We talked about Knights of Badassdom before, and last time the future of the LARP film looked rather bleak. Well it’s a new day and a new outlook for the project as it has finally found a distributor in Entertainment One! Incidentally, Entertainment One is the same company that distributes Femme Fatales, a Grizzly Bomb favorite.
In the last Knights of Badassdom update, there was a bit of drama regarding the editing of the film. Apparently after director Joe Lynch finished and had it cut and edited to his liking, the powers that be went in and did their own edit. Lynch took to Twitter with hopes of making sure everyone knew that it was #notmyedit.
It is unknown if the final product Entertainment One is set to release is that of Lynch’s or those that came after him. We’ll find out soon I suppose. No premiere date has been set but let’s not let that get us down for Knights of Badassdom is finally going to see the light of day! Hopefully!
Let’s start right off with the Arrow season two sizzle reel. Now, if you have not seen all of Arrow season one, you might want to skip this as it has a lot of spoilers in it. A lot, a lot.
So much action packed into so little time! Taken from footage of the season premiere, we get a good look at Summer Glau as Isabel Rochev.
As exciting as that is, I think we all echo Roy Harper’s question to the mysterious blonde in a mask (Caity Lotz as not Black Canary), “Where the hell did you come from?” Of course this Arrow season two sizzle reel didn’t answer any big questions, like who exactly Caity Lotz’s character is, but we do see Oliver Queen make the beginnings of his move from “the Vigilante” to actually being called Arrow. As Marc Guggenheim said in this interview, they are moving from Hood Guy, to Arrow, to ultimately Green Arrow.
Same with Black Canary apparently. Laurel will eventually be Black Canary but she needs to start on that journey and Caity Lotz is there to help her begin.
Apparently everyone is moving along in their storylines, including Roy Harper and Deathstroke. During the Comic-Con panel, Colton Haynes referred to season two as Roy’s “island” and Andrew Kreisberg made a point of telling fans that those who are interested in if/how Manu Bennett’s Slade Wilson becomes the Deathstroke, then they should make sure to watch season two.
The other big news from the panel is that although it seems as if Malcolm Merlyn met his end in the season finale of Arrow season one, perhaps he’s not as dead as we assumed. John Barrowman appeared on stage saying “I would be more than happy to come back into this family fold. And if I’m being invited back, it’s more than the 50th anniversary of ‘Doctor Who’s’ ever done.”
As great as all that news is, two big guest spots were also announced.
That’s right, Suicide Squad’s own Bronze Tiger is coming to Starling City! Or the island, his story hasn’t been revealed. Michael Jai White will play the martial artist sometime in season two. Given that they are announcing it this early, you’d have to imagine it’d be early in the season.
Same goes for Kevin Alejandro, guest starring as a character named Sebastian Blood, aka Brother Blood. Longtime foe of the Teen Titans. It’s a little easier to see the martial arts fighting of Bronze Tiger making the leap to the Arrow-verse, but there will be some definite changes in the Brother Blood character to comply with the “no superpowers/metahumans” thing that they’ve committed to. But we’ve seen how Count Vertigo was able to be adapted so I’m not too worried about it.
So I think that about covers it. Laurel Lance is still going to be Black Canary. Caity Lotz is going to help her. Roy Harper and Slade Wilson both have changes in store for them. Oh yeah, Thea is taking over Oliver’s club, and Summer Glau’s Isabel Rochev is coming to town.
Can’t wait for October 9th when Arrow season two premieres!
Filming of the second season of Arrow just started. Like yesterday. And already there is big news when it comes to casting and her name is Summer Glau. That’s right, the geek princess herself is coming to Starling City. With a show that has been drawing heavily from pretty much every other nerdy show out there – Battlestar Galatica, Doctor Who, more that I can’t remember right now – it feels like it was only a matter of time. Not only that but it appears as if I already believed that the character Glau is slated to play would someday appear on the show.
As you can clearly see, the name Isabel Rochev appears there below David Drayson. Waaaaaayyyy back towards the beginning of the season. I made note of this page when talking in this post about the upcoming episode with the Royal Flush Gang.
