Harry Potter Playing 007?
ontact Music reported a rumor that Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe is one of the young actors under consideration to play James Bond in his teen years. Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell is also rumored to be up for the role in a movie based on Silverfin, the first in a series of books by British comic Charlie Higston about 007 as a 13-year-old, the site reported.
Citing an anonymous source, the site reported that the film's storyline would center on Bond's time in Britain's public school Eton, but movie producers are planning to raise the age of the teenage spy to secure either 16-year-old Radcliffe or Bell, 19, in the lead role, the site reported.
Spidey 3 Villains Revealed?
reezeDriedMovies reported a rumor about the identities of the three villains in Sam Raimi's upcoming third Spider-Man movie. The villains will be played by Topher Grace, Thomas Haden Church and James Franco.
Citing anonymous sources, the site reported the following spoilers: Grace will play Venom, Haden Church will play Sandman and Franco will play Hobgoblin (not Green Goblin II, as expected). All are well-known villains from the Marvel Comics franchise.
Fall SF&F Shows To Debut
he broadcast networks will begin rolling out their slate of science fiction, supernatural and fantasy programming next week, beginning on Sept. 13 with The WB's Supernatural. The fall season boasts an unusually large selection of such programming, owing in part to the success of last year's hit ABC series Lost, as well as NBC's Medium. Below is a rundown of the upcoming season and series premieres. All times are ET/PT.
•Tuesday, Sept. 13: 9 p.m. Supernatural (The WB)
•Friday, Sept. 16: 9 p.m. Threshold (CBS)
•Monday, Sept. 19: 8 p.m. Surface (NBC), 10 p.m. Medium (NBC)
•Wednesday, Sept. 21: 9 p.m. Lost (ABC), 10 p.m. Invasion (ABC)
•Friday, Sept. 23: 8 p.m. Ghost Whisperer (CBS)
•Sunday, Sept. 25: 8 p.m. Charmed (The WB), 9 p.m. Desperate Housewives (ABC)
•Thursday, Sept. 29: 8 p.m. Smallville (The WB), 8 p.m. Alias (ABC), 9 p.m. Night Stalker (ABC)
Lost Habla Espanol
BC will dub its hit series Lost and Desperate Housewives into Spanish, part of an effort to broaden its audience to Latino viewers, Zap2It reported. Other shows will also be either dubbed or subtitled as well, the site reported.
"We wanted to move beyond toe-dipping and really dive in," Stephen McPherson, president of ABC Entertainment, told the site. "Almost half of the 41 million Hispanics in this country watch only or mostly Spanish-language television, and we want to bring that audience to ABC."
ABC says it's currently casting the voice roles for the series it plans to dub.
Supernatural Sneaks On Yahoo!
he WB is teaming up with Yahoo! to offer a sneak peek at its upcoming series Supernatural, starting Sept. 6, Zap2It reported. The network and Yahoo! will make the show's debut episode available as a webcast. The episode, which Yahoo! plans to promote heavily on its front page and in its TV section, will be up through Sept. 12, a day before Supernatural's TV premiere.
The Supernatural webcast is the second of its kind for The WB. Last year, the network streamed the premiere of Jack & Bobby to America Online subscribers.
Supernatural stars Jensen Ackles (Smallville) and Jared Padalecki (Gilmore Girls) as brothers who travel the country searching for their missing dad and hunting down otherworldly phenomena. Eric Kripke (Boogeyman) created the show and executive-produces it with McG (The O.C.).
Supernatural Won't Draw Out Arcs
ric Kripke, creator and executive producer of The WB's upcoming creature feature series Supernatural, told SCI FI Wire the show is a return to self-contained storytelling. "I'm a fan of Lost, and from what I know of Invasion and Surface and a lot of the new shows is they're sort of about this endless mystery unfolding," Kripke said in an interview. "And I think that you have to be careful with that, because that runs the risk of the Twin Peaks syndrome, where your audience loses patience with this endless tease."
