Admittedly, this old video of Gerard Butler auditioning for the lead in Dracula 2000 isn’t new to the internet, but it is entirely appropriate viewing for this spoooooky season. It is so hilariously terrifying that you could easily put it on a YouTube playlist for your Halloween party and not a single guest would question why “Gerard Butler Dracula Audition” was queued up between “The Monster Mash” and a compilation of Freddy Krueger kills.
If you’re going through Roland Emmerich withdrawals, or perhaps you’ve always wanted to know what Armageddon would be like if it wasn’t as good, then may I present to you the latest trailer for — wait for it — Geostorm. Yes, that’s the actual title. Really. No, it’s not a fake movie, but you’d be forgiven for thinking as much after sitting through two and a half totally bonkers minutes of footage.
It’s odd — as our planet rapidly hurdles towards any number of very real oblivions, disaster-porn movies have started to play a little more fancifully. ‘Malfunctioning weather-controlling spacecraft triggers climate cataclysms’ sounds like a kinda quaint way for the world to end, as opposed to nuclear holocausts or World War III or a total breakdown of humanity’s societal order. It’s been a minute since the Earth last swallowed up its inhabitants with the earthquake-sploitation picture San Andreas, and frankly, it’s just a relief to see a fictitious vision of the apocalypse that’s not entirely our fault.
If you’ve seen 300, then you’re very familiar with the Spartan soldiers’ costumes: A helmet, a cape, a shield, and not a whole lot else. Among those Spartans, only one, Gerard Butler’s King Leonidas, has a helmet with a plume on it. Did you know that the real historical Spartans all had plumes on their helmets? Director Zack Snyder decided to change that detail in order to make Leonidas stand out, and easier to identify in the midst of the film’s battle scenes. That’s just one of the facts featured in the newest episode of You Think You Know Movies!
Few actors in life have embraced their status as a walking, talking action figure quite like Gerard Butler. Once in the running to play James Bond — he had apparently been considered for Daniel Craig’s role in Casino Royale — Butler seems to have abandoned his ambitious side in recent years, content to grin his way through violent action movies about Egyptian demigods and jingoistic secret service agents. For a while there, it looked as though Butler might have given up on anything . And then Snow Ponies came along.
Gerard Butler’s environmental disaster movie Geostorm is in a perfect storm of its own. Most of the time, when news leaks out that a film is undergoing reshoots, a bigger deal is made of it than it actually deserves. The two big ones this year were Suicide Squad and Rogue One, which both seemed to have changed huge parts of their stories months before their release. Geostorm is the latest movie to enter reshoot hell, but that’s not all: it’s also getting a new director.