Now that the trailer has hit for the third Twilight installment, Eclipse, Summit has begun the hunt for the lucky soul to sit in the director’s chair for the final dose of Twilight: Breaking Dawn. According to Entertainment Weekly, they’re aiming high and want no less than someone with an Oscar nomination or two under their belt.

Summit has reportedly approached Sofia Coppola, Gus Van Sant, and Bill Condon with offers.   It’s still very hush hush, however, as only Van Sant’s representatives would confirm first contact. Summit declined to comment.   Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg’s script outline is due next week, so it’s unlikely any serious offers can be made until  everyone knows how the iffy bits are going to be handled.

Stephanie Meyer will also have to weigh in, as she has approval over every hire Summit makes.  Any Twilighters know whether she prefers Marie Antoinette to Dreamgirls? What does she think of Good Will Hunting?

Of course, it may end up being none of these fine people. When Chris Weitz dropped out of the series after helming New Moon, the list of possible Eclipse directors was long and interesting:  Drew Barrymore, Juan Antonio Bayona, Paul Weitz, and James Mangold were all name dropped before David Slade climbed on board.

With that in mind, do you think we can convince David Cronenberg consider the gig?  If so, Breaking Dawn would officially be the first Twilight film I’d be camped out to see.

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.

Superheroes had quite a year in 2009. From Watchmen finally getting it’s film adaptation, to lesser known superhero flicks getting made, the world of Superhero films certainly grew. With that came a spec script from David Bourla about a select group of people with mental abilities in the film Push, starring Chris Evans and Dakota Fanning.

The film did marginally well in theaters, and Summit Entertainment is now planning to expand on the property by bringing it to your TV’s. The studio is teaming up with another indie company in E1 Entertainment to bring a global series into homes. They even have David Hayter, who adapted Watchmen and X-Men for film, writing the pilot script.

They currently don’t have a deal with any particular network, as they are currently meeting with many. No word on if any of the film’s cast, such as Evans or Fanning, will return in the weekly series. From The Hollywood Reporter:

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With Twilight: New Moon making over $500 million worldwide, it only makes sense that production studio Summit Entertainment would try as many gimmicks as possible to help boost the next film’s success. It has been announced that the third film in the series, Eclipse will get a simultaneous IMAX release along with the worldwide theatrical release of the film.

The film is set to open on June 30th of next year, which will make it a linchpin for the summer’s blockbuster season. In a recent article in Variety, Summit is already quite pleased with the plan.

“‘Twilight moviegoers will have a whole new way to experience this next installment of the series, with the enhanced image and sound quality of The IMAX Experience putting them in the movie,’ said Richie Fay, Summit’s president of domestic theatrical distribution.”

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With New Moon making over $230 million in the US and nearly $500 million worldwide, it was only a matter of time before the studio decided to try and milk the franchise for even more, and you really can’t blame them. There are two more books left in Stephenie Meyer’s series, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn.

The film adaptation for Eclipse was shot alongside New Moon, Donner and Jackson style, and will hit theaters next year. Now it looks like Summit Entertainment will be splitting Breaking Dawn into two separate films. Some may or may not know what goes down in Meyer’s final book, but things get pretty intense.

In nearly 800 pages, the entire story gets tossed on it’s head, with characters falling in love with offspring, and a few more characters dying off. It makes sense to split a book that large into two films, in order to stay true to the source.

This strategy isn’t completely unheard of in Hollywood. The most recent example would be J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter films. The final book was 759 pages long (4 more than Breaking Dawn) and will be split into two films, one to be released in November of 2010, and the second in July of 2011.

Breaking Dawn won’t get a release until well into 2011, but before then Eclipse will be in theaters on June 30, 2010.

With Twilight: New Moon breaking all kinds of records and such this past weekend, it only makes sense that studios would be trying to jump on the gravy train (whether or not the train is “Edward” or “Jacob” is neither here nor there). It was a little surprising when the first studio to jump in was the cable network FX, however.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the network has purchased the rights along with Summit Entertainment for exclusive TV distribution:

FX has acquired the ad-supported TV rights to the four “Twilight” movies in a package deal with producer Summit Entertainment that also includes the indie studio’s Oscar hopeful “The Hurt Locker,” the Nicolas Cage thriller “Knowing” and actioner “Push.”

Under the pact, FX will start running last year’s “Twilight,” the first movie in the franchise, beginning in late 2011. “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” which shattered projections to open at $142.8 million domestically this past weekend, will be available in late 2012. “Eclipse,” which is slated for a June 30 release, will have its premiere on FX in early 2013. Summit has yet to greenlight production on “Breaking Dawn,” an adaptation of the fourth book in Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series.

With the purchase of the Twilight rights, the network also purchased the distributions rights to other huge 2009 hits such as 2012, Star Trek, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, Monsters vs. Aliens, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, The Proposal and Zombieland.

Coming off of the astounding numbers from the midnight performance of The Twilight Saga: New Moon (nearly $25 Million) comes a trailer for the next Robert Pattinson/Summit Entertainment project entitled Remember Me.

In the film, Pattinson plays a young New Yorker who is fed up with the glamorous life as son of a rich father (played by Pierce Brosnon, also doing an American accent). From there, the broody Pattinson meets a young quirky girl (Emilie De Ravin), who eats her desert before eating meals. They fall in love, and a love triangle between a werewolf begins live happily.

The film is set to hit theaters on March 12th, 2010, which should be just enough time to start up the marketing machine for the third film in the Twilight series, Eclipse. The success of this film will be interesting to watch, as New Moon is expected to make nearly $100 Million in it’s first weekend.

Does that money come from fans of the Twilight series, or just Pattinson and his glittery skin? Check out the trailer for Remember Me after the jump and decide for yourself.

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In a crazy, mixed-up world where something like New Moon Underwear and New Moon Chocolate has enough of a demand for mass production, it was only inevitable that the ticket pre-sales for the movie itself, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, would be astronomical. According to Fandango, that is, indeed, the case.

Though the film doesn’t open until November 20th (This Friday), tickets are already on sale. As of Saturday, November 14th at 8:00PM, the film had already broken the record for most pre-sales of the last 10 years. Here’s the list of the top five, for comparison.

Fandango’s Top 5 Advance Ticket-Sellers:

1. New Moon (2009)
2. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005)
3. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
4. The Dark Knight (2008)
5. Twilight (2008)

Though this is no surprise to the ticket-selling empire, as they already have a New Moon fan site embedded in their network, this is still a bit of a shock to those who have yet to jump onto the “Twilight” bandwagon. At the rate that advanced ticket sales went, it’s quite likely that New Moon will break $100M this weekend, and could very well be on the way to taking on, and perhaps surpassing, such other heavy-hitters as Spider-Man 3 and The Dark Knight.

Every great romance needs a great soundtrack. So one huge problem I had with Twilight (other than the overacting, terrible script, and all the screaming fans around me in the theater) was the music. This movie was part of a pop culture sensation, and the filmmakers had the chance to entwine the romance on screen with some amazing tunes to culture its pre-teen audience. “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” by Iron and Wine was really the only standout track on the soundtrack to me, while Paramore and Linkin Park seemed like obvious choices for the time in which the film came out, and while these bands added to the angsty feeling of teen romance, they just didn’t do it for me.

Luckily, the film’s sequel, New Moon, looks like it’s got a killer soundtrack in the works. Most of the choices are a bit surprising, like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Grizzly Bear, but it’ll be exciting to see how these add to the feeling of New Moon, which looks far more mature and evolved than its predecessor.

By combining the likes of Death Cab for Cutie, Thom Yorke, and Lupe Fiasco, hopefully the romance between Bella, Edward, and Jacob will be a little bit more believable, and easier on the ears.

New Moon hits theaters November 20th. To satiate your thirst for all things vampire, the soundtrack comes out October 20th, giving you a month with these tracks before the film’s release. You can check out the full track listing for The Twlight Saga: New Moon soundtrack after the jump.

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We here at The Flickcast are all but shocked when we hear about this thing or that getting rebooted or remade. Sadly, we were a little bit surprised when news came that 1986’s Highlander is getting a fancy Hollywood facelift, and even has a director and producer attached.

Distributor Summit Entertainment is going forward with the reboot of the film, hiring the team of Justin Lin to direct and Neal H. Moritz to produce. The team was also behind Fast and Furious, which was one of the bigger film of the year, and the highest grossing title of the year for Universal Pictures.

Summit has had great success so far with the adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series (with New Moon hitting theaters this November). According to Variety this may be the birth of another franchise for the company:

Summit plans to expand on the original “Highlander” premise of immortals hunting each other through the ages. The new pic will center on the immortal Scottish swordsman Connor MacLeod, who must confront a murderous barbarian who lusts for a fabled prize.

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