Are you ready to rock?

Opening in theaters on June 15th is the big screen adaptation of the smash hit Broadway musical Rock of Ages, which was directed by Adam Shankman (Hairspray). The film truly features an all-star cast that includes Julianne Hough (Footloose), Diego Boneta (Mean Girls 2), Russell Brand (Arthur), Alec Baldwin (TV's 30 Rock), Bryan Cranston (Drive), Paul Giamatti (Sideways), Malin Akerman (Watchmen), Will Forte (MacGruber), Oscar winner Catherine Zeta-Jones (Chicago), singer Mary J. Blige, and international superstar Tom Cruise (Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol). 

Rock of Ages tells the story of small town girl Sherrie (Hough) and city boy Drew (Boneta), who meet on the Sunset Strip while pursuing their Hollywood dreams. Much like the musical, the film features rock 'n' roll hits of the era from such legendary artists as Def Leppard, Joan Jett, Journey, Foreigner, Bon Jovi, Night Ranger, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, Twisted Sister, Poison, and White Snake. 

The work week is very nearly over, and while we'd love to simply gift everyone out there with a Get Out of Work Early Card, that's just not feasible.  As a consolation prize, however, we'd like to offer three new one-sheets for three very different summer movies.  How different?  Well, the one features the sixteenth U.S. President wielding an ax that he uses to kill vampires, another has neighborhood dads facing aliens, and the last lines up the characters who hang out at a 1980s rock club on Sunset Boulevard.

A new theatrical trailer for the musical Rock of Ages has docked in internet bay, by which I mean to say you can see a new trailer for Rock of Ages now.  It's got a lot of hair metal, overblown lighting that manages to be assaultive in that neon 1980s way, but without the skeezy charm of actual footage from the time.

In 1982, writer-director Steven Lisberger's TRON represented a major step forward in visual effects, but its technical accomplishments didn't make it the commercial success Disney was aiming for.  The film then spent two decades gaining a fervent cult following, prompting Disney to create a big budget sequel in 2010.  The studio made it abundantly clear that TRON: Legacy was meant to kickstart a new franchise, but there's been little movement on another theatrical TRON in the last year.  Now, star Bruce Boxleitner himself has provided an update on the third TRON, as well as this year's animated series TRON: Uprising.

Maverick and Iceman – those two hotheaded pilots whose airborne rivalry was resolved through a mutual love of volleyball and strategically dubious aerial combat in 1986's Top Gun – might just fly again.  Paramount continues its attempts to revive the enduring property, as the studio has hired screenwriter Peter Craig to write a new story for Top Gun 2, despite the transformation of the American military into one far more dependent on drone aircraft than on fighter jets and the inexplicably homoerotic pilots on board.

This April will involve a lot of people crowding around giant televisions to watch Tom Cruise crawling around on the Burj Khalifa.  After Mission: Impossible III proved to be the franchise's least commercially successful installment back in 2006, there seemed to be assumption that both the series and Cruise were running on fumes. 

Then Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol closed out 2011 to a whole lot of acclaim.  The fourth film proved, amongst other things, that Cruise is still a movie star, Brad Bird can direct live-action with blockbuster aplomb and nimble wit, Paula Patton is a force to be reckoned with, and Simon Pegg can steal damn near any show.  You'll be able to experience the Kremlin exploding all over again, as Paramount has announced that Ghost Protocol is set to debut on Blu-ray, DVD, VOD, and digital download this April 17th.

After technically making the biggest directorial debut feature ever with TRON: Legacy, Joseph Kosinski's sophomore movie, Oblivion, is on track to start principal photography next month in Louisiana.  Tom Cruise has been involved with the epic science fiction tale since before TRON: Legacy even hit theaters, but with production about the get underway, we're now hearing some casting news.  The latest addition to Oblivion is Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, best known as a warrior who always pays his debts on HBO's Game of Thrones.

Morgan Freeman is a gravitas machine, capable of making anything seem hugely important or especially wise in his own easy way.  It doesn't matter if he's in classy picture like The Shawshank Redemption, unapologetic nonsense like Wanted, or a massive blockbuster like The Dark Knight, it's just what Freeman does.  And it's apparently what he'll be doing alongside Tom Cruise in the science fiction actioner Oblivion, as the Oscar winner has apparently joined the cast of the film, which has also been widely referred to as Horizons.

After spending the last weekend of 2011, and the first weekend of 2012 atop the charts, Tom Cruise’s extremely successful Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was unseated as the champion of the box office by an unlikely competitor … The Devil Inside. Paramount’s documentary-style, found footage, supernatural, horror film cost less than $1 million to make yet it earned $34.5 million in its opening weekend and has gone on to earn over $46 million in just two weeks at the box office. While the film has done quite well financially, it has also received some complaints from fans regarding its abrupt ending and use of a website to tie up the film’s loose ends. None-the-less, that hasn’t stopped audiences from seeing the new movie, which is currently playing in theaters across the country.

The Devil Inside is directed by William Brent Bell, and co-written by Bell and producer Matthew Peterman, the duo behind the 2006 horror film Stay Alive starring Adam Goldberg, and Sophia Bush. The film features a cast of basically unknown actors including Fernanda Andrade, Simon Quarterman, Evan Helmth, Ionut Grama, Suzan Crowley, and Bonnie Morgan. The Devil Inside tells the story of Isabella (Andrade), a documentary filmmaker, and her mother Maria (Suzan Crowly), who committed a triple homicide over twenty years ago as the result of an exorcism gone terribly wrong. The Catholic Church intervened and Maria has been in a Catholic psychiatric hospital in Rome ever since. But when Isabella decides to make a film about exorcism and travels to Rome to find out more about her mother’s condition, she discovers a horrifying truth about the Catholic religion that she never could have imagined.

I recently had an opportunity to speak with William Brent Bell and Matthew Peterman about The Devil Inside and their work on the project. They discussed the film, its surprising opening weekend, the controversial ending, found footage, the Catholic Church, and the possibility of a sequel.

The first full weekend of January saw only one major new release, a critically reviled faux-documentary horror film that performed quite spectacularly despite eliciting a vitriolic reaction from damn near everyone who saw it.  The second weekend was considerably more competitive, however, with a number of titles with very different audiences.  In that environment, the Mark Wahlberg-led crime drama Contraband surprised many by easily winning the number one spot, while the 3D reissue of a twenty year old Disney movie came in second place, a third sequel passed an important mark, and a music-centric comedy-drama opened in fourth place.