Supernatural stars Jensen Ackles (Smallville) and Jared Padalecki (Gilmore Girls) as monster-hunting brothers who travel the country looking for their missing dad.
"We're hoping the audience will connect to just committed, good, red-blooded, rollicking storytelling that every week is a satisfying story," Kripke said. "We'll track the mythology, but every week we just want to scare the hell out of you with basically a different horror movie that has a beginning, a middle and an end."
Kripke said that his great wish is that the nights his show airs, no one will go to sleep. "I think it's a huge advantage that we have budget considerations and have restrictions to what we can show and what we can't show, because it seems uniquely and specific to horror that [that] always seems to improve the product," he said. "When you don't see the monster."
Kripke added of his two hunky leads: "We're hoping our guys are charismatic and handsome, and we hope the girls are attracted to that. But we want everyone to come to the party. We have what we think are Luke Skywalker and Han Solo cruising the country and killing monsters, and what's not to love about that?" Supernatural debuts Sept. 13 and will air Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Surface Creatures Aren't Shy
ake Bell, who stars as marine biologist Laura Daughtery in the upcoming NBC SF series Surface, told SCI FI Wire that the unidentified ocean species at the center of the show will be seen more frequently than viewers might expect. "I sort of thought [creators Josh and Jonas Pate] would be a little more hush-hush and sort of coy and teasing about seeing certain things, seeing the actual creature," Bell said in an interview. "They're kind of excited to have the first sort of digital character in a TV show. They want it to exist as something. Our technology in film and television has advanced so drastically that we can do stuff like that now."
Rather than showing the creatures little by little, as Steven Spielberg did in Jaws, Bell said that the Pates want to put their digital creations front and center. "We're going to be a little daring with it," she said. "It's a gutsy thing to kind of do that every week, but they're ready to take on the challenge, because they feel that the technology is high enough right now, and they have such a clear idea of what they want down to the detail. They want to show the audience a little more than you expect. We're going to see it."
As for the answer to the mysterious origin of the creatures, Bell is as much in the dark as the viewers. "I think [the Pate brothers] try to keep everything kind of mysterious for us as well, because we don't read anything or know anything beyond the episode we're working on," she said. "They love to throw curve balls. I'm reading these scripts, and I'm like, 'Whoa!' ... That's how I'm finding out more and more. That's why it's very exciting on script day, when the new scripts come out. Everyone's like, 'Oh, my God.'" Surface premieres Sept. 19 and will air Mondays at 8 p.m. ET/PT. NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
SF Films Top Lackluster Season
F movies ranked highest in an otherwise lackluster 2005 summer movie season, led by Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith, War of the Worlds, Batman Begins and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Variety reported.
As of the Labor Day weekend, which traditionally marks the end of the summer movie season, the period's take totaled $3.53 billion, down 9 percent from last year's $3.86 billion and the lowest figure since 2001's $3.34 billion, the trade paper reported. This summer marked the third straight year that the actual number of movie tickets sold has declined.
Other successful films included Madagascar, Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Fantastic Four.
Big flops among SF movies included The Island and Stealth.
Hobbits Hoped for Kong Cameo
lijah Wood, who starred as the hobbit Frodo Baggins in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, told SCI FI Wire he was disappointed that he couldn't coordinate a surprise cameo of hobbits for Jackson's next epic, King Kong.
"I think that early on we had conceived of maybe trying to get the hobbits out there, maybe Billy [Boyd], Dom [Monaghan] and myself to try and do some kind of cameo: get stomped on by a giant foot or something or maybe even dressed as hobbits way in the background or something," said Wood, who is traveling with director Liev Schreiber at the Toronto International Film Festival promoting his latest little film, Everything Is Illuminated. Although Wood is now focusing on small indie movies—Green Street Hooligans is also coming out soon—Wood said he's still in very close contact with his fellow Lord of the Rings cast members and crew.
