Though Iron Man 3 is technically the first Marvel Studios movie to start filming after The Avengers, Thor 2 isn’t far behind. The return to Asgard is going to be directed by “Game of Thrones” helmer Alan Taylor, and now Variety reports Casino Royale star Mads Mikkelsen is in talks to play a villain in the movie.

Don’t worry, Loki fans – Tom Hiddleston is coming back to reprise his role, and he offered up an interesting piece of info in an interview about Thor 2 last year:

“This isn’t definitely going to happen, but I think there would be nothing more awesome than seeing Loki and Thor fight somebody side by side.”

Could the casting of Mikkelsen be an opportunity for the former brothers to fight together against a common enemy? We’ll have to wait and see, but he certainly has the look of a great villain. (He’s also playing a bad guy in the Shia LaBeouf movie The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman.) Thor 2 hits theaters on November 15th, 2013, and filming begins sometime in the next couple of months.

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While The Expendables are cavorting around the world blowing things up, there’s another group of old people that aren’t content with sitting on the sidelines. Dean Parisot is directing RED 2, the sequel to the geriatric actioner RED from 2010, and Deadline reports that Sir Anthony Hopkins just might play the villain.

Hopkins is signed on for Thor 2, and though he spent most of the first movie in some sort of coma, I thought he was really great in it. It’s Anthony Freaking Hopkins, of course he’s great. The only trouble with RED 2 is that the scheduling might conflict with Thor 2, in which case Hopkins is heading back to Asgard because his Marvel deal holds the most weight.

It goes without saying, though, that Hopkins would be a spectacular foe for Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, and John Malkovich (not sure if Morgan Freeman is on board this one yet), especially since the action is travelling to Europe this time and Hopkins can play sophisticated with the best of ‘em.

What do you think about Hopkins as a villain in RED 2? Does it make you any more interested in seeing it?

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It’s been almost a month since The Avengers opened internationally and boy did this film gross a lot of money. As expected, there wasn’t much in the way of competition last weekend so the superhero flick was #1 again.

Over the years superhero movies have never been incredibly popular outside North America, I mean sure, there’s Batman and Spider-Man but can you think of another such film that made an insane amount of money? The answer is no, or at least it was no until The Avengers dropped on us. This box office giant made another $59.1 million over the weekend, bringing its total to an unbelievable $726.4 million (a new record for superhero movies). Worldwide the number is even more impressive, $1.19 billion so 4th place on the all time chart. Currently Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 is 3rd with $1.32 billion, but it’s only a matter of weeks until The Avengers flies past it. Now 2nd place, Titanic with $2.18 billion, that’s unfortunately out of reach, so in the end The Avengers will have to settle for the bronze medal worldwide.

Surprisingly Dark Shadows had a very solid 2nd weekend with $31 million, good for 2nd place and $81.8 million internationally. Worldwide the Tim Burton directed horror comedy has made $135 million.

3rd place belongs to newcomer The Dictator with a hefty $30.8 million, damn good start for Sasha Baron Cohen in 29 countries. Worldwide the politically incorrect comedy has $59.5 million. In 2006 Borat made $261.5 million worldwide while Bruno in 2009, only $138.8 million. From the looks of things The Dictator should finish somewhere between the two for the British comedian, closer to Borat.

American Reunion was 4th thanks to $9.7 million and right now Stifler and co. have $216 million worldwide. But that’s still last in its class with all previous films making more money (from $231.4 million all the way to $287.6 million for American Pie 2).

Battleship rounds out the top 5 with $6.1 million. Internationally the film has $227.3 million while worldwide (including US) things aren’t much better, only $257.4 million. This will probably finish around $300 million, quite a bust for Universal considering they spent $200 million on it. Also this is probably one of the main reasons why Paramount moved the G.I. Joe sequel, as in they think Battleship would have made more money in 3D.

