At this morning's 20th Century Fox CinemaCon 2012 panel, Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos (Co-Chairman Fox Filmed Entertainment) world premiered footage from all their upcoming releases and talked about what they have coming up in the future. While I was excited to see more of Ridley Scott's Prometheus, and Liam Neeson kicking a lot of ass in Taken 2, the real surprise was Ang Lee's Life of Pi. Called unfilmmable by anyone that's read Yann Martel's 2001 novel about a boy and a tiger that get stranded at sea, the unfinished footage that Fox world premiered today was nothing short of stunning, and it was easily the highlight of their presentation. While you might have wondered if Ang Lee could pull it off, based on what I saw today, Life of Pi is an early contender for Best Picture and all the other year end awards. Hit the jump for more.
Neighborhood Watch
Besides Life of Pi, we got our first look at the aliens in Neighborhood Watch, which stars Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill and Richard Ayoade as a group of neighbors who form a local watch group and end up stumbling onto an alien plot to destroy the world. While I've been less than impressed with Vaughn's recent resume, the footage from today looked extremely funny and the pairing of these four might turn out to be comedy gold.
Over the past few months, Fox has been slowly releasing more and more footage from the film that will make or break my summer. While I was nervous they might show a spoiler-filled scene during the panel today, we just got a look at the Prometheus ship landing on the planet and then a sizzle reel of stuff we've already seen. Like all of you, I think Prometheus looks amazing and everything I've seen makes me so optimistic that the film is going to be a huge home-run.
Fox world premiered footage today from the fall release and we saw Liam Neeson firing guns and punching people in the face. If you dug the first Taken, it looks like more of the same. Which is fine by me. Also, the footage finally revealed a bit more of the plot. It seems the families of the people Neeson killed in the first film are looking for revenge and they come after him.
As I've been doing all week, right after the panel ended I recorded a video blog with Peter from Slashfilm and Alex from FirstShowing. We talked about the footage that Fox premiered during the panel and how impressed we all were with Life of Pi.
