RIDLEY TO COUNSEL CORMAC?

Nobody cares?  Really?

Ehh. How many films has Old Man Scott been lining up over the past few years? The BLADE RUNNER sequel, the Bell picture, WOLF OF WALL STREET, MONOPOLY, now this...plus a PROMETHEUS sequel should that go well, I'd imagine. He's been talking about a McCarthy adaptation/collaboration for well over a decade now, so I think any enthusiasm has to be tempered by his constantly shifting slate. And that's without mentioning his largely cruddy post-millennium output.

Monopoly is dead and Blade Runner is still a few years away.  Bell depends more on Jolie's schedule than his own.  Wolf of Wall Street?  Well, he and Marty need to definitively decide which one of them is going to direct it before anything can be done there.............plus it is dependent on DiCaprio's schedule.  Scott has a truckload of other potential projects (Gucci, Brave New World, The Forever War, etc.), but none seem ready to be made anytime soon.

This, on the other hand, is far more likely to happen.  Hell, The Counselor will likely hit theaters in 2013 with or without Ridley Scott.  With Ridley seemingly set on cranking out another film or two between Prometheus and the Blade Runner project, I won't be surprised if this is one of them.

Besides, his output now isn't really all that more inconsistent than it ever has been.

HIs lows are still low, but his highs are a lot less higher than they once were.

Just to show how slow I can be, I only caught up on this story the other day and completely missed this thread. I don't know, Riddles may have not have the best track record over the last few years but there's something about his choice of material lately that makes me wonder if he's getting a second wind in his old age. Between Prometheus, this Blade Runner project (Which the rumour mill is now saying he's talking to Harrison Ford about, weirdly enough) and this his choices seem to have been getting a lot more interesting lately. That plus McCarthy at the keyboard? I'm in.

There's really nothing interesting about the BLADE RUNNER project - only thing that gets me excited about that is if PROMETHEUS is the big sci-fi renaissance people are hyping themselves up for it to be.

I guess I just struggle to see where this notion of Scott as a big ideas filmmaker is coming from - he made his name on two of the most influential sci-fi movies of all-time, granted, but they were both over thirty years ago now. The excitement feels more like hope than it beng genuinely earned.

It's more about what he can do when he is on form. Scott's been known to handle big ideas with skill (Alien, Blade Runner, even Legend) and to elevate stories that on paper, might not be especially interesting in and of themselves, like Black Rain. Thing is, the line between Masterful Ridley and Mediocre Ridley has always been so thin, you never really know what to expect. That's where the excitement comes in. Yes, there's a degree of hope in there (As there is with a lot of filmmakers) but it's because the guy gets close to his full powers so often, you can tell that on the right day and with the right project he'll catch fire again. What helps is that these newer projects are tackling more interesting ideas than a lot of his 2000s output, a lot of which is perfectly solid but also fairly generic-feeling. He's a guy who needs a push to really unleash what he's capable of, and interesting material seems to bring it out of him. For now though, I'm sure we can all exercise a bit of optimism without making Harry Knowles-style emotional investments.

I don't know - is revisiting ALIEN really a more interesting idea than the stuff he's ben doing? The only project of his that truly felt like a tired old redundancy was ROBIN HOOD. Seems like the upcoming stuff is deemed interesting and original because a)we like the source material and b)we know so little about what it is he's actually doing with these properties.

With PROMETHEUS I'm especially wary. For all the talk of the project's smarts and intriguing concepts and a possible return to form for Ridley, it's still a massively budgeted tentpole movie rewritten by the genre's current boogeyman and put out by the most bipolar studio in Hollywood. It's not gonna be 2001, and the chances of it really being something special are really slim. To go back to my first point, the film really is benefiting from the Abrams-patented approach of saying nothing until release time. People are working themselves into a lather about that giant head and every shot of Rapace standing in a corridor, when recent history tells us that most often what's behind the curtain of mystery is just, at most, a pretty good movie.