To Adapt Bestselling YA Novel Wonder

Lionsgate Taps Jack Thorne To Adapt Bestselling YA Novel Wonder

Watch Iron Man 3 Online Middle-aged punks. Greying mohawks. Back in 1998 writer-director James Merendino mined his own rebellious youth to created the dramedy SLC Punk. The film about two 1980s punks nonconforming in conservative Salt Lake City earned a coveted spot on the Sundance Film Festival's opening night and went on to find a devoted fan base. Since then, Merendino has gone on to make a handful of movies you've probably never heard of like a crime comedy called Magicians and a horror flick titled Death Club. But he's clawing his way back to relevance by returning to his greatest success for a sequel. Film School Rejects reports Merendino is looking to bring much of the cast from SLC Punk back together for Punk's Dead, a sequel that would pick up with the grown punks in 2003. In his announcement, Meredino explains:

Watch 42 Online Or do they love Joan, Dennis, Irwin and the other people featured on the series enough not to mind their candidness and liberal use of swearing? The video below shows the mixed reaction to the first season of Small Town Security. Expectations will surely be high this Saturday night. Kristen Wiig departed Saturday Night Live last year, ending a long and successful run on the sketch comedy series to pursue her acting career outside the NBC series. While she has a slew of projects in the works, including an appearance in the upcoming revival of Arrested Development on Netflix, she's set to return to SNL this Saturday night to host an episode. As she mentions a few times in the promos above, Vampire Weekend will be the musical guest this week. Will Gilly return? Will we see the return of The Lawrence Welk Show? Or The Californians? The sight of Wiig with Fred Armisen, and some of the more dramatic moments featured in the video above makes me think we might expect a Californians sketch. Personally, I'd prefer a revival of "The Two A-Holes.

Watch Pain And Gain Online I made SLC Punk when I was a kid, and accordingly, the story is naive, and, as just a coming of age story, not finished. The characters are facing big questions, 18 years later, as outsiders, Punk rockers… What relevance do they have in a world where all statements have already been made?Reportedly in talks to reprise their roles are Matthew Lillard, Annabeth Gish, Devon Sawa, Til Schweiger, Chris McDonald and Michael A. Goorjian. Casting confirmations should come soon, as production on Punk's Dead is proposed to kick off this August, meaning the finished film could hit theaters in 2014. Sequels to independent films are rare, or at least far more rare than studio-backed sequels. But it's worth noting that a couple if indie sequels of late have proved welcomed additions to their beloved originals. Last year Julie Delpy unveiled 2 Days in New York, a sequel to her heralded 2007 comedy 2 Days in Paris. And even though the second film jettisoned one of the protagonists from the first, it was met with warm critical praise.

Watch Evil Dead Online This year at Sundance, Delpy fronted another indie sequel, the hotly anticipated Before Midnight, the third film in Richard Linklater's romance trilogy, following Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Wild praise followed.In each of these instances, characters who were lovable but flawed resurfaced to show audiences where they are years later, and were roundly embraced. Could the same prove true for Punk's Dead? Weigh in below. Even though the horizon of cinema’s future is dotted with highly fantastical young adult novel adaptations like The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and The Maze Runner, there is more than enough room in film for children who don’t spend their novelized lives within dystopian worlds sharing space with mythological creatures. If Judy Blume can finally get the Tiger Eyes adaptation she’d been waiting for, then let’s open the floodgates for more humanized YA fare.

Watch Scary Movie 5 Online Deadline reports Lionsgate is doing just that by hiring English screenwriter Jack Thorne to adapt the critically adored Wonder, the heart-unraveling debut from author Raquel Jaramillo, under the pseudonym R.J. Palacio. Though the only produced script Thorne has written was 2009’s The Scouting Book for Boys, he’s been all over British television, writing several episodes of the teen drama Skins and the apocalyptic horror The Fades. He also created the mockumentary reality series Cast Offs. While it doesn’t seem like this kind of an inspirational tale is in Thorne’s wheelhouse, he wrote the upcoming war drama How I Live Now as well as the new Nick Hornby adaptation A Long Way Down. He’s also set to adapt the family adventure The Magic Hat of Mortimer Wintergreen. It helps to have a diverse writing range.

Watch G I Joe Retaliation Online The Mandeville Films production will tell the story of Auggie Pullman, a 10-year-old with a facial deformity that has kept him away from attending public school until he enters the fifth grade. And while the results are to be expected in the beginning, Auggie proves to everyone that beauty isn’t limited to the eye of the beholder. And he proves it with laughs as much as anything else. As weird as it sounds, this will hopefully resemble David Lynch's The Elephant Man much more than Victor Salva's Powder. Hopefully a “wonder”-ful director gets the gig. Apparently Sacha Baron Cohen is a big fan of the Danish comedy Klown. While that probably means that he's seen it a bunch of times and owns it on Blu-ray, he has taken it one step further. He has apparently flown to Denmark just to get the writers to script his new film.

Watch The Last Exorcism Part 2 Online Variety says that a deal has been struck with Casper Christensen and Frank Hvam to script the upcoming comedy The ***. The story is based on a horrible-but-true story about a Hong Kong billionaire named Cecil Chao who "offered $65 million to any man who succeeded in marrying his *** daughter." Borat and Bruno writer Ant Hines and Baron Cohen himself wrote the treatment for the film, and one can assume Christensen and Hvam will be working from their outline. The screenwriting duo was actually getting ready to script a sequel to Klown, however, they will be delaying their work on that project to focus on this new one.

Watch Jack The Giant Slayer Online The trade notes that there is actually an English-language remake of Klown in the works. The Hangover director Todd Phillips is attached to produce while Danny McBride will star. To get a sense of what the feature is like and Christensen and Hvam's sense of humor, watch the Red Band trailer below. Be warned, this is definitely not for the young-ones. Two years ago director Nicolas Winding Refn brought his first American film to the Cannes Film Festival, and absolutely blew everybody away. The film, Drive, was nominated for the Palme d'Or and won the Best Director prize at the festival, and went on to be one of the biggest critical hits of the year. Now the filmmaker is getting set to duplicate that approach with his latest movie, the dark drama Only God Forgives.

While the film is already set to hit theaters on July 19th, it will be holding its premiere at this year's Cannes, and to get you ready The Playlist has posted not only a whole bunch of new photos, but a director's statement from Winding Refn where he explains what he was trying to do/express with Only God Forgives. Read the statement below and then scope out a few of the new stills. The original concept for the film was to make a movie about a man who wants to fight God. That is, of course, a very vast obstacle but when I was writing the film, I was going through some very existential times in my life - we were expecting our second child and it was a difficult pregnancy - and the idea of having a character who wants to fight God without knowing why very much appealed to me.