In a new interview with the LA Times’ Hero Blog, Campbell stated that they were still working on a script for the film, and that he wanted it to be “the Expendables of horror”-

Yeah, The Expendables, or more like the It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World of horror. I want to get so many horror movie stars that people can’t possibly not see the movie. I want to give them other stuff to do. I want to have Kane Hodder be very particular about what he eats. I want Robert Englund to be a tough guy, like he knows tae kwon do or something. I want to find out the hidden sides of all these people. Some will play themselves, some will play alternate characters as well. I may approach Kane Hodder to play Frankenstein. He could be Kane Hodder himself fighting himself as Frankenstein. It could be crazy. It’s a silly concocted story that we hope to do maybe in a year or so. My breaks between Burn Notice have been getting tighter because they’ve been adding episodes. They’re trying to trap me like a rat in the TV world, and I might just let them. There’s a script, it just kind of blows right now, so no one’s really seeing it. We gotta work on it. Definitely shoot in Oregon all on a stage. It’s like the 300 of horror comedies. We want to make it a whole world. Someone’s gotta take Frank down for good.

I have to admit that this certainly sounds like a fun idea if Campbell can get his horror film contemporaries to come out to play for this. Here’s hoping he can.

Initially, the project was set up at Universal Studios with Angelia Jolie attached, but after the studio put the project in turnaround, Jolie departed. Even after the film landed at Warner Brothers, Cuaron could not entice Jolie back.

Although she had met with producers and Cuaron about the project before, Portman landed the offer without even taking a screentest. Previously, Cuaron had met with and/or screen tested a number of actresses for the role including Sandra Bullock, Blake Lively, Marion Cotillard, Abbie Cornish, Sienna Miller, Carey Mulligan, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Olivia Wilde and Naomi Watts.

According to the Hollywood Reporter‘s Risky Business blog, the offer and the latest draft of the script have been sent out to Portman, who should giver her decision shortly.

Portman will play an astronaut stranded on a space shuttle after some debris strike it, killing the rest of the crew. Her only chance of survival is donning a spacesuit and heading towards the International Space Station, hopping from satellite to pieces of space debris along the way. The character will spend a majority of the film’s runtime on screen alone, so the movie will sit very squarely and heavily on whomever takes the role.

Robert Downey Jr is already signed for a short role on the film, which is scheduled to go before cameras in January.

While we still don’t have much in the way of new news on the project, a short animation test from the project has surfaced. It’s set fairly early in the story and shows us a portion of the scene where Dorothy first meets the Scarecrow along the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City. Note that this is just a render test, to see how the designs look, rather than a full-on animation test.

Via Bleeding Cool.

Unfortunately, it now looks as if either Gilliam was downplaying the “hiccup” or it has grown to a size where it has scuttled the project for the time being… again.

Variety caught up with the director this past weekend at the Deauville American Film Festival and asked him what the status was of the off-again on-again project-

The financing collapsed about a month and a half ago… I shouldn’t be here. The plan was to be shooting ‘Quixote’ right now.

But Gilliam remains optimistic that this latest version he had all ready to go will still move forward.

Robert Duvall is Quixote, Ewan McGregor is also there, and we are looking for new financing right now. Don Quixote gives me something to look forward to, always. Maybe the most frightening thing is to actually make the film.

I have to admire Gilliam’s continued optimism in the face of yet another set back. Sometimes it is the only thing keeping this fan of his movies in believing that he will one day see it.

• The prequel will be two films.
• The films will be shot in 3D, and Scott adopts an air of friendly competitiveness when he states  of James Cameron, who shot the Alien sequel Aliens -  “Jim’s raised the bar and I’ve got to jump to it… He’s not going to get away with it.”
• Lost co-creator Damon Lindeloff is currently polishing the script for the first prequel.
• The film will be set some 30 years before the original Alien.
• Exploring the origins of the titular alien killers, Scott promises that the prequel films will be ” really tough, really nasty… It’s the dark side of the moon. We are talking about gods and engineers. Engineers of space. And were the aliens designed as a form of biological warfare? Or biology that would go in and clean up a planet?”

While I am excited to see Scott returning to the franchise he created over thirty years ago, I have to admit to be less enthused about his return heralding an exploration of the aliens’ origins. A big part of what made Scott’s original film so powerful was the air of mystery about the alien that was stalking the crew of the Nostromo. We didn’t get a good look at it for a majority of the film, it striking out from the shadows. It was vaguely humanoid, but had a biology terrifyingly different than our own. It was an unknowable force of nature and that is what made it terrifying. Doing away with that mystery robs the alien of much of its power to frighten.

While the first film made $491 million at the international box office, it did not fare well with critics. (The film currently has a 28% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.) To combat the complaints about Clash‘s muddy and horrible looking post-production 3D conversion, the studio is planning on filming the movie in the format. Writers, Dan Mazeau and David Leslie Johnson are currently working on the film’s script, which they developed as a treatment with Greg Berlanti.

Warners is hoping to have the project in front of cameras by early spring in order to have star Sam Worthington finished in time for his duties on an Avatar sequel which is hoped to start shooting in later half of 2011.

McCoy told the Argyllshire Standard, a Scottish newspaper, Saturday, he is one of two characters being considered for “one of the wizard parts.”

I am being cast in The Hobbit… We’re currently in negotiations – there are two of us under consideration. It’s not the Bilbo role, but could be bigger.

As there has been no word of Ian McKellen leaving his Lord Of The Rings role of Gandalf The Grey, I can only assume that McCoy is up to play Radagast the Brown. Radagast was not seen on screen in Jackson’s adaptation, but in the books was another of the wizards who were sent to help Men and Elves in their struggle against Sauron but became an unwitting tool of the wizard Saruman and helped in imprisoning Gandalf in the tower at Orthanc. I am assuming that he will appear in some of the material that Jackson is developing for the film from the appendixes in Lord Of The Rings that detail  what Gandalf was up to when he was not with Bilbo Baggins and the group of dwarves he was traveling in The Hobbit‘s main storyline.

The is an exciting bit of news for a couple of reasons. First, it means that Jackson and company are slowly continuing to work on the Hobbit films while MGM continues to figure out their financial problems and may be an indicator that there is a light at the end of that particular dark tunnel. Secondly, as a nearly life-long Doctor Who fan, McCoy has been one of my favorites in the role, especially in his second and third year of the film when he was given some meatier material to play. I’m intrigued as to exactly what material Jackson has been developing to fill out The Hobbit in to two films to connect them with the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, and now doubly intrigued to see McCoy in that material as a character that never got much “screen time” in Tolkien’s works.

First, the proposed sequel to Ben Stiller’s 2001 comedy Zoolander had a writer in Tropic Thunder‘s Justin Theroux and it looked like Stiller might be able to get the studio interested in making the film.

Then a few months later, Stiller tweeted that that the follow-up’s future looked to be in doubt due to Paramount not wanting to pony up the $50 million needed to finance the film .

But if you’re still looking for Derek Zoolander to strut down the runway and hit you with his patented Blue Steel look, there’s hope. On Friday, Stiller tweeted that he and Theroux were still working on getting the film in front of cameras -

It’s unclear exactly what they are working on, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were going trough the script and looking for a way to trim it down a bit to get it a bit more inline budgetarily with what the studio is willing to pay for. Hopefully, this won’t compromise the comedy.

But with Woodward’s book long out of print and Wired never even making it to DVD, perhaps the time has come for someone to do a more – Shall we say fact-based? – look at the life of the man who brought us Samurai’s in the workplace and the joys of collegiate food fights and introduced a new generation to the blues. Hangover director Todd Phillips seems to think so, as he is teaming with writer Steven Conrad to develop a new Belushi biopic.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Phillips is only signed to produce a potential film, not direct, though directing may not be entirely out of the picture. Belushi’s widow, Judith Belushi Pisano, will be serving as an executive producer, so don’t expect the backlash for this project that Woodward’s book and subsequent film adaptation received.

Of course, even though the ink on the deal for rights to Belushi’s life story hasn’t dried yet, people have already begun speculating on who would be a good casting choice to play the comic. Not surprisingly, Zach Galifianakis’ name has been floated, based in part on that actor’s recent collaboration with Phillips on The Hangover. I don’t think he would be a good choice though, as I haven’t really seen him deliver any kind of range in his film appearances, certainly not what would be needed to bring Belushi to life on the screen. Jonah Hill’s name has also been floated, but I’m not sure he can bring the manic energy that fueled so much of Belushi’s comedy.

Personally, I would think that Artie Lange would make a pretty good cinematic Belushi. Although his own career has never hit the heights that Belushi’s did, Lange’s own path mirrors Belushi’s in several respects. They both were touted as breakout stars when the sketch comedy shows they appeared on premiered. While Belushi would parlay his Saturday Night Live popularity into a short lived movie career, Lange’s substance abuse problems caused him to be dropped from Mad TV after only a year and a half. But Lange’s ongoing battles with drugs could provide him insight on Belushi’s own struggles.

Warners has now committed further to a sequel by hiring Michael Goldenberg to pen it. Presumably he will be working from the story developed by Berlanti, Green and Guggenheim, though the Variety story announcing the hiring does not mention the three other writers. Previously, Goldenberg has worked on Contact, Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix and Where The Wild Things Are, in addition to having done a polish on the first Green Lantern screenplay.

In the film, Ryan Reynolds will play a test pilot Hal Jordan who is recruited to join an interstellar police force known as the Green Lanterns. Frustratingly for fans is the fact that no official pictures of many of the myriad of aliens who compose the Green Lantern Corps have shown up yet. (Even though we are still ten months out from the film’s release.) Outside of a few photos of the prop corpse of Jordan’s predecessor, we’ve only seen some concept art for some of the rest.

The folks over at Comic Book Movie have some art which they say is the final design for the alien Green Lantern Kilowog. While it does keep in general with the design of the character, I think he looks a bit thoughtful and maybe even introspective for the being who is the Corps’s tough-as-nails drill sergeant. (Click on the picture below for a bigger look.)

According to Scott Bakula, who starred in the 1980s series as the time-traveling scientist Sam Beckett, Quantum Leap creator Donald P. Bellisario has been at work on a cinematic version of the show. Unfortunately, since a couple of decades have now passed since Bakula and co-star Dean Stockwell played their characters, it is looking like they won’t be back to reprise their roles. However, as Bakula told fans at a Quantum Leap retrospective panel last month at the San Diego Comic-Con, that doesn’t mean that they’ll be absent from the project entirely-

The good news is that Don [P. Bellisario] is working on the film script and has a big time Hollywood producer who wants to do it… It’s about time. But what I always thought would happen, happened … But Dean [Stockwell] and I will have a part in it somehow… Don did say that as he was writing, he told me he was having trouble, ‘getting you and Dean out of my head.’

Well, it won’t be the first time that characters strongly associated with specific actors have been recast. Last summer’s Star Trek showed that it could be done effectively well. Of course, this winter’s Tron: Legacy promises to work as a stand alone film as well as a sequel the 1982 Walt Disney classic by mixing old and new casts. And since Quantum Leap is a time travel story, whose to say that Bakula and Stockwell couldn’t appear as older versions of themselves? Again, look to Star Trek.

I would suggest that probably most fans of the series would want a Quantum Leap movie to wrap up the seeming cliffhanger the series final episode ended on. Myself, I thought it was a fitting, if bittersweet, conclusions that was true to the nature of Bakula’s character. I won’t spoil it here, but if you haven’t seen it, I would recommend tracking it down on DVD and judging for yourself.

Via TheTwoCents.com

Bleeding Cool credits the rumor as originating “[f]rom the bars of New Orleans… from certain bragging production staff.” So, is this just the liquor talking or is there some real truth here?

We already know that Warners  hired the film’s writers, Greg Berlanti, Michael Green and Marc Guggenheim, to develop a treatment for a sequel film. Could they actually be working on a treatment for two Green Lantern films? It should be noted that at the time of their hire, it was also announced that the trio would be working on a treatment for a possible film based on DC Comics’ The Flash and that whichever treatment the studio like better, the three would go on to write.

So we have a grain of truth in that Warners is definitely looking to have a sequel already in the works if the film is a hit. And it’s looking like Warners and DC Entertainment is looking to expand and interweave a superhero film franchise in the way the Marvel Studios have been doing with Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, etc. So there is at least a slim possibility that this could be the plan.

Of course, such a plan has a certain amount of financial risk to it as well. The number of films shot back to back over the last 40 years is incredibly small – the first two Christopher Reeves Superman films, Back To The Future II & III, the Matrix sequels and Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings adaptation.

It should be interesting to see how this pans out.

While talking with MTV about directing a live webcast for the band Arcade Fire this past weekend, when he stated that

We moved forward and then we stepped back a bit. Originally, I thought we were going to be in pre-production right now, but there’s been a little hiccup. And me doing this thing with Arcade Fire is a result of this hiccup with “Don Quixote.” Robert Duvall is still Quixote and Ewan McGregor is still involved — all that stuff is still happening. There’s just been a financial hiccup.

Gilliam sounded positive that this would was only a minor set back, especially when compared to the delays he has had to endure before. Hopefully. he’s right.

He just may, according to a rumor that is currently making the rounds which states that the indie director is attached to direct Twentieth Century Fox’s in development adaptation of the classic radio and pulp her, the Shadow. Supposedly the script is undergoing a rewrite and Tarantino will also take a stab at it.

Now I love Tarantino’s work as a director and I love the old Shadow pulp series, but Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups notwithstanding, sometimes two things that you love should not be mixed in to one.

Tarantino is a great stylistic director, but his style is his own. It is hard not to watch more than a few random moments of any of his films and not know that you are watching a Tarantino film. Even the film in which he stretches furthest away from his normal aesthetic, Jackie Brown, still has that Tarantino feel.

A Shadow film, on the other hand, will need to be drenched in darkness, fog and shadow, a modern noir. Director Russell Mulcahy came close in the opening scene of the 1994 Shadow film, though he didn’t really follow it up in the rest of the picture. (Granted, though, the script was the real main problem with that version.) While Tarantino has shown that he has been at least marginally influenced by noir on a story-telling level, none of his films have ever shown a visual influence.

Honestly, I was much more interested in this project when it was at Sony and Sam Raimi was attached as a possible director. But when Sony sold the film rights on to Fox, Raimi unfortunately dropped out.

Even if this rumor turns out to be true, and it very well may not, this is Tarantino we are talking about. While all directors are tied to multiple in development projects that seldom get made, no one talks about them as much as Tarantino. (With the possible exception of his good friend Robert Rodriguez.) In the meantime, I am firmly placing this one in the “I’ll believe it when I see the first trailer” file.

The studio has just paid out a “mid-six figures” fee to Saw and Feast screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan for an adaptation of the 1960s science-fiction anthology series The Outer Limits, according to Variety. There is no word as to whether the film will be one story or an anthology of shorter stories or whether it will contain original material or retell stories from the classic television series produced from 1963 to 1965.

Now, reportedly the deal has been in place since before things started to get really bad for the studio, but the payment just went out a few weeks ago, around the same time that the studio got their most recent debt extension approved by its creditors. Couldn’t the deal have been suspended?

Meanwhile, Red Dawn and Cabin In The Woods continue to sit on the shelf waiting to be released while The Hobbit and the next James Bond picture are mired in development, waiting a go-ahead from the studio to begin production. While the amount being paid to Melton and Dunstan isn’t nearly enough to fund any movement on any of these projects, it does raise the question as to what MGM plans to do with the script once completed. Are they hedging that they’ll have something ready to go into production as soon as their money problems are sorted out? That presupposes that the current management is still in place to greenlight the film once everything is settled, and that is a bet I am not willing to put too much money on.