In Wreck-It Ralph, a villain (voiced by John C. Reilly) whose job is to bust up 8-bit buildings finds himself longing for more. It’s just like that time Donkey Kong started writing poetry and listening to The Cure. What did you think that funky Kill Screen was all about? Exactly. It’s a cool concept from Disney trading on nostalgia that includes multiple worlds (theoretically for Ralph to adventure through). There’s the racing game “Sugar Rush” and the space fighting game “Hero’s Duty,” and Disney has delivered the first look with three pictures (via CineHeroes). They’re all beautiful, but that’s par for the course at Disney. Check them out for yourself:

Why Watch? Short films weren’t honored at the first Academy Awards in 1929, but it didn’t take long for them to be added to the docket. After all, the film industry owes its origins to short work (which may be part of why Hugo is damned popular this year). In 1932, the award for Best Live-Action Short Film and Best Animated Short Film celebrated work from Laurel and Hardy and Disney respectively. Disney’s contribution was Flowers and Trees – a movie that was supposed to be in black and white, but ended up being the first cartoon made with the three-strip Technicolor process. It bridged technologies, was loved by fans, and got the gold. Plus, it teaches the lesson that grumpy trees shouldn’t play with fire. What will it cost? Only 7 minutes. Skip Work. You’ve Got Time For More Short Films.

The Mayans, the wise race of ancients who created hot cocoa, set December 21st, 2012 as the end date of their Calendar, which the intelligent and logical amongst us know signifies the day the world will end, presumably at 12:21:12am, Mountain Time. From now until zero date, we will explore the 50 films you need to watch before the entire world perishes. We don’t have much time, so be content, be prepared, be entertained. The Film: Homeward Bound: The Incredibly Journey (1993) The Plot: During a family move, a trio of pets are left at the home of a rancher friend to be cared for tempoarily, but animals, not fully capable of understanding the English language, assume they’ve been abandoned. Not ones to go easily into the night and exist happily on a farm, they take it upon themselves to embark upon an incredible journey to find their owners in a tale of inspiring loyalty and hilarious Michael J. Fox hijinks!

The Motion Picture Association of America must die. It’s a monopolistic behemoth that poisons creativity and commerce while hiding behind the failed task of educating parents about film content, and the time has come to call for its dissolution. The above logo is what we, as movie fans, are most familiar with when it comes to the MPAA because we see it on trailers and home video, but that symbol is really a trick of PR. The goal of the MPAA is not to rate movies, even if that’s the product we know and loathe best. The MPAA’s founding, fundamental aim is to maintain the corporate dominance of its members – the six largest studios. It does not serve fans. It does not serve families. It does not serve filmmakers.

The found fauxtage superhero flick Chronicle comes out next week, but Max Landis has already lined up his next project over at Disney. According to Variety, The Mouse has taken the bait on a space adventure from the writer. Not only is it untitled (or without a title they can release at least), there’s also essentially no information on it at all. It involves a brother and sister going through an emotional journey. And there’s space. From that, it’s easy to assume that it will be science fiction on a large scale. What’s interesting is that Disney seems to be putting healthy stock in the final frontier and science fiction – with John Carter trying to become a Spring fixture this year, the video game-inspired Wreck-It Ralph, and this new project in the works. It’ll be interesting to see if they stick with the sci-fi tilt and truly move ahead with more Tron movies. They’ve made confidence announcements, sure, but it remains to be seen whether sequels will survive the development process. That’s not to say that they aren’t placing their narrative bets on other genres. They have Frankenweenie and The Odd Life of Timothy Green coming out this year – a Gothic coming-of-age tale and the organic version of a test tube baby story respectively. Beyond that, they’re supplementing with 3D re-releases of Beauty and the Beast and Finding Nemo this year. Hopefully they can take the money made by converting and shipping reels to theaters and invest it [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Back in July of 2010 it was announced that Disney was putting together a live action Tinkerbell movie called Tink, and that Elizabeth Banks would star. That sounded like a fun idea, but July 2010 was a long time ago…whatever happened to it? Apparently it’s still a possibility, and while talking to Movie Hole, Banks spilled a few more details about the concept: “It’s a live action Tinkerbell movie sort of in the vein of Elf in which I would play Tinkerbell. Tinkerbell gets thrown out of Never Never Land, and it’s about where she goes and who she meets and the adventures she has…Tinkerbell is one of the greatest characters because she’s mischievous and snarky and fun and sexy and jealous and vengeful.” Invoking the name of Elf  is a pretty bold move. Could Disney really make something that funny? The possibility is there, as Banks is a talented comedic actress, and the script is being written by Fright Night screenwriter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer veteran Marti Noxon, who is no slouch either.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr recovers from his colossal failure in getting any of his votes in the Critic’s Choice Movie Awards to count (except for A Separation for best foreign film, but who didn’t think that would win?) by engaging in therapy via multiplex. Unfortunately, it’s January, and his only choices were Marky Mark and the Smuggling Bunch or Queen Latifah going mano-y-mano with the robot Dolly Parton. He opts for the action film, but he may have also fallen asleep during it. How soon until good movies are released again?

