New year movie news

There may be a little more flesh around the waistband, and there may be fewer sentient braincells as a result of all that liquid seasonal cheer, but the Indie Movies Online team are back on daily news duty after our Xmas break. And to celebrate our return we have a mini round-up of the best movie news from the last fortnight, featuring the likes of Peter Jackson, Ghostbusters 3, Russell Crowe and Avatar.

Mmmm, that's right. It may be a brand new year. It may be a brand new decade. However the biggest film story in town is still James Cameron's galactic tale of blue-skinned peasant folk fending off the evil developers. The BBC reports that Avatar has been performing stellar feats at the global box-office, having grossed of $1b after just 17 days on general release, with $350m of that total coming from the US, and approximately $670m from overseas markets. This is the quickest that any movie has achieved that milestone in history, and it means that Avatar is already the fourth-biggest film of all time after Cameron's own Titanic, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, and The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. “This is like a freight train out of control,” 20th Century Fox distribution executive Bert Livingston is quoted as remarking, “It just keeps on going,” presumably not referring to the flabby runtime of Cameron's movie.

It was a very happy new year for Peter Jackson, director of the aforementioned Return of the King, who has been knighted as part of that rather arcane British regal tradition known as the Queen's New Year Honours list. The dear old Baked Bean will be slapping her ceremonial chopper down on the shoulders of Charles Xavier too, as X-Men and Star Trek actor Patrick Stewart has also been given the right to prefix his name with a 'Sir'. /Film has a complete list of all those film folk who have been invited to collect shiny baubles from Buckingham Palace.

Sir Ridley Scott is of course already a knight of the realm and he is due to deliver one of 2010's big blockbusters, in the green-tights clad shape of Robin Hood. Russell Crowe stars as the eponymous outlaw, with Cate Blanchett as Maid Marion, and Heyuguys has the first international poster for the movie, which is due for release on 14 May.

Remaining in Britain, but spinning a few centuries further back into the past, we come to The Eagle of the Ninth, directed by State of Play director Kevin McDonald and based on a 1954 book by Rosemary Sutcliff. Set in Roman-occupied Britain, there are new stills from the film at Yahoo Movies. Channing Tatum stars as Centurion Marcus Aquila, and Jamie Bell also features – sans shirt it would appear.

Bell's fellow young British hopefuls Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender are apparently all set to play opposite one another, with The Playlist reporting that they will both star in The Talking Cure - David Cronenberg's adaptation of the play of the same name by Dangerous Liaisons writer Christopher Hampton. According to The Playlist, 'Hampton's play follows the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and their complicated relationships with a brilliant and beautiful patient, Sabina Spielrein.' Sounds like it's gonna be couches at dawn when those two wacky shrinks go toe-to-toe! Fassbender's Inglourious Basterds cohort Christoph Waltz rounds out the cast.

Finally we have updates on a prequel, a sequel and a remake. First up; Production Weekly's Twitter feed advises that the prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing will shoot from March till June in Toronto. Directed by Dutchman Matthijs van Heijningen, the action supposedly centres on those unfortunate Norwegians who crop up at the outset of Carpenter's movie. News too on Ghostbusters 3, with Egon Spengler himself, Harold Ramis, telling Heeb that “GB3 is progressing with plans to shoot next summer and release in 2011.” The Caddyshack director also confirmed the passing-the-torch approach that has been widely anticipated: “We’ll introduce some new young Ghostbusters, and all the old guys will be in it, too.”

And, staying in spooky territory, Variety reports that New Line will deliver an English-language remake of Juan Antonia Bayona's acclaimed Spanish chiller The Orphanage, with Mark Pellington (Arlington Road) at the helm. Credited as producer on the original, Guillermo Del Toro has co-written the script for the new version and will also serve as producer.