What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie and entertainment news column that brings you all the stuff you should be reading that hasn’t already been published on Film School Rejects. We admit that we’re honored to be an inspiration to every person, writer and sentient being mentioned in the links below, and would like to pay them back with a link. Also, it’s a column whose author is going on vacation for a week starting tomorrow, so you’ll be seeing some fresh faces pinch-hitting over the next week. It’s likely that they will do a much better job, but lets not tell them that. We’re already having problems with their egos, as it is. We begin this evening with an image Tweeted by Chris Hardwick, king of the Nerdist empire. It’s a preview from his appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, in which he will assuredly be pimping his new book, hitting on Zooey Deschanel (because who wouldn’t) and talking about nerdy things with another nerdy famous person. If Questlove plays the drums with lightsabers, I’m in.

Director Peter Berg is making his bid for A-level status (box office-wise) this summer with an adaptation of the Hasbro game Battleship. That, by the way, is a complete misuse of the term ‘adaptation’ seeing as the game has zero story elements to adapt. Maybe if the movie featured naval combatants going head to head and controlled by unseen forces? Or if the aliens were manipulating ships to fight each other? I don’t know, I’m just spit-balling here, but you can see how difficult it would be to make a good movie from the game. So why do it? Obviously Universal is hoping to find the same success with Hasbro that Paramount has with their Transformers movies, but it’s still so nonsensical. The Battleship name offers no recognizable pull for audiences. These aren’t fighting robots that viewers have seen in action previously on TV or via toys in their hands…this is a board game with no moving pieces. The film could exist exactly as is under a different name and would end up with the exact same box office results. Check out the new ad below.

The first glimpse we got of Peter Berg’s upcoming board game adaptation (it hurts me somewhere deep to have to type those words) played a little coy with us, and at first made it look like the film would be sticking to the Battleship board game’s naval battle roots. Once a spaceship popped up and the whole thing turned into an alien invasion movie, it was kind of a surprise. This second look at Battleship, however, doesn’t bother to take any time tying this movie to the board game at all. It’s all alien invasion from beginning to end. And with a color palette very reminiscent of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, a bunch of elaborately techno ships and weapons that look like they’re right out of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, sound effects that seem to be ripped from Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, and a big ol’ headline that says this movie is from the company that brought you Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, I think it’s safe to say that Universal is aiming this thing less at fans of grid based strategy games and more at fans of Michael Bay’s big, dumb Transformers movies. It leaves me with a question: if this movie isn’t going to have anything to do with naval battles at all, why even attach it to the Battleship name? Why not just admit what you’re doing and call it Gobots? Check out the new trailer below.

Disney’s latest would-be-blockbuster, John Carter, has had a hell of a time making it to the screen – with live-action feature film development interest first kicking off back in the 1950s (from Ray Harryhausen, no less), though the rights to Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ novels weren’t bought until the 1980s, when Disney picked them up. From there, the project seemed ready to go (with cast and crew falling into place), until its own would-be director John McTiernan himself noted that technology was not yet advanced enough to create the write cinematic vision. Then Paramount got the rights for Robert Rodriguez to direct, then it was Kerry Conran, then it was Jon Favreau, and then Paramount didn’t renew the rights, and then Disney got them back, and then I fell asleep. The film is finally hitting screens next year, thanks to Disney and Wall-E director Andrew Stanton (making his live action debut), with John Carter himself being played by rising star Taylor Kitsch. And while this is all well and good, John Carter has one huge obstacle to overcome – it is a huge, multimillion dollar production that comes from a beloved and deep source material that has an obviously epic scale, and awareness by the general public for the property is negligible. And I can’t quite believe that the film’s first full-length trailer will do much to alleviate that. Check it out, along with more of my concerns, after the break.

Some pieces of news are just bound to cause eye-rolling and heavy sighs. I’m not going to pretend as if I am some huge Romancing the Stone fan and that every single one of my sensibilities and emotions are offended by this news, but that’s not really necessary, is it? This is the sort of news that will, most likely, not be met with an outpouring of glee. But this is not a new brand of news. The Romancing the Stone remake has been kicking around for years now, but without much of a push behind it. For awhile, Robert Luketic was attached to the film, and with him came the inevitable, a casting wish list that included Katherine Heigl (who Luketic has directed in two separate horror shows, The Ugly Truth and Killers). Though Luketic is now off the project, and Emma Watts and Fox are reportedly looking for “someone newish” to direct the film, Heigl is apparently still on the top of their wish lists to play the Joan Wilder role (played in the original by Kathleen Turner). And, somewhat bizarrely considering how different the two men are in terms of both age and star power, Watts and Fox have added Gerard Butler and Taylor Kitschto their “early wish list” to play Jack Colton (originally played by Michael Douglas). As The Playlist wisely points out, “this [is] all tremendously early, and possibly none of these names will make it through,” but these sorts of supposed “wish lists” show the [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]

Seriously folks. Battleship may very well turn out to be a fun action flick, but this trailer makes it look like a massive chore to sit through. Directed by Peter Berg (who has proven that he knows good character and story), this film shows off the talents of Liam Neeson’s one-liner abilities as well as the fill-in-the-blanks action prowess of Dolph Lundgern’s son Taylor Kitsch. It goes strictly by the book, and the comparison to Transformers and Skyline is so apt that you can still see the afterbirth pooling around the edges if you look hard enough. So, look hard:

The first teaser for John Carter isn’t the astonishing first peek it should be. Instead, it’s oddly underwhelming. Where’s the sense of a grand-scale adventure film? First of all, John Carter seems to be hanging out in any Earth bound desert, not Mars. There’s nothing in this trailer that’ll tell a filmgoer who is unfamiliar with the books that they’re on frickin’ Mars. Besides the quick glimpse of a green martian, very little is here that gives off the vibe that they’re on an alien inhabited planet.

It was a month ago that I first heard about Oliver Stone directing an adaptation of the Don Winslow Novel “Savages.” A couple of the key male roles had been cast, but Jennifer Lawrence was out as the female protagonist, O, due to her involvement in The Hunger Games. Now Stone and company seem to have found their new choice to play O, and they’ve filled out a couple of the other key roles as well. The three main characters of the film are Chon, Ben, and O, two dudes and a chick who start a successful grow operation and find themselves running afoul of a dangerous Mexican drug cartel. When we last saw Savages it had already cast Taylor Kitsch as the ex Navy SEAL Chon, Aaron Johnson as the botany expert Ben, and Salma Hayek as the head of the cartel Elena. This time Deadline Laguna reports that not only has Gossip Girl star Blake Lively been chosen to play O, but also a few big names have been approached to join the cast as well.

Adapting Don Winslow’s novel “Savages” has been on Oliver Stone’s to-do list for quite some time. Well now quite a bit of news about how his efforts are coming together has come to light. I’m not familiar with Mr. Winslow’s work, so the first thing I did when trying to put together this article was figure out what “Savages” was all about. During my search I came across this blurb, apparently from the book’s publisher, that was just too hilarious not to share: “Baditude. Bad attitude. Ben, Chon, and O have a bad case of it, but so would you if you were the twenty-something Laguna-cool producers of the best hydro on the Left Coast and now a powerful and vicious Mexican cartel wants in on your business. Ben’s a genius botanist out to save the world. Chon’s a former SEAL with a “Post-Traumatic Lack Of Stress Disorder.” O is a South Orange County slacker girl who loves them both. When the cartel kidnaps O to keep the boys in line, serious baditude breaks out in this twenty-first-century thriller that blasts through all the old rules and blows the lid off the genre. But that’s baditude for you.”

Just as he’s in the midst of production in the titular role of Disney’s upcoming epic John Carter of Mars, Friday Night Lights and Wolverine star Taylor Kitsch is lining up another big sci-fi tentpole.

Willem Dafoe will need to paint himself green and add two more arms for his upcoming role in John Carter of Mars. Or maybe the make-up department can handle that for him.

It was less than 48 hours ago that we reported that Disney had found a location for John Carter of Mars. Now they’ve found not one, not two, but possibly three names to add to the top of the cast list.

We know that some of you have already downloaded the illegally leaked workprint of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us can’t be excited about it.

The third full X-Men Origins: Wolverine trailer has hit the web, and it is bringing a lot more mutant action. Check out some in-depth analysis, courtesy of us.

Earlier in the weekend we posted the bootlegged version of the X-Men Origins: Wolverine trailer and found that it didn’t last very long on the YouTubes. We can assure you though, that this one will last quite a while.

Empire Magazine’s upcoming issue has an in-depth look at the upcoming Wolverine movie, including a first look at Taylor Kitsch as Gambit. And guess what, we’ve got the image to show you in advance.

The Friday Night Lights star will be throwing cards in May ’09.