Morrissey: I Plan On Sticking Around

David Morrissey has confirmed his commitment to The Walking Dead.

The actor, who made his dramatic return as The Governor in this week's episode, has recently completed a pilot for AMC, but insists to Entertainment Weekly that this has no bearing on his future with the show.

"I had a little hiatus on The Walking Dead and we filmed that pilot," Morrissey explained. "So I'm waiting to see.

"But I like The Walking Dead. I am part of The Walking Dead. I really hope to make it to season five of The Walking Dead."

The 49-year-old added that the direction his career takes next is "an AMC decision, not mine.

"But I really consider myself to be a Walking Dead actor, and I consider myself to be the Governor and that's where I am... at the moment," he concluded.

If David wants to carry on into the fifth season, he may face a bit of a struggle - post-prison trio Abraham, Eugene and Rosita are confirmed to be appearing later on in this season. Mind you, the TV show has a history of keeping characters around beyond the point of their death in the comics (and vice versa), so who knows?

The Walking Dead's fourth season continues on Sundays on AMC in the States, and on Fridays on FOX in the UK.

Maleficent Poster Revealed

Disney have released the teaser poster for upcoming Angelina Jolie flick Maleficent.

The movie sees Jolie take on the role of the famous Sleeping Beauty villainess, in a prequel that Disney hopes will give the character the "Wicked" treatment, casting her in a more sympathetic light in the run-up to her encounter with Aurora (Elle Fanning).

Says Disney: "Maleficent is the untold story of Disney's most iconic villain from the 1959 classic Sleeping Beauty. A beautiful, pure-hearted young woman, Maleficent has an idyllic life growing up in a peaceable forest kingdom, until one day when an invading army threatens the harmony of the land. Maleficent rises to be the land's fiercest protector, but she ultimately suffers a ruthless betrayal - an act that begins to turn her pure heart to stone. Bent on revenge, Maleficent faces an epic battle with the invading king's successor and, as a result, places a curse upon his newborn infant Aurora. As the child grows, Maleficent realizes that Aurora holds the key to peace in the kingdom - and perhaps to Maleficent's true happiness as well."

Sounds like good stuff.

Also starring Juno Temple, Peter Capaldi, Sharlto Copley, Miranda Richardson, Imelda Staunton and Brenton Thwaites, Maleficent is due for release on the 30th of May, 2014.

ID4 2 Slips To 2016

Independence Day 2 has joined the fifth Pirates Of The Caribbean flick in bowing out of the packed 2015 line-up. The sequel is now slated to  to appear in cinemas on July 1st 2016 - almost exactly twenty years since the original.

Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum are expected to return for a rematch with the landmark-hating aliens, while Michael B Jordan is heavily rumoured to appear as a now-grown version of Dylan, step-son to Will Smith's Capt. Hiller. Two versions of the script reportedly exist, depending on whether Smith accepts the invitation to return.

Smith: "Can Jaden come too?" Literally everyone else: "Aw hell no!"

Elsewhere in the 2015 line-up, the mooted Fantastic Four reboot has been pushed back from March to a June 19th release, while Matthew Vaughn's superb-loking adaptation of The Secret Service has joined the fray, slipping from a late 2014 release to an early 2015 slot.

Tales From The Darkside Returns

The CW are planning a revival of cult 80s horror anthology series Tales From The Darkside.

The original series ran for four years, and received a big-screen spin-off in 1990. A creation of horror legend George A. Romero, and featuring stories from Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Clive Barker and Robert Bloch (amongst many others), the show was a spiritual successor to the Creepshow movies - themselves inspired by the classic horror style of Tales From The Crypt and the EC comics of the 50s.

The new run of thirty-minute episodes is expected to debut in the Summer and, in a nice moment of generational torch-passing, the new series will be overseen by King's son (and current top-tier horror novelist) Joe Hill.

 

Hill will be joined by Star Trek and Sleepy Hollow's Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. So with the best horror writer out there at the moment teaming up with some seriously proven genre TV producing talent, this is shaping up to be a very exciting project indeed.

Here's hoping that The CW don't fall into their biggest current trap of filling each episode with vacuously pretty faces with no real acting talent...

The douche is strong in this image...

Some Interesting Pics From The Day Of The Doctor (Spoiler Warning)

 

"You were The Doctor on the day it wasn't possible to get it right."

The Eleventh Doctor

By now you've no doubt seen the two trailers released for The Day Of The Doctor - if not then I urge you to check them out here and here. There's lots of exciting stuff to keep us talking over the next few weeks - there's the fact that the updated Zygon costumes look great (but still somehow just a little bit worse that the originals), there's the question about how Clara got hold of a vortex manipulator, whether or not that Time Lord posse was being led by Timothy Dalton's Rassilon, whether that was Bad Wolf Rose and - most important of all - the question as to what the hell Eleven is doing with that Fez?

But the most interesting part, for long-term fans, is the short scene we see of the two Doctors being questioned by what appears to be two Kates. Check out the board in the background:-

Yep, that's a minor cameo from not only Ace, but also Mel and Kamelion - surely the two characters one would least expect to be celebrated come the 23rd.

As to the other big... well... moment in the trailer, where John Hurt's Doctor heads to a shack in the desert to activate what appears to be The Moment, well, The Telegraph has revealed some filming pics from that scene today, the most interesting of which is this:

And doesn't The Moment look like a rose...

This scene seems to show all three Doctors joining forces to activate The Moment - could it be that they have forgiven Hurt's Doctor, and are choosing to share his burden rather than letting him become the "forgotten" Doctor? The above quote certainly seems to hint so.

In the same publication, Steven Moffat had the following to say about the episode (and it looks like we won't be picking up where The Name Of The Doctor left off after all...): "He's [John Hurt] from The Doctor's past, and The Doctor did not expect to see him again. We pick up, as it were, months later [After the events of The Name of the Doctor]. So you'll get an update on what Clara's been up to, a little bit about what The Doctor's been up to. Very, very roughly, I suppose, and with apologies to Charles Dickens, it's the A Christmas Carol structure - there's the ghost of the past, the present and the future. There's plenty of inter-Doctor rivalry and, as The Doctor's 50th birthday present, we're establishing a whole new Doctor right there in front of you."

The talk of "the future" is fascinating - Moffat clearly says that Hurt is a past Doctor, as is Tennant, and Matt Smith is obviously "the present"... What else has Moffat got in store for us?

It's not all about The Day Of The Doctor, though - Radio Times have revealed a couple of lovely pictures from An Adventure In Time And Space, one showing "Ian" and "Barbara" with the Menoptra from The Web Planet, and the other - in a true fanpleasing moment - reveals William Russell's cameo in the docudrama.

An Adventure In Time And Space airs at 9pm on BBC2 on the 21st November, and is immediately followed by a showing of An Unearthly Child on BBC4.

The Day Of The Doctor airs at 7:50 on BBC1 (with a worldwide simulcast), and is immediately followed by Doctor Who Live: The Afterparty on BBC3.

Stone And Hill For Ghostbusters 3?

It looks like that time of year again where the rumours about Ghostbusters 3 do the rounds.

This time, the story - from SchmoesKnows - is that Jonah Hill and Emma Stone are in line to appear as "Jeremy" and "Anna", though there is no word on who those characters may be.

Presumably, these are the two characters that were originally rumoured to be played by Anna Faris and Seth Rogan back when they were the two hot young names, so that shows how long these rumours have been going.

And, again with some wearying predictability, Dan Ackroyd has made his annual claim that Ghostbusters 3 should start filming early next year. He said: "I know that we're expecting half of the screenplay to be completed very soon. It should be into production by the fall and be shooting by the New Year."

By my reckoning that makes us roughly four weeks away from the traditional "Bill Murray has changed his mind and will be in the movie after all" reports.

While any news that suggests that another Ghostbusters movie is actually going ahead is good news, the sheer length of time that this project has been in the "about to start, honest..." stage makes it apparent that, as heartbreaking as it is to say, this film is almost certainly never going to happen.

Anthony Coburn's Son Claims Ownership Of The TARDIS

With just two weeks to go before the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who, the show's most iconic image is under threat.

Stef Coburn, the son of Anthony Coburn - writer of the very first episode An Unearthly Child - has launched a legal claim to the TARDIS.

In what can only be described as an opportunist move, trying to capitalise on the show's current stint in the limelight given this months celebrations, Coburn The Younger says in The Independent:

"It is by no means my wish to deprive legions of Doctor Who fans (of whom I was never one) of any aspect of their favourite children's programme. The only ends I wish to accomplish, by whatever lawful means present themselves, involve bringing about the public recognition that should by rights always have been his due, of my father James Anthony Coburn's seminal contribution to Doctor Who, and proper lawful recompense to his surviving estate."

Stef claims that the "informal permission" that his father gave to the BBC to use the TARDIS passed on to his widow upon his death in 1977, and was subsequently passed on to him earlier this year, at which point presumably the pound signs started flashing in his eyes. He now wants the TARDIS to either be removed from the show entirely, or to receive payment every time it appears.

The TARDIS in its first episode

A similar deal has been struck in the past with the estate of Terry Nation, ensuring that they receive payment for the inclusion of the Daleks, but unlike the Daleks the TARDIS features every week in the show, pretty much - the effect that this would have on the budget of every episode is huge.

It should be noted that Mini-Coburn probably doesn't have much of a case at all: the TARDIS was described in the original plans for the show (before Anthony Coburn was even hired) as "something humdrum, say, .... such as a night-watchman's shelter", so it is literally just the fact that it is seen as a police box that can be attributed to Coburn - given that in the late 90s the police themselves lost a legal battle to the rights of the TARDIS image, hopefully this case will be swiftlty thrown out.

At least we now know what legal issues  potentially prevented An Unearthly Child from getting a birthday airing on BBC Four. The BBC will now show the episode at 10:30pm on the 21st - perfectly timed to go out right after An Adventure In Space And Time.

Stef Coburn has had an interesting "relationship" with Who and his late father recently - check out this bizarre Twitter rant from earlier in the year, in which he sent a sequence of Tweets to his late father (who, to reiterate, died in 1977), not only lambasting him, but also having some rather derogatory things to say about the late Verity Lambert's religion and gender:

It paints a portrait of quite a sad, bitter man. While this quest for BBC money will no doubt prove fruitless, one can only hope that Stef Coburn finds whatever peace or happiness he is looking for, whatever the source may be.