When the Oscar nominations were announced, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen didn’t make the Visual Effects category like I had predicted earlier. (Avatar, District 9, and Star Trek were the three nominees.) But it did manage to grab one nomination, for Sound Mixing, which it will compete for at the ceremony on Sunday, March 7th.
Unfortunately, it faces stiff competition: The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Star Trek, and Avatar are all also competing in the category. And all four of those movies also showed up in the Sound Editing category, where Transformers was replaced by Pixar’s Up.
That doesn’t exactly give it the best chances. In all likelihood, the award will go to Avatar in a sweep of technical awards.
But hey, it’s the Academy Awards — surprises happen.
Michael Bay has been posting some brief updates on Tranformers 3 on his official “Shoot for the Edit” site lately and he’s dropped a handful of hints:
Busy scouting - Chicago, Detroit, and Washington D.C. for Transformers last week. Things are going well. The script is feeling very different from the other two.
And, in quoting an L.A. Times article:
“There will be a nice crescendo ending,” Bay said. “It gets much more into the robot character. The last time you kind of met a few of the robots; this time you’re gonna get a much cooler landscape.”
Considering how disappointing Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was, it’s nice to hear that the script is feeling “very different.” Maybe this time they’re actually bothering to fashion a coherent film before filming begins.
We’re just a week and a half or so away from the announcement of this year’s Oscar nominations, but there’s already some word on which technical awards Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen might have a shot at.
It’s one of the seven movies in the running for Best Visual Effects, a category which will eventually have three nominees. Its competition includes Avatar, District 9, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Star Trek, Terminator Salvation, and 2012.
If I had to guess, it’ll make the list with Avatar and District 9, with 2012 as a potential spoiler.
Additionally, ROTF was just nominated for the Cinema Audio Society’s awards, which usually match up pretty closely with Best Sound Mixing nominees. Other contenders in that field include Avatar, District 9, Star Trek, and The Hurt Locker.
Since it’s in consideration for Sound Mixing, a Sound Editing nomination probably isn’t far off. And finally, its song “New Divide” is one of the dozens in consideration for Best Song.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen made the most money out of any movie in the 2009 calendar year. So that means it’s the #1 movie of the year, right? Well, sort of.
If you’re counting by what made the most money out of any movie released in 2009, Transformers 2 drops down to #2, replaced by — you guessed it — Avatar. James Cameron’s flick is currently at $513 and rising, versus Transformers 2’s distant $402 million. The third spot goes to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, with $301 million. After that, there’s a good five movies ranging from $229-293 million.
But within the calendar year? Avatar had only made $284 million by December 31st, so Transformers 2 still has it.
Empire Online got their hands on a clip from one of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’s special features, a breakdown of the Decepticon attack on a fleet of battleships and aircraft carriers.
In the clip, the narrator reveals that they actually did research to check how fast boats of that size can actually sink. Turns out it’s surprisingly fast — under twenty minutes for some. Check out the clip here.
Considering Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is one of the worst-reviewed movies of the year (not a judgment, just an observation), it takes a certain amount of sheer nerve to try to get it nominated for Oscars.
Not just Visual Effects or Sound Editing, mind you. It’ll probably be nominated for awards like that. I’m talking the big guns: Best Picture and Best Director. Yes, Paramount Pictures is suggesting that Michael Bay get an Oscar nomination. Check it out for yourself at ParamountScreenings.com.
Why are they doing this? I like to think it’s because Michael Bay sincerely believes that he deserves it.
In an article on The Playlist, they even show some For Your Consideration art:
I’m not sure if that’s fake or not. It looks like a screen-capture of the Paramount Screenings site, but the artwork is from a fan-made poster. Maybe they had it up originally but took it down when they realized.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is selling like crazy. 24 hours after its release on October 20th, it had sold a stunning two million copies.
That’s good news for Hollywood, where everyone is perpetually worried about falling DVD revenues (memo to Hollywood: it’s because of Blu-Ray, idiots).
A week later, the Blu-Ray and both DVD editions — a single-disc and a two-disc version — are all still among Amazon’s top twenty sellers in movies & TV (the Blu-Ray is on top at #3).
In other words, as the Hollywood Reporter said, the release was a nice “shot in the arm” for Paramount/DreamWorks.
