You’re about to get one very long and breathless piece about Mr. Popsicle Eyes, and you’re going to like it.
Actually, I have to confess that this latest batch of news leaves me rather furious. You might know (or not) that I was at San Diego Comic Con the week before last. One of my goals was a 1:1 with Popsicle Eyes, who was there to promote the as-yet unfilmed Paradise Lost.
But, no press. It was one of the rants of all the week’s roundtables that there would be no roundtables or interviews for Legendary. I barely got into the panel itself, and was just sort of baffled by how little it contained for the starpower present (I mean, The Dude himself showed up for the hell of it), especially in a year when the studios were making such a point of cutting back.
It was sort of my obsessive joke of the week (much to the annoyance of all my friends and Twitter followers) that I would get Cooper, come hell or high water, and grill him on Hyperion. Of course, it didn’t happen, and if it isn’t frustrating enough to be denied a chance (ComicCon is the place of promotion after all), then you find he went off to London where Den of Geek, Bleeding Cool and Hey U Guys all got awesome Hyperion and Paradise Lost quotes. And they didn’t even have to catch ComicCon’s unique and colorful strain of bronchitis to do it! Yes, I am bitter and jealous. But don’t mind me, I just…you know…wanted to talk about Hyperion and Milton and find out if his eyes were really that Popsicle blue…sniff.
Anyway. To all of those site above, Cooper revealed that The Crow wasn’t as done a deal as press releases implied. “I’m not sure where we are with that. I mean, it makes tracks on the internet but I’m really not sure.” How odd. Might that Crow remake be grounded like so many before it?
Cooper is making amazing headway on Hyperion, though. Now, this is a project that’s gone around and around Hollywood for years, so who knows if he’ll be the one to crack it, but Cooper seems confident he’s the one: “We are just finishing the deal to write that so that’s going ahead… Ideally we’d like to do them all but we’re actually combining them because it’s kind of a mammoth undertaking, these four books, to consolidate and turn them into script form. The first one, we’re going to write two scripts, so the first is kind of a combination of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion and Endymion, which is three out of the four, and then we’ll see where that takes us in terms of the second one.”
That’s a lot for one film. I just finished Fall of Hyperion last weekend…and I honestly can’t figure out how one would combine the first two books, let alone work in Endymion. There’s so much crammed in the first two books. The first book alone could probably make for an entire HBO series, with an episode devoted to each pilgrim’s tale, punctuated by the pilgrimage itself. Godspeed, Cooper. I don’t know how you’re going to pull that off.
As if he doesn’t have enough on his plate with screenwriting, mo-cap testing for Paradise Lost, and the upcoming The Place Beyond the Pines, Deadline reports Cooper is in talks to replace Mark Wahlberg in David O. Russell’s The Silver Linings Playbook. Based on Matthew Quick’s offbeat novel, it centers on a man named Pat Peoples, who loses his sanity, his wife, and his memory. As he recovers in the care of his mother, and tries desperately to win his wife back, he falls in with his beautiful, widowed and mentally unstable neighbor. Not only will Cooper be playing a lost puppy of a character, he’ll get to do it alongside Robert DeNiro and Jennifer Lawrence, who will play the lonely neighbor girl. It’s probably going to be delightful.
And to think, I just wanted him to play The Flash. Now he’s Lucifer and adapter of Dan Simmons…