According to Variety, Matt Reeves‘s Twilight Zone has captured another writer who is no doubt currently wondering why he’s back in Abraham Lincoln’s time and unable to convince anyone of the assassination. Jason Rothenberg wrote the original draft, which was tackled by Anthony Peckham (Sherlock Holmes), and now Joby Harold (All You Need is Kill, Awake) will take an ink-filled stab at it. The most fascinating thing about the Warner Bros. project is the idea that Rod Serling‘s show will essentially be stretched into a feature film. Previous movies based on the iconic television show were serials, and the show itself got paper thin when it tried to fill an hour-long time slot, so two full hours of being in the Zone could be a bigger challenge than most expect. After all, how much clever brow-beating can we handle? The answer to that question lies in watching every episode. Tread carefully, but there’s still hope for this project. Despite Hayden Christensen’s strange take on playing a motionless guy, Awake was a clever little flick (that Harold also directed). With any luck, his talent will be the final polish it needs to get shoved in front of cameras.

Sure, The Avengers being really awesome probably had a lot to do with the fact that it’s now the third most money-making movie of all time. But, more than that, the film probably has Marvel’s long term planning to thank for its extreme level of success. Instead of just making a movie about a team of superheroes, Marvel first introduced each member of the team in their own films, they dropped hints about the fact that they would all be coming together at some point, and, when it was all said and done, The Avengers finally premiered after six years of build-up and anticipation. That’s pretty unprecedented. Seeing as they own DC Comics, Warner Bros also has a fairly impressive stable of superheroes at their command. And they’ve even managed to leverage their properties into a bunch of successful animated television shows in the past. But, in recent years, the only character they’ve had any real success with in the live-action feature format is Batman. They’re not even close to doing something with DC’s premier superhero team, The Justice League, that could be on par with what Marvel did with The Avengers.

Paramount and J.J. Abrams are planning a super secret sci-fi project, but they’re not the only ones in the game. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Warners is staying in the science fiction business with The Wind – a script from David Koepp (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds). It takes place in a space colony, and that’s all that’s known, which means we know more about it than the Abrams gig. It will be the feature directing debut for commercial talent Nic Mathieu. In checking out his work, The Wind will most likely involve a healthy amount of fantastic CGI concepts (see link and above). As for the hiring, conventional wisdom says that studios like commercial directors because they’re more easily controllable, but Warners is remarkably hands-off with projects like this. Although, that also depends on the budget. The studio hasn’t been exploding with sci-fi in the recent past, but their future looks spacey. Gravity, Pacific Rim and Cloud Atlas are on the horizon, with this and hopefully more to come. The science fiction Renaissance continues.

UPDATE: After speaking with the head of WETA’s marketing, we can confirm that the sizzle reel mentioned below was not WETAs. Again, this IMDB posting should be taken at arm’s length, and there’s also the possibility that Rothbart got the effects company wrong, but if these scenes are real, they are not the work of WETA. Original posting follows: There was never much doubt that Man of Steel would have a comic book feel. It was only slightly less guaranteed than it looking like a Zack Snyder movie. The Warners mulligan on Clark Kent is set for theaters in June of 2013, but apparently WETA just showed two scenes as part of a sizzle reel that played at a fancy gathering with smoked salmon and a bunch of visual effects artists. Allegedly, one of those effects wizards, Jonathan Rothbart (Avatar, Priest, Iron Man), posted a description of the scenes on the film’s IMDB message board. He was pretty excited. Here’s what he (spoilerifically) had to say:

On Charlie Rose last night, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes explained his desire to shorten the time between theatrical releases and home entertainment availability. His reason? It’s great for everyone ever. It makes sense that Time Warner (which owns New Line, Warner Bros., HBO, DC Comics, Castle Rock Entertainment, and other media ventures) would want to shorten the window. Bewkes evoked the dreaded P-word in his initial rationale for getting movies to television screens sooner, but he also recognized that there’s an audience beyond pirates that wants to have home-viewing options. “Everyone in the business, including theater owners, has an interest,” said Bewkes. But what exactly is in the theater owners’ best interest? And what will broadband bundled with shorter waiting periods mean for DVD and Blu-ray?

Dark Shadows and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter don’t fit the bill of your average summer blockbuster. An adaptation of a slightly obscure soap opera about a vampire? We don’t see those often enough in the summer season. A hard-R actioner featuring one of our greatest presidents shredding vampires to bits? That’s another unheard of type summer tentpole. Although Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s names alone can create money out of thin air, Dark Shadows is not the sort of film we often see as a May release, and the same goes for June’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. The man partly responsible for these two going-against-the-norm pictures is author/screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith. Grahame-Smith had to tackle some difficult tasks when it came to making these two projects – like making an accessible Dark Shadows film and adapting his own epic and tonally tricky novel, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Here’s what Seth Grahame-Smith had to say about writing for the screen, the soap-operatic tone of Dark Shadows, and the straight-faced badassery of Abraham Lincoln slaying vampires:

Danny McBride’s particular brand of humor seems to be one of those “love it or hate it” forms of entertainment. Some people watch what he does on Eastbound and Down and laugh hysterically, others just shake their head at it with a look of disapproval on their faces. So when Deadline Dragør breaks the news that he’s going to be starring in a new film that has the tagline, “two men and a 13-year old boy embark on an R-rated vacation,” you can probably guess how you’re going to react to it already. Those of you who will be disgusted should probably just move on to the next article, but for those of you who feel like such a film would tickle your funny bone, read on. Klovn is a Danish TV show turned feature that follows the misadventures of two characters named Casper and Frank. In the original film version they’re all set to go on a canoeing trip that they’re calling the “tour de pussy” when the bad news hits that Frank’s girlfriend is pregnant. Fearing that Frank is a total nincompoop who can’t take care of a kid, she wants to terminate the pregnancy. This doesn’t jibe with Frank’s sensibilities, however, so they strike a deal that if he can take her 11-year-old son along on the canoeing trip and not have any mishaps, then they can keep the new baby. This, of course, is a flawed plan, because the canoeing trip is planned not to be

In recent years Ben Affleck has been earning praise left and right for his skill as a director. His first two films, Gone Baby Gone and The Town, have largely been far better received by the movie media than any of the performances he’s given over the course of his career. But, it turns out, his first love is still acting. Sorry, everybody. Even as he handles the post-production of his next project as a filmmaker, Argo, he’s managed to find some time to negotiate himself into another job as an actor. Warner Bros. has been sitting on the political comedy, Nathan Decker, for a while. Written by Dan Fogelman (Crazy, Stupid, Love.), it’s the story of a prominent politician who gets disgraced by an affair and is forced to return to his home town in order to deal with lingering issues from his past. Originally it was thought that Tom Cruise was going to star, but his involvement in the project never materialized, and the studio is now looking at it as a starring vehicle for Affleck.

Once upon a time Warner Bros. was pretty gung-ho about putting together a new version of the King Arthur story. They tried to develop an Excalibur remake with director Bryan Singer, they paired Guy Ritchie up with Trainspotting writer John Hodge for another take, and they bought David Dobkin’s script Arthur & Lancelot for a cool $2m. Dobkin’s version came pretty close to getting made, and had Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington all ready to play Arthur and The Killings’ Joel Kinnaman set to be Lancelot, but ultimately things fell apart. In trying economic times, the film’s proposed $130m budget was deemed just too much to risk, especially with a couple of actors who hadn’t been proven on the big screen stuck in the lead roles. After the deal with Warner fell apart, Dobkin was free to once again shop his script around town, but nothing much came of his efforts. That’s reportedly changed, however. According to Deadline Malahide, Colin Farrell is now interested in the film, which gives it considerably more star power than it ever had before, and which has rekindled interest on the part of  Warner Bros. If the project gets back on track Farrell would be playing Lancelot, which is considered to likely be the breakout role of the film. There’s no word on who they would be looking at to play Arthur (get Brendan Gleeson!), but Deadline does claim to have knowledge that Gary Oldman will be re-approached to play Merlin, a role he initially

Five of the six major movie studios (Paramount, Sony, Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, and Warner Bros.) have partnered together to create a service called UltraViolet, which is an authentication system that gives you the rights to a digital copy of all their movies that you buy on DVD and Blu-ray. The problem with UltraViolet is that it’s kind of a clunky system full of vague and complicated rights issues, it doesn’t utilize any of the content delivery systems that people are already watching their movies on, and it hasn’t done a good enough job educating the public on how to use it. After five minutes spent rooting around their FAQ section I still don’t know what the process of getting an UltraViolet copy of a movie onto my phone or tablet is. All of that is set to change due to a new partnership between those same five studios and Walmart, however.

