Newsbites: The comics and remakes edition!

1. Zack and Deborah Snyder say the theatrical cut of Watchmen is getting ever-so-slightly shorter, but the director’s cut will run to 3 hours and 10 minutes. — SciFi.com

2. Stephen Sommers, director of Van Helsing (2004) and the first two Mummy movies (1999-2001), plans to pattern his Tarzan movie after the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks (2003-2007); he is reportedly “ditching the boy-raised-by-apes origin story for a 1930’s-set romp with a hefty helping of romance . . . with buffed-and-tanned actors flying through the jungle and sprinting up trees, parkour-style.” — Entertainment Weekly

3. Producer Gale Anne Hurd says the movie version of Magdalena will be “kind of like The DaVinci Code meets Wanted“. — ShockTillYouDrop.com

4. Jay Baruchel is in talks to play the title character in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, opposite Nicolas Cage, who will be playing the Sorcerer himself. The film — which “takes place in contemporary New York, where a wizard searches for an apprentice” — is a live-action Disney production, but it is unclear whether it will have anything other than the title in common with the famous Mickey Mouse cartoon that first appeared in Fantasia (1940). — Variety

5. A remake of John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) is in the works. So is a remake of Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), although, in fairness, that particular film was itself a remake of Howard Hawks’s The Thing from Another World (1951). — Hollywood Reporter

6. A remake of Robert Zemeckis’s Romancing the Stone (1984) is in the works. — Hollywood Reporter

7. A remake of the Dudley Moore comedy Arthur (1981) is in the works, starring Forgetting Sarah Marshall‘s Russell Brand. — Hollywood Reporter