No, this isn’t a joint obituary. According to Aint It Cool, international star of stage and screen Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to join Sylvester Stallone for action flick The Tomb. Some people have golf. Some people have bingo. These two have action movies. But as old as they are (65 for Stallone, 64 for Schwarzenegger), it’s still awesome to see the two working together because it’s the culmination of every 1980s action dream out there. It’s Commando and Rambo! It’s Rocky and Conan! It’s Cash and The Terminator! It’s the kind of pairing that should make everyone want to pick up a ventilation shaft and throw it through the nearest kidnapper. The movie itself will feature a security officer (Stallone) who creates top-grade systems for jails that want to keep their prisoners in cells. When he’s framed and lands in one of those prisons, he has to use his knowledge to escape and seek retribution. Hopefully he also has to use his buddy with the grenade launcher and gubernatorial experience. As Harry Knowles points out, Bruce Willis was once going to star, then Schwarzenegger himself was going to take the lead, and now Stallone is doing it. So after turning the movie down to do The Last Stand, Schwarzenegger has decided he just wanted another role. If Willis signs back on, it’ll be the movie casting equivalent of square dancing (another thing retired people enjoy). It will also be awesome. Now the thing just needs a director…is Mark Lester still [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

UPDATED: Looks like this baby is still called Black Sands. One of TheArnoldFans sent us this – “SORRY…Okay, it looks like we are back to the film title ‘Black Sands!’ An Arnold rep contacted us and explained there must have been a translation problem from Google translator on the title. The original source, written by one of Arnold’s close Austrian friends, either accidentally wrote ‘Black Sunday’ or the translation to English was off. Either way, it  sounds like the plot remains equally as exciting with Arnold as an angel! Production start date: April!” We still haven’t seen any finished products from the newly out-of-retirement Arnold Schwarzenegger hit the theaters. But with his first project back in the acting world, Last Stand, done shooting, and the first trailer for Stallone’s upcoming Expendables sequel (where Arnie reportedly has a meatier role) having come and gone, all that will soon be remedied. Now that the action legend has his first round of comeback movies in the can, what’s next on his schedule? According to fan site The Arnold Fans, it’s going to be a movie called Black Sunday, which was previously being developed under the title Black Sands. Reportedly the film is about an immortal character who is in a war against a group of evil arms dealers. When asked details about the project, Schwarzenegger replied, “I’m a kind of angel,” but stopped short by adding, “I can not currently say more about this film.” His lawyers have trained him well. While I’m [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

My anticipation for the original The Expendables was massive, only to be matched in size and scope by my disappointment after I actually saw the film. Stallone’s new version of Rambo was awesome, it was packed full of R-rated action movie sleaze and it wasn’t at all ashamed of being exploitation. The Expendables looked like it was going to be a continuation of that, and also a massive team-up of bitchin’ 80s action stars the likes of which we’ve never seen. It didn’t really turn out to be all that though. It was kind of lame and boring, and really it was just a Stallone and Statham team-up movie with a handful of other cameos thrown in. So I’m approaching The Expendables 2 much more cautiously. But even with lowered expectations, I can’t help but feel a little bit of a tingle watching the first teaser. I don’t know if it’s going to be the classless, take no prisoners, R-rated schlock that I’m hoping for, but at least it looks like this one is finally going to be the huge team-up of old guys that I wanted from the first. The team-up aspect is all that can be discerned from this teaser though. It’s a teaser in the truest sense, basically we get the names and head shots of the principal cast and not much else.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that’s a little tired, a little wired, and it thinks it deserves a little bit of appreciation around here! We begin this evening with a shot of Luis Guzman, Johnny Knoxville, some old burly man and Thor’s Jamie Alexander on the set of The Last Stand. It’s good to see that The Governator hasn’t lost that charming expression.

I haven’t seen a nice, dumb prison movie in a while. It seems like it used to be a staple of the action genre. Some super tough guy is framed for something or other, gets thrown in prison, and by the end he has beaten up both the other prisoners and the evil warden. Really, it’s a great plot for a movie, so they need to come back. Summit has been trying to put one called The Tomb together for a while, but it’s been slow going. First Bruce Willis was set to star, but then that didn’t work out. Then it seemed like Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to take the project, but he decided to do Last Stand instead. Also, there has been some shuffling of the director. Antoine Fuqua was going to direct at one point, but then he left to do Southpaw. What is a dumb prison movie to do?

