Majin Planet

Montreal gets a big-budget boom with three movie shoots

The 20th Century Fox is expected to shoot three big-budget movies in Montreal over the next year; The films are a Night at the Museum sequel Another Night, Roland Emmerich's remake of the sci-fi flick Fantastic Voyage, and a big-screen adaptation of Dragon Ball Z! Each has a budget of over $100 million.

Another Night is the follow-up to the family film directed by former Montrealer Shawn Levy, which grossed $250 million at the North American box office last year. Like the first film, the sequel will once again be set at New York's Museum of Natural History and will feature many of the same characters, including the nightwatchman played by Ben Stiller. Robin Williams, who played Theodore Roosevelt, is also expected to be back.

The ironic twist for Montreal is that the first Night at the Museum was set to shoot here, and local crews had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building sets at Mel's Cité du Cinéma studios. But the shoot was moved to Vancouver at the last minute to accommodate Stiller's schedule.

Emmerich, who shot the 2004 weather-gone-wacko epic The Day After Tomorrow in Montreal, will be back in town for Fantastic Voyage, an update of the 1966 film that starred Raquel Welch. It is about a scientist who is dying of a blood disorder. A group of his colleagues attempt to save him by being shrunk down, put in a miniature ship and injected into his bloodstream.

Emmerich's own company, Centropolis Entertainment, will be producing in partnership with James Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment. Emmerich tried to make this film 10 years ago, but it didn't come to fruition.

Dragonball Z is adapted from the manga created by Akira Toriyama; the work was also turned into a Japanese anime series that played all over the world. It tells the story of an alien sent to destroy Earth, who has a change of heart and decides to join the humans in their fight against various aliens and bad guys.

There are no details yet as to when these three shoots will begin, but they are expected to wrap production by next July.


BRENDAN KELLY, The Gazette
Published: Saturday, September 01
bkelly@thegazette.canwest.com

Source: The Montreal Gazette

well i hope this time the DBZ movie is more than just a rumor with a big start

I dunno about DBZ, how would that work? The hair is gonna look ridiculous.

I'll believe it when I see it. I looked at other news sites and no one reported on it so until some kind of real news site reports on this then I may believe their going to make it. Personally a Dragonball Z movie would be no where near ready to shoot.

Being that I've followed a number of movies over the years it's extremely hard to keep something like that secret. First they have to write a script which generally would create buzz being how the first rumors of the movie back in 2002. Next they have to get someone to direct it and generally once they do it gets reported some where along with casting and locations. In Hollywood you can't keep anything secret.

For the first two films there, Night I doubt it be any good. The kind of movie that it was is a one shot and doing another one will just mess it up and it'll end up sucking. The other one I don't know much about to really comment on. The only cool thing about this news is that people will now flock here to ask if the rumors are true and being that I surf a number of movie sites both fan and officially daily looking for news on other movies I'll pick up on if this DBZ rumor is real and you can be sure I'll flood the site with news and updates on it.

Up Darth look at the source. It is a real news site.

Yes I see that. What I met was I haven't seen the news on any other news movie site yet. Which is odd that something like this would be kept so quite. But then again it is an anime and maybe most movie sites saw it and didn't report it thinking it was fake, but you know the transformers movie did really well and its base off anime so I don't see why it wouldn't be seen a real. I mean I've seen a number of times of news being posted and it turning out to be fake.

I think it's real. But since it doesn't have a directer and stuff yet, it probably won't be announced on a lot of sites yet.

I agree on NU with Night, that was a one shot deal and it was good, but another movie would just mess things up.

Fantastic Voyage.. I havent seen this movie but I've heard about it. It could possibly work if it were something like a modern adaptation of it but I'm not sure if people want to pay money to see a remake.

Seriously..Dragonball Z again? I mean the rumors seem to die out and then they spring up again suddenly. It's unlikely they're going to make a live-action adaptation to DBZ, maybe an animated movie with a totally different story or a cgi movie with the original voice cast but otherwise the looks are going to be off, but this is just cause we've only seen DBZ in no other format but animation, manga, or videogames. If the live-action adaptation is this time real then more power to them I say, just dont screw it up and I'll be happy. Hell they did it with Transformers, but then those were robots, and humans that looked normal to everyday life. With DBZ we're talking about Saiyans with crazy looking hairstyles and flight and energy blasts. This should be a little harder to pull off and do it well but depending on the director they attain for the movie I think they might be able to do it, that is if it's not another false news report like we've heard of oh so many times in the past.

weve seen DBZ in no other forum but animation however we have seen a DRAGON BALL live action movie (IMG:http://community.majin-planet.com//style_emoticons/majinplanet2//tongue.gif) Good old japanesse low budget films.

Yea, but seriously that was like.. back in the 80s and oolong wasnt even a pig as far as I saw, he was just a chubby human =P

If they can actually get the right cast and crew for the production of DBZ I think it'll be okay. But then they could also take DBZ fans for morons and think they can make it as crappy as possible and we'll still go and see it. You just never know. When I see a teaser trailer made for DBZ movie that isnt fan-made I'll believe they're making a DBZ movie, but till then I'll continue to treat it as it's always been treated: as a rumor and nothing more

Personally with today's movie magic, a DBZ movie wouldn't be very hard to make. If I was going to head a movie like this the first thing I do is keep it as close to the manga as I could (not anime) follow the story and cut stuff that is not needed but wont effect future story lines. I would then go with mostly unknown actors. After all DBZ is not known for great writing so it wont be bad if the acting is not great nor if the screenplay is good. It have to be something long the lines of what they did with Transformers. It wasn't really about deep writing either.

The next thing is you have to make sure every attack and fight has the look and feel of what fans know and love. You have to start the fights off in the first act to be too fast to watch and this would not only show you how fast they really move but to save on CGI cost. But keep it simple for the early fight. Then after the mid way point threw Gohan's eyes learn how to watch the fights fast and then you can show them slow and only show them extremely fast when needed to add to the shots.

The backgrounds would have to be almost 90% CGI like done in star wars with maybe getting away with on location shots for some of the fights like with Goku/Piccolo vs Raditz and Vegeta vs Goku. The movie needs to be 3 hours long or under, anything longer (such as 4 hours as the rumors always said) would be too long and would cost too much.

A movie like DBZ has one thing and one thing only, look nothing more. While its cool to think about some high up actors out there to play these roles, the cost to pay them would kill the movie. Having unknowns would keep it low (be sure to sign them for a 4 picture deal Vegeta/Frieza/Cell/Buu) I say more then 75% of the budget would need to go to special effect shots and for it to be great the budget would need to be 200Mill or more dare I say 300Mill.

Personally on the hair, it not a deal breaker, as long as their hair looks some what close to what the hair would look like if real. Such as Raditz could have extremely long hair but maybe not all the way down his back. That's just my input on it. Funny thing is back in 2002 I felt the same way about it all. My only difference was that I thought the shots of them fighting would be hard being that no movie to date had been able to do such high render shots in light (was always at night or some sort of cover) but after seeing transformers it shows that when you put your budget into the shots and not sets or actors you can get some really good shots done.

The closest thing I pictured hair being like in DBZ was spiked up hair with gel. But in DBZ the spikes are so chunky, it'd look ridiculous in real life.

With the action stuff, yeah, I believe that's definately possible. You just need to have good effects and shots. It's the character's look that worries me the most.

As I said, if they can give us 90% of the look and feel I'd be happy. Even if the hair didn't look right or was off, as long as when they get into classic shots like Super Saiyan the hair looks right. They could get the super saiyan hair with out much work, as when I was around 19 and I had much shortter hair I could spike my hair up some what. Even some of my friends use to laugh saying I had Teen Gohan's hair.

HAHA! Lot of other movie news sites are now reporting the story. Funny we had it 2nd! LOL. I guess just because I'm going to make Dragonball Z Countdown section.

It will happen eventually, DBZ is too popular for it to not happen. As for if it's going to be good or not ...they may have to tweak it a bit for it to work. I mean, there is hope since the transformers movie didn't suck too bad.

Now for the Evangelion movie! (IMG:style_emoticons/majinplanet2/grin.png)

I really feel that if they are going to be able to make the DBZ movie right, they should try and do one of the already made movies. To try and condense a Saga down to three hours would cut out too much and would put our expectations too high. I know alot of people want don't want to go pay money to see something they could see already in animated format, but it makes things simpler and allows them to concentrate on more important things, like the real reason we want to see it, excellent looking live action fighting. I'm not sure if anyone agrees with me, but what do you guys think?

There is an update, this was posted by IGN's news report of the above news.

"UPDATED: 20th Century Fox has informed IGN that this report cannot be confirmed as neither start dates nor locations are locked in at this point."

So at least we know that they are doing it and that this is not a rumor. However some light has been shown that now has me extremely worried in how good this movie will be.

"It looks like 20th Century Fox is rushing the long-awaited live-action movie adaptation of Dragon Ball Z into production before the looming industry strikes happen next year."

I bold the parts I am worried about. I think it speaks for themselves. Your thoughts?

It's obvious it won't live up to it's full potential if it's rushed. It kinda worries me too. T_T

well given the track record, the above states filming, which for a movie like this you have to think their be lot more computer rendering work then film. So they could get all the filming done in a short time and then spend the next year of filming. It all depends on when they set the release date. So if their going to be done next July, a movie like this be a summer movie so we would see likely a release in summer 2009.

Ok, summer 2009 sounds good to me. I didn't understand the bold part in your post, though.