Of all the Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, Timecop is probably the most popular. It even turned into something of a mini franchise for Universal, so now they plan to reboot it. Probably because they want another franchise.

The 1994 Timecop takes place in a world where a police force regulated time travel. One officer, played by Jean-Claude, finds out that a politician is using time travel to further his political career. What a douche, right?

There’s no story yet for this Timecop, that’s because Universal and their producers don’t have a story in mind. They just want to reboot the franchise, probably because of money. They have a couple different writers working on scripts, says THR, and they’ll likely just choose whichever one they think will make them the most money.

That’s cool, I guess. However, I kind of think a Timecop movie could be cool. There’s a lot to play with there. I mean, cops that regulate time travel? There’s a ton of potential story ideas there that could be exciting. Line up the right director and you could have something really entertaining on your hands.

Or you could totally botch it up like that Totall Recall remake. Don’t do that, Universal. Give this thing a chance of being interesting, like Dredd 3D! And no, Jean-Claude will not be involved. [THR]

We’ve The Millers has an insane premise. Jason Sudeikis is a drug dealer that recruits a stripper (jennifer Aniston), a homeless kid (Emma Roberts) and his neighbor (Will Poulter) to smuggle some drugs for Ed Helms into the country.

This movie is packed with comedic talent, firstly. Nick Offerman also makes an appearance, along with the aforementioned Helms and Sudeikis. The highlight of the trailer has to be the young Poulter though. He looks like he’s set to steal the show. Unfortunately, Roberts doesn’t seem to have much to do. And it looks like Aniston has centered in on playing sex-crazed characters in some of these comedies.

Which is fine. Good for her, right? She was quite the surprise in Horrible Bosses, so if she’s happy with her niche that’s good.

I’m surprised how much I liked this trailer though. The premise seemed far too zany to actually pull off, kind of like The Watch. Sometimes comedy writers get way too caught up in the premise and leave everything else (like laughs) in some sort of comedic abyss. This doesn’t totally look like the case here. It’ll probably rely on their chemistry as a “family” to pull off though.

We’re The Millers comes out August 9, so you’ll have some nice counterprogramming if you don’t want to watch Elysium.

When you tell someone a new Superman movie is coming out they kind of feign excitement. “Oh that’s cool,” they say. “I’m not really into Superman though.” It’s a common response. People are tired of Superman in these modern times. We don’t want the perfect hero who does no wrong. That’s boring.

People are much more in sync with heroes like Iron Man or Batman, flawed heroes that aren’t goody goodies. This is the challenge Warner Bros. has had for years, and it’s the challenge Christopher Nolan, David Goyer and Zack Snyder took on when they decided that they wanted to make a Superman movie.

The New York Times has an excellent interview with the trio that dives right into that subject. How do you make Superman cool for modern audiences?

For too long, said Mr. Snyder, the director of “Man of Steel,” a new Superman movie that Warner Brothers will release on June 14, modern-day interpretations of this DC Comics superhero had been apologizing for the outdatedness of his origins; they sought to conceal him in contemporary trappings instead of embracing an essential mythology that, he said, was as bulletproof as the character himself.

He’s right. DC has, for far too long, kept its characters mostly the same and hasn’t updated them for modern audiences. They’re characters built for the more hopeful late 60s, not for the more beaten down and cynical 2010s. People don’t buy that there’s this perfect being out there that only does good. So they can’t connect with that.

So how do you fix a character that’s perfect? Superman himself, Henry Cavill, puts it best:

“Perfection without effort is, in itself, not perfection,” he said. “It’s just gifted. Just being right because you exist isn’t interesting. Doing the right thing, through hard work and the right decisions, is a better character.”

That’s exactly right. This is actually the route that the new Star Trek movies are taking with Kirk. They’re not going to hand greatness and perfection to him; he’s going to have to figure out how to get there. In Man of Steel, we’re going to see a Superman who’s struggling with whether he should even help humanity in the first place. And when should he help? Should he help stop bank robberies? No. Should he help when alien threats come to Earth and threaten to destroy it? Yeah, he probably should.

Screenwriter David Goyer illustrates that to the New York Times: Superman isn’t some vigilante superhero stopping crime, he’s a worldwide event:

“If he really were an alien,” Mr. Goyer said, “when the world finds out that he exists, that in itself would be the biggest event in human history. That would change the world forever.”

Humanity is at a weird point. We’re cynical about the world we live in, yet we’re also hopeful that people can be better. We’re constantly hit by a hyper paced news cycle that goes from newspapers to 24-hour cable news to twitter to blogs. And I think we’re all looking for something grounded in this crazy world that we can feel hopeful about. That’s the balance that Man of Steel needs to straddle.

I think Nolan and his crew understand that and that’s what they’re going for. We’ve already seen hints in the trailer, personified by Russell Crowe’s voiceover, about how Superman is the guy who can show us how to be better. That’s great. And when you see that that savior is struggling with himself while trying to be better for humanity? That’s even better.

Now, we just have to hope their execution meets their talk. Man of Steel arrives on June 14. You really should head over to the New York Times for the rest of their excellent piece. [New York Times]

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is at the hot point of his career. He can almost do no wrong and he seems to be melting into each role he takes. The dude even played a young Bruce Willis in Looper! But now he’s trying to expand and one of the ways he’s doing that is by writing and directing some of his movies, like Don Jon.

It’s a movie about a New Jersey guy that develops unrealistic expectations from watching too much porn, until he meets Scarlett Johansson’s character that is – then things start changing. This looks like a fun movie, firstly. And I love the comparison between porn and romantic comedies. It’s hilarious.

And hey, fun cameos from Channing Tatum and Anne Hathaway! That’s a nice surprise too. I’m really digging this trailer though. It looks fun and light hearted, but not too light hearted. It kind of feels like it has a similar tone to 50/50 and The Silver Linings Playbook, which took some serious subjects and played around with them.

The movie is set to release on October 18, which makes me thing they’re going to try for a couple acting awards for these folks – Gordon-Levitt and Johansson in particular.

Note: I will not be using the underwear picture of Alice Eve for this article, so if you really want to see it you’re out of luck on this site. 

A couple days ago, MTV’s Josh Horowitz was conducting an email interview with Star Trek Into Darkness scribe Damon Lindelof and asked him a question that a lot of people want to ask him: Why the hell was Alice Eve’s Dr. Carol Marcus shown in her underwear for no reason?

He responded:

Why is Alice Eve in her underwear, gratuitously and unnecessarily, without any real effort made as to why in God’s name she would undress in that circumstance? Well there’s a very good answer for that. But I’m not telling you what it is. Because… uh… MYSTERY?

He comes off as a douche, but if you know Lindelof you’ll know that he takes every opportunity to self-destruct himself. This was an attempt to do that (there is no reason) but it exploded in his face. So he followed up by taking to his twitter and admitting his wrongs, because he said it in multiple tweets I will combine them in a single paragraph:

I copped to the fact that we should have done a better job of not being gratuitous in our representation of a barely clothed actress. We also had Kirk shirtless in underpants in both movies. Do not want to make light of something that some construe as mysogenistic. What I’m saying is I hear you, I take responsibility and will be more mindful in the future. Also, I need to learn how to spell “misogynistic.”

Now here’s the thing: I don’t think the buck stops at Lindelof for this, it stops at JJ Abrams. After all, he’s the director. Sure, the scene might be written in the way it was but do we really need a full body shot of Alice Eve to drive home the point that Kirk is looking? No, we don’t. You could easily have kept the camera on Kirk’s face and then switched to a close up of Eve saying to turn away. That way even adds a flavor of mystery, which Abrams is a huge fan of. Or, hey – he could tell them to rewrite the scene!

The other side of this is that the female characters in the film are underwritten: with Zoe Saldana’s Uhura harping on her romance with Zachary Quinto’s Spock and Eve doing little during the film. I see where that argument is coming from, but I think the larger problem there is that they have about 15 characters they have to write for in a movie that’s just over two hours long. If this were a TV show, they could spend much more time writing stronger female characters. Having said that, the majority of the time we see Saldana she’s either highly emotional or about to cry.

But let’s not forget Rachel Nichols’ green girl in Star Trek 2009, laid out in underwear, and the two alien twins with tails near the beginning of this film. The reason that Star Trek Into Darkness is being hit with all of this is because people expect better of Star Trek, even though the original series had a brand new attractive female Yeoman or Officer that fell in love with someone almost every week.

The fact is that the majority of films are written by men and directed by men. Not only that, but they’re making the majority of the blockbusters today, which are the movies that we see the most. GI Joe Retaliation, for instance, had pretty much the same scene that Star Trek Into Darkness had, except that it was Adrianne Palicki that was changing in front of a male co-worker (her character was actually stronger than Eve’s, however)

Star Trek Into Darkness is an example, but let’s not trick ourselves into claiming that it’s the only offender. I just hope people continue to take these films to task for weak female characters that are used for quick boob and ass shots for trailers.

In the first trailer for The World’s End, we saw that Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and the gang were headed on an epic pub crawl that they couldn’t do when they were young. However, they ran into what we thought were a town that was invaded by aliens – but that isn’t so. No no, these things are robots.

Robots with ink-blue blood! A giant metal robot thing that looks like the thing from Thor! This movie genuinely looks funny though, with Pegg getting the most laughs, which is kind of surprising when most of the time Frost is the comedic relief and Pegg plays more of a straight man. In this one they’ve switched roles, which is a welcome change.

My only problem is that this is the end of the Three Flavor Cornetto trilogy, which started with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Here’s hoping they release an awesome trilogy pack when this comes out on DVD/Blu Ray.

The World’s End comes out on August 23 in the United States.

I haven’t been impressed with the two Wolverine trailers we’ve gotten so far. The first one laid on the dramatic music and was far too dull to be interesting; same with the International trailer. The WonderCon trailer was much better, showing off some of the action in the film.

This, however, is the trailer that sets the tone for the film. I now see why director James Mangold was looking at old samurai and Westerns for inspiration for this film – it feels like one. It also attempts to explain why the hell he’s walking around like some emo superhero in the first trailer: he’s tortured by what happened to Jean Grey in the original trilogy.

So he’s given it all up. I mean, I think I can understand. Being immortal and watching all your friends die would be emotionally devastating, but I’m not sure how it’s going to work here. Is this kind of like an Iron Man 3 thing where they’re going to break down the Wolverine character to find out who he is without his powers?

That could be really interesting if they pull it off, but it’ll be difficult. I do have faith in Mangold, who happened to have made one of the best Westerns in recent memory with 3:10 to Yuma. So here’s hoping he can deliver. I think I may be on board with this after all.

The Wolverine opens July 26

Holy crap I cannot stop smiling. Warner Bros. surprised us and decided to drop a present in our laps: a Zod trailer for Man of Steel. It starts off showing Zod’s warning to Earth and then zooms into a bunch of action footage from the film.

Oh. My. God. Our own Donovan Farnham has said this many times: Superman doesn’t deal with parking tickets. He’s not at his best lifting planets out of the ocean or whatever. He takes on threats that can absolutely destroy the Earth. That threat is Zod. Seeing Superman, for the first time on the big screen, punch the absolute shit out of someone on his own level is going to be something special.

This may be just another superhero/Superman movie to some, but it’s not something we’ve seen. And you can easily tell. This thing makes me giddy. The impact of every action Superman takes in this trailer LOOKS super. And that score! Whatever music Hans Zimmer has cooked up for this is a winner.

Man of Steel arrives on June 14. It can’t come soon enough.

Pacific Rim is less than two months away and we’ve got some action packed trailers. So now Warner Bros. has decided to fill in some of the details about the new (and original) world that Guillermo del Toro has built. First up: why the heck does each Jaeger need two pilots to drive the damn things?

Del Toro and his cast talk about why they did it in the new featurette. Basically, they felt that one person could not handle controlling a giant mechanized robot all by their lonesome. When you really think about it, it kind of makes sense. It takes crews of people to run a ship and two people to command something as simple as a Boeing 707 airliner. So why shouldn’t a giant-ass robot be controlled by two people?

It’s really that simple. I can dig that explanation too. Plus, it adds some interesting things they can do with two pilots that have to have intimate knowledge of each other to work together in harmony and kick some kaiju ass.

Pacific Rim opens on July 14

It’s clear with each trailer what The Lone Ranger is supposed to be: Pirates of the Caribbean in the Wild West. That’s all. That’s their goal: to make a big budget and fun Western, which is sorta admirable. You don’t see many studios betting big on Westerns nowadays, mostly because they barely make money and they’re cheap to make.

But Disney and Gore Verbinski were like “nah dude, let’s try to make a new franchise out of this shizz.” And they went and did it, for about $200 million. Of course, the budget used to be around $250 million and they had werewolves for some reason – but they cut that out. I guess cutting werewolves out of your movie cuts off $50 million from your budget, but I digress.

What we see in this trailer is the same thing we’ve seen before: explosions, trains, horses and a comedic tone. This isn’t going to be some serious character piece. It’s going to be Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer running around and jumping on trains, which is fine. This won’t light the world on fire, but Verbinski is one of the great spectacle directors we have today so I’m sure it’ll be fun to watch.

The Lone Ranger arrives in theaters on July 3.