“Yellow Submarine” is going to need a new port of call.
A day after “Mars Needs Moms,” a computer-animated comedy produced by “Yellow Submarine” director Robert Zemeckis, bombed at the box office, Disney confirmed that it was not planning on making the remake of the Beatles musical.
A person close to the production who was not authorized to speak publicly said Disney made the decision to scuttle the project several months ago, not after the $150-million “Mars Needs Moms” grossed a disastrous $6.9 million in its first weekend of release. News of “Yellow Submarine” being shut down was first reported Monday by the Hollywood Reporter.
Disney last year closed Zemeckis and producing partner Jack Rapke’s ImageMovers Digital, the outfit that made both “Mars Needs Moms” and “A Christmas Carol.” But even after the closure, Zemeckis was developing the remake of the iconic 1968 animated movie at Disney. Cary Elwes, who was set to voice the role of George Harrison, said late last year that he expected filming to begin in April.
Like “Mars Needs Moms” and “Avatar,” the remake of “Yellow Submarine” was going to be made using motion-capture technology, which takes the physical and facial performances of live actors and maps them onto an animated character. A spokesman for Zemeckis could not immediately be reached.

— John Horn

Photo of orignal production of "Yellow Submarine": MGM Home Entertainment Inc.

If you've caught any of the promotion for "Mars Needs Moms," you're probably under the impression that Seth Green has a major role in the Robert Zemeckis-produced science-fiction movie that opens Friday.

After all, Green's name and cartoon visage are featured on the poster for the 3-D performance-capture film, and the actor has made appearances on behalf of the animated movie, posing on the red carpet at the film's premiere and sitting for an interview on "Conan." Casual fans could be forgiven for thinking he voiced his character, the 9-year-old Milo.

But while Green's movement is represented in the movie, his voice never is.

During production, the star acted as he would in any performance-capture movie, which requires actors to move in special sensor-equipped suits. Green spent six weeks outfitted in a uniform to play the child protagonist whose mother is kidnapped by Martians (you can see a shot of the get-up above), while also simultaneously performing his lines. 

But during the post-production process, in which animators used computer imaging to shape the character, filmmakers noticed an issue. Green was able to physically embody a 9-year-old -- imitating the movements and behaviors of a child -- but his voice sounded too mature for the character. So they decided to hire an unknown child actor, Seth Dusky, 11, to come in and record all of Milo's lines over Green's initial recording. (Dusky's name is not featured on the poster.)

It's fun to count how many times the word "prom" is mentioned, printed, flashed and otherwise promoted in this new trailer for "Prom," the Disney movie about same.

Then again, the film's title has an elegant simplicity: As the trailer makes clear, this is about, no surprise, a  collection of couples and quasi-couples taking the tentative steps toward the high-school rite of passage. (Kudos to the studio for dropping in at least a few characters who don't look like they walked in from an Abercrombie catalog shoot.)

As for the quality of said film, it's hard to tell from the group of mostly unknowns cast in this low(er)-budget Disney production if we're looking at a more wholesome update of "American Pie" or a higher-end Disney Channel movie. There are signs of both, from the glossy look (the former) to the acting (the latter).

Either way, there's something quaint about "Prom," from its obsession over who's asking whom to the big dance to the absence of anything resembling social media, cellphones or other technological advances from the last 15 years. Even the wrong-side-of-the-track guys feels like a throwback, a (more sanitized) version  of  Emilio Estevez's Andrew Clark from "The Breakfast Club."

The movie hits at the end of April, when countless prom-stressed teenagers will (Disney hopes) look to a movie theater for guidance and vicarious relief.

--Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: "Prom." Credit: Richard Foreman Jr. / Disney

EXCLUSIVE: Disney theme-park attractions couldn't be hotter as Hollywood source material.  "Pirates of the Caribbean" is about to crank out its fourth installment. Jon Favreau is turning "Magic Kingdom" into a family-friendly extravaganza. "Haunted Mansion" will be an on-screen spookfest courtesy of Guillermo del Toro.

In fact, they're so hot that even an attraction that was never built could become a movie.