That’s right, Summer Glau has signed on in a “major role” in season two as Isabel Rochev, the Serbian businesswoman who is a bit off her rocker.
A fairly new character in the DC Universe, Isabel Rochev is a woman who once met Robert Queen, is starstruck by him and sets out to make her own life better using him as an example. Long story short (not too long it’s been less than five years), she sort of goes off the deep end. As she gets older she gathers up small companies and is able to in the long run own a controlling share of Queen Industries. Somehow in between the time of being a Serbian slave girl to actually taking over Queen Industries, she gets it in her head that she is actually the rightful heir to QI and that Robert Queen truly loves her.
Oh and most importantly? She wants Oliver out of the picture. For good.
Of course that’s the Isabel Rochev of the Star City. Isabel Rochev of Starling City, played by Glau, is the head of Stellmore International which is in the hunt to take over Queen Consolidated. Talk about kicking a man when he’s down. Moira is off to jail, Oliver is likely going to start the season off brooding over Tommy, and Thea? Who the hell knows what Thea will be doing. Seems about the right time for a ruthless business woman to step in and right the floundering ship.
As a matter of fact, Summer Glau will first appear as Isabel Rochev in the season two premiere of Arrow in October.
Sit back, close your eyes, relax… and let me tell you a tale that will frustrate and infuriate even the most chill amongst us.
It starts back in 2010 when a group of actors signed on for a movie about a group of LARPers (that would be Live Action Role Playing for those who aren’t in the know or who haven’t seen Role Models) who accidentally summon a real demon and the hijinks that ensue. This just isn’t your run of the mill group of actors though. No, this is a group of actors that get the neck hairs of a wide variety of geek standing on end. Peter Dinklage, Danny Pudi, Jimmi Simpson, Steve Zahn (a personal favorite of mine), Ryan Kwanten, Joshua Malina, and of course the geek girl herself, Summer Glau. I don’t know that it’s possible to look at that list of names and not want to immediately see what they have put together.
Well, fast forward to 2011 San Diego Comic-Con and a trailer is released. Our own esteemed Dr. Kronner did the honors and provided a nice write up about it, including interviews with the cast. You will most certainly want to check that out, but just for ease of use right now, let’s go ahead and put the trailer here as well.
Right? Even though I’ve never had the chance to don chain mail and wield a foam sword myself, I am a huge fan of LARP and movies about LARP. I’ve watched Faintheart more times than I can count, and Unicorn City is one of my “because you liked…” categories on Netflix. Hell, I’ve even watched All’s Faire in Love more times than anyone should ever admit to, so it isn’t really surprising that I really want to see this movie. Enter the problem.
It appears as if Knights of Badassdom has hit a bit of a snag and by that I mean, it’s having a lot of issues, and by that I mean, we might not ever get to see it. With a trailer being released in 2011, one would expect to see the movie in 2012, especially when the movie’s site has a banner that says…
Incredible MS Paint job credit to: Me.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, 2012 has come and gone and this movie has not been released. Actually for quite a while there was nothing even mentioned of this movie. In July of 2012, an unknown investor in the movie took to the internet claiming that the film’s production company, IndieVest, was doing nothing but stringing them along. Then radio silence again.
I googled June 15th and got this as a result. Apparently Google doesn’t believe Mr. Bradley either.
That was until March of this year. It seems as if the original cut of the movie, done by director Joe Lynch and completed days before the trailer was released at Comic-Con (remember this was back in the summer of 2011), was tossed aside by the Indievest and namely, it’s CEO Wade Bradley. It was actually Wade Bradley himself who responded to the ‘Rip-Off Report’ complaint by saying that “The film is now readying for its final mix and is on schedule to be released (by IndieVest Pictures) in the first half of 2013.”
I’m thinking that perhaps Mr. Bradley needs Santa to bring him a calendar this Christmas because there’s only roughly three weeks left in the first half of 2013 and there’s been neither hide nor hair seen of the recut Knights of Badassdom. But what of director Joe Lynch? What has he been saying in all this? Well when IndieVest was planning on screening their own edit, he took to twitter to make sure that everyone knew that it was not his version of the film by often using the hashtag #notmyedit.
