Film ON AIR

This is the first time I heard about a sequel to ‘Donnie Darko.’ It’s interesting, but when was the last time a sequel to a cult hit really impressed? The only cast member to return seems to be Daviegh Chase, Donnie’s little sister, at the moment.

The $10 million ‘S. Darko’ starts shooting May 18. It takes place seven years after the original, when Samantha Darko and her friend take a road trip and get strange visions during the trip. A short description, but it sounds like the usual cash in.

The original $4.5 million ‘Donnie Darko’ was a flop at the box office, but it made up in rentals when it became a cult hit. After grossing just a little over a million worldwide, it was able to make $14 million in rentals the first three years. After which director Richard Kelly released a new directors cut DVD with all sorts of extras.

‘Bioshock,’ the Xbox 360 game which sold over 2 million copies last year, has been picked up for a movie adaptation. It’s the first time Take-Two, the publisher of the game, went ahead with a movie. They previously turned down many options for a ‘Grand Theft Auto’ movie.

Why did they agree to do it now? Probably because director Gore Verbinski attached his name to it. He is responsible for ‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’ one of the highest grossing movie franchises of all time. Take-Two is said to be getting the best deal out of this movie adaptation for a game ever.

There’s certainly potential here.

The only thing we didn’t have was an official word from Marvel, but now we have it. ‘Iron Man 2′ has been confirmed for April 30, 2010. Jon Favreau and his crew already hinted at how they’d like to do a sequel. They said it in like every other interview last week. If it wasn’t for the possible actors’ strike, they might have already been working on it. But Marvel didn’t want to take any risks by setting the release date for next summer.

Marvel Entertainment stock jumped almost 10% as we expected, but settled to around 7.5% later in the day. This while the market was down overall, mostly caused by the failed Yahoo deal and concerns about mortgage lender Countrywide’s suitor backing out as well.

In 2006, Marvel Entertainment started raising $525 million to produce its own movies. Before that it was only licensing its characters, like ‘Spider-man’ to Sony. Their second film will be ‘The Incredible Hulk’ in June and the third will be the just announced ‘Iron Man’ sequel. Marvel also announced their fourth feature called ‘Thor,’ which is planned for June 4, 2010. They sure like their summer season.

With ‘Sex and the City: The Movie’ tracking to be the hottest movie this summer, first talks about a sequel have begun. “I feel like we could release a second movie just based on stuff that we’ve cut out of this movie,” Cynthia Nixon said. “We were [at such a] breakneck speed to get this first movie out, I don’t know if there would be a second one, but it’s not up to me.” And while this is true, if the forecasts are right, there will be a second movie, because when there’s money there’s a movie.

Last week Moviefone released the results of their survey with over 420,000 respondents. ‘Sex and the City: The Movie’ was leading this questionnaire with 32% looking forward to the movie. Very impressive for a movie that cost only $65 million to produce, compared to about 10 movies that crossed the $100 million this summer.

‘Sex and the City: The Movie’ will premiere in London, May 28.