The Museum of the Weird, an idea that Walt Disney liked back in the 1960s but that never got off the ground, looks to be headed for the development pipeline.

Disney is in discussions for a movie based on the museum with screenwriter Ahmet Zappa, according to a source close to the project. Zappa, son of Frank, is also developing a movie for Disney that may or may not be inspired by its Enchanted Tiki Room attraction. [Update, Wednesday 3:42 p.m.: A Disney spokesman said that no senior executives at the studio had discussed the project with Zappa.]

A half-century ago, well-known Disney theme park creators Rolly Crump and Claude Coats designed the Museum of the Weird with the idea of spotlighting a parade of ghostly organists, magic carts, talking chairs and other surreal exhibits. Walt Disney wanted to use the museum as an adjunct to the Haunted Mansion, complete with its own restaurant. But the museum was never built, though some of the more ambitious pieces were incorporated into the mansion itself.

Zappa's idea is for the museum to be refashioned as a film — given the kinds of whimsical creations Crump and Coats planned, it's hard not to think of "Night at the Museum" or "The Mummy" — with an attraction to follow. It's still in very early development, though, so don't expect it in multiplexes anytime soon.

Under its new leadership, Disney seems to be taking a two-pronged approach to movies. It's getting into business with top-tier filmmakers (add David Fincher and Tim Burton to Del Toro and Favreau) even as it's putting chips down on seemingly as many theme park attractions as possible and trying to merchandise more than ever. The net effect: a studio slate that's a strange combination of stubbornly visionary and explicitly marketing-driven.

— Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: Crump designing the Museum of the Weird. Credit: Reuters.

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The hairy task of creating Rapunzel's hair in 'Tangled'

  When long, golden tresses are your only means of escaping a prison tower, eluding an abusive mother and rescuing the handsome thief who has promised to take you on your first road trip, a bad hair day is not an option. To ensure that Rapunzel never split an end in the new film “Tangled,” Walt Disney Animation Studios unleashed a small army of digital stylists -- a team of more than 30 animators and software engineers -- that Vidal Sassoon himself would envy.

When it comes to computer generated animation, hair is, well, hairy. Computers have trouble when objects collide, and Rapunzel's hair is made up of more than 100,000 objects (i.e. strands) that bump into one another, sweep over her shoulders, slide across the ground and crash into other characters in moments of both embrace and defense. As character-generated animated characters go, Rapunzel is Mt. Everest, and "Tangled" a sign of how high the medium has climbed since shiny, hairless toy characters populated the original "Toy Story" in 1995. "This is a progression of the art form," says Jerry Beck, animation historian and editor of the site Cartoon Brew. "The difference with 'Tangled' is that the hair is a character unto itself."

Long hair is costly in terms of computing power and technicians’ time, which is why most female CG characters wear their hair in a bob or a Lara Croft-style braid. In the case of “Tangled,” a wash-and-go 'do was out of the question. Rapunzel’s famously magical hair had to remind the audience of the character’s vast, untapped potential.

EXCLUSIVE: Fans of  "Tron: Legacy" who are eagerly awaiting that movie next month could soon be in for another Disney futuristic thriller.

According to two sources who've been briefed on the film, the studio is working on a live-action techno-thriller titled  "Hovercar" -- a movie about a hovercar racer (yes, it's a real job) tasked with escorting an informant to safety as the two come under fire from corrupt government operatives (a setup that will no doubt allow for plenty of "Tron"-like chase scenes).

Video and commercials director Fredrik Bond -- he's worked with Moby, among others -- is one of the directors who's being looked at to direct the film, and the up-and-coming writer Blaise Hemingway will write it, the sources said.

Disney declined to comment.

Based on an online serial that turned into a popular young-adult book series from the Australian novelist Matthew Reilly , the property was actually set up at Disney six years ago with the creators responsible for "Smallville," who remain involved. But "Hovercar" has now been restarted and put back on track, with all the attendant puns that implies.

Like "Tron," the film will be in 3-D. And like "Tron," there will be merchandising possibilities -- in this case, we imagine, cars along the lines of, well, "Cars." So there's a certain logic to it.

Reilly's story lines, developed over the course of several books, contain a series of discrete challenges and adventures that some fans have compared to Harry Potter. Which, given the mad dash in Hollywood to find a replacement for that franchise, we suppose provides "Hovercar" with a different type of logic.

-- Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

 Photo: 'Hover Car Racer' book jacket. Credit: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

EXCLUSIVE: "Pirates of the Caribbean" is one of the most successful franchises in the history of Disney. But when it comes to classic action-adventure, the company that Walt built isn't stopping with Jack Sparrow.

The studio is developing an adventure film from a script by Ahmet Zappa -- yes, son of Frank -- that's set against a Polynesian backdrop.

Sources close to the project said Zappa and writing partner Michael Wilson were inspired by Disneyland's Enchanted Tiki Room in writing the script. A Disney spokesperson, however, said the project is not an adaptation of the attraction and is merely an action-adventure that mixes in Polynesian mythology.

While not the first attraction one thinks of when one thinks of Disneyland, Enchanted Tiki Room does offer a colorful setting for a movie. The attraction, built in the early 1960s, has patrons entering a room filled with Disney musical ditties and animatronic macaws and other flora and fauna, a bit of Polynesia amid the hub-bub of the park. (It was one the first animatronic attractions, and one said to be close to Walt Disney's heart.) There's not much known mythology behind the Tiki Room -- but then again, there wasn't much of one on "Pirates" either.

Zappa, the musician and media personality who has a deal with Disney, is seeing some other movie projects heat up too: "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" writer Peter Hedges is set to make the Jennifer Garner fantasy "The Odd Life of Timothy Green," based on Zappa's script.

Even if Disney winds up keeping anything related to Enchanted Tiki Room out of its movie, there would still be the opportunity to cross-promote the film with the attraction, as well as launch other spinoff properties (the kind of cross-pollination the studio is increasingly intent on doing).

Disney is going in a cinematic direction with a number of attractions, with the fourth movie in the "Pirates" series coming up next year and Guillermo del Toro taking another crack at developing the "Haunted Mansion" attraction into a horror picture. Not to mention "Tron," the upcoming remake that has seen themed-attractions popping up across Disneyland this fall. When you have the rides, might as well make them into movies, and make the movies into pretty much everything else.

--Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: Walt Disney in the Enchanted Tiki Room. Credit: Disney Parks.

The answer: many, at least as far as Hollywood is concerned.

The movie business has been scrambling for the past several months to bring the classic fairy tale — most famously incarnated 73 years ago in Disney's first feature-length animated film — back to the big screen.

Now we're getting closer to seeing a new version. Or three new versions.

The upstart distributor Relativity confirmed Monday afternoon that the commercials director Tarsem Singh — he of the sweeping "The Fall" a few years back — will be directing the company's version of the fairy tale. The movie is a more classic take on the Brothers Grimm story (about a beautiful princess who is forced to flee her evil stepmother and then takes refuge with titular little people, of course). Singh is finishing up his swords-and-sandals film "Immortals" and then will get to the land of princes and evil queens.

As Disney's "Secretariat" gallops into theaters this weekend, the film provides some fodder for horse racing enthusiasts to nitpick. Many movies based on real events, it seems, distort at least some of the story under the imprimatur of dramatic license, but racing movies about real horses often seem to be at the front of that pack.

"Phar Lap," a 1983 Australian picture about a tragic wonder horse from Down Under, was a notable exception -- one reason it is still considered one of the best racing films ever made. 

On the other hand, both Seabiscuit movies played with the truth. "The Story of Seabiscuit" (1949) is perhaps the worst horse movie ever made. Its story is virtually cut from whole cloth, with Barry Fitzgerald as a trainer mumbling profundities and Shirley Temple trying to keep up with a badly done Irish accent. The 2003 film "Seabiscuit," which was nominated for a best picture Oscar, contained inaccuracies; it said, for instance, that Seabiscuit arch-rival War Admiral was a much bigger horse, when in reality the two were about the same size.

More recently, in a TV movie about the great filly Ruffian, racing fans were quick to notice that most of the horses playing the star had male equipment underneath.
                                                                                             
Some other notable racing movies include "Champions," made in Britain in 1984; "The Killing," Stanley Kubrick's seminal film from 1956; and "Premieres Armes," a little-known picture from France in 1950.