Movie studios have been using testimonials to market their films for years. Most frequently, they rely on professional film critics to supply pull quotes for use in advertising. While some of these quotes are genuine, some are simply generated on demand by media hounds who just want to see his or her name on a movie poster or in a TV spot. In the industry, we disrespectfully refer to these folks as “quote whores.” Quote whoring is big business to some, giving them attention from the studios with perks and junkets. Being in the inner circle of quote whores is kind of like being in the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. There’s lots of benefits and little responsibility. However, there’s a disturbing recent trend in Hollywood that jeopardizes the institutionalized quote whore’s well being, and it comes in the form of social media.

Director Todd Phillips has made three films for Warner Bros. so far: The Hangover, Due Date, and The Hangover Part II. Say what you will about their varying degrees of quality, but there’s no denying the fact that they were all huge financial successes for both Phillips and the studio, so Warner Bros. is obviously very committed to being in the Todd Phillips business. To that end they’ve signed him to a new first look deal that will keep him making movies for the studio until at least the end of 2013, and will give him first crack at quite a few potential projects. Deadline Dix Hills has a rundown of four different scripts that are all being put together as potential Phillips vehicles.

On January 11, 1991, the then-head of Disney studios, Jeffrey Katzenberg, circulated an incredibly important memo about the state of the movie industry and the products they were making. It was called, “The World is Changing: Some Thoughts on Our Business,” and it had a simple purpose: to locate the root of a growing problem and to take steps to avoid falling victim to it. Katzenberg began the memo by stating: “As we begin the new year, I strongly believe we are entering a period of great danger and even greater uncertainty. Events are unfolding within and without the movie industry that are extremely threatening to our studio.” As we begin a new year two decades after this memo was written, it’s critical to look back at the points Katzenberg made to see that his period of great danger is now our period of great danger, to note that the same events unfolding within and without the industry still threaten the entire studio system in 2012, and to predict our future based on the past.

It’s been my opinion for a while now that all-you-can-eat subscription services like Netflix are going to be a temporary thing with a limited window of success. Back when movie streaming was a minor thing aimed at a niche, tech savvy audience, it probably made sense for studios to sign deals with Netflix giving them access to their film libraries. Even five years ago high speed Internet wasn’t so ubiquitous, and if you wanted to stream something over the Internet, that pretty much meant you were streaming it to your computer monitor. But in today’s world of omnipresent wifi and apps that allow everyone to stream movies to smart TVs, video game consoles, app-enabled Blu-ray players, smart phones, and tablet computers, the entire game has changed. Now people can stream movies wherever they are, whenever they want. And they do… a lot. I think we’ve all seen that statistic floating around that 1/3 of all Internet traffic in the evenings comes from people streaming movies through Netflix. While I’m not in any position to prove that such a statistic is true, let’s just assume that it’s mostly true; that accounts for a huge amount of movie watching that ten years ago was being done through the more profitable to studios vehicle of DVD purchases and rentals.

The proposed live action Akira being developed over at Warner Bros. is slowly and steadily becoming the most talked-about film project of all time. The ups and downs of bringing this beloved story to the big screen have been well documented, but the most recent news made it look like this project might finally be ending its wild ride. Reports came in last week that all work on the film had been halted, the entire thing was being rethought, and maybe it could get scrapped indefinitely. But that was last week. This week, Variety is reporting that a new strategy for resuscitating director Jaume Collet-Serra’s project is being hatched. It sure didn’t take long to get the roller coaster going again. Last week’s reports said that the main reason for Akira being halted was that it needed to, yet again, go through some budget cuts. But according to a source that talked to Variety, that’s not exactly the case. While trimming some more fat from the budget is certainly something that Collet-Serra and his producers are looking at, mainly the reason the film is being re-tooled is just that there are still problems with the script they’re working with. Reportedly there are still questions about some character elements and the film’s look. And that’s after this thing has already received rewrites from the likes of Steve Kloves and David James Kelly.