The Scream Awards were held a couple of weeks ago in L.A., but they’re not airing until tonight. If you want to catch Megan Fox and Isabel Lucas — both in attendance — check it out on Spike TV at 10 p.m.
As we reported the day after the event, Fox won Best Sci-Fi Actress and Lucas won Best Breakthrough Female Performance. I hope that doesn’t ruin any surprises.
The good folks at How it Should Have Ended finally turned their sights on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and the result is a three-minute video featuring a number of alternate scenes and ending possibilities. I can’t say it’s the funniest HISHE video out there — I’m personally partial to the Superman one and the Star Wars one — but this is pretty good.
The segment starting at the two minute mark is my favorite.
The only problem with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen selling two million copies in 24 hours is that it’s October, and it’ll be hard for the holidays to live up to that standard without a huge release like that. But, of course, Transformers is a franchise, and Hasbro will continue to sell toys and comic books and animated movies and 3rd grade school folders and everything you can possibly think of that is Transformers-related.
Covering all the ancillary material is pretty much impossible: there’s just way too much of it. But there’s this Bumblebee-centric Transformers comic book coming out for the holidays that seemed kind of cool. I don’t know, maybe it’s because Bumblebee was the only Transformer in the movie who knew how to shut up. (If only he taught Mudflap and Skids…)
Here’s an excerpt from the press release from Hasbro and IDW Publishing:
After the huge success of this summer’s blockbuster Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen movie from DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures, in association with Hasbro, IDW continues the excitement with TRANSFORMERS:BUMBLEBEE, an all-new, four-issue miniseries. Under license from Hasbro, IDW expands this fan-favorite character, as BUMBLEBEE finds himself between a rock and a hard place with his own friends.
Written by Zander Cannon with art by Chee, TRANSFORMERS: BUMBLEBEE spins out of events in the new ongoing TRANSFORMERS series. The miniseries picks up with BUMBLEBEE finding himself in an unfamiliar position after the CYBERTRON-shattering events of TRANSFORMERS #1. Chee and Guido Guidi will provide the covers.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will finally drop on DVD this Tuesday, October 20th, after its massive $400 million box office run in the U.S.
It’s still the #1 film of the year by a margin of about $100 million; second is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince with $300 million.
In an interview for the DVD release, screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (who are sitting out Transformers 3) talked about the film’s love-it-or-hate-it reactions:
Question: Did you expect the Transformers Sequel to be so divisive? People seemed to love it or hate it.
Orci: Yeah… Sequels are easy targets, and the film was undertaken under the pressure of the writer’s strike, it was bigger louder and longer than the first one.
Kurtzman: It’s very hard to gauge what’s going to work with people and what’s not going to work. Because what one person says is way too long, but my 12 year old cousin would say “I wish it was longer!” And so that totally confuses me, so I think that at the end of the day, Mchael (Bay – Director) has his rhythm and his pace and he can determine in the editing how long he wants the movie to be.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen made a strong showing at the Scream Awards, which were held last night in L.A.
The annual awards show will air October 27th on Spike TV.
Megan Fox won the award for Best Sci-Fi Actress, and Isabel Lucas won the award for Best Breakout Female Performance. Hey, it’s hard work seducing Shia LaBeouf and then turning into an evil robot.
For what seems like a relatively minor awards show, it was a pretty big event: Fox and Lucas were both there, as were folks like Harrison Ford, Johnny Depp, and Twilight’s Taylor Lautner.
Making a valiant effort to squash those rumors is a hilariously silly website called Gossip Cop. Gossip Cop purports to be the anti-gossip blog by finding rumors and then proving them false.
The only problem is that they do this by asking publicists whether rumors are true or not. Publicists, whose job it is to make everybody look good and drama-free, just say “no” or “we don’t know.” Gossip Cop then publishes these denials as “exclusives.”
A new rumor claims Megan Fox faces the “distinct possibility” of a “gory death scene” in a third “Transformers” movie, thanks to her outspoken comments about how difficult she found working for director Michael Bay.
Perez Hilton and others are picking up an In Touch report that says Fox’s character might be killed off early in the next sequel and swapped with a new female lead. Supposedly, according to the magazine’s “source,” Bay is “very quietly looking for her replacement.”
Very quietly. So quiet, in fact, no one can confirm it’s actually happening. And you know why? Because a rep for Fox tells Gossip Cop the story is “not true.”