Jee-Woon Kim’s Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring story about a western sheriff running afoul of a Mexican drug cartel leader seems to be getting closer to shooting, because a bunch of names have been added to the cast list. We already found out that Friday Night Lights star Zach Gilford would be joining the cast as Schwarzenegger’s young deputy, but now a whole host of pretty diverse, kind of interesting actors have been added to support that duo. The biggest of the new names on the Lionsgate cast list are probably Forest Whitaker and Johnny Knoxville; one man who is famous for acting in a bunch of movies over the last three decades and another for getting hit in his balls a lot. Okay, that’s not fair, Knoxville has been fine in the few films I’ve seen him in, and I’m sure he’ll be fine with whatever they give him here. And Whitaker is always at least interesting to watch, even when he goes super hammy. But that’s a weird couple of actors to pair with Schwarzenegger if you ask me. I’d probably feel more comfortable with the choices if I knew what kind of characters they were playing. Whitaker and Knoxville aren’t the only new names though, a handful of less famous but still notable actors have been added as well. Let’s run through them: there’s Jaimie Alexander, Luis Guzman, Harry Dean Stanton, and Eduardo Noriega. Jaimie Alexander I’ve only seen in her small role in Thor, but she was playing a [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Young actor Zach Gilford is best known for his role as Matt Saracen, the unlikely choice for a starting quarterback on TV’s Friday Night Lights. Over the course of a few seasons, Gilford took Saracen from being a shy, mumbly-mouthed, and in-over-his-head second-stringer to being a less shy, less mumbly-mouthed star player with aspirations toward being an artist; so you know the kid has the chops. But even if you’ve already proven your skills on the small screen, you don’t just jump right into meaty Hollywood roles, you’ve got to pay your dues. To that end, Gilford has recently signed on to play Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sidekick in the upcoming action showdown Last Stand. Last Stand is the Kim Jee-Woon-directed Western that has been described as a cross between Die Hard and High Noon. It stars Schwarzenegger as an aging, small town sheriff who finds himself mixed up in some nasty business with a Mexican drug cartel. You see, one of the cartel’s big wheels has broken out of a U.S. prison, and Schwarzenegger and his sleepy town are the only things that stand between the escaped con and his pathway of destruction back into Mexico. I haven’t heard it mentioned until now, but apparently Schwarzenegger also has a bright-eyed young deputy under his command. This is the role that Gilford will be playing. It may not be a glamorous part, but you’ve got to break out of the stigma of being a TV and indie film actor somehow, and jumping into a [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

We packed the truck that would travel to location in Palenque, Mexico a few days before we traveled via airplane. The set crew: Steve Wang, Matt Rose, Shane Mahan, Brian Simpson, Richard Landon and me. Stan Winston would be with us, supervising the set work, understanding that we would only be gone for two weeks. At least that is what our work visas indicated. Palenque, Mexico was not a location easily reached. It required one flight from Los Angeles to Mexico City, another to Villa Hermosa, and finally a long ride in a Volkswagen bus through miles of rough country until we reached our hotel that was, from what we were told, the best in the area. It sat in a large clearing, surrounded by trees; two wings of rooms branched out from a central building that housed a restaurant/bar. Later, we discovered that Arnold Schwarzenegger had taken over the entire upper conference room and had turned it into a gymnasium that was open to anyone on the crew. As we settled into our rooms we were told that there would be screening of the film the next day for the cast and crew. My understanding was that this was for the benefit of the new crew members to get a chance to catch up and understand the shots needed to complete the film. A screen and projectors were set up in Arnold’s gym.

Next year’s The Expendables 2 is set up to be a team-up movie of the biggest action stars Hollywood has ever known. The only problem is that it looks a bit more like a senior’s circuit than it does an all-star game. Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean Claude Van Damme, and Chuck Norris are all huge stars, sure, but if you add up their combined ages you get… okay, I don’t know, I’m not going to take the time to add up their combined ages. But they’re old. Jason Statham is going to need somebody who he can fight in this thing without worrying about knocking out their dentures with an uppercut or ripping their colostomy bag with a roundhouse. Luckily for him, Variety’s Showblitz is reporting that he may have found a sparring partner. Earlier this summer Chris Hemsworth made a pretty big name for himself by very charismatically filling the shoes of the mighty Thor. He’s probably got a big Hollywood career ahead of him from this point forward. But it’s starting to look like little brother Liam is playing a quick game of catch up. Not only does he have one of the big roles in next year’s much hyped The Hunger Games, but also it looks like he’s going to be joining Stallone and company in becoming Expendable. His role in the film is currently undisclosed, but adding another high profile project to the resume has got to be big news for the young [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

