Corona | Coming Attractions

Fly Air New Zealand with hobbits, orcs and Peter Jackson

After the world watched Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, the director's native land of New Zealand became the visual default setting for J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. While it already enjoyed a healthy level of tourism for its sweeping, majestic vistas, Jackson's homeland experienced a new wave of interested travelers because of the popularity of the movies. In fact, several tourism companies now exist due to worldwide inquiries from people interested in visiting where the scenes in The Shire were filmed, or to gaze upon the Misty Mountains or plains of Rohan for themselves.

Infographic: 50 years of James Bond

This month marks the 50th anniversary since the release of Dr. No, the first James Bond movie. During the past five decades we've seen 25 James Bond movies released, two of which are considered outside of the canon that most Bond fans follow, those being the 1967 comedy version of Casino Royale and the 1983 Sean Connery picture Never Say Never Again. And with current Bond actor Daniel Craig appearing in the most recent Bond film (Skyfall), there's been renewed interest in the British secret agent and his government issued license to kill.

Survey finds Airplane! as the funniest film ever

According to a survey done by the users of Lovefilm, the 1980 slapstick comedy Airplane! ranks as the funnest movie of all-time if you measure its value by laughs.

With an average number of three laughs per minute, the 88 minute comedy would generate 265 laughs from you, if you follow the site's methodology. According to Lovefilm's editors, just because Airplane! can make you laugh out loud so many times and so frequently, that doesn't make it the funniest movie of all-time.  Monty Python's Life of Brian would take the Lovefilm's title for that distinction.

Bad Lip Reading for Twilight

Stephanie Meyer's Twilight gets a lot of slapdown. If you've ever read her novels, then you would know why. Still, she's a mega-successful author worth hundreds of millions of dollars while I'm a broke movie webmaster writing about her stuff. Who's the king of the world now?

But the good news is that there are a lot of other broke people who love to poke at the whole Twilight phenomenon. The folks at Bad Lip Reading, who seem to make it a crusade to provide alternative dialogue for famous people and celebrities, wanted to share their loathing of Twilight by making it the subject of their latest video.

Global James Bond Day to be held on October 5

2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the appearance of James Bond in movies. To celebrate the occassion, the makers of the James Bond film series have announced plans to make October 5, 2012 Global James Bond Day, and will mark the event with special events held around the world.

The companies involved with the promotion include EON Productions, the producers of the Bond films (including the new one, Skyfall), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sony Pictures Entertainment and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. October 5, 1962 was the day that Dr. No, the very first 007 movie, had its world premiere in London.

Video: Thomas Jane returns as The Punisher!

The day after the conclusion of Comic Con is typically one of nothing newsworthy to note. Actor Thomas Jane decided to break that expectation by releasing online Dirty Laundry, an unofficial and unashamed "love letter" to fans of Marvel's The Punisher.

Big Trouble in Little China's Jack Burton watches the Prometheus trailer

Question: what do you get when you take a character that Kurt Russell played in the 1980s (inspired by John Wayne, no less) and have him comment on Ridley Scott's latest opus, Prometheus? Why, dear reader, it's the internet's latest mash-up and collision of two cinematic worlds.

Russell's character is, of course, two-fisted trucker Jack Burton from the 1986 John Carpenter movie Big Trouble in Little China. If you've seen Big Trouble, then you may recall Burton's style of saying what's on his mind and in his larger-than-life style.

Lego Inception

If you play video games you know that Lego is making very fun, very addictive adaptations of popular movies. Star Wars Lego, Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter Lego and the forthcoming Lego Lord of the Rings games are examples of this fusion of brick gaming and digital games.

And now that the door has been opened by Lego, why can't we wonder what it would be like to see other movies done in Lego? Say, a certain Christopher Nolan sci-fi movie released two years ago called Inception?

The Avengers done like Pixar characters

So it seems that others out there on the wild Internet have had the same ideas as myself: what would the heroes from Marvel's Avengers superhero team look like if Pixar had made the movie?

Sure, putting Samuel L. Jackson in his Nick Fury black leather look isn't that great a leap in the imagination since the actor also voiced the superhero character Frozone in The Incredibles, but what would Thor look like? Or Hulk? Or Hawkeye?

Hulk has unfriended Loki on Facebook

For those of you that have seen The Avengers, you know what happens when a mouthy god of mischief meets a gamma-irradiated brute with a short temper. But what happens when Loki of Asgard sends a friend request to social media Hulk on Facebook?

I guess it's pretty much the same thing.

Listen to our Avengers movie audio roundtable!

Have you seen The Avengers movie yet? Are you ready to pick up the discussion about the film and the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe where The Avengers ended? If so, get thee to Comic Related and listen to The Avengers movie roundtable podcast that I participated in along with several other online gurus including Rob Keyes (editor of Screen Rant), Brant Fowler (editor of Comic Related) and Marc N.

Video: The Avengers movie from 1978 you never saw!

Generation X and older people know that before there were Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies and Hugh Jackman played the X-Men's Wolverine, guys like Lou Ferrigno and Bill Bixby kicked weekly ass as Marvel's mightest heroes. Back in the late 1970s CBS had The Incredible Hulk TV show on the air. There was even a Captain America TV show that never got further than the pilot episode. While the effects budget that these superhero shows had was really limited, the excitement of just getting to see the Hulk or Captain America or some other comic book hero in live action was enough to satisfy most eager minds back in the age of Atari.

Wil Wheaton gets weepy when Star Trek: Next Generation cast reunites

This past Sunday in a cowboy hat wearing city of Canada known as Calgary, the entire cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation got together on stage for the first time in a looooong time. Not only were the seven principle cast members up there in front of 7,000 fans (Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner, Michael Dorn, LeVar Burton) but so was fanboy enemy #1 himself, Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) and even that dead sexcurity chief of the USS Enterprise, Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby).

It's a working Star Trek phaser

Star Trek has been more than a pop culture phenomenon; it's actually influenced technology and science, making what was once science fiction, science fact. While warp drive technology and the transporter aren't around to change our lives yet, today's smartphones can do more than Captain Kirk's communicator. There's even a working tricorder being developed.

Video: Pac-Man: The Movie

There's something wrong in the world of entertainment when fan-made films are of better quality than what Hollywood would make. The Pac-Man movie trailer/short film made by Steelhouse Studios is what happens when a creative group of people take a well-known property, like Namco's Pac-Man video game, and give it a high-powered cinematic treatment.

Before I watched their film, I would have thought there was very little that could be mined from Namco's Pac-Man game universe to make a movie from. After seeing this, I wouldn't call myself a full believer just yet -- but I've moved a lot closer towards thinking that a Pac-Man movie could work if it were executed similar to this.