Hancock

[Retroman]

More....

Hi-res (spoilerly)....

Spoiler

Source Links: 1 2

 

[Dr Lee]

WTF is going on in the last pic?

 

[Symbiotic]

So who's the villain in the movie?

 

[Mr. Credible]

wow... are people still asking that?

 

[Symbiotic]

wow... are people still asking that?

Sorry man but I haven't been following.

 

[SuperBatman]

I just Heard that this movie is going to be Rated R. Big Mistake or what?

 

[Gotham]

I just Heard that this movie is going to be Rated R. Big Mistake or what?

It's definitely testing out Will's draw with an R-rating.

 

[SuperBatman]

You know hasn't he proved that though with Bad Boys wasn't that Rated R? I can't recall

 

[Gotham]

You know hasn't he proved that though with Bad Boys wasn't that Rated R? I can't recall

Right, but I'd say Martin Lawrence carried half of that film.

 

[cerealkiller182]

Also Bad Boys 2, Ali (which got him an Oscar nominee), and Enemy of the State

But i mean, seriously, Will Smith is above ratings at this point in his carreer

 

[BlackLantern]

Enemy of the State is one of my favorite movies....I just enjoy it

 

[cerealkiller182]

i'd say its definitely underappreciated

 

[M.O.Steel]

i'm really looking forward to this

 

[Retroman]

I just Heard that this movie is going to be Rated R. Big Mistake or what?

Hold on a sec...i knew the script was R-Rated but i thought the movie was going to be Pg-13?

Edit - Here's a very interesting new article on Hancock's rating and how difficult it was it get it made (over 10 years of development!).It's said to be darker than the marketing campaign suggests.

From NY Times:

Summer Movies
A Man of Steel With Feet of Clay

By MICHAEL CIEPLY
Published: May 4, 2008
CULVER CITY, Calif.

TWICE in the last month visits to the Sony Pictures lot here went much the same way.

The normally efficient guards at the gate struggled with their computers. They were unable, on the first trip, to find a trace of the writer-producer Akiva Goldsman or, on the second, of the actor and director Peter Berg.

“Why aren’t these people in the system?” snapped an exasperated young man in the booth on the second visit.

Actually, both Mr. Goldsman and Mr. Berg are in the system. Sort of.

Lately the two men are fixtures at Sony, where they have spent the breezy spring weeks in meeting rooms and darkened stages, wrangling the last round of work on a film, “Hancock,” that will occupy thousands of America’s movie screens over the July 4 weekend.

In a larger sense, however, the two are exactly what they seemed during those hang-ups at the studio gate: consummate insiders with just enough of the outsider about them to keep the Hollywood system on edge.

Both make big movies for big companies. “Hancock,” with Will Smith — by some accounts the most valuable star in the world right now — will cost roughly $150 million to produce, and a similarly large amount to market worldwide.

Yet neither can resist the kind of movie that nudges a studio one step beyond its safety zone. “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” of which Mr. Goldsman was a producer, was a tale of love-struck assassins trying to kill each other; “The Kingdom,” directed by Mr. Berg, was an unlikely action caper set in Saudi Arabia.

“Hancock” is probably two steps past safe. This time Mr. Smith, who shares a penchant for pushing the envelope (think of “Ali,” undertaken when he was still an action-comedy star), plays a superhero who swills bourbon, hates his job and looks unnervingly like Mr. Berg, who was considerably bedraggled in the final weeks of work on his film. (According to Mr. Goldsman, Mr. Smith, on meeting Mr. Berg in one of his work-worn states, said: “Oh. Oh. He is Hancock.”)

Along with, among others, Michael Mann, one of the producers of “Hancock,” and James Lassiter, Mr. Smith’s longtime producing partner, the two belong to what Mr. Goldsman likes to call a loose collective of like-minded filmmakers. By their own account they keep pushing an increasingly corporate entertainment industry to do what scares it a little — and not just stick to a summerful of sequels and animated sure shots.

“It is more difficult, and more necessary, at the same time,” Mr. Mann said recently, speaking of the ticklish art of making movies that keep the system from boring itself, and the audience along with it.

So “Hancock,” whether it succeeds or fails, will most likely be remembered for having forced Hollywood to reach a bit farther than it likes to go. That has happened in the past with unconventional hits like “Star Wars,” “Titanic” and “The Sixth Sense,” and with dozens of flops like “Last Action Hero” and “Heaven’s Gate.”

Eleven weeks before the release of “Hancock” Mr. Berg and company were still testing the creative boundaries. Their picture has a spot on the schedule filled last year by Paramount’s toy-driven crowd-pleaser, “Transformers.” As of mid-April, however, it had been twice to the ratings board and tagged each time with an R, not acceptable for a movie that must ultimately be rated PG-13 to reach its intended broad audience.

“We had statutory rape up until three weeks ago,” Mr. Berg said, describing just one of the elements that has turned “Hancock” into an exercise in brinkmanship.

Sipping coffee in a studio kitchenette, having finally been allowed through the gate, three-day growth and worn Macalester Scots T-shirt notwithstanding, he spoke with a candor usually reserved for the retrospective DVD commentary.

The film, he said, remained surprisingly sexual, violent and true in spirit to an original script that was viewed as brilliant but unmakable when its creator, Vincent Ngo, first circulated it more than a decade ago under the title “Tonight, He Comes.”

Keeping it that way became what Mr. Berg called “an epic game of chicken.” The filmmakers, for instance, long ago conceded that their hero should not get drunk with a 12-year-old. But their concession was a bargaining chip, aimed at keeping a similar situation with a 17-year-old in the final version, which was still weeks from being locked as Mr. Berg spoke in April. Another touchy area, Mr. Berg said, involved flying, never mind driving, under the influence.

Asked about the process, Amy Pascal, Sony’s co-chairwoman, took a chipper view. “Will Smith playing a superhero in a movie that’s funny and has tons of action, that’s not so hard,” she said in a telephone interview.

Pressed a bit, however, Ms. Pascal acknowledged that “Hancock” does break some ground. “It’s scary in that it goes farther than we’ve gone before,” she said.

By Mr. Berg’s lights the executives became comfortable with the film only recently. That occurred when they settled on a marketing approach that played down drama in favor of action and humor. In one of the trailer’s highlights Mr. Smith heaves a beached whale out to sea and smashes a sailboat.

“The ad campaign for this movie is much friendlier than the film,” Mr. Berg noted.

That Sony would stake its summer on an unusually alienated superhero — even the Batman of “The Dark Knight” does not sleep on a bus bench — owes much to its enduring relationship with Mr. Smith. Beginning with “Bad Boys” in 1995, he has made seven films with the studio, all of them successes. “Will Smith in anything makes it even better,” Ms. Pascal said.

That Mr. Smith in turn would stake his platinum persona on such an unlikable (by design) character owes a great deal to Mr. Goldsman, who has made a career out of movies that are just subversive enough to let the biggest star feel he is sneaking past the studio gate.

The best of those films can look like sure bets in retrospect, but at the time they often were not. “A Beautiful Mind” had taxed Universal with its story of a schizophrenic mathematician. Yet Russell Crowe rode the role to an Academy Award nomination in 2002, and the movie won the Oscar for best picture and a writing Oscar for Mr. Goldsman.

Warner Brothers proved similarly skittish over its smash horror hit “I Am Legend,” a movie that starred Mr. Smith, with Mr. Goldsman as both a writer and a producer.

“It’s a silent movie, Will doesn’t make a single joke, we kill a dog and then kill” the hero, Mr. Goldsman said, describing studio reservations about his version of the “Legend” script.

Almost as dapper as Mr. Berg is grizzled, Mr. Goldsman is at ease in a sport coat and delights in playing the cheerful provocateur. Over a Cobb salad in Sony’s commissary, he recalled offering Mr. Ngo’s far more difficult screenplay to Warner executives, who were then busy trying to revive their Superman franchise. As he remembered it, they said: “No. No. No, no, no.”

Later he persuaded a college friend, Richard Saperstein, to acquire an option on the script for an independent company, Artisan Entertainment, where Mr. Saperstein was an executive. Mr. Mann, another friend, agreed to direct it, but at a crucial moment chose to do “Miami Vice” for Universal instead, though he remained a producer.

Artisan disappeared in a corporate shuffle. Vince Gilligan (the “X-Files” television series and the AMC series “Breaking Bad”) and John August (“Big Fish”) eventually did rewrites. First Jonathan Mostow (“Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines”) and then Gabriele Muccino (“The Pursuit of Happyness”) were expected to direct, before Mr. Berg finally took over.

(Mr. Ngo declined to be interviewed for this article. His agent said that Mr. Ngo, who was born in Vietnam, intends to build a school in that country with his money from “Hancock.”)

Along the way Mr. Goldsman persuaded Mr. Smith to play the role and took the project once more to Warner — which again passed, allowing Ms. Pascal and Sony to step in.

“This is about why Superman can’t get a date,” Mr. Goldsman said, speaking of Warner’s reluctance to make a movie that dares to parody one of its most enduring characters. Hancock, he explained, cannot spend the night with a woman he meets at a party. “The physical impracticalities of this, this is what we play with,” he said.

The material is sufficiently risqué that Mr. Goldsman said he now believes the system — executives, agents, leery handlers — might have warned Mr. Smith away from it, had Mr. Goldsman not traded directly on a working friendship rooted in his earlier involvement with both “I Am Legend” and “I, Robot.” (Mr. Smith did not respond to requests, through his publicist, to be interviewed for this article.)

It also helped that Mr. Goldsman is no stranger to Sony, confusion at the guard stand aside. He has adapted both “The Da Vinci Code” and its sequel, “Angels & Demons,” for the studio and Imagine Entertainment.

Still, executives must be mindful of the risks into which Mr. Goldsman and his associates have drawn the company. It has its own superhero franchise to protect, in “Spider-Man,” and a star who has made Sony a fortune when he has been inspirational, as in “The Pursuit of Happyness” in 2006, or lovable, as in “Hitch” a year earlier.

But the best ones are always a bit intimidating. “So was Jack Nicholson in ‘As Good as It Gets,’ ” a Sony film for which he won an Oscar, Ms. Pascal said.

And, as Mr. Goldsman noted, the business still yearns, in its wary way, for life on the edge.

“Everybody knows that you want to break the box,” he said. “It’s just that the act of breaking the box is really frightening.”

Source Link: (credit to Flashing-Lights from the imdb.com forums for the find):http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/movies/moviesspecial/04ciep.html

 

[A.J.Rimmer(BSC)]

Right, but I'd say Martin Lawrence carried half of that film.

Martin Lawrence gave that film minus points that Smith had to earn back.

 

[fabman]

So is it going to be R-rated in the end or is the studio still trying to get a PG-13 rating!?

 

[the a1ant]

Wow - I had no idea the film was edgy.

Usually, I never agree with cutting a film down to reach a lower rating, but they've been marketing it as a lighter film, and it's a July 4th release, so at this point it make sense to make it PG-13. They seem to be trying their hardest to keep the spirit of the film intact, but lower the rating with the MPAA. If it keeps an R-Rating, It would make this film different, and be seen as risk in Hollywood, like the article states...but possibly a successful risk.

Has anyone seen the Unrated trailer? I guess I can see some of the many factors going into the rating

[YT]vNEZYytYX0U[/YT]

 

[SuperBatman]

I've heard they appealed this twice and it still got the R Rating.

 

[fabman]

Yeah, but will they still be trying to get a PG-13 after gettin R twice?

 

[fabman]

I was thinking... maybe the SHOULD go all out and risk by releasing this pic with an R rating... I mean, in the '80's there were so many R rated blockbusters, such as Die Hard, the Schwarzenegger flicks, Robocop, why not try and 'save' this kind of movie. I mean, if there's anyone who can make an R rated summer blockbuster a success it's Will Smith!

I mean, thanks to Judd Apatow & Co. the R rated comedy is back, what about having R rated science-fiction and action movies again?

 

[GL1]

I think 300 did fine with an 'R' rating, I don't see why Hancock doesn't just go ahead and do the same thing. The statutory thing is pretty mind-blowing... I can't believe they had a 12-year-old in the original script... that's just... creepy. If they cut it down to PG-13, I think they can do some good business selling the Unrated version on DVD.

Interesting indeed... now I REALLY want to go see this movie, knowing it has some edge to it... no wonder it felt so bland and unappealing in the teaser... they're advertising the movie different than it is!

If they ever get it together, I gotta wonder... how could they top it for a sequel?

 

[cerealkiller182]

I always figured it would be PG13, so I dont mind if they cut it down PG13 (at least not as much as i would for other projects). Id favor the R though.

 

[Savage]

Oh hell yeah! Now I'm really excited to see this! Keep it R! Bad Santa with superpowers! t:

 

[fabman]

Yeah, if they cut it down to PG-13 I hope that they at least release the R-rated version on DVD.

 

[fabman]

Hey, now that we're talking about censorship.

I've got to know that Iron Man has been cut down for a '12' rating in Germany and The Dark Knight will either get a '16' rating (the first in the Batman series) or get cut down to a '12', aswell... the prologue already got a '16' rating over there. Quite exciting, the first '16' Batman in Germany... If that'll give the movie more cred in Germany (?) - Batman Begins was a huge flop over there!