He hasn’t said much else about it since then, instead choosing to tweet about Joss Whedon and S.H.I.E.L.D., conversations with friends, and his podcast, The Movie Crypt, with Adam Green.
When asked directly about Knights of Badassdom, the answer is a little sad.
I’m a person that hates to see good people get hurt (unless they’ve wronged me then I take glee in it – I’m a complicated individual) so it’s disheartening to see a director of a movie get shut out of his own project publicly like this. Granted this was probably mishandled by everyone involved but it’s hard not to paint IndieVest as the demon in this situation.
The real victim here though? Well that of course is the movie and the potential fans of said movie. I think we can all agree that this is the type of film that it doesn’t really matter if it wasn’t the best writing, or the best story, or the best anything. As a rule, if you don’t mess up the major things like Star Wars, Star Trek, or any other established universe, we geeks can be rather forgiving. There aren’t many shows or movies that have LARP as a main aspect so I think it’s safe to say that most of us would embrace it regardless. Sadly, no word yet on if we’ll ever get that chance.
The Science channel’s BrowncoatsUnite special, which reunited all the cast, revealed something more than reminiscing. Firefly flew onto our screens in 2002, but was sadly shot down after only one season. Joss Whedon, the man behind TheAvengers and BuffytheVampireSlayer created the show, but could not convince Fox to keep it on the air, though he was able to tie up the series in a feature film called Serenity which came out in 2005. Aside from the odd graphic novel or two, fans have suffered from a severe case of Firefly withdrawal. So the release of three deleted clips are a breath of fresh air for us suffocating fans.
The first two scenes are titled You never leave Serenity and Extraction, and both give us more details on the history of the ship Serenity, as well as the battle of Serenity for which it was named. These are quite dark shorts and show the brutality Mal (Nathan Fillion) and Zoe (Gina Torre) suffered through in the battle. It also explains Mal’s devotion to his ship and crew.
The last clip is a more humorous piece titled Women Trouble, where River tries to get Shepherd Book to marry her and her brother together! It also has a young Christina Hendricks from MadMen fame who gets some tough love from Mal.
These clips are not the new series that Firefly fans truly crave, but these brief scenes arethe best we are going to get for now in regards to new content. They are great extras which help to add a little more depth to an already incredible series.
On Friday at CCI, the Firefly Reunion Panel took place with Joss Whedon, Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, Alan Tudyk, Sean Maher, and Summer Glau all in attendance. This is one panel I was very excited to read about after the fact. You can check out CinemaBlend.com for the as-it-happened play by play of the event. OR… if you are extra American and don’t like to read… you may watch the panel as it happened, courtesy of Geektyrant.com OR:
We’ve talked about The Knight of Badassdom before, but didn’t have much info. Now, thanks to Comic Con, we’ve got a Knights of Badassdom trailer. And we’re gonna show you the trailer, but let me first talk a little bit about what could be my favorite film cast ever. Ever.
Tyrion Lannister, Jason Stackhouse, and Steve Zahn are roommates, (Awesome already right?) and Stackhouse has just been through a rough breakup. So to cheer him up, his buddies do what all movie-land friends do – they kidnap him and take him somewhere to raise his spirits.
Only in this case, that somewhere is a LARP game. Once there, they encounter Liam McPoyle, Abed Nadir, and Summer Glau. Sounds good to me.
Now what that means is that in one paragraph, I’ve already tied this movie to Game of Thrones, True Blood, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Community. And I didn’t even mention W. Earl Brown (Deadwood, Justified), Joshua Malina (Sports Night), and Larry Zerner (Friday the 13th Part III) whose character ‘Shelly’ is famous for supplying Jason Voorhees with his hockey mask. And now, his name in KoB will also be ‘Shelly’…
Anyhow, here’s the Knights of Badassdom trailer:
BAD. ASS.
In addition, we also have some interviews from Comic Con…
The first one with Entertainment Weekly, which feature both Margarita Levieva (The Lincoln Lawyer) and Michael Gladis (Mad Men) whom I for some reason had not already mentioned, along with may of the aforementioned actors and Director Joe Lynch.
And the 2nd, longer interview, for G4TV is just Lynch and Summer Glau…
Grizzly Bomb 