Thanks to Kickstarter, there continues to be an increase in documentaries being made about movies. On top of that, there also seems to be a trend lately for filmmakers to look at failed movie projects, as if inspired by the heartbreaking 2002 release Lost in La Mancha. Currently on the festival circuit is the must-see doc Persistence of Vision, which is about the decades-long disaster of The Thief and the Cobbler (see my thoughts on that and some clips here), and recently funded and now in the works is Science Fiction Land about the canceled movie that wound up at the center of Argo. Now, we may get to learn the full story on another collapsed production, Tim Burton‘s Superman Lives, via the proposed new project of director Jon Schnepp (The ABCs of Death; Cartoon Network’s Metalocalypse). It’s another “unmaking of” doc titled The Death of “Superman Lives”: What Happened? And yes, Schnepp is attempting to finance this movie through Kickstarter, where he formerly had a hand in one of the most successful crowd-funding campaigns for film ever (for the animated Grimm Fairy Tales series, which he’s directing). He’s already amassed a lot of background material and concept art for the failed Superman movie, since he’s been collecting the stuff passionately over the years, and now he just needs to conduct interviews and put it all together to tell the story of what went wrong. He hopes to talk to attached stars Nicolas Cage and Sandra Bullock, as well as

Early this year Tim Burton said he wouldn’t know a good script if it was thrown at him. Based on some of his recent works, that self-deprecation rings a little too true, especially considering how all over the place Dark Shadows was. Frankenweenie was a return to form for clean, simple, if slight, storytelling, but now it appears that Burton’s attempting to step up his game on the script front. Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller took a crack at Burton and Robert Downey Jr.‘s potential Pinocchio project early on, and now another screenwriter of equal talent is getting involved. Frequent Matthew Vaughn collaborator Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass, The Woman in Black) is close to signing on to pen a new draft for Warner Bros.’ live-action version of the classic puppet tale. According to THR, Goldman’s involvement may seal the deal with Burton and Robert Downey Jr., who both have yet to officially sign on. Burton and Goldman have had ties before, so her involvement makes sense beyond her talent for genre films. If the project moves forward, we’ll see Downey playing Geppetto, who goes on a journey to find the missing Pinocchio. This isn’t the only Pinocchio film in the works either, as Fox has The Three Misfortunes of Geppetto and Guillermo del Toro is working on a stop-motion animated picture. I would usually take a del Toro interpretation over a Burton one, but with his project drawing in such reliable screenwriters, it’s hard not to gain interest in a Burton film which may actually have a story.

Last weekend seems like such a long time ago. It seems like it was in another galaxy far, far away, in fact. We now live in this strange new world in which Disney not only owns Lucasfilm but is also putting out a new live-action Star Wars movie in two and a half years. And yet, that’s still not the biggest thing to happen in the last seven days. This is, of course, the destruction of Hurricane Sandy, which has affected the film industry to a degree. For one thing, as we reported, it destroyed a major piece of movie memorabilia — the HMS Bounty replica used in Mutiny on the Bounty and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest — and two human lives with it. Also, a number of films that opened or were supposed to open in limited release in New York City this weekend have been delayed until power is restored to the venues hosting them. Meanwhile, individuals without electricity in the wake of the storm have been unable to read FSR all week. The least of their problems, obviously, and I’m not saying it’s any priority of theirs to catch up with our content, but if they are looking to do so once they can, the recap is here. Seriously, though, join us in helping the people in need post-Sandy by maybe skipping just one movie and donating the ticket money instead. If you are catching up or looking for highlights, let us first remind you of our

You know the story. At this point it’s basically the new shot heard ‘round the world: Disney has bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion, George Lucas is retiring from the Star Wars game, and three more Star Wars films are planned for production starting in 2015. Lucas and the new Lucasfilm president, Kathleen Kennedy, have stated that they have archives of story treatments for more books, TV shows, and films… but with Lucas stepping back from the property, who are they going to get to direct these next three episodes in the ongoing Star Wars adventure? Let’s take a look at some candidates, whether they be likely, unlikely, or long shots.

