Trailers:

Astro Boy
The Princess and the Frog
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Alice in Wonderland
Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant
Twilight Saga’s New Moon
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
The Lovely Bones
Up in the Air
A Serious Man
Youth in Revolt
The Men Who Stare At Goats
The Wolfman
Avatar
Inception
The Book of Eli
The Box
The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day
Bronson
Trick ‘r Treat
Daybreakers
Legion
Ninja Assassin
Jennifer’s Body
The Fourth Kind
The Descent Part 2

Plan 9 (a proposed remake of Plan 9 from Outer Space)

Videos:

Where the Wild Things Are 1 featurette
Twilight Saga’s New Moon 1 featurette
Clash of the Titans 1 featurette
Whiteout 7 clips
Jennifer’s Body 1 featurette
The Road 5 clips

Posters:

Where the Wild Things Are
2012
2012
The Smurfs
The House of the Devil
Jennifer’s Body

Images:

Green Hornet
Twilight Saga’s New Moon
Avatar
Pandorum
Priest
Saw VI

image from USA Today

General News:

Disney has bought Marvel Entertainment in a $4 billion deal. The acquisition, which has been approved by each company’s board of directors but is still waiting for the approval of Marvel shareholders and anti-trust clearance, closes the end of this year. The plan, according to Disney CEO Robert Iger, is to aggressively expand its audience “across multiple platforms and territories.”… “It gives us a treasure trove of content.” Disney would have the rights to 5,000 Marvel characters. More here and here.

North American anime distributor ADV shuts down. Anime Network will continue as it “has always been a separate entity from ADV.” Another article here.

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus will release in the UK October 16, and in the US December 25.

The Weinstein Company has acquired all rights to The King’s Speech in North America, Germany, France, Benelux, Scandinavia, China, Hong Kong and Latin America from See-Saw Films and Bedlam Productions. The Colin Firth/Geoffrey Rush starrer is about a “man who would become King George VI, the father of the current Queen, Elizabeth II. After his brother abdicates, George ‘Bertie’ VI (Colin Firth) reluctantly assumes the throne. Plagued by a dreaded nervous stammer and considered unfit to be King, Bertie engages the help of an unorthodox speech therapist named Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). Through a set of unexpected techniques, and as a result of an unlikely friendship, Bertie is able to find his voice and boldly lead the country into war.” Director Tom Hooper will begin shooting later this year, with a planned 2010 release.

Oscar Isaac has joined Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch.

Daniel Craig will star in the Morgan Creek’s Dream House. Directed by Jim Sheridan the psychological thriller is about “a successful publishing executive who quits his job in New York City to relocate his family and two daughters to a beautiful house in a small New England town. They soon learn their home was once the murder scene of a mother and her children, believed to be at the hands of the husband who survived.” Production is scheduled to start January 25, 2010, in Toronto.

Hayden Christensen will play a reporter in Brad Anderson’s indie thriller Vanishing on Seventh Street. “The story is set in a once-thriving city where shadowy forms cause residents to inexplicably disappear. Five survivors fight to stay alive while grappling with the meaning of existence.” Thandie Newton and John Leguizamo are in negotiations. Filming starts mid-October in Detroit.

Patrick Lussier will direct Nicolas Cage in Drive Angry. Co-written by Lussier and Todd Farmer, it’s 3-D revenge thriller about “a man driven by rage who is chasing the people who killed his daughter and kidnapped her baby. The vendetta/rescue spins out of control as the chase gets bloodier by the mile, leaving bodies strewn along the highway.” [So it’s a “feel good” movie, right?] Shooting begins April in New Orleans.

Kelly McGillis has joined Damici, Danielle Harris, and Conor Paolo in Jim Mickle’s epic vampire road film Stake Land. Written by Jim Mickle and Nick Damici, it “takes place following a global spread of vampirism. McGillis plays a nun who joins a small team of survivors as they make a treacherous journey north to safety through the war-torn U.S.” It’s produced by Dark Sky Films and Glass Eye Pix.

Prequels; Sequels & Remakes:

Star Trek returns to IMAX for a two-week limited engagement.

Tron: Legacy will come out December 17, 2010.

A July 10, 2010 release date has been announced for The Twilight Saga’s Eclipse.



image from theonering.net

Guillermo del Toro on the rumors that The Hobbit will be 3-D: “As a co-writer and director of this film (who works with the design teams, costume teams, creature teams, VFX teams every day of the week), let me be very clear one more time: we are not talking about 3D, we are NOT writing the screenplay for 3D right now- we are hiring my DoP Guillermo Navarro to shoot the film and we are not discussing 3D with him either or with WETA digital or WB or anyone else.”

Nu Image/Millennium Films has green-lit the fifth Rambo movie, which will star and be directed by Sylvester Stallone. The “storyline revolves around Rambo fighting his way through human traffickers and drug lords to rescue a young girl abducted near the U.S.-Mexico border.” Productions starts in the spring.

Ben Ketai will direct 30 Days of Night sequel 30 Days of Night: Dark Days. “The sequel will focus on the character of Stella Oleson, the wife of Sherriff Eben Oleson, who has published a book on the vampire attack on the Alaskan town of Barrow and who subsequently draws the attention of a vampire clan in Los Angeles.” Stella, played by Melissa George in the first, will be recast for the second which begins filming this October in Vancouver.

Bob Weinstein says that development has started on the next Halloween movie, which will be in 3-D and called Halloween 3-D [Distant cousin to Jaws 3-D?]. Reportedly Patrick Lussier is in negotiations to take over directing from Rob Zombie.

Columbia Pictures is developing a third Bad Boys movie, and have hired Peter Craig to write the screenplay.

Adam Fierro and Glen Mazzara will write Hancock 2. Will Smith is the only sure return in the cast at the moment.

Ericson Core has signed to direct XXX: The Return of Xander Cage. Rob Cohen, who directed the first, was on board but left for Regency’s Medieval. Vin Diesel is still attached to star.

Fox has hired Akiva Goldsman and Michael Greene, as producer and writer respectively, to “reboot” the Fantastic Four movie franchise.

Rob Zombie will be making a second remake [*sigh*] of The Blob. Originally done in 1958 (the first remake was in 1988) and starring Steve McQueen, the story is about red goo that comes from outer space and grows as it eats people. Says Zombie, “My intention is not to have a big red blobby thing; that’s the first thing I want to change. That gigantic Jell-O-looking thing might have been scary to audiences in the 1950s, but people would laugh now. I have a totally different take, one that’s pretty dark.” [Because, ya know, a movie called The BLOB being about a blob is like freakin’ crazy right?]

Rebecca De Mornay will play Mother in Darren Lynn Bousman’s remake of the 1980 Troma slasher Mother’s Day. Jaime King and Shawn Ashmore will also star.

Warner Brothers is remaking 1981’s Outland. Yes, that Outland. It’ll be written by Chad St. John and directed by Michael Davis, who will expand on the concept of the original to make it a tentpole film. “The story takes place in an orbiting city around the moon, where a cop uncovers a murderous conspiracy endangering the entire city. With a week before his retirement back to Earth, our hero has to choose between walking away with his wife, or taking on a private army with his overachieving ex-partner and wife’s former boyfriend.”

Adaptations:

Nikolaj Arcel will direct, and Guillermo del Toro will produce, Warner’s Deadman movie. The DC comic created by Arnold Drake and Carmine Infantino is about “Boston Brand, a circus acrobat who is murdered and who in the afterlife is granted, by the goddess Rama Kushna, the ability to endure as a ghost who can control the bodies of the living in order to avenge his own death and further cause of justice.”

Guy Ritchie will direct Warner Brothers’ adaptation of DC’s alien bounty hunter Lobo. Don Payne wrote the latest draft of the script of what will be a PG-13 movie heavy on visuals. Warner wants “Ritchie [to] bring the irreverent, gruff tone of past films like “Snatch” and “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.”” Production should start sometime early next year.

Jon Favreau will direct the movie for Cowboys and Aliens. Based on Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley’s graphic novel, it’ll reteam Favreau with Robert Downey Jr. and co-screenwriters Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby. “The sci-fi Western explores what would happen if the traditional Old West enemies — cowboys and Native Americans — found the prairie attacked by aliens in mid-1800s Arizona.”

Al Gough and Miles Millar will adapt James Frey and Jobie Hughes’ novel I Am Number 4 for DreamWorks. First in a six-book series, it’s about “a group of nine aliens whose home planet is destroyed. They escape to Earth disguised as teenagers, and the title character discovers he and the others are still being hunted by the enemy that destroyed their planet.”

DreamWorks has the rights to Michael Crichton’s Pirate Latitudes, with hopes to make it a Spielberg producing and directing vehicle. David Koepp will adapt Crichton’s final manuscript about “a daring plan to infiltrate Port Royal, Jamaica, one of the world’s richest and most notorious cities, and raid a Spanish galleon filled with treasure.” HarperCollins plans to publish the novel November 24.

Emile Hirsch will star in Catherine Hardwicke’s version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Says Hirsch, “We want to make it like a horror, scary-movie Hamlet. Like a supernatural with like a mystical bent to it, set in college and following these cool characters. It’s all in Shakespeare verse, so it’s going to be kind of like the cool, darker answer to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. We’re making Hamlet a musician, so it should be pretty cool.” [*cries*]

Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Blake Lively, and Jeremy Renner will star in Warner Brothers’ The Town. Affleck will also direct the adaptation of Chuck Hogan’s novel Prince of Thieves about “bank manager (Hall), the career criminal (Affleck) who stole more than her heart and the dedicated FBI agent (Hamm) trying to bust the crook and his gang, of which Renner is a part.” Chris Cooper is in negotiations to star as well.

Miramax has the rights to Ernessa Carter’s novel 32 Candles. ”A fairy tale about an ugly duckling from a Mississippi town who escapes to Los Angeles the novel’s central character reinvents herself as a beautiful lounge singer and runs into her high school crush.”

Bruckheimer Films has hired Derek Haas and Michael Brandt to adapt Haas’ short story Shake. It’s “a thriller centering on an FBI agent battling his own body and the elements while hunting down a killer.”

After Seth Rogen’s Green Hornet movie was pushed back five months, (July 7, 2010, to December 17, 2010) Columbia Pictures has released a statement saying that principle photography has already started. Also, David Harbour and Tom Wilkinson have joined the cast.

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo has replaced Gore Verbinski as director on Universal’s Bioshock movie after delays caused scheduling conflicts with Verbinski’s other projects.

Brett Simmons is writing and directing horror movie Husk for After Dark Films. Based on his own short film, “The story sees five friends on a weekend trip who become stranded in isolated farmland when crows attack their SUV. They soon realize that the corn fields are inhabited by reanimated human scarecrows who reproduce by killing and force their undead victims to join their ranks.” C.J. Thomason, Wes Chatham, and Devon Gray have been cast.

DVD and Blu-ray Releases:

Supernatural: The Complete Fourth Season – September 1
Heroes: Season Three – September 1
Fringe: The Complete First Season – September 8
An American Werewolf in London Full Moon Edition – September 15
X-Men Origins: Wolverine – September 15
Superman/Batman: Public Enemies – September 29
Futurama: The Complete Collection 1999-2009 – October 13
The Prisoner: The Complete Series (Blu-ray) – October 27 [28 September in the UK]
Farscape: The Complete Series – November 17
Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea – December 8 in Japan

Arclight has bought rights for Chinese time travel action movie Future X-Cops. Stars Andy Lau and is directed by Wong Jing.

Consolidated Pictures Group has acquired I Love You Phillip Morris for domestic distribution.

Twentieth Century Fox Animation has green lit Carlos Saldanha and Blue Sky Studios’ 3-D digital animated Rio. The story about “a nerdy macaw who leaves the comforts of his cage in small-town Minnesota and heads to Rio de Janeiro” will be released April 8, 2011.

Submarine has closed deals worldwide for Glenn McQuaid horror I Sell the Dead. Starring Larry Fessenden, Dominic Monaghan, Ron Perlman, and Angus Scrimm, “18th-century justice finally catches up with two of the craftiest grave robbers in town, who tell a priest about their outlandish adventures.”

Andrew Traucki’s The Reef has received financing and will start filming in August. “Based on a true story about a boat that went down on Australia’s Great Barrier, The Reef tells the terrifying story of four friends being stalked by a Great White when their boat sinks and they try to swim for land.”

Michael Madsen, Rachel Hunter, and Jennifer Tisdale will star in Doug Elford-Argent’s horror thriller Nictophobia. “The story follows a murderer (Madsen) who terrorizes a trio of people who, in real-estate parlance, flip properties.”

Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz, and Robert Pattinson will star in period drama Unbound Captives. Madeleine Stowe will make her directorial debut from her own script about “a woman (now to be played by Weisz) whose husband is killed and her two children kidnapped by a Comanche war party in 1859. She is rescued by a frontiersman, to be played by Jackman. Pattinson will play the son.” They’re looking at beginning production near the end of this year.

Kevin Spacey will play Jack Abramoff in George Hickenlooper’s Casino Jack (formerly Bagman). It’s about how “the once high-powered lobbyist whose bribery schemes and fraudulent dealings with Indian casinos ultimately landed him in prison.”

Jean Claude Van Damme and Vinnie Jones will star in Russell Mulcahy’s Weapon. They’ll play “Derek Chase and Jack Conway, the world’s most talented assassins. The story follows the two as they join forces to take down the head of a DEA-backed drug cartel.”

Lindsay Lohan will star in indie fantasy comedy The Other Side. “The story centers on a grad student who must spend the summer working at a scientific institute on a remote island where she discovers an eccentric community of characters who are hiding a secret about a tragedy that took place many years before.” Also stars Woody Harrelson, Giovanni Ribisi, Dave Matthews, and Alanis Morissette.

Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Garner, Ashton Kutcher, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, and Shirley MacLaine will star in Garry Marshall’s ensemble romantic comedy Valentine’s Day. “The film tells of a group of interconnected characters celebrating (or not) Valentine’s Day.” Katherine Fugate wrote the first draft, with the latest version by Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein.

Sequels; Prequels & Remakes:

Paramount has set June 5 as Star Trek’s new Mexican release date.

Paramount has set a June 18, 2010, release for their Footloose remake.

[E: This one goes out to Justin] After being dropped by Sony Screen Gems, the Fright Night remake has been picked up by DreamWorks. “The original ‘Fright Night,’ written and directed by Tom Holland in 1985, was a horror comedy about a teenager who discovers that his neighbors are vampires. No writer has been hired, but the updated version will keep the comedy-horror tone while modernizing the effects.”

Dark Castle is developing a remake of William Castle’s 1965 I Saw What You Did and I Know Who You Are! [E: There was a 1988 TV movie also, both are unintentionally hilarious, with most of the creepiness being unintentional as well. So unknown, so unloved] Patrick Lussier will direct and co-write with Todd Farmer. Based on Ursula Curtis’ novel Out of the Dark, it’s about “two girls who innocently pass the time making prank phone calls to unsuspecting people until they call the wrong guy.” Warners will distribute.

Warner Brothers and Silver Pictures have hired Evan Daugherty to write the latest draft of Master’s of the Universe movie Grayskull. John Stevenson is attached to direct.

