HitFix just reported that a source close to the production has said that Logan Lerman is the frontrunner to be the next Spider-Man. Contract negotiations have not started, but the source says that Lerman is “almost 100% locked” to star in Marc Webb’s Spider-Man reboot.

This comes only a few short months after Sam Raimi departed the franchise, leading Sony to decide to send Peter Parker back to high school. This new beginning will focus more on “a teenager grappling with both contemporary human problems and amazing super-human crises.” The picture is helmed by Marc Webb ((500) Days of Summer) and based on a script by Jamie Vanderbilt.

First of all, I think rebooting the franchise was probably the best thing to do. This way, the movie will actually have time to develop, and maybe a new cast could bring a whole new angle on Spidey. However, I hope the film will still appeal to fans of the superhero, and not be too bogged down with this teen drama stuff.

Lerman was just seen in Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, which I did not enjoy, but his performance wasn’t bad. Given a good script, I think he could definitely make a good, young Peter Parker. What do you think of the casting?

The new Spider-Man swings into theaters July 3, 2012.

It has been a  cold, cold winter.

Snow has been piled high here in Baltimore since late January and it’s been raining down indiscriminately from the heavens since mid December. Snow shovels have become my ally and stolen parking spaces the bane of my existence, but the promise of spring looks set to melt that all away.

Unless, of course the chill returns and with it more seasonal storms. Thanks to the recent blizzards, we are entering the merry month of March and all of us are still looking over our shoulders, waiting for Jack Frost to give us an icy wedgie.

And when you are there, lodged in your home, with no way to get out, it’s understandable that a bit of stir craziness might set in. What better way to counteract that than with some good old fashioned cinematic madness?

Here’s hoping the rest of the year is smooth sailing from a meteorological standpoint, but if it isn’t, here are ten creepy chillers you can snuggle up with on a cold evening:

30 Days of Night-

Before they were fey emo poets, vampires were not just fearsome entities but walking signposts of death and decay. When you get down to it, what better season for the Nosferatu than winter? The sun is dim, the evenings long and the days short, and with everyone wrapped up tight and shivering, it’s easier to go unnoticed. Lately, we have had a trio of cinematic vampires who have chosen the dreary northern climes to inhabit; Frostbiten, Let the Right One In, and this comic adaptation that sees a tribe of dying vamps lay waste to a town in Alaska during a month of perpetual darkness. The other two films fall out of the range of horror/thriller but 30 Days has the creepy color palette, the perfect menace, and the right setting for a terribly enjoyable action/horror romp. Hartnett isn’t the most believable action hero, but Danny Huston as the head vamp is a baddie with real menace. When the remaining survivors discover a young girl who has been bitten, the creep factor goes through the roof.

Wind Chill-

I never really took inventory of Emily Blunt until I saw this 2006 indie ghost story that casts her as a self absorbed college student who catches a ride home with a guy on campus she doesn’t really know. Then, the two find themselves stranded together on a freezing back road during Christmas break. Sound romantic? It isn’t. In addition to the mounting unease that Blunt feels when she realizes her driving buddy might be a stalker, there’s also the possibility of hypothermia setting in before they are rescued, and the fact that the road they broke-down on is inhabited by a plethora of real ghosts. Blunt really delivers a strong performance and for entire chunks of the movie she is alone, pitted against the supernatural forces of this stretch of highway. There’s a feel of Jack London survival stories in all of the tragic details and in the nature of the ghosts themselves, who are playing out a long forgotten misery that traps all who come that way. It’s not a classic, but it does what it does effectively with a good amount of spookiness.

Transsiberian-

The atmosphere alone in Brad Anderson’s wintry suspense thriller makes it worthy of a place on this list. Anderson, who has channeled unspoken fears before in Session 9 and The Machinist,tells the story of a couple of missionaries (Mortimer and Harrelson) riding a train from China to Moscow, meeting up with a sketchy young couple, and getting involved with murder, international intrigue and a stone-faced Ben Kingsley who looks ready to snap. Mortimer and Harrelson have an odd chemistry as the couple, and Kingsley flip-flops between sinister and benign. All of this helps craft an uneasy sense that we can’t trust anything we see. The desolate, snowy scenery is matched against the cramped, claustrophobic confines of the train to deliver a thriller that moves single-minded about the business of fraying our nerves. Hitchcock would be proud of this one.

