Back in September of 2019, we reported that The Collected – the third film in the franchise that began with 2009’s The Collector (watch it HERE) and continued with 2012’s The Collection (watch that HERE) – had started filming in Atlanta. Genre legend Tom Atkins had a role in the film, and he told us that the first thing shot on The Collected was the twelve-page sequence that makes up the ending. Nearly five years later, that’s still all that has been shot for The Collected. Writer/director Marcus Dunstan and co-writer Patrick Melton previously revealed that production was shut down on The Collected after just eight days of filming… but it looks like this project is finally coming back together and moving forward again!
After the production shutdown, Dunstan and Melton stopped hearing from anyone involved behind the scenes. Attempts to get in contact with the producer who held the rights went unanswered. But now, while doing the press rounds for his new movie #AMFAD:All My Friends Are Dead (a slasher that’s set for an August 2nd release date), Dunstan confirmed to The Direct that the rights issues have been resolved. He said, “As of about four days ago, the legal elements holding it back were all alleviated. And it is coming back, I can tell you. Shout it loud and proud: The Collector is coming back. It is free. It is going to be a barreling freight train for your mind of fear. Yes, we can do it right!“
Now that Dunstan and Melton have the chance to get to work on a new and improved version of The Collected, “We’re not bringing it back until it’s something that we feel is the best one. And that we feel is in honor of the time we’ve been waiting because we haven’t been waiting on the bench just staring at the sky. We’ve been conceiving and concocting. Yeah, here it comes. And we want to honor this opportunity with something great.“
When filming began in 2019, Tom Atkins was joined in the cast of The Collected by Josh Stewart, Randy Havens, Dot-Marie Jones, Navi Rawat, and Emma Fitzpatrick. It remains to be seen if those actors will still be involved with the project when Dunstan gets it back into production, or if the footage shot five years ago will end up in the finished film.
Are you glad to hear that The Collected is finally going to happen? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.
Sometimes a certain breed of male actors can come off beyond disinterested in the whole Hollywood thing, despite working their butts off to get where they are. Maybe it’s some mumbling or not committing to interviews or the smacking of gum, but whatever it is they do, it comes across like they think they are just too cool for it all. That’s something that Casey Affleck had to come to terms with when he came across as ungrateful when making the circuit for 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Casey Affleck had been thrust into the awards circuit for playing Ford in Andrew Dominik’s western, garnering nominations from the Academy Awards, the Screen Actors Guild, the Golden Globes, and more. And while Affleck did turn out for a number of events, he tended to come off like he just didn’t want to be there. “I was chewing gum at some award show and people said, ‘Who does this little punk think he is? Like he’s on camera chewing gum at the SAG Awards.’ And that I wasn’t taking it seriously enough… I realize now that I could have been more respectful because it does mean something.”
Casey Affleck would go on to say that snubbing the praise and open arms of Hollywood in a way he had never seen was rightfully seen as disrespectful. “It means something to be acknowledged by your peers, who are a group of hardworking, very talented people. By and large, our community is really, really great people. That was our office Christmas party. Those are our industry celebrations, and I guess I could have been more deferential and respectful and not chewed gum or done the campaigning or something.”
While Casey Affleck would lose Best Supporting Actor to Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, he would go on to win the Best Actor Oscar for 2016’s Manchester by the Sea. That honor would put him in a position to choose where and when he would be seen. That included the following year’s ceremony, which he opted out presenting Best Actress at following sexual assault allegations against him.
How do you think Casey Affleck came across during this time? Do you think he has matured since? Give us your thoughts in the comments section below.
The episode of WTF Happened to This Horror Movie? covering Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was Written by Mike Holtz, Narrated by Shawn Knippelberg, Edited by Joseph Wilson, Produced by Andrew Hatfield and John Fallon, and Executive Produced by Berge Garabedian.
