The First Teaser Trailer For Tom Hardy Kray Twins Film Legend

Totally Kray Kray

There's only one thing better than one Tom Hardy, and that's two Tom Hardys. So pin back your peepers and feast your mince pies on this little number, the teaser trailer for the upcoming Kray twins London gangster movie, Legend, where Tom Hardy - you guessed it - plays both Reggie and Ronnie.

LA Confidential’s Brian Helgeland is once more in a historical crime arena, adapting John Pearson’s book The Progression Of Violence. Legend dips into the dark underbelly of the swinging ‘60s, when sharp-suited gangsters warred for turf and control, and innocent people were caught in the middle of the conflict, although criminals like Ronald and Reginald Kray liked to claim they only went after the competition.

Emily Browning, David Thewlis, Christopher Eccleston, Taron Egerton, Tara Fitzgerald and Chazz Palminteri fill out the main cast for the film, with Legend to arriving September 11.

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Paul Giamatti And Toby Jones To Meet Morgan

Joining the cast of Luke Scott's sci-fi

Kate Mara and Anya Taylor-Joy were cast last month, and now Paul Giammati and Toby Jones have signed onto the cast of Luke Scott's sci-fi thriller Morgan. Boyd Holbrook (Run All Night, Gone Girl) is also negotiating to jump aboard, but hasn't quite made a deal yet.

Morgan revolves around a corporate risk-management consultant (Mara), although the actual corporate risk-management depicted on screen will likely be kept to a minimum when the consultant is summoned to a remote lab to evaluate an artificial being (Taylor-Joy) with a view to its termination.

Giamatti will be playing a psychologist who struggles to actually relate to people, while Jones will be the chief scientist in charge of the facility. The role Holbrook is up for is that of a nutritionist working for Jones.

There are shades of Ex Machina in Seth Owen’s 2014 Black List script, although it also taps into Ridley Scott’s A.I. explorations in Alien and Prometheus. Sir Ridders, who recently wrapped directing Mara in The Martian, is producing alongside Scott Free's Michael Schaefer and Elishia Holmes.

Luke Scott - Ridley's son - worked as second unit director on Exodus: Gods And Kings, and makes his solo directorial feature debut here. Shooting, by the sound of things, should be underway in the near future, but there are no release dates pencilled in so far.

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Jennifer Saunders Makes Absolutely Fabulous Progress

Says the Ab-Fab movie will shoot in the autumn

Back in January, Jennifer Saunders said her New Year's resolution was to get the long talked about Absolutely Fabulous movie made. Impressively, that seems to have been the motivator she needed, since she's just revealed that development on the film is now well underway, and that all being well it'll go before the cameras later this year.

"I didn’t do it for a while," says Saunders, "because I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be awful if it was awful’. But now we’re all so old … Joanna [Lumley] says ‘do it before we all die'. There is a plot and that’s the miracle. It involves all the main characters and virtually everyone that’s ever been in the series, all those characters and we’re in London and sometimes we might go to the South of France, I’m hoping. I’m waiting for the budget. It could be anywhere. If it’s a big budget it will be the Bahamas. I’ve got another deadline on May 8th … and then we’ll probably do it in the autumn.”

Last we heard, the film was going by the title Edina & Patsy, named for the hard-partying and responsibility-averse PR guru and her booze-happy best pal, played by Joanna Lumley. It isn't actually clear who is number-crunching the budget and setting Saunders' deadlines, but it's hard to imagine the BBC isn't a large part of the mix.

Uprooting a sit-com's cast to an exotic location is a well-worn trope of British TV-to-movie spin-offs, from Holiday On The Buses to Are You Being Served? to Kevin & Perry Go Large. Hopefully Ab-Fab can rise above those dubious precedents...

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James Wan Now In Talks To Direct Robotech

He's considering Sony's anime adaptation

With Fast & Furious 7 effortlessly hurtling past the magic billion-dollar box-office mark, director James Wan is, shall we say, these days rather in demand. His name has already been mentioned in connection with Warner/DC's Aquaman, but his latest suitors are Sony, who are courting him to man the cameras for Robotech.

The project is based on the 1980s Japanese anime, bought by Harmony Gold USA and Japan’s Tatsunoko Productions, which re-edited and redubbed three different series to make into a daily syndicated ‘toon for audiences in the US and elsewhere.

In the series, mankind builds machines using technology developed from a crashed alien spaceship to fend off three different alien invasions, including one race of huge warriors none too happy about us pinching their tech and power source.

Sony picked up the Robotech rights when Warner Bros. dropped them last month. The former studio had been developing the project since 2007 (Tobey Maguire and Akiva Goldsman were involved at that point).

Mark Canton and Gianni Nunnari (300, Immortals) are among the producers, with Michael Gordon (300, G.I. Joe) writing the screenplay. Whether Wan signs on the dotted line remains to be seen, although Deadline seem confident that he'll take this over Aquaman. He's also developing a movie based on his own Malignant Man comics with Fox, while juggling a producing slate at New Line.

Wan's immediate next directing gig is, however, a return to his horror roots. He starts shooting The Conjuring 2 in the autumn.

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Female Jump Street Film In Development

And the Men In Black crossover is becoming reality

Given its history trying to spin a linked film universe out of Spider-Man and its current efforts in conjuring up a sprawling Ghostbusters franchise, it’s perhaps not surprising that Sony would be planning even more with bona fide success the Jump Street franchise. According to The Wrap, not only is the Men In Black crossover definitely in the works, but the studio also wants a female-focused spin-off, with writers in place to work on the script.

Jump Street overseers Phil Lord and Chris Miller will be involved in developing both new movies, with the MIB crossover planned as a typically chucklesome comment on shared film universes. Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill are also attached alongside producer Neal Moritz, who has shepherded the movies from the start.

Nothing is yet known about what the film will entail, beyond Jenko and Schmidt taking on alien threats, and no-one should be holding their breath for Tommy Lee Jones or Will Smith to show up, except possibly in cameos. 

As for the female-led spin-off, writers Lucia Aniello and Paul Downs, who usually work on US comedy show Broad City, have been hired to crank out a script for the film, which remains equally under wraps for now. We’ll see how this all pans out, as the studio is still licking its wounds over how the big Spider-Man plans have so far failed to materialise. 

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Mary Elizabeth Winstead Heads For Mercy Street

Josh Radnor, Gary Cole and more join Ridley Scott's Civil War drama

In January, word arrived that Ridley Scott was producing and developing a new TV drama for US network PBS set during the American Civil War and medical staff treating wounded warriors. Now we know the title – Mercy Street – and that the likes of Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Josh Radnor and Gary Cole will be among the cast. 

Mercy Street focuses on two volunteer nurses whose political ideology falls on opposite sides of the conflict. New England abolitionist Mary Pinney (Winstead) works alongside Confederate supporter Emma Green (Hannah James) in the former luxury hotel owned by the latter’s family that has been converted into a Union Army hospital.

Radnor is aboard as Jebediah Foster, a civilian surgeon who grew up in a privileged Southern slave-owning household. The scripts will be drawn from memoirs and letters of real medical volunteers at Mansion House Hospital.

The main trio is bolstered by Cole, Peter Gerety, Norbert Leo Butz, Jack Falahee, AnnaSophia Robb, McKinley Belcher III, Shalita Grant, Cheery Jones and Donna Murphy, with PBS aiming to air the drama next year alongside the final run of Downton Abbey. Whether it makes it over to the UK has yet to be decided.

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First Art From Pixar's Next Short

Sanjay's Super Team will be attached to The Good Dinosaur

While we already know the short that will be screening in front of Pixar’s Inside Out here this July (Lava, a clip from which you can see here), the company has now announced the film that will be attached to its late 2015 release, The Good Dinosaur. Take a look at the first picture from Sanjay’s Super Team. 

It’s the directorial debut of Sanjay Patel, an artist who has worked in character design and animation at the studio since A Bug’s Life. After working on movies such as The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Monsters University, he’s bringing to life a story based on his own childhood.

Growing up in California in the 1980s as the child of Indian immigrants, his world was a blend of the superheroes he loved to watch in cartoons on TV and his parents’ strong religion. So the short follows him as a youngster combining both worlds, seeing an ancient, Hindu take on the Avengers, with the gods as superheroes bringing colour and life into his world. "If I could, I would go back to the 1980s and give my younger self this short," Patel tells the LA Times. "I want to normalize and bring a young brown boy's story to the pop culture zeitgeist. To have a broad audience like Pixar's see this... It is a big deal. I'm so excited about that."

Patel pitched the short to John Lasseter and others at the studio back in 2012 and it’ll premiere at this year’s Annecy International Animation Festival in France this June ahead of The Good Dinosaur’s UK release in November. 

from Empire News