BoxOffice® Pro - October 2012

ON THE HORIZON
MAMA
MEET UNIVERSAL’S NEWEST MONSTER
■ Guillermo del Toro executive produced this Canadian
horror by Spain’s Andres Muschietti, which is
why you’ll otherwise see this film called “Guillermo
del Toro presents Mama.” The film began as an ambitious
short—a captivating two-shot thriller directed
by Muschietti that featured a mother who lost her
children and was using a waifish pair of orphans in
a ghostly bid to recover her own babies. Consistent
with his interest in frightful families and new talent,
del Toro globbed on as a “producer/mentor” early on
and tapped Hollywood’s go-to girl Jessica Chastain
(Tree of Life, The Help) to star as the wife of a dedicated
family man (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) whose young
nieces were lost in the woods for five years. As the
couple’s own children are dead, this seems like an opportunity
to recover the joy they lost when they lost
their kids, but the nieces seem guided by something
outside of them—a ghostly presence they suggest is
their mother. Chastain was the eternal mother in Tree
of Life; let’s see what she can do with this Mama.
DISTRIBUTOR Universal CAST Jessica Chastain,
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Megan Charpentier DI-
RECTOR Andrew Muschiett SCREENWRITERS Neil
Cross, Andres Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti
PRODUCERS J. Miles Dale, Barbara Muschietti
GENRE Horror RATING TBA RUNNING TIME TBA
RELEASE DATE January 18, 2013
THE LAST STAND
ARNOLD MEETS ASIA
■ South Korea has enjoyed an inspiring tidal wave of
great pictures in the last decade. Americans became
aware when Bong Joon-ho’s The Host hit the states with
the fury of The Blair Witch. That environmentally aware
monster movie proclaimed its dedication to American
horror (most notably, John Carpenter’s The Thing), and
an allegiance was struck. But then things got really kooky.
Later titles like Oldboy (Park Chan-wook) showed off
stunning action, while Poetry (Lee Chang-dong) recast
horror in a more insidious context. And now the cross-
Pacific cultural mash-up comes full circle: The Last Stand
is the first Hollywood blockbuster with a Korean director
at the helm. Early word on the film boosts it as a “neo-
Western” in the vein of James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma
remake, but it’s made by a man who takes the concept of
the Western into totally different terrain—director Kim
Jee-woon made a glorious cult splash with his oddball
steampunk train-heist flick The Good, the Bad, the Weird.
Here, he’s tasked with directing the après-Governator
Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first starring role since
T3. It’s a good role for him—Arnie plays the sheriff of a
small, sleepy border town who’s pressed to stop a recently
escaped cartel leader from reaching home and collecting
$200 million. Hey, anything’s possible this side of Korea.
DISTRIBUTOR Lionsgate CAST Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Eduardo Noriega, Forest Whitaker, Jaimie
Alexander, Harry Dean Stanton, Johnny Knoxville,
Peter Stormare, Luis Guzmán DIRECTOR Kim Jeewoon
SCREENWRITER Andrew Knauer PRODUCER
Lorenzo di Bonaventura GENRE Neo-Western RAT-
ING TBA RUNNING TIME TBA RELEASE DATE January
18, 2013
42 BOXOFFICE PRO OCTOBER 2012