Giant Freakin Robot

The internet is full of really well done Star Wars fan art, so it stands to reason that there is bound to be somebody out there organizing a more professional event for art inspired by George Lucas’ venerable space franchise. If you live in the Seattle area, you can find one for yourself thanks to “Who Shot First?” a Star Wars-themed art show that opens tonight, December 13th, at the Ltd. Art Gallery.

Tron: Legacy star Garrett Hedlund has confirmed that he would be reprising his role as Sam Flynn in the upcoming Tron 3 for Disney. The 28-year-old actor said he was “very excited” about going back to the grid for Tron 3.

When asked about the forthcoming sequel by MTV’s NextMovie.com, Hedlund confirmed his participation in the film, which may start shooting in 2014 for a possible 2015 release date. While in New York City doing press for the film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, co-starring Sam Riley and Kristen Stewart, Hedlund said, “Are we gonna break this now?,” then he added, “You know, yeah, I’m very excited, Disney’s very excited.”

Earlier this week, Disney tapped screenwriter Jesse Wigutow (Eragon, It Runs in the Family) to re-write and punch up the Tron 3 script by David DiGilio (Eight Below). Wigutow is currently working on the film adaptation for Peter and the Starcatcher, featuring iconic characters Peter Pan and Captain Hook for Disney. Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy, Oblivion) is also attached to return as director for Tron 3.

The reveal that Alice Eve will be playing Carol Marcus in the upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness caught a lot of people — including me — by surprise. After someone pointed out her remarkable resemblance to Dr. Elizabeth Dehner from the Original Series episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” many assumed that was who she was playing, and figured that added weight to the argument that Benedict Cumberbatch was indeed playing Gary Mitchell. Some might similarly conclude that the appearance of Carol Marcus proves that Cumberbatch is playing Khan after all. A new interview with Chris Pine suggests that Alice Eve will playing an important role in the sequel, but we probably shouldn’t assume we can reference the original timeline to figure out what that role will be.

Here’s Pine talking to MTV, and we’ll talk more afterwards, for those of you who aren’t someplace where you can watch the clip.

This Friday we will know if the future of cinema will be 48 FPS after the release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Director James Cameron attended the world premiere of the film in Wellington, New Zealand and hopes the new technology will catch on with general audiences. Although filming hasn’t started on the Avatar sequels, the Oscar-winning director is considering shooting both films at the higher frame rate.

In a new interview, visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri, who worked with Peter Jackson on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, says that he believes the future of filmmaking will be with the high-frame-rate format. Letteri and his team at WETA will be working with James Cameron on the Avatar sequels, and he thinks the possibility is high for Cameron to be swayed by the tech. Letteri says:

Jim’s still thinking 60, because it’s a persistence of vision artifacts and to quote Doug Trumbull and the studies he’s done, he says it tends to go away at around 64. I tend to agree with him from the tests we’ve done. We’ve gone to pretty high frame rates and after about 64, the returns are pretty minimal and to tell you the truth, the difference between 48 and 60 is not as noticeable as the difference between 24 and 48 so for practical reasons, we decided to go with 48 because asking the theaters to have projectors and servers that could handle 60 was not really practical in the time frame we had for ‘Hobbit’ plus it would have meant even more work, double the amount of work, that we were already committed to at 48 frames.