Tim Burton is not a fan of the horizontally-challenged. That’s the conclusion I reached from watching Frankenweenie, an otherwise very pleasant return to form for for the director. What isn’t so pleasant is how every paunchy character — the mayor, the gym coach, and the chubby kid whose name doesn’t matter — is cackled at by Burton and turned into a visual punch-line. Burton portrays these characters in a way that seems antithetical to how most people perceive him and his films… with a casual dash of mean-spiritedness. The one constant in Burton’s films, aside from Johnny Depp obviously, is that he’s always championed the outcasts and made them the eventual heroes of their worlds. Think of the Goth cutter Edward Scissorhands defeating the jock bully, the goofy Amish kid saving the day in Mars Attacks, the friendless Charlie Bucket outlasting the truly bad kids to win the chocolate factory, etc. Looking back at his work, though, it seems clear that Burton himself has been acting the bully when it comes to even the mildly obese. They’re made to be clumsy, goofy, obnoxious and irritating, and if they don’t exist strictly as a visual gag they’re almost sure to be a villain. Can you think of one overweight hero or true good guy in his films? I can’t. Why would a man so feverishly in favor of defending and uplifting outsiders himself single out a specific group of people to consistently bully throughout his career? Hell if I know, but

They said it couldn’t be done. A fifth year of 31 Days of Horror? 31 more terror, gore and shower scene-filled movies worth highlighting? But Rejects always say die and never back away from a challenge, so we’ve rounded up the horror fans among us and put together another month’s worth of genre fun. Enjoy! Synopsis In the live action short film that inspired the full-length stop-motion film in 2012, young Victor Frankenstein turns to the powers of science and electricity to bring his dog Sparky back to life. After his experiment is a success, the young boy must try to hide the cute, misunderstood monstrosity from an easily frightened neighborhood.

By the time 1993 rolled around, Tim Burton already had projects like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, and Edward Scissorhands under his belt, and had firmly established himself as an auteur director of quirky, weird films. It was probably that year’s The Nightmare Before Christmas – a movie that Burton produced and didn’t even direct – that firmly established him as being a filmmaker with a cult of personality following, and has become his most enduring work, however. A stop-motion animated feature directed by Henry Selick (with strong creative input from Burton) and produced by Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, The Nightmare Before Christmas mixed up Halloween and Christmas imagery in iconic ways (Mickey Mouse has his fingers in all the holiday pies), it captured the imaginations of an entire generation, and it can still be seen advertised all over the backpacks and binders of eyeliner wearing teenagers to this day. That same year another Halloween-themed family film came out of another wing of the Disney conglomerate called Hocus Pocus. But, despite that fact that it starred a trio of actresses who were fairly big names at the time, it hasn’t enjoyed nearly as much attention over the years as Nightmare. And, unless you happen to be a devotee of the movie Newsies (which I know some of you are), chances are you’ve never heard of its director, Kenny Ortega. Sure, Hocus Pocus still gets played on the Disney channel around Halloween every year, as it’s probably cheap programming for the company, but

Before we even start one might ask, “Does Tim Burton need defending?” Obviously, he does (or else why would I write this?), and he needs it because the Tim Burton of today is not the Tim Burton we know and love. Or is he? Dun dun dun! Virtually everyone you come across will have a soft spot for his early works like Edward Scissorhands, Batman, and Beetlejuice and many hold a great respect for his work on Ed Wood and Big Fish. But after a series of perceived missteps, it’s as though Burton’s stock with more movie-savvy people has dropped, even as he’s garnered some serious monetary success.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that’s taking it easy on this Friday evening. Expect fun, happy thoughts heading your way in the news rundown below… We begin this relaxed Friday evening edition of MNAD with a shot from the Frankenweenie art exhibition currently going down at Disney’s California Adventure. Our friends at ScreenCrave posted some shots from around the gallery. As you know, I was quite fond of Frankenweenie. And I like art shows.

Editor’s note: Halloween comes early with this week’s release of Frankenweenie. For some delicious review snacks to go with your candy corn, here is a re-run of our Fantastic Fest review of the film, published just two weeks ago, on September 20, 2012. Since 1984, Tim Burton has directed fifteen feature films. And according to my research assistant Siri, eleven of those fifteen went over well (and were made “Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes) with critics. So it’s not outside the realm of possibilities that Burton could be considered a great director. Unfortunately for the man behind Edward Scissorhands and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, a number of those not-so-fresh movies have come in recent years. Alice in Wonderland was a messy 3D “experience” and Dark Shadows was laughable, and not in a good way. If you ask any movie-loving member of the internet community what they think of Tim Burton these days, the answer is more than likely to skew negative. That’s because we have the collective short term memory of Leonard from Memento when it comes to directors. Lucky for us, 2012 Tim Burton still remembers the guy he was in 1984, and has since returned to direct Frankenweenie, his black-and-white stop-motion ode to classic monster movies and the bond between a boy and his dog, based on the 1984 short of the same name.

