Variety has another article up tonight on Warner Brothers’ plans to go ahead with a series of movies based on the DC Comics superheroes — or, rather, as one of their bloggers puts it, Warner has “plans to make plans.” The phenomenal success of The Dark Knight, after a summer that had already seemed to be glutted with comic-book movies from Marvel and others, has apparently convinced the folks at Warner that they really need to do something with the... Read more

Fly Me to the Moon, the latest film to be produced in the digital 3-D format known as Real-D, was originally supposed to open August 8. Then it was delayed to August 15. And then, last Monday, the Canadian distributor suddenly announced that the film would only be opening in Toronto for now; all other Canadian cities will have to wait. Why is this? My theory: Journey to the Center of the Earth, which was also released in Real-D way... Read more

It’s too early to say anything about the films released in August, of course, but the box-office trajectories of the films released between January and July seem pretty clear. So, depending on how you count these things, we can safely say that there are only a few wide releases from that period that have had such strong “legs” that their final box-office totals will be at least four times what they made in their opening weekends: The Bucket List ($20... Read more

Good news for Touch of Evil fans. Jonathan Rosenbaum hinted at this in a footnote to his recent post on director’s cuts, but today Universal put out the official press release announcing that a new, two-disc set will be released October 7 including not only the 1998 re-edited version of the film, but, for the first time ever on DVD, the original 1958 version which, for all the compromises it endured, was still the version that won decades of critical... Read more

Nikki Finke reports that the release date for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has been postponed by a factor of eight months, from its original release date on November 21, 2008 to July 17, 2009. That means this film, the sixth in the series, will be coming out two years and six days after the previous film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — easily the longest gap between Harry Potter movies to date. The second movie... Read more

Two items, one new-ish, one old-ish. 1. MTV Splash Page reported yesterday that Jim Uhls has finished the second draft of his script for Rex Mundi, and now the producers, including Johnny Depp, are looking for a director. The film will star Depp as someone named Dr. Julien Sauniere, and the original comic book concerned “the Holy Grail and a descendant of Jesus Christ” — but all of that must have seemed too similar to The Da Vinci Code (2006),... Read more

It’s been a while since I had to do this, but the summer is coming to an end, so… It is called Mirrors. It is a horror film. It is distributed by Fox. So, not surprisingly, as Lou Lumenick reports, it is not being shown to critics before it opens tomorrow. Read more

My review of Tropic Thunder is now up at CT Movies. Read more

Time to catch up on some history, here. 1. Theseus is making a comeback in War of Gods, and Perseus is making a comeback in a remake of Clash of the Titans (1981). So it must be time for Jason to make a comeback, too, in The Argonauts, a new film being written and produced by comic-book specialist Zak Penn. Apparently there are also three Hercules movies in development at various studios, as well as God of War, “based on... Read more