Weak reviews, cranky fans, a pirated version: none of it mattered.
“X-Men Origins: Wolverine” kicked off the spring-summer blockbuster season with $87 million in ticket sales, continuing the year’s box office boom and keeping a core franchise alive for 20th Century Fox and Marvel Entertainment.
The 81st Academy Awards ceremony was held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to honor its selection of the best films of 2008 on Sunday, February 22, 2009, at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, California. The ceremony was televised in the United States on ABC and on Sky Movies in High definition in the United Kingdom. Australian performer Hugh Jackman hosted the ceremony for the first time. Academy Award-nominated producer Laurence Mark produced with Academy Award-winning writer/director Bill Condon as executive producer.
“Slumdog Millionaire” — a love story that combines artistic ambition with broad commercial appeal — won a leading eight Oscars on Sunday night, including the best picture trophy.
While the film’s triumphs at the 81st annual Academy Awards marked an amazing outcome for a movie filled with subtitles, scenes of torture and a Bollywood dance sequence, the wins also cemented the reputation of distributor Fox Searchlight, which has become Hollywood’s top advocate of the kind of daring works that movie studios have all but abandoned.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is an upcoming superhero film based on the fictional Marvel Comics character Wolverine, due for release on May 1, 2009. The film is directed by Gavin Hood and stars Hugh Jackman as the title character. It is a prequel to the X-Men film trilogy, focusing on the mutant Wolverine and his time with Team X, before Wolverine’s skeleton was bonded with the indestructible metal adamantium. The film was mostly shot in Australia and New Zealand.
Premise
Set roughly twenty years before X-Men, the film will focus on Wolverine’s violent past, and his early encounters with William Stryker (Danny Huston). The Weapon X program and his interactions with other mutants will be explored, including his complex relationship with Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber).
