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Kaieteur News
Hunger Games to become stage show Best-selling trilogy and blockbuster film franchise The Hunger Games is set to be made into a stage show in summer 2016, it has been announced. The “innovative” stage adaptation will launch in a purpose-built theatre next to Wembley Stadium in London. It will be created by Robin de Levita, who was behind a Dutch stage show about World War Two diarist Anne Frank. The movie adaptations of The Hunger Games have taken around $1.5bn (£946m) at the worldwide box office. The latest instalment, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay -
Part 1, will be released in cinemas later this month. Based on the novels of Suzanne Collins, the dystopian tales follow the fortunes of Katniss Everdeen, who becomes a reluctant reality show heroine No further details of the production, or the plans to build a new theatre to accommodate it, have been disclosed. Tim Phelan, chief marketing officer for Lionsgate - the company behind The Hunger Games film franchise - said the team behind the stage adaptation would “provide a uniquely immersive experience for fans
around the world”. Broadway producer Mr de Levita added: “The theatre is a fantastic medium to bring the many meaningful layers of Suzanne Collins’ writing to life.”
Disney announces ‘Toy Story 4’ for 2017, directed by Lasseter Walt Disney Co said recently it will extend one of Pixar’s most successful film franchises by making “Toy Story 4” for release in 2017, directed by John Lasseter. “John created ‘Toy Story’ and directed its first two films and it’s great to have him back directing one of our most valuable properties,” Disney chief executive Bob Iger said on an earnings call.
Iger called 2010’s “Toy Story 3” a “tremendous success” with more than $1 billion at the global box office and $10 billion in retail sales. He said that demonstrated that “these wonderful characters are clearly just as relevant and beloved as ever.” “Toy Story” was the first feature film made by Pixar Animation Studios, in 1995,
and gave the famous animated characters Woody, the toy cowboy, and space ranger Buzz Lightyear a prominent place in pop culture. The first installment made $362 million at the global box office, while “Toy Story 2” brought in $485 million. Disney bought Pixar in 2006 in a deal worth $7.4 billion.
Sunday November 09, 2014
When the Berlin Wall came down... The Cold War offered a perfect backdrop for spy fiction. Masters of espionage like Ian Fleming’s James Bond, John le Carré’s George Smiley and Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer squared off against their communist counterparts in a global chess game with highly calculated moves and obvious goals, risks and rewards. Betrayals and deceptions complicated the matter, but the enemies were clear-cut. British intelligence officer Smiley against his KGB counterpart Karla. Us versus them. “During the Cold War, any reader opening a spy novel understood the handful of possible conflicts they would find,” says spy fiction author Olen Steinhauer. “It would be East v West, or the hero against political corruption – greedy Westerners destroying their own system.” Readers of Cold War spy fiction were drawn into identifying double agents (as in Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol) and fantasising about the effects of brainwashing (Deighton’s The Ipcress File). We were presented with spycraft on a human scale, without the satellite surveillance and mobile phone tracking systems of today’s hi-tech thrillers. Characters suffered from psychological as well as physical stress. James Bond is on the verge of a nervous breakdown after his new bride is killed in You Only Live Twice. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold ends with a devastating portrait of the effect of years of duplicity on agents constantly justifying acts at odds with their moral values. But there were pleasures as well – dinners in fine restaurants, romantic dalliances, vicarious visits to far-flung parts of the world out of the range of most readers, including countries behind the Iron Curtain. Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice was adapted to become fifth James Bond film – with a screenplay by Roald Dahl (Alamy) The end of the Cold War made it necessary to find new enemies. “When the Cold War ended, the genre lost a perfect adversary,” says spy fiction author Joseph Kanon. Writers could no longer depend upon an easy polarity. “Russia remains, but
Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice was adapted to become fifth James Bond film – with a screenplay by Roald Dahl (Alamy) as a threatening kleptocracy,” says Steinhauer, whose Milo Weaver trilogy focusses on relations between the US and China, just one facet of a postCold War world that has many existential conflicts: “Terrorism existed as a subject during the Cold War, but now, of course, it’s become a primary source of narrative conflict. And the complex relationships between Middle Eastern states and religious extremists make for more fictional fodder. Political corruption at home never goes away, but the American relationship to European states has become more complex,” he says. “The rise of electronic surveillance and the hero-status of the whistleblower... these things are all excellent subjects.” For his 2014 novel The Cairo Affair, Steinhauer worked almost in real time, chronicling Libya and postMubarak Cairo during the Arab Spring. New world order After 1989 it was time to rethink the spy game in fiction entirely. “I always wrote about people groaning under the moral weight of the Cold War and begging to get out,” John le Carré told the New York Times after the Berlin Wall came down. “I’m absolutely delighted to be presented with a new pack of cards.” And he dealt them out into plotlines featuring the international drug trade, the Russian mafia, money laundering and corporate corruption. In The Constant Gardener (2001), which is set in “dangerous, decaying, plundered, bankrupt, onceBritish Kenya,” he takes on pharmaceutical companies who used citizens in developing countries as guinea pigs in drug trials.
Le Carré’s 2001 novel The Constant Gardener was adapted for the screen in 2005, starring Ralph Fiennes (Alamy) Soon le Carré was writing of the international war on terror and American operatives who justify torture and extraordinary rendition (as in his 2008 novel A Most Wanted Man), and their British allies. His character Toby Bell, a rising star in the British foreign service who seeks his country’s “true identity in a post-imperial, post Cold War world”, bears a resemblance to Edward Snowden. Frederick Forsyth also has followed the headlines. He set The Fist of War (1994) during the first Gulf War. The CIA, MI6 and Pakistan’s ISI battled al Qaeda in his 2006 novel The Afghan. And The Kill List (2013) features an internet-based ‘preacher’ who calls upon radical Muslims for assassinations of leaders in the US and Britain. Some contemporary writers have chosen to set their books in the past, in the certainties of the Cold War, or even the period before it, rather than updating them for the uncertainties of the present day. Alan Furst‘s atmospheric thrillers (12 to date, most recently Midnight in Europe) take place in the 1930s and early ’40s, when Sovietand Western intelligence operatives joined forces to fend off the growing Nazi juggernaut. Joseph Kanon focuses on the immediate postwar period, setting The Prodigal Spy (1998) and The Good German (2001) in 1945, “a pivotal time, the beginning of the world we live in now,” he says. For Istanbul Passage (2012) he turned to “a neutral city near the Balkans, a perfect listening post, a mecca for spies and a prime staging area for the Mossad in helping rescue trapped European Jews.”