• The Thing prequel gets its stars, but doesn't anyone care what happened to the Norwegians?

• This isn't looking good: Both Katheryn Bigelow and Robert Rodriguez have passed on a Planet of the Apes movie.

• I think Captain America director Joe Johnston is just messing with us: He says that Cap will be joined by The Invaders in the new movie, but that they'll all be British... which doesn't make any sense.

• Bill Murray confirms his role in Ghostbusters 3: He'll be a Slimer ghost after all.

• Doctor Who has generated some wonderful concept art.... in fact, too wonderful and creative to ever be done justice by such a low-budget television show.

Continue reading "Daily Scan for 02.09.10 - Murray Confirms Ghostbusters Role, The Thing Prequel Gets Cast" »

• The SciFi Writer's Guild is not happy about Amazon's latest game of chicken with Houghton Mifflin. I'm on their side, but I'm a non-Rand-eseque libertarian, so I do tend to believe the market should sort itself out.

• Disney is so happy with Tron Legacy that they are already planning a television series.

• This is getting a lot of news recognition, but it's clear director Joe Johnston was winding people up: He says Captain America will start as a USO officer in the next movie.

• Neil Gaiman confirms he's written an episode of Doctor Who.

• Oh dear. Daredevil is being rebooted... by the author of The Day the Earth Stood Still remake.

Continue reading "Daily Scan for 02.08.10 - Daredevil Gets Reboot, Gaiman Writes Doctor Who" »

Hollywood is quite fond of making sequels. Hey, if something worked the first time, why not do it again, right? The challenge is that the first movie of a series often succeeds because it surprises the audience in some way -- a novelty that quickly fades when you bring out another flick just like it. Sometimes though, a sequel can succeed as a movie all its own. Here are the best fantasy flicks that do just that.

10. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
One of the easiest ways to come up with a sequel is to start with a fantasy series with sequels already built in, like in the Narnia books. You take familiar characters, throw them into a new situation and introduce a few new (dreamy) characters along the way. In this case, the Pevensie children arrive back in Narnia to find an internal political struggle between the titular Prince and his usurping uncle. The story can't quite stand on its own, but it comes close.
How it improves on the original: Better pacing

9. Addams Family Values
This one is one of those rare fantasy sequels that is actually better than the original -- admittedly, in this case, a low bar to clear. It recognizes the inherent campiness of the television show, which the first movie aims for and fails to capture. It also expands on Gomez and Morticia's characters by using their lens to view contemporary world issues. Just pretend the first one doesn't exist.
How it improves on the original: Uses campiness for character exploration

Continue reading "Mary Robinette Kowal - The Ten Best Fantasy Movie Sequels" »

• In the wake of Moon not being nominated for best picture, io9 lists the ten worst scifi snubs in Oscar history.

• M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender got a preview screening, but the reviews were pretty mixed.

• With DC Comics being restructured into DC Entertainment, the previously sacrosanct Watchmen now looks likely to get a sequel.

• District 9's married writer/director couple are looking at stone monsters and gritty worlds for their next projects.

• Star Trek and Transformers writers Bob Orci and Alex Kurtzman have just signed a three year development deal with Fox.

Continue reading "Daily Scan for 02.05.10 - Watchmen Gets Sequel, Airbender Gets Screened" »

Well! Tuesday was not a bad day for scifi: Avatar racked up nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, District 9 found its way to four nominations including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, and Star Trek also picked up four nods in technical categories. Oh, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen got one, in Sound Mixing, to go with its seven Razzie nominations. So that's nice, too.

Some thoughts on all of this:

1. This year breaks a 27-year drought for science fiction in the Best Picture category, dating back to 1982 when E.T. was nominated; Avatar and District 9 are the fourth and fifth movies in the genre to be nominated (after E.T., Star Wars in 1977 and A Clockwork Orange in 1971). It's also the first time two scifi flicks have been nominated for Best Picture in the same year, so no matter how you slice it 2009 will go down as a watershed year in the genre.

Continue reading "John Scalzi - Five Thoughts on This Year's SciFi Oscar Nominations" »

• Don Cheadle says there'll be no War Machine solo movie.

• Rupert Murdoch says that Fox is already in negotiations with James Cameron for Avatar 2.

• With little less than a week until the game's release, the underwater scifi sequel Bioshock 2 gets a great trailer.

• SciFi Wire lists 35 things you probably didn't know about James Cameron. Who knew he was gay and half-robot?

• Tron: Legacy gets its first official image. It's not very informative, but at least Jeff Bridges looks cool.

Continue reading "Daily Scan for 02.04.10 - Fox Negotiates Avatar 2, Tron 2 Gets Official Image" »

There are plenty of reasons to get excited about Repo Men, the sci-fi thriller due in theaters this April. For starters, it stars Jude Law as a badass killer on the run in the dystopian future; Forest Whitaker gets to show off his real-life martial-arts skills; and, for those who didn't like Repo! The Genetic Opera, it's another chance to see what happens when artificial organs are readily available and made affordable with predatory financing. (You don't want to miss a payment.) But perhaps the best reason to see this movie is that its story could come true. Thanks to 3-D bio-printing, scientists are closer than ever to manufacturing replacement organs on demand.

It's unclear how the Union -- the fictional megacorporation out to get Jude Law in the movie -- makes their Artforgs (artificial organs), but the ones in our future will likely be printed out cell by cell and layer by layer on a machine not unlike the ink-jet printer in your home or office. Except that this one sprays tiny living cells (bio-ink) onto successive layers of an organic matrix (bio-paper) to create a three-dimensional object.

Continue reading "Calling All Repo Men - 3-D Bio-Printing Creates a Market for Artifical Organs" »

• io9 aims to cease all confusion by listing the worst superhero movies of all time. I'm not sure Superbabies counts though.

• Patrick Stewart would like to make a Nimoy-esque cameo in Star Trek 2. It makes sense: the Star Trek comic prequel setting up the reboot prominently featured Picard.

• The creators of Clone High and Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs have been shot down as the directors of the next Muppets movie. Instead the job will go to Flight of the Conchords helmer James Bobin. What an ineffably stupid decision.

• The New York Times posts an absolutely fantastic interactive timeline to Lost.

Continue reading "Daily Scan for 02.03.10 - Sir Stewart Wants Trek Cameo, Bobin to Direct Muppets Movie" »

Along with capes and tortured psyches, big cities are an essential part of superhero flicks. Heck, Superman's Smallville is pretty much the only small town in the entire genre. And whether fictional (Gotham) or real (New York City), a comic book movie hero's city defines him just as much as his cool car or red and blue tights. But which is the toughest, grittiest, most rough-and-tumble city of them all?

1. Champion City (Mystery Men)
Home to loser heroes like Mr. Furious and The Spleen, Champion City's name is more than a little tongue-in-cheek: Regular joes grab shovels and bowling balls and the only hero with any real power (Captain Amazing) is a total sellout. Visually, Champion City is a generic mish-mash of comic book and scifi movie tropes, and with all these misfit heroes running around, you'd think it would be a dangerous place to live -- or at the very least, an expensive place to buy insurance. But any city where Dane Cook can pass as a hero can't really be all that tough.

Continue reading "The Five Most Dangerous Comic Book Movie Cities" »