Ravenous-

Foreboding and gritty, Ravenous is half thriller, half dark comic farce. All of it is revolting in a thematic way. Guy Pearce and Robert Carlyle play two opposing forces battling it out at a military outpost in the Sierra Nevadas circa 1847. Pearce is Boyd, a disgraced soldier sent to the fort as punishment by his superior, and Carlye is  Colqhoun, a pioneer whose party was lost in the wilderness and went cannibalistic. Colqhoun is the only survivor and he finds he not only has a taste for human flesh, but in keeping with Native American legend, he can absorb his victim’s power. The stage is set for all kinds of dark hi jinks as Carlyle starts eating his way through the outpost, and making converts as he goes. The cinematography is stunning and beautiful and director Bird captures several disconcerting shots of suspicious meat cooking on the stove. A thoughtful and cheerfully gross horror movie that will help curb that winter desire to snack all day.

Misery-

Got cabin fever? Well, no one handles the idea of cabin fever or interior isolation better than Stephen King, who has two titles on this list. There’s even a snowstorm in this one, albeit it mostly serves as a plot device to keep James Caan’s Paul Sheldon in the helpless care of the psychopathic Annie Wilkes, played to passive-aggressive perfection by Kathy Bates. What Annie does to Paul over the course of months he is in her ‘care’ ranges from subversively funny to downright harrowing. If you ever end up house bound as a result of the weather, or have to hole up for an extended period of time with company that isn’t exactly cheerful, just remember Sheldon’s misfortunes and that hot cocoa will taste all the sweeter. To this day, I can’t watch that scene involving the sledgehammer and Caan’s ankles without turning away.

Cold Prey-

A Swedish production and little known here in the US, Cold Prey is one of the best slasher films in recent memory and the arctic setting has almost everything to do with that. A couple of ski buddies head up to a remote and abandoned (aren’t they always?) resort in the mountains and there they find a force bent on dispatching them one by one. I gave up on dead teenager movies ages ago, but the style and suspense of Cold Preyreally works. The snow-capped mountains and ice glaciers are a spectacular canvas upon which to splash a little blood and viscera. The killer, a hulking giant in a snow parka, is a satisfying villain and among the ranks of the hapless youngsters, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal proves she can swing an ice-pick with the best of them. The perfect remedy for that long-distance ski vacation you’ve been planning. The film also has a sequel which manages to be similarly unnerving.

Runaway Train-

Based on a screenplay by the legendary Akira Kurosawa, Runaway Train is an action spectacle that never lets up and what really makes it sing are the performances by Jon Voight and Eric Roberts and the dazzling, snowy landscapes that the train hurtles through as it heads towards it’s destination. Runaway Train has a harsh, near existential quality to it that distinguishes it from other thrillers of the same era. Voight and Roberts, as two prisoners trying to make a getaway, are seemingly up against the whole universe in their bid for freedom. Although there’s much that feels metaphorical, the frozen, craggy wasteland that these men are thrust into pushes reality and consequence front and center. Intelligent, emotional and entertaining, Runaway Train is the perfect popcorn thriller for a cold afternoon.

A Simple Plan-

Quite possibly Sam Raimi’s best movie, and probably one of the most underrated, A Simple Plan captures the melancholy and eerie loneliness that can accompany a long winter. Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton are brothers who stumble upon a bag of money in a downed plane while they are out hunting. With Paxton’s wife Bridget Fonda, playing lady Macbeth, Paxton, Thornton and a family friend conspire to keep the money for themselves and then things begin to go amiss and haywire. A treatise on greed and the dangerous nature of moral compromise, A Simple Plan is heartbreaking in its emotional depiction of a family pulling apart in the face of temptation. Thornton, particularly, is poignant as a man who isn’t terribly bright, but is enough so that he understands how it is exactly that he doesn’t fit in. Paxton is compelling as a good man driven quickly and devastatingly from the path. The shivery scenery casts exactly the right funeral pall for the film’s events. Crows dangle menacingly from an icy tree and Thornton muses contemplatively “They eat dead things. What a weird job to have.”

The Shining-

The granddaddy classic of all isolated paranoid thrillers involving winter, Kubrick’s The Shining deviates significantly from the events of King’s book, but it is terrifying and scary nonetheless. Kubrick makes the Overlook a most menacing antagonist through long angle shots, still frames, and tracking scenes that capture the disquieting and the unsettling with no particular fanfare. When evil blossoms in such a potentially mundane scenario, everything becomes charged with fear very quickly. Images of swirling snow, and gently falling flakes have the same effect upon our psyche, and I don’t think there has ever been a more perfect use of interior/exterior contrast where setting is concerned. Forget all of that though, and you still have the main attraction; Jack going crazy and stalking his wife and child with an axe through the art deco halls of the Overlook. The ultimate family dysfunction winter madness medley, this one gets me every time.

The Thing-

This is it, the most distressing and sneaky piece of cold weather paranoia I have ever laid eyes on. John Carpenter designs a foreboding atmosphere with this Antarctic base camp and the star ship long frozen in the snow. It adopts all of the functions of the original Howard Hawks movie but it skews more closely to the short story “Who Goes There?” when it comes the shape-shifting identity of the monster. Kurt Russell testing the blood with fire to determine who among the crew isn’t what he appears to be is spine-tingling tension at its very best. The gooey fx that include a head on spindly spider legs, mutated husky dogs, and Wilford Brimley trying to eat his coworkers are still neat all these years later. I also appreciate the way the weather conditions are presented as merciless and dangerous, and don’t take a side seat once the alien terror shows up. There are few horror movies that work as well as The Thing and fewer still that stick with us when they are over.

How about you? Is there a particular movie that evokes the icy dread of winter? Any titles I missed that help reinforce that feeling of unease when the white stuff starts falling? Share with us below!

Horror comedy enthusiasts, behold!

First your patron saint Raimi returns with Drag Me to Hell, and now Norwegian Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow comes shambling onto DVD to revive the slap-stick scare routine of the incomparable Evil Dead 2.

And for anyone with a zombie fetish or just a plain weird sense of humor (or both), the film’s ’big idea’ is that its vacationing med students are set upon by legions of the Nazi undead. In a year when the Nazi has resurfaced as a go-to symbol of evil and moral compromise, Snow goes hog wild with the concept; the zombies are rotting, ferocious cadavers in full battle attire, led by a menacing officer in SS uniform.

Dead Snow has a lot of fun with its basic premise and its ambitions are very simple: deliver a goofy good time that pays tribute to the endless parade of genre titles that have come before it. It works because of skillful production and a Puckish attitude that freely pokes and prods the audience as often as it jolts and shocks them. There is ZERO subtlety used and absolutely no substance to the overall story. But unlike other horror-comedy misfires like Jennifer’s Body, Dead Snow understands that humor and zany contrivance require a certain finesse and patience.

Ultimately, it’s a little too patient for its own good, never really taking off into the stratosphere of insanity until its final twenty minutes. But fans of horror and schlock will get exactly what they are looking for from Dead Snow; well-timed thrills, visually inventive action sequences and a gore and dismemberment factor that leaves biological accuracy behind for Looney Tunes town. I was resisting the movie for its first half hour, but when I saw one of the heroes dangling Cliffhanger style over a dangerous precipice, clutching onto nothing more than miles and miles of a zombie’s intestines, I just gave up and went with it. And in the end, I was glad I did.

The plot is by the numbers horror fodder. Four guys and four girls are scheduled to meet up at a cabin in ski country. One them arrives early to prepare the place for the others. When the rest arrive, she’s nowhere to be found and inside the cabin the group discovers a box of old coins. Later, a grizzled old vagabond shows up (as they often do in this type of film) and tells them the story of a Nazi unit who terrorized the nearby town and were driven off and trapped in a cave by the angry citizens. The creepy passerby rolls up, issues the odd warning, lights a joint and puts it out in a cup of coffee, snags a beer and then heads on his way. Shortly thereafter, the last remnants of the Third Reich drop by the cabin and before you can say “Great Gallons of Gore, Batman!” legs are being gnawed, zombie torsos mashed and heads removed for a bracing game of hot potato.

The first hour or so of Dead Snow progresses exactly like a typical slasher film with the usual stock characters; sensitive guy, fat movie geek(complete with a Brain Deadt-shirt), jock girl who has one crippling weakness (claustrophobia) waiting to be exploited. The zombies get a slow reveal and a scene involving the drifter’s campsite and an ominous shape in a parka is one of the creepier moments in recent horror pictures. The film’s ickiest sequence doesn’t even involve guts but a rendezvous between the movie geek and his prospective gal in an outhouse; zombies are roaming the woods around them, but I could only cringe and think “he hasn’t washed his hands!”

Lots of Dead Snow is like that; disarming. Whether it’s an out of the blue, spoken in English, reference to Indiana Jones or an extension of scenes we think are finished (at one point we assume one of the students and a zombie have fallen to their deaths only to realize they are both buried under the snow, alive and in biting proximity of each other) Snow keeps pulling old but reliable rabbits out of its hat. There is absolutely nothing here I haven’t seen before, including the Nazi zombies, but the style with which it is assembled makes all the difference.

The weakest aspect of Dead Snow is its characters. They are developed in all of the usual ways, but for the first half of the film we barely know anything about them or their personalities. We don’t care at all, and some of them are dead before we do. By the middle and definitely by the finale, we are invested in them and cheer on two of the bolder guys who make a desperate charge on the entire zombie army while a Norwegian pop song blares in the background. But because of this hesitation to invest, the film feels relatively flat, only springing to life in time for it all to end. It’s competent and entertaining throughout, but the second half is so good that I wish it had found its legs and its tone earlier.

If you enjoy crazy B-movies or thrillers that aren’t afraid to laugh at and with themselves then you might want to consider Dead Snow. It’s hardly original in content, but it is inspired in the execution ( pun fully intended). Wirkola and company accomplish exactly the kind of thing Eli Roth tries and fails at; this is drive-in silliness at its most entertaining.  It doesn’t do a whole lot with the concept of the zombies being Nazis, but their dark grey outfits contrasting against the chilly winter scenery is truly striking and evokes the sensibility of a graphic novel. It also provides the basis for one of the funniest bits in the film. When one of the med students is bitten, and acting on advice from the film geek decides to conduct emergency surgery on his arm, his friend intervenes. “Wait, is that necessary?” he asks. “Isn’t your mother’s father Jewish? I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t want to recruit someone like you!”

Dead Snow is now available on DVD and Bluray.

Rating: ★★★½☆ 

Now that director Sam Raimi (Drag Me To Hell, Spiderman) is officially off of Spiderman 4–it seems that Sony has gone with 500 Days of Summer helmer Marc Webb – there’s much speculation in the geek realm about what comes next.

The die-hard Raimi nerds are no doubt clamoring for Evil Dead 4, but in recent weeks it has appeared that the big budget fantasy adaptation of World of Warcraft is going to be Sam’s next project. Today, via the rumor mill, comes word of another project that the director might be putting his hands on soon; The Shadow.

Raimi has been on tap as producer of the new version, being penned by  Slavash Farahani, since 2007. Sources are citing however, that he’s now interested in possibly directing the movie himself.

That’s right. If these rumors prove to be true, the man who brought us Spiderman will be taking us into the world of The Shadow, a character whose crime-fighting history not 0nly outdates the webslinger but the dark knight as well. Originally appearing on July 31st, 1930 as the mysterious narrator of the Street and Smith Detective Hour, The Shadow rose to fame via a series of novels, comic books, films and serialized programs.

Immortalized in print by the pulp writer Walter B. Gibson, The Shadow followed the adventures of Kent Allard who took on the alias of playboy Lamont Cranston and fought crime by moonlight as the mind-bending Shadow, whose tagline suggested that he ‘knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.’ Existing both in the light of the 30′s era social scene and the criminal underbelly of New York, Cranston shared similarities with his contemporary Kit Walker, and later characters like Bruce Wayne and Denny Colt.

In 1994, Highlander director Russell Mulcahy headed up a big-budget adaptation of The Shadow that starred Alec Baldwin, John Lone, Penelope Ann Miller, Ian McKellan and Tim Curry. Although lost in the shuffle of July, where The Lion King, True Lies and Speed were still burning up the box office, Mulcahy’s film is actually a pretty good rendition of the source material. Borrowing heavily from Burton’s Batman and Raimi’s own Darkman, Baldwin’s Shadow was both a darker and more humorous character than the Cranston of the radio plays.

