This week:

The box office sings A Christmas Carol; Faceman visits Dark Fields; Michael Fassbender fires A Single Shot; High Fidelity guys re-team with Lay The Favorite and Helen Mirren sees Red.

Short Version: There are already so many great adaptions of the classic Dickens story – this one adds nothing but CGI and gimmicky 3D effects.

Screen Rant reviews A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol is one of my all time favorite Christmas stories. Maybe because most of the year I feel like a somewhat cranky Ebenezer Scrooge but once Thanksgiving is over my mood lightens over the spirit of the upcoming holiday. It seems that every few years someone feels the need to do an update on the classic tale, and sometimes it works. Heck there have certainly been a lot of versions over the years (over two dozen on TV and in movies according to IMDB), and I’ve enjoyed many of those myself.

Ever since Comic Con, Disney has been pushing their Robert Zemeckis-directed version of the Charles Dickens’ classic story A Christmas Carol. They’ve done everything they can to ensure that as many people as possible know about the film and go see it. Of course, that is the whole point of marketing but I fear they may be over doing it a touch. The 7-month-long A Christmas Carol train journey was almost overdoing it but now I think they are showing way too much of the film two weeks before its release.

However, some people like to watch as much as they can for an upcoming movie; I just don’t happen to be one of them. Steve “Frosty” Weintraub at Collider is just like me (‘cept cooler) in that he doesn’t want to have the entire movie spoiled. We both want to experience it for the first time in the theater, in IMAX or 3-D; but on the off chance that you want to soak up as much Christmas Carol as possible; Collider has assembled 6 video clips into one 5 minute video for you to watch.

Happy Friday everyone! For the last Friday of October before Halloween weekend, we’ve again gathered the latest posters to come out for this week’s poster round-up.

Screen Rant’s wall this week now includes new one-sheets for Nowhere Man, Séraphine, Cabin Fever 2, Invictus, Collapse, House of the Devil, Late Fee, Jennifer’s Body, Zombieland, Everybody’s Fine, The Fouth Kind, The Road, Kniga Masterov (Book of Masters), The Bleeding, Gentlemen Broncos and Youth in Revolt.

In addition to that, we have a little somethin’ somethin’ for Disney’s A Christmas Carol and Heavy Metal.

Let’s get to it.

The marketing genius that is the Walt Disney Company is at it again, and this time it’s a unique tie-in to the upcoming Robert Zemeckis-directed 3D digital CGI extravaganza, A Christmas Carol. Maybe you’ve heard of it? I don’t see how anybody can’t know about it – Disney has been pushing this movie hard since the beginning of summer at the Cannes Festival and followed it up with a good showing at Comic-Con.

To help mass-market A Christmas Carol, Disney teamed up with Amtrak and HP to help bring a train full of goodies to 40 cities. It all started back in May in Los Angeles and so far, the special train has stopped at 37 cities including my hometown of Jacksonville, Florida. I went with my family today thinking it was going to be a whole lot of fun and the kids would get a kick out of seeing the train, because what kid doesn’t like trains?

Got two new trailers for you today, both coming from “The House of the Mouse.” The first one is the theatrical trailer for Disney and Robert Zemeckis’s re-imagining of the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol, and the other is an exclusive clip for the Toy Story 3D Double Feature, which kicks off its two-week limited engagement this weekend.

Fridays deserve a little touch of magic and there’s nobody who $pecializes in the magic touch better than Disney.

Happy Friday everyone! Today we’ve again gathered the latest posters to come out for this week’s poster round-up.

Screen Rant’s wall this week now includes one-sheets for Toy Story 3, Saw VI, Paranormal Activity, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Blind Side, Dark Country, Jekyll & Hyde, The Hole, Get Low, The Descent: Part 2, The Karate Kid, The Fourth Kind, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, The Men Who Stare at Goats, and A Christmas Carol.

But that’s not all! We also have the latest sets of character banners for Where The Wild Things Are and The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Let’s get to it.

We’ve been talking about the new Disney 3D movie A Christmas Carol since the first poster came out during Cannes earlier this year. With Robert Zemeckis (Polar Express) directing and Jim Carrey (Ace Ventura) starring as Ebenezer Scrooge, the Charles Dickens’ classic tale is sure to be a hit with audiences.

Today we bring you the official teaser trailer for A Christmas Carol as well as the first TV spot and a new still for you to enjoy.

Enough talking, let’s watch the trailer.

Here’s an interesting piece of news for you to ponder. While the rest of Hollywood TV and movie studios are out promoting their upcoming projects at Comic Con, Robert Zemeckis is there to clarify some things about his latest upcoming project, A Christmas Carol.  Apparently Zemeckis wants us to know that his version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a “classic ghost story”.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times Thursday, and verified at the Disney 3D comic Con panel by our own writer Rob Keyes, Zemickis said he thought people might get the wrong idea about A Christmas Carol because it is being released by Disney.

On Thursday morning, the opening day of San Diego Comic-Con, the first Hall H event of this year’s convention was for Disney’s 3-D presentation – the first ever 3-D presentation at the event.

The presentation was divided into three separate parts, the first two of which we wrote about earlier in the weekend: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and the recently re-titled Tron Legacy.

The first part of this presentation which we have yet to talk about, was for Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol.

This year marks (amongst other things) yet another adaptation of the classic Charles Dickens tale, A Christmas Carol. This time Disney are having a go, enlisting the help of Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Back to the Future trilogy) to write and direct, Jim Carrey to play Ebenezer Scrooge (as well as the Ghosts of Christmas Past/Present/Yet to Come), and the modern day effects of CGI, 3D and motion capture.

CGI Jim Carrey in A Christmas Carol

One of the most loved Christmas stories ever written is arguably Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. A quick IMDB search produces 26 versions of the story told on film, theater or TV. A Christmas Carol has been in told in a variety of way by a variety of characters. Mickey Mouse, Kermit the Frog, Mister Magoo, The Flintstones and even Bill Murray have all taken a crack at it and most if not all have succeeded in faithfully reproducing the story.

We’ve been slacking off here a little bit recently when it comes to presenting and talking about newest posters that have been revealed online so it’s time to play catch-up.

Today we have a batch of posters that cover Public Enemies, Transformers 2, A Christmas Carol, Inglourious Basterds and Pandorum.

Our friends over at FirstShowing.net have acquired some snapshots of brand new posters for some upcoming movies, spotted at the Cannes Film Festival. These are not new posters released online, but rather a couple released Cannes by small and big studios alike to gain the interest of keen festival goers – as well as to catch the eyes of international distributors.

I was happily surprised to learn that director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, Beowulf) has been thinking about bringing Roger Rabbit back to the big screen.  Holy cow, that would be fantastic! I’ve been waiting 21 years for a sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

At a recent red carpet event, which seems to happen everyday in Hollywood, MTV Movies editor Josh Horowitz asked Zemeckis, who has been focusing on 3D performance-capture movies of late (including the upcoming A Christmas Carol), about using the technology to revisit older movies.  He was alluding to possibly a fourth Back to the Future movie.  Zemeckis’ answer surprised Horowitz:

“I’ll tell you what is buzzing around in my head now that we have the ability—the digital tools, performance capture—I’m starting to think about Roger Rabbit”