Once upon a time, we heard the wonderful news that we would be eventually seeing both animated and live-action TV shows based in the world of Star Wars. The Clone Wars animated series has come along, but we hadn’t heard any news on the live-action show — a show which had most people already hooked with promises of being “Deadwood meets The Sopranos in space” and rumors of it airing on HBO. Though the HBO thing is probably too good to be true, now comes some surprising news that the show may be casting already.

While speaking at a panel for her new movie — Knowing, with Nicolas Cage — Rose Byrne (28 Weeks Later, Sunshine) let it slip that a lot of her buddies have auditioned for roles on the show. Byrne had a small and not very visual role in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, but says she won’t be auditioning for the show as she currently stars on Damages. [...]

While not nearly as exhausting or crowded as its San Diego counterpart Comic-Con International, San Francisco’s WonderCon definitely had a lot to offer comic book-loving geeks and movie buffs alike. The 3-day WonderCon 2009, which ran from February 27 – March 1, had a lot of the same panels as the recent New York Comic Con (probably because they happened to be so close together this year), but there were new panels (Pandurom, 9). There also wasn’t as many comic book companies representing out on the Con floor, very little gaming presence, and the least amount of cosplay of the three major conventions, but Artist Alley’s was nicely packed with some of the best indie artists selling their work.

Admittedly, there wasn’t a lot of breaking news, but you can check out Geeks of Doom’s coverage of Star Trek, Terminator Salvation, Watchmen, and more at our WonderCon page. Below are some photos from the convention floor, of which I think my favorite is the one of Jedi Sherlock Holmes and Jedi Dr. Watson. The first row of images is from the Isotope Comics 100 Bullets party after the Con. I’ve also embedded a video roundup of the Con events created by my friend Alex of First Showing — watch for me as Alex points me out on camera near the end of the footage while we’re riding up the escalator together with Peter (of /Film) and John (of /Gamer) as we’re leaving the Con for the last time. Lastly, I’m including an Artist’s Alley Spotlight, which has some info on some of my favorite artists at the Con [...]

Morena Baccarin, known best as the sexy and well-respected escort from Joss Whedon’s Firefly has been cast as one of the leads in the pilot for ABC’s V. (Read: Science Fiction Series ‘V’ To Attempt Return To TV)

V is a remake of an ’80s show which told the tale of a race of aliens known as Visitors who come to earth in an effort to take it over. Baccarin would play Anna, the leader of the Visitors, who is smart and very knowledgeable in human culture.

The show isn’t a guarantee yet, as ABC has only ordered the pilot to see how it fares. The pilot is based on a spec script by Scott Peters.

The original show aired 19 episodes in 1984 and 1985, and it starred Beastmaster Marc Singer in the lead. His character captures one of the Visitors named Diana, who is put on trial for her actions.

The new show was supposedly going to follow a female Homeland Security agent, so I assumed because of this female replacement of Singer’s agent character, the leader of the aliens would be male. [...]

Now that every single big superhero title out there has been made into a movie or has a movie on the way, the new popular trend is to take the ones that for the most part failed, and “reboot” or “re-imagine” them. The newest movie rumored to be heading for a new vision, is Fantastic Four.

Fantastic Four had a $100 Million budget and only made $154 Million domestically, but they did pull down $330 Million worldwide which isn’t too bad. The sequel — Rise of the Silver Surfer – didn’t fare as well, costing $130 Million to make and bringing in $131 Million domestic (ouch). Worldwide, they made $289 Million.

The iffy-but-decent box office take was the high point, if you can believe it. The first movie received mixed, but mostly negative reviews; the sequel was hated by most.

With the success of The Dark Knight, everyone simply wants to stop making cheesy comic fare and making the darker and/or more realistic superhero tales with hopes that fans will eat it up. In every case, this means entirely new cast and crew — an entirely new take on the story and characters. [...]

Zack and Miri Make A Porno
2-Disc Edition
Directed by Kevin Smith
Starring Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Robinson, Jason Mewes, Justin Long
Weinstein Company
Release Date: February 3, 2009

When it comes to Kevin Smith, I may be a little bit biased. Whether people love or hate his movies, I always seem to love them for one reason or the other. What can I say, the dude’s style and his sense of humor have always simply entertained the hell out of me and that is what it is.

Zack and Miri Make A Porno is the biggest movie for Kevin Smith so far. Instead of using his normal gang of actors, he used some of them and fused them together with a group of Judd Apatow’s people — not a bad idea, strategically.

The movie follows Zack Brown (Seth Rogen) and Miriam Linky (Elizabeth Banks), a pair of twenty-somethings who live together and who have known each other since childhood. Basically, the two are just old buddies — they joke with each other, insult each other playfully, and all is well this way. Unfortunately, times are tough and bills are coming faster than income is, so their water, heat, and electricity all get shut off. After a quintessentially painful, awkward, and depressing ten-year high school reunion, Zack and Miri sit at a bar to avoid their cold apartment and figure out how to fix everything. Their idea: make a porno movie [...]

Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic
Blu-ray Edition
Directed by Jake Strider Hughes
Narrated by Tom Stechschulte
Based the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Warner Home Entertainment
Release Date: March 3, 2009

It would be logical to write off the Watchmen Motion Comic as yet another way for Warner Bros. to cash in on the recent Watchmen movie tie-in craze. That’s understandable, but going on the assumption that anyone putting out a product is primarily looking to turn a profit, what is the benefit of this motion comic and is it worth your time? Let’s find out.

For those of you not familiar with motion comics, it’s an animated version of a comic book that includes a narrative and musical score. So with the Watchmen Motion Comic, you get the original artwork by Dave Gibbons that was in the printed book with nothing changed except its presentation. Panels of art are panned in and out of, and the pieces of each panel are animated, making it look like a crude form of cartoon. A narrator speaks the dialogue from the word balloons while a musical score plays along with it [...]

Seinfeld fans have longed for it since the moment the show aired its final episode eleven painful years ago. The cast of the brilliant and quite possible funniest show ever made, Seinfeld, will make their first on-screen, scripted appearance together since the shows end. The whole gang — Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, and Michael Richards will get together for a new story arc that will span multiple episodes on the ultra-sarcastic and hilarious HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm. The show, as most know, stars Larry David, who created Seinfeld with Jerry Seinfeld.

Don’t get your hopes up too, too high; the appearances will be as themselves and not as their characters on Seinfeld. Even so, I’d be shocked if you didn’t see the actors offering up some very distinctive dialogue or reactions to give fans that warm and fuzzy feeling of pure unfiltered nostalgia.

The appearances will take place sometime during the show’s seventh season. The season isn’t set to start and we don’t know exactly when the group’s involvement will begin, but it has been announced and that’s pretty exciting. [...]

Fans of the 1992 cult classic Hard Boiled will be thrilled to learn that a sequel is on the way. If you recall, in 2007 a video game called Stranglehold was released, and this was technically the sequel to the movie. But instead of leaving it at that, it’s been decided to adapt the game into a feature movie and make a real sequel out of it.

Hard Boiled starred Chow Yun-Fat as “Tequila” Yuen — a detective who teams up with an undercover cop to take down a dangerous and deadly mob boss. Yun-Fat then reprised his role as Tequila in the 2007 multi-platform video game Stranglehold, which received a decent and for-the-most-part positive reception by game fans and critics.

Jeremy Passmore and Andre Fabrizio are writing the script for John Woo‘s Lion Rock Entertainment. There’s no word on if Chow Yun-Fat will again return to the role for the new movie. I’d imagine he would have to be a guarantee in order for them to go forward with the project, but no confirmation as of yet. [...]

Obviously, Watchmen finally came out Friday and it’s doing quite well at the box office. This likely means that all our lovely readers have already seen the movie, of course. But, this does not mean that more Watchmen-related movies can’t show up to entertain us.

New to join the party — we have an analysis of one of the scenes by director Zack Snyder, a new video journal, and a new video from the viral New Frontiersman website. There was also supposed to be a video of the movie’s ever-popular opening title sequence, but that video didn’t even last a day, so it apparently wasn’t supposed to be online.

The first video is an analysis of a scene from Zack Snyder. The video is over at the NY Times — click over to check it out. It even has an interesting little option to adjust the audio for more or less of Snyder or the movie’s original audio.

Next up, you can head over to MSN for a new production diary. [...]

