Moviefone Editorial

Category: Sci-Fi

  • ‘Star Wars: Episode IX’ Would Have Been Carrie Fisher’s Movie, Says Kathleen Kennedy

    Wizard World Comic Con Chicago 2016 - Day 4In case you weren’t already sad enough about Carrie Fisher‘s death in late 2016, producer Kathleen Kennedy has revealed that the actress would have had a huge role in “Star Wars: Episode IX.”

    In a new Vanity Fair cover story, Kennedy discussed Fisher’s excitement about the latest trilogy, including her hopes of having a bigger role in “Episode IX.” Apparently, after finishing her work on “The Last Jedi,” Fisher went to Kennedy and told her, “I’d better be at the forefront of ‘IX!’”

    As the producer explained it, after watching her co-stars Harrison Ford and Mark Hammil get to be “front and center” in “Episode VII” and “Episode VIII,” respectively, Fisher saw “Episode IX” as her turn.

    “She thought ‘IX’ would be her movie,” Kennedy told Vanity Fair. “And it would have been.”

    Needless to say, Kennedy’s comments inspire some serious regret over what could have been. Fisher’s character, Princess Leia, has been a beloved part of the series since the beginning, and it’s hard to imagine the films without her. Knowing that she was meant to be a huge part of the story only makes our sense of loss more acute.

    Still, we do still have Fisher’s work in “The Last Jedi” to look forward to. Vanity Fair shared a touching photo Wednesday of Fisher and her daughter, Billie Lourd, who plays Lieutenant Connix in the movie.

    It’ll be bittersweet to see Fisher in her final Star Wars film when “The Last Jedi” opens Dec. 15.

    [via: Vanity Fair]

  • Here’s Why ‘Alien: Covenant’ Is a Box Office Disappointment

    If you saw “Alien: Covenant” this weekend, you probably have a lot of questions. Some involve plot holes big enough to pilot the Covenant colony spaceship through, and some involve whether or not you’ll ever be able to get the image of Michael Fassbender kissing Michael Fassbender out of your head. (Or if you even want to.)

    This column can’t answer any of those — sorry — but it can answer those regarding the movie’s razor-thin victory over “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” at the box office. The latest “Alien” prequel claimed an estimated $36.0 million debut, keeping “Guardians” from a three-peat at No. 1 by a margin of less than $1 million.

    Going into the weekend, “Alien’s” projections were near $40 million, but a Friday to Saturday dip crushed those hopes. Still, what does this photo finish mean for the franchise, its director and stars, its studio, and a summer movie season that has hobbled out of the gate? Let’s break it down.

    “Guardians” is holding up very well after three weeks; it just crossed the $300 million mark on its 17th day in theaters, and it’ll almost certainly surpass the $333 million total earned by the first “Guardians” within the next several days. Plus, Ridley Scott‘s previous “Alien” prequel — 2012’s confusing “Prometheus” — may have squandered a lot of the franchise’s good will.
    Nonetheless, anticipation for “Covenant” was keen, reviews were good-ish (73 percent at Rotten Tomatoes), word-of-mouth was just okay (as measured by a B grade at CinemaScore), and the R-rated sci-fi/horror installment was able to deliver gore, thrills, and chills that franchise fans have come to expect over the last 38 years. Plus, it’s competition among new wide releases skewed a lot younger, so it didn’t have to worry about losing viewers to teen romance “Everything, Everything” or family comedy sequel “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul.” No wonder people 25 and older made up 66 percent of the “Covenant” audience.

    Is “Covenant’s” Opening Weekend a Triumph or Disappointment?
    The argument is leaning toward the latter.

    It’s a lot less than the $51 million debut of “Prometheus,” but no one expected it to open anywhere near that big anyway. After all, anticipation for “Prometheus” was even greater, since that marked the beginning of Scott’s prequel series, as well as the celebrated director’s return to the franchise he launched in 1979, after a 33-year absence.

    Some pundits predicted that “Covenant” would premiere with as little as $35 million, though others predicted it would open as much as $40 million. So $36 million is within the range of expectations, and — assuming the weekend estimates hold up when final figures are released Monday — “Covenant” will claim bragging rights as the movie that dethroned “Guardians.”

    Is Katherine Waterston the Next Sigourney Weaver?
    It’s not clear whether her role as the plucky “Covenant” heroine will make her as famous as the original “Alien” made the then-unknown Weaver. But certainly, Hollywood is trying its darnedest to make her a star, between this and her recent supporting-lead role in the Harry Potter franchise-reviving “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.”

    Still, in “Covenant,” she has to compete for the spotlight against not just one but two Michael Fassbenders, as well as a large ensemble cast, so she’s probably still a few movies away from a breakthrough role.

    Is “Covenant” Going to Make a Profit?
    That could depend on what it cost, which in turn depends on who you ask.

    Trade reports cite Fox as saying the movie cost $97 million, but the typically blunt and candid Scott has said $111 million. Both figures seem remarkably low for an effects-heavy space opera, especially since “Prometheus” cost a reported $130 million five years ago.

    Then again, Fox is reporting that “Covenant” has already earned $81.9 million overseas, so its global total of $117.9 is above even Scott’s figure. Of course, once you add marketing costs and subtract the theater owners’ take, “Covenant” is going to have to gross as much as $450 million just to break even.

    That’s not impossible. Scott’s previous “Alien” prequel grabbed $403 million from earthling ticketbuyers, and that was at 2012 prices. In any case, what will save “Covenant,” like nearly every other big-budget Hollywood release this year, will be the foreign audience. The domestic release was always going to be just gravy, which is another reason why Fox shouldn’t be too disappointed by $36 million North American debut.

    What Do This Weekend’s Results Say About the Summer 2017 Movie Season
    Don’t forget, even if domestic box office is an afterthought these days, summer sales still traditionally make up 40 percent of the year’s take, or about $4.5 billion at the North American box office.
    The current summer movie season is just three weeks old, but already, it’s seen “Covenant” do “meh” business, “Guardians 2” slightly underperform them, and “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” bomb outright. The box office for the year to date is just slightly ahead of this time last year (by 2.4 percent, or about $102 million). That’s not much of an edge; a couple more shaky debuts or massive flops and this year’s box office will fall behind and struggle to catch up with previous years. There’d better be a lot of gold in Wonder Woman’s lasso.

    Scott has said he has at least one and as many as four ideas for future “Alien” installments. As long as the 79-year-old’s health holds out, and as long as the $1.4 billion franchise keeps delivering solid worldwide numbers like “Covenant” has, those facehuggers and chestbursters should keep coming back to terrify us for years to come.

  • 21 Things You Never Knew About ‘The Lost World: Jurassic Park’

    “It wasn’t as good as the first one. But it was very successful.”

    That was the assessment by Steven Spielberg himself of “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” which marks its 20th anniversary on May 23, 2017. Indeed, the 1997 sequel may have prompted eye-rolling among fans, but it scared up a fortune at the box office, enough so that the franchise has continued to this day. Plus, it was the last time we got to see Jeff Goldblum‘s snarky scientist Ian Malcolm — at least until next summer’s “Jurassic World 2.”

    As smoothly as the production ran — Spielberg finished it on budget and ahead of schedule — there were still some surprises and jokes on the set. Read on for the dino-details.
    1. Michael Crichton called his “Jurassic Park” follow-up novel the only book he ever wrote that he knew would be made into a movie. He took inspiration from Arthur Conan Doyle, who’d written his own dinosaur novel in 1912 called “The Lost World,” and who had famously resurrected Sherlock Holmes after killing him off — a precedent Crichton used to justify bringing back Ian Malcolm, who had survived in the movie version of “Jurassic Park” but not in Crichton’s earlier novel.
    2. Even so, Spielberg and “Jurassic Park” screenwriter David Koepp ended up tossing a lot of Crichton’s plot and characters, though they kept a handful of key scenes, including the central set piece of mom-and-dad Tyrannosaurus Rexes attacking a trailer in order to rescue their wounded infant.
    3. The little girl attacked by tiny dinosaurs in the opening scene (above) is played by Camilla Belle. She and Vanessa Lee Chester (who played Malcolm’s daughter, Kelly) had both played supporting roles in Alfonso Cuarón‘s “A Little Princess.” Fittingly, Belle would grow up to star in prehistoric adventure “10,000 B.C.“
    4. Early in the film, while Goldblum rides the subway, you can see a familiar-looking young man reading a newspaper. That’s future “Inglourious Basterds” co-star and “Hostel” director Eli Roth, who was an extra in several movies at the dawn of his Hollywood career.
    5. Koepp got the names for characters Roland (Pete Postlethwaite, above) and Van Owen (Vince Vaughn) from the macho rivals in one of his favorite songs, Warren Zevon’s “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.”
    6. Vaughn was all but unknown when Spielberg cast him. The director had first noticed him while watching a pre-release edit of “Swingers,” whose makers had passed it along to Spielberg in order to get his approval to borrow the “Jaws” theme music. Vaughn would also co-star in 1997 indie drama “The Locusts” with Kate Capshaw (Spielberg’s wife) before “Lost World” introduced him to a mass audience.
    7. While many shots in the film make use of advances in CGI that had occurred in the four years since “Jurassic Park,” close-up shots of menacing carnivores were accomplished as before, with animatronic creatures built by monster-effects wizard Stan Winston.
    8. The two T-Rex parents he built were so massive (19,000 pounds each — and they were just head-and-torso) that they couldn’t leave the soundstage, and sets had to be built around them. They were mounted on carts that ran on fixed tracks.
    9. The crew had the most fun staging the T-Rex tracks’ attack on the trailer, creature designer Shane Mahan recalled.

    “At first, we were hesitant, thinking that we had to be careful with the rigs. But it got to the point where we were just, ‘Ah, to hell with it,’ and we just demolished that trailer with the T-Rex rigs,” Mahan said. “That scene wasn’t faked. Those T-Rexes were really slamming into that thing, breaking glass and shaking it. I think the scene really works because we went for it like that. You can tell that something truly violent is happening.”
    10. The cliff over which the damaged trailer dangles was built out of a parking garage on the Universal Studios lot.
    11. Most of the outdoor footage was shot in the redwood forests of Northern California. Yeah, in real life, there are no redwood forests in Costa Rica, but the ancient, enormous trees gave the scenes the prehistoric look that Spielberg wanted.
    12. The sequence where velociraptors attack in the tall grass had to be planned a year in advance, in order for the seed sown by the production crew to grow tall enough. The crew planted eight full acres, in case scenes required multiple takes, since the grass, once trampled, wouldn’t spring back up.
    13. The screenplay’s original ending had the humans fleeing the island in helicopters while being attacked by pteranodons, but the flying lizards wouldn’t get their due on screen until “Jurassic Park III.” 14. The idea of ending the movie with a T-Rex attacking San Diego came from Conan Doyle’s novel, whose finale brought a pterodactyl to London, and from Spielberg’s delight at the idea of making his own little “Godzilla” movie and seeing a T-Rex drinking from a swimming pool.
    15. How did the crew of the ship get eaten if the T-Rex was still locked in the cargo hold? Apparently, there was supposed to be a scene showing raptors aboard the ship, but it was never filmed.
    16. The “Godzilla” gag isn’t at all subtle, except for the fact that one of the fleeing Japanese businessmen is saying, in Japanese, “I moved from Tokyo to get away from all this!” At least the filmmakers dropped their early idea of printing out that punchline in subtitles.
    17. Koepp (above) has a cameo as “Unlucky Bastard,” who is eaten by the runaway T-Rex during the San Diego sequence.
    18. We still get a kick out of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em posters for imaginary movies in the San Diego video store: Tom Hanks riding a surfboard in something called “Tsunami Sunrise,” a giant Robin Williams holding a tiny family in his palm in “Jack and the Beanstalks” (a hint toward the “BFG” adaptation in Spielberg’s future?), and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Shakespeare’s “King Lear.”
    19. The budget of “Lost World” was reportedly $73 million, just $8 million more than “Jurassic Park” had cost in 1993.
    20. “Lost World” set box office records when it opened. Its $72.1 million opening weekend was the biggest ever at the time and held the record until “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” surpassed it four and a half years later. It was also the fastest film to cross the $100 million mark, doing so in just six days. It ultimately earned less over the course of its run than “Jurassic Park,” racking up $229 million in North America and $619 million worldwide. Still, it remained the top grossing movie for most of 1997, until “Titanic” opened in December.
    21. It’s no wonder Spielberg followed “Lost World” with dialogue-heavy dramas “Amistad” and “Saving Private Ryan.” “It made me wistful about doing a talking picture because sometimes I got the feeling I was just making this big silent-roar movie,” he said of “Lost World.” “I found myself saying, ‘Is that all there is? It’s not enough for me.’”

  • 18 Things You Never Knew About ‘The Road Warrior’

    Thirty-five years after it detonated on these shores (on May 21, 1982), “The Road Warrior” remains one of the greatest action films ever made.

    Plus, it made an A-lister out of Mel Gibson, finally made Australian director George Miller‘s “Mad Max” franchise a success in the U.S., and influenced countless other post-apocalyptic-wasteland sagas.

    The production saga behind the original “Mad Max” was nearly as wild as what wound up on screen, and the same is true of its first sequel, as you’ll see below.
    1. The international success of 1979’s “Mad Max” gave Miller license to retell Max’s story the way he might have if he’d had greater resources. Miller has said he made “Road Warrior” partly to “overcome all my frustrations on the first ‘Mad Max’ because that was such a low budget — and such a tough– movie that I had all this sort of pent up energy for the story and the filmmaking.”

    2. Many of the costumes came from specialty leather and fetish shops. A lot of them had cheek cutaways in the back, but it was actor Vernon Wells (who played magenta-mohawked henchman Wez) whom Gibson nicknamed “Barometer Bum” — because he could tell how cold the weather was by the color of Wells’ backside. “When my butt cheeks went purple on set,” Wells recalled, “they’d send everyone into the bus so we could warm up.”
    3. The filming location was a remote Australian mining town called Broken Hill. Despite being off the beaten path, when the filmmakers staged the explosion of the refinery compound, the blast was so big that they had to alert all jetliners flying over the area and make sure all the mines were closed.

    4. Guy Norris, a 21-year-old professional motorcycle daredevil, served as Gibson’s driving double, appeared on camera as marauder Bearclaw Mohawk, did motorcycle stunts for the film, and doubled for several other marauders in fight scenes. “Essentially, every character that jumped onto the tanker was me,” he said in 2015. “I’d put on a different wardrobe, jump. Then put on different wardrobe and jump again from a different position.” He doubled as Mad Max during driving scenes again, 34 years later, when Tom Hardy starred in Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road.”
    5. Norris was one of several stuntmen seriously injured during production. On one stunt, he went flying off his motorcycle, clipped his leg on a dune buggy, and broke his femur. (The shot stayed in the film, and Norris returned to the set a couple days later for a fight scene against Gibson, with his broken leg kept out of the frame.) Stuntman Max Aspin was successfully hurled from a vehicle during a staged crash, but he insisted on a second take and broke a vertebra.

    6. But the most unusual injury befell stuntman Kim Noyce on his day off. Riding his motorcycle, he stopped in the desert to greet a caravan of camels. But his motor spooked a camel, which kicked him and sent him flying. Noyce returned to the set with a broken ankle.
    7. Max’s dog (above), simply named “Dog,” was adopted from a pound a day before he was set to be put to sleep. Unfortunately, he was terrified by all the roaring engines on the set, and the filmmakers had to plug his ears with cotton so that he wouldn’t ruin takes by barking — or lose control of his bladder in Max’s car.

    8. No animals were harmed in the making of the film, Miller has claimed, not even the slaughtered rabbit. And while the dog’s death occurs off-screen, Miller says he’s received more complaints about shooting the pooch than about anything else in the film.
    9. One more dog item: What was in that dog food can Gibson was eating from? Miller says he doesn’t think it was actually dog food, but he’s not sure.

    10. Where did Emil Minty, the 8-year-old who played the Feral Kid, learn his lethal boomerang skills? Minty has said he learned to throw a boomerang from Gibson, and that the leading man also taught him how to head-butt without hurting himself.
    11. The massive actor who played Lord Humungus (above) was Kjell Nilsson, a former Mr. Sweden and a weightlifter who had trained Swedish Olympic athletes.

    12. Cinematographer Dean Semler found himself shooting one chase sequence while bound to the side of a truck with nothing more than bungee cords. The camera jostled so violently that Semler couldn’t hold the eye piece to his face and had to aim by instinct. Miller like the result so much that he made a point in other scenes of having Semler jostle the camera.
    13. Those two guys strapped to the front of the car (above) who are seen smashing into the back of the tanker? Semler has said those were dummies with watermelons for heads — “watermelons with wigs,” he specified.

    14. The filmmakers blockaded local roads during the chase, but a postal driver ignored them and crossed over, insisting that “the mail must get through.”
    15. The rolling of the tanker was the film’s most dangerous stunt. Driver Dennis Williams, who had never done it before, had to pull it off in one take, and on an empty stomach. Former emergency room doctor Miller had Williams fast for 12 hours beforehand because, if things went wrong and he were to need surgery, there would be fewer complications if he had no food in his system. A helicopter and ambulance were present, but many of the cast and crew were not; they were too squeamish to watch. Fortunately, Williams executed the stunt perfectly and safely.

    16. The film was released as “Mad Max 2” throughout most of the world except the United States, where the original “Mad Max” hadn’t made much of a dent at the box office. Here, it was marketed with the “Road Warrior” title as a stand-alone film. And since “Mad Max” had failed to make Gibson famous in the land of his birth, the “Road Warrior” trailer barely features him.
    17. “Road Warrior” cost about $2 million to make, or about 10 times the cost of “Mad Max.” It was a hit around the world, including $24 million earned in the U.S.

    18. By Miller’s count, Gibson smiles only three times throughout the film.

  • The First ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Trailer Introduces a New Leader

    CBS is ready to show off “Star Trek: Discovery” at last.

    The network gave Trekkies what they’ve been waiting for Wednesday: the first official trailer for the upcoming series. The preview places the latest addition to the long-standing franchise in context, bringing us back to 10 years before Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock explored the galaxy aboard the Enterprise. As such, we meet several new characters, including budding leader Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and her apparent mentor, Captain Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh).

    In addition to making introductions, the trailer shows off many elements of the series Trekkies will appreciate. There are Klingons, Vulcans, dangerous-looking missions, and cutting-edge technology that looks suspiciously like a flip phone.

    The series has a grand tradition to live up to. The original “Star Trek” premiered in 1966 and has spawned numerous shows, films, books, and more in the years since. We’ll see how “Star Trek: Discovery” compares when it premieres this fall.

  • 14 Things You Never Knew About the ‘Alien’ Franchise

    As “Alien” fans know, the xenomorph has acid for blood, is a relentless hunter, breeds parasitically inside human hosts before killing them, and has a tremendous hunger for cash. It’s eaten up some $1.4 billion in earthling movie-ticket money over the past 38 years and seven films. And Fox is hoping it will gobble hundreds of millions more when the eighth film, Ridley Scott‘s second prequel “Alien: Covenant,” is released May 19.

    Over the years, Moviefone has learned a lot of wonderfully disgusting facts about the franchise (read this if you want to know what the alien’s innards and mouth-slime were made of, or this if you want to know how Lance Henriksen nearly chopped Bill Paxton‘s finger off performing his knife trick), but in honor of “Alien: Covenant,” we’ve dug up a few more things you didn’t know about the scary space series.
    Alien (1979)Directed by Ridley ScottShown: Sigourney Weaver1. Sigourney Weaver was an unknown when she auditioned for “Alien,” but that anonymity proved an asset. “We felt that if Ripley was a big name, she would lose part of her mystery,” producer David Giler recalled in 1991. Weaver claims she got the part because 20th Century Fox studio chief Alan Ladd Jr. showed her screen test to his secretaries, and the ladies gave her audition the thumbs-up.

    2. Weaver earned about $30,000 for the first “Alien,” $1 million for “Aliens,” $4 or $5 million for “Alien3” (plus a percentage of the profits), and $11 million for “Alien: Resurrection.”
    3. A scene cut from “Aliens” might have explained how Ripley developed her maternal urge to protect the orphan girl Newt. In the scene (above), shortly after she’s awakened from her decades-long sleep, Ripley is shown a picture of the daughter who was ten when she first left on her mission, and who has since grown old and died. The prop was actually a picture of Weaver’s own mother. The studio reportedly trimmed the scene because it slowed down the movie’s pace and delayed Ripley’s return to space.

    4. David Fincher disavowed 1992’s “Alien 3,” even though it was his feature directing debut. “A lot of people hated ‘Alien 3,’” he said a decade later, “but no one hated it more than I did.”
    5. Weaver said she felt that Fox had undermined the first-time filmmaker, first by having him start shooting without a finished script, then by micromanaging him. “They started off telling him they wanted ‘Hobbit in Space,’” Weaver recalled. “Midway through, they’re saying they want an E-ticket ride of a movie. It was a mess.”

    6. Similarly, Joss Whedon disavowed 1997’s “Alien: Resurrection,” even though he found it a fairly faithful adaptation of his screenplay. “It wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script,” he said in 2005. “It’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable.”
    7. In the early 2000s, “Aliens” director James Cameron was working on an origin-story prequel — the germ of the idea that eventually became “Prometheus,” — but he abandoned it when he learned Fox was developing the “Alien vs. Predator” crossover films. To this day, Ridley Scott claims not to have seen the two “AvP” movies.

    8. “Alien vs. Predator” director Paul W.S. Anderson claimed that Arnold Schwarzenegger had agreed to appear in a cameo in the 2004 film as Dutch, his character from the original “Predator,” on the condition: that he lost the California gubernatorial election, which he did not. Also, Anderson said, Schwarzenegger had wanted to film the cameo at his own house.
    9. In 2012’s “Prometheus,” when the snake-like “hammerpede” alien bursts forth from Rafe Spall‘s corpse, Kate Dickie‘s screaming reaction is real and spontaneous. She didn’t know what she was about to see: the sudden emergence of an alien puppet manipulated by the director. It was the same exact technique Scott had used to scare the actors in the original “Alien” when they first saw the “chestburster” force its way out of John Hurt‘s torso.

    10. To create the sounds made by the glistening cave’s ice crystals, the “Prometheus” sound effects artists used Pop Rocks candies, sprinkling them on hard surfaces and then spraying them with water to make them crackle.11. Originally, the filmmakers sought Max Von Sydow to play ancient tycoon Peter Weyland, but they went with Guy Pearce instead in order to be able to show the character as both young and old.

    12. The old-age makeup Pearce wore in “Prometheus” took five hours to put on and another hour to take off. In character as the younger Weyland, Pearce appeared in a short promo clip, supposedly giving a TED talk in the year 2023. The clip, directed by Luke Scott (Ridley’s son), marked the first time the TED curators had licensed their brand to makers of a fiction feature.
    13. There was much talk, as recently as summer 2016, that Weaver and “District 9” director Neill Blomkamp were moving ahead with a fifth Ripley movie, one that would have pretended that the third and fourth movies never happened and would have kept Newt and Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn) alive. But in April 2017, Scott (who would have executive-produced the Ripley movie), said that Blomkamp had never written more than a 10-page story pitch, and that Fox had nixed the project.

    14. “Alien: Resurrection” went through many drafts, especially in regards to the film’s climatic ending. At one point, Whedon wrote a draft where the Betty crashes on an Earth forest. Here, once she realizes they and the newborn albino alien are too close to a populated city, Ripley takes action. Armed with a grenade launcher, she flies around in a futuristic combine harvester vehicle to finish the newborn off in a very cool — but ultimately too expensive — sequence.

  • 22 Things You Never Knew About ‘The Fifth Element’

    Twenty years after the release of “The Fifth Element” (on May 9, 1997), we still have one question: What in the world was that?

    Luc Besson‘s flamboyant, over-the-top sci-fi epic, starring a blond Bruce Willis, an androgynous Chris Tucker, a tragically-coiffed Gary Oldman, and Milla Jovovich left viewers stunned. Some loved it, some hated it, but it was a box office hit around the world (for many years, the biggest French cinema export ever), and it remains a cult favorite today.

    Still, as many times as you’ve marveled (or snickered, or just gawked) at “The Fifth Element” on cable, there’s a lot you may not know about the movie — its long gestation (22 years!), the hilarious story of how Tucker landed his role, and the production’s scandalous off-screen love triangle. Here are the elements that made the film.
    1. Besson (above) said he started writing the screenplay when he was 16, creating the vivid fantasy universes to combat the boredom he experienced living in rural France. But it didn’t reach the screen until he was 38 years old; by that time, he felt he was old enough to actually have something to say about life.

