Michael Bay Is Coming to Television
Today in show business news: TNT is now in the Michael Bay business, Andrew Garfield books a prestigious role, and another movie musical is in the works.
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If you just saw the mostly grotesque Pain & Gain and are for some reason jonesing for more Michael Bay, fear not. Help is on the way. TNT has just ordered to series a Bay-produced action drama show called The Last Ship. It's about the Internet collectively deciding to no longer write slash fiction. No, no, of course not. Would that it were. It's really about a Navy boat that is incommunicado on a mission for a long time or something and when it reenters the real world they find out that a global pandemic has caused the world to breakdown into a total nightmare. The series stars Eric Dane as the square-jawed captain, Adam Baldwin as his number two, Rhona Mitra as a sexy scientist who might be the key to the cure, and, thrillingly, Tracey Middendorf, who most famously (to me anyway, she was also on Boardwalk Empire), played crazy Laura on the first college season of 90210. She's playing the captain's wife. Now, Michael Bay didn't direct this — Jonathan Mostow did, and he knows a thing or two about naval stuff after directing U-571 — but in the first trailer for the show, Bay's whiz-bang stamp is all over it. TNT has ordered ten episodes for now, presumably with more to come if people take to it. (Meaning it's not a miniseries.) Will it be good? Oh, probably not. But maybe it can succeed where Last Resort failed. If anyone can do it, it's Michael Bay. [Deadline]
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Andrew Garfield keeps getting bigger and bigger. Career-wise! Career-wise, sheesh. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is on the way (is Emma Stone doomed?) and now he's just been cast as the lead role in Martin Scorsese's next film. Unfortunately for everyone's romance fantasies, he will be playing a Jesuit priest. Yeah. The movie is called Silence and is about 17th century priests traveling to Japan in an attempt to convert everyone to Christianity. Hm. That didn't really work, did it! Oh well. Ken Watanabe has been cast as the priests' guide and translator, while Rinko Kikuchi has been cast as a beautiful farm girl who steals Garfield's character's heart. No, no, I just made that up. But think on it, Marty. That's what everyone wants to see from Andrew Garfield. I mean, if it has to be a farm boy, so be it. Either way, really. Just... think about it. [Deadline]
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Guys, let's slow it down with the movie musicals, shall we? We just got done shaking our heads about Rob Marshall's really-gonna-happen Into the Woods adaptation, and now we're hearing that Smashed and The Spectacular Now director James Ponsoldt, a real up-and-comer, has plans to make a movie version of every high school's favorite up-and-comer story, Pippin. Yeah there's a well-received (well, well-received enough, anyway) revival of the show that just opened on Broadway, so now everyone's thinking movie. Harvey Weinstein flew Ponsoldt out to see the show a little while back and there was a meeting and it was decided. Who knows if this will be some modern adaptation or what, but it is interesting that Ponsoldt is doing a forty-year-old musical after two small, intimate, contemporary indies. It might work! Or it might be Nine. Really the important question, though, is who will sing "Corner of the Sky"? Besides every straight high school theater boy at summer camp auditions next month, I mean. Who will sing it in the movie? I'm sure every young musical actor in New York just called their agent and said "Make this happen." [The Hollywood Reporter]
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Not having anything else to do that night, NBC has extended the series finale of The Office by fifteen minutes. Or forty-five minutes depending on how you look at it. The finale will air next Thursday from 9:00 - 10:15, which is almost the length of a movie! Except for the commercials, obviously. And maybe some of it's clip show? That could very well be. But yeah, it's gonna be a lot of Office next week. I mean, they'll have a lot to cover, seeing as Jim and Pam die in a horrible car wreck this week. Oh, oops, sorry. Yeah, that happens. Sorry. Spoiler alert. [Entertainment Weekly]
In case you missed it, the first full trailer of the upcoming YA adventure adaptation Ender's Game was released today. Give it a watch, if only for the hilarious title card that dramatically introduces Abigail Breslin as "Academy Award Nominee Abigail Breslin." Or, y'know, don't watch it, because Orson Scott Card is a total prick who really, really doesn't like gay people! Whichever!
