Newsbites: The ancient Greco-Roman edition!

1. Clash of the Titans has a new trailer and a new tagline (“Damn the gods!”), and it looks to me like the new film might not be as forgiving of Zeus and his bloodthirsty ways as the original film was:

Sam Worthington, who plays Perseus in the movie and is also currently onscreen in Avatar, told the Los Angeles Times last week that the filmmakers will be reuniting next month for a round of reshoots — only two months before the film’s release date in March. Ordinarily this sort of last-minute retooling might be interpreted as a sign of trouble, but Ain’t It Cool News assures us that the reshoots would have been done a lot sooner if it weren’t for the fact that Liam Neeson, who plays Zeus in the movie, was too busy shooting The A-Team until now. (He’s playing Hannibal, i.e. the George Peppard role, in that one.)

2. The Los Angeles Times says the follow-up to 300 (2006) will now be a prequel, rather than a sequel. Frank Miller says he is going to base it on the Battle of Marathon, which took place ten years before the battles depicted in 300 … but he is also calling the story Xerxes, which is odd, because the Persian king at the time of Marathon was not Xerxes but his father Darius.

3. The first episodes of Spartacus: Blood and Sand won’t be aired for another month, but the Starz network has already ordered a second season, which will go by the name Spartacus: Vengeance. A rather bloody trailer for this show recently went online, too; make of it what you will: