Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson in Saving Mr. Banks Take a look at the first photo of the actors in character as Walt Disney and 'Mary Poppins' author P.L. Travers By Lily Rothman @lilyrothmanJuly 10, 2013 (TIME)

FRANÇOIS DUHAMEL / DISNEY

Emma Thompson has taken on some difficult roles during her career, winning Oscars and numerous other awards for her performances in works based on classic literature and  historical events. But, says the actress, one role stands apart from the rest.

“She’s the most difficult person I’ve ever played,” Thompson says of her role as P.L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, in the forthcoming film Saving Mr. Banks.

The movie, coming out this holiday season, is Disney’s take on Travers’ life and, eventually, the stormy relationship she had with the studio’s own mastermind, Walt Disney. Here, TIME presents an exclusive first official look at Emma Thompson as P.L. Travers and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney. In the scene shown above, Travers has come to Disneyland, in 1961, to meet with the man himself.

Of course, today’s audiences have long enjoyed their resulting cinematic collaboration: Disney’s 1964 Mary Poppins movie. But the film was a struggle to make: even though Disney had a personal interest in Travers’ tale of a magical nanny, it being one of his daughters’ favorites, the author was not interested in her work being changed by a movie studio.

“She was a woman of quite eye-watering complexity and contradiction,” says Thompson, whose first-ever movie-going experience was seeing a Disney movie, Fantasia, as a child. “Often I play people who are controlled by some very clear guiding moral principles. Like Margaret Schlegel [in Howards End], guided by the early principles of feminism and equal rights, and Elinor Dashwood [in Sense and Sensibility], guided by the principles of decency and honor. There are very clear moral prisms these women pour life through, and I understand that very well. And [Travers] was not like that at all. She was far more chaotic and confused and morally various.”

Read more: READ MORE HERE: http://entertainment.time.com/2013/07/10/exclusive-first-look-tom-hanks-and-emma-thompson-in-saving-mr-banks/

Helena Bonham Carter to Play Fairy Godmother in Disney's 'Cinderella' (Exclusive) 3:56 PM PDT 6/20/2013 by Borys Kit (HOLLYWOOD REPORTER)

Kenneth Branagh is directing the live-action fantasy, which already has Cate Blanchett playing the role of the wicked stepmother.

Helena Bonham Carter has nabbed the plum role, or perhaps it’s the pumpkin role, of the fairy godmother in Disney’s live-action version of Cinderella.

Kenneth Branagh is directing the movie project, which sees Lily James in the title role, Cate Blanchett as the wicked stepmother and Game of Thrones' Richard Madden as the prince. Sophie McShera (Downton Abbey) and Holliday Granger (The Borgias) are playing the stepsisters.

The fairy godmother will be getting more screen time in this version than in Disney’s classic animated movie, with the character disguised as an old beggar who watches over Cinderella before revealing herself as the magical being she truly is.

READ MORE:http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/helena-bonham-carter-boards-cinderella-572595

Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson in Talks to Star in 'Saving Mr. Banks' 6:11 PM PDT 4/9/2012 by Borys Kit (THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER)

The true-life story recounts the behind-the-scenes drama of bringing the beloved "Mary Poppins" to life. Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson are in talks to topline Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks, a true-life account behind one of the studio’s most-cherished films.

The script by Kelly Marcel details how Walt Disney spent 14 years courting P.L. Travers, the Australian author of Mary Poppins, in order to make adapt her books about the magical nanny. Travers resisted for so long because she feared Disney would make an animated adaptation. The studio finally made a live-action movie in 1964, starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, but stuck in animated sequences, which turned the author off from working with Disney again.


READ MORE:  http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/tom-hanks-emma-thompson-saving-mr-banks-disney-309716

THE RANT: ‘JOHN CARTER’s’ MASSIVE FALLOUT: Who’s to blame for Disney’s ‘$200-million’ bomb (THE RANT)

THE RANT: ‘JOHN CARTER’s’ MASSIVE FALLOUT: Who’s to blame for Disney’s ‘$200-million’ bomb By Michael Cavna

SOMETIMES BAD FLOPS happen to good people. Even those hideous, avert-your-eyes flops that cause you to question how so much talent can go to so much disgraceful waste. Amid the commercial carnage that follows the CGI blood-splatter, even Hollywood’s best coroners are sometimes stumped by the precise cause of staggering box-office death.

They walk away, shaking their heads, chalking it up to fickle audiences or muddled plots or who-knows-what-exactly? Commercial death comes, as it must, to all serial big-spenders backing gargantuan movies. But in the case of “John Carter,” it didn't have to be this way.

Disney still has its Imagineers. But where in the Martian world were the studio’s marketeers? “John Carter” may go down as one of Hollywood’s biggest movie flops ever. But it should rightly go down as one the town’s biggest marketing flops ever.

Did someone at the Mouse House dial the E.R. instead of PR? The Mouse House announced this week that it anticipates that “John Carter” — its new film about Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Civil War “Martian” — will “book a loss of $200 million” for the quarter. Meaning in Hollywood dollars, it’s on track to be one of the biggest money-losing ka-booms ever. “John Carter” had grossed nearly $190-mill globally as of last weekend — but had a whopping production budget of about $250-million, plus its $100-million marketing price tag, the AP reports.


READ WHAT MAY HAVE GONE WRONG:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/comic-riffs/post/the-rant-john-carters-massive-fallout-whos-to-blame-for-disneys-200-million-bomb/2012/03/19/gIQAOKf6VS_blog.html