On January 11, 1991, the then-head of Disney studios, Jeffrey Katzenberg, circulated an incredibly important memo about the state of the movie industry and the products they were making. It was called, “The World is Changing: Some Thoughts on Our Business,” and it had a simple purpose: to locate the root of a growing problem and to take steps to avoid falling victim to it. Katzenberg began the memo by stating: “As we begin the new year, I strongly believe we are entering a period of great danger and even greater uncertainty. Events are unfolding within and without the movie industry that are extremely threatening to our studio.” As we begin a new year two decades after this memo was written, it’s critical to look back at the points Katzenberg made to see that his period of great danger is now our period of great danger, to note that the same events unfolding within and without the industry still threaten the entire studio system in 2012, and to predict our future based on the past.

There’s a spy comedy in the works over at Disney called The B Team that’s starting to see some life. The film is reportedly about a James Bond-type secret agent who gets himself kidnapped, leaving his nerdy tech support and research team left with the responsibility of rescuing him. Hilarity will doubtless follow as the pudgy, dweeby types try to acclimate themselves to being out in the world doing stuff instead of sitting behind a computer screen, typing things and coloring missions with snarky commentary. The new action regarding the film’s development is that Seth Rogen has been brought on as a producer, which means he’s likely also being looked at to star. This has been Rogen’s modus operandi of late. He’s had a producing hand in a lot of his recent films, including 50/50, The Green Hornet, and Pineapple Express. I guess he’s kind of like the Jay-Z of the comedy world.

It’s been a long, winding road to get Disney’s new version of The Lone Ranger to the big screen. We went through the whole casting process, we went through a phase where everybody was waiting to see if Gore Verbinski would come on to direct, we were told that Disney had canned the movie due to its budget being out of control, and then there was a whole series of will-they-won’t-they back and forths where Verbinski kept trying to cut money from the budget to save the film and nobody knew whether or not each cut would be enough to do the job. But, finally, after what feels like years of reporting on this movie already, Deadline Tioga is saying that it’s actually set to go in front of cameras in February. The amazing thing is, despite all of the delays and uncertainty, The Lone Ranger still has the original cast it put together in place. Armie Hammer is still going to be the title character, Johnny Depp is still going to be Tonto, and they’ve even now got Tom Wilkinson signed, sealed, and delivered to play the film’s villain, Latham Cole, and Ruth Wilson locked in to play the female lead, Rebecca Reid. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, there’s also a strong supporting cast featuring names like Barry Pepper and Dwight Yoakam that are still on board.

A deal was announced today that Walt Disney Pictures will start allowing hundreds of their films to be rented on YouTube, the Google-owned video hosting site that has also been pushing itself as a place to rent mainstream video titles since May of this year. Disney’s deal makes it the fourth big studio, joining Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros., to allow easy access to their movies not just on the YouTube.com site, but also on Android powered devices and on Google TV. Some Disney titles have already started hitting the site, with older movies like Alice in Wonderland available for a $1.99 rental, and newer titles like Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides available for $4.99. In addition to pushing movie rentals on their site, YouTube has also been active in developing branded channels where big time media companies can distribute video for free. This new Disney rentals deal was proceeded earlier this month by an announcement that the two companies were launching a co-branded YouTube channel for Disney’s original series. According to Reuters, this new channel will include, “video drawn from relevant family-friendly content currently available across YouTube, original video produced by Disney, as well as a blend of current Disney Interactive original series, select Disney Channel programming and Disney user created content.”