There are events that define one’s existence that go beyond being learning or growing experiences. They become scars. Battle scars. They may fade in time, but they don’t go away. They persist. The memories of the events may become blurry, but every now and then, you run your fingertips along the raised, healed wound and remember. It all comes back like a punch in the nose. I had been on movie sets before and believed that I had been trained. The snarky ADs , the disinterested teamsters, the hustling, the waiting, they were all nearly second-nature to me, especially with the close of my on-set involvement with Monster Squad. However, nothing could prepare me for what I was going to face. My first location experience. My first time out of the country. My first time working set on a big budget film. My first time supervising a team. Predator would be all of those things and it would change my life forever.

Let’s face it. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the greatest actor of this generation. There were some dark days for moviemaking when he took that foray into politics in order to save California from itself, but it’s starting to appear like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. After a little hiccup involving impregnating the help, it’s looking like Arnie’s comeback to acting is going full speed ahead. His first foray back into the world of kicking ass and taking names will see him playing an aging law man in the upcoming Last Stand. Also, all of those rumors that he would have an extended role in The Expendables 2 have now been confirmed as true. That’s more Schwarzenegger than you can shake a stick at already, but Deadline Freistadt is reporting that things might be getting even more Schwarzeneggery real soon. Apparently the pinnacle of human perfection is now negotiating to star in a film called Captive, which would see Arnie playing an American real estate magnate living in Brazil who gets kidnapped and held for ransom. This one is being described as an action thriller, so I can only guess that things don’t go so well for the kidnappers once they get Schwarzenegger in their hideout. I’m picturing him ripping off their limbs and using them as clubs. Now I’m picturing him ripping off their genitals and shoving them down their throats. Probably he says something clever after doing it, but I don’t know what; that’s why they [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

When Sylvester Stallone started casting for the original The Expendables it was said to be an all-star action icon meet up. Anybody who had ever been in an action movie before, and even a lot of dudes who just slept on those guys’ couches for a couple months, were all rumored to be in the film. When all was said and done, however, it mostly just ended up being a Stallone and Jason Statham team-up movie, with a dash of Jet Li, a sprinkle of Mickey Rourke, and a very brief cameo from the other big action icons Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone. Not quite the all-star lineup people hoped for. Now that production is underway for a sequel, the rumor mill has once again been churning out hopes and dreams of an all-star action cast. Not only are Willis and Schwarzenegger supposed to have bigger roles this time around, but sources loosely associated with the project have intimated that huge names in the action genre like John Travolta, Chuck Norris, and Jean Claude Van Damme are all going to be in the cast as well.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr flexes his rippling muscles and sets out to live a warrior lifestyle, just like Jason Momoa in Conan the O’Barbarian. But before he can do that, he has to drive a stake through his neighbor’s heart, since he’s certain he lives next door to a vampire. What else could all those sparkles be about? Meanwhile, he sends his kids off to a dangerous 3D, Aroma-Vision mission, hoping they can make it as real spy kids so they can teach him to put on a fake British accent and woo a not-quite-British Anne Hathaway.

Yes, we know we let suspect pictures containing very little health benefits drown us in their half-nakedness and drag us through the dirt like a barbarian here in this column, but we like it rough and prefer our movies to treat us like ragdolls from time to time because after we’ve mended the scrapes and burns we have ourselves a little snack reminding us of our experience because you should never forget when you’ve been triumphed in life.

Today we visit one of the greatest sequels ever released in June 1984 and Schwarzenegger’s best film of that year’s first 9 months. Sit back, chug some mead and let us tell you about the days of high adventure in Conan the Destroyer.

Yeah, I know Conan the Barbarian isn’t exactly a new movie, but were you expecting a drinking game for Rio or Soul Surfer? You see, in preparation for the release of the Conan the Barbarian remake, Universal has released the original film and its sequel on Blu-ray. While the original is an 80s cinema classic, if you plan on watching the sequel, we suggest playing this game with both films. That way, when it comes time to watch Conan the Destroyer, it’ll be a much better movie.