The Huffington Post has a couple of new images of star Jake Gyllenhaal in the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced video game adaptation Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

In the movie, Gyllenhaal plays Dastan, a prince who is tricked into unleashing the Sands of Time, which destroy his kingdom and turn its people into vicious demons. In order to amend his mistake and stop an evil ruler from allowing the Sands to destroy the world, he teams up with a rival princess (and natural love interest) named Tamina, played by Gemma Arterton. The movie also stars Ben Kingsley as Nizam and Alfred Molina as Sheik Amar.

I’m not sure what to think of these images. I know he’s a prince and all, and I’ve only played one of the games — but does Jake look maybe a little too… pretty? This could just be me, but I definitely expected more of a rugged, warrior-type in the final product and not the same thing we saw on those set pics a while back (Read: First Look: Jake Gyllenhaal in ‘Prince Of Persia’). [...]

Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic
Digital Download
Directed by Jake Strider Hughes
Narrated by Tom Stechschulte
Based on the original work by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Warner Home Entertainment
Release date: July 31, 2008 – February 23, 2009

We’ve been told for the last few years that digital comics are the wave of the future, and whether that involves just finding some way to make them easier to read on a computer screen, or some way to read them on a portable devise, I haven’t found a good platform for digital comics yet (which is not to say it’s not out there.) With the release of the Watchmen movie, DC comics and Warner Brothers have decided to cash in by turning Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ groundbreaking work into what they call a motion comic. What this means is that they’ve put minimal animation into Gibbons’ original art, minimal voice work to read the captions and dialog, and minimal music to set the mood. In the end, what they have come up with is something that fails to live up to the original work, and does not present the work as it should be [...]

Watchmen
Directed by Zack Snyder
Starring Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson
Rated R
Release date: March 6, 2009

This movie should not exist. There have been rumors of its making finally happening for many years. How many acclaimed visionary filmmakers have tried and failed to make this movie? Terry Gilliam, Paul Greengrass, and Darren Aronofsky are the most well known. I’ve been reading the reports of development and false starts in the pages of magazines like Wizard and entertainment web sites since I was a kid. The material first came to me more than a decade ago after I had read about it for many years and after digesting the collected volume in a single setting I stared off into space wondering how in the hell they could ever make a movie of this. It was impossible, a mad folly that would frighten even Werner Herzog. There was just too much in this book to absorb. I myself even attempted to create a movie version in my head just for fun and see how it would play. It practically fried my brain, but then again I wasn’t a director or a screenwriter.

What brave soul would take on Watchmen, the landmark comic miniseries created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons that ran for twelve remarkable issues from 1986-1987 and has been credited with ushering in a darker and more introspective age of comic book storytelling, and not just live to win to tell the tale but conquer the bloody thing? [...]

Widely considered to be a groundbreaking series that changed the way the world viewed comic books, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen showed us that comics could be more than just funny books, but a place for challenging, thought-provoking literature that extends beyond the mere cape and cowl of typical innocuous superhero tales.

Some of us geeks just found out about Watchmen when director Zack Snyder announced that he was be making the film adaptation for Warner Bros.; the rest of us have been waiting for over 20 years to see a Watchmen movie done right on the big screen. After years in development hell, a potentially damaging lawsuit, and the stigma of being called the “unfilmable” story, the theatrical opening of Watchmen is finally upon us! Whether you highly anticipate the movie or are as skeptical as can be about it, there’s no doubt it’s at the forefront of all of our minds: will Zack Snyder and his propensity for slo-mo be a distraction or will he bring the printed page faithfully to life the way we all hope?

Here’s some anticipatory thoughts from those of us on the Doom Crew — who happened to be huge lovers of both movies and comic books — on this most auspicious occasion [...]

A new batch of pictures for the X-Men spin-off — X-Men Origins: Wolverine have been unveiled on USA Today. The pictures offer some new looks at some of the main mutants of the movie with a nice foggy/cloudy little backdrop. They almost look like they could each be their own poster or magazine cover.

The lineup includes a new shot of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, Liev Schreiber as Sabretooth, Lynn Collins as Silverfox, Taylor Kitsch as Gambit, Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, and Will.i.am as Kestrel.

Along with the new images, Hugh Jackman spoke to USA Today a little bit about the part of Wolverine and his vision of it.

Click over for quotes and images!

Jackman first shared his disliking of the way the character of Wolverine was handled over time:

I’m not mad about it, but I thought he had gotten a bit soft. I thought we had gotten away from the essence of who Wolverine really is: a bad (dude) who wants to live his own life. [...]

It’s still pretty early on Watchmen‘s theatrical launch date, so I’m sure not everyone has had the chance to see it yet.

Either way, a new set of sweet videos have been released. The videos are basically character videos for Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, Silk Spectre, Ozymandias, The Comedian, and Nite Owl. Click each one and see the character in action from some of their scenes in the movie.

Fair warning, some of the clips include footage that we haven’t seen in trailers and other videos, so if you want your brain to stay as clean and clear of movie footage as humanly possible before you rush out and see it four or five times, you might just want to steer a little clear of these. For those who just don’t care, these are a nice peek into each character and well worth checking out.

Click on over to the other side for the link. [...]

In order to keep everyone excited for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, many images and some trailers have been released over the months. Today, the 2nd theatrical trailer was presented to the public by Warner Brothers.

It’s amazing how fast time sometimes moves. In November, we were shocked and angered with the news that our precious Harry Potter would not be released as it was planned, but instead, it would be pushed back eight whole months. The July 17, 2009 release is still a ways off, but on the bright side of life, we’re already half of the way there. Ta-da!

Click over for the trailer.

This one is a little interesting. Most of the trailers we’ve seen seemed to be bringing back a little of that silliness that was featured in earlier installments, but this one definitely shows that they are not holding back on the darker stuff either. I’m actually surprised that the movie received a PG rating looking at this trailer — it looks like it could have just as many “scary images” as the last two did. [...]

Along with the convention wide theatrical release of Watchmen today, Warner Bros. is also releasing the IMAX version today as well. Dubbed Watchmen: The IMAX Experience (so look for it under that name if you’re buying tickets through an online vendor), this version of the film has been digitally re-mastered for the image and sound [...]

Last weekend, I wrote a description of the latest Star Trek theatrical trailer, which made its world premiere at WonderCon 2009 and is in theaters in front of screenings of Watchmen starting today.

That trailer has been released online today, so watch at this end of the entry or in high definition at Apple.

Star Trek hits theaters May 8, 2009 [...]

As you all know, this week is the one we’ve been waiting so impatiently for, the Watchmen Week of Geek!

In celebration of this momentous occasion, I have a collection of great books to tell you about. But before I get into the movie tie-in books, I should mention that if you haven’t read the original Watchmen graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, be sure to get your hands on that! Ok, now that that’s out of the way, we’ll start this entry up with a review of the grand daddy of the Watchmen tie-in books: Watching the Watchmen. After that, we will have more brief looks at Watchmen: The Art of the Film, Watchmen: The Official Film Companion (Hardcover Edition), Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test (The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series), and Watchmen: Portraits.

Watching the Watchmen
The Definitive Companion to the Ultimate Graphic Novel
By Dave Gibbons, Chip Kidd, Mike Essl
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Titan Books (October 21, 2008)

Watching the Watchmen is about as in-depth a look into the world of Watchmen as you could possibly get [...]

Principal photography commences this week on the Columbia Pictures production Salt, an espionage action thriller starring Angelina Jolie (Wanted, Changeling, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, The Bone Collector). Phillip Noyce (The Bone Collector, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger) directs. The original screenplay is written by Kurt Wimmer (The Recruit, The Thomas Crown Affair), with a current re-write by Brian Helgeland (Mystic River, Man On Fire, The Taking Of Pelham 1 2 3). Salt is produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura (Transformers, 1408, G.I. Joe) and Sunil Perkash (Enchanted). Executive producers are Ric Kidney and Mark Vahradian.

In Columbia Pictures’ Salt, Angelina Jolie stars as Evelyn Salt, a CIA officer who swore an oath to duty, honor, and country. When she is accused by a defector of being a Russian sleeper spy, Salt goes on the run to clear her name and ultimately prove she is a patriot. Using all her skills and years of experience as a covert operative, she must elude capture and protect her husband or the world’s most powerful forces will erase any trace of her existence.

Liev Schreiber stars as Winter, Salt’s boss and friend on the Russian desk at the CIA, and Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Peabody, a CIA counter-intelligence officer [...]