StudioCanal has announced intentions to remake 1993 Sylvestor Stallone vehicle Cliffhanger. Producer Neil Moritz, “Just as they rebooted ‘Star Trek,’ we’re going to do the same with ‘Cliffhanger.’ ” Looking to shoot in 2010, it “will center on a group of young climbers.”

Simon Baker has joined Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba, and Kate Hudson in Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me. “The story centers on a West Texas sheriff (Affleck) and his downward spiral from a boring small-town cop into a ruthless, sociopathic murderer.” This is the second adaptation of Jim Thompson’s novel, the first was in 1976 starring Stacy Keach.

Christopher Lloyd will play a piranha expert in Alexander Aja’s Piranha 3-D.

Chris Hemsworth has been cast as Jed Eckert, Patrick Swayze’s role, in Dan Bradley’s remake of Red Dawn.

Adaptations:

Chris Hemsworth has been cast as Thor, and Tom Hiddleston as Loki, in Marvel Studio’s Thor. The movie is set for a May 20, 2011, release.

Universal Pictures and Dark Horse Comics have made a deal for Mike Richardson and Jason Shawn Alexander’s graphic novel The Secret. Scott Milam will adapt the story of “a group of high school students involved in a prank that goes horribly wrong, but puts a spin on the teen horror thriller.”

Takashi Miike will direct a live action adaptation of Buichi Terasawa’s adventure manga Takeru. Yoshiya Nagasawa will write based on “the manga follows Takeru Ichimonji, a ninja in a fictional land that borrows elements from both ancient and future Japan.” It has a tentative October production date.

Fox International and IMJ are negotiating to turn Ai Yazawa’s fashion/romance manga Paradise Kiss into a live action film. “The story centers around a high school student named Yukari who is discovered by ‘Paradise Kiss,’ a group of up-and-coming fashion school students. The students transform Yukari into a fashion model, and she discovers a new passion for a future career and potential romance in her personal life.”

Halcyon Co.’s first movie, in a first look deal with Philip K. Dick’s estate, is Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. “Set in a futuristic, dystopian world, Tears is the tale of a celebrity who wakes up after an assassination attempt to find no one has ever heard of him.” Electric Shepherd Productions will develop along with Halcyon.

Shauna Cross will write Summit Entertainment’s adaptation of Gayle Forman’s novel If I Stay. Catherine Hardwicke is attached to direct the fantasy drama.

Abel Ferrara is developing another re-imagining of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Titled Jekyll and Hyde [E: Unfortunately, no relation to the musical… as far as I know], with Forest Whitaker and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson to play the two halves. Glasshouse Pictures and Cheetah Vision Films are producing.

La Petite Reine is fast-tracking Fantomas, based on Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s French fantasy detective novels. Christophe Gans and David Martinez are writing the script from an original story by Thomas Langmann, with Gans also directing. Fantomas, “an ingenious but amoral master of disguise and sadistic killer,” will face “off with a villain of equal or even more dastardly dimensions,” and will be influenced by The Dark Knight. Will film in French and English.

The Gotham Group has hired John Stevenson to direct its adaptation of Steven Sherrill’s novel The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. It’s about “the mythological creature who survived Theseus’ attack in the labyrinth and walks among us today.”

American Gladiators creator Johnny Ferraro is developing a bigscreen, live action, adaptation of the TV show. “The goal is to create an action story that takes place inside the world Ferraro has created.” Producer Scott Mednick: “I look forward to creating a compelling story that launches a whole new set of characters.” [E: I’m speechless.]

Arclight Films, Wizzfilms, Infotainment China Media Company, and Latec International have agreed to produced a proposed live action Bubblegum Crisis movie. It’s based on ARTMIC’s ‘80s cyberpunk anime about “four women who protect a cybernetic future Tokyo with powered armor.” A spokesman said it “will feature two male leads and a quartet of female action babes — two Caucasian and two Asian.” Negotiations have started for a director and cast, it’ll film in Australia with an early 2012 worldwide release.

Monica Bellucci has joined Jerry Bruckheimer’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice as “Veronica, a sorceress and the long-lost love of Nicolas Cage’s character, Balthazar Blake.”

Trailers:

The Road
District 9
Public Enemies
Gamer
The Princess and the Frog
Tetro
Nine
Taking Woodstock
Whatever Works
The Hangover
Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete
Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance
Legend of Kamui Japanese
Blood: The Last Vampire
TBK

Video:

Up 1 clip
Terminator: Salvation 10 clips
Terminator: Salvation 2 behind the scenes
Prince of Persia 1 featurette
Big Man 1 clip

Posters:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Gamer
Public Enemies
Inglorious Basterds
Halloween 2
Blood: The Last Vampire
Cold Skin

Images:

Iron Man 2
Terminator: Salvation
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Ponyo
Inglorious Basterds

Sucker Punch! Has been pushed from October 2010, to March 25, 2011.

Senator Distribution has pulled Jonathan Levine’s All the Boys Love Mandy Lane from its July 17th release date, and it’s release is officially “to be determined.”

Anchor Bay has acquired the domestic rights to Michael Meredith’s indie drama The Open Road. They have a late summer theatrical release planned.

Todd Lincoln will write and direct Dark Castle’s The Apparition. A haunted-house movie supposedly based on true events, the story is being kept under wraps.

Christopher Lee will join Hilary Swank and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in Hammer Films’ The Resident. “Swank will play a doctor who moves into a Brooklyn loft. Becoming suspicious that she’s not alone in her new home, she discovers her landlord is a stalker.” It’ll be directed by Antti Jokinen.

Antonio Banderas will star in Tony Krantz’s neo-noir The Big Bang. The detective story is about a “L.A. private detective who’s hired to find a missing stripper. The trail leads to the New Mexico desert, where the private eye finds a trail of bodies and contends with a brutal Russian boxer, three LAPD detectives and an aging billionaire looking to perfect the nuclear physics equivalent of the Big Bang.” Shooting starts September in Spokane, Washington.

Matthew Goode has joined Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s dramedy Cemetery Junction (former title The Men at the Pru). It “takes a period [1970s] look at a group of twentysomething men working at the Prudential insurance company and their relationships with each other as well as the women in their lives.” Also stars Christian Cooke, Tom Hughes, Jack Doolan, Ralph Fiennes, and Ricky Gervais.

Ken Watanabe and Tom Hardy have joined the cast of Christopher Nolan’s Inception.

James McAvoy, Elizabeth Banks, Laura Linney, and Anna Friel will star in Jacob Estes’ black comedy The Details. “Story concerns a couple, to be played by McAvoy and Banks, who discover an infestation of raccoons in their back yard. Disagreements over how to deal with the animals lead to an escalating series of events.” Films this summer.

Robert De Niro and Edward Norton will star in indie psychological thriller Stone. Directed by John Curran, it’s about “a correctional officer (De Niro) who is seduced by the wife of a convicted arsonist (Norton) up for parole.” Written by Angus MacLachlan.

Rachel Weisz will star in Larysa Kondracki’s feature directorial debut, indie political thriller The Whistleblower. Based on the story of Kathryn Bolkovac, It’s about “a female cop from Nebraska who serves as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia and exposes a United Nations cover-up of a sex trafficking scandal. Kondracki and Eilis Kirwan wrote the film, which will shoot in Budapest.”

Uppity Films and H20 Motion Pictures have secured the rights to, “negotiator between pirates and the owners of vessels hijacked off the coast of Africa,” Andrew Mwangura’s life story. Samuel L. Jackson plans to play the “journalist and ex-marine engineer who runs the Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, a nonprofit group that offers humanitarian aid to all seafarers.”

Prequels; Sequels & Remakes:

Happy Feet 2 in 3-D will come out November 18, 2011.

After the success of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Fox has green-lit the Deadpool movie. Called just Deadpool, Ryan Reynolds will reprise his role. “It is understood that Reynolds would regain the ability to mouth off, with the movie going back to the roots of the character known for his slapstick tone and propensity to break the fourth wall. The character also was disfigured in Wolverine, though it’s unclear at this time how much the studio would want to mess with Reynolds’ face.” Lauren Shuler Donner and Marvel Studios would act as producers.

Meanwhile, Hugh Jackman and his Seed Productions have begun planning a Wolverine sequel to X-Men Origins: Wolverine. “They are squarely focusing on the samurai storyline originated in the comic series, whose Japanese locale was teased after the film’s final credits.” No writer has been brought on yet.

Sin City 2 info from IGN: “’As for the story in the film, Rodriguez said that it will include the Sin City story ‘A Dame to Kill For’ as well as new additional material written by Miller himself.
“‘There’s a lot of stories,’ Rodriguez said. ‘That was sort of the approach I took to it. That’s why there’s three stories in the [first] movie, because I thought, ‘I love this material, but gosh, what happens if it’s not successful and I don’t get to make a part two and part three. I still want to see ‘The Big Fat Kill’ and ‘That Yellow Bastard.’ So I wanted to put them all in one movie so I could at least get some of these stories out of my system. But there’s still so many books and so many stories to do.’”

Halloween 2’s official synopsis: “It’s that time of year again, and Michael Myers has returned home to sleepy Haddonfield, Illinois to take care of some unfinished family business. Unleashing a trail of terror that only horror master Rob Zombie can, Myers will stop at nothing to bring closure to the secrets of his twisted past. But the town’s got an unlikely new hero, if they can only stay alive long enough to stop the unstoppable.”

Due to “timing issues” Brett Ratner has left the Conan movie. Conan and Red Sonja producer Joe Gatta says, “We have a potential start-date on Conan of August 24. And we’ll be shooting in Bulgaria. I would say though the emphasis is on Conan [rather than Red Sonja]. It’s our crown jewel here at the company and that will be the leader. Red Sonja probably won’t happen until next year, as far as making it goes. So we want to launch Conan and reinvent the franchise.” … “We’re currently in the process of hiring a director.”

Twisted Pictures will remake Troma Films’ 1980 cult horror Mother’s Day. “Story follows a family of villains, led by a sadistic mother, who return to their former home and terrorize the new owners and their guests.” Darren Lynn Bousman will direct. They’re hoping to film this summer and release Mother’s Day 2010.

Simon West will direct the “update” of Charles Bronsan starrer The Mechanic. The 1972 original is about a “hitman who finds himself training the son of one of his victims.” While Sylvestor Stallone was at one point interested in it, Jason Statham will star instead. Films this summer in Louisiana.

The storyline for the Karate Kid remake.

Adaptations:

Green Lantern has been pushed from December 17, 2010, to June 17, 2011.

President of Production at Marvel Studios Kevin Feige updates Thor and The Avengers.

CBS Films has the rights to Johanna Stokes’ comic book Station. Published by Boom Studios!, who’ll also produce, the miniseries is about “five nations [who] have sent their finest astronauts to operate Earth’s first multinational space station. But when one turns up dead, the remaining personnel race against time to discover whether it was sabotage, an accident or murder.”

Jeffrey Nachmanoff will direct Warner Brothers’ adaptation of B. Clay Moore and Eric Kim’s upcoming comic book series Billy Smoke. “The story centers on an elite hit man who is nearly killed during a botched job. He realizes that his only way to find redemption is to rid the world of all assassins.” Matthew Fox will star.

Universal is developing a modern retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Keanu Reeves is attached to star and Justin Haythe will write the script. Plot details are slim. Nicolas Winding Refn is in negotiations to direct.

Ray Stevenson, Christopher Walken, and Val Kilmer will star in Code Entertainment’s mob drama The Irishman. Jonathan Hensleigh will direct from his screenplay inspired by Rick Porrello’s book To Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia. “Project is based on the life of mobster Danny Greene (Stevenson), who lorded over Cleveland’s criminal underworld during the late 1970s. Walken is onboard to play infamous loan-sharking nightclub owner Shondor Birns, and Kilmer will portray a Cleveland cop who befriends Greene.” Filming starts May 19 in Detroit.

Rosario Dawson and Steve Coogan have joined the cast of the Percy Jackson movie.

Director Yasuomi Umetsu is working on the animated adaptation of Electronic Arts’ upcoming videogame Dante’s Inferno. “According to Umetsu, the American side of the production asked that the project not have a uniform overall style; instead the Americans requested that each company contribute in its own unique individual style to its portion of the anthology. Each company is responsible for about ten minutes of the final work.” Umetsu will personally direct one of these portions with Tsukasa Kotobuki doing character designs for him. It will “loosely follow Dante’s classic Divine Comedy poem as the fictional Dante descends through the nine circles of Hell in search of a woman named Beatrice.”

Chris Morgan, writer of the Gears of War movie, says that a first draft is done. “I think the gamer side is going to be thrilled with it. All the stuff you want to see, we put that in there and then we blow it out a little more, even. Now it’s just a matter of honing in on all of the character arcs and determining production types of things.” Len Wiseman is directing.

Vin Diesel will star in, and John Singleton will direct, Paramount’s Wheelman movie. Rich Wilkes adapted, with a rewrite by Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell, the Ubisoft videogame, which also starred Diesel, about “an expert driver who comes out of retirement to protect a woman from his past.”

Universal is developing Andy and Barbara Muschietti’s debut feature Mama. The horror movie is based on their Spanish short film about “two girls, Victoria and Lily, who are on the run from a ghostly woman who appears to be their mother in a Gothic home.” Guillermo del Toro is in talks to produce and “mentor.”

Troy Nixey will make his directing debut with Miramax’s thriller Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. Written by Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins, it’s based on the “1973 ABC telepic about a young girl who moves in with her father and his girlfriend and discovers they are sharing the house with devilish creatures.”

Trailers:

G.I. Joe the Rise of Cobra
Terminator: Salvation
District 9
Ninja
$9.99
Julie and Julia
Year One
The Hangover
Drag Me to Hell
Orphan

Video:

The Expendables

Posters:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
District 9
Inglorious Basterds
Inglorious Basterds
Terminator: Salvation
Ponyo

Images:

Clash of the Titans
Iron Man 2
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Sherlock Holmes
Dead of Night
Dead of Night

An earthquake near Mexico City and swine flu has caused Cinepolis, Cinemex and Cinemark, Mexico’s top three exhibitors, to close dozens of theaters. This will delay the release of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Terminator Salvation, Star Trek, and Angels & Demons.

Fanboys’ Australian DVD release has been pushed back to October, due to its recently announced theatrical release.

David R. Ellis will direct Amber Entertainment’s 3-D horror Humpty Dumpty. Billy Majestic is writing the script about “a half-human, half-alien creature who embarks on a murderous rampage after his alien mother is abused by two rednecks in the Deep South.” Goes into production September.

Ben Stiller’s next directing job will be Help Me Spread Goodness. Mark Friedman’s script is about “a Chicago banker who gets swindled in a Nigerian Internet scam.” He’ll also be replacing Steven Spielberg on The Trial of the Chicago 7.

Lizzy Caplan, Crispin Glover, and Sebastian Stan have joined Steve Pink’s comedy Hot Tub Time Machine.

Don Johnson has been cast in porn themed comedy Born to Be a Star.

Elizabeth Banks will headline DreamWorks’ workplace comedy Forever 21. Mike Culbert and Mike Pellettieri wrote the top secret script.

Prequels; Sequels & Remakes:

From UGO:
“Jordan Hoffman: Who’s voicing Soundwave in Transformers?
Roberto Orci: Welker.
Jordan Hoffman: That’s official?
Roberto Orci: I think so.”

Director McG on the possible Terminator 5:
“I strongly suspect the next movie is going to take place in a [pre-Judgment Day] 2011. John Connor is going to travel back in time and he’s going to have to galvanize the militaries of the world for an impending Skynet invasion. They’ve figured out time travel to the degree where they can send more than one naked entity. So you’re going to have hunter killers and transports and harvesters and everything arriving in our time and Connor fighting back with conventional military warfare, which I think is going to be [E: ahem “fairly”] awesome. I also think he’s going to meet a scientist that’s going to look a lot like present-day Robert Patrick [who famously played the T-1000 in Terminator 2], talking about stem-cell research and how we can all live as idealized, younger versions of ourselves.”

Robert Rodriguez on Predators:
“We’d create new otherworldly characters while not taking away from the draw our main Predator has. I think another reason I called it Predators was to mark it as a project that should be taken seriously by a filmmaker to make a worthy follow-up to a classic, much in the way Cameron made Aliens a compelling work on its own, following Ridley Scott’s Alien.” He wants to make it an R-rated movie.

Shia LaBeouf will play opposite Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2 (working title; former development title Money Never Sleeps). “The sequel will once again involve a young Wall Street trader (LaBeouf), and the recent economic meltdown spurred by rampant greed and corruption will fit prominently into the plot.”

Chris Noth has committed to Sex and the City 2.

[E: *rubs hands down face*…] Universal is remaking Drop Dead Fred as a starring vehicle for Russell Brand. “The 1991 original starred Phoebe Cates as a wallflower who loses her job and husband during the course of a lunch hour. Forced to live back home, she’s reunited with her childhood imaginary friend (British actor Rik Mayall), who promises to help but causes more havoc. The angle for the new Fred is to make a film with the tone of Beetlejuice, building a universe around the concept of imaginary friends. Brand would play the trouble-making pal.” Dennis McNicholas is one of the writers. [E: I honestly… Just… Why? The mind boggles.]

Clancy Brown [E: who is awesome] will play Allen, and Katie Cassidy will play Kris, in Samuel Bayer’s Nightmare on Elm Street remake.

Danny Huston will play Poseidon in Louis Letterier’s Clash of the Titans remake.

Dina Meyer, Brooklynn Proulx, Quinn Lord, and Riley Steele have joined Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3-D.

Adaptations:

Dimension Films will release John Hillcoat’s The Road October 16.

Samuel Goldwyn Films will release SAJ’s live action Blood: The Last Vampire in American theaters this summer.

Mike Newell will direct Disney’s Lone Ranger movie.

Peter Stormare and Kurt Angle will play werewolves Gabriel and Wolfgang, respectively, in Dylan Dog adaptation, Kevin Munroe’s Dead of Night.

John Wells and Don Murphy are developing an adaptation of indie comic The Forgotten. It’s “about a man who, no matter what he does or whom he meets, is forgotten five minutes later.”

Nehst Studios has picked up Kevin Grevioux’s graphic novel The Pale Horsemen. Grevioux will write the script and make his directing debut with the adaptation of his “supernatural thriller that revolves around a gang of hitmen who are forced to work together to uncover who killed their mentor.”

Hugh Jackman will star in, and produce through Seed Productions, an adaptation of Doug TenNapel’s upcoming graphic novel Ghostopolis. “The story centers on a man who works for the government’s Supernatural Immigration Task Force. His job is to send ghosts who have escaped into our world back to Ghostopolis. When a living boy accidentally is sent to the other side, the agent must team with a female ghost (and former flame) to bring him back.”
Warner Brothers has the rights to adapt Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s Death Note manga. Vlas and Charles Parlapanides will adapt the supernatural suspense series about “a teenager [who] finds a notebook with which he can put people to death by writing their names. He begins a self-anointed crusade against the criminals of the world, and a cat-and-mouse game begins with the authorities and one idiosyncratic genius detective.” In the live action movie the main character would change to a college student.

JJ Abrams on Stephen King’s Dark Tower series: “Damon Lindelof and I talked to Mr. King. We got the rights for [Dark Tower] as a film. Damon is obviously still on Lost, and we’ve been working on Star Trek together. As soon as Lost is done, hopefully we’ll begin tackling that.”

Director Marcus Nispel is in talks for Phoenix Pictures’s The Last Voyage of Demeter. Written by Bragi Schut Jr., it’s “based on a chapter in Bram Stoker’s Dracula describing the arrival of the vampire count in England on a cargo ship that has crashed into the rocks at Whitby with no crew and the dead captain lashed to the wheel. Stoker tells the story via the captain’s log of the voyage, which begins in Bulgaria and becomes increasingly disjointed as members of the crew disappear.”

Director Roger Donaldson has signed on for Phoenix Pictures and Robert Chartoff’s adaptation of Seymour Reit’s The Day They Stole the Mona Lisa. “The book centers on the theft of the world’s most famous painting from the Louvre in 1911. It was missing for more than two years before an Italian carpenter named Vincent Perugia showed up with the painting in Florence. The film will center on the conman who masterminded the theft.”

Illumination Entertainment will make 3-D animated feature based on Ricky Gervais’ children’s series Flanimals. Gervais will voice the lead character, and Matt Selman will write the script.

Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola is developing Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, “exploring how things played out for the poor siblings 15 years after that whole gingerbread house incident.”

Trailers:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
The Propasal
MW Japanese (In the linked page, wait for the opening movie and top page to load, and then select the third option (”予告編”) from the left in the red menu.)
First Squad
Case 39

Video:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine 7 clips
Star Trek 4 clips
Death Note: L Change the World 1 clip

Posters:

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
The Surrogates
Case 39

Images:

Iron Man 2
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Terminator: Salvation
Jonah Hex
Kick Ass
Edge of Darkness

“Anime and manga distributor Central Park Media (CPM) filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and has closed its doors as of Monday. According to Crain’s, the company owes US$1.2 million to creditors. The company has not been active in releasing new titles in the past 12 months.”

Alpha and Omega has been moved to October 1, 2010 (from April 16, 2010).

The Tooth Fairy has moved to January 22, 2010 (from November 13).

Aardman Animations will use CGI to animate Arthur Christmas, about “how Santa delivers all his presents in one night.” It’ll be directed by Sarah Smith and Barry Cook, and written by Petey Baynham.

Jamie Chung and Jena Malone have been cast in Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch!

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michael Caine have joined Christopher Nolan’s science fiction actioner Inception.

Prequels; Sequels & Remakes:

The Mirage Group is moving forward with a live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles origin story movie. Scott Mednick and Galen Walker are producing, and Peter Laird, Gary Richardson, Frederick Fierst, Eric Crown and Napoleon Smith III are exec producing. It has a targeted release of 2011.

Summit Entertainment has hired David Slade to direct The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. The third film in the franchise will release June 30, 2010.

Kate Mara and Clark Gregg have joined Iron Man 2. Mara’s role is unknown, while Gregg will be Agent Phil Coulson of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Producer David Heyman says Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows will be split “at a very tense cliffhanger.” “We’ve played around with a couple of places. And ultimately settled on a place that we think is very exciting, and I think quite bold, in that it’s not necessarily where one might expect. You want to give a sense of completion, on one hand, but a sense that there’s another piece, more to come. We tried one, and then Steve [Kloves, the screenwriter,] came up with the idea to try it another way, and when we tried that, it felt just right.” Also that “Benjamin Button-like technology” will be used to age the characters for the end.

Columbia Pictures already has plans for Dan Brown’s third Da Vinci Code book. The Lost Symbol comes out September 15, in North America through Doubleday.

Cats & Dogs: Revenge of Kitty Galore has moved to July 30, 2010 (from November 20).

Jim Piddock will be in Forgetting Sarah Marshall spin-off Get Him to the Greek.

Universal Pictures will remake David Cronenberg 1983 thriller Videodrome. Ehren Kruger will write and co-produce with Daniel Bobker. Including nanotechnology it’ll update the original about “the head of Civic TV Channel 83, who makes his station relevant by programming Videodrome, a series that depicts torture and murder that transfixes viewers.”

Kellan Lutz has joined, and Rooney Mara will play Nancy in, the Nightmare on Elm Street remake.

Robert Rodriguez: “I’m going to be able to shoot my upcoming Machete here, a sci-fi action film called Nervewrackers, a reboot of the Predator series called Predators and a couple of smaller movies called Sin City 2 and The Jetsons.” Predators’ pitch: “In the reboot, a team of commandoes face down a mysterious race of vicious monsters.”

Adaptations:

The Fantastic Mr. Fox has moved to November 13 (from November 6).

Gulliver’s Travels will come out June 4, 2010. Also Amanda Peet has joined the cast.

Guardians of Ga’Hoole has been delayed to an undetermined holiday date in 2010 from July 30, 2010.

Dark Castle has the rights to Whitley Strieber and Devil’s Due’s The Nye Incidents. “Inspired by real events, the comic book revolves around a medical examiner on the hunt for a killer of alien abductees.” Todd Lincoln will direct.

Tezuka Productions has plans for anime features based on Osamu Tezuka’s mangas Buddha and Princess Knight. “In Buddha, Tezuka recounted the life of the young prince Siddhartha, the founder of Buddhism, over the course of eight volumes between 1972 and 1983.” “The original Princess Knight manga centered on Sapphire, a princess who has been disguised as a boy since birth to protect the throne. She goes on various adventures to fight evildoers under yet another different guise, the ‘Ribbon Knight.’ She falls in love with Prince Franz, who unfortunately see her as three different people: as ‘Prince’ Sapphire, and as the ‘Ribbon Knight’, as ‘Prince’ Sapphire’s mysterious ‘sister.’”

Vanessa Hudgens will be in Daniel Barnz’s adaptation of Alex Flinn’s Beastly.

Stephen Fry tweeted that he’s doing voice work in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. “Playing Cheshire Cat. Smug, complacent, cheese-eating grin – moi? Walking off to studio in next ten minutes.”

Kevin Macdonald will direct New Regency’s adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity. “Futuristic tale concerns a ruling class called Eternity whose members can manipulate time and alter history.”

Fox 2000 is acquiring rights to Patricia Cornwell’s Dr. Kay Scarpetta series. The suspense thriller, which won’t be tied specifically to any of the 16 books about the opera-loving coroner, will be developed as a vehicle for Angelina Jolie.

Gideon Defoe’s The Pirates! (in an Adventure with Scientists) will be adapted by Aardman Animations with hand-crafted stop-motion animation. Peter Lord will be in charge of animating the story about “a group of pirates who journey to London and meet Charles Darwin, a talking chimp named Mister Bobo and an enemy looking to wipe them out.”

Marlon Wayans will produce and star in Paramount’s adaptation of A.J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically. Julian Farino will direct from Jay Reiss’ script.

Universal Pictures has put the Bioshock movie on hold due to the rising budget.

Trailers:

Oceans
Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror Japanese
Paper Heart
The Boat That Rocked
H2
The Skeptic
Antichrist

Video:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine 1 clip
Angels & Demons 8 clips
Angels & Demons 1 featurette

Posters:

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
500 Days of Summer
Post Grad
Old Dogs

Images:

Robin Hood
Twilight Saga’s New Moon
Star Trek
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Lovely Bones
Avatar
Whiteout
Orphan
Final Destination 4

Twentieth Century Fox is set to shut down comedy and genre films production label Fox Atomic. Head Debbie Liebling will return to 20th Century Fox as an executive, continuing to develop comedy and genre films. Atomic movies coming out later this year are Chris Columbus’ comedy I Love You, Beth Cooper (July 10), and Karyn Kusama’s horror Jennifer’s Body (September 18). Other titles that “presumably will move over to 20th” include 28 Days Later sequel 28 Months Later, and potential Sacha Baron Cohen vehicle Accidentes.

Regent Releasing and Here Media have North American distribution rights to Entertainment Motion Pictures’docudrama Eichmann. “The story is based on the final confession of Adolf Eichmann, who was known as an architect of Hitler’s ‘final solution’ during World War II. Captured by intelligence operatives in Argentina 15 years later, Eichmann recounts events from his past to a young Israeli police officer, Captain Avner Less, who is faced with the monumental task of tricking the consummate manipulator into self-incrimination. As the world waits and Avner’s fellow countrymen call for immediate execution, the two men must confront each other in a battle of wills – the result of which will change a nation forever.” The film will hit select cities this October.

Matthew McConaughey’s production company J.K. Livin is developing Exchange Student. Mike Vukadinovich has been hired to write the comedy about “two exchange students, one who ships out from the U.S. and one who comes in, who experience new environments in very different ways: One has the time of his life, the other goes off the rails. The tenor of the project is described as a family comedy with wry overtones a la Wes Anderson.”

Elisabeth Moss, Sean Combs, and Rose Byrne will be in Universal’s Get Him to the Greek. Nicholas Stoller wrote and will the direct the movie about “a fresh-out-of-college record-company intern (Jonah Hill) hired to get an out-of-control rock star (Russell Brand) from London to a gig at Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre, becoming introduced to an out-of-control life of hookers and blow along the way.” Apatow Prods is producing.

Kristen Bell will star in Disney and Andy Fickman’s You Again. The comedy’s about “a girl who’s horrified to find that her brother is marrying the very girl who made her life a living hell in high school.” Filming starts this summer.

Megan Fox will star in The Crossing, Screen Gems’ thriller about “a couple returning home from a Mexican Vacation get carjacked, and the husband is kidnapped. The wife is forced to smuggle some heroin across the border in exchange for her husband.”

Patrick Wilson has joined Roger Michell’s morning anchors comedy Morning Glory.

James Franco, Mark Wahlberg, Steve Carell, Tina Fey Leighton Meester, Common, Taraji P. Henson, and Kristen Wiig have been cast in Shawn Levy’s comedy Date Night. Josh Klausner’s script is about “a married couple who find themselves in harm’s way after their routine date night goes horribly awry.”

Sequels; Prequels & Remakes:

Possibilities for a Dr. Horrible sequel.

Director McG talks about Terminator: Salvation’s ending.

Samples of the Star Trek soundtrack.

Michael Bay says that a new trailer for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will be attached to X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Guillermo del Toro on the Hobbit: “We’ve decided to have The Hobbit span the two movies, including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur. We decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie. The essential brief was to do The Hobbit, and it allows us to make The Hobbit in a little more style, if you like, of the [LOTR] trilogy.” [E: So no gap filling second movie.]

Universal has hired Evan Spiliotopoulos to write Wanted 2, based on a story by Chris Morgan who also co-wrote on the first one. Timur Bekmambetov is back to direct and will produce with Marc E. Platt and Jim Lemley.

Producer Lauren Shuler Donner on X-Men First Class: “It is the first class of Xavier’s school, way back when, so it’s young Scott, young Jean, young Beast and that’ll be really fun. I think (the plan) is to follow some of the characters into their own stories, and weave them back into the X-Men world. And hopefully First Class will become its own franchise and we can follow them as they grow up.” Josh Schwartz will write. Shuler Donner (who produced all three X-Men movies and the Wolverine movie) also says that the Magneto movie is still in development.

Thomas Dekker is in final negotiations for the Nightmare on Elm Street remake as Jesse, “a jock on the swim team.”

Declan O’Brien has optioned the rights to Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors for a “big studio remake.” “We’re in the process of talking to studios this week. It will be a remake of Roger’s original 1960’s movie. I don’t want to reveal too much, but it’s me, it’ll be dark. It won’t be a musical.”

Producer Arthur Sarkissian has remake rights to Jonnie To’s Hong Kong crime thrillers The Mad Detective and The Mission. The Mad Detective is about “a police detective who uses his ability to see the inner personalities of suspects to solve crimes,” while The Mission is about a Triad boss who has just escaped being killed in an assassination attempt and hires five killers for protection.

Adaptations:

Warner Brothers’ Green Lantern will be made in Sydney Australia, with preproduction starting in July and filming scheduled for November. Martin Campbell will direct the movie that has a planned December 2010 release.

Patrick Tatopoulos, Kevin Grevioux, and Death Ray Films will adapt I, Frankenstein. Grevioux, who will also write the script, and Darkstorm Comic’s upcoming series “brings together classic monster characters, including Frankenstein’s Monster, the Invisible Man, Dracula and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, in a contemporary film noir setting. The Monster, for example, has evolved, learned how to control his anger and now acts as a private investigator. Dracula, meanwhile, is a kingpin of crime, and the Invisible Man is a secret operative.”

Lorenzo di Bonaventura will produce Lions, Tigers and Bears for Paramount. Based on Mike Bullock’s comic book, it’s “told from the perspective of an adult reminiscing about his childhood, revolves around a group of stuffed animals that come to life at night.” Adapted by Joey Aucoin, it will be live action with “considerable” CG effects.

DM Productions has the rights to Danny King’s upcoming superhero novel The Henchmen’s Book Club. “The story centers on a lowly henchman for hire working for some of the world’s most notorious supervillains who starts up a book club.”

Michael Chabon will do revisions to Andrew Stanton and Mark Andrews’ script for Andrew Stanton’s John Carter of Mars.

Catherine Keener will play the mother in Christopher Columbus’ Percy Jackson movie.

Kristen Bell will play the lead in, and produce, a movie based on Meg Cabot’s Queen of Babble novels. “This one tells of the misadventures of a college girl looking for Mr. Right in Europe.”

New Line has bought the pitch for comedy “What Was I Thinking?” Writers Susanna Fogel and Joni Lefkowitz sold the pitch that’s based on Barbara Davilman and Liz Dubelman’s book about “a quartet of girlfriends who take a hedonistic ski trip after one of them gets dumped.” Leslie Mann and Elizabeth Banks are attached to star.

Tsumugu Hashimoto’s light novel series Hanbun no Tsuki ga Noboru Sora – looking up at the half-moon has been green-lit for a live action film. It’s about “the evolving relationship between Yuichi and Rika, a boy and a girl in the same hospital for different reasons.”

Zac Efron has been confirmed as Jonny Quest.

Jerry Bruckheimer says The Lone Ranger will be, “geared more towards the Pirates [of the Caribbean] audience, 10 and up.”

New Regency and 20th Century Fox have the rights to classic TV show Father Knows Best. Chad and Dara Creasey will write “the contemporized film will involve a father whose modern-day parenting displeases his more traditional father, who comes to live with the family. They clash over which father knows best.”

Toby Kebbell has joined The Sorcerer’s Apprentice as “Drake Stone, a celebrity illusionist who joins forces with Alfred Molina’s evil sorcerer, Horvath, to gain ultimate powers.”

Cartoon Network and Lionsgate’s Alli Shearmur are developing a live action movie of the legend of King Arthur. Travis Wright wrote, the tentatively titled, Reborn “a modern retelling of the King Arthur tale, with archetypal characters from the legend transported to the present.”

McG’s next project will be based on Broadway musical Spring Awakening. He’ll direct and independently produce the movie. “Set in 19th-century Germany, the coming-of-age story follows a group of teens discovering their sexuality and dealing with high-wire topics like masturbation, abortion, rape and suicide.”

Trailers:

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Astro Boy
Armored
Hunter Prey
The Hurt Locker

Video:

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World first video blog
X-Men Origins: Wolverine 5 character spots
Inglorious Basterds American Idol footage
Angels & Demons 1 featurette

Posters:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

Images:

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Star Trek
Terminator: Salvation
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Tintin
The Expendables
Bruno
Halloween 2: The Devil Walks Among Us (H2)
The Crazies

After some cuts were made, comedy Year One has been rated PG-13.

Director Kevin MacDonald is prepping The Eagle of the Ninth. Says MacDonald: “It takes place in Roman Britain in the second century. All the Romans will be American, all the Celts will be Scots and it’s about the friendship between a Roman legionary and his Celtic slave. They go on a journey upriver, kind of like Apocalypse Now, crossing Hadrian’s Wall, looking for the Lost Legion in the wilds of second century Scotland.”

Fox Searchlight has bought writer-directors Jay and Mark Duplass’ ensemble dramedy pitch Table 19. It’s “describes the experience of those wedding guests quarantined at the dreaded ‘singles table.’ Told from the points of view of the strangers randomly thrown together, the story explores what marriage means to those on the sidelines.” 21 Laps will produce.

Brittany Murphy and David Zayas have joined Stallone’s The Expendables.

Rachel McAdams, Harrison Ford, Diane Keaton, and Jeff Goldblum will star in Roger Michell’s Morning Glory. It’s “the story of an aspiring news producer (McAdams) who tries to save a failing morning show by getting control of its feuding anchors.”

Sequels; Prequels & Remakes:

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince has been moved from Friday, July 17, to Wednesday, July 15.

While Warner Brothers hasn’t officially announced the rating for Terminator: Salvation, Pizza Hut’s tie-in site has it as being PG-13.

Star Trek’s soundtrack details.

Michael Bay says Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will run 147 minutes long.

The Weinstein Company has lost the rights to Sin City 2. Robert Rodriguez’ Trouble Maker studios will still produce the film, with financing most likely coming through a private equity group. No word on who will distribute.

Writing team Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese have been hired by Sony to write a script for a Venom movie as a spin-off of the Spider-Man movies.

Michael Sheen has joined The Twilight Saga: New Moon as the leader of the Volturi.

Figure skater Taylor Firth will star in Donald Wrye’s remake of his 1978 movie Ice Castles. Rob Mayes, Henry Czerny, and figure skater Molly Oberstar have also been cast, and Michelle Kwan will have a cameo. It’s a love story about a competitive figure skater who continues to fight for her dreams after an accident leaves her blind. Filming has already started in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Stage 6 Films, Jaffe/Braunstein Entertainment, and Magic Rock Prods are producing.

Kyle Gallner will play one of the main teens, Quentin, in New Line and Platinum Dunes’ Nightmare on Elm Street remake.

Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson will play Hades and Zeus in Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans remake.

Elisabeth Shue will star in Alex Aja’s Piranha remake as Sheriff Julie Forester.

Emily Joyce and John Laskowski have joined Jean Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren for Sony’s Universal Soldiers : The Next Generation.

Adaptations:

Universal has hired Mark Bomback to write the script for The Umbrella Academy. Based on Gerard Way and Dark Horse’s superhero comic: “The Umbrella Academy is a group of disbanded superheroes who reunite after the death of their adoptive father, Sir Reginald Hargreeves, an alien disguised as a wealthy entrepreneur. Hargreeves collected the members of the group shortly after their birth and trained them to save the world, and, after his death, they carry on his plan.”

Plan B and Paramount Pictures has hired Alex Tse to adapt Battling Boy. Paul Pope’s graphic novel “follows the son of a god who comes down from the top of a mountain at his father’s urging to rid the giant, continent-sized city of Monstropolis of a plague of beasts.”

Fumi Yoshinaga’s historical science fiction manga Ōoku: The Inner Chamber will be made into a live action film. “The story takes place in an alternate history version of medieval Japan, in which a bizarre disease has dwindled the male population. This has led to a matriarchal society where women outnumber men by 4 to 1. The shogun and de facto ruler of Japan keeps her own harem of men, or Ōoku.” Fuminori Kaneko will direct, and Natsuko Takahashi wrote the script for, the adaptation.

Mandalay Pictures has the film rights to Shoji Gatoh’s Full Metal Panic! light novels. “The story centers around a brusque young sergeant named Sousuke Sagara who must protect an assertive high school girl named Chidori Kaname by masquerading (somewhat unsuccessfully) as a high school student himself.” The high school action comedy has already been adapted into three anime series. [E: And Zac Efron is supposedly interested in playing Sousuke Sagara. Ugh.]

Sony will adapt the game Shadow of the Colossus for an action movie. Justin Marks will write and Kevin Misher is in negotiations to produce. It’s about “a man named Wander who must travel across a cursed wasteland and defeat 16 creatures, known as the colossi, in order to restore the life of a girl,” it’ll build on the game’s fantasy setting.

Instead of the proposed fourth Pirates of the Carribean movie, Gore Verbinski will direct Universal’s Bioshock movie. “”I had a fantastic time bringing ‘Pirates’ to life, and I am eternally grateful to Jerry, Johnny and the rest of the creative and production team. I’m looking forward to all of us crossing paths again in the future.”

Mike Neweall will direct an adaptation of John Mansfield’s The Box of Delights. Frank Cottrell Boyce is adapting the children’s fantasy novel “about a boy entrusted with a magic box that allows him to travel through time.” Brilliant Films is producing.

Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer have the rights to Doug Stanton’s Horse Soldiers. The upcoming book is about “a band of elite special forces and CIA operatives who secretly invaded Afghanistan post-9/11 on horseback and helped Afghan fighters capture the city of Mazar-i-
Sharif and topple the Taliban.”

Kiefer Sutherland, Emma Roberts, Chace Crawford, Rory Culkin, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, and Ellen Brakin will star in Joel Schumacher’s Twelve movie. Nick McDonnell’s novel is about “a high school dropout-turned-drug dealer. His lucrative life sours when the dealer’s cousin is brutally murdered on an East Harlem playground and his best friend is arrested for the crime.”

William Hurt will play William Marshall, the Earl of Pembroke in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood movie.

Trailers:

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Moon
Public Enemy
The Taking of Pelham 123
Extract
Summer Wars Japanese
The Asylum Session Japanese

Video:

Star Trek 1 clip
Star Trek 2 clips
Star Trek 1 featurette
Angels and Demons 1 clip
Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea French trailer; 6 clips

Posters:

2012
Moon
Where the Wild Things Are
Terminator: Salvation
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Fame
The Box

Images:

Star Trek
Terminator: Salvation
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

Also, today marks MRFH’s 2200th review! Sooner or later we’re going to have to invest in new tires.

Disney has announced an October 2 double feature release for the new 3-D versions of Toy Story and Toy Story 2 in theaters.

Columbia has hired Scott Silver to rewrite Chris Bertolini’s original screenplay Battle: Los Angeles. “About an alien invasion pulverizing its way across L.A.,” Aaron Eckhart will star and Jonathan Liebesman will direct.

Megan Fox has been cast in Mitch Glazer’s Passion Play. In it Mickey Rourke Rourke “will play a down-on-his-heels trumpet player, and Fox will play an angel in 1950s Los Angeles, with Rourke finding redemption in Fox after he attempts to save her from a gangster.”

Amanda Seyfried will drop out of Sucker Punch due to scheduling conflicts after HBO refused to release her from Big Love.

Kyle Newman will replace Kevin Munroe as director of horror comedy War Monkeys. Munroe, who had conflicting schedules with Dylan Dog, will stay on as producer. “During a Christmas holiday two janitors get trapped in an underground research facility after accidentally unleashing military-trained rhesus monkeys.”

Kevin Spacey will star in Trent Cooper’s Father of Invention. It’s about “a humble inventor-turned-egomaniacal billionaire who loses it all when one of his inventions goes horribly awry. After eight years in federal prison, he returns bankrupt, homeless and determined to rebuild his reputation and fortune.” It’s written by Jonathan Krane and Nichole Beattie.

Christina Ricci will star in Tom Brady directed Born to be a Star. The porn-tinged comedy was co-written by Adam Sandler, who will produce through his Miles Deep Prods. “The story centers on a small-town nerd who stumbles upon a family secret: His quiet and demure parents were famous porn stars in the 1970s. This motivates him to leave Northern Iowa for Hollywood, hoping to follow in their footsteps and fulfill his destiny as the biggest adult-film star in the world.”

Tom Selleck, Catherine O’Hara, and Martin Mull have joined Robert Luketic action comedy Five Killers.

James Franco, Mary-Louise Parker, David Strathairn, Jeff Daniels, Bob Balaban, Treat Williams, Alessandro Nivola, and Jon Hamm will star in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl. The indie film is “about the obscenity trial centering on Allen Ginsberg’s famed poem.”

Brian White will be in Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods.

Anthony Hemingway directed Red Tails will star Cuba Gooding Jr., Terrence Howard, Bryan Cranston, Nate Parker, David Oyelowo, Tristan Wilds, Cliff Smith aka Method Man, Kevin Phillips, Rick Otto, Lee Tergesen, Andre Royo, Ne-Yo, Elijah Kelley, Marcus T. Paulk, Leslie Odom Jr., Michael B. Jordan, Jazmine Sullivan, Edwina Finley, Daniela Ruah, and Stacie Davis. John Ridley wrote the script from a story by George Lucas, who will also executive produce, about “a fictional story inspired by the historic and heroic exploits of America’s first all black aerial combat unit.” Will film in Europe.

Prequels; Sequels & Remakes:

The X-Men Origins: Wolverine leak.

Paramount has announced that the MPAA has given Star Trek a PG-13 rating for “sci-fi action and violence and brief sexual content.”

Jackie Earle Haley will play Freddy Krueger in Samuel Bayer’s A Nightmare on Elmstreet remake.

Sex and the City 2 will be out May 2010.

Sean Penn is set to play Larry in MGM and the Farrelly brothers’ The Three Stooges, with Jim Carrey in negotiations for Curly, which he he already plans to gain 40 pounds for. “The film is not a biopic, but rather a comedy built around the antics of the three characters that Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Howard played in the Columbia Pictures shorts.”

Joss Schwartz will write and make his directorial debut on a remake of Bright Lights, Big City. The novel, first adapted in 1988, “revolves around a disillusioned magazine writer who numbs the pain of a failed marriage and writer’s block with drugs, alcohol and nightly carousing.”

President of Sony Worldwide Distribution Rory Bruer announced during the company’s ShoWest 2009 presentation that it is developing another Men in Black movie for a 2011 release.

Production will start on My Life as a Dog sequel My Father, His Son in 2010. Daniel Fridell will direct Reidar Jonsson’s script, who wrote the original novel.

Sam Raimi on Spider-Man 4: “Right now, David Lindsay-Abaire is working on a draft of the new picture, and he’s hard at work, and hopefully we’ll see something in about three months.”… “I’m not at liberty to discuss the villains yet. I think I have to wait till the finished screenplay, and then it’d really be up to Sony Pictures and the producers to determine when they want to release that information. To them, it’s usually a big, a big, big thing, a big moment where they want to present the villain with the proper respect or fear that he or she deserves.” Also in regards to Spider-Man 3: “They really gave me a tremendous amount of control on the first two films, actually. But then there were different opinions on the third film and I didn’t really have creative control, so to speak.”…“The best way for me to move forward on films, I realize… and this was a lesson I had to learn for myself… is that I’ve gotta be the singular voice that makes the creative choices on the film. I love Spider-Man so much that I’d like to continue telling Spider-Man stories but only under those circumstances where I think I can honor him. I don’t think I can honor him any other way.”

Paul Walker on The Fast and the Furious 5: “It’s beyond rumors at this point. I’ve spoken with executives at Universal and they’re pretty serious about it. They’re developing it. They know where they want it to take place. They want to do it in Europe”.

Adaptations:

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland will release simultaneously in IMAX theatres alongside its wide release on March 5, 2010.

Universal Pictures has announced a January 15, 2010, release date for Cirque Du Freak.

Will Arnett and Michael Shannon have joined Jonah Hex. Arnett as “a Union soldier who enlists Hex and is blindsided by the dirty fighting style of his enemies,” and Shannon as Doc Cross Williams, who might appear in any sequels.

Idris Elba and Zoe Saldana are in negotiations to play Roque and Aisha in Sylvain White’s The Losers movie.

Paul Bettany is in negotiations to star in Screen Gems and Scott Stewart’s Priest adaptation. Cory Boodman wrote the script based on Hyung Min-woo’s manwha, it’s “set in a world ravaged by centuries of war between man and vampire and follows a warrior priest (Bettany) who turns against the church to track down a murderous band of vampires who have kidnapped his niece.”

Writer Dave Kajganich on It: “The remake will be set in the mid-1980s and in the present almost equally—mirroring the 20-odd-year gap King uses in the book—and with a *great* deal of care and attention paid to the backstories of all the characters. I think the real twist here is that my pitch to [Warner Brothers]—which they’ve assured me they’re on board for—is that this will not be PG-13. This will be R. Which means we can really honor the book and engage with the traumas (both the paranormal ones and those they deal with at home and school) that these characters endure.”

Giovanni Ribisi and Amaury Nolasco have joined Nomrod Antel’s The Rum Diaries.

Brian White has been cast in Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All by Myself as “Randy, the cocky potential romantic interest of Taraji P. Henson’s character.”

Trailers:

Roseancrantz and Guilderstern Are Undead (Thanks Al)
Fame
Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance Japanese
Easy Virtue
Is Anybody There?
The Informers
The Escapist
Dead Wood
Bruno red band

Video:

Terminator: Salvation viral video
Up 1 featurette
Battle for Terra 1 clip
Fast and Furious 1 featurette
17 Again 10 clips

Posters:

Star Trek
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Twilight Saga: New Moon
Sherlock Holmes
Planet 51

Images:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Twilight Saga: New Moon
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Inglorious Basterds
Halloween: The Devil Walks Amongst (H2)
Halloween: The Devil Walks Amongst (H2)

The tagline for James Cameron’s Avatar will be “An All New World Awaits.”

Lionsgate has North American distribution rights for From Paris with Love, Luc Besson’s action thriller starring John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

James Watkins will write and direct Warner Brothers’ Methuselah. The film’s protagonist ages at a very slow rate and has used all the extra time to develop an incredible set of survival skills.

DreamWorks has picked up Michael Gilvary’s spec script Nonstop. Patrick Tatopoulos is attached to direct the science fiction thriller about “passengers on a plane after it is mysteriously abducted by an alien ship.”

DreamWorkshas also bought Chris McCoy’s romantic comedy Good Looking. “In a funky tweak on Minority Report, McCoy’s newest project posits a future dating service that matches soulmates around the world without fail. The storyline follows a guy who has the audacity to reject the person chosen for him.”

Nicole Kidman will star in Woody Allen’s as yet untitled next project.

Queen Latifah will star in Fox Searchlight’s romantic comedy Just Wright. “A modern-day Cinderella tale, story centers on a female physical therapist who falls in love with a basketball player while helping him recover from a career-threatening injury.”

Salma Hayek, Maya Rudolph, and Colin Quinn have joined Adam Sandler and Columbia’s untitled comedy. Dennis Dugan will direct the movie about “five best friends from high school who reunite 30 years later on a Fourth of July weekend.”

Prequels; Sequels & Remakes:

Jackie Chan on the Karate Kid remake: “They don’t want to call it Karate Kid any more. They want to call it The Kung Fu Kid.”

Gemma Arterton will play Io in the Clash of the Titans remake.

Distributor Funimation has announced the acquisition of Fumihiko Sori’s 2008 live-action remake of the blind swordmaster character Zatoichi, Ichi. In this one “Ichi is a female fighter played by Haruka Ayase.”

C. Thomas Howell, Christopher Showerman, and Timothy Bottoms will star in a remake of The Land that Time Forgot. The original movie, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ book, “a German U-boat sinks a British ship and takes the survivors on board. After it takes a wrong turn, the submarine takes them to the unknown land of Caprona, where they find dinosaurs and Neanderthal.” It’ll be directed by Howell from a script by Darren Dalton.

Zac Efron has left the Footloose remake. Paramount: “Footloose is a project we’ve longed to see re-booted for a new generation. While Zac is no longer attached, we remain excited and committed to the collective brain trust of Kenny Ortega, Neil Meron and Craig Zaden, who will reinvigorate the franchise.”

Eric Heisserer has been hired to rewrite Ronald D. Moore’s The Thing prequel script.

Preparations are being made for a sequel to the new Star Trek movie with Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof being hired to write a screenplay. Estimated release Summer 2011.

Chaske Spencer, Bronson Pelletier, Alex Meraz, Kiowa Gordon, and Tyson Houseman will play members of the wolf pack in Twilight Saga: New Moon. Meanwhile supermodel Noot Seear will play Heidi and Jamie Campbell-Bower will play Caius.

David Cronenberg, Viggo Mortenson, writer Steven Knight, producer Paul Webster, and Focus Features are working on a possible sequel to Eastern Promises. Says Cronenberg, “We are going to have a meeting very soon between me, Steve Knight and Paul Webster to discuss what the script would be. I have some very strong ideas about what I would like to see, but I would like to hear what they have to say as well. And then after that, if all goes well, Steve goes away and writes a great script. If we all like it, we make it.”

Adaptations:

Dragonball: Evolution has been pushed back by two days, from to April 8, to Friday, April 10.

New Regency has the rights for Radical Publishing’s Freedom Formula: Ghost of the Wasteland. Edmund Shern’s comic book series is “set in the future, when fighter jets have been replaced by pilots who battle in racing exo-suits. The protagonist is a genetically engineered racer who learns his bloodline has the power to change society.” Regency is developing it as a potential Bryan Singer directing vehicle.

Universal and Imagine Entertainment have the rights to Mac Carter and Jeff Blitz’s unreleased The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft. Being set up as a possible Ron Howard vehicle, the graphic novel “borrows elements from Lovecraft’s life, such as his family’s struggle with mental illness and his own bouts with writer’s block, and transforms the young writer’s darkest nightmares into reality when he comes across a book that puts a curse on him and lets the evils he conjures up loose on the world.” Carter will write the script.

Taye Diggs will star alongside Brandon Routh in Dead of Night, the movie version of Italian comic book Dylan Dog.

Nicki Clyne will star in Matt Pizzolo’s Godkiller movie.

Anne Hathaway will play Judy Garland in film and stage adaptations of Gerald Clarke’s Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland. The Weinstein Company bought the rights to the biography that’s “based on hundreds of interviews plus Garland’s own unfinished and unpublished autobiography, portrays the dramatic highs and lows of the cultural icon’s life– from her tumultuous early years as a child performer to her tragic last days.”

Brad Pitt and Natalie Portman will star in Paramount’s romantic comedy based on Leanne Shapton’s book Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry. “The book takes the form of a Sotheby’s-like estate auction catalog, with 325 entries and photographs depicting items that reveal the private moments and the rise and fall of a four-year relationship between the fictitious couple Hal Morris (a 40ish photographer) and Lenore Doolan (a New York Times food columnist in her late 20s).” Plan B and Handsomecharlie Films will produce.

Paramount Pictures has acquired Sarah Mylnowski’s YA fantasy novel Gimme a Call and will develop for director Andy Fickman. The book, which will be published May 2010, is about “a high-school senior who is generally dissatisfied with her life mistakenly drops her phone in a fountain. When she fishes it out, she discovers the only call she can make is to herself—at age 14, when anything seemed possible.” Oops Doughnuts will produce.

ImageMovers and Disney are in negotiations for film rights to Charlie Fletcher’s The Stoneheart Trilogy. The YA fantasy series is about “a 12-year-old London boy who enters a hidden alternate world where statues, imbued with the soul-like essence of their makers, come to life. The boy’s presence upsets a balance between good and evil, and while dealing with such creatures as sphinxes and gargoyles, he teams with an orphan girl and the statue of a World War I gunner to try to set things right.”

Universal will develop a live action Major Matt Mason movie to star Tom Hanks. Graham Yost will write a script based off Mattel’s vintage astronaut action figures line that “originated in 1966; Mason led an astronaut team that worked on the moon and lived in a space station. The toy was a hit in the buildup to the first manned moon mission. Mattel retired the line in the 1970s.” Playtone will produce.

Pierce Brosnan, Sean Bean, Uma Thurman, Kevin McKidd, and Melina Kanakerides will star in Chris Columbus’ Percy Jackson movie as Chiron, Zeus, Medusa, Poseidon, and Athena respectively.

Summit Entertainment has already bought the rights to, and Catherine Hardwicke is attached to direct, as yet unpublished If I Stay. The Gayle Forman novel “is the story of Mia, a senior in an Oregon high school who is an avid cellist bound for Juilliard. On a snow day, Mia and her family drive to visit friends, and suffer a brutal head-on collision. Mia is left in a coma, and yet is fully aware that her parents and younger brother have died. She watches events unfold around her from her bed in the Intensive-care unit, and is left with the decision: whether to die with her family, or live in a world without them.”

Trailers:

Where the Wild Things Are
Astro Boy
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
The Year One
The Hangover
Blood: The Last Vampire

Caprica (TV)
Warehouse 13 (TV)

Video:

Dragonball: Evolution 4 clips
The Haunting in Connecticut 1 clip
Fame featurette

Posters:

Astro Boy
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Star Trek
Gatchaman
Angels & Demons
It’s a Wonderful Afterlife

Images:

Where the Wild Things Are
Terminator: Salvation
Blood: The Last Vampire

Disney announced that Ghibli’s Ponyo (the English title for Ponyo on the Cliff) will open in US theaters August 14.

Danny and Oxide Pang will direct Asia’s first digital 3-D horror film The Child’s Eye in 3D. Filming begins June in Thailand on the movie about “six stranded Hong Kong travelers during the shutdown of the Bangkok airport in the November 2008 anti-government protest and their supernatural encounters after the disappearance of three in the group.”

Japanese anime, music, and game production company Marvelous Entertainment “is asking for a number of its employees — ‘in the range of 20’ or about 17% according to its press release — to voluntarily retire in an effort to reduce costs. As of December 31, 2008, the company employs 120 people. The employees who choose to take advantage of the program between March 23 and April 3 will receive a special severance payment. Their retirement will become effective on April 30.”

Brian White has been added to Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods.

Terry Crews has replaced Curtis ‘50 Cent’ Jackson (who replaced Forest Whitaker when Whitaker had to leave due to schedule changes) as Hale Caesar in Stallone’s The Expendables.

Kevin Costner and Tommy Lee Jones will star with Ben Affleck in John Wells’ The Company Men. The indie drama is “about the impact that a corporate downsizing has on both its casualties and survivors.”

Justin Long will star in New Line and Nanette Burstein’s romantic comedy Going the Distance. Geoff La Tulippe’s script is about “a man and woman in a long-distance relationship who ultimately come to the realization that they would be happier dating someone closer to home.”

Adam Scott, Amy Adams, and Matthew Goode will star in Anand Tucker’s romantic comedy Leap Year. “A young woman who travels to Dublin to propose to her boyfriend (Scott) on Leap Day. When weather forces her to veer off course, she enlists a cynical Irish innkeeper (Goode) to join her on a cross-country trip.”

Prequels; Sequels & Remakes:

Evan Charnov will write the script for Lost Boys 3, which will be another straight to DVD [E:…piece of garbage]. Corey Feldman will return, with this one being reportedly about Edgar Frog.

Pete Segal will direct, Meet the Parents sequel, Little Fockers.

Producer Mark Burg on this year’s Saw, Saw VI: “Shawnee Smith [as Amanda] is in Saw VI. There are several new characters. Also, this movie is a lot more violent than the previous five. Lastly, we have traps that pit victims against each other like the opening of Saw V. Could be the best script yet!”

After Variety reported that Paramount wanted to stake out July 1, 2011 for a possible Transformers 3, Michael Bay posted on his blog: “I said I was taking off a year from Transformers. Paramount made a mistake in dating Transformers 3. They asked me on the phone. I said yes to July 4—but for 2012—whoops! Not 2011!!! That would mean I would have to start prep in September. No way. My brain needs a break from fighting robots.”

Tohokushinsha Film Corporation have confirmed their plans for a 2009 theatrical release for Yamato. “Nishizaki’s new project is set in 2220, or 21 years after the first Yamato story. An expanding black hole threatens Earth, so three hundred million people set forth into space as part of an emigration operation. The transport fleet is attacked, and the Yamato leads the counterstrike. 38-year-old Susumu Kodai, the hero of the first series, is now a space captain with a daughter named Miyuki with his wife Yuki (the heroine of the first series).”

Karl Urban and Adriana Barraza have joined Marcos Efron’s remake of And Now the Darkness.

The Coen brothers’ next project will be their version of True Grit. This one “will be more faithful” to Charle’s Portis’ book, about “a 14-year-old girl who, along with an aging U.S. marshal and another lawman, tracks her father’s killer in hostile Indian territory,” and be told from the view point of the girl.

Director Pascal Laugier on the Hellraiser remake: “The idea behind Hellraiser is not to do a remake—it’s to do what they call a reboot—that is to say, a new version. [E: That is to say, a remake] So what I am proposing to Dimension, the studio behind Hellraiser, is some elements coming from the first film mixed with brand-new stuff. My main problem, honestly, with the Hellraiser reboot is that Hellraiser is very transgressive material. It deals with S&M and gay issues, and I really want to be faithful to the book and Clive Barker’s world. I don’t want to betray him. So if I have the feeling that I am being asked by Hollywood to soften the franchise, I will leave in a blink.”

Adaptations:

Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice has a release date of July 16, 2010.

