Mark L. Smith

‘Twisters’ is a new thing, says its writer.

Who’s ready for ‘Twisters’?

“What did you do to Marvin, Bones?!?”

Don't hold your breath for Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Star Trek.’

Mark L. Smith, who penned Alejandro Inarritu’s The Revenant, has been chosen to write the script in a move that’s quite different from Tarantino’s usual M.O.

Well that was fast. Although we’re still mighty skeptical about Quentin Tarantino actually directing this thing, his Star Trek pitch is moving along rather quickly. The director has met with a trio of writers, with one reportedly emerging as the frontrunner to script the new Star Trek movie based on Tarantino’s idea. But the most interesting part of the latest update on this wacky concept is that Paramount has agreed to Tarantino’s stipulation that the film be rated R.

Leonardo DiCaprio arguably went Peak Leo with The Revenant, a film that is essentially a two-hour frontier-style reimagining of his quaalude scene in The Wolf of Wall Street. While we wait to find out whether all his suffering and bison liver-eating and vape withdrawals will pay off with a long-deserved Oscar, DiCaprio is already going back to work with one of the screenwriters of The Revenant on a new film that will presumably torture the actor once more.

The Revenant has sold itself in trailers as a story of revenge, but to hear director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and screenwriter Mark L. Smith tell it, this is a movie about a “spiritual journey.” We’ll have to wait another week to see if that’s what audiences ultimately take from the film, but according to Smith, The Revenant wasn’t originally conceived as a revenge tale — it was something a little different, and a little more interesting.