With a compelling backstory–Cranston struggles with his own dark urges and sordid past– and a wealth of history and mythology to draw from, one can only imagine what  Raimi might do with The Shadow.

I, for one, am excited. A fantasy/suspense period piece with a superhero at its center and directed by the same guy who gave us Army of Darkness and A Simple Plan could be quite something. Personally, I’m more interested in what Raimi could bring to the table of this potential franchise than anything that’s been discussed regarding World of Warcraft.

Atomic Popcorn will keep you updated on this project, while I secretly keep my fingers crossed hoping we can get Bruce ‘The Chin’ Campbell as Lamont Cranston.

Up-and-coming indie director Marc Webb has officially signed on to helm Sony’s proposed reboot of the Spider-Man series, following previous director Sam Raimi’s departure from the hit franchise.

Webb is best known for last year’s breakout Sundance hit, (500) Days Of Summer and countless music videos and commercials. This would be his first film with a major studio, and coming fresh off the unique visual touches of Summer, the movie world is now curious to see what he can bring to the ongoing story of your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

The Sam Raimi-led Spider-Man trilogy, beginning in 2002 and running through 2007′s third installment, was one of the highest-grossing and most profitable film franchises in history, setting countless records and helping to keep the box office strong in a particularly trying period for the industry.

The newest addition to the web-slinger’s film canon is reportedly being scripted by James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, this year’s upcoming The Losers,) and is tentatively scheduled for a 2012 release.

Just because Tobey Maguire is hanging up his Spidey suit doesn’t mean Sony Pictures is through with the franchise. Following in the current Hollywood trend, Sony is preparing a Spider-Man reboot for 2012.

Apparently two versions of Spider-Man were in the works simultaneously. The call to focus on the reboot came when director Sam Raimi failed to come to terms with a script for Spider-Man IV’s summer 2011 release date.

Sony’s contingency plan for the franchise puts Peter Parker back in high school, allowing for more films than Maguire, age 35, could offer. In this new version, Parker will get his abilities while tackling puberty.

Fans have been waiting three years for Spider-Man IV, but does this really count? Will Peter Parker be better this time around, or are you going to miss Maguire? What are your thoughts?

Inexorable: Not capable of being persuaded by entreaty.

We’ve known for some time that Sam Raimi was either in-talks, or had signed-on to direct the inevitable World of Warcraft film.

New bits of information have been revealed through an interview with MTV, and then collected in an article linked at the source below.  Robert Rodat, screenwriter of Saving Private Ryan and The Patriot has been commissioned to write the screenplay, which may or may not have the working title of:  Warcraft: The Rise Of The Lich King.  Not only do the fine folk at movieguys.org believe this title will change in the near future, I do as well.

Raimi and company anticipate a release for this film sometime in 2011, which further confirms that Spidermen 4 & 5 will NOT be filmed back to back, which would have been awesome.

Stay tuned for more info as we have it on the upcoming release of World of Warcraft: Whatever it will be named!

Well folks, no need to wonder any longer. Spider-Man 4 director Sam Raimi has reportedly decided on at least one villain to throw at Spider-Man.

Completely blowing out of the water the numerous villains whose names had been tossed around to be Spider-Man’s potential nemesis in the fourth film, Raimi is going with Black Cat as the foe in Spider-Man 4.

While Black Cat was certainly not one of the names that came up in speculation about the movie’s villain, the choice is anything but random.

Raimi follows a strict rule when it comes to choosing his villains: the character can’t just be a threat to Spider-Man, but also has to somehow be linked to Peter Parker’s life. Black Cat fits this rule perfectly.

In the Spider-Man comic series, Black Cat is the cat burglar alter ego of Felicia Hardy, who at one time was Peter Parker’s girlfriend (before Mary Jane, of course), and goes from being a villain to eventually being a consistent ally to Spider-Man.

No actress has been officially cast as Black Cat yet, but word is that Rachel McAdams is being seriously considered for the part. Casting is also in the works to find a male actor to play a second, as of yet unrevealed, villain for the movie.