David Varod is the CEO of a Bulgaria based film studio called Nu Boyana. This is notable because Sylvester Stallone and his new director pal Simon West are filming scenes for their upcoming sequel to Stallone’s team-up movie The Expendables in Bulgaria. This is newsworthy because Varod is claiming that some big names, not previously confirmed as being in The Expendables 2, are on their way to Bulgaria to film for the movie. When speaking to Novinite, Varod first confirmed that shooting was taking place in September, and then hinted that a lot of Hollywood stars would be moving into the country to do work, “Yes, we are definitely going to do that project. It is going to be a sequel the (sic) The Expendables. The shooting is going to take place the second week of September. The movie is on, definitely. It will be a very good thing for Bulgaria, since there are some very big stars coming.” Big stars, that makes sense. It’s long been assumed that the stars from the original film like Stallone, Jason Statham, and Mickey Rourke would return. There was even some notion that guys like Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who only made small cameos in the first film, might return in larger roles this time. But when pressed to name off the “big stars” that would be making their way into the country, Varod named a few that could potentially be huge casting announcements.

In the rapid fire world of journalism, heh, sometimes you only get a few minutes with talent to get to the really great information. Then sometimes you only get a few minutes shoved into a tiny room overflowing with people shouting very general questions that offer little in the way of what we call “interesting information.” Today was one of those days when I got to share a room for about five minutes with Jason Momoa. Luckily the very tall and friendly star of Conan the Barbarian shot out some interesting information in this short period of time that we’re offering you up here.

Not too long ago I was all abuzz at the possibilities of a grumpy old Arnold Schwarzenegger returning to acting and taking on all of the roles that Clint Eastwood wouldn’t be able to after taking a step back from acting. One of the more promising projects he had on his plate was a western directed by I Saw the Devil’s Jee-woon Kim called Last Stand. Schwarzenegger would play the role of an aging sheriff who gets in over his head dealing with a dangerous drug cartel and decide whether or not to rise to the occasion in order to protect his town. Unfortunately, soon after word of this project came out, Schwarzenegger’s personal life erupted into very public scandal, and he pulled out of all the acting gigs he had been dancing around. What a difference a couple of months make. Schwarzenegger has laid low, he let the heat die down, and now he’s ready to take a second stab at that acting comeback. What this means for fans of action legends and Jee-woon Kim is that Last Stand appears to be back on. Lionsgate has picked up the project and it looks to be starting in September. This will be Kim’s English language debut and the first starring role for Schwarzenegger since 2003’s Terminator 3. I’m giving myself permission to get re-excited about this movie. I just hope that Arnie doesn’t knock up any gardeners or pool girls before it can get off the ground. [Deadline Beclabito]

What daring! What arrogance! We salute these trailers! In 1982, John Milius brought Conan the Barbarian to life with questionable authenticity and a gallon or three of body oil. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the only man at the time for the job, and James Earl Jones the only man willing to turn into a snake and fight him. Now there’s a new adaptation coming soon featuring Jason Momoa. He’s got a huge loincloth to fill, but, unlike Schwarzenegger, it’s almost certain he didn’t have to tone down his workout routine in order to wield a sword properly. Arnold was a monster.

“You know, I don’t know if it really makes sense to call it Commando. Maybe it does or maybe doesn’t. It is the reboot of it and all of that stuff.” That’s producer John Davis, inspiring confidence that he knows what he’s talking about since 2011. The producer revealed to Collider that he’d been working on a remake of the Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring action flick that let us all blow off a little steam. Harsh Times writer/director David Ayer has written the script and may direct the film himself, but it’s unclear (thanks to Davis) how closely it will follow the original. “Bad guy steals girl and is pursued by guy who won’t die” is a bit too high concept to speculate on when it comes to remake territory, so a ton of the work will fall on Ayer’s script. The bigger question is whether a faithful remake will make sense in a world of more realistic action films. That modifier should be taken with a grain of salt considering a movie came out last year where a tank was dropped out of a plane, but Commando featured a literal one-man army killing thousands without getting scratched. It also had more one-liners per cubic foot than any other action movie. Can Ayer top that record? Remember when they promised to remake Commando last?