Gee, I’m so convinced. Especially since there’s no script yet — according to Bay himself they’ve only “broken a story,” which means they vaguely know what the movie’s about, enough to start pre-production.
Memo to Gossip Cop: publishing a two-word denial from a publicist is not the same thing as debunking a rumor. For now, I’ll assume that killing off Mikaela is something Michael Bay is still privately considering, even though he probably won’t, because that’s stupid — while Megan Fox might not be able to carry movies by herself (like Jennifer’s Body) she’s still a big draw in the Transformers franchise.
Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, longtime writing partners and two of the writers on the last two Transformers flicks, were chatting up the press recently because of the release of the DVDs of the two summer movies they worked on: Revenge of the Fallen and one of the year’s other big hits, Star Trek.
While they’re beginning to work on a Star Trek sequel, as previously reported they’re not doing Transformers 3. So why is that? Sci-Fi Squad has the answer:
Why have you decided not to be involved with Transformers 3?
Orci: We’ve been working on Transformers longer than I was in college. I feel like we have our degree in Transformers now.
Kurtzman: The franchise is so wonderful that it deserves to be fresh, all the time. We just felt like we’d given it a lot and didn’t have an insight for where to go with it next, and said, “You should do it right.”
Orci: The studio was nice to say, “Oh, yeah, if you guys want to come back then come back.” But, we never want to do that, unless we have an idea. We always think the best idea should win, and that means opening it up to everybody.
Aside from Star Trek 2, they’re also working on Cowboys & Aliens with Jon Favreau and Robert Downey, Jr.
After saying he wanted to wait three years before filming a third Transformers or suggesting that he might do a smaller movie called Pain and Gain before tackling another blockbuster, Michael Bay has unsurprisingly announced that he’s doing the exact opposite. Transformers 3 will come out on July 1st, 2011 — not 2012 like he’d been saying.
For all of Bay’s bravado, he’s a hired gun who does what he’s told (albeit thanks to massive amounts of money). Transformers 2 was the biggest movie of the summer, and if the studio wants a third one fast-tracked, they get what they want.
Bay posted the announcement himself at his official site, and managed to make fun of Megan Fox at the same time:
Well its official: We have a great Transformers 3 story. The release date is now July 1st 2011. Not 2012.
Today is Day One. This morning started with an ILM meeting for five hours in San Francisco. Currently I’m flying with writer Ehren Kruger to Rhode Island to talk to Hasbro about new characters.
P.S. Megan Fox, welcome back. I promise no alien robots will harm you in any way during the production of this motion picture. Please consult your Physician when working under my direction because some side effects can occur, such as mild dizziness, intense nausea, suicidal tendencies, depression, minor chest hair growth, random internal hemorrhaging and inability to sleep. As some directors may be hazardous to your health, please consult your Doctor to determine if this is right for you.
Pain and Gain is right after shooting of Trans 3.
As much as I ragged on Revenge of the Fallen for being really terrible, I liked the first Transformers a lot, and I think the franchise could be great again. Do I trust Michael Bay? No. But I never did. At this early stage, I have plenty of hope.
Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen Plot and Cast Info
The battle for Earth has ended but the battle for the universe has just begun. After returning to Cybertron, Starscream assumes command of the Decepticons, and has decided to return to Earth with force. The Autobots believing that peace was possible finds out that Megatron's dead body has been stolen from the US Military by Skorpinox and revives him using his own spark. Now Megatron is back seeking revenge and with Starscream and more Decepticon reinforcements on the way, the Autobots with reinforcements of their own, may have more to deal with then meets the eye.
Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Rainn Wilson, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, John Turturro, Matthew Marsden, Ramon Rodriguez, Jennifer Alden
Transformers 1 Movie Plot and Cast Info
The Earth is caught in the middle of an intergalactic war between two races of robots, the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons, which are able to change into a variety of objects, including cars, trucks, planes and other technological creations.
Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel, Anthony Anderson, Megan Fox
When the Oscar nominations were announced, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen didn’t make the Visual Effects category like I had predicted earlier. (Avatar, District 9, and Star Trek were the three nominees.) But it did manage to grab one nomination, for Sound Mixing, which it will compete for at the ceremony on Sunday, March 7th.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
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