After sitting through the snoozefest ball-kick that was The Devil Inside (refresh your memory of my disdain by giving my review another look), a large part of me hoped that I would never need to think (or write) about the film ever again. Of course, that was before the “found footage” (fauxtage! fauxtage!) flick won the box office for the weekend, despite that F CinemaScore and some of the worst buzz surrounding a film ever. Of course such insipid, uninspired filmmaking would be rewarded! And how, as director and co-writer William Brent Bell has already been signed to direct a new film for Warner Bros. You will be shocked to learn that the film will be called The Vatican, and that it will also employ the found footage style that The Devil Inside used, though it’s described as “a hybrid.” I, too, am utterly shocked! The film is still in pitch format, and Deadline Atrani describes it as “a conspiracy driven thriller” that will be penned by David Cohen. Man, William Brent Bell must really hate the Holy See.

It’s been a long time since we’ve talked about producer Dan Jinks trying to get a live action version of Pinocchio together over at Warner Bros. So long that many people probably assumed that the project was dead. That’s not the case though. As a matter of fact, it’s probably about to get quite a bit of attention. THR is reporting that none other than Tim F’n Burton has taken an interest in the Pinocchio script, which was written by Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller. And I know what you’re thinking already…who wants to see a version of Pinocchio starring Johnny Depp as the puppet and Helena Bonham Carter as Geppetto in drag? Don’t be so quick to judge. Early reports don’t say anything about Depp or Carter at all. As a matter of fact, apparently Burton wants Robert Downey Jr. to come on board to be his Italian puppeteer. How’s that for a switch?

The live-action adaptation of the legendary manga and anime property Akira has had one of the rockiest roads to the big screen of any movie I can remember. There is a lot of disagreement out there about what a Hollywood version of Akira should look like, but I think the one thing everyone can agree on is that nothing Warner Bros. has tried to do with the property so far has come close to hitting the mark. Back when Albert Hughes was still going to direct the project there were fan gripes about the film being forced into a PG-13 rating, after Hughes left the project everyone was left to complain about a new director and a slashed budget, and I don’t think anybody has been thrilled with any of the casting that has been done. But, finally, the time for tears may be over. Heat Vision is reporting that a stop has been put to all work on the project. Offices are closing, talent is being sent home, and the whole thing is being re-thought. Director Jaume Collet-Serra and producers Jennifer Kiloran Davisson and Andrew Lazar will spend the next couple weeks ironing out issues with the script and trying to once again cut the budget, this time from the $90m range down to the $60 or $70m range, so that deals can be made with more actors. As of now, Garrett Hedlund (Tron: Legacy) is the only name that they’ve been able to secure, with actors like Kristen

Do you remember how there is somebody out there trying to put together a big screen re-boot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that doesn’t involve the property’s creator Joss Whedon, or is that a memory that you’ve repressed? Well, it’s happening, at least on some level. Warner Bros. wants the property to live on, and to that goal they hired a screenwriter named Whit Anderson to write a script some time ago. Unfortunately for those hoping for more Buffy, that script was submitted to the studio over the summer and Hero Complex has sources saying that the studio didn’t like it at all. Because of the disappointing words on page, the project has been sent back to square one and executives are looking for a new writer to take a crack at it. Someone Hero Complex describes as a “key player” in the production said of their progress so far, “If you’re going to bring it back, you have to do it right. Anderson came in with some great ideas and she had reinvented some of the lore and it was pretty cool but in the end there just wasn’t enough on the page.” So I guess now that the proposed film has hit a stumbling block the question has to be raised, is this the beginning of the end for a new Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or is the next writer who gets hired going to be able to do something with the property that the studio finds acceptable?

There have been hushed whispers going around the Internet for a while that Warner Bros. was interested in getting Steven Spielberg to direct a movie about Moses called Gods and Kings. It’s apparently an epic movie that spans the whole life of Moses, from the slave freeing, to the plagues, to the ten commandments, to all of the rest, and it comes from a script by Michael Green and Stuart Hazeldine. It makes sense that Warners would be looking to Spielberg for a project like this for a couple reasons. Primarily, a film of this scope is going to need a huge budget, and that’s something Spielberg has a history of handling well and getting a return on. Also, Spielberg is a filmmaker who has a history of making projects that explore his Jewish heritage, and when he dealing with that sort of subject matter he ends up making movies as awesome as Schindler’s List and Munich; so who better than him to explore the life of Moses, one of the most badass Jews ever? Probably no one, so it’s good news for Warners that they are reportedly now in official talks with the legend to sign on to direct. According to Twitch, the talks between the two parties are “formal,” so take that as you will. Is that the difference between sitting down face to face in a boardroom instead of just chatting on the phone? Or does it just mean everyone is in fancy dress and slapping each