Hello Folks
The weather is warming up , and what better to be outdoors and catch movies under the stars.
Starting tonight – Friday, March 8 – at the 5 Drive in Theater and over the entire March break week we have a great line up of movies playing.
One movie we all have been waiting for is also part of the line up , Oz the Great and Powerful.
The studio behind the Wizard of Oz prequel, Oz the Great and Powerfull, has already commissioned a follow-up, according to Variety.
Oz the Great and Powerful, directed by Sam Raimi, and featuring James Franco, Mila Kunis and Michelle Williams, is due to open today in the US and Canada but backers Disney are so confident of its success that they hired scriptwriter Mitchell Kapner “several months ago” to work on a second film.
So far, no plot details have emerged, but Kapner, who co-wrote Oz with David Lindsay-Abaire, is expected to draw on more material from L Frank Baum’s series of novels, published between 1900 and 1920.
However, some famous elements of the story, such as Dorothy’s ruby-red shoes, are out of bounds as they are additions made by film-makers for the original 1939 film, which is owned by rival studio Warner Bros.
With a $200m budget, Oz the Great and Powerful is set for an $90 million Plus in the US only according to box office trackers Box Office Mojo.
Boisterous, engaging, lovingly detailed and overlong, Sam Raimi’s new film functions as a prequel to the classic myth: it is basically a very accomplished tribute to Victor Fleming’s original 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, with the look and spirit of those studio sets reproduced digitally with eerie exactitude. (Raimi may also have been inspired by the global stage smash Wicked.) James Franco plays Oscar Diggs, the grinning and rascally fairground magician from Kansas who is swept away by a twister and lands up in the magical land of Oz; we begin in monochrome and then burst into glorious colour, in the traditional style. Diggs finds himself slavering at the thought of all the wealth and power involved in being mistaken for a wizard, but – wouldn’t you know it? – the decent people of Oz and the lovely good witch Glinda ( Michelle Williams) (find some virtue in him, and we can see how this fellow’s talent for imposture could actually be a positive force. Whether you like this movie may depend very materially on how you respond to Franco himself, but I found his casting very astute. Mila Kunis is the unsettling witch Theodora, and Rachel Weisz is her sister Evanora, two powerful women who unfortunately bring out the worst in our antihero.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy2fJsCkUn4[/youtube]