Newsbites: The comics and cartoons edition!

Lots of catching up to do here. Catching up, up and away.

1. Warner Brothers gave some reporters an advance look at about 26 minutes of footage from Watchmen, and the reporters liked what they saw. The film itself currently runs 163 minutes. — SpoutBlog, ComingSoon.net, IGN, New York Times

2. Philip Glass has been hired to compose an opera about Walt Disney for the New York City Opera. The musical “will be based on Peter Stephan Jungk’s German-language novel ‘The Perfect American'” and it “imagines the last months of Disney as seen through the eyes of a fictional Austrian cartoonist who worked for him.” — Variety

3. Steven Spielberg is thinking of casting comedy duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as the bumbling detectives Thomson and Thompson in his motion-capture adaptation of the Tintin comics. So says Pegg, at any rate, though it’s not clear whether Spielberg was serious about this or just joking. — Sunday Times, Stuff.co.nz

4. Green Lantern might start shooting as early as next spring. — FirstShowing.net, MTV Splash Page

5. Kenneth Branagh is in talks to direct the movie version of Marvel Comics’ Thor, and current comics writer J. Michael Straczynski says Branagh would be “perfect” for the film, given the “classical bent” of the character. — Variety, MTV Splash Page

6. Paramount and Marvel Comics had so much fun with Iron Man, they have agreed to distribute five more films together: Thor, The First Avenger: Captain America, The Avengers and two Iron Man sequels. — Variety, Nikki Finke, MTV Splash Page

7. Will Iron Man’s daddy be part of the Captain America movie? Perhaps even the man who “created” Captain America? — MTV Splash Page

8. Kirsten Dunst says she may or may not be in the next Spider-Man movie. — MTV Splash Page

9. Rumours are afoot to the effect that the next Batman movie might start pre-production as early as February 2009, even though they don’t have a script or anything like that yet. — Batman on Film, MTV Splash Page

10. We’ve already got a TV show about the young Clark Kent, i.e. Superman, so why not a TV show about the young Dick Grayson, i.e. Robin? Well, um, for one thing, isn’t Robin supposed to be young in the first place, before his parents are killed and he is adopted by Bruce Wayne, i.e. Batman? How much back-story can there be, really? The new show, which is being developed by the CW, will be called The Graysons. — Variety, MTV Splash Page

11. Disney has announced that Cars 2 will now come out in 2011, one year earlier than originally planned. Alas, it will not co-star the original film’s Paul Newman, who passed away this week. Pixar is also producing a series of related short films called Cars Toons. — Hollywood Reporter, Associated Press

12. Warner Brothers is developing a feature-film version of Yogi Bear, in which Yogi Bear and Boo Boo will be CGI characters in a live-action world. — Hollywood Reporter