The Thor franchise may have hit a snag when it lost Kenneth Branagh, the director of the first film in the series, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to let one little setback get it down. Heck no! As a matter of fact, right on the heels of that disappointing news springs forth hope for a new day. Thor 2 may not yet have a director, but it does already have a screenwriter. So we can rest assured that the film set for July 2013 is well on its way to being delivered on time. Who did they get to write the continued adventures of our favorite hammer-wielding maniac, you might ask? A guy named Don Payne. There’s some good news and some bad news about Payne doing the scripting for Thor 2. The good news is that he’s had plenty of experience writing in the super hero genre before. The bad news is that said experience was for writing movies like My Super Ex-Girlfriend and Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer. I’d try to bring up the fact that he was a Simpsons writer to sugar-coat things, but it was for later years Simpsons, so that’s a no-go. Hey, wait! He wrote an episode of The Brian Benben Show! How about that? Okay, okay, let’s all just try to keep an open mind. [Deadline Chesterton]

At this point it’s starting to become a certainty that Zack Snyder’s upcoming Superman movie Man of Steel is going to be mostly about a young Superman developing an Oedipal complex. First came the news that super sultry Diane Lane was on board to play Superman’s kindly, old earthbound mom Martha Kent. And now it appears that super sexy British actress Julia Ormond is close to signing on as his spacemom Lara. That’s a lot of MILF for one superhero movie. I’m jealous of Superman’s dads, who happen to be Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe.