Looks like we’re going to have to adjust our list of The 52 Most Anticipated Movies of 2012, knocking the number down to a significantly less exciting 51. Summit Entertainment has just announced that they are pushing the release of Warm Bodies from August 10 of this year allllllll the way to February 1 of next year. When I touted the film as part of our most anticipated list of plenty, I explained it as such: Jonathan Levine follows up his critical cancer comedy hit, 50/50, with an en vogue type of affair – a zombie love story based on a YA novel. But Isaac Marion’s source material shares considerably more with Romeo and Juliet than it does with The Walking Dead and that, along with its up-and-coming cast (Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Analeigh Tipton, Dave Franco, Rob Corddry, and no less than John Malkovich) recommend this original look at love at the end of the world. And that’s all still true, but now we have to wait six more months to catch it. I feel like a zombie just took a bite out of my heart. While I’m not the biggest fan of Marion’s novel, I think it’s a fun basis for a film, and I believe in both Levine and the solid cast he’s assembled for this outing.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly dose of awesome movie news, with a side of other stuff you’ll probably want to read in between all the movie news. We begin tonight with an image of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg pondering The World’s End, the supposed third film in their “Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy” that began with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. It’s about damned time, as they say. From Scott Pilgrim to Star Trek, the pair have done plenty of great things apart, but now we’ll hopefully see them wrap this thing up. Unless Marvel calls Edgar about that Ant-Man movie…

Somehow, I just knew that our “52 Most Anticipated Movies of 2012″ would pay off! You know, eventually. Included on that massive list is 50/50 director Jonathan Levine‘s next film, and while the idea of a sexy zombie story about teens might turn some of you off, I beg you to give it a chance. Based on Isaac Marion‘s 2011 novel of the same name, the film follows young zombie R (Nicholas Hoult) as he grapples with a new twist on the classic zombie story – he’s not dealing with the fall-out of turning into a zombie, he’s trying to come to terms with becoming a human (again). Young R has been a zombie for, well, he doesn’t even know how long (but not too long, he’s still got meat on his bones), and everything else pre-zombification is just weird memory ether. It’s not there. But all that changes when a beautiful human girl (Teresa Palmer) and some weird happenings begin to dull the desire for brains and blood in R, while also awakening the human that might still lurk inside him. R’s change has not only personal implications, but effects on human-zombie relations at large. That may seem somewhat hard to picture, which is why I’m glad we get our first look at Hoult in his zombie get-up today. Readers of Marion’s excellent book will surely approve of his look, as it matches up with the author’s description of R quite handily. Check out the full look at Hoult [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]

Who doesn’t love cinema from the 80s? Aside from Cole Abaius I mean. The decade is a movie genre unto itself and filled with films that could have only been made in that very specific time. More than just about any other decade films from the 80s are instantly recognizable by their attitudes, wardrobes, and degree of female nudity. Luckily for those of us you who weren’t alive in the 80s Hollywood occasionally returns to the scene of the crime and makes a film that hopes to recapture that poppy magic. The most recent example is the ensemble comedy Take Me Home Tonight starring Topher Grace, Dan Fogler, Anna Faris (in a rare non-ditzy role), and the lovely Teresa Palmer. (Demetri Martin also steals every scene he’s in.) Take Me Home Tonight hit shelves today, and we’ve got three brand new DVDs to give away! How can you win? Simple… there were thousands of movies produced during the 1980s, but not all of them are perfect representatives of their time-frame. Tell us in the comment section below which 80s film is the most iconic of the decade and why. As always the contest is open to US residents only ages 18 and up. Be sure to leave an email address associated with your comment is correct as that’s how we’ll notify the winner. Contest ends July 25th! Good luck! The official synopsis and trailer are below.

With the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises wrapping up this year, it seems all the studios are scrambling to find something that can replace them. The last teen-book-turned-movie to throw its hat in the ring is I Am Number Four. Whether it holds up to these franchises… well, we’ll let you be the judge of that. But if you get a chance to check this one out on DVD or Blu-ray, you can really enjoy it with a drink in hand. Because even though all the actors are old enough to drink, their characters aren’t.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s your definitive source of Pixar pandering, at least for tonight. But hey, at least we get it out of the way in a single article. Try reading other sites — it’s Pixar this, Pixar that, even the new Batman reboot will be done by Pixar. Good grief. That said, we watched The Incredibles on Blu-ray this evening and it was INCR… you get the idea. Now on with the news. We begin tonight with news that excites me. It’s no secret that Max Brooks’ book “World War Z” is a personal favorite of mine. It’s exceptional in every possible way and one of the great zombie apocalypse stories ever written. So to see it come to life as a movie is risky, but worth it. When the project was reportedly in danger a few weeks ago, I was sad. But now I’m happy(ish) again, as a new report says that World War Z could get financing and even begin shooting this summer. If I could, I would will this project to happen. It may be impossible, but I’m going to try.

