Never let it be said that director Alex Proyas didn’t have a tremendous vision for his big screen adaptation of John Milton’s epic poem of the same name, but that same ambition appears to be what has sunk Paradise Lost for good. Reports are now coming in from various outlets that the project, with a huge budget that already exceeded $120m and a vision that included technology that, as Variety’s Jeff Sneider puts it, “wasn’t there,” has been killed by Legendary Pictures. Proyas was hired for the gig back in September of 2010 and, since then, had gathered an impressive and up-and-coming cast for the epic tale of angelic battles, including Bradley Cooper, Benjamin Walker, Casey Affleck, Djimon Hounsou, Diego González Boneta, and Camilla Belle. The film’s shooting schedule was already moved from January to early this summer, but that’s all moot now that the film has been scrapped entirely.

Legendary Pictures CEO Thomas Tull has been trying to get his Here There Be Monsters project going for quite a while. It’s a story of his own creation that tells the tale of John Paul Jones’ life as a Revolutionary War-era Naval Captain, but with a twist. In this telling of Jones’ story, there are added giant sea monsters and the like. As if Jones’ exploits weren’t exciting enough already. In order to shepherd his dream to reality, Tull hired veteran screenwriter Brian Helgeland to get together a script, and he’s been searching around for a director as well. At one point it was looking like Robert Zemeckis might come on board, but that never came to fruition, and not much has been said about the film since. Hope is not lost for Tull and his dream of telling stories where historical figures grapple with giant squid, however, as someone close to the situation is telling Vulture that the project has new life.

Comic-Con. A place of joy. A place of wonder. A place of really awesome costumes. Thursday marked the start of New York Comic-Con 2011. Not nearly as land mark as SDCC (which some would say is a benefit), but certainly not at the bottom of the scrap heap. In a city bustling with the creative minds from all walks of life, it would only make sense that once a year, those creative minds come together for one giant weekend of awesomeness. And we’re here to bring you all of it.

Ever since Seth Grahame-Smith’s “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” got picked up to be adapted into a feature film, there has been a rush to make movies where supernatural elements get inserted into inappropriate places. This is no problem for me as I’m a big fan of both supernatural elements and inserting things into inappropriate places. With “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” Grahame-Smith himself moved the venue from classic literature to historical events, and now Legendary Pictures is looking to keep that trend alive with their new film Here There Be Monsters. Legendary CEO Thomas Tull has come up with the concept for the film, and he has hired Brian Helgeland to write the script. Helgeland is the guy who wrote L.A. Confidential, but don’t get too excited because he’s also the guy who wrote the 2010 version of Robin Hood. Whether he’s the right choice for this project or not will remain to be seen. The focus of the film follows around Revolutionary War naval hero John Paul Jones. You know, the guy who said that he had, “not yet begun to fight.” Everyone knows that Jones captained the USS Ranger during his time fighting against the British, but what this film presupposes is that he was also grappling with giant sea monsters at the same time. Revolutionary War naval battles and sea monster wrangling are two concepts that could make two great movies. Smoosh them together and you get some sort of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of a movie. [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]

After returning home at 4am after wherever that party was, Robert Fure, Jack Giroux and Cole Abaius blacked out in their hotel room overlooking the San Diego Convention Center and communicated their favorite moments of Day Two of Comic-Con through their shared dream state. If you read the first day’s best, you’ll recognize that not a lot of movie moments make the list, and that’s sadly because of a smaller presence here at the convention, but Day Two brought a bit more heat. And sand-filled nudity. Here are some of our favorite things from Day Two:

I know what you’re thinking. With how bad the last attempt at a Hollywood Godzilla movie was, and given the fact that Guillermo del Toro already has a different movie about a big monster coming out of the Pacific in the works, who needs another Godzilla film? Well, turns out Legendary Pictures does, because they keep trying to make one. Or were you asking a rhetorical question? The newest news about their long gestating project is that they’ve hired writer David Goyer to rewrite the current script floating around that was done by David Callaham. Legendary has learned from the mistakes of Sony’s big, glossy Godzilla movie from ’98, so they’re getting the guy who wrote gritty, down to Earth genre stuff like Blade and The Dark Knight to work his magic on the property.

Can’t get enough movies that exist for no reason other than as a framework for car chases and as a way to promote a brand name? Then boy do I have some good news for you. Legendary Pictures is close to signing a deal with Mattel for the rights to make a Hot Wheels feature film. Yeah, that’s right, you’re remembering Hot Wheels correctly. They’re little cars that kids play with, replicas of real cars in most cases. So, essentially, Legendary Pictures is spending money on licensing the rights to a film that’s sole concept is “cars”.

Earlier in the day, I typed a news post while standing up because I’d jumped out of my chair for joy. At the Mountains of Madness was finally set to go into production this summer. The record is now being corrected, and it turns out that it was false joy and pipe dreams put forth by producer Don Murphy trying to pressure an answer from Universal. That answer is no. It’s unclear why, and I’m checking with Universal for their side of the story, but the assumption seems to be that the R-rating and cost were a bit too much for them to handle. Instead, Guillermo Del Toro might move on to deliver a PG-13 big-budget piece of work called Pacific Rim that was written by Clash of the Titans writer Travis Beacham and deals with the world defending itself from alien monsters in the future. Del Toro and monsters is a good fit, and it’s set up at Legendary, but its high concept sounds eerily familiar. Like, say, Battleship. Or Battle: Los Angeles. That’s a shallow assessment, but that doesn’t mean it’s incorrect.

In some alternate universe out there, there’s a film by Paul Greengrass starring Anthony Mackie as the talented and troubled Jimi Hendrix. Sadly, we don’t live in that universe because Experience Hendrix has officially denied the rights to the man’s music to be used for the project. The explanation given was that they feared the film would hurt sales of the back catalog. Of course, anyone who’s kept up with the aborted attempts and the successful adaptations of Hendrix’s life knows that’s just a press-friendly excuse. The real reason is a fear of how the guitar master will be portrayed when it comes to his drug abuse.

An official press release from Legendary Pictures last evening has announced that the development of the BioWare video game Mass Effect for the big screen is now underway.