Saturday News Round-Up

Doctor Who sets new record; Edgar Wright is a big tease; Peter Jackson on The Hobbit ; Hammer comics

Doctor Who Sets iPlayer Record
The first Matt Smith episode of Doctor Who , “The Eleventh Hour”, has set a new record on the BBC’s iPlayer service – for the most downloads/viewings in a single week. The episode was requested a massive 1.27 million times during its first week on iPlayer, reports The Doctor Who News Page . The most viewed programme ever on iPlayer is currently an episode of Top Gear with 1.6 million individual viewing requests, but as “The Eleventh Hour” was still hovering around the lower reaches of the iPlayer Top 10 well into its second week, Doctor Who could well smash that record too.

Edgar Wright – The Big Tease
Scott Pilgrim and Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright has mastered the art of creating the biggest possible internet buzz with the least initial effort expended. How? One simple Tweet – “I just met Joss Whedon for the first time. Speculation commence!” Hah… we’re not going to fall into that t trap.

But wasn’t Wright working on an Ant-Man script before he started on Scott Pilgrim?

Peter Jackson Outlines What's Happening In Hobbitland
Despite all those internet rumours, there is no official start date for filming of The Hobbit, and no casting for the new characters has commenced – and that’s straight from the horse’s mouth. Peter Jackson tells Moviefone : “We’ve just delivered the script. Literally last week, we delivered the second of the two screenplays – the first draft. So the studio’s got both scripts now, which is a milestone; and if anything was holding it up, it was us doing the screenplays, because we’d just been writing as fast as we can, but it took us this long to get them finished. So we take whatever responsibility there is for the speed. And we’re now in the process of budgeting the films, and then hopefully we’ll get to a budget the studio are happy with, and they’ll greenlight the movies and we’ll announce the shooting dates. I’d be pretty optimistic that we’ll be shooting before the end of the year. I would imagine October, November, we’d be shooting by. I’m not announcing it, though.”

Dave Golder
Freelance Writer

Dave is a TV and film journalist who specializes in the science fiction and fantasy genres. He's written books about film posters and post-apocalypses, alongside writing for SFX Magazine for many years.