    2. The filmmaker had approached Willis to star as heroic cabbie Korben Dallas back in the early 1990s, before he had financing in place. He also sought Mel Gibson, who turned the part down.
    3. Ultimately, Besson thought he’d have to settle for a cheaper leading man, but in a chance conversation with Willis, the actor said that if he liked the script, he’d figure out a way to make the money work. “Sometimes I just do it because they’re just fun,” he said of his movie role choices in 1997, “and this was a real fun movie to make.” He’d end up signing on for a reduced salary up front and a percentage of the profits.
    4. Oldman, who’d played the villain in “The Professional,” took the bad guy role of Zorg as a favor to Besson, who’d helped finance Oldman’s directing debut, “Nil by Mouth.” “It was me singing for my supper,” Oldman recalled in 2011. “I owed him one.” He did his duty, but he didn’t think much of his performance. “I can’t bear it,” he said in 2014.

    5. The filmmakers auditioned 8,000 actresses to play mysterious, scantily clad heroine Leeloo. Besson said he saw 200 or 300 of those actresses read. One of them was Jovovich, who had taken a break from acting after “Dazed and Confused” three years earlier, in order to focus on her singing career. “Milla has this physical thing, she can be from the past or the future,” Besson said in 1997. “She can be an Egyptian or a Roman. She can be Nefertiti and she can be from outer space.”
    6. “Fifth Element” would relaunch the future “Resident Evil” mainstay as an action star, a career for which she began training over several months of rehearsals for Leeloo, studying acting and karate for eight hours a day.
    7. Even so, the martial arts novice couldn’t manage some of the high kicks required of her character. They were accomplished via artful editing and an artificial leg operated from just outside the frame.

    8. French fashionista Jean-Paul Gaultier designed the film’s elaborate, gender-bending costumes. He had to outfit at least 900 actors and extras. One costume included a jacket that was said to have cost $5,000.
    9. Chris Tucker (still best known at the time for his scene-stealing “Friday” role) won the role of colorful media personality Ruby Rhod because the part had been turned down by Besson’s first choice: Prince.

    10. So why did Prince turn down the role? As Gaultier explained it in 2013, the “Purple Rain” star found the proposed costumes the designer had shown him in illustrations to be “a bit too effeminate.” (Let that sink in for a minute.) 11. Gaultier had also unwittingly offended Prince with his description of one proposed outfit, a mesh suit with a padded, fringe-bedecked rear. Gaultier kept referring to this part of the suit as a “faux cul” (“fake ass”), but because of his thick accent, he said Prince misheard him as saying, “F— you!”

    12. Tucker has said he took inspiration from both Prince and Michael Jackson in crafting his performance as Ruby Rhod. Quipped Gaultier, “Maybe he’s less Michael Jackson and more Janet.”
    13. Besson enlisted influential French comic book artists Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius) and Jean-Claude Mézières to design his futuristic universe. Willis’ flying taxi was inspired by the images of a similar vehicle in Mézières’ title “The Circles of Power.”

    14. The New York scenes were created using a combination of CGI (for the flying cars), live action (the people), and scale models (the buildings). A crew of 80 on the production design team spent five months building dozens of city blocks at 1/24th scale.

    15. The language Leeloo speaks had a vocabulary of 400 words invented by Besson and Jovovich. They practiced it by writing letters to each other in the made-up tongue.
    16. Besson cast his wife, Maïwenn Le Besco, as the alien Diva Plavalaguna (above) after the actress he’d originally chosen dropped out. But during the shoot, he left Maïwenn and took up with Jovovich.

    17. Besson and Jovovich married at the end of 1997 and divorced two years later, after he’d directed her in the lead role of his 1999 movie “The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc.”
    18. The astonishment on everyone’s faces when Plavalaguna appears was real. Besson had isolated his wife from the cast so that no one would know what the Diva was supposed to look like until they saw her in character as the blue-skinned alien.

    19. Surprisingly, hero Willis and villain Oldman share no screen time.
    20. “The Fifth Element” cost a reported $90 million to produce, the costliest film made up to that point by a non-American production company (in this case, the French studio Gaumont). It earned back $264 million worldwide, $200 million of which came from moviegoers outside North America. It held the record as the most globally successful French-produced movie until “The Intouchables” in 2011.

    21. The movie earned one Oscar nomination, for Best Sound Editing.
    22. As sophisticated as the visual effects seemed at the time, Besson found them frustratingly primitive. Today’s digital effects would have made shooting “Fifth Element” much easier, he said recently. He’s currently finishing for July release the sci-fi epic “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” based on the Mézières stories he loved as a boy. Besson says it features 2,734 effects shots, compared to a mere 188 for “Fifth Element.”

  • A Student’s Darth Vader Costume Led to a School-Wide Evacuation on Star Wars Day

    Comic-Con International 2016 - Preview NightA Wisconsin high school student accidentally inspired a school-wide evacuation and lockdowns at other locations on Thursday.

    The student showed up at Ashwaubenon High School dressed as Darth Vader for May the Fourth (also known as Star Wars Day), and a parent called the police thinking the outfit was a “ballistic-type vest,” according to the city’s department of public safety. In response, students were evacuated from the building while police did a sweep. A nearby middle school and community center were both put on lockdown, the school district reported.

    Luckily, it didn’t take long to determine that there wasn’t a dangerous situation at hand. Students were only out of class “for a short time,” according to Ashwaubenon Public Safety. The department’s official Twitter account clarified that there “was no actual threat” and revealed that the Darth Vader costume was at the root of the incident.

    Ashwaubenon Public Safety indicated that the concerned parent who called the police was right to do so.

    “The saying ‘If you see something, say something’ certainly applies to this and we always encourage people to report suspicious activity,” read a post on the department’s Facebook page.

    Given how many violent and tragic incidents have taken place at schools in recent history, it makes sense to err on the side of caution. Sadly, not every potential threat is as harmless as Star Wars cosplay.

    May the Fourth be with you.

    [via: Ashwaubenon Department of Public Safety; WBAY.com]

  • Ridley Scott Says Neill Blomkamp’s ‘Alien’ Sequel Isn’t Happening

    Neill BlomkampWere you holding out for that Neill Blomkamp-directed “Alien” sequel? Well, it’s never gonna happen, says Ridley Scott.

    In 2015, Blomkamp, the director of “Elysium” and ” District 9” shared some concept art for an upcoming “Alien” film that featured Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and a disfigured Hicks (Michael Biehn), who apparently didn’t die in “Alien 3” after all. At the time, he said, “‘Alien’ going very well. Love this project.”

    But Scott now says that film is DOA. He told French web site Allocine (via The Playlist), “I think it will never see the light. There was never a scenario, just an idea that evolved into a pitch of 10 pages. I had to participate as a producer, but it did not go any further because Fox decided that they did not want to do it.”

    You can start debating now whether this is because “Chappie,” Blomkamp’s most recent film, was a critical and box-office disappointment, or because Scott wants to keep making any and all “Alien” films himself.

    Blomkamp hasn’t yet commented on the news. He did share a tweet on #AlienDay, saying he was excited for Scott’s upcoming “Alien: Covenant.”

  • New ‘Alien: Covenant’ Prologue Shows What Happened After ‘Prometheus’

    “Alien: Covenant” still hasn’t opened in theaters, but Ridley Scott isn’t making us wait for the “Prometheus” sequel before tackling some of the prior film’s unanswered questions.

    20th Century Fox unveiled a new short today that serves as a second prologue to “Alien: Covenant.” Called “The Crossing,” it shows what happened to the android David (Michael Fassbender) and Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Katherine Waterston) after the Prometheus mission took its horrifying turn. At less than three-minutes-long, the prologue doesn’t reveal all, but it does show Dr. Shaw healing David, and the duo heading to (and possibly arriving at) the Engineer’s homeworld.

    “Alien: Covenant” will pick up after the events of both “Prometheus” and “The Crossing” as a different colony ship, Covenant, travels to the far side of the galaxy. Looking for a remote planet, they’ll end up on what seems to be an uncharted paradise but actually turns out to be a place more like hell. Fassbender and Waterston return, and the film also stars Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Amy Seimetz, Jussie Smollett, Callie Hernandez, Nathaniel Dean, Alexander England, and Benjamin Rigby.

    “Alien: Covenant” hits theaters May 19.