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.

According to Deadline Word on the Street, Walden Media has bought the rights to produce a movie version of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, the game that got me through my childhood. They will be teaming with Jennifer Lopez‘s Nuyorican Productions, and the real mystery is whether she’ll simply produce, or whether she’ll don the giant red fedora to star as well. On the other hand, an entire movie spent searching for Sandiego would mean the possibility of very little screen-time for Sandiego, so who knows what role she might actually take if starring. The synopsis is apparently as follows: “When the ACME agency’s greatest detective Carmen Sandiego becomes the world’s greatest thief, it’s up to her former partner to follow her clues and track her down. Their cat-and-mouse game leads the partner to confront a greater mystery: Is Carmen really a thief or a hero?” Sound exactly like Salt. If done right, the movie should strike a family friendly tone that manages to teach a little bit of geography without being obviously a learning tool. It should also involve Rockapella somehow (as the television game show did), or else be doomed to abject and complete failure. Of course, all of this should be taken with the same skepticism as a sandwich being sold by Sam O’Nella. After all, we’ve been waiting on that Where’s Waldo? movie since it was announced back in the Summer of ’09 – which is also the first time I called seriously for [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]

Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming spy movie The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which is an adaptation of a popular television series from the 60s, has had some trouble finding a leading man. The movie will tell the tale of the teaming of two spies under the banner of the United Network Command for Law Enforcement. If Soderbergh’s vision of the material stays true to the TV show’s, then those men will be American secret agent Napoleon Solo and his Russian counterpart Illya Kuryakin. Originally, like in most of Soderbergh’s movies, George Clooney was just going to play the lead role. He had to drop out of the production due to the always looming scheduling conflicts or whatever though, so Soderbergh has been on a mad rush to fill Clooney’s shoes. Since all of the man’s movies that don’t star George Clooney usually star Matt Damon instead, he was the next guy to get a look for the role, but he ended up passing. Then things got desperate, Soderbergh went way out of his wheelhouse and tried to get Johnny Depp to play the part, but he passed as well. That’s a lot of Hollywood’s biggest leading men telling you that they can’t be in your movie. What is a director to do? What Soderbergh seems to be doing is moving on to the next big thing. According to Variety he is in intense negotiations with Bradley Cooper to step in and be his guy. Cooper has been in a good number of films [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]

Henry Pym was born in 1962 in a story titled “The Man in the Ant Hill” in which Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers saw a character fooling around with shrinking technology. Lee once stated that the fun of the character and his initial popularity caused him to think about turning him into a super hero, but it’s unclear as to whether Stan Lee would have ever imagined Pym, or Ant-Man, as a super secret agent. That’s how director Edgar Wright sees him. He’s still working on a script for a possible adaptation of the comic to fit into the Marvel universe, and he’s revealed that he’d like Ant-Man to be a technologically advanced spy.

In case you were wondering where all those spy film elements come from, it’s this film – the Grandfather of Modern Spy Thrillers. James Bond owes Fritz Lang his life.

In honor of Secret Agent Week here at Film School Rejects, I’ve been asked to share my genius methods with the hopes that you too can become a master of ducking the airtight security systems found at every major theater chain in the country.

I’m bound and gagged. Handcuffed to a chair somewhere in a dark, musty warehouse. Dust is creeping into my lungs, and I miss my stuffed animals, but I managed to intercept a critical piece of news from a source that I refuse to name.

The third title in a series is like middle age for movies. By now audiences know what to expect.

In spite of, or because of, the flashbacks to the very legal water boarding that I undertook, I found even more reason to love this movie now that it’s on DVD.