Legendary Pictures has some big releases coming up, quite literally, with large-scale monster movies Pacific Rim and Godzilla both aiming to dominate the box office over the next year. While there is a lot of hype for the kaiju pair, those aren’t the only films that the studio has up its sleeves.
To keep movie fans up to speed with the various projects that Legendary has in development at the moment, the production company held a press conference during which they presented various new details and materials. Earlier we rounded up some of the hints that director Gareth Edwards had dropped about the plot and themes of his Godzilla reboot, and now we have some details for more Legendary films that we’re looking forward to over the next few years – including Warcraft and The Seventh Son.
Firstly, there was a small update to the status of Legendary’s World of Warcraft adaptation, starting with the fact that the title of the film has now been shortened to the simpler, snappier Warcraft. Studio CEO Thomas Tull said that the producing team, screenwriter Charles Leavitt (Blood Diamond) and director Duncan Jones (Moon) are taking their time with the development of their project, since, in Tull’s own words, “video game movies have not fared very well.“
The studio’s caution isn’t without justification, as movie adaptations of video games do not currently have a great reputation and there are an awful lot of bad video game movies out there (though admittedly about 99.8% of them were directed by Uwe Boll). The future is looking brighter at the moment, however, now that video games developer and publisher Ubisoft has pieced together a full slate of movies based on their video game franchises for their new production company, Ubisoft Motion Pictures. The company is planning to keep the spirit of the source material alive by maintaining strict creative control. If all goes smoothly, Warcraft may end up being released shortly after Assassin’s Creed, increasing 2015’s chances of being a good year for video game adaptations.
The other major project on Legendary’s slate is The Seventh Son, a fantasy adventure movie with Jeff Bridges playing an exorcist and reuniting onscreen with Julianne Moore for the first time since The Big Lebowski. The film is an adaptation of Joseph Delaney’s novel “The Spook’s Apprentice,” and stars Ben Barnes (Dorian Gray) in the lead as Tom, a farm boy who becomes apprenticed to Bridges’ character, The Spook (like The Dude, but spookier), in order to make the most of the talents he has inherited as the seventh son of a seventh son.
The main focus of Legendary’s presentation was a sneak-peek at the trailer for the film, so hopefully a first look at The Seventh Son will become available for public consumption soon. So far we’ve seen a couple of promotional images like the one above, but no actual footage, but ComingSoon’s Ryan Turek gives some of his impressions of what we can expect in terms of tone:
Bridges plays a knight whereas Moore is a powerful witch (with a tail, I might add) who can transform into a demonic, winged beast. The trailer packed a nice punch and it was brimming with various creatures and the promise of a cool adventure – akin to something like the old Ray Harryhausen films. Bridges is back doing some sort of Rooster Cogburn drawl, still, the movie looked like fun.
Based on the description of the trailer, it sounds like The Seventh Son will probably, like the novel, be aimed mainly at teen and pre-teen audiences – but that doesn’t mean it won’t be enjoyable for older audience members as well – especially if it invokes classic fantasy adventure movie nostalgia.
It isn’t the only movie this year that will see Bridges cast in a mentor role with an invocation of the Cogburn drawl; first up on that front is R.I.P.D., a movie based on the comic book series of the same name, in which Bridges will play a ghostly veteran police officer called Roy Pulsipher, who is assigned to coach rookie undead lawman Nick Cruz (Ryan Reynolds).
Are you impressed by what you’ve read about these Legendary Pictures projects, or do you only have eyes for Pacific Rim and Godzilla?
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The Seventh Son will be out in theaters on February 15th, 2013, and Warcraft is currently estimated to release some time in 2015.
