It seems the popularity of vampires would be winding down with the over-saturation of the market, but Hollywood is moving away from your modern vampire, as seen in Twilight, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries, and seems to be looking toward the past to keep the craze going. There has been a sudden explosion of projects based on the classic vampire, Dracula. Names ranging from Adam Sandler to Park Chan-Wook are involved in some kind of story about the classical bloodsucker.

According to Deadline, Sony has purchased a pitch from writer Jason Keller that will tell Dracula’s origin story, with Joe Roth and Palak Patel set to produce. Sony would only admit that they intend to start a period franchise, and with Keller credited for the upcoming Snow White re-imagining Mirror Mirror, that might put two franchises on his plate.

Continue Reading →

He’s had a career most directors would kill for and has been nominated and/or won pretty much every award and accolade show business has to offer. So, after all that, what does he do? Go to Comic-Con in San Diego, that’s what.

That’s right, the man who brought us such films as The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation and Dracula is heading to Comic-Con in a few weeks to promote his latest horror project Twixt. The director, who hasn’t been to the Con since 1992, will present portions of the experimental film he calls “one part Gothic romance, one part personal film, and one part the kind of horror film that began my career” on Saturday, July 23 in Hall H.

The film, which stars Val Kilmer, Elle Fanning and Ben Chaplin, reportedly incorporates live music by performance artist Dan Deacon, who will be at the panel. Other than that, details on the film are still scarce. I’m sure that will change soon . . . probably sometime around July 23rd.

This just might be the one thing that gets me to go to Hall H. It sure as hell won’t be Twilight.

This week on The Flickcast Chris and Matt work alone and without a net covering all kinds of new topics including Toy Fair 2010, the box office success of Valentine’s Day and The Wolfman and new adaptation announcements such as Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein and Dracula (aka Vlad the Impaler). They also discuss the oddness and length of recent movie titles, the Avatar prequel novel, the potential endings for ABC’s Lost and who rules Bartertown.

They both also made some good picks again this week incuding Matt’s pick of Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant and Chris’ pick of the Martin Scorsese gangster classic Goodfellas, featuring Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro.

As always, if you have comments, questions, critiques, offers of sponsorship or whatever, feel free to hit us up in the comments, on Twitter, at Facebook and MySpace or via email.

One would think that the overwhelming success of Summit Entertainment’s Twilight series would spark a resurgence of the classic Universal monsters, but in the end it took Universal itself to get things back into the public eye, with this weekend’s release of The Wolfman.

First, news comes that a new Frankenstein project is in the works. Now Summit has decided to drop their their hat into the vampire ring again with a new Dracula project.

The studio has been planning this remake of the Dracula story for some time, but they’ve now made things serious by hiring The Machinist writer Scott Kosar to clean up the script. The original screenplay comes from Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam, who had never written a feature script until now.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the story takes an “action-oriented look at Dracula, or Vlad the Impaler, as a young prince.” With music video director Anthony Mandler signed on to direct, Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B producing, and Summit taking the helm, expect to see this film make plenty of waves when the time comes.

While Universal is ramping up their marketing for the upcoming Wolfman reboot, and Summit is rolling around in giant piles of cash thanks to angsty teen vampires, there are still a few classic monster franchises left to be tapped. That’s where Lakeshore Entertainment and Death Ray Films come in.

The studios have teamed up and optioned the comic book I, Frankenstein, originally written by Kevin Grevioux. The book mashes up the genres of classic movie monsters with crime noir in an epic miniseries. In the book, Frankenstein’s monster has learned to control his anger and now stands as the only hope for humanity against an army of supernatural forces. Meanwhile, Dracula is a kingpin of crime and the Invisible Man lives his life as a secret agent.

With Universal and other studios revving up their use of the latter two franchises, you can expect them to not make the final cut, and focus on Frank. The film has been on the shelf for nearly a year, until genre studio Lakeshore Entertainment, who presented other cult faves as Gamer and Underworld, recently purchased the rights to turn I, Frankenstein into a film.

Original creator Grevioux, who penned all of the Underworld films will be taking on the script, while Patrick Tatopoulos, who directed the same, will be stepping in to direct. Production is set to begin this July, but there hasn’t been any rumblings as to who could play the gigantic green detective. Our choice? Tony Danza Mickey Rourke.

Building on the success of Avatar, the seemingly everywhere Sam Worthington has apparently already picked his next role: Dracula. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Worthington is currently in negotiations to star in director Alex Proyas’ vampire epic Dracula Year Zero for Universal and producer Michael De Luca.

The film, written by Matt Sazama and Buck Sharpless, will explore the origins of Dracula and his ties to Vlad the Impaler. It will reportedly portray the titular vampire as both demonic evil and tragic, flawed hero. The film currently has no start date and is still in development.

As a fan of Proyas’ previous work with The Crow and Dark City, I’m hopeful his take on Dracula will be equally as visually compelling and also feature interesting characters and situations. That said, the movie does sound a lot like Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version of Dracula, which featured Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder.

As for Worthington, I’m still not convinced that he’s the “next big thing” even as studios shove him in our faces more and more. I just don’t find him that interesting. No matter what, I guess we’ll find out how he handles Dracula when this film eventually hits theaters.