Walt Disney Studios Chairman Rich Ross was feeling his oats.

A year into the job, Ross suggested it would be exciting to have a horse at Wednesday’s screening of the studio’s holiday film offerings, to promote to the press Disney’s “Secretariat,” which opens Oct. 8. Faster than you can say Triple Crown, a thoroughbred appeared on the grass in front of the theater, where Disney showed a trailer of the racing drama.

“I ask for a horse, I get a horse,” Ross said, as he took the stage at Disney’s main theater.

The studio then showed about 25 minutes of "Tron: Legacy" (more on that presentation here) and also screened a nearly complete version of its Nov. 24 animated movie, "Tangled."

Disney is making a big bet on "Tangled," an animated retelling of the Rapunzel fairy tale that Ross labeled "a comedy adventure very much off the grid."

Directors Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, who worked together on “Bolt” and replaced original director Glen Keane on "Tangled," oversaw a complete remake of the film (it was initially called "Rapunzel," but the studio worried the title and the original story wouldn't appeal to boys and men) that now plays up the role of the male lead, the bandit Flynn Rider (voiced by Zachary Levi from television's "Chuck").

Even with the new title and some new swashbuckling, the core story remains a tale about an 18-year-old princess (singer Mandy Moore) with magical golden hair who’s trapped in a tower by a cruel woman pretending to be her mother (character actor Donna Murphy) –- and it's a musical, at that.

Greno joked that the reason he and Howard looked so pale was that, like Rapunzel, they had been sequestered indoors for the last two years, feverishly working on the film. The computer-animated movie balances a modern playfulness with elements reminiscent of classic Disney animation, with music by  Alan Menken, composer for “The Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin,” and lyrics by Glenn Slater ("Home on the Range"). 

“When people hear we’re making a contemporary version of this classic tale of Rapunzel, they want to know if it would be cynical,” said Howard. “It’s not. It’s got heart."

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski, John Horn and Claudia Eller

 Photo: "Tangled." Credit: The Walt Disney Co.

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When "Tron" came out 28 years ago, it was hailed as a visual spectacle and a technological marvel, but was written off on storytelling and entertainment grounds.

Disney wants to make sure that doesn't happen again.

In a presentation on the studio's lot Wednesday afternoon, "Tron: Legacy" director Joseph Kosinski showed more than 20 minutes of footage from the alternate-reality adventure that's being released Dec. 17, a straight-up sequel to the flash-heavy original.

In the new film, Jeff Bridges reprises his role as computer programmer Kevin Flynn, who disappeared into a virtual universe back in 1982. The movie treats real time and cinema time as the same, and now, his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) has slipped into that world to find him. (The film also offers the sight of a modern-day Bridges playing against his younger self; when we caught up with him at Comic-Con, Bridges said he starred in it because of that challenge, and because "it's a modern-day myth, and we need more of those.")

Disney is intent on broadening the movie's appeal beyond the sci-faithful, an impulse very much in evidence at Wednesday's presentation. In the pre-screening introduction, Kosinski made his case that the film would appeal to more than just a narrow band of fans. In a turn of phrase that could easily have been used to describe "The Social Network" or "Catfish," he said his film was really about "finding human connection in a digital world."

The scenes did show plenty of visual pizazz as Flynn the younger is thrust into a sleek world that has him dodging Tron's famous discs and engaging in light-streaked chases (you can see the trailer below). But the footage notably included a reunion scene, another indication the studio wants this story to be thought of as much for its emotional pleasures as its visceral ones.

Disney has a lot riding on the 3-D film (not yet rated), which features plenty of cost-intensive effects and goes outside the studio's sweet spot of tweens and children that turned films such as "Alice in Wonderland" into blockbusters.  ("Tron: Legacy" producer Sean Bailey is also now Disney's president of production, adding a layer of consequence.)

But even with the movie's populist ambitions, those involved in it say a philosophical aspect is unavoidable. "It's a story about what's authentic and what's inauthentic -- it asks the question 'Is technology going to get between me and my loved ones or is it going to help me get closer to them?'" Steven Lisberger, who wrote and directed the original and served as a producer on this one, told 24 Frames at Comic-Con.

Kosinski, meanwhile, told us that he thought the idea of "Tron" had more relevance than ever. "The notion that people have a digital alter ego is not something I think people understood in 1982," he said. "Now it's something we take for granted. The real world has caught up with 'Tron.'"

We'll see if audiences do too.

-- Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

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Photo: Tron: Legacy. Credit: Walt Disney Pictures

As Peter Jackson makes progress -- in theory -- on getting "The Hobbit" moving forward again, Guillermo del Toro has a few things to say about the movie he spent two years developing.

The genre auteur says he has no regrets about departing the New Zealand production, but says that anyone who think that MGM's financial mess was the main culprit for his departure is oversimplifying the issue.

"People kept misconstruing that it was MGM. It came from many factors," Del Toro told 24 Frames in an interview at Comic-Con. "It wasn't just MGM. These are very complicated movies, economically and politically. You have to get the blessing from three studios."
 
Instead, he said, it was the cumulative effect of all of these problems that began to wear him down. "It was really the fact that every six months we thought we were beginning, and every six months we got pushed [back]. And before you could blink, it was a year, and then it was two years."

So was there was a last straw in this bundle of woes? Some insiders have said that Del Toro and Jackson clashed over creative-control issues. The director said that in all their time working on the movie, he and the "Lord of the Rings" filmmaker were nothing but copacetic, though Del Toro didn't entirely rule out that it one day could have become fraught. "We were at the stage where the collaboration was good. If there were going to be any issues, we never got to that stage [in development]," he said.

Del Toro was in San Diego to tout two Disney projects -- a newly announced reboot of "Haunted Mansion," based on the theme-park attraction, and his latest godfather/producer/co-writer project, the Gothic scare-fest "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark," which the studio will release in January.

"Dark," which stars Katie Holmes and remakes a little-known 1973 movie, tells of a young girl who moves into a house with her mother and stepfather and begins to realize there are supernatural beings in the basement who want to pull her down with them. It fits with the themes of Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" and "The Orphanage" (which the filmmaker also godfathered), in which supernatural events reflect more subtle emotional truths.

"We're combining the dark European fairy tales of creatures who would substitute babies, creatures from a world older than ours, and we also borrowed what I think it a very interesting idea from 'The Birds,' where the monsters are a manifestation of the tensions in the family," Del Toro said.  "It's a classic tale with a modern level of intensity."

The genre community has played the game of 'What will Guillermo do (next)?' practically since the moment the auteur left "The Hobbit." While Comic-Con shed light on some of his longer-term projects -- he could eventually direct "Haunted Mansion," he said, but it's not his next movie (Matthew Robbins and he need to write the script first) -- it still left tantalizingly open what he will tackle in the immediate future.

And that future is indeed not far off. In the interview, Del Toro said he would shoot a movie in the first quarter of 2011. The film, he said, was a big movie he'd been writing and developing (so anyone hoping he'd jump on, you know, "Superman: The Man of the Steel" might be disappointed). "It's something that has been with me for a while," he said.

Of course, that still leaves the possibilities pretty open, and gives fans even more to chew on. The new movie could be anything from a new "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde "to a "Van Helsing" reboot to the Roald Dahl adaptation "The Witches" --  but it particularly could be his long-gestating "At the Mountains of Madness," based on the H.P. Lovecraft novella for which he's long professed enthusiasm. We mentioned that title, and Del Toro flashed an impish grin and said, "We'll see."

As for the film he left behind, Del Toro threw his support to the man whom fans have been calling for. "I would love for Peter to direct it." But couldn't that be difficult for Del Toro to watch, knowing it could well have been his own creation? "Parts of it would be, but I'll be really happy to see the designs we did come to life," he said.

Del Toro did still sound a rueful note about his decision to pack his bags and return to Los Angeles without seeing "The Hobbit" through. "It is the hardest professional decision of my life," he said. "I still feel very emotional about it."

-- Steven Zeitchik
twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: Guillermo del Toro. Credit: Miguel Villagran / Associated Press

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