Fans of the original Dark Shadows television series may not have been wild about the Tim Burton big-screen adaptation of the story, but those who like Burton’s many collaborations with Johnny Depp should be interested. Depp plays the legendary Barnabas Collins, who was turned into a vampire by a scorned witch. After returning home to his family home of Collinwood after being asleep for almost 200 years, he faces a new world of 1972 and his old adversary… in color! This vampire comedy hits Blu-ray and DVD this week, so you can check it out for better or for worse. At least you’ll be seeing it in the appropriately-themed month of October, rather than when it hit theaters in May.

No matter how much it may seem to be true in the age of The Internet, a director is not the sum of his or her most recent work. Often we find ourselves caught up in the fast-paced “what have you done for me lately” societal convention and we forget about what someone may have given us in a different time. Such is the plight of Tim Burton. Taken as a whole, his filmography may ultimately stand among the elite of his generation. Edward Scissorhands, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Batman, Ed Wood and Beetlejuice amongst his more iconic works. His gothic style and ability to connect us to the loner at the heart of many of his tales have become a hallmark of his long, successful career. But it’s a career tainted with a few more recent miscues. Ask a number of internet movie lovers what they think of Tim Burton’s movies, and long-term amnesia sets in. All we seem to remember are the recent failures, not the successes of our childhood. These were the thoughts running through my head moments prior to sitting down with the director for the first time in my career. There, just outside a large wooden hotel conference room door, I was uncharacteristically nervous. Sure, he’s just another director, a public figure — one who has more to lose if he says the wrong thing than I do if I mess up a question — but he’s also a filmmaker and artist whose work could be seen as landmarks

Actor Martin Landau has been in the business of making movies and delighting audiences for over 50 years. There isn’t much, at this point, that he’s not seen. From working with directors named Hitchcock and Coppola to winning an Oscar in the role of Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, he’s had more than a few moments worth remembering. It’s the kind of talent that demands reverence. The kind of man you’d like to sit with and listen to for hours on end. No questions. No soundbytes. Just stories. The premiere of Frankenweenie at Fantastic Fest 2012 brought just that kind of opportunity. Before I was even able to sit down at the table for our interview, there was an energy about him. There, in an otherwise large and empty conference room at the Austin Four Seasons hotel, sat a man ready to tell me a story. Before I made contact with the seat, he was already off like a shot. While he may not be as physically nimble as he was earlier in his career, never has a mind been sharper. And in me, he found a captive audience ready to listen and share.

I have been anxiously awaiting Fantastic Fest 2012 (September 20-27) ever since the carnivalesque tomfoolery of the Fantastic Fest 2011 closing party. Year after year, Tim League and the Fantastic Fest programmers have totally blown me away with their impeccable curating of genre films. And the parties… Oh, the parties! If my liver could talk, the stories it would tell… If history serves, Fantastic Fest 2012 will continue to expand upon its awesomeness, so this year will probably be ten times more amazing than last year’s festival. The announcements that Fantastic Fest has made so far with the first wave and second wave of programming have already solidified the fact that this will be the best damn Fantastic Fest of them all. First off, Tim Burton will be in attendance at the world premiere of Frankenweenie on the opening night of Fantastic Fest 2012. Sure, I have not been a fan of most of his recent work, but that makes him no less of a cinematic genius in my mind. And, while on the subject of this year’s festival guests, I pretty much peed my pants with excitement when I heard that Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt will be coming to Fantastic Fest with their film Looper. Color me thrilled!

Enduring cultural figures like Batman endure precisely because of the slight but notable changes they incur over time. Batman has had a long history in the moving image, and while the character has maintained both the central conceit of being a crime-fighting detective, the cinematic Batman of seventy years ago bears little resemblance to the Batman we’re familiar with today. The character and his myth have been interpreted with variation by a multitude of creative persons other than Bob Kane and Bill Finger. In the moving image, Batman has been embodied by a range of actors including Robert Lowery, Adam West, and George Clooney, and Batman has been realized by directors and showrunners prone to various tastes and aesthetic interpretations like William Dozier and Christopher Nolan. While Batman is perhaps best-known by a non-comic-astute mass culture through the many blockbuster feature films made about him, including this summer’s hotly anticipated The Dark Knight Rises, the character’s cinematic origins are rooted in the long-dead format of the movie serial. Batman first leapt off the page in a 15-part serial made in 1943 titled Batman and another six years later titled Batman and Robin. These serials did not influence Batman’s later cinematic iterations realized by Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher as much as they inspired Batman’s representation on television. Batman’s presence in film serials and on television have had a decisive and important impact in terms of how mass audiences perceive the Batman of feature films. At the same time, these serials

The only thing in life better than Fantastic Fest would be winning the lottery while you’re at Fantastic Fest. Like every year, we’ll be covering the hell out of it with a preternatural dedication that often requires us writing our reviews with straight jackets on. That’s a lot harder than it sounds when you’re also singing karaoke and drinking a high quality concoction of hooch. The full fest line up hasn’t been announced yet, but it will undoubtedly be full of movie goodness, and the opening night film promises to set the tone. The flick? Tim Burton‘s forthcoming Frankenweenie – which promises a return to stop motion, a returning to working with John August and a return to a story from his youth that finally gets a feature-length treatment. The movie hits theaters October 5th, but Fantastic Fest attendees will see it before anyone else. Hopes are high here because Burton seems to have lost his way as of late, crafting stuff in his wheelhouse that feels stale, but perhaps the solution to the rut is to dig deeper into it. To return to the kind of magic this morbid magician built his name on. It’s a hell of a way to kick things off. And this poster for the fest is a great way to celebrate the end of everything:

Have we learned no lessons from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”? Nothing about the consequences of playing God and reanimating the flesh? The inevitable disasters that accompany messing with the lines between life and death and–ooh! cute puppy! Fine, you can’t blame young Victor Frankenstein (voice of Charlie Tahan) for bringing his beloved pup Sparky back to life in Tim Burton‘s Frankenweenie – the dog is the kid’s best friend, after all. And damn if this second trailer for the film doesn’t make zapping life back into the dead look easy…too easy. Burton’s long-awaited feature take on the ‘weenie has already gifted us with one adorable trailer, but this longer take on some familiar material now presents a major obstacle for Victor and Sparky’s continued happiness – namely, pesky neighborhood kids who want to reanimate the dead too. Whatever happened to safe stuff, like playing video games and eating ice cream? It’s alive, it’s aliiiiiiivvvveeeee…after the break.

“The joke ends in the title” has been a popular selling point for the makers of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Now, with the film out in the world, there will inevitably be question over that statement. However, what no one can question is the all-out seriousness the cast and director Timur Bekmambetov took Seth Grahame-Smith‘s material. There is no 21st century irony in sight here. Namely, there’s the lead of the film – Benjamin Walker, who goes as straight-faced as one can in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. No matter how ridiculous the situation – Lincoln running on top of horses or, you know, killing vampires – Walker never winks or smirks at the silliness. Here’s what Benjamin Walker had to say about the melancholic superhero nature of Abraham Lincoln, adjusting to makeup, and how the film is a Lincoln biopic which just so happens to have blood-thirsty vampires roaming around:

Last week, the utterly shocking news broke that not only was Warner Bros. pursuing a Justice League movie, but it also was in no way at all ever influenced by the unbridled financial success of Marvel’s The Avengers. We can all believe that, can’t we? After all, we read it on the internet. With Man of Steel coming out next year and a no-brainer Batman reboot coming now that Christopher Nolan’s movies are wrapping up this summer, this is an opportunity for Warner Bros. and DC to set a new stage. Plus, with adaptations of The Flash and Lobo, and the potential for a Green Lantern reboot, Warner Bros. and DC have things laid out for them to work out very similar to the pre-Avengers line of films. But this is Hollywood, and so many things can go potentially wrong with a project like this. Here are seven ways Warner Bros. can avoid a potential disaster as they develop this film series.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a collection of all the things you’ll be talking about tomorrow with your friends. Assuming you have friends. We hope you do. If not, we’ll be your friend. We begin this evening with the first image from Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim, featuring Idris Elba looking badass in a suit that, if our guess is right, allows him to control giant robots or something. Everything about this film makes it a giant, sloppy, wet orgy for nerds. We cannot wait.