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20th Century Fox has released a new red band trailer for Timur Bekmambetov’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter which features more vampires, hacking, slashing, and blood than the previous trailers combined.

Watch below:

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter explores the secret life of our greatest President, and the untold story that shaped our nation. Visionary filmmakers Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov (director of Wanted) bring a fresh and visceral voice to the blood-thirsty lore of the vampire, imagining Lincoln as history’s greatest hunter of the undead.

The movie stars Benjamin Walker, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Anthony Mackie, Dominic Cooper, Alan Tudyk, Jimmi Simpson, and Rufus Sewell, and will be released June 22, 2012.

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When the first Men in Black movie came out in 1997, my dad and I built a homemade neuralizer for me to play with. We took a piece of hollow silver pipe, drilled a hole in one end near the top, secured a red light in it, then ran wires down the middle of the shaft to a button on the back. It didn’t actually wipe anyone’s memory, of course, but I didn’t care – I had my very own neuralizer, and it was awesome. I loved the first Men in Black movie. I had Will Smith’s theme song memorized (who am I kidding? I still do), and I was excited about the sequel when it came out a few years later. But the mediocrity of Men in Black 2 turned my devotion to the series into total apathy, and I haven’t bothered revisiting those movies since then. A lot of people my age had similar reactions.

Now it’s 15 years after the original and 10 years after the second movie, and director Barry Sonnenfeld and stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are back again for more alien action in Men in Black 3. Why? Because they can, I guess. There doesn’t really seem to be a great reason for this movie to exist, other than the genesis of it came from Will Smith and he’s powerful enough to make it happen. No one was clamoring for a sequel, especially after a pretty questionable second attempt. Against all odds, Men in Black 3 is not a terrible movie. But it feels like a movie that knows it barely has any reason to exist, cribbing a Back to the Future time travel story and providing just enough of a narrative to keep us interested.

The film starts with Boris The Animal (Jemaine Clement from “Flight of the Conchords”) breaking out of a high security prison. He’s got a chip on his shoulder, but not much beneath that – Agent K (Jones) shot his arm off 40 years prior and sent him to the maximum security facility, and Boris is out for revenge. He finds out a way to travel back in time and kills K, which is quite the shock to Agent J (Smith), who wanders into MIB headquarters the next day looking for his partner…but everyone tells him he died in 1969. Turns out K also installed a huge force field over Earth in 1969, but since he was killed by Boris, Boris’ race comes crashing down to Earth, destroying civilization. So in a Back to the Future-inspired plot device, J has to travel back one day further in 1969 so he can kill Boris before he kills Agent K. Once there, he accidentally meets up with the younger Agent K (Brolin) and eventually teams up with him in order to save the world.

If that sounds confusing, I assure you the film does a far better job of explaining it than I did. In fact, the time elements are so by-the-numbers that the movie feels like Time Travel for Dummies. Time travel movie junkies (myself included) love the complicated nature of crossing timelines and cause-and-effect paradoxes that often come up in these stories; here, everything is pretty easy and goes pretty much according to plan. There’s not a lot of time (heh) to spend thinking about the consequences of anyone’s actions, and even though the big reveal at the end (which I won’t give away) causes us to rethink what we know of the first two movies (specifically Agent K’s motivation in recruiting J), the movie doesn’t bother to address these points beyond surface level.

There’s also a guy named Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), an alien who can see all possible events in all possible timelines simultaneously, that comes along to offer some exposition to the audience, but the film isn’t concerned with complicating things too much. It’s a simple, entertaining movie, and that’s about it. Sonnenfeld brings his familiar visual stamp, and the score is pretty much just the main instrumental theme played 400 times throughout the movie, so it all seems designed to make you go, “Oh yeah, I remember these movies!” There are some good setpieces and the 3D was surprisingly decent (but still ultimately unnecessary unless you love wasting money), and Smith is his usual wise-cracking self, back on screen after a five year absence.