It’s wholly unfair that we compare a forthcoming John Carter movie to Return of the Jedi (considering how much older the Carter books are), but there’s definitely something going on in this new picture that should take fans back to the Rancor pit. The image comes from the latest edition of Entertainment Weekly (which explains the crease). After all these years, it’s great to see the film finally ready to get launched into theaters. Take into consideration that Carter might have been the first character done animation style for Disney, and it offers some context into how long Edgar Rice Burroughs‘s character has been waiting on deck. Ironically, it’s Andrew Stanton, a director known for animation, that’s chosen this to be his first live-action project. It sees theaters March 2012.

One of Disney’s biggest historical successes came back in 1954 when they released a live action version of the Jules Verne story 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. They pumped a huge amount of money into that movie and all of its giant squid spectacle, and then saw their risky investment pay off when it became a hit. That was pretty much the beginning of Disney in the live action movie game. 1954 was a long time ago though, and there’s now probably a couple generations of people who have never seen that film, which is so important to Disney history. To fix that, the studio has been working on a remake for a while. So far the Leagues remake has been slow to get off the ground. At one point McG was set to be in charge of the whole thing, and a whole slew of different screenwriters were helping the process along, but that all fell apart. More recently David Fincher has been said to be involved in getting this one going, but it’s still not clear where exactly it fits into his schedule. The rumblings of Fincher making this movie soon seem to be getting a bit more credibility though, as Deadline Nantes is reporting that Se7en scribe Andrew Kevin Walker has been brought on board to help Fincher shape the re-told tales of Captain Nemo. There are probably about a million jokes to be made right now about all of the vile things that were in Se7en, [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Hoosiers is one of those films that somehow finds a way to strike a chord with nearly everyone who watches it. There are some movies that are just mainstream right down to their DNA. There’s this, there’s The Shawshank Redemption, maybe a Forrest Gump; they get mentioned as people’s favorite movies with far greater frequency than anything else. And I’m not talking about cinema buffs when I say people, I’m talking about your grandma, the guy who works on your car, the grandma that works on your car. You know, regular people.  Since it contains one of the big starring roles of Gene Hackman’s career and it was directed by David Anspaugh, who repeated his success at telling an Indiana sports tale with Rudy, that should probably come as no surprise. Disney is maybe the most mainstream production company in the movie business. From the very beginning they’ve focused on creating wholesome entertainment that the whole family can enjoy together.  In the early 90s one of those attempts at making movies for the whole family was Cool Runnings, a John Candy starring bobsled movie that most people might describe as a “guilty pleasure.” It gets lumped in with other 90s sports movies that Disney made like The Mighty Ducks and Air Bud, movies that you can look back at with nostalgia, but if you were to watch them today would look about as ridiculous as a team of Jamaicans showing up to the Winter Olympics with a bobsled.

If you look at the box office numbers that Disney’s 3D re-release of The Lion King did not too long ago, it’s clear that there is more than a little interest out there for seeing some of the studio’s classic efforts being once again released on the big screen. So Beauty and the Beast 3D probably doesn’t need any assistance when it comes to drawing families to the theaters. Regardless, an announcement that Walt Disney Pictures made today confirms that it’s going to get some heavyweight help whether it needs it or not. Disney’s animation department has hit a bit of a slump in the last decade, not being able to recreate the magic of its classic releases or its second golden age that came in the 90s; but one film that has bucked the trend of disappointment and gone on to become quite a success is the studio’s retelling of the Rapunzel legend Tangled. The film was a success financially, praised critically, and I myself know a two-year-old little girl who watches it about three times a day. So she and millions of other little kids will undoubtedly be thrilled to hear that an animated short, Tangled Ever After, is going to be released in front of Beauty and the Beast 3D come January 13th.

Being a professional obsessive might make me a social pariah, but it does offer me the opportunity to trawl the internet looking for my worldly fix with relative impunity – “what! This is work!” And even more importantly, it introduces me to some extremely cool stuff. Stuff that I will invariably buy on my own recommendation, or at least leave major hints to loved ones that I need them for Christmas of my birthday. Both of which are coming up, just in case you’re reading this, Mum… Anyway, a wise man once said that the important things in life aren’t things, but I would put it to him that he obviously hadn’t seen Disney’s Villain Vinylmations, or Sideshow Toys’ Batman busts, or Derek Deal’s posters, the big idiot. Luckily, no one here shares his false philosophies, so here are all of those lovely things below…

This past summer, Disney/Pixar continued their string of sequels with Cars 2. It may not have been the most popular Pixar film with critics, but kids loved it, and it’s one of the most merchandised movie of the year. That’s gotta be worth something, right? Now that Cars 2 is out on DVD, Blu-ray and 3D Blu-ray, parents around the world will be watching it over and over and over again with their kids. Whether you liked the film or not, this might begin to wear on you. So uncork a bottle of wine or crack open a beer and find a new way to get through the film for the 50th time.

Disney’s limited engagement re-release of a 3D-ized The Lion King is poised to cross the $80m mark today, which means the latest news from the studio is essentially of the “what took you so long?” variety. Disney and Pixar have announced that they will give the 3D re-release treatment to (at least) four more titles over the next two years. You can start swinging your Nemo plushie around in a plastic bag right about now. And you want to put on your Ariel wig? Should I wait for you to sprout legs, too? Fine, I’ll wait. Disney and Pixar have picked Beauty and the Beast, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., and The Little Mermaid as their next titles to get an added dimension and a return to theaters. Beauty and the Beast will dance into theaters first (anthropomorphic tableware and all) on January 13, 2012. It will most likely demolish its mid-January competition, just like Simba snapped right through September. Pixar will join in on the re-release mayhem with Finding Nemo swimming back to theaters on September 14, 2012, followed by Monsters, Inc. on January 18, 2013. The long-awaited prequel to Monsters Inc., Monsters University, will open (in 3D!) later that year, on June 21. Disney will then re-release The Little Mermaid on September 13, 20123. As a kid, The Little Mermaid was tied with 101 Dalmatians as my favorite Disney flick, so the six-year-old in me is hysterically screaming on the heels of this news. All of the films will get [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Another week, another introduction mentioning Christmas: after all, this week has seen the official unveiling of Christmas 2011 with the addition of Christmas decorations to the Disney Store’s online catalogue (that’s the actual scientifically proved start of the Christmas period, you see), and I’ll be damned if I let that one fly without a mention. Anyway, back to the serious business of movie merchandise, and three fairly light-hearted, but no less essential picks, with yet another beyond-awesome creation by Japan’s inimitable Medicom Toy company, some shoes bearing the face of the greatest movie villain of all time (no, sadly not Ballbricker from Porky’s), and baby clothes. Don’t judge me, I’m broody. For no reason at all, here’s a column dedicated disproportionately to Disney.

You may already be a film industry cynic. Maybe you think Hollywood is a barren wasteland, devoid of creativity and originality. Maybe you’re sick of seeing talented people get ignored and vapid hacks get splashed all over the trades. Maybe you’re tired of 3D everything and having to re-buy your movies every five to ten years. I’m not here to dissuade you of any of that. Hell no, I’m here to make it worse. Get ready, because this is some of the rottenest shit of which the film industry is capable. These are the things so terrible that Hollywood has to cover them up, lest God see their sin and smite them accordingly (and keep various government entities and lawyers off their backs, of course). If you still had any kind thoughts toward Hollywood, I suggest you prepare yourself for crushing disappointment. But first, I’d like to give a very huge shout out and thank you to writers C. Coville and Maxwell Yezpitelok for their help on this article. You guys are great! And now back to the shit storm, already in progress: