain't It Cool News community, regular employers of the spoiler alert, have shown restraint.

"i don't know how much i want to give away b/c i think people are having a really good time hypothesizing about what the monster is," one reputed tipster wrote.

Hoffman credits filmmakers for keeping fans busy—with viral sites, such as the one for the bogus Japanese corporation, Tagruato, with MySpace pages for the movie's characters and more.

"Part of the reason they've been able to keep it a secret this long has been leaking other little things about the project," Hoffman says.

Certainly, there's been enough intrigue to keep Acevedo hooked. No caveman he, the 36-year-old computer programmer runs a blog called Cloverfield Clues.

Just because Acevedo doesn't want the surprise spoiled—he declared his site a spoiler-free zone this week—doesn't mean he wants a news blackout. Or a moratorium on monster speculation. When he emailed a reporter a screen shot from the latest Cloverfield trailer, he couldn't resist asking of the upright something or other, "What do you think it looks like?"

Acevedo has his own theories. Mostly of what it's not.

"It's not Cthulhu [the giant, tentacle-faced H.P. Lovecraft creature]," Acevedo says. "It's not anything we've seen before. It's not Godzilla."

Acevedo cites as evidence a recent interview with Bryan Burk, another Cloverfield producer, who told Sci Fi Wire that, while Abrams was inspired by Japan's King of the Monsters, the new movie is "an entirely original story and monster."

But maybe not entirely unique. Acevedo guesses that, like Godzilla, Cloverfield's mountain of trouble emerges from the sea.

Which is not the same as saying it is a sea creature.

"You can't have a fish monster, like a giant scrod or something," Hoffman says. "That would be absurd."

All will be revealed in the former 1-18-08 on Jan. 18.

Unless the secret leaks before then. Which both Acevedo and Hoffman fully expect.

"I think we're past the point where we can make it to the end, and somebody's not going to spoil it," Acevedo says.

Hoffman says there's "no chance at all" opening day will arrive without the monster's identity previously being revealed.

"It'll simply have to leak at some point," Hoffman says. "It's going to have to leak. And I think at some point they want it to leak."

Either way, it won't matter to Hoffman. He'll still be up for the ride. That's because, if nothing else, Cloverfield will come complete with the teaser trailer for Abrams' new Star Trek movie.

"That's my $10 right there," Hoffman says.

His secret's out.