3 more Lego movies scheduled, and maybe a Lena Dunham ‘Girls’ movie, too
Building a franchise
With the BLOCKbuster success of “The Lego Movie” last year, Warner Bros. has announced dates for three more, says The Hollywood Reporter. It all starts with an untitled Lego Batman movie Feb. 10, 2017, with Will Arnett providing the starring voice. (Sounds like a way better idea than the live-action “Batman v Superman,” whose grim trailer leaked last week. Lighten up, you guys.) Then there’s “Ninjago” (Lego ninjas! Dragons and snake men!) on Sept. 22, 2017. And finally, “The Lego Movie Sequel” — yup, that is the title — on May 18, 2018.
Big-screen “Girls”?
Hey, HBO’s “Entourage” will soon be a movie (opening June 3), and “Sex and the City” got adapted twice. So why not HBO’s “Girls”? No problem, creator/star Lena Dunham tells Variety. Just not for a while. “I have fantasies of us all coming back and making a movie when we’re 40,” she said. “I think we’d want to wait long enough for something to have really gone down.” Filming will soon begin on the show’s fifth season, which she said jumps ahead in time a bit.
To boldly go
We’ve heard that Idris Elba is going to be the next “Star Trek” villain. But we don’t know who. He’s definitely an original character, not some baddie from the TV series like Khan, says Simon Pegg, who doubles as Scotty and the film’s screenwriter. “This is the five-year mission now; we’re out there,” Pegg told MTV. “We don’t always have to keep bumping into the same people. It’s a massive universe. So we’re gonna try and reflect that in the movie.” The movie is due in July 2016. First, you can catch Pegg in this July’s “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation.”
That’s impossible
Speaking of the next “Mission: Impossible,” star Tom Cruise stopped by this week’s CinemaCon to talk about doing his own stunts. Like hanging off the side of a massive Airbus A400M taking off and flying to 5,000 feet. No stunt double here. He did it eight times with a harness attaching him to the aircraft, says The Associated Press. Cruise admitted he was terrified, worrying about particles from the runway, jet fuel fumes and … birds. “I want to keep audiences on the edge of their seats,” he told the group, all theater owners getting a taste of this summer’s movies. (Find The Star’s summer movie preview in Sunday’s A+E section.)
Well, well, Welles
You may not know that the late filmmaker Orson Welles has a KC connection: “I was a fortuneteller once in Kansas City, when I was playing a week’s stand there in the theater,” he told Playboy in a 1967 interview. “I took an apartment in a cheap district and put up a sign — $2 READINGS — and every day I went there, put on a turban and told fortunes.”
If that isn’t reason enough to celebrate the Hollywood icon, it’s also the 100th anniversary of his birth. The Kansas City Central Library, 14 W. 10th St., will present a month-long series of Welles’ films, curated by KU film professor John Tibbetts.
Screenings begin at 1:30 p.m. Saturdays in the Stanley H. Durwood Film Vault: “Citizen Kane” May 2, “The Magnificent Ambersons” May 9, “Touch of Evil” May 16, “Chimes at Midnight” May 23 and “F Is for Fake” May 30. Admission is free.
This story was originally published April 22, 2015 at 4:52 PM with the headline "3 more Lego movies scheduled, and maybe a Lena Dunham ‘Girls’ movie, too."