But the real stars of this film aren’t Smith and Jones (the latter of which is only in the movie for about 20 minutes): Josh Brolin as a young K and Rick Baker’s makeup and creature effects are the main draws here. Brolin is really great, impersonating Tommy Lee Jones but also allowing us to see a side of this character we’ve never seen in an MiB movie before. He’s straight-faced but jovial, and we’re genuinely curious to find out what happens in this man’s life that turns him into the sourpuss we know from the other films. (Don’t worry, that question is answered.)

Baker’s work, on the other hand, is much more subtle. The seven time Oscar winner has designed over 100 new aliens for this movie, many of which only appear on screen for a few seconds, but he’s almost singlehandedly responsible for making the MiB Headquarters such an iconic location because of all the craziness going on in the background. His crowning achievement this go-around is Jemaine Clement’s Boris The Animal makeup, rendering the comedian almost unrecognizable. Unfortunately, all this makeup may have hindered Clement’s performance, as his Boris is completely devoid of everything I assumed they cast him for in the first place: wit, sarcasm, comic timing, etc.

There must be something in the air in Hollywood, because this is the second big-budget movie in two years to involve a story that takes place around the moon landing mission, the other being Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The back half of this movie, much of which takes place in Cape Canaveral, works pretty well from both story and character perspectives, especially considering that when filming began, the screenwriters had only finished the first act. (Word to the wise: this is not a good way to make movies, it just so happened that they got lucky this time.)

I’m still at a loss as to why the film exists, but I suppose it’s not a big leap when you realize a movie studio spent hundreds of millions of dollars to capitalize on nostalgia that no one really wanted in the first place. (Ahem, Battleship.) Men in Black 3 isn’t so bad that you’ll want to neuralize yourself, but you can borrow mine if you still want to try. Until next time…

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Lionsgate has set The Hunger Games Blu-ray release date for August 18, 2012. An official countdown will begin this Friday, when the Blu-ray and DVD will become available for pre-order.

Interestingly the DVD, Blu-ray, and Digital Download will become available at 12:01am on August 18th as Lionsgate hopes to recapture the excitement from the midnight theatrical screening back in March.

The movie has earned $636 million worldwide to date ($391 million in the US and $244 million internationally), and we can expect The Hunger Games DVD/Blu-ray release to push the profits made by Lionsgate even higher. The sequel, Catching Fire, will begin shooting later this year under the direction of Francis Lawrence for a November 2013 release.

The Hunger Games Blu-ray & DVD Special Features

• “The World is Watching: Making of The Hunger Games” — an eight-part documentary covering the “making of” the film in all aspects from the pre-production process all the way through the theatrical release and fan reactions.
• “Game Maker: Suzanne Collins and The Hunger Games Phenomenon” featurette
• “Letters from the Rose Garden” featurette — insights from Donald Sutherland on the development of his role as President Snow
• “Controlling the Games” featurette — stories and concepts behind creating the control center
• “A Conversation with Gary Ross and Elvis Mitchell”
• Propaganda Film (in its entirety)
• Marketing Archive
• “Preparing for The Games: A Director’s Process” (Blu-ray Exclusive)

Directed by Gary Ross and based on the Suzanne Collins novel, The Hunger Games stars Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Lenny Kravitz, Wes Bentley, Toby Jones, Alexander Ludwig, Isabelle Fuhrman, Amandla Stenberg, Stanley Tucci and Donald Sutherland.

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You may remember Hot Rod director Akiva Schaffer’s new movie The Watch from its formal title, Neighborhood Watch. (The film’s marketing team decided to change the name in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting.) The film stars Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, and Richard Ayoade, and is about four suburban dads who create a neighborhood watch program because they’re bored at home. But then the guys discover aliens in their neighborhood, and things get a whole lot more interesting.

Take a look below.

The Watch was written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (the duo behind Superbad and The Green Hornet) and arrives in theaters on July 27th, 2012. What do you think? Looking forward to it?

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Harry Potter star Rupert Grint continues his journey to transition into more adult fare at the movies. He’s dabbled in some other projects in between trips to Hogwarts, but now that the series has come to a close, he can start really pushing himself as an actor. Variety reports that Grint has signed on to two smaller films, CBGB opposite Potter co-star Alan Rickman and The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman with Shia LaBeouf.

CBGB tells the story of the real-life club in New York City and traces the impact of the club on music and culture. Rickman plays the club owner, and Grint will play Cheetah Chrome of The Dead Boys, an influential punk rock group active in the late 1970s.

The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman stars LaBeouf and is slowly becoming one of my most anticipated movies of next year. Here’s the synopsis:

Charlie Countryman (LaBeouf) was just a normal guy…until he fell in love with the one girl who will probably get him killed.  When Charlie meets the absolutely irresistible Gabi she’s already been claimed by Nigel, an insanely violent crime boss with a gang of thugs at his disposal.  Armed with little more than his wit and naïve charm, Charlie endures one bruising beat down after another to woo Gabi and keep her out of harm’s way.  Finally his exploits of blind valor create such a mess that he’s left with only one way out; to save the girl of his dreams, must Charlie Countryman die?

No word yet on what part Grint will play in that one, but I’m looking forward to seeing him mix it up with some solid actors in both of these films. Both movies are tentatively set for 2013 releases.

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We last heard about Shadow of the Colossus, a movie based on the popular video game, way back in 2010 when word came out that it would be in 3D. I thought the project was dead, but it appears that the studio simply needed to find the right director. Deadline reports that Sony has signed Chronicle director Josh Trank to bring the video game to the big screen. More after the jump.

I’ve never played the game, but Deadline has a pretty good description of it:

The protagonist is a young man who thinks his lover has died. Desperate to bring her back, he heads into a forbidden land, and summons a demon who can wake the dead. The price for bringing back his girl: slay 16 colossi that dominate this mystical place. These are skyscraper-sized giants that rise from the ground, fly through the air and come from the water. As the young man works through his quest on horseback, he begins to wonder if he is on a noble pursuit to bring back his lover, or perhaps has made a deal with the devil and is being used.

(Let it be known: “colossi” is my new favorite word.)

Trank has been a fan of the franchise since it came out in 2005, and he apparently has been campaigning for the director’s chair on this movie because he loves the property so much. It’s good to hear he’s got passion, because this sounds like one hell of an ambitious movie and it needs somebody who really cares about the material instead of just turning into another Clash of the Titans .

Chronicle cost around $13 million and made $124 million worldwide, so it stands to reason that Sony would be interested in giving Trank a shot at a project with a bigger scope. Trank has been linked to a bunch of other projects, including The Red Star, Venom, and a Fantastic Four reboot.

Have you played Shadow of the Colossus? Let us know in the comments if you think Trank is the right fit for a movie version.

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In a move that has shocked the movie blog community, Paramount has decided to bump G.I. Joe: Retaliation from June 29th, 2012, all the way back to March 29, 2013, to do a massive post-conversion process to 3D. More info below.

Deadline broke the news, and they have a quote from a Paramount executive that gives a reason for the delay:

We’re going to do a conscientious 3D job because we’ve seen how it can better box office internationally.

Wow. I’m not going to call this a stupid decision on Paramount’s part because they very well could end up making more money in a less-crowded blockbuster year like 2013, especially early in the year and with the added 3D ticket prices. But I will say that it’s one of the most blatant cash grabs I’ve seen in a long time. It’s not like the 3D boom is a recent fad – they had plenty of time to make this decision beforehand, and chose not to. Now, after half of the marketing has been done and the film barely a month away from release, they’re bumping it? As my friend Ethan at FirstShowing points out, there are toys already on the shelves! Kids are going to have to wait another year to see this? Bad form, Paramount.

What do you think about this decision? Smart? Stupid? Sound off in the comments.

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