"We never got to do it, because Dom was super busy on Lost, and Billy has been working," Wood said in an interview. "So we couldn't coordinate schedules to do it."
Wood did get a chance to visit the set of King Kong in New Zealand during filming and saw Jackson and the old crew he worked with for nearly four years.
"I was actually surprised at how overwhelmed I was, because I was walking onto the same stage that we used and all the same crew, and it was amazing," Wood said. "It was great to go back. It will always be such a huge part of my life, that country and those people."
Wood will next be a voice of a penguin in Happy Feet. King Kong, from Universal Pictures, opens in December. Universal is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Marvel Has New Name, Slate
arvel, the home of Spider-Man and X-Men, has a new name and 10 new movies in development, Variety reported. With its $525 million debt facility from Merrill Lynch closed, the company is changing its name from Marvel Enterprises to Marvel Entertainment, reflecting its new business producing and financing movies internally without a studio partner.
Along with the Merrill Lynch deal, Marvel struck a deal with Paramount to market and distribute its films for a fee, similar to Lucasfilm's arrangement with Fox, the trade paper reported.
Marvel has identified 10 new characters and groups it will develop as potential feature franchises to produce itself: Captain America, the Avengers, Nick Fury, Black Panther, Ant-Man, Cloak and Dagger, Dr. Strange, Hawkeye, Power Pack and Shang-Chi.
The deal with Merrill allows Marvel to produce films with budgets between $50 million and $165 million. If the first films are successful, Marvel will be able to replenish the facility to produce new movies in development or sequels to hits. The company is hoping to release its first movie by the summer of 2008.
SCI FI Asks What If?
CI FI Channel announced that it is developing What If, a "speculative future" series that poses intriguing scenarios of alternate realities. The program, from NBC Universal Television Studio in association with New Line Television, asks, "What if a moment in time could change the world forever?"
What If is being developed as a weekly, one-hour series. Some scenarios: What would happen if the meteor had missed the Earth and dinosaurs co-existed with the development of humans? What if Germany had developed the first atomic weapon, bombed New York and was victorious in World War II?
"This project has universal appeal," Mark Stern, SCI FI Channel's executive vice president of original programming, said in a statement. "Who hasn't wondered what our daily lives might be like if certain moments in history had gone a different way? What If will take an exciting, thought-provoking approach to imagining such possibilities."
What If will incorporate computer-generated graphics, dramatic recreations, narration and interviews. Emmy Award-winning producer/director Jon Kroll (The Amazing Race, Big Brother) will serve as executive producer on the series.
What If is inspired by the book series of the same name. The production will work with Byron Hollinshead, president of American Historical Publications and producer of the best-selling anthologies, which are published by Putnam in the United States.
Rose Star Practiced Seizures
ennifer Carpenter, who stars in the title role in the upcoming supernatural drama The Exorcism of Emily Rose, told SCI FI Wire that she practiced in a mirrored room to perfect her character's various seizures, spasms, vocalizations and physical contortions. "My sister's a chiropractor, and she says I have an unusually flexible lower back, but I don't do yoga," the Kentucky native said in an interview. "I don't think I'm very bendy."
Carpenter plays a 19-year-old college student who becomes increasingly distraught over visions and seizures she experiences while away from home. A priest (Tom Wilkinson) eventually attempts to drive out what he believes to be demons possessing the girl, who nevertheless dies, leaving the priest charged with negligent homicide.
"I was in Italy on vacation with my grandmother and my mom, and I'd only seen 12 pages of the script, and I spent money I didn't have to come back to L.A. to have a shot at it," Carpenter, 25, said. "And while I was on the plane, you can't like get in the aisle and start practicing seizures. So I ... just sort of started playing it out in my mind how I wanted ... certain pieces to look. ... I got a room at [the company that was] going to work with us for special effects when we needed them. And they gave me a room full of mirrors, and so I would just play and look and see what I liked and what was scary. And then adrenaline kind of made me bend a little further than I realized I could. ... [As for the screaming], I would just grunt and growl and see how high you could get and low you could get and play with like diphthongs and vowel sounds. .... There was sort of a method to the madness."
Carpenter added of the realistic-looking seizures: "When I look back at it a year later, I don't remember any of it hurting or being hard. The hard part about this job feels like communicating what went on in my mind when we were doing it." The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which purports to be based on a true story, opens Sept. 9.
Rose Doesn't Pick Sides
ennifer Carpenter, who plays the title character in the upcoming The Exorcism of Emily Rose, told SCI FI Wire that the movie tries not to take sides in the case of a young woman who perished during the course of an alleged exorcism. Was she truly possessed, or were her experiences the result of psychosis and illness?
"I think I was really lucky," Carpenter said in an interview. "I went to Catholic school and stuff growing up in Kentucky. But I feel like I came to it at a really neutral place. Like, I ... didn't have a lot of my own opinions to place on it or try to champion those causes."
In Exorcism, Carpenter plays a 19-year-old woman who begins to see visions and have seizures that she believes are the result of demonic possession. A priest, played by Tom Wilkinson, comes in to try to exorcise them, and in the course of the procedure, the young woman dies. The bulk of the movie, which is loosely based on a true story, centers on the trial of the priest for negligent homicide, in which he is defended by a lawyer played by Laura Linney.
"I did the work of the prosecution and the defense ... as much as I could," Carpenter said, referring to her mental preparation for the role. "And it's funny, because like you get really comfortable on one side: 'Ah, that's exactly how it happened.' And then I was really surprised to go over to try to do a little bit of Laura's homework, ... and I got really comfortable over there, too. So I never made a decision all the way through. ... I didn't make a decision one way or another, and I think that helped to play it. And after the fact, I was having a meal with a friend, and having a completely unrelated conversation, and I thought, 'Ah, I know what happened. I know how I feel about it.' And then I saw the movie, final cut, and I think it's changed again. I think how people respond to it belongs to them, you know? That's the great thing about this movie. It's not trying to champion after one cause. It's just saying, 'Take inventory and see how much room you've left for possiblity and doubt and new information, and whatever you leave with belongs to you.'"
Carpenter added that some believers or skeptics may have issues with the movie's even tone. "I think there's probably some concern about how people in certain groups would react to it," she said. "But if your faith can be rocked by a movie, then there's something else you're not looking at. Because, like I said, it's just trying to give you questions, not answers, you know?" The Exorcism of Emily Rose opens Sept. 9.
St. Louis Hosting NASFiC
he 2007 North American Science Fiction Convention will be held in Collinsville, Ill., a suburb of St. Louis, on Aug. 2-5, 2007, according to a report on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Web site.
The site was selected by ballot at this year's NASFiC in Seattle.
NASFiC is held only on years when the World Science Fiction Convention is held outside North America; the 2007 WorldCon will be held in Yokohama, Japan.
Guests of honor at the 2007 NASFiC (which will also be known as Archon 31) will include Barbara Hambly, Darryl K. Sweet, Mira Furlan, Nancy Hathaway, Roger Tener and Vic Milán.
EverQuest Helps Red Cross
ony Online Entertainment has added a feature to its popular EverQuest II massively multiplayer online role-playing game to enable gamers to make a donation to the American Red Cross to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina.
EverQuest II now has a "/donate" command, which will take a gamer to the American Red Cross's Hurricane 2005 relief Web site. Members of Sony Online Entertainment communities in other games can also contribute using the link "Red Cross."
For the more than 13,000 players who live in hurricane-affected areas, Sony will suspend billing until such time as they are able to play again. In addition, any items or structures in any of those games that decay over time will be preserved until the user's next login.
Resident 4 Packed With Extras
he upcoming PlayStation 2 Limited Resident Evil 4 Collector's Pack from Capcom will feature soundtrack CDs, a T-shirt, a figurine and a whopping price tag of $119.99, the GameSpot Web site reported.
