Category — Walt Disney Pictures

“Beverly Hills Chihuahua” barks onto the scene tomorrow to declare an early lead on the Best Dog In A Motion Picture Academy Award. No, it’s not the next Eddie Murphy return vehicle, instead it purports to be a cute story of love, loss and rescue between two diminutive and overly pampered dogs who happen to believe they’re descendant from gods. Well, not exactly, but you get the picture.

The film features the voices of George Lopez, Drew Barrymore, Andy Garcia, Plácido Domingo, Edward James Olmos, Paul Rodriguez, Cheech Marin, Luis Guzman, Eddie “Piolin” Sotelo, and actors Piper Perabo, Manolo Cardona, Eugenio Derbez and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Critics have not been kind to “Beverly Hills Chihuahua.” Rotten Tomatoes has it pegged at 67%. But some have reported that a warm hearted story and a lack of the typical dog jokes make BHC better than the average dog comedy. So that says something.

If you live in the Los Angeles area you can catch a special engagement of Walt Disney Pictures’ “Beverly Hills Chihuahua,” at Hollywood’s legendary El Capitan Theatre. From October 3rd through the 16th each screening will feature a LIVE stage appearance by the film’s dog stars, “Papi” and “Chloe,” .

The film screens daily at 10:00 am, 1:00 pm, 4:00 pm, 7:00 pm and 9:40 pm. Tickets are available at the El Capitan Theatre (6838 Hollywood Blvd.), on line at www.elcaptitantickets.com, or by calling 1-800-DISNEY6. Special group rates for parties of 20 or more are available by calling 1-818-845-3110.

The full press release is below the cut:
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It’s been a couple days of big news on the Walt Disney Company movie front. First Johnny Depp confirmed he has at least three films for Disney in his future. First he’ll be doing voice and motion capture acting work for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland film. Depp will play the Mad Hatter, sure it’s type casting, but hey, Depp is perfect for the role, so why not. The second film announced was that Depp would play Tonto in Disney’s The Lone Ranger. Depp’s part Cherokee, in case you were wondering. Perhaps the biggest news (although we’d mentioned it much earlier on TDB) is that Depp will indeed be back for a 4th Pirates Of The Caribbean. No news on date or plot. But fountain of youth had been mentioned as a destination before.

In news from our friends at Pixar, some more details have leaked regarding the “John Carter Of Mars” project being helmed by Nemo and Wall-e director Andrew Stanton. Reportedly the film will mix live action and animation as they journey to Barsoom. Sci-Fi Wire has more.

One more voice actor has been added to Walt Disney Animation Studios hand-animatted feature film “The Princess and the Frog”. Oprah Winfrey will come on board and voice Eudora the mother of the main character Princess Tiana.

Finally, IESB.net reports that Disney’s Dick Cook, Actor Nicolas Cage, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer have confirmed that the popular National Treasure movie will come back with a third edition. There’s no word on what treasure they’ll pursue this time, but expect to find out sometime in the fall of 2010.

Brad Brevet at Rope of Silicon, a movie news website, had never seen the original Tron movie before. Hard to believe I know. But it provides him a unique (non-fanboy) perspective on TR2N, aka Tron 2.0, after watching the original for the first time.

one thing the first film does do is set up the sequel with many avenues to go down. Tron was something of a man against the system story, and it opens the door to a man against man inside the system story; it’s just a matter of whether or not man will continue to die while inside the system and how much effect the Disney production factor will have on the film’s storyline.

Obviously The Matrix already ripped off a lot of what Tron brought to the table initially, but in a far more elastic way. Tron is set in a very controlled environment, but it appears there is some leeway for a rogue program inside the system, which essentially is what Neo and Morpheus were when they jacked into the Matrix.

Lots of other interesting ideas there too.

I’m really jumping ahead a bit here, But the proof of concept footage leaked from Comic-Con showed me that TR2N could easily become another Walt Disney Pictures epic trilogy along the likes of Pirates Of The Caribbean or Narnia for Disney.

The basics rules for the rich world of Tron are already established, they just need to be fleshed out to a world wide level. There are also plenty of heavy issues involved with computers and their influences on our lives that haven’t been addressed since the original TRON was released. The original Matrix touched on it, but the sequels took another direction.

With some great screenwriters I think we could be loving this new world of TRON for years to come.

(link)

Want to see what Jake Gyllenhaal looks like as the Prince of Persia? JustJared has the on-the-set pictures. Based on the popular video game, the film is set to come out in May 2010. So we have a while to wait to see the final product.

You can read up in the Los Angeles Daily News on a bison herd in Newhall, which is north of Los Angeles.  The herd started as a gift from Disney in the 1950s after they were used in filming “Westward Ho, The Wagons!”

I guess there wasn’t room at Disneyland?

Found another copy of the TR2N teaser trailer. It’s back up on the original post until the lawyers request that copy be removed too. It’s really not fair for Disney to show the trailer to an open event and not expect others to want to see it.

Update: The Vimeo video is down, but it’s back up on youtube, which will no doubt go down shortly after I post this (*waves to Disney lawyers!*). Yes, it’s not the best quality video, but it was publicly released, so Disney should expect it to be shared online. If they don’t like the quality, the way to fix that is easy. Release a better version. I promise to embed it.

As far as I know the TR2N (aka Tron 2.0) teaser trailer hasn’t officially been released by Disney other than that screening at SDCC. So here is a slightly blurry, zoomed in and adjusted, video of the trailer taken from someone in the audience. It’s the best I’ve seen so far. See it now before Disney legal sics their dogs.

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to see this right now. I hope it gets the IMAX treatement as well as Digital 3-D. Can you imagine?

Previously: Tron 2.0 Trailer debuts at SDCC – TR2N.

[ hat tip: Tron 2.0 Trailer blog ]

Update: Found a videocam’d version of the tr2n trailer. Don’t know how long it will last. It’s fuzzy quality, but totally worth checking out.

Oh my. I’m 3000 miles away from San Diego and I can still feel the excitement from the surprise release of a new preview for Disney’s sequel to TRON. Yep, we had heard that the film was greenlit, but had no idea that production was under way, let alone casting finished and filming commenced.

Yet, as evidenced by the scene played for attendees of the “Race to Witch Mountain” panel Disney hosted at San Diego Comic-Con, Tron 2.0, or TR2N as the teaser title called it, is well under way. However, attendees were told that it would be about a year before more footage was revealed.

Adam Quigley from /film describes the teaser:

The teaser starts off with the camera panning through a strange stylized landscape. At this point, nobody knew what we were watching, so only silence filled the hall. And then, two blue/yellow suit-wearing motorcyclists burst into frame, engaged in a frenzy of a race. Audiences erupted in applause.

The race continues to grow heated between the two players until the yellow guy finds a way to swerve in front of the blue, leaving his yellow race trail behind him. The blue guy smashes into it and causes sort of an electric ripple, launching him over the edge of the track. He grabs on a ledge, just barely holding on.

Apparently Jeff Bridges makes an appearance as well. I like that Quigley feels the graphics and feel of the movie make it obvious this isn’t just another cash-grab sequel from the Mouse House, but a serious attempt at a revisiting the universe of TRON.

The 1982 original was a seminal moment in film making. Now that we’ve had 26 years to reflect on it, Tron is to CGI animation as Snow White has been to traditional feature length animation. OK, that might be a bit of a stretch, but it definitely helped inspire the techies and animators who launched Pixar. So we owe the original Tron creators for that at least.

Also see: Ain’t It Cool News (warning:some bad language) and Geeks of Doom’s coverage.

Update: FirstShowing has some great coverage. I’m still looking for actual video of the teaser… anyone have it?