The International Olympic Committee announced earlier today the 4 finalists to host the 2016 Olympics. The four finalists are:
- Chicago, USA
- Madrid, Spain
- Tokyo, Japan
- Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
These four finalists get 16 months to plead their case. The host city of the 2016 games will be announced on October 2, 2009.
Granted, I don't know much about global politics, but I kind of hope it goes to Rio de Janeiro, because the Olympics have never been held in South America.
Hey, what's my favourite director, Tim Burton, up to?
Rumors have been flying the past few days that Burton was recently approached by his ol' buddy Johnny Depp to do a movie version of the classic TV show Dark Shadows.
For those who don't feel like clicking on the link to Wikipedia, Dark Shadows was a soap opera popular in the late 1960s. It was unique in that it drew its inspiration from Gothic horror novels. Plots frequently featured werewolves, ghosts, zombies...hell, the lead character was a vampire!
Needless to say, it's become a cult classic. It spawned two movies in the early 1970s. There was a revival in the early 1990s that, while being popular, only lasted one season. And, it was a huge influence on Goth culture.
Which is where Johnny Depp and Tim Burton come in, because they are both fans of the show. In fact, Depp's own production company currently holds the movie rights, and Depp has alegedley asked Burton to direct. Depp himself wants to play that lead character vampire.
Of course, there's nothing official yet. As for what Burton is officially doing right now, he's hopping on the performance capture bandwagon to give us a performance capture version of Alice in Wonderland, and then he'll be producing a stop-motion animated version of his 1980s short film Frankenweenie.
Big news happening with the development of Disney's straight-to-DVD Tinker Bell movies.
Disney's Tinker Bell Movie has had one of the most storied productions of all of Disney's straight-to-DVD movies. Rumor has it that there have been two dozen versions of the script, a dozen different directors, and Disney has poured more than $50 million into the project.
And then, John Lasseter, the head of Pixar, was put in charge of Disney Animation. While he was not in charge of the straight-to-DVD unit, he started becoming deeply involved anyway. Like a lot of people, he thought that the straight-to-DVD sequels were a blight on the Disney legacy. When Lasseter took charge, he saw a rough cut of The Tinker Bell Movie and declared it "unwatchable." It was thought that Lasseter pulled the plug on the project.
Which is why it came as a shock a few months back when Disney and Pixar announced their upcoming animated film slate, and revealed that there would be not one, but four straight-to-DVD Tinker Bell movies. The first one is due out in October.
But that's not the news.
The news is that it was recently announced that Brittany Murphy was fired as the voice of Tinker Bell.
Murphy was announced with much hype and fanfare back in 2006 to give voice to Tink. So, again, surprising.
The new voice of Tinkerbell will be Mae Whitman, whom my fellow Arrested Development geeks will recognize as Ann, George Michael's girlfriend. Yes, her.
Replacing an overpaid celebrity for someone lesser known? That's a classic Pixar move.
These might be good after all.
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