Resident Evil 4 is the latest installment in the zombie video-game franchise and reportedly the scariest title so far.
The Collector's Pack will include a six-disc soundtrack collection, a Resident Evil 4 shirt and a 7-inch figurine of hero Leon Kennedy, the site reported.
The pack will not be sold in stores and will only be available directly through Capcom's Web site.
A Resident Evil 4 Premium Edition will include a making-of DVD, a Resident Evil prologue art book and cel artwork of Ada Wong, who was recently confirmed as a playable character in the PS2 version. The Premium Edition retails for $49.99, $10 more than the standard edition.
Shatner To Sing Trek
riginal Star Trek star William Shatner will sing the theme from his show at the 57th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards, airing Sept. 18 on CBS, TV Guide Online reported. Shatner, now on the cast of ABC's Boston Legal, will be joined by opera star Frederica von Stade.
The stunt is part of a segment called "Emmy Idol," in which actors will perform classic TV theme songs throughout the telecast and viewers will pick a winner.
Indigo Streets This Month
tari announced that Indigo Prophecy, a suspense adventure video game, is ready for manufacture and will be available for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC in North America on Sept. 20.
Known as Fahrenheit in Europe, Indigo Prophecy tells the story of a man whose destiny is irrevocably altered when he unwillingly commits a brutal murder.
Through the use of branching storylines and multiple character perspectives, players embark on an immersive adventure on par with a Hollywood thriller. Indigo Prophecy is developed by Quantic Dream.
Corpse Wows Venice
im Burton's stop-motion animated movie Corpse Bride won a thunderous reception from the press and critics at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 6 and will be showcased out of competition on Sept. 7, the Reuters news service reported.
"We feel so lucky, with computers and all taking over, to be able to do this beautiful, old-fashioned technique," Burton told the press, referring to the painstaking animation. "It's something about the old-fashioned quality of it. There's something very emotional about it. It is hard to put it into words, ... the idea of somebody moving a puppet frame by frame."
Corpse Bride took Burton 10 years to bring to the screen and is not in competition for the Golden Lion.
Burton's film will screen on the Lido on Wednesday, away from the main competition, the wire service reported. Corpse Bride opens in North America on Sept. 23.
Hunnam Mulls SF Children
harlie Hunnam is in negotiations to join Alfonso Cuaron's SF movie The Children of Men for Strike Entertainment and Universal Pictures, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Clive Owen and Julianne Moore already have been cast in the film adaptation of the book by P.D. James.
Marc Abraham and Eric Newman are producing for Strike Entertainment, while Hilary Shor is producing for Hit & Run Prods.
The story is set in the near future, when mankind has lost the ability to reproduce, and the world is rocked by the news that the world's youngest person, who is 18, has died.
Hunnam will play Patric, a young rebel member of the Five Fishes group, which is trying to incite chaos, the trade paper reported.
Slade Gets 30 Days Of Night
avid Slade is directing Columbia Pictures' adaptation of Steve Niles' comic-book series 30 Days of Night for Ghost House Pictures, Variety reported. Ghost House is a genre label founded by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert and jointly owned by Mandate Pictures.
30 Days of Night is set in Barrow, Alaska, a town where, in the middle of winter, the sun sets and does not rise again for more than 30 days. When an evil force terrifies the town's residents, all hopes are pinned on the local sheriffs, a husband-and-wife team, who must choose between saving themselves and helping the town survive the siege, which will last until daylight returns. No screenwriter has yet been hired, the trade paper reported.
Raimi and Tapert are producing, with Grant Curtis overseeing the project for Ghost House.
Slade directed this year's Sundance Film Festival movie Hard Candy, which will be released by Lions Gate later in the year.
Ghost House recently wrapped Rise, directed by Sebastian Gutierrez and starring Lucy Liu. The company is producing an as-yet-untitled horror film to be directed by Danny and Oxide Pang.
