Biopics of famous musicians don’t always translate to big box office, but the awards committees love them and there aren’t many big names in the business who wouldn’t jump at the chance to personify a musical icon. In the past decade we’ve seen Jamie Foxx and Reese Witherspoon nab Oscars for playing Ray Charles and June Carter Cash (respectively), Joaquin Phoenix get snubbed by the Academy for his fantastic performance as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, and the further likes of Control, Nowhere Boy, Notorious, and Todd Haynes’ impressionistic Bob Dylan film I’m Not There. This August, Get On Up will bring the life story of James Brown to the big screen with Chadwick Boseman in the role, while Andre Benjamin plays the greatest guitar player in the history of rock (in my opinion) in the John Ridley (12 Years a Slave)-directed Jimi: All is by My Side.

The latest legend of music to get the big screen treatment is country great Hank Williams in I Saw the Light, to be directed by Marc Abraham, a well-known producer who made his feature directorial debut with 2008’s Flash of Genius. His credits as producer include Air Force One, The Rundown, Slither, Children of Men, The Last Exorcism and its 2013 sequel, Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, and the recent Robocop remake.

The cast and filmmakers of Universal’s The Thing made an appearance at the 2010 New York Comic-Con on Saturday to promote their upcoming prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 film, and revealed the first footage from the new film (see footage description here below).

Director Matthijs van Heijningen said that in the film we will get to see The Thing creature in its “pure form” — the form in which it’s been trapped in the ice in for all these years, but he also hinted that since the very nature of The Thing is stealing the biological identity of other lifeforms and it being from another planet, how could we know what this entity’s pure form really is.

Heijningen talked about a bit the effects used in the film, stating that they used as many practical effects (as opposed to CGI) as possible. He said he feels that playing against a man in a suit is much better for the actors than looking at a tennis ball on a string against a green screen. “We had as many real monsters on the set as possible,” the director said.

It seems all of those rumors about a remake of John Carpenter’s scifi/horror cult classic The Thing were just a tad off.

Latino Review is reporting that the movie will in fact be a prequel and will fill us in on what happened leading up to the events of the 1982 movie, which starred Kurt Russell.

While speaking to newbie director Marc Abraham, LR asked if this would be a remake or a sequel and this was the simple answer they got: