During last weekend’s junket for The Twilight Saga: New Moon, I got to speak with Twilight producer Wyck Godfrey for an extended amount of time.  Since we covered not only the Twilight franchise, but some of the other major projects he’s developing, I decided to break the interview up into two parts.   I felt this news was worth a separate article since we talked about D.J. Caruso’s adaptation of the video game Dead Space; developing Len Wiseman’s adaptation of the video game Gears of War; and writer-director Dan Rush’s Everything Must Go starring Will Ferrell.

The big news is Everything Must Go starts filming March 1st and he calls the project Leaving Las Vegas with the humor of Bad Santa!  Also, for fans of Gears of War, he says Wiseman is working on a script and “we’ve done a ton of visual references and he’s sort of put together a whole presentation, so we should know pretty quickly if this version is going to move forward or not.”  What he said about all three projects after the jump:

You can never go wrong making a movie about counterfeiters or gangsters. They could make a hundred of these movies a year and studios would still make money. The reason is simple: people love to watch others reap financial rewards through illegitimate means as long as the criminals don’t take the money directly from average, good-hearted Americans.

Making the latest entry in the popular counterfeiter/gangster subgenre, Chris Pine (Captain Kirk) and director D.J. Caruso (”Eagle Eye”, “Disturbia”) are in negotiations with Paramount Pictures to make “The Art of Making Money” next year. The movie would be based on a 2005 Rolling Stone article by Jason Kersten, who turned his reporting into the book “The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter”. More after the jump:

Hot on the heels of last week’s announcement that Sam Raimi will direct “Warcraft” (based on “World of Warcraft”), D.J. Caruso has signed on to direct the live-action adaptation of the video game “Dead Space”. According to Variety, Caruso, the producers, and EA have been meeting with screenwriters to try and figure out the story. Once they do, they’re going to auction the property to the studios. More after the jump:

For the last few years, director D.J. Caruso has been trying to bring Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra’s “Y: The Last Man” to the big screen.

D.J. has always said he wanted Shia LaBeouf to play the series’ protagonist Yorick Brown. But recently, Shia has said the character is too close to his “Transformers” role and that led to everyone speculating the project wouldn’t happen.

Not so fast, says Shia.

You see, yesterday I sat down with the in-demand actor as a reporter for our partner website Omelete. Shia is out doing a lot of press for “Transformers Revenge of the Fallen” and I got some time with him on camera. In the next day you’ll be able to see the entire interview, but after the jump you can see Shia explain his love for “Y: The Last Man” and how the project might still happen.

He also says one of the reasons they’re not making it is, “the script is not ready to be shot. DJ is making a different movie right now. He’s making “Jack and the Beanstalk”.

Interesting. More after the jump:

In a recent interview with Wizard Magazine, Shia LaBeouf has taken himself out of the running for the role of leading (and only) man in the planned adaptation of Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra’s  brilliant comic series “Y: The Last Man”.  LaBeouf tells Wizard, “You take Sam and you put a monkey on his shoulder.  I don’t know if it’s that big a differential. It seems like he’s the ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation again.”  I understand that LaBeouf doesn’t want to be pigeonholed and do roles that seem repetitive but I’ll say that A) The dramatic material in playing Yorick would far exceed anything that could come out of a “Transformers” movie; and B) if that’s his new criteria for judging which films he will and won’t do, he’s basically ruled out about two-thirds of all Hollywood movies.

LaBeouf continues, “I’m not willing to make that movie currently, and may be too old to play the role by the time it does come around.”  Clearly not a lot of faith in director D.J. Caruso and writer Carl Ellsworth to make it happen in the near-future and with Caruso currently in negotiations on Masi Oka’s “The Defenders”, it looks like we won’t be seeing the adventures of Yorick Brown and Ampersand any time soon.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Heroes” star Masi Oka has just set up “The Defenders” over at DreamWorks with “Star Trek” writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci producing, Gary Whitta (”The Book of Eli”) writing the script, and D.J. Caruso (”Eagle Eye”) potentially directing.  I’m not sure what role this leaves Oka since the story doesn’t say he’s acting in it, co-producing, co-writing, or if he’s active in any capacity other than developing the idea.

The idea: “The story centers on a group of mostly teenagers from around the world who are involved in a multiplayer video game, each unaware of who they really are behind the cover of their consoles and avatars. They are forced to come together for a real adventure, becoming inadvertent heroes in the process.”  Also, the teenagers who say they’re hot women and have a busty elf as their avatar should actually be ugly dudes.  Naw, I’m just kidding.  This is totally gonna play into a geek fantasy and some gorgeous chick is going to be a hardcore gamer*.

Honestly, it seems like a fun idea since Orci and Kurtzman want to make a film in the vein of the old Amblin movies like “The Goonies” and Oka asks the cool question of “What if you had to live up to the person you created in the virtual world?”  Cynically, I’d say you’d fail completely and be revealed for the failure that you are.  The movie will probably come to a different conclusion.

*Yes, I know there are hardcore gamers that are gorgeous women.  It’s just that the aforementioned hideous dudes are far more common.