Like the dinosaur blood found inside ancient, tree sap-encased mosquitoes, short films can often be cultivated and grown into something bigger and more rewarding: a feature film (sorry if you were hoping for a T-Rex). Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, there are more and more quality short films popping up everyday (and we’ve been trying our darndest to pay them their due around here), many of them hoping to hit it big and make a name for the filmmakers. It’s not an impossible dream — in fact, while you have heard of most of these writers and directors, they weren’t all that famous back when they made their shorts. Here are twelve films that started small before hitting the cineplexes:

I, like many people, went out to see Fast Five and be dazzled by its complex plot and characterizations. Just kidding, I went to see shit get blown up, crashed, smashed, and shot. I was pretty excited to see two separated-at-birth meatheads, Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson, smash sweaty brows into each other. While the racing is always cool, I think this is the installment where the physical action really shines through. The gun fights and the fist fights were both more exciting than any of the driving. And while enjoying The Rock and Vin Diesel try to lay the smack down on each other, I got to thinking: why isn’t The Rock a bigger star? I mean, who cares about Vin Diesel? Just kidding. Vin Diesel is fine too. But really I was thinking about Dwayne Johnson. Do you smell what he’s cooking? I don’t think so, because he hasn’t been in nearly enough films. Right?

The story of the hour is that after winning the weekend box office for seven weeks in a row and after setting some big-time records, the reign of Avatar is over. Dear John won the weekend with an unofficial haul of $32.4 million compared to $23 million for Avatar.

Avatar is again the winner of the domestic weekend box office for the seventh weekend in a row with a haul of $30 million. What’s more, the movie has cracked $2 billion in the box office worldwide, the first motion picture in history to do so.

We are not far away from Avatar toppling the Titanic all-time records for domestic and worldwide all-time box office. To sum it up, Titanic’s worldwide record is going down probably sometime tomorrow. Avatar is going to be all-time box office champ,

Rob Hunter leads you into the valley of despair known as January, with a week-by-week guide of all the major (and limited) releases.

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we talk about homosexuality in film (to celebrate National Coming Out Day), awkwardly discuss the all-nude fighting of Bronson (because it’s awesome), and explore the hardest part about rollerblading.

What happens when Fox demands a sequel to a sequel most critics and the general movie-going public felt was unnecessary? Does Fox owe Martin Lawrence a favor? Are we just shooting for mediocrity now?