Motion capture work on Spielberg and Jackson’s Tintin movie has finished. It’s scheduled for a 2011 release.

Sam Fell will direct the live action Demonkeeper adaptation of Royce Buckingham’s novel about “a Seattle teen who inherits responsibility for a house filled with demons.”

Catherine Hardwicke is in talks with Columbia to develop and direct an adaptation of James Patterson’s Maximum Ride. Don Payne wrote the script based on the YA series about “six teens, known as the Flock, who are genetically altered so that they are part human and part bird. Learning to fly, they escape the laboratory where they have been housed and are pursued by a pack of creatures called the Erasers who are part human and part wolf.”

Lionsgate has acquired the worldwide distribution rights to, independent production company, Color Force’s adaptation of Suzanne Collin’s The Hunger Games. Collins will also write the screenplay for her futuristic YA novel, the first in a planned trilogy, about “a dystopian future in which North America has been divided into 12 oppressed districts, each of which is forced to send tribute in the form of a boy and a girl to compete in a televised battle to the death once a year.”

Keiichi Hara will direct Sunrise’s animated Colorful for a projected 2010 release. Based on Eto Mori’s YA novel, “The ‘heart-warming comedy’ follows a person who finds himself trapped outside the normal endless circle of life and death. Thanks to ‘winning’ a lottery in the angel world, the protagonist is brought back to inhabit the body of a 14-year-old boy — who is planning to commit suicide. Thus, the protagonist begins a new life.”

Toei Animation has announced plans for a Niji-Iro Hotaru ~Eien no Natsu Yasumi~ (Rainbow-Colored Fireflies: The Eternal Summer Vacation) movie, based on Masayuki Kawaguchi novel. “The story revolves around a sixth-grade boy named Yūta on his summer vacation. His father passed away one year ago in a traffic accident, and Yūta now goes alone to visit a place where he and his father once shared memories. The two had gone often to an unused dam deep in the mountains to collect the rhinoceros beetles nearby. Yūta suddenly receives a shock in a thunderstorm, loses his footing, and gets knocked out. When he wakes up, he sees a small girl and a village — except this village is the one that should be submerged below the dam. Yūta realizes that he slipped back time to over thirty years ago, before the dam was completed. Another summer vacation, and another chance for Yūta to reclaim what cannot be reclaimed, begins.” The tagline is “Another summer vacation begins.”

Fox Atomic, with Zombie Studios and Union Entertainment, will develop a Blacklight movie, game, and comic book. Jason Dean Hall will write the movie and game about “a covert military action story set 25 years in the future.”

Universal has hired Dan Harris to write Dante’s Inferno, a live-action version of Electronic Arts video game where “players journey through the depths of hell.” Electronic Arts and Strike Entertainment are also producing.

Trailers:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Princess and the Frog
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Imagine That
500 Days of Summer
Management
Musashi: The Dream of the Last Samurai
Surveillance
Thirst (Korean)
Sorority Row

Video:

Up 1 clip
Monsters Vs. Aliens 13 clips; 8 featurettes
Bruno news story
Observe and Report 4 clips

Posters:
Where the Wild Things Are
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Terminator: Salvation
Crank 2
Orphan

Images:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Star Trek
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Princess and the Frog
17 Again

Dennis Iliadis will direct Groundswell Productions’ thriller Cure. Written by Beau Michael Thorne it’s about “a young man who sends his wife for an experimental treatment to save her from a terminal illness. Although she returns completely cured, she is suddenly infected with something more terrifying.” Filming starts this summer.

David Ayer will write and direct his pitch Last Man for Fox. The futuristic actioner is about “a hardened captain assigned to protect an outpost on a distant planet must lead a group of young, inexperienced American soldiers in battle against an alien race.” New Regency is co-financing.

Writer/director Mamoru Oshii has described his next two live action movies: “One of the projects will be aimed at film connoisseurs and will have a penny-pinching budget. The other live-action film project will be an action-adventure epic of “eroticism and violence.” He also hopes that the anime film he just started on will release some time in 2011.

Alexandre Aja will direct, and Ian Jeffers will rewrite, Gaumont’s science fiction drama The Contractor. “The story is set in a world where the U.S. government can no longer afford to fight wars and authorizes private contractors to send a band of elite soldiers on missions around the world.”

Disney has bought Barry Blaustein and Jason Hefter’s science fiction family comedy pitch Wouldn’t It Be Nice. “The story follows a teenage couple who, just before they plan to run away together and pursue their dreams, are magically zapped 20 years into the future, only to discover that their lives didn’t necessarily turn out as expected. In their mid-30s but with teenage minds—and dealing with three kids and everyday worries—they learn that maybe they weren’t as grown up as they once thought.” Gunn Films is co-producing.

Steve Carell will star in Warner Brothers’ Hi-T. The comedy is about “a man dealing with uncontrollable mood swings after an injury forces him to take testosterone injections.” Carell will also produce through his Carousel Prods. Kim Barker is writing.

Permut Presentations and Bee Holder Prods have secured the rights to the life story of John Z. DeLorean. It’ll cover the auto executive’s “rise and fall, starting with his work as a young exec VP at General Motors, where he developed the Pontiac GTO and Firebird, and the creation of his own company and the DeLorean DMC-12 car — later featured in the “Back to the Future” films. DeLorean’s downfall came when was arrested in 1982 on charges of drug trafficking to help his faltering auto company. He was freed two years later after a court ruled he was a victim of government entrapment.”

Danny DeVito will direct, and Peter Steinfeld is writing, a biopic about Eddie “Crazy Eddie” Antar. “Antar was a pioneer in discount consumer electronics, and Crazy Eddie’s grew to 43 stores, fueled by TV ads in which a frenzied pitchman promised prices that were ‘In-sa-a-a-a-a-ane!’ Antar took the company public and briefly became a Wall Street sensation. He’d been skimming money and falsifying inventory to inflate stock value. Losing control of his company in a hostile takeover, Antar went on the lam after the new owners uncovered his financial shenanigans and the SEC charged him with stock fraud. He fled to Israel — where he’d deposited millions of dollars — only to be extradited three years later. He ultimately served a prison term that ended in 1999 and was ordered to pay $150 million in fines.”

Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz, and Jesse Williams haved joined the cast for Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods.

Mickey Rourke, Jason Statham, Steve Austin, and Charisma Carpenter will star in Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables.

Prequels; Sequels & Remakes:

Producers Brian Yuzna and Ray Haboush have said that the Re-Animator remake will shoot in Spain as early as next summer. Jeffrey Coombs will be replaced as Herbert West by Ezra Godden, with Coombs instead having a small role. Elisha Cuthbert will be the girlfriend.

Roseblood Movie Co. and Twisted Pictures have hired Adam Marcus to direct the remake of Val Lewton’s 1943 I Walked With a Zombie. Marcus co-wrote with Debra Sullivan, in this one “a private tutor who discovers a terrifying family secret while working at the ancient estate of a New Orleans businessman.”

Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and MGM have made a deal to develop a remake of Roger Corman’s X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes. The 1963 movie was about “a scientist who is near a breakthrough in X-ray vision technology when his funding is cut off. Desperate to show results, the doc applies eye drops that eventually cause him to lose control over his growing powers.”

Tracy Morgan, Martin Lawrence, Chris Rock, Loretta Devine, Ron Glass, Danny Glover, Regina Hall, James Marsden, Zoe Saldana, and Columbus Short will star in a remake 2007’s Death at a Funeral. Neil LaBute is directing the comedy, “in which a funeral ceremony turns into a debacle of misplaced cadavers and family secrets,” for Screen Gems and Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. Chris Rock and Ayesha Carr co-wrote the script.

Spyglass Entertainment and Paramount have partnered for Jay Roach’s comedy Dinner for Schmucks. The remake of French movie Le Diner des cons will star Steve Carell and Paul Rudd. The movie was held up over last year’s divorce between Paramount and DreamWorks, also Sacha Baron Cohen has quietly left the cast.

Mickey Rourke has [finally] been confirmed for Whiplash, “a character that includes elements from that comicbook villain and Crimson Dynamo, another Russian baddie,” in Iron Man 2. Meanwhile Scarlett Johansson will take over the role of Black Widow from Emily Blunt who had scheduling conflicts.

Andy Linden and Domhnall Gleeson have been cast in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 to play Mundungus Fletcher and Bill Weasley, respectively.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has confirmed he’ll have a brief cameo in Terminator: Salvation. Meanwhile, producer Moritz Borman has sued co-producers Derek Anderson, Victor Kubicek, and their Halcyon Co. Alleging fraud and breach of contract for not paying him producing fees, the suit lists eight causes of action and seeks more than $160 million in damages. This has not affected the movie’s release.

Vin Diesel says writer director David Twohy is writing the script for a third Riddick movie. “We’re going to find Riddick alone for the first part of the movie, barely alive, surrounded by carnivorous monsters who are trying to eat him. So you’ll see a futuristic Rambo-esque Riddick trying to survive.”…”David Twohy is scripting the next installment of Riddick as we speak, and it’s underway. The story will return to a Pitch Black [sensibility] while servicing the mythology that’s been enhanced in Chronicles of Riddick.”

Halloween remake sequel H2 now has a new title – Halloween: The Devil Walks Among Us. Also Margot Kidder has joined the cast.

Tyler Perry and Lionsgate have signed for sequels for two of his movies. I Can Do Bad All by Myself, based off the play of the same name, will have Perry’s Medea character and star Taraji P. Henson. Filming begins March 16, and will be released September 11. The other movie is Why Did I Get Married Too will release April 2, 2010.

New Line, Walden Media, and ContraFilm have teamed for Journey to the Center of the Earth sequel Mysterious Travels. Based on Richard Outten’s script Mysterious Travels: The Lost Map of Treasure Island, Trevor Anderson and his nephew “embark on a journey to a mysterious island that was the subject of three classic novels (Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels).”

Bindi Irwin and Beau Bridges will star in the straight to DVD fourth Free Willy movie, Free Willy: South Africa. “Kirra, a young Australian girl who is sent reluctantly to stay with her grandfather, Gus, in Cape Town. When a young orca whale, Willy, is trapped by a storm in Gus’s run down water theme park, Kirra slowly but surely finds herself adapting to the new surroundings and an ever-growing friend. But, when Gus’s latest attraction starts eating too much, he is tempted to sell Willy to an unscrupulous competitor. The race is on for Kirra and her friends to find Willy’s family and return him to the ocean.” It comes out 2010.

Adaptations:

Marvel Studios has pushed back the release dates of some of their movies to “maximize the visibility of its single-character superhero films, leading to the highly anticipated release of the multi-character Avengers.”
Thor moves from July 16, 2010, to June 17, 2011.
The First Avenger: Captain America from May 6, 2011, to July 22, 2011.
The Avengers from July 15, 2011, to May 4, 2012.
Iron Man 2 keeps its May 7, 2010, release date, and (Columbia’s) Spider-Man 4 will come out May 6, 2011.

Latest word on Green Lantern: It’ll be an origin story of the Hal Jordan version. Similar tone to Iron Man. Currently in pre-production.

Andy Fickman will direct Disney’s Monster Attack Network. Scott Elder and Josh Harmon will adapt Marc Bernardin, Adam Freeman, and Nima Sorat’s graphic novel about “a team of first responders who guard the citizens of Lapuatu, a Pacific island that would be a paradise except for frequent attacks by giant monsters that rise from the sea.”

Manga creator Jiro Taniguchi’s hometown Tottori is organizing a film commission and committee to adapt Taniguchi’s Chichi no Koyomi (Father’s Calendar). “In the story, a family is devastated by the Great Tottori Fire of 1952, but the family comes to terms with the disaster and breaks free from the bonds holding them back. Taniguchi calls upon his childhood memories of Tottori’s streets, the nearby Kyūshōzan mountain, and the local Ōchidani Park to color the manga’s backdrops.”

Universal and Ridley Scott’s Untitled Robin Hood movie has set a release for May 14, 2010.

Warner Brothers has hired Dave Kajganich to write a big screen adaptation of Stephen King’s It. Already adapted in 1990 as a miniseries, it’s about “seven children in a small Maine town who confront the source of a series of murders in 1958 and again in 1985, when the cycle begins again.”

New Line, Raffaella Productions, and series creator Lee Zlotoff are developing a MacGyver movie. “No writer is attached, but the studio hopes to find a script that can acknowledge how the concept has staked a place in pop culture yet still makes for a serious and fun adventure movie.”

Aasif Mandvi, Shaun Toub, Cliff Curtis, and Keong Sim have joined M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender movie as Commander Zhao, Uncle Iroh, Fire Lord Ozai, and Earthbending Father.

Alice Braga, Mickey Rourke, and Vincent Cassel will star in Hany Abu-Assad’s adaptation of Paulo Coehlo’s novel 11 Minutes. “Braga plays a naive girl who is betrayed by her first lover and swears off romance. She becomes a high-priced call girl who works at an upscale gentlemen’s club in Geneva. Cassel plays a music exec who gets her hooked on S&M. Rourke plays the club owner.” Filming begins in Brazil and Geneva in June.

DreamWorks has optioned Chris Gall’s illustrated children’s book Dinotrux. It “takes place in a fictional prehistoric age, when the world was ruled by Dinotrux, creatures that were part trucks, part dinosaurs, with species like the Craneosauraus, Garbageadon and Tyrannosaurus Trux plowing and bulldozing their way across the terrain.“

Ginnifer Goodwin, John Corbett, and Bridget Moynahan will star in Elizabeth Allen’s adaptation of Ramona and Beezus.

MGM has acquired Charlie Vignola, Kevin Marcus, and Bradley Marcus’ script Once Upon a Time… It “is a live-action quest movie that subverts the conventions of fairytale lore at every turn. Not a parody, this is a classic story told in a fresh new way with high adventure and amazing wonders… the likes of which audiences have not yet seen.” Epidemic Pictures will co-produce.

Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan will star in Kevin Smith’s detective comedy A Couple of Dicks. The Robb and Marc Cullen script is about “a pair of cops who track down a stolen baseball card, rescue a Mexican beauty and must deal with gangsters and laundered drug money.”

Endeavor is shopping around writer Aaron Guzikowski’s Prisoners. “The story concerns a Boston family-man whose 6-year-old daughter and her best friend are kidnapped and then takes matters into his own hands by in turn kidnapping the man he suspects responsible.” Mark Wahlberg is already on board and Endeavor wants to have a director attached before selling to a studio.

Wes Craven on where supernatural horror 25/8 is at: “Marco Beltrami just came on [and] is going to be doing the music. Patrick Lussier, my old editor, came in and did three weeks of kind of exploration. It’s been a really fun process. There’s always the compensation for ideas that didn’t work or performances that maybe weren’t as strong as you thought they would be or structure that can be discovered that’s better than what you originally thought. Choices in music and sound effects and all those things are really a very important part of making a film. So I’m deeply immersed in that right now. It’s always fascinating, but it’s very exciting.”…”It’s in the fall. October we’ve been talking about, but not a particular day. I think it’s a little too far forward for the company that’s just kind of changed hands. Rogue is gone, and Relativity is the producing studio body. I mean, they love the film, and they love Last House, so the relationships are great, but they’re still kind of figuring out the schedule.”

Dakota Fanning is in negotiations to play Cheri Currie, along with Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett, in Floria Sigismondi’s biopic The Runaways. Production begins late spring.

Leonardo DiCaprio will star in Christopher Nolan’s Inception.

Paul Giamatti, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Reese Witherspoon will star in Alexander Payne’s satire Downsizing. Details will be worked out after Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor finish the screenplay about “a man low on money who decides he can have a much nicer life if he undergoes a process to shrink himself.”

Prequels; Sequels & Remakes:

J. Michael Straczynski on the Forbidden Planet remake: Because so much of the Forbidden Planet screenplay was leaked out, Warners and I have decided to chuck the screenplay in its entirety and start over. This is the direct result of the leaks that showed up on the nets, including detailed script reviews of a project that was barely a week old, and which would effectively destroy any anticipation of the movie because by the time it finally reached the screen in 2010 or thereabouts, the story would be old news. So we’re starting fresh, and we’re going to keep a tight lid on the script this time.”

Danielle Panabaker and Joe Anderson have joined Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell in Overture Films and Breck Eisner’s The Crazies “reinvention” [a remake by any other name is still a remake, people].

Amber Heard and Odette Yustman will star in Marcos Efron’s And Soon the Darkness. A remake of the 1970 movie of the same name, the setting will be moved from France to Argentina where “two American girls [are] on a bike-riding trip in a remote part of the country. When one of them goes missing, the other must find her before darkness falls and her worst fears are realized.”

Producer Ray Haboush is developing a remake of 1985’s Re-Animator. He’ll be working with Brian Yuzna, but it’s too early to say who’ll play Herbert West.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has been given a release date of December 10, 2010.

Daft Punk will compose the score for TR2N.

Dakota Fanning has been confirmed for the part of Jane in Twilight Saga’s New Moon.

Michael Bay on whether Megatron is in Transformers Revenge of the Fallen or not: “Okay cat is out of the bag. Megatron is back —- but you will only get to see him from the long lost past. We go way back in time as this movie explains the mythology of the Primes. He is not a tank like everyone suggests, but an alien vehicle. But sadly he does not has much screen time.”

George Miller is reviving the fourth Mad Max movie – this time as a 3D “anime” and a game, neither of which will have Mel Gibson. “I’ve got a couple of years left. We’re in the early stages writing and designing. A really good game you need two and half years. And for good anime you need two years.”

Damian Walshe-Howling has joined Jan de Bont’s Point Break Indo as a bad sea pirate [Yarr!] named Dali. “He and his team wear masks of ‘The Bush Administration’ (George Bush, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney and so on) as they strip boats for loot. Dali’s sister, Teela, ends up falling in love with Billy Dalton, an undercover Fed working in Dali’s gang, which complicates matters.”

JJ Abrams on a Cloverfield sequel: “We’re actually working on an idea right now. The key obviously at doing any kind of sequel, certainly this film included, is that it better not be a business decision. If you’re going to do something, it should be because you’re really inspired to do it. It doesn’t really have to mean anything, doesn’t mean it will work, but it means we did it because we cared, not because we thought we could get the bucks. We have an idea that we thought was pretty cool that we’re playing with, which means there will be something that’s connected to ‘Cloverfield,’ but I hope it happens sooner than later because the idea is pretty sweet.”

Word on the street is New Line and Platinum Dunes are starting to develop a follow up to the Friday the 13th remake. Damian Shannon and Mark Swift are beginning the script for the movie which “is expected to use elements of the original franchise more as a jumping-off point than as a template.”

Adaptations:

New Line has hired Michael Brandt and Derek Haas to adapt Richard Doetsch’s upcoming novel The Thirteenth Hour. “The story follows a man accused of murdering his wife who gets to go back in time—in one-hour increments over 12 hours—with the chance to stop his wife’s killer.”

Logan Lerman and Brandon T. Jackson will star in Fox and Chris Columbus’ Percy Jackson. An adaptation of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & The Olympians book series, it’s “about a schoolboy (Lerman) whose world is turned upside down when he discovers that his father is actually the Greek god Poseidon. The story kicks off with Percy’s becoming the prime suspect when Zeus’ master lightning bolt is stolen. The boy has just 10 days to find and return the stolen property to bring peace to the warring gods.” Filming starts April in Europe.

Universal and Media Rights Capital are finalizing a deal for The Adjustment Bureau. Loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s Adjustment Team, it would star Matt Damon as “a charismatic congressman apparently destined for national political stardom. Once he meets a beautiful ballet dancer, strange circumstances will conspire to keep them apart.” It’ll be written and directed by George Nolfi.

Megan Fox is in final negotiations to play Leila in Jimmy Hayward’s Jonah Hex movie.

Fox has signed on director Tom Dey to develop an adaptation of Brad Anderson’s Marmaduke. The newspaper comic strip created in 1954, is “about a mischievous Great Dane who lives with the Winslow family.”

Jiro Shono will direct the adaptation of Mamora Goda’s manga Mori no Asagao. “The manga revolves around the secret friendship between a rookie prison guard and a death row felon.”

Alfred Molina has been cast in Disney’s modern day Sorcerer’s Appentice movie.

Elle Fanning on Nutcracker: The Untold Story: “It’s the normal ballet music, but they just add words to it. It’s a musical, but it’s the same story.”

Christopher Nolan’s Inception will release July 16, 2010.

Zack Snyder’s “Alice in Wonderland with machine guns” movie Suckerpunch comes out October 8, 2010.

Eliza Dushku has exclusive rights and full cooperation from Robert Mapplethorpe’s estate for a biopic. Ondi Timoner will make her directorial debut on The Perfect Moment, with Interloper Films and Boston Diva Prods. producing. It’ll cover the photographer’s career “from his rise to fame in the 1970s for his portraits of socialites and rock stars until his death in 1989 at age 42 from complications arising from AIDS.”

Writer/director Bill Condon is shopping around biopic Richard Pryor: Is It Something I Said?, with Eddie Murphy attached to star.

Ellen DeGeneres has signed on to produce voice in Warner Brothers’ animated Dog Show. “The story centers on a stray dog and her misfit friends who shake up the famed and pure-bred world of a Westminster-like dog show.”

Mark Verheiden will write DreamWorks’ Quartermain. While no plot details are available, it’s supposed to be an original idea science fiction adventure.

Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell will star in Adam McKay’s cop comedy B Team.

Melissa Leo has joined Tony Goldwyn’s indie drama Betty Ann Waters.

Pruitt Taylor Vince and Jason Connery will star in Mark Bernier’s Glass Houses, “about a cop haunted by ghosts of his youth.”

Tony Todd, Tom Savini, and Michael Berryman will star in Jeanie Sidelman Galster’s coffee shop horror movie The Ground House.

Prequels; Sequels & Remakes:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has a July 15, 2011, release date (same weekend as The Avengers).

Louis Leterrier’s The Clash of the Titans remake has March 26, 2010.

Iron Man 2 will start principal photography early April.

Samuel L. Jackson has made up with Marvel and signed a nine picture deal to play Nick Fury. The movies include Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, The Avengers and its sequels, and possibly headline a S.H.I.E.L.D. movie.

Michael Petroni will adapt Fox’s The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Bronson Pelletier has joined the cast of New Moon.

Universal Pictures has hired Gore Verbinski to direct the Clue remake. [I hate this remake, so much... it-it- the f - it -flam - flames. Flames, on the side of my face, breathing-breathl- heaving breaths. Heaving...]

Neal H. Moritz, through his Original Films, is in final negotiations to develop and produce a Total Recall remake for Columbia.

Warner Brothers, Kennedy/Marshall Co., and Appian Way are in the early developmental stages of a The Neverending Story remake. Warners recently acquired the rights to Michael Ende’s novel, which was first adapted in 1984 [and then… the sequels. *shivers*], about “a loner, delves deeper into the book, he increasingly finds his life intertwined with the plot of the novel, in which a hero in the land of Fantasia must save the universe on behalf of an empress.” The new one “will examine the more nuanced details of the book that were glossed over in the first film.”

Jim Carrey and Jake Gyllenhaal will be in their first musical with a “contemporized film transfer” [*cough*remake*cough*] of 1958’s Damn Yankees. New Line Cinema has hired Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel to write the script. Originally a Broadway musical in 1955, it’s about “Joe Boyd, a happily married middle-aged man whose devotion to a hapless pro baseball team prompts him to make a Faustian bargain with the devil to help the team. He’s transformed into slugger Joe Hardy, in exchange for Boyd’s soul. Boyd can break the deal, but the deadline occurs during the World Series. For good measure, the devil engages Lola, a gorgeous lost soul, to seduce the slugger and seal his fate.” Gyllenhaal will play Boyd and Carrey the Devil.

Adaptations:

Marvel has announced the release date of the Kenneth Branagh directed Thor movie as July 16, 2010.

Warner Brothers has Green Lantern’s release as December 17, 2010.

Warners also changed Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes release to December 25, 2009 (was November 13, 2009).

Jimmy Hayward’s Jonah Hex movie sees theaters August 6, 2010.

IMAGI has reported they’ve secured the finances to finish Astro Boy in time for its October 23, date.

Warner Brothers is developing a Suicide Squad movie based on DC’s comic about “a group of incarcerated supervillains recruited by the government to accomplish a task deemed too dangerous for superheroes.” Justin Marks is writing and Lin Pictures will co-produce.

Threshold Entertainment, Platinum Studios, and Top Cow Productions are developing an 3-D Aphrodite IX movie. “After the cyborg assassin is sent on a series of undercover missions, she achieves self-awareness, begins searching for her origins and eventually stumbles onto a secret society of cyborgs attempting to undermine the government.”

Lance Henriksen, Bill Moseley, Tiffany Shepis, Justin Pierre, Lydia Lunch, and Davey Havok are on board for writer/director Matt Pizzolo’s “illustrated film” adaptation of his and Anna Muckcracker’s comic book Godkiller. Halo 8 will release serialized, short-form DVD in the spring and summer, with a full length theatrical release this fall. “Godkiller takes place in a dark future after economic collapse, after nuclear holy war and after Earth is colonized by alien races. Tommy and his kid sister Lucy live in an orphanage in one of the few remaining city-states, but Lucy is critically ill and desperately in need of a new heart. Tommy’s odyssey to find a new heart for his sister begins when he follows an organ-stealing prostitute named Halfpipe out of the city-state and into the savage borderland known as Outer City.”

Alex Proyas says The Tripods will be the first of a planned trilogy based on John Christopher’s YA series.

Seth Green will star as Milo, a boy who stows away on a spaceship to rescue his mother after she is kidnapped by aliens, in Disney and Simon Wells’ performance capture adaptation of Mars Needs Moms. Joan Cusack will be the mom and Mindy Sterling will be Mars’ leader.

Bavaria Pictures is producing Superhero with Anthony McCarten directing the movie based on his novel Death of a Superhero. It’s about “a teenage comic-book artist suffering from leukemia who finds escape from the harsh realities of life in his illustrated adventures.” Freddie Highmore and Jessica Schwarz will star.

Cate Blanchett is in final negotiations to play Maid Marian in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood movie (formerly called Nottingham).

Michel Gondry will direct Columbia Pictures’ The Green Hornet.

Eric Brevig will direct Warner Brothers Yogi Bear movie.

Trailers:

Land of the Lost
Funny People
Alien Trespass
The Taking of Pelham 123
Sleep Dealer
Inglorious Basterds
Mum & Dad

Videos:

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince 1 featurette
Watchmen 6 clips
Watchmen 1 clip
Watchmen 3 behind the scenes
Watchmen viral video
Star Trek 1 featurette
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li 8 clips
Land of the Lost 1 clip
2009 Movies Preview

Posters:

Wolverine
Inglorious Basterds
Fast & Furious
Crazies

Images:

Star Trek
The Twilight Saga’s New Moon
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Battle for Terra
I Love You Man
Universal Soldier 3

North American manga and anime publisher Viz Media is restructuring, resulting in layoffs on Friday. CEO Hidemi Fukuhara: “Viz Media is in the process of refining its focus and is restructuring to adjust to changing industry and financial market realities. VIZ feels confident that with these changes, the company will be more streamlined to face the current economic climate.”

One of Kyle Newman’s next projects is a “very non-traditional bio-pic” about Wolfman Jack, Heard it on the X. Written by Ernie Cline: “We take a look at two weeks in the Wolfman’s life, how he gets on the air down in Mexico, put the finishing touches on his radio persona. He becomes a sort of Robin Hood figure for this community of disenfranchised workers stuck in this radio station. There was a lot of shady stuff going on at this place. The staff take the station back from this Mexican warlord. In the third act, it becomes very over the top. It becomes a legend the way the Wolfman would have told it.”

Robert Rodriguez will write and direct Dimension’s science fiction thriller Nerverackers. “Set in 2085, the story centers on a character named Joe Tezca who is part of an elite unit dispatched to quell a crime wave in a theoretically perfect future society.” It has a release date of April 16, 2010.

Breckin Meyer is writing a comedy called Superguys. Based on a story by Harry Elfont and Deb Kaplan, it’s “being described as ‘Ocean’s 11 with idiots set at Comic-Con.’”

Katherine Heigl has been cast in Robert Luketic’s thriller Five Killers. Also starring Ashton Kutcher, “a woman meets the man of her dreams while on vacation. Married bliss is turned upside down when they discover that their neighbors may be assassins hired to kill them.” Shooting starts March in Atlanta and France.

Halle Berry will star in the Eunetta Boone written Who Is Doris Payne? J2 are developing the “fact-based film about an international jewel thief whose career spanned five decades.”

Chiwetel Ejiofor has been added to Angelina Jolie starrer Salt as “CIA counter intelligence officer Peabody,who is obsessed with proving that Angelina’s character Everlyn A Salt is a Russian sleeper spy.” Liev Schreiber is in talks to play “Ted Winter, Evelyn Salt’s friend and colleague in the CIA.”

John Cusack and Rob Corddry have joined, and Craig Robinson and Clark Duke are in negotiations for, Steve Pink’s comedy Hot Tub Time Machine. It’s about “a group of guys who have grown frustrated with their adult lives. They return to the ski lodge where they partied as teens to find answers and are transported to 1987 via their hot tub, a bubbly time machine”

Prequels, Sequels & Remakes:

New Moon’s new title is The Twilight Saga’s New Moon. The third movie, based off Stephenie Meyer’s Eclipse, has been given a release date of June 30, 2010.

Jon Favreau says Emily Blunt is out of Iron Man 2.

Universal will go forward with Meet the Parents’ second sequel Little Fockers. Jay Roach will not be directing, John Hamburg is rewriting the script. Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, and Owen Wilson are in talks to star.

Actor Justin Chatwin says there’s already a script for a Dragonball Evolution sequel, this comes after Jamie Chung said the actors were signed for two more movies. If green-lit, Chatwin says, “The second one goes more into the whole legacy and the genealogy of Dragonball. It goes more in-depth into a real Dragonball series, the kind of intergalactic world of Dragonball.” It’ll open in Japan March 13, the United Kingdom April 3, and America April 8.

