It also feels like Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion (April 26, 2013) had just started shooting a couple of weeks ago, so we were shocked to see they already had so much footage to show, although that was also combined with concept art and animatics. We got a good look at the world and the cool spaceship flown by Tom Cruise’s character Jack Harper. We see him entering a room where he gets caught in a trap and pulled across the room into a chair and when the lights come on, we see Morgan Freeman saying, “We’ve been watching you, Jack” and then lights come on around him and there are people up on the decks all around him. Yeah, no idea what this movie is about from the little bit we’ve seen, but it looks pretty cool.
Just delayed to February to finish up some FX work, Carl Rinsch’s feature film directorial debut 47 Ronin (Feb. 8, 2013), starring Keanu Reeves, showed off a sizzle reel that combined footage, animatics and concept art. Since we visited the set nearly a year ago, we already knew of the look and scale of the film so it’s nice to see that it’s really been coming together. It mainly showed a scene of Keanu’s character sword-fighting in a make-shift ring on a ship and a scene afterwards where Hiroyuki Sanada’s character asks him how he learned to fight like that, and Keanu’s Kai responds “by fighting demons” and then we saw a few of the amazing creatures he fights in the movie, including an ogre-like Oni and the monks known as the Kangu Warlords, who we see in a lightning-fast action scene. Honestly, we know quite a bit more about the movie but since we’re under embargo from our set visit, we better leave it at that.
R.I.P.D. (June 28, 2013), the action-comedy based on the little-known Dark Horse comic, stars Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges as an undead police force known as the “Rest in Peace Department,” and it looks like another great action-comedy from Neal Moritz (The Green Hornet, 21 Jump Street). Directed by Robert Schwentke, the footage opened with a scene of Ryan Reynolds’ police officer being killed on the job and then being inducted into the R.I.P.D. and partnered with Bridges’ character, who seems to come from out of the old West, wearing a sherriff’s hat and having a well-coifed moustache and beard. It looks like another funny character and a good buddy comedy with some solid action, where they’re fighting various supernatural creatures – think somewhere between Ghostbusters and Men in Black, but with that pairing. Apparently, people don’t see the R.I.P.D. officers as they really are and Reynolds discovers that he looks like an old Chinese man while Bridges looks like a hot blonde, and we get a funny shot of two people seeing them walk by and sure enough, it’s an old Chinese man and a hot blonde. The movie’s still so far away, so who knows when we’ll finally get some sort of teaser trailer but what we saw looks good.
You can read about the other films that Universal previewed by clicking here.
