The New York Times has an extensive analysis of 20th Century Fox’s lawsuit with Warner Bros over the rights to Watchmen. Here is an excerpt which I think explains the situation better than anyone else:“On its face, turnaround is a contractual mechanism that allows a studio to release its interest in a dormant film project, while recovering costs, plus interest, from any rival that eventually adopts the project. But turnaround is a stacked deck. The turnaround clauses in a typical contract are also insurance for studio executives who do not want to be humiliated by a competitor who makes a hit out of their castoffs. That trick turns on a [...]

Jeff Robinov confirmed to the Wall Street Journal, that Warner Bros will reboot the Superman franchise.
“Superman [Returns] didn’t quite work as a film in the way that we wanted it to,” said Robinov. “It didn’t position the character the way he needed to be positioned. Had Superman worked in 2006, we would have had a movie for Christmas of this year or 2009. But now the plan is just to reintroduce Superman without regard to a Batman and Superman movie at all.”
No word on if Bryan Singer will still be involved or not. Lets just hope George Miller isn’t involved.
Warner Bros will begin to refocus on bigger tentpole movies, [...]

Warner Bros has released a new behind the scenes shot for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Director David Yates and crew watch Michael Gambon as Albus Dumbledore film a scene. Yesterday, Warner President and Chief Operating Officer Alan Horn offered a statement to the many upset fans explaining why the film had been moved back to Summer 2009:Many of you have written to me to express your disappointment in our moving “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” to Summer 2009. Please be assured that we share your love for Harry Potter and would certainly never do anything to hurt any of the films. Over the past 10 [...]

One of the most often asked fan questions about Fox’s Watchmen lawsuit is: Why didn’t the studio file the lawsuit before principal photography began and before millions and millions of dollars had been spent. Fans believed that Fox waited to “blindside” Warner Bros with this copyright suit after it was too late. Not so.
According to Entertainment Weekly’s Fox source, “studio lawyers contacted Warner Bros. about the distribution rights issue several times prior to the start of production but were rebuffed.”  If this is the case, then Warner Bros is the only one to blame for this whole mess. On the other hand, WB clearly saw this whole thing coming, which [...]

Variety’s Anne Thompson posted another update on the status of the next Superman film. Basically, no one knows. Warner Bros wants to make another movie, but weren’t happy with the last film. Bryan Singer is still technically attached, and has promised to go “Wrath of Khan” with the sequel, but I don’t think Warner wants a sequel. And a unnamed executive admitted that “it might be better to start from scratch.” It seems to me that we’re looking at the equivalent of a game of chicken, with neither the studio or Singer willing to move out of the way. The interesting sentence in Thompson’s update is this one: “Today [...]

Earlier this year, 20th Century Fox filed a copy infringement and breach of contract lawsuit against Warner Bros over the big screen rights of the upcoming comic book adaptation Watchmen. Fox alleged that it had the “exclusive copyright and contract rights” to “produce and develop the picture and to distribute the work throughout the world.” When the story was first reported, many wrote it off as baseless. Even I assumed that it would be thrown out of court or quickly settled for a small amount of cash. WRONG.
Not only did Judge Gary Feess of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California deny a motion by Warner Bros [...]

Warner Bros has just announced that they are moving Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from November 21st 2008, back to July 17th 2009. The reasons given are that the summer season is a more ideal window for for a family tent pole release, and that the writers strike left a big gap in the Summer calendar. I’m not quite sure if I buy the first reason. The three Potter films released in November averaged $916 million worldwide, while the two summer releases averaged $866 million worldwide, which is about a $50 million difference.
It’s also worth noting that ICE Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs opens two weeks earlier, Ronald [...]

Former Tori Spelling deflowerer, turntable spinner and current Terminator TV star, Brian Austin Green, has thrown his hat (sideways baseball cap?) into the casting ring for Batman 3. B.A.G. was wowed by Heath Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight and feels deep down he’s the right thespian to play The Riddler in the next installment…
“I would love to be the Riddler,” Green told MTV in all seriousness. “I hope to God they don’t replace Heath and have the Joker [again]. So they need a new villain and The Riddler makes sense. …[My Riddler] would take years of preparation. It’s tough. Heath set the bar a new level.”
How do our readers [...]

With the risk of sounding like a broken record, Slashfilm feels that Lost Boys: The Tribe was a lost cause. Even some of the people who worked and starred in the direct-to-DVD afterthought seem to agree. But it leaves open the question: do you reverse the damage done and attempt a real sequel—as rumored—or do you let the original speak for itself? From the sound of this new interview, Kiefer Sutherland still isn’t against the idea of revisiting Santa Carla.
“Lost Boys was a massive part of my life, it still is,” Sutherland told Shock Til You Drop. “You can’t crap on that. And I’m not going to go out and [...]

If Warner Bros asked us for a pull quote for the DVD to Lost Boys: The Tribe, it would say, “Corey Feldman can’t be felled, man. -/Film.” The most prominent Corey, in this sequel and IRL, manages to endearingly synopsize and upstage this laughable production in a single scene. Feldman cracks open a raw egg into a glass, a la Rocky Balboa, filled with garlic and holy water and swallows it. Then he wipes his mouth and the camera lingers on his face, this still youthful lake of resilience, resourcefulness and 1980s radicalness. Feldman’s character, Edgar Frog, labels his novelty cocktail “Frog Juice,” but in my sore eyes, Feldman just [...]

Warner Bros. has acquired the rights to Robert Whiting’s Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan. Frank Baldwin, the screnwriter of Phillip Noyce’s upcoming film The Art of Making Money, will make his feature film debut. Published in September 2000, Tokyo Underworld is an “unorthodox chronicle of the rise of Japan, Inc.”: “Through the eyes of Nick Zappetti, a former GI, former black marketer, failed professional wrestler, bungling diamond thief who turned himself into “the Mafia boss of Tokyo and the king of Rappongi,”  we meet the players and the losers in the high-stakes game of postwar finance, politics, and criminal corruption [...]

Give or take, I am asked eight times a week by random pedestrians, “What is the best comic book adaptation that is not based on a comic book at all,” and my hands begin to tremble every time. This causes the surface of my coffee to break into concentric circles like a mud puddle on Isla Nublar. I tend to quickly shuffle away from these inferior beings, while mumbling, “Obviously, The Lost Boys dude.”
More than 20 years after The Lost Boys hit theaters, a much maligned straight-to-DVD sequel, Lost Boys: The Tribe, has entered the pop culture cloud; but far more interesting is that The Lost Boys and its original [...]

There have been many rumors over the years, and supposedly a script that fell into development hell, but as Hollywood continues to search for my recycled ideas, The Goonies never say die. Moviehole is reporting that Warner Bros is planning a big screen theatrical tent-pole movie release. There are supposedly writers aboard the project, however we have no idea who.
The last script attempt involved a new group of kids, as the daughters and sons of the original Goonies gang, going off on a new adventure. All of the original cast members, including Josh Brolin, have expressed interest during interviews, in returning for a second film, if it were to happen.  [...]

Production Weekly’s current issue has updated Warner Bros’ adaptation of DC Comic’s The Green Lantern as being in active development:
STATUS - DevelopmentPRODUCER: Donald De Line - Andrew Haas WRITER: Greg Berlanti - Marc Guggenheim - Michael J GreenDC COMICS 1700 Broadway New York, NY 10019 WARNER BROS. PICTURES 4000 Warner Blvd. Burbank, CA 91522-0001 Each sector of space is protected by a Green Lantern, possessing a power ring that uses a powerful green energy to do anything within the limits of the user’s imagination and will power. When the Green Lantern assigned to this sector of space finds himself dying on planet Earth, he tells the ring to find a [...]

Warner Bros has announced that they are developing a big screen hybrid live-action/computer animated feature film based on the classic Chuck Jones’ Tooney Tunes cartoon Marvin the Martian. No writer or director has yet been signed, but the pitch is aimed at the family demographic and will be packaged as a Christmas movie. Marvin comes to Earth to destroy Christmas but becomes trapped in a gift box. Yeah, the proposed plot for the feature seems to stray far from the original short toons which I fell in love with as a kid. It seems to me that Warner Bros took noticed the box office gross of Alvin and the Chipmunks, [...]