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Chris Pratt and Chris Evans make awesome Super Bowl bet

Marvel

Earlier this week, we told you about a little Twitter war between Marvel stars Chris Pratt and Chris Evans over the upcoming Super Bowl. Pratt's Seattle Seahawks will face off in the big game against Evans' New England Patriots, and it seemed a friendly wager over the game was imminent. Now we know what the stakes of that wager will be.

Pratt and Evans won't be betting money, or public humiliation, though. They'll be betting on some superhero kindness. On Tuesday, Pratt proposed that if the Seahawks win, Evans should visit Seattle Children's Hospital and drop in on kids as Steve Rogers himself.

Evans accepted and countered that if the Patriots win, Pratt should, as Star-Lord, show up at Christopher's Haven, a Boston-based nonprofit that provides housing to families with children receiving pediatric cancer treatments in the area.

So the bet is made, and one of two great charities will get a visit from a superhero later this year. We'll know who wins on Sunday, Feb. 1, and we'll definitely be on the lookout for the adorable photos likely to result from this wager.

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"Wet Hot American Summer" show is coming to Netflix

"Hey, let's all promise that in 10 years from today, we'll meet again, and we'll see what kind of people we've blossomed into." The rumored "Wet Hot American Summer" TV show is reportedly on its way to Netflix, according to Deadline.com Even better, the eight-episode limited series will include most of the original cast.

The reported returning cast includes Elizabeth Banks, Michael Ian Black, Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler, Judah Friedlander, Paul Rudd, Marisa Ryan, Molly Shannon, Michael Showalter and more. David Wain will again direct.

Rumors that a follow up to the cult classic was coming to Netflix began circulating in May, though few details were known. E! reports rumblings of a sequel had been going around for years, with Wain even saying in a Reddit AMA that the follow up would have the original cast.

Though Netflix would not confirm, Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos had previously teased the "Wet Hot" return. "We're really excited about the proposition of getting that show together," he said during the winter leg of the TCA tour. "Stay tuned."

For more, head to Deadline.com.

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"The Fault in Our Stars" Trailer

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How "Office Space" got the modern workplace just right

The office could be any office. Cove fluorescents on a dimmer, modular shelving, the desk practically an abstraction. The whisper of sourceless ventilation. You are a trained observer and there is nothing to observe.
—David Foster Wallace, “The Pale King”

After the stock market crash, which emptied out the lofts and warehouses of San Francisco, eroding in an instant the frictionless, cloud-kicking fantasies of the dot-commers, another white-collar recession slung into place, and the office seemed to resume its role as the workplace everyone loved to hate.

Few cultural objects expressed this miasma of ill will better than the film “Office Space,” which appeared in 1999 at the very peak of the boom. Its theatrical run was a modest failure, but in retrospect it’s no surprise that a film so relentlessly dark and nasty would be overpowered by the delirium that gripped the end of the millennium. (From a reporter visiting a Microsoft annual meeting in 1997: “‘Why are we at Microsoft? ’ bellowed billionaire Steve Ballmer, then the company’s executive vice president, to a crowd of nine thousand employees packed into the Kingdome, Seattle’s indoor stadium. ‘For the money! ’ he screamed. ‘Show me the money! ’ The crowd responded with a roar: ‘Show me the money! ’ ”) Running gags about staplers, misplaced memos, “Hawaiian Shirt Day,” and the specter of working lives wasted in dead-end, purposeless jobs for a gray tech company: no one appeared ready for that sort of humor in an era of raging exuberance—and anyway, the cubicle was dead, right? Then the bubble burst; people woke up the following morning with their stock options erased; the beanbag chairs were gone, and they were in a cubicle again or unemployed and desperately searching for a cubicle. “Office Space” found new life on the small screen, a medium that suited the office worker existence depicted in the film: long days huddled in front of a computer, followed by short nights exhausted on the couch, staring at a television. In 1999 it barely recovered its $10 million budget in box office receipts; by 2003, it had become a cult classic, with more than two and a half million copies sold on video. (It screens on Comedy Central with the sort of mindless regularity that suggests a bored television office staff behind it all. “What do we fill the 2 to 5 p.m. slot with? ” “Fuck it, let’s just put on ‘Office Space’ again.”)

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Cast of The Lion King does impromtu performance on a plane

En route from Brisbane to Sydney, the Australian cast of The Lion King treated their fellow passengers to a spontaneous, spirited rendition of the show’s most iconic song, “The Circle Of Life.” You’d think they be tired from singing it on stage so many times, but nope!

Watch their awesome performance — and the delightfully confused reactions it prompted — below.

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Movies that weren't expected to do well...but smashed the box office

Many films that we now know better than we know ourselves once suffered from low budget or lack of faith from producers, or even total abandonment. Fortunately, the obstacles didn’t stop these movies from becoming smash hits, and let’s face it - it’s always fun to mock those who were so very in the wrong (just ask the twelve publishing houses that rejected the Harry Potter manuscript). So which movies that were expected to tank actually soared above and beyond expectation?

The Sixth Sense
The Sixth Sense was written by the same guy who helped write Stuart Little (slightly different storylines, no?) and although the script was purchased by Disney, them of little faith lost confidence in the film and sold it off, keeping only a 12.5% investment. Unfortunately for them (Mwuahaha), the film was number one at the US box office was five weeks straight and was nominated for six Oscars.

The Blair Witch Project
First-time feature filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez began the trend of the shaky camera ‘is this real life’ footage style filming. Their viral marketing campaign included true-to-life reports and interviews, leaving audiences questioning if they really did just witness three teenagers go missing at the hands of a witch.

The actors were all pretty much improvised as well, and although the filmmakers were aiming for it to become a television movie, they ended up making an unbelievable $248 million from the film. Maybe we should go into low-budget filmmaking and see where we wind up?

Lord of the Rings
The now famous film trilogy really was in production hell for several years. Peter Jackson wanted to begin the project in 1995, but other projects got in the way, and the initial plan of having two films with Miramax pictures was pulled due to budget, with producers at Miramax suggesting they cut it down into one film.

Upset that he would have to “cut out half the good stuff”, Jackson met with other studios. It was New Line Cinema who suggested they make a trilogy, and the rest is history. Sucks to be you, Miramax.

The Lion King
The Lion King might be one of the greatest animated films of all time, and became the highest-grossing movie the year it was released (it’s still number 19 on the list of highest grossing films of all time), but plenty animators at Disney thought it was beneath them, hugely doubting their chance of success, and chose to work on Pocahontas instead.

Donnie Darko
This cult classic only opening in 58 screens in the US, and grossed next to nothing in its opening weekend. However, it eventually made its budget back and more importantly gained a devoted fan base, with a cinema in New York City showing midnight screenings of the disturbing teen movie for 28 consecutive months.

Napoleon Dynamite
Young filmmakers Jared and Jerusha Hess decided to celebrate awkward with Napoleon Dynamite. They could only pay their lead actor a measly $1,000 (that’s measly even by our standards!) and completed production in 22 days after editing the film in the cinematographer’s basement on a MacBook. Once the film premiered at Sundance, Fox won rights, and the film made over $46 million!

Paranormal Activity
This horror film going down the ‘found footage’ road cost next to nothing to make (seriously, we could get the budget after a few cake sales and perhaps a minor bank loan) but people went crazy for the horrendous haunting of the ordinary couple, with story of people fainting in the theatre selling MORE tickets, and the final box office grossed over $190 million.

Juno
The film director Jason Reitman didn’t have a single theatrical release under his belt, the budget was extremely low, and the script was basically just a sample to show what Diablo Cody could do. However, Juno rose above the ranks with amazing performances from Ellen Page and Michael Cera, and went above and beyond any expectations, grossing over $200,000,000.

Little Miss Sunshine
This quirky dark comedy premiered at the 2006 Sundance festival and was picked up by Fox Searchlight, despite it’s risky subject matter. This movie pretty much had to rely on critical reception and word of mouth, and ended up making $100,221,296 even though its budget was initially only $8,000,000. You go word of mouth!

My Big Fat Greek Wedding
The film had a teeny little budget, the director wasn’t exactly famous (Joel Zwick had mostly worked on television) and it was based on a not especially successful one-woman show.

On opening the movie made pretty much zero impact, but by the 20th week of its release it was number 2 in the top 10 US domestic chart, and remained in the top 10 for another ten weeks, something no other film has achieved with so little promotion.

Slumdog Millionaire
We lurve this film, but needless to say when it was released – a film about Who Wants To Be A Millionaire wasn’t exactly expected to break the box office.

But it DID and it’s modest budget of $15 million was catapulted to the final Box Office total of $377,910,544.

The King’s Speech
The King’s Speech was huge, won Colin Firth an Oscar and was generally always going to do well, but it opened to a limited released and grossed only $9 million. It was only when people got talking did the film skyrocket to fame, and The King’s Speech ended up spending ten weeks reigning in the top ten after its release.

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Movies that got great performances from torturing the actors

Warner Bros.

As usual, this year's Academy Awards have nominated numerous actors who were voluntarily tortured, abused, and punished for their art.

It's a strategy that has worked in the past — most recently for Anne Hathaway in Les Miserables, who implied she had used dangerous weight-loss techniques to play a dying woman, and won an Oscar for her efforts. This year, more actors have mistreated themselves. Some have Oscar nominations, and some haven't even come close — but each one deserves at least a courtesy paragraph in tribute to their sacrifice.

Are you a director looking to earn your actor their first big win, or an actor who wants to take their craft to the next level? Learn from the best:

1. Blue is the Warmest Color makes it feel real by doing it for real.
Director Abdellatif Kechiche, and actresses Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos, were all kisseswhen they shared the Palm d'Or at Cannes for Blue is the Warmest Color. At Toronto, however, the stars said that working with Kechiche was "horrible." The problems? Let's start with the fight scene, for which he made Seydoux actually beat Exarchapoulos for a full hour, refusing to stop even when Exarchapoulos cut her hand on broken glass.

2. Rigor Mortis removes all joy from its star's life.
For his vampire flick Rigor Mortis, young director Juno Mak cast many Hong Kong film legends, including Chin Siu-ho. So how do you treat a legend and personal hero? "I wanted him to be really depressed," Mak said in an interview with The Week, "so we consulted a few doctors and came up with a plan that's really torturing." To achieve the desired effect, they disrupted Chin's sleep cycle by phoning him every two hours, 24/7 and forcing him to talk for at least five minutes — for three consecutive months. They also gave him a strict diet: nothing but black coffee, boiled vegetables, and water. For three consecutive months! Depression achieved.

3. Canopy messes with its would-be stars' minds.You can start on the casting couch. Australian director Aaron Wilson, casting the lead role of his film Canopy, would begin each audition by describing a scenario. "I said, 'Now you've got to sit in a chair and just think about that,'" he explained in an interview with The Week. Wilson would then film them without any instruction or comment… for 12 minutes. Before long, some actors became very uncomfortable and "freaked out." (The role ultimately went to New Zealand actor Khan Chittenden, who somehow got through the audition without losing it.)

4. Gravity cuts Sandra Bullock off from the outside world.
To best mimic the light of space for Gravity, director Alfonso Cuaron strapped Sandra Bullock into a "light box," in which she could communicate only through a headset. As it was an arduous process to get her out, she stayed there, alone, for nine or 10 hours at a time, isolated from everyone else. But for once, you can't blame the director: Bullock chose to spend all that time in the box! Someone wants another Oscar…

5. Dallas Buyers Club starves Matthew McConaughey.
Well, duh. Stars seem to love doing this. To play a man with AIDS in Dallas Buyers Club, Matthew McConaughey lost close to 50 pounds, which is twice what Anne Hathaway lost for Les Miserables. For his weight-loss regime, he sought advice from Tom Hanks, who has also gone ultra-slim for roles — and now blames this for his type 2 diabetes. When a friend of McConaughey's told him, "My God, we need to get you some help," he says he knew he had reached the "perfect spot." Co-star Jared Leto, playing another AIDS sufferer, lost 30 pounds for his role. Both actors are favorites to win Oscars.

………………………………………………………………………………

You might think that suffering for a role is a relatively recent trend in Hollywood. What Oscar-hungry stars go through today is so different from the days when actors didn't even bother doing accents and Grace Kelly could win an Oscar for (gasp!) playing a role without make-up. But in truth, the stars of bygone years suffered for their art in ways that were probably against the Geneva Protocol. Among the techniques…

6. The Valley of the Giants pushed Wallace Reid into painkillers.
The handsome Wallace Reid, Hollywood's top box-office star of 1919 and 1920, was injured in a train accident en route to a location. To keep him working, the studio gave him frequent doses of morphine to ease the pain. He became an addict, which in turn led to heavy drinking. He died in a sanatorium at age 32.

7. The Passion of Joan of Arc tortured Renee Falconetti's career away.
The classic 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc is comprised mainly of close-ups of the star, French actress Renee Falconetti, looking truly tortured — and there's a good reason for that. Director Carl Dreyer ensured that the film was painful to watch by making Falconetti kneel on stone floors until her face showed the right degree of suffering. She was so drained by the experience that she never made another film.

8. Frankenstein gave Boris Karloff some real-life horrors.
Boris Karloff underwent four hours of make-up each day to play Dr. Frankenstein's monster. Make-up artist Jack Pierce recalled that over three Frankenstein films, Karloff "not only spent 864 shooting hours in three pictures with those big bolts plugged into his neck, but he carried a five-pound steel spine… to represent the rod which conveys the current up to the monster's brain."

9. Jungle Jim stressed Johnny Weissmuller down to size.
Weight loss was an issue with actors even 70 years ago. Johnny Weissmuller, fired from Tarzan movies after gaining too much weight, was paid $75,000 to make B-grade Jungle Jim movies. However, $5,000 was deducted from his salary for every pound over 190 pounds. Under such pressure, he was said to lose his weight through stress rather than exercise.

10. Rebecca made Joan Fontaine feel unloved.
Alfred Hitchcock was not exactly known for treating his actors humanely. For Rebecca (1940), he got the feisty Joan Fontaine to convey fear and insecurity by making her, well, scared and insecure. The cast and crew agreed to played along. On her 21st birthday party, he made sure that most of the cast didn't show up, making her feel dejected. Result: An Oscar nomination (and a huge career boost) for Fontaine — though the on-screen nerves and anxiety might not have been acting.

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The unnecessarily censored version of Finding Nemo

How "Office Space" influenced the way an entire generation thought about work

Nobody wants to be just another cog in the machine. None of us dream of working a job we hate, for a boss who repulses us, mindlessly tapping buttons day in and day out, just to make a living. Sure, there’s the whole, “It’s just a paycheck” justification, but does that ever succeed in making you feel less miserable?

When Mike Judge’s film Office Space came out in 1999, I was observing that time-honored tradition of American 18-year-olds: trying to understand Marx while also smoking an obscene amount of pot. Which probably explains why, even though it was billed as a comedy,Office Space looked more like a horror film to me, following an unhappy worker stuck in a grayish, Kafkaesque hell of an office where a woman keeps repeating, in a high-pitched voice, “Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment.” Bill Lumbergh was the vampire-like labor-sucker Marx wrote about, and the mundane life Peter Gibbons went home to after he clocked out seemed like some bit of purgatory as imagined by a modern-day Dante.

Although my mind was saturated with THC and irrational fears of the real world I was soon going to have to walk into, Office Space really did serve as a cautionary tale for me. In fact, I think it educated an entire generation about exactly what we should not want from life, skewering and satirizing all the tiny indignities of office work. Sitting behind a desk pushing paper was revealed to be no different from working at a corporate chain restaurant where your performance is measured by the amount of “flair” you wear. Both types of jobs would eventually, the movie promised, chew you up and spit you out.

I’ve re-watched Office Space plenty of times since its release, and I can say with clear and sober surety — even though jobs are far more scarce on its 15th anniversary — that the film remains just as potent a critique of meaningless white-collar work as it was in the Clinton-era budget-surplus days.


In 2014, it seems clear that this “cult classic” is one of the most sneakily influential films of the last 20 years. I get the sense that almost everyone who watched Office Space around its release decided they wanted something different out of their work experience. For a lot of people in my generation, that’s meant fewer cubicles, more open spaces; less suit-and-tie (unless you’re Justin Timberlake), more jeans-and-collared-shirt; less company-speak, more chilled-out jargon; less gray, more colors. Watching shows like Girls, you get a glimpse of the current generation’s office culture, full of natural light, snack bars, and cool coworkers having a good, company-sanctioned time.

Still, no matter which way you spin it, it’s all business. The ugly face of capitalism rears its ugly head; downsizing happens, employees put in long hours in those beautiful offices, and nobody can find their worktruly fulfilling 100 percent of the time. Office Space ends on a happy note, with Peter finding happiness through working outdoors, shoveling the rubble from the office where he once wasted away. Will he remain satisfied with his new occupation? Who knows? The whole point was that he got out of Initech, escaped one vividly rendered workplace nightmare, and got plenty of young people thinking about how to avoid a similar fate.

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Reporter has seen "Frozen" too many times