Corman Strikes Disney DVD Deal
oger Corman, the producer of hundreds of films on the outer fringes of the studio system, is bringing his DVD base to Disney, Variety reported.
Concorde-New Horizons, the company Corman runs from his headquarters in Brentwood, Calif., has struck a DVD-distribution pact with Buena Vista Home Entertainment, the trade paper reported.
Under the 12-year pact, BVHE gains distribution rights to more than 400 cult-classic Corman films in the U.S. and on select films in Canada.
Corman, who's never had a DVD distribution deal with a studio, is best known for his low-budget horror and SF movies, including 1960's The Little Shop of Horrors, Rock and Roll High School and Death Race 2000.
MTV Options The Suffering
TV Films, a division of Viacom, has acquired an option on the worldwide film rights to Midway Games' supernatural action horror game The Suffering, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
MTV Films is working in conjunction with Stan Winston and Brian Gilbert from Stan Winston Productions and Jason Lust and Rick Jacobs from Circle of Confusion on the development of the horror film.
The original game The Suffering has sold nearly 1.5 million copies worldwide. Winston was involved in the creation of the game's creatures, working with developer Surreal Software, which has since been purchased by Midway. Midway ships a sequel, The Suffering: Ties That Bind, on Sept. 26, which features a voice cast that includes Michael Clarke Duncan and Rachel Griffiths.
The games put players in the shoes of Torque, a man who was on death row in the first game when all hell literally broke loose and monstrous creatures invaded the island where his prison was located. The sequel sends Torque to Baltimore and involves a secret government organization and the nefarious Caleb Blackmore, the man behind the death of Torque's family, the trade paper reported.
Horror Chronicles Commencing
dd Lot Entertainment has launched a genre arm, Dark Lot Entertainment, and announced its first project, a three-picture anthology dubbed The Horror Chronicles, Variety reported.
The new company will make horror, thriller and suspense films with budgets from $3 million to $15 million.
The Horror Chronicles will mark the feature helming debuts of three genre writers: Neal Marshall Stevens (13 Ghosts), Richard Jefferies (Cold Creek Manor) and Art Monterastelli (The Hunted). Each will write and direct a feature, the trade paper reported.
Shooting on the first of the three movies is expected to start next summer in New Mexico.
Swanwick's Table Is A Book
ichael Swanwick, author of The Periodic Table of Science Fiction, told SCI FI Wire that the collection of stories that originally appeared on SCIFI.COM's SCI Fiction site is being released in book form. Swanwick added that he considers Mendeleev, who designed the periodic tale of elements, a genius and that he found it challenging to write short-short SF stories about each of the 118 elements.
"The periodic table is one of the great achievements of the human race: descriptive, predictive and endlessly useful," Swanwick said in an interview. "Shakespeare never wrote a sonnet half so beautifully constructed. … Although I knew some of it would be easy (who couldn't write a story about gold?), there were elements that would be a serious challenge to dramatize. It's like watching a tightrope walker. Nobody wants him to fall. But it's the possibility that he could that makes it so exciting."
To create a story for each element, from hydrogen to ununoctium, Swanwick tried everything. If there was an obvious association, he used it: The story about hydrogen is about time travelers meeting at the site of the Hindenburg explosion. Potassium is about bananas and how you can live forever by eating them every day, though a side effect is that you turn into a monkey.
Other elements required Swanwick to do research. Osmium is named after its smell ("osme" is Greek for "odor"); Swanwick humorously pointed out the importance of personal hygiene. Praseodymium responds to magnetism by getting colder; Swanwick found it a small step to write a story about cryogenic research.
Swanwick called vanadium the most boring element, since all he could uncover about it is that it is essential to a chicken's diet. "I made the mistake of writing it up as 'the couch potato of the periodic table,'" he said. "Did I get letters? Hoo boy. It turns out that a lot of people out there care passionately about vanadium and don't like to see [it] dissed."
Swanwick said that he always wanted to be a scientist; that is, until he discovered his inability to replicate the easiest laboratory experiments. "So I became a science-fiction writer as a next-best thing," he said.
Myst Developer Shuts Doors
ichard A. Watson, game developer Cyan's official historian of the D'ni culture featured in the company's Myst video-game series, confirmed to SCI FI Wire that Cyan is shutting its doors and laying off its staff indefinitely as it seeks new funding. Watson said the closure might be temporary.
"The decision to lay people off now was in everyone's best interest, really," Watson said in an interview. "If Cyan had waited until funds were completely dried up, everyone would still have to find work, but there wouldn't have been any money for Cyan to give as severance pay to help cushion the transition. In the meantime, those who are still at Cyan will still be trying to get funding, and if they're successful, those of us who are still available will be rehired."
Watson's news confirms reports by Cyan employees on various blog sites that the company had shut down over the Labor Day weekend. The company employs about 40 artists, programmers, designers and support personnel.
Cyan's publishing partner Ubisoft issued a statement confirming that the developer had made a "decision to close the doors of their games production unit," the GameSpot Web site reported. Ubisoft said the closure would not affect the upcoming release of Myst V: End of Ages, which is already in manufacturing and is set for release on Sept. 22 for the PC at a suggested retail price of $49.99.
Myst V: End of Ages will feature the same dreamlike, interactive worlds that marked previous Myst titles. The game is a real-time 3-D immersive experience, Watson told SCI FI Wire. "The time of day can change," he said. "Weather can change, and creatures can appear anywhere, rather than only in a handful of predetermined places."
Kingdom: Heroes Goes Gold
icrosoft announced that the Xbox action-strategy game Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes is ready for manufacture and will soon be released worldwide. Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes is the anticipated sequel to the award-winning 2004 video game Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders.
Gamers take on the role of warrior generals in the war-torn land of Bersia and must battle hordes of enemies using various moves and magic spells, while commanding hundreds of soldiers, catapults and dragons to achieve victory.
Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes is set five years before The Crusaders and introduces a new cast of seven heroes, who take players through 50 massive medieval battlefields in the single-player campaign mode. An overhauled multiplayer mode supports up to six players on Xbox Live in the strategic Troop Battle Mode, the arcade-style Hero Battle Mode and the cooperative Invasion Mode. Spectator Mode and Fair-Match condition make sure that even beginners can have fun online without fearing defeat.
Briefly Noted
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Wellspring has acquired all North American rights to the stop-motion animation SF musical-comedy Live Freaky! Die Freaky! by John Roecker, an outrageous retelling of the Manson family murders, set circa 3069, Variety reported.
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The European Film Academy will honor the original 007, Sean Connery, with a lifetime achievement award at its annual ceremonies Dec. 3 in Berlin, Variety reported.
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Scott Derrickson, who co-wrote and directed The Exorcism of Emily Rose, has written a chapter for the upcoming book Behind the Screen: Hollywood Insiders on Faith, Film, and Culture, a collection of essays by Christians working in mainstream Hollywood, the publisher announced.
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Now Playing Magazine has posted an interview with Smallville co-creator Al Gough talking about the upcoming fifth season.
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Variety reports that Todd Garner's new production company Broken Road has set up the comedy pitch Henchman vs. Sidekick, by writing team Kathy Gori and Alan Berger, at Revolution.
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Moviehole has posted an interview with animator Nick Park (Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit), who talked about his idea for a sequel to his hit Chicken Run.
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Now Playing has posted an interview with Serenity director Joss Whedon.
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Universal Studios announced partnerships with Volkswagen, Kellogg's, Toshiba, Chase, the City of New York, Nestle and Burger King to promote the Dec. 14 release of its SF movie King Kong.
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ComingSoon.net has posted an image of the onesheet for Whisper, the upcoming supernatural film starring Lost's Josh Holloway, which opens in 2006.
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Newsweek magazine published an exclusive story and images about Bryan Singer's upcoming Superman Returns movie, which is currently shooting in Australia.
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