The CinemaCon convention kicked off this past week in Las Vegas, with the major studios coming out in full force and pushing their upcoming movies.
With The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises, this is promising to be a hell of a summer, although the initial reaction to The Hobbit, which was shot at 48 frames a second was mixed. As we reported, the footage was well directed, but the audience may take some time to get used to the new look.
So of course one of the big movies Sony is pushing for the upcoming year, along with Men in Black 3, the new Bond film, and The Amazing Spider-Man is the remake of Total Recall, starring Colin Farrell.
As we’ve seen with this particular reboot, the industry of Philip K. Dick, who also wrote Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly, is still going strong. And while I didn’t think a remake of Total Recall was all that necessary, apparently footage from the film has gotten a positive reaction at CinemaCon.
The Hollywood Reporter headlined its report “Total Recall Wows Theater Owners,” and remarked that the footage Sony showed “prompted widespread buzz among exhibitors, who remarked on its Blade Runner-like quality.”
A Philip Dick adaptation that brings back Total Recall, and has elements of Blade Runner as well does indeed sound like an interesting combination, and the guy who directed it, Len Wiseman, is a pretty good filmmaker. Remember, he also gave us Live Free or Die Hard.
Comingsoon.net also concurred that the footage from the new Total Recall “really looked fantastic, everything from the production design and world-builidng got the action scenes, and this footage definitely upped our anticipation for the movie.”
Again, while I’ve always been anti-remake in general, strong word of mouth has been building on Total Recall for quite some time now, and early buzz indicates it could indeed be a big winner when it’s released on August 3.