It looks as if the absurd notion of making a teen zombie romance movie is becoming more than just a notion, as Summit’s Warm Bodies is deep in the casting process. Already signed to star is Nicholas Hoult, who is about to take the screen as the new Beast in X-Men: First Class. And now actress Teresa Palmer is rumored to be close to signing on as the love interest. The film is being described as a cross between Twilight and Shaun of the Dead, so I guess that means that half of it is going to be embarrassingly melodramatic, while the other half will be irreverent and fun. I’m not sure exactly how that will look, but the name drop of Shaun of the Dead at least gives me hope that this project could be entertaining, and not a complete train wreck. Palmer’s character is described as the daughter of a high-ranking military man who falls in love with a zombie after it eats her boyfriend. Their budding relationship goes on to change the way humans and zombies interact all over the world. I’ve seen Palmer work in both I Am Number Four and Take Me Home Tonight. In I Am Number Four she didn’t get much to do other than look like a stone faced badass, but she handled the jumping around and punching stuff thing well. And I thought that she was appropriately charming and magnetic as the object of affection in Take Me Home Tonight. If [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]

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr gets an added dose of tiger’s blood and Adonis DNA to make it through all the movie-watching he endures. He bats about .500 in his screenings, really liking some but struggling through others. After a visit to the wild west of Rango, he finds his fate adjusted by a mysterious fleet of men with stylish hats. Then, he realizes how ugly Number Four really is before staying out all night, drinking with Topher Grace and Teresa Palmer… who looks a lot like Number Six.

Director of the Mad Max franchise George Miller sat down with The Daily Telegraph to give an update on the status of his delayed project Mad Max: Fury Road. The film, which has Tom Hardy set to star as the new Mad Max and also includes Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, and Teresa Palmer in the cast, was already set to begin filming, but has been shut down due to extreme flooding in Broken Hill, Australia, where it was scheduled to shoot. If you’re a fan of Mad Max, then you know how important its dry, desolate, scorched Earth setting is to the story. Getting that post-apocalyptic desert landscape feel to resonate on film is pretty hard when you’re standing in ankle deep water. Miller said, “The week we were to start, it rained the heaviest it had in 10 years. I’ll never forget the first day — we were holed up in a big sort of shed watching the rain. We couldn’t shoot. If you want the rain to come, just send a film crew there.”

After an entire decade of nonstop irony during the 90s I felt like I was already done with snarky references to 80s pop culture. Then once VH1 systematically mined the decade, year by year, for every possible comment and quip that an army of B list comedians could come up with for I Love the 80s, I was certain that the book on the subject had been closed. At least until last year when we got the mediocre Hot Tub Time Machine, which went for every cheap 80s joke in the book, and suddenly the door was once again open to make fun of the decade of excess. I dreaded watching Take Me Home Tonight. I could not watch all of the same jokes regurgitated, yet again. How happy was I then, when this didn’t turn out to be that sort of movie at all? Super happy. Take Me Home Tonight has less in common with comedies like the aforementioned hot tub movie or something like Sandler’s The Wedding Singer and more in common with movies about young people from another decade like American Graffiti or Dazed and Confused. It bathes itself in an 80s aesthetic, but it doesn’t ever shine a spotlight on the trends and tropes in order to exploit them for laughs. This isn’t so much a comedy about the 80s as it is a comedy set in the 80s. The trailers really do it no favors, so don’t walk into it with a bad attitude like [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]

Marti Noxon speaks with the sort of joyous enthusiasm you can’t fake. After the Smallville creators (and at least one uncredited script doctor) took a stab at the I Am Number Four script, Noxon sat down to add her geek-property prowess (with episodes of Buffy, Mad Men, and the script to the remake of Fright Night under her belt) to the project about an alien discovering his powers and hiding out from other aliens that want him dead. Noxon was nice enough to take some time out of her day to talk to us about the science fiction flick, how a ghost named Bertha acted as a catalyst for her writing , and to respond to one critic’s fear that Fright Night won’t be gory enough.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr hit his head and spent the better part of his time wandering around Berlin looking for January Jones. Soon he unlocked the key to his past and realized he was an alien who is hiding among the people of Earth, hunted by big dudes with tattoos and trench coats. Fortunately, he woke up from this terrifying dream to realize the true nightmare… there’s another Big Momma movie with Martin Lawrence and on-screen son Brandon T. Jackson in fat suits. To quote many a movie: “Noooooooooooo!”

The virtual DVD racks on Netflix are littered with hopeful young-adult franchises trying too hard to become the next Harry Potter or Twilight phenomenon. Cirque du Freak? Percy Jackson & the Olympians? The Golden Compass? All based on a popular book series meant to start a whole new franchise… but every single one of them failed at the box-office. Not that that’s stopping the suits in Hollywood from snapping up the rights to even more series (The Hunger Games, Incarceron, etc.), and then bringing them to the screen with attractive teens, mediocre directors, and shitty scripts. Which brings us to I Am Number Four. It seems somewhere out in the cosmos a planet was attacked and decimated by a race of fish people called the Mogadorians. Are they actually fish people? I don’t know, but they do have gills on the face so we’ll go with it. The survivors (known as Loriens) came to Earth hoping to start anew, but the Sea Bass assassins followed and are now hunting them down, killing them, and stealing their jewelry. We’re told there were nine surviving Loriens, all teens, although each has a special guardian assigned to protect them for some unknown purpose that will be revealed at an undisclosed time. Why aren’t the guardians counted among the survivors? Who knows, but maybe it’s because they suck at their job. The killer Carp have already slaughtered teens one through three and have set their sights on number four. Because the only thing 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]

There are few people that can pull of an introduction like this, but Teresa Palmer (who plays Number Six) does it with style and some futuristic weaponry. After all, there’s nothing like blowing up some high school lockers, killing some enemies, and then making some new friends. This is also our introduction to Number Six and a little bit more of that getting-to-know-you phase for I Am Number Four, the sci-fi action movie that sees Alex Pettyfer starring as the numerically titled lead who is trying to avoid being killed by the dark forces chasing him. Also, he gets to hold Diana Agron’s hand during the running, so that’s a bonus. Check out this clip from the movie in which Palmer gets into a fight (probably over lunch money):

D.J. Caruso is bringing another film (ostensibly in his same brand of lightweight intrigue) to theaters this year, and I Am Number Four has a truly intriguing premise. A young man is hiding his amazing powers for fear of being killed by a mysterious entity. It, on the surface, seems like the movie version of Heroes that everyone was clamoring for (or the movie version of The Tomorrow People if you’re cooler). The movie, stars rising actors Alex Pettyfer, Diana Agron, and Teresa Palmer alongside Timothy Olyphant and fan-favorite character actor Kevin Durand. The twenty new images that just hit our inbox show some brooding, some pensive stares, and a building evaporating in a giant fireball while a young bad ass walks away (without looking back!). Check them out for yourself:

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr celebrates the summer tent pole season with Christopher Nolan’s Inception, eager to watch the movie again and fall asleep just to see what happens. He also takes his kids to see The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and shows some love for Disney’s family adventures, even if they are a bit silly.

You’d think that the combination of awesome that is Nic Cage, Alfred Molina, and plasma orb throwing would make The Sorcerer’s Apprentice a sure bet. Sadly, this was not the case. While Jon Turteltaub brings us a reasonably entertaining romp through New York with plenty of magic, wizardry, and Cage one-liners — the viewer isn’t left with a lot of heart, or much reason to get emotionally invested in the characters. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is based on a 1797 poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, about a…well, a sorcerer and his apprentice. Most people know the story based on Disney’s Fantasia, the part of the apprentice played by the iconic Mickey Mouse. In the current iteration, a lot of story and background have been created to make this a full length film. The apprentice is Dave Stutler (Jay Baruchel), a physics major at NYU with a past he’d like to forget.

Teresa Palmer has joined the already booming cast of the D.J. Caruso directed science fiction thriller I Am Number Four. The film tells the story of nine aliens who escape their home planet just before it’s blown to bits by a rival species, only to come to Earth and disguise themselves as human high schoolers.

I’d be lying if I said I had previously been looking forward to this summer’s Nicolas Cage flick, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Early teasers haven’t done much to dampen my disinterest, but a couple of new scenes from the movie may have succeeded where those teasers failed.

So we’ve got two attractive young people cast in a movie. How is this news?