/film reports on a synopsis for a Superman Returns sequel, now titled Superman Unleashed: “Ramping up the action of its esteemed predecessor, the sequel to ‘Superman Returns’ promises to raise the stakes and take the audience to heights of action that no other superhero movie can achieve.”

Leonardo DiCaprio is reportedly wanting to produce a reboot of 1983’s WarGames.

Wes Craven: “We’re actually talking about remaking THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS. Possibly SHOCKER also. So these ones that we’ve been remaking, especially THE HILLS HAVE EYES and THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, I own with the producer. Two different producers and both close friends. Peter Locke with The Hills Have Eyes and Sean Cunningham with Last House. So we now own them after thirty years we got them back. It’s funny because when we made those deals we thought, we’ll never be alive in thirty years, we were all like [mimicking smoking pot]… but it turns out we’re still alive. So were able to remake those. And People Under the Stairs and Shocker, although we don’t own them, Universal owns them but we have rights with Universal and myself, and the producer who is Shep Gordon to say yes or no. So if we all say yes we can do it. Universal can’t go off and make them with somebody else. So we’re talking about doing that now.”

Adaptations:

Coraline will be released May 7, in Australia under the title Coraline and the Secret Door.

Will Clark will direct Rocket Pictures’ Pride and Predator [Yes, you read that right], a mashup of Jane Austen’s book and the Predator movies. Clark wrote the script with Andrew Kemble and John Pape, “the alien will butcher the mannered protaganists, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about.” Elton John, who owns Rocket, will supervise music. Filming begins later this year in London.

Diablo Cody and Mason Novick are producing an adaptation of S. G. Browne’s upcoming novel Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament. Geoff LaTulippe will adapt, and Nanette Burstein will direct. The novel is described as such: “Meet Andy Warner, a recently deceased everyman and newly minted zombie. Resented by his parents, abandoned by his friends, and reviled by a society that no longer considers him human, Andy is having a bit of trouble adjusting to his new existence. But all that changes when he goes to an Undead Anonymous meeting and finds kindred souls in Rita, an impossibly sexy recent suicide with a taste for the formaldehyde in cosmetic products, and Jerry, a twenty-one-year-old car crash victim with an exposed brain and a penchant for Renaissance pornography. When the group meets a rogue zombie who teaches them the joys of human flesh, things start to get messy, and Andy embarks on a journey of self-discovery that will take him from his casket, to the SPCA, to a media-driven class-action lawsuit on behalf of the rights of zombies everywhere.”

Stephen Gaghan will adapt Jon Stock’s Dead Spy Running for Warner Brothers and director McG. The movie is the first in a planned trilogy “to reinvent the spy genre by telling the origin story of a newly trained spy in a tone that mixes the grittiness of ‘The Bourne Identity’ with the wittiness of John Le Carre’s oeuvre.”

William Monahan will adapt John Grisham’s The Associate for Paramount. The likely Shia LaBeouf vehicle will be about “a Yale Law School student with a sordid secret that leaves him vulnerable to blackmail. He’s manipulated into taking a job at a law firm and working on a multibillion-dollar lawsuit.”

Sandra Bullock will star in Alcon Entertainment’s John Lee Hancock written and directed The Blindside. The sports dramedy is based on Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side: Evolution of the Game, about football player Michael Oher.

Push: Based on a Novel by Sapphire has had its titled changed to PRECIOUS, Based On the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire.

Universal has “quietly entered into negotiations” with Glen A. Larson to write and produce a movie version of Battlestar Galactica. Larson produced the 1978 show, and the movie wouldn’t be connected to the Sci Fi one. It “would relaunch the story in a new medium with the characters Adama, Starbuck and Baltar.”

While nothing’s finalized, Dwayne Johnson says he’ll play Race Bannon in Warner Brothers’ Jonny Quest movie, and that it’ll be directed by Andy Fickman, with Zac Efron in talks to play Jonny.

Steve Oedekerk will write the script for the latest in the Universal/Hasbro movies, Stretch Armstrong. “The toy, a 13-inch, blond-haired muscled figure whose limbs could be stretched to nearly four feet, was launched by Kenner in the ’70s. He had a dog named Fetch Armstrong, and a sibling, Evil X-Ray Wretch Armstrong.”

Some of these links may contain mature material, and MRFH is not responsible for their content.

Trailers:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Tales of the Black Freighter
Blood: The Last Vampire (Japanese)
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
Observe and Report
Echelon Conspiracy
Open Graves

Video:

Watchmen 4 clips
Knowing 1 clip
X-Men Origins: Wolverine Outcasts TV spot
X-Men Origins: Wolverine Brothers TV spot
X-Men Origins: Wolverine Legends TV spot

Posters:

Transformers Revenge of the Fallen
Dragonball Evolution
Dragonball Evolution
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
Last House on the Left

Images:

Watchmen
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Sorority Row

UPDATE: “FANBOYS expands on Friday, February 20th into 10 more cities / regions including…. Boston, Washington DC, Detroit, Atlanta, Phoenix, Orlando, Daytona Beach FL, Hartford CT, New Haven CT, Raleigh-Durham NC, and Columbus OH. Note: FANBOYS will continue to play in Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle-Tacoma, Houston, and Austin. However, if you live in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, or San Francisco and wish to see FANBOYS on the big screen, please do so by Thursday Feb 19th as it will be your last chance.” Theater info here.

Walt Disney Studios and DreamWorks have entered into an exclusive distribution agreement. The terms are Disney will handle marketing and distribution on approximately six live action DreamWorks films a year. The first, to be release through the Touchstone Pictures banner, will be in 2010.

Parent company GDH is restructuring Japanese animation studio Gonzo. After slowing DVD sales, Gonzo’s creative staff of 130 will be reduced to 30 over the next five years. “With only 30 members in its production staff under the restructuring plan, Gonzo will not be able to proceed with anime projects on its own.” This comes after cutting its annual projects from 8 to 4, and asking for 50 employees to “voluntarily retire” last year.

Christopher Nolan has signed a deal with Warner Brothers to direct his original screenplay Inception. It’s “a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind.” This means that a Dark Knight sequel would have to wait until he finishes Inception, which could be in theaters summer 2010.

Dimension Films is developing an untitled “high school thriller in the vein of Ten Little Indians that involves a teen social networking site.” T.S. Faull will write the script.

Josh Brolin and Anthony Hopkins have been cast in Woody Allen’s next, untitled, project. Filming starts this summer in London. Mediapro is financing, and Letty Aronson and Steve Tenenbaum are producing.

Mickey Rourke will star in Occupant Films and Secret Handshake Entertainment’s indie drama St. Vincent. Directed by Walter Hill and written by Cameron Young it’s about, “a hit man returning to his former New York City neighborhood to finish off the botched killing of an informant. He’s then forced to masquerade as a priest and finds himself taking the confessions of his target.” International rights are being sold by IM Global with North American rights by ICM.

Kevin James will star in MGM and Frank Coraci’s comedy The Zookeeper. In it “the animals at the zoo adore their caretaker Andrew (James), an amiable but lonely guy who’s never quite fit in. Finding himself more comfortable with a lion than a lady, Andrew decides he should leave the zoo and get a life. When the zoo animals discover his plan they decide to break their code of silence and reveal their biggest secret: they can talk! Now they won’t shut up and they’re teaching Andrew nature’s best mating rituals. To help him win the girl of his dreams and save their happy family they’re willing to do – or say – anything.” Happy Madison is producing.

Prequels, Sequels & Remakes:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine’s release has been moved up to April 29.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will come out two days earlier – June 24.

Justin Marks will rewrite Disney’s fast-tracked 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo.

Music video and commercial director Samuel Bayer will direct Platinum Dunes’ proposed remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Ghost House Pictures will be remaking two European horror movies, the Spanish Anguish and Danish film Room 205. Jade Wade Wall did the English screenplay for Anguish, first written and directed by Bigas Luna in 1987, about “two girls who, while watching a scary movie, find themselves in a horror film of their own when their life starts to mirror the pic’s plot.” While Martin Barnewitz, who directed Room 205, now called The Dorm, will also direct the English language version. “A college freshman moves into a dorm only to find that her room is haunted by sinister forces.” Stephen Susco is writing.

After rumors that Malcom McDowell might not be returning as Dr. Loomis for H2, Rob Zombie says that it’s not true and that McDowell will be back. Filming starts March, with a planned release of August 28.

P.J. Pesce’s straight to DVD prequel Smokin’ Aces : Blowback will star Tom Berenger, Vinnie Jones, Maury Sterling, Michael Parks, David Richmond-Peck, Merwin Mondesir, Martha Higareda, C. Ernst Harth, and Sofia Vergara.

Adaptations:

Reliance Big Entertainment has the rights to Rob Liefeld’s graphic novel Youngblood. Brett Ratner will direct the adaptation “about a superhero team sanctioned and overseen by the U.S. government.”

John Malkovich has joined Jonah Hex as villain “Turnbull, a wealthy Southern plantation owner whose son is killed by Union soldiers during the Civil War. He blames Hex, a former confederate soldier turned hardened bounty hunter and gunslinger.”

Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain will adapt Red 5’s ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction for Benderspink. Kevin Grevioux’s comic “follows an elite team of soldiers sent on a covert operation into hostile territory in the Middle East to stop what they soon discover to be a government-created army of the undead.”

Sam Esmail will write Mandate Pictures’ adaptation of children’s comic The Ghouly Boys.

Jim Sturgess, Geoffrey Rush, Rachael Taylor, and David Wenhem have joined the voice cast for Zack Snyder’s animated adaptation of Kathryn Lasky’s Guardians of Ga’Hoole. The children’s book series is about “a young barn owl and his friends as they join forces with the mythical Guardians of Ga’hoole, owl protectors, to save the owl kingdom from rogue elements.” Warner Brothers, Village Roadshow, and Animal Logic are producing.

Richard Jenkins has signed onto, and Aaron Eckhart is in negotiations for, Gruce Robinson’s Rum Diary. They join Johnny Depp and Amanda Heard in the adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s novel about “a washed-up, hard-drinking journalist named Paul Kemp (Depp) in 1950s Puerto Rico.”

Producers Charles Roven and Richard Suckle are developing an adaptation of Robert Stone’s novel Damascus Gate with Columbia. Eric Warren Singer will adapt the political thriller about “a journalist and a group of extremists in modern-day Jerusalem.”

Director/writer Michael Radford and Al Pacino will work together again in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear. “An aging monarch who selects his successor by parsing his kingdom in three parts, ruled by his trio of daughters. Two of them are scheming connivers who flatter their father, while the one loving daughter, Cordelia, refuses to play that game and is exiled. The king ultimately loses everything.” It’ll film in Europe later this year.

British miniseries Lost in Austen will be turned into a movie by Columbia Pictures. Guy Andrews, who also wrote the series, will adapt the story about “Amanda, an ardent Jane Austen fan, who lives in present-day New York with her boyfriend, until she finds she’s swapped places with Austen’s fictional creation Elizabeth Bennet.”

Will This Awesome Doctor Who Filming Go To Waste?

Reportedly, the BBC will pay Matt Smith £1 million when he takes over as the 11th Doctor in Doctor Who, and then an annual salary of £200,000 for three years, with the option to extend his contract another two.

Reaper’s second season will premiere on the CW March 3, a couple weeks sooner than was originally announced.

ABC has officially green-lit the pilot for a remake of 80’s miniseries V. Written and executive produced by Scott Peters, it will still be about aliens (Visitors) who say they’ve come to help Earth, but they’re dirty dirty liars. It’ll focus on “Erica Evans, a Homeland Security agent with an aimless son. When the aliens arrive, her son gloms on to them — causing tension within the family.” Jason Hall is also producing and Warner Bros. TV is producing.

Eddie Izzard, Vanessa Redgrave, Dougray Scott, Joely Richardson, Brian Cox, and Jason Priestley will star in the BBC’s new Day of the Triffids. Patrick Harbinson wrote the adaptation of John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic novel about “the search for an alternative fuel supply leading to the discovery of the triffid, a plant cultivated for its fuel but which seems to have a life of its own. When spectators gather worldwide for an anticipated solar storm, billions are left blinded and the few sighted survivors watch as society collapses into chaos. The triffids find their way out of captivity and, free to roam the planet and with a fatal sting and a taste for human flesh, begin to rapidly start breeding.” Power and Prodigy Pictures will co-produce the two part drama that will air later this year. Filming starts April.

Brian Michael Bendis on the TV adaptation of Powers: “‘Powers’ is in active development as a pilot at FX. I just handed in a draft to the network and we’re getting our notes from the network as soon as [New York Comic Con] over. So next week I’ll get the notes, and as long as they don’t involve sock puppets and some sort of orgy scene that I’m not interested in, then hopefully it will go in the right direction.”

David Nutter will direct the pilot for ABC’s Witches of Eastwick adaptation.

Kyle XY will be canceled after finishing its current 10 episode third season.

Chris O’Donnell and LL Cool J are in talks to star in CBS’ NCIS spinoff as Callen, “an average guy born to do undercover work as the ultimate chameleon, taking on different identities,” and Sam Hannah, “a former U.S. Navy Seal who is tough but charming,” respectively. The pilot will air as an episode of NCIS.

Krysten Ritter has been cast in CW’s Gossip Girl spinoff/prequel as Carol Rhodes. Written by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage it’s about a “young Lily Rhodes (her maiden name), who, after a falling-out with her parents, is forced to move in with her sister, Carol (Ritter), the black sheep of the Rhodes family.” The backdoor pilot will air as a Gossip Girl episode May 11.

DVD Releases:

Chocolate – February 10
The Lodger – February 10
Summer Heights High – February 24
Dark Reel – March 10
The Grudge (Blu-ray) – March 24
Tokyo Zombie – April 1
The Tale of Despereaux – April 7
Vinyan – April 7
The Spirit – April 14
Splinter – April 14
Caprica – April 21
S. Darko – April 28

Trailers:

G.I. Joe
Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen
Star Trek
Fast and Furious
Monsters Vs. Aliens
Up
Race to Witch Mountain
Land of the Lost
Year One
My Life in Ruins
The Great Buck Howard
Drop (Japanese)
Heaven’s Door (Japanese – skip the opening and select the “Trailer” button)
Tokyo
Angels & Demons
Torchwood (TV)
Eden Log
S. Darko
Red Mist
Infestation

Video:

Watchmen featurette
Watchmen viral video
The Prisoner (TV) featurette
Inglorious Basterds promo
Alien Trespass mockumentary
Fired Up 1 clip
Friday the 13th 3 clips

Posters:

Watchmen
Watchmen
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
G.I. Joe
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Monsters Vs. Aliens
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
17 Again
Crank 2
Mutant Chronicles
The Horsemen
H2

Images:

World War Z concept art
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Ramona on Edgar Wright’s MySpace page
Tales of the Black Freighter
Terminator Salvation
Tranformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen
Astro Boy
Knowing
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
Rage
Jennifer’s Body
Mutant Chronicles
Mutant Chronicles
S. Darko