Newsbites: The sequels and remakes edition!

Just catching up on a handful of items, here — a few of which are, admittedly, a week or two old, by now. But hey.

1. Get ready to be Left Behind again! News Blaze reports that Tim LaHaye and Cloud Ten Pictures have resolved their legal differences, such that LaHaye has the right to remake the existing films if he wants to, but if he does not do so within a certain length of time, then Cloud Ten can go on making sequels to the existing films. Meanwhile, the world wonders what ever became of that Resurrection film that LaHaye was supposedly working on with Screen Gems.

2. Jim Hill explores how Pixar chief John Lasseter took Tr2n, the upcoming sequel to Tron (1982), out of the hands of Steve Lisberger, who created the original movie and had hoped to write the sequel himself.

3. MTV Movies Blog reveals that Star Wars: The Clone Wars will not begin with the famous “crawl” that kicked off all six of the live-action movies. Instead, it begins with a newsreel, a la Starship Troopers (1997).

4. Patrick Goldstein asks the top dog at Universal why Nottingham, Ridley Scott’s revisionist take on the Robin Hood legend starring Russell Crowe as the titular sheriff, has been indefinitely postponed. The answer: rewrites, basically.

5. Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and film director Guillermo del Toro talk to MTV’s Splash Page about their plans for the next Hellboy movie — and how that movie might interfere with Mignola’s plans for the comic book.

6. MTV Movie News reports that the new RoboCop movie will not be a sequel, and it will be rated R.

7. David Goyer tells the MTV Movies Blog that he’s working on an Invisible Man script in which the nephew of the Claude Rains character in the 1933 film is sent as a “secret agent” into “imperial Russia”. That sounds kind of like the plot of Invisible Agent (1942), except there it was Rains’s grandson and he was sent into Nazi Germany.

8. Variety reports that AMC is going to turn Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid classic The Conversation (1974) into a TV series. That’s … interesting. The series will take place in the 1970s and will be co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, who won an Oscar for some little flick called The Usual Suspects (1995).

9. Jeffrey Wells says it looks like there has been a shift in emphasis for The Special Relationship, the follow-up to screenwriter Peter Morgan‘s previous films The Deal (2003) and The Queen (2006):

What’s happened, in short, is that Morgan has gradually lost interest in the Bush-alliance downfall story and shifted focus to the lah-dee-dah Blair-Clinton relationship. It’s almost certain that whatever A Special Relationship turns out to be, Morgan will make it work and then some. He’s a very sharp writer. But I for one am disappointed. The Iraq War-downfall thing is about a smart guy going astray, drinking the Kool-Aid and screwing his career — clear and simple. What’s the [Blair]-Clinton story about? Two liberal-minded heads of state come to like each other during the ’90s and….what? I don’t see what it is.

10. Director Francis Lawrence tells ShockTillYouDrop.com that a prequel to I Am Legend (2007) is in the works, and yes, Will Smith may star in it. Presumably, since the prequel would have to end more or less where the original film began, they wouldn’t be able to make such drastic last-minute revisions to the ending of this film.

11. The Hollywood Reporter says writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless have been hired to come up with a script for Breck Eisner’s remake of Flash Gordon.