Following the world-dominating success of Terminator 2 in 1991…we all knew what was coming. As Matthew Lillard’s Stu from Scream would say, “Let’s face it, baby….these days….YOU GOTTA HAVE A SEQUEL!”. But stop me if you’ve heard this one before, and a trigger warning alert for Friday the 13th fans…..before anything could be done, a tricky rights situation had to be sorted out. In this particular situation, the Terminator film rights belonged 50% to Carolco Pictures and 50% to James Cameron’s ex-wife Gale Anne Hurd. Rights she accrued in part when Cameron sold her his half of the Terminator estate for merely a dollar before the first Terminator film was made. Inflation is nuts! And so is the story of just WTF Happened to Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
Producers of the previous film, Carolco Pictures, would eventually declare bankruptcy and sell their assets in a liquidation auction. Which sounds like something cool Arnold would say to the T-1000 before blasting its liquids all over the place with a large weapon. That came out wrong. What I mean is, I could picture Arnold telling someone he’s about to “liquidate their assets” before blowing them to smithereens. Just…let’s move on…. 20th Century Fox was sure of their intention to purchase the rights to the sequels via a US bankruptcy court but there were still so many puzzle pieces yet to be put together, including the writer, director, and star. Cameron at this point was on record as uninterested in returning, saying they had made T2 in such a way the story came full circle and there needn’t be another.
According to Hurd, Schwarzenegger was always in play for a return…as long as he approved the script, director, and filming schedule. The chairman of Fox Film Entertainment at the time (well into 1997 at this point), Bill Mechanic wanted to secure agreements with the trio before officially picking up the rights to the sequels, knowing damn well that having this agreement in place would work in his favor with the courts in his effort to purchase the rights. Eventually, even James Cameron changed his mind, wanting to work with FOX on the sequel. None of it was to be.
One fateful night, Cameron invited his previous Carolco friends Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna over for an early screening of Titanic, not knowing their friendship was headed towards its own iceberg. Cameron, as legend has it, would mention that the rights for Terminator were still available, as he and FOX were in the process of attempting to secure them. The pair would then go on to seek the rights themselves, hoping to begin a new production company with Terminator 3 as their lead horse out of the gate. Vajna didn’t see an issue with this perceived slight, since they would have wanted Cameron to direct anyway, as he did for them before. But it was all a moot point. When Mechanic then asked Cameron if he wanted FOX to outbid the pair for the rights, he had once again changed his mind during post-production on Titanic and no longer wished to direct. Although he did give a very loyal Arnold Schwarzenegger his blessings to make the movie with a new director, knowing how much he loved the franchise.
When the dust settled in 1998, after all the courts, bad blood, and even Dimension Films being in the running at one point….Kassar and Vajna had acquired not only the future Terminator film rights but also Hurd’s portion of ownership before signing her up as an Executive Producer. Terminator 3 officially had a home. But it was a home without any furniture.
The year is now 1999 and it was time to hire a writer for the follow-up to the greatest action movie ever made. Kassar and Vajna’s newfound production company, C2 Pictures, had a huge decision on their hands, and they decided to hire the writer of…..Tank Girl. You just….you do with that information what you want. Good for you Tedi Sarafian. Good for you. I’d have been shaking worse than Miles Dyson at the end of T2 holding that bomb.
Production company VCL was also brought on to have a 25% stake in the film and at one point Kassar had plans to shoot a third and fourth film back to back with two different directors. The writer of the second film? Jeff Speakman’s The Perfect Weapon writer David C. Wilson. We were truly all over the f*ckin (bleeped) map. The director wish list made a lot more sense and featured another round of trying to swoon Cameron, who declined a multitude of times for a variety of reasons, as well as notables David Fincher, Ridley Scott, John McTiernan, Roland Emmerich, and even Ang Lee. After all that, the job ended up in the hands of a game Jonathan Mostow, who had previously directed one of Kurt Russel’s most underrated films, Breakdown.
Mostow was quite clear however that he wanted Serafin’s script fixed to his liking before he’d agree to shoot. Enter new writers and frequent Mostow collaborators, John Brancato and Michael Farris, who had previously written David Fincher’s The Game and 1995’s Sandra Bullock vehicle, The Net. Ferris would also go on to write the Halle Berry Catwoman movie. Which I am mentioning for no other reason than to say you shouldn’t judge people by one piece of their work. Meow let’s move on.
Serafin’s original script featured John Connor working at a dotcom and a female villain who would turn invisible. An easy day for the Special Effects guys, sure, but not very fun for an audience. Who remembers the A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 invisible karate fight? Riveting. Much of Serafin’s script was gutted. One thing that remained was the villain being a female Terminator from the future. Whatever the case, the final script must have been great, because it garnered what was at the time the most expensive production budget in history at around 170 million dollars.
Part of all that cash was a record $30 million initial contract for the Austrian Oak, Arnold Schwarzenegger, which also included 20% of all of the film’s future profits. All this after his last few films, including Collateral Damage, The Sixth Day, and End of Days only grossed $142 million together (I still think two of those movies kicked ass though, Arnold). Sure, Arnold treated the studios like Suge Knight did Vanilla Ice, holding them over a balcony, knowing the leverage he held over the franchise; but being the total badass Schwarzenegger is, he also later gave up part of his salary so that the cast and crew could stay in Los Angeles and the entire crew wouldn’t have to have their set moved to the cheaper Vancouver, British Columbia area.
Arnold, as usual, had a lot going on at the time. While he had postponed some of his political plans once T3 finally got moving along, he was still flirting with the idea, even having politicians and journalists often visiting the set. Then there were the physical requirements of a 55-year-old man playing a physically perfected robot from the future. Arnold knew that if he fell off physically from the film, which at this point was over a decade in the rearview, he would be judged mightily. But he refused to be molded digitally, saying, “People would say, ‘He’s lost it; he’s all saggy and flabby,’ and that would be all anyone would talk about it. I didn’t want to be digitized, because someone would blab, and it would be in all the columns. So, I just worked harder.” Arnold had a twenty-foot trailer with a gym inside of it on set and would work out during lunch breaks and in between filming. And that’s why he’s Arnold Schwarzenegger…and why I ran out of breath making a sand castle yesterday.
FINALLY, after rights issues, bankruptcy courts, and even a writer’s strike pump-fake….Terminator 3 was set to appear butt naked, in an orb from the future, on the streets of California, to film in the year 2002. With Schwarzenegger on board, albeit without Cameron, it was time to round out the cast.
The obvious choice for John Connor was the return of T2’s Edward Furlong, who was at one point signed on for the role, then removed by the film’s US Distributor, Warner Brothers due to his ongoing public battles with substance abuse. The actor said, “It just wasn’t the time. I was going through my own thing at the point in my life…whatever…it just wasn’t meant to be.” Ironically, in the script for the finished movie, there are multiple drug and alcohol references related to John Connor, and one wonders if that wasn’t also on Warner Bros mind given his current public situation. Mostow would later say it was tough to cast this role because you had cast an actor in his twenties, who looked like he had the weight of the entire world on his shoulders. Possible actors to replace Furlong were Jake Gyllenhaal and Logan Marshall-Green…but history is history and Disturbing Behavior’s Nick Stahl would earn the role instead after a lengthy five auditions.
When director Jonathan Mostow originally signed on to direct the film, one of his main stipulations was that Linda Hamilton would return to play Sarah Connor. However, Hamilton declined, unimpressed with the script and absence of James Cameron, eventually stating “They offered me a part. I read it and I knew my character arc was so complete in the first two, and in the third one, it was a negligible character. She died halfway through and there was no time to mourn her. It was kind of disposable, so I said no thank you.” Which is understandable, and yes, I say that knowing Dark Fate happened. People’s lives change, man! I’m not judging. Ultimately, Mostow realized that she was right and that the film needed to focus on John, rather than regulating her to a third wheel. This led to John simply explaining that his mother had passed away from Leukemia before a wild and crazy shootout with Arnold carrying a casket on one shoulder Commando style.
The role of veterinarian and John Connor’s future wife and fellow Resistance leader Kate Brewster was initially cast in actress Sophia Bush, who played the role for an entire month before Mostow decided she was too youthful-looking and replaced her. That’s some Eric Stoltz Back to the Future type shit. Mostow then brought in his original choice for the role, Claire Danes, who had never done an action film before and gave it her all, although she might have thought she was in a horror film. Finally, we have the prized role of the future machine huntress that was so impressive (in more ways than one) that it supposedly made Arnold’s T-800 “obsolete” (his words, not mine!).
These next few sentences are going to be wild….
While Schwarzenegger campaigned for the Ninth Wonder of the World, WWF wrestler Chyna to play the role of the T-X, the studio auditioned over 10,000 women for the role. They at one point even changed their minds about the character entirely and considered casting Vin Diesel as the villain after the success of Fast and the Furious. Terminator 3 could have been very, very different. Like casting Eric Draven as a tatted-up mumble rapper for a Crow reboot kind of different. Yeah right, that would never happen! Finally, Kristanna Loken was cast, even beating out the great Famke Janssen for the role. Loken would put on fourteen pounds of muscle for the role and take mime classes to nail the robotic movements, impressing even Schwarzenegger. However you feel about T3, I think she was an ass-kicking stand-out for a lot of us in the film. And not that she was a total unknown or anything, but as Robert Patrick said about his casting as the T-1000 in Terminator 2, he worked as a villain for the audience in part because “they didn’t know who the hell I was!”.
By 2002, filming was set to begin on a script that would feature a major tonal change for the franchise; even including a moment where Arnold steals the clothes of a male stripper, including his pink star-framed sunglasses. On paper, I would have lit this script on fire and chased its writer down the studio hallways Ari Gold style. But to be honest, the scene was hilarious. There were multiple moments of great Arnold comedy in T3, just as there had been in T2.
John Connor’s story is still dark, and finds him on the run, unable to enjoy any semblance of a normal life. Skynet sends an advanced Terminator to kill both John and his future co-workers (the aforementioned T-X model), in the form of a beautiful woman who has new and seemingly unstoppable capabilities. Meanwhile, the resistance, in a last-ditch effort, has sent good ole’ outdated and overmatched T-800 Arnold to stop her. Now reprogrammed as the T-850.
Mostow knew exactly what he was doing making Arnold the underdog, stating, “It’s always great if you can have your protagonist or hero be completely outmatched.” He’s right, and it’s an important fabric of the entire Terminator franchise that even with some technical hiccups, Rise of the Machines handles well.
We get to watch the T-X go on a mini-slasher spree, even pulling the good ole’ Super Troopers “enhance” bit on her own chest to get out of a speeding ticket. This is all pure unbridled entertainment before we’re thrown back into John’s story where he meets up with Kate (the not-so-entertaining storyline) in a really weird scene involving a Vet’s office and a paint gun. Finally, everyone meets up, a royal rumble ensues and the “chase” element of the script begins as the two terminators tear through downtown Los Angeles in an entertaining melee that would have had the Police Chief from Last Action Hero with smoke rolling out of his ears again. The goal eventually becomes to reach Kate’s dad, US Air Force General Robert Brewster, played by David Andrews before he is unknowingly pressured into releasing Skynet in an attempt to kill a massive server virus. They don’t reach him in time and all Hell breaks loose, leading to a surprisingly somber ending with John and Kate in a bunker, receiving a transmission from an emergency radio, and becoming the leader of the resistance as the nuclear holocaust rages around them.
Rise of the Machines ended up being such a strange film. While it was never in the same league as its predecessors, it’s a strangely watchable and entertaining film, albeit with many flaws. Arnold was still Arnold, and the action scenes were ambitious. Even if they weren’t nearly as technically proficient and needle moving as what had come before.
One such scene, thought up by stunt coordinator Simon Crane involved a 14-camera one-take shot which sent Schwarzenegger (who did a lot of his own stunts) as the T-850 smashing through a glass building and firetruck. This led to Arnold spending days and weeks hanging from a crane and encountering many “close calls”. In the end, T3 would feature more than 600 special effects shots from Stan Winston’s Industrial Light & Magic company. Throw in Scream Composer Marcos Beltrami’s score and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was ready to unleash itself upon the Summer box office. Backed by a huge marketing plan that included a Superbowl spot, a Todd McFarlane-produced action figure line, and an Atari video game…..Terminator 3 was released on July 2nd, 2003. Twelve years after its predecessor changed action movies forever.
With a record-breaking budget of 187 million dollars, Terminator 3 needed a big box office……..and they got it. $44 million on its opening weekend on its way to a worldwide grab of $433 million. Warner Bros would go on to call the film “meaningly profitable”. How did the critics and audience take a Cameron-less third film in the beloved franchise? Surprisingly well, given the obvious quality drop-off (again, a drop-off from T2 is nothing to be ashamed of) and the large boots the film had to fill, most saw Terminator 3: Rise of The Machines as a flawed but fun ride. Audiences gave the film a B+ CinemaScore and to this day, the film sits with a 70% critics approval rating on the review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes.
Mostow had no illusions about his daunting and well-accomplished job here saying, “The problem in Terminator 3 is that Terminator 2 was such a seminal movie. It was going to be impossible to blow people away because T2 was the first time a lot of people saw digital effects. The liquid-metal man, no one had ever seen that before. That and Jurassic Park, those are two movies that probably most have blown people away from seeing them in the theater. I knew that we wouldn’t be able to achieve that.” Self-awareness is a big tool to have in your arsenal, folks. And because of it things all worked out in the end for Mostow and Company. The franchise stayed alive despite the absence of Cameron, who would go on to call the film “great”. More sequels would be made….but none of them feel quite like Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines; a strange but watchable and fun outlier in the Terminator universe. And that my friends, is WTF happened to Terminator 3D: Rise of the Machines.
A couple of the previous episodes of WTF Happened to This Horror Movie? can be seen below. To see more, head over to our JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
In an age where mainstream movies are saturated with superhero comic book films, the quality of films in the genre is inevitably going to fluctuate. For every Avengers or Winter Soldier, there will also be a Morbius or Madame Web. For a lot of characters made popular at the comic book stands, Hollywood will not seem to know how to properly adapt them while also making them accessible for general audiences. Then, you have legacy characters that you’d think would be a slam dunk, like Catwoman. Especially when you cast someone like Halle Berry in the titular role.
2003’s Catwoman would be released to a pretty unifying negative reaction from both audiences and critics. Variety reports on Halle Berry’s reflection of the infamous bomb as she speaks with Entertainment Weekly in recognition of the 20th anniversary of the film. At the time, Berry played a good sport by accepting Razzie Awards for the movie at the ceremony herself, but in this new interview, she mentions how she hated receiving the sole blame for the film’s quality. Berry stated,
I felt like it was Halle Berry’s failure, but I didn’t make it alone. All these years, I’ve absolutely carried it.”
Catwoman had earned the reputation of being one of the worst superhero movies ever made. Berry definitely saw some red flags in the script, “I always thought the idea of Catwoman saving women from a face cream felt a bit soft. All the other superheroes save the world; they don’t just save women from cracked faces. I always knew that was a soft superhero plight, but at that time in my career, I didn’t have the agency I have today or belief that I could challenge that, so I went along with it.”
The star would say that “things went smoothly [for me]” during the production and that “it was a great shoot.” She also added, “I had the time of my life. I worked my ass off to embody a cat in so many ways, psychologically and physically. I never thought it went awry; I just thought that maybe it wouldn’t feel as big as other movies because the plot stakes aren’t as high.”
The first two episodes of Supacell could have done a more thorough job of focusing on Sabrina (Nadine Mills) and other women in the show. Instead, they’ve served primarily as support characters for the male narrative. So Sabrina’s episode is the one I’ve been waiting for, as it brings her superpowered struggles into…
The first two episodes of Supacell could have done a more thorough job of focusing on Sabrina (Nadine Mills) and other women in the show. Instead, they’ve served primarily as support characters for the male narrative. So Sabrina’s episode is the one I’ve been waiting for, as it brings her superpowered struggles into…
It didn’t really take all that long but Green Book is now generally considered one of the most undeserving movies to ever win Best Picture, serving as a safe choice that could give the Academy members yet another chance to pat themselves on the back instead of voting for something more daring like Roma, which many pegged to be the favorite. And this backlash has stuck with Viggo Mortensen ever since, calling out critics of the movie to this day.
Speaking with Vanity Fair, Viggo Mortensen – who played real-life figure “Tony Lip” to his third Best Actor nomination – stood up for Green Book, which faced heavy criticism partly for the depiction of the relationship between Lip and Dr. Donald Shirley, played by Mahershala Ali (winning his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar). “It was frustrating to me, as part of the filmmaking team, to see that the studio was somewhat cowed by the disingenuous criticism of the movie, of it being not historically accurate, so forth, or unfair in some way—being cowed by that kind of rumor-mongering that spread like wildfire because of the way social media is these days, and which rival studios greatly enjoyed and propagated as much as they could. That’s what happened. I thought they should have been bolder about refuting it. They eventually did what we—Peter Farrelly, me, and others—wished they had done early on: put out the recordings that show that this is actually a true story and that this happened.”
But Mortensen wasn’t just defending Green Book here but rather also calling out much of modern film criticism, which he suggested could be part of the reason that that film – and so many others – don’t get proper reception. “More and more these days, what passes for critical thinking in terms of reviews is pretty poor. In terms of the reviewer having some understanding of film history, how movies are made—the level is really low. There are some good reviewers—some really interesting conversations are had from journalists in terms of their reactions to films—but it’s not great. As a director, certainly as a director-producer, I pay attention. It matters to me more, a lot more than as an actor because the fate of the movie, whether it’s going to be distributed well, whether it’s going to be seen in movie theaters—a lot hangs in the balance as to how it’s received critically.”
Clear Oscar bait or not, Green Book ended up taking home the top honor at the 91st Academy Awards after a string of gutsier Best Picture winners like The Shape of Water, Moonlight and Birdman. Its support – or perhaps what might be better described as the industry congratulating itself for voting for a race-themed film – shouldn’t really have been that much of a shock when it comes down to it. The biggest surprise might be that it falls in very limited company as being one of just five films to win Best Picture without a Best Director nomination. Another to pull off this feat? Driving Miss Daisy.
Do you think Green Book deserves the backlash it gets or does it have strong enough merits? Give us your take on the film below.
Americans are waking up this morning to discover that the whole world isn’t working properly. It’s a crisis that has spread around the planet, grounding flights, shutting down hospital procedures, and causing worldwide travel chaos, and it’s all because of a single software update by cyber-security firm Crowdstrike.
Americans are waking up this morning to discover that the whole world isn’t working properly. It’s a crisis that has spread around the planet, grounding flights, shutting down hospital procedures, and causing worldwide travel chaos, and it seems it’s all because of a single software update by cyber-security firm…
Next week, Jaws 3D (as well as Jaws: The Revenge) will be released on 4K Ultra HD, but the release has come under fire because it appears that some fairly aggressive AI was used to help restore the movie.
Owing to the 3D process used to film the movie—which divided a 35mm film frame in half along the middle—Jaws 3D has never been the best-looking movie on home media. The film has always had a great deal of grain and some frame distortion, but the AI processing has smoothed things over just a little too much, as well as turning the background characters into rather horrifying creatures.
If these screen grabs from reddit are true, then the Jaws 3 and 4K UHD's are just AI upscales.
I'm hearing they A.I.'d it to get it that way, but I love JAWS 3D (probably a little too much) and did screen grabs comparing the current Vudu digital copy transfer, the MoviesAnywhere transfer (both different), and the 4k transfer now on Peacock… pic.twitter.com/41IIcDfQLG
While some won’t be bothered by this AI remastering on the Jaws 3D 4K release, it does appear to be a deal-breaker for many. This isn’t the first time AI remastering has reared its head, as the 4K release of James Cameron’s True Lies also proved to be controversial. I’m certain AI will continue to play a part in the remastering process of select movies, but it feels as though we’re back in the early days of DNR with overly waxy faces and a complete absence of grain. The technology will doubtlessly continue to improve, but at the moment, it’s looking rough.
Jaws 3 stars Dennis Quaid as Mike Brody, the son of Martin Brody, who is now the chief engineer at SeaWorld Orlando. When a giant thirty-five-foot Great White Shark infiltrates the park and begins killing the employees, it’s up to Mike to save the day, all in glorious 3D. The film is also famous for representing the height of Quaid’s cocaine habit in the ’80s, with the actor later saying that he was high in “every frame” in which he appears.
If you were hoping to pick up Jaws 3D on 4K next week, does this AI remastering change your mind about buying it, or are you not bothered?
(@cartycinema)