Earlier today, the news that we had all been waiting for was announced: the original voice cast had been signed for the upcoming new 26-episode run of Futurama. The news was initially reported by The Star, but has since changed up a bit: I contacted someone at Fox who confirms that Katey Sagal (Leela Turanga), Maurice LaMarche (Kif Kroker/Hedonismbot/Morbo/Donbot/Clamps), and Tress MacNeille (Mom) had all officially signed on. This of course means that the biggest name of them all, Billy West (Philip J. Fry/Dr. John Zoidberg/Prof. Hubert Farnsworth/Zapp Brannigan), and John DiMaggio (Bender Bending Rodriguez) — who admitted that he was confident all cast would return at Comic Con — had not yet signed on, but it is hoped that an agreement will be reached with the rest of the cast soon.

The news comes after the shocking report recently that the original voice actors with stuck in a financial dispute, and that a casting call had gone out to find new voice actors to take on all of the show’s roles. [...]

Jon Favreau‘s Iron Man 2 isn’t set to come out until May 7, 2010, but Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is preparing for the boom in business by hiring new employees, and you can go and apply yourself right now at Stark Industries! If you need to suck up, I suggest sucking up to the new CEO, Miss Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), who you would probably be working for more than Mr. Stark these days.

You’ll fill out the basic information, such as your name and location, before moving on to your skills and goals in your life and career. You’ll even be asked a couple of questions that you likely won’t know the answer to, which is always a good way to weed out prospective employees.

As a viral marketing campaign, it’s a pretty cool and original idea, but I’m not quite sure what it is yet. There is a terms of use agreement to OK, which mentions respecting other users and forums. It could be the ultimate Iron Man 2 social networking website, theoretically. [...]

Fans of the Fox animated comedy Family Guy were treated to a sneak peek of the next Star Wars parody episode, based on The Empire Strikes back, which is titled Something, Something, Something Dark Side.

We got to see about 10 minutes’ worth of the episode, and from the footage shown, fans of the show will be quite happy. All the humor that made the first Star Wars-themed episode a success was back on display. Show creator Seth MacFarlane said that the episode should be on around Christmas. They also revealed the title for the Return of the Jedi episode, which will be called We Have a Bad Feeling about This. Characters from all the Seth MacFarlane shows (Family Guy, American Dad, and the new Cleveland Show) will appear in the Jedi-themed episode. They didn’t say when that episode would air, but did said that work was beginning on it, and I would expect it to air next year.

One episode discussed for the next season was a show dealing with abortion that Fox has said they will not air. McFarlane did not seem upset with Fox’s decision on this, saying that they wrote the episode and submitted the script to Fox, which allowed them to produce it, but canceled the episode after seeing it. McFarlane said viewers could expect to see it on a future DVD release. It does seem odd that Fox would be okay with the episode at the writing stage, but would not have the guts to air the episode, but who can understand the inner workings of a television network [...]

What was looking to be bad news just a few days ago has begun great news today. According to the Toronto Star, the entire voice cast of Matt Groening’s Futurama has agreed to return for 26 new episodes.

The episodes will air on Comedy Central once production has finished on them. The actors and studio had been in a dispute over the salary to be paid to the actors, with the studio going so far as to say they would replace the cast, and even putting out a casting call for new actors.

At the Futurama Panel at last weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con, Groening would only say that the negotiations were still ongoing, and it seems a sham that we couldn’t have gotten this news 6 days earlier [...]

Of all of the gigantic movie reveals that happen at the San Diego Comic-Con each year, you wouldn’t expect a TV show to steal some of the spotlight. Well, leave it up to Lost and producers Damon Lidelof and Carlton Cuse to put on a show and do just that. The duo showed up with some very interesting video clips and a little fun from a few of the show’s cast members, leaving the room fully entertained and perhaps even more curious than ever.

The panel started off with a promo for Lost University — which begins enrollment on September 22, so don’t miss out! After that, they played a few minor clips before introducing Mr. Lindelof and Mr. Cuse. The duo gave a brief intro before going into some more hilarious videos. If you hadn’t figured it out, the panel was more of a collection of fun videos and the above-mentioned interesting videos than anything. Being the last time Lost will be at Comic-Con, the producers made their panel for the fans [...]

I already covered the news coming out of the Adult Swim side of this panel here, but the bulk of this panel was taken up with news and questions regarding the Venture Brothers. There were a lot of great cosplayers in the crowd, including at least a dozen Dr. Girlfriends, so you could tell that a lot of people were fired up for it.

The biggest thing that the crowd saw was the preview for the new season, which premiers in October. The biggest thing in the preview was the look we got at how Hank and Dean are growing up, especially now that all their clones were destroyed at the end of Season 3. Dr. Venture will be getting a new bodyguard, although it wasn’t shown who that would be. As to be expected there were a lot of funny moments to look forward to.

Some information that has already been announced, but which I will repeat here, is that Season Four will be broken up into two 8-episode sections, with the first 8 in October, and the rest airing next year. Creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer confirmed that there will be a lot of characters showing up who have been mentioned before, but never seen, including Monstroso and Captain Sunshine. Viewers will also get to see who the members of the Council of 13 actually are [...]

The first trailer for Wes Anderson‘s attempt at a stop-motion styled movie in The Fantastic Mr. Fox has been released by 20th Century Fox.

The movie is based on the book by the legendary Roald Dahl, Fantastic Mr. Fox. It tells the story of a fox who sneaks out at night to steal animals like chickens and turkeys from three rich and mean farmers. Mr. Fox steals the animals in order to provide food for his family, but it doesn’t take long before the three farmers have had enough and set off on multiple attempts to kill Mr. Fox and stop him from stealing their animals.

Anderson initially set off to make this movie along with Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) in 2004, but things didn’t work out and Selick moved on to direct Coraline.

Click over to check out the trailer for yourself and share your thoughts below!

The Fantastic Mr. Fox stars George Clooney as the title character, along with Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, and Willem Dafoe. [...]

It’s being reported that the man himself, Ridley Scott, will now be directing a prequel to his own classic science fiction film, Alien. The report comes as quite the shock: back in May we learned that Carl Rinsch would be directing the prequel that had been swirling around in rumors for a while at that point (Read: ‘Alien’ Prequel With Carl Rinsch As Director Confirmed By Tony Scott Himself). Rinsch is an understudy of Ridley and Tony Scott, and has done music video and commercial work for their Scott Free Productions label, which is producing the movie, naturally.

20th Century Fox, however, was holding on to the hope that things would change and Ridley would actually come back to direct — a wish that has now come true.

The original 1979 film followed a space shuttle crew that responds to a distress signal while on their way home. While checking out the call, they soon realize that the signal was actually a warning, and that a horribly dangerous and deadly alien species inhabits the planet and knows that they’re there. [...]

The annual Fables panel at the San Diego Comic-Con played to a full house on Saturday, largely thanks to a scheduling snafu that had many fans waiting for the Venture Brothers and Adult Swim panel that would be happening in the same room right after it.

After some not so gentle ribbing from Fables creator Bill Willingham about getting the Venture Brothers fans to read a book, the panel went into full swing. The best thing about the SDCC Fables panel is that every year the creators give away a one-page story that is only available at the panel. This year’s story is a prophecy told to Ambrose, one of Snow White’s and Bigby Wolf’s children, and according to Willingham, the story sets up everything that will happen in the book after Issue #100. This was reason enough for me to come to this panel, but fortunately, there was plenty of news to go around.

The big item that was being pushed by the panel was the forthcoming Fables prose novel, Peter & Max. The novel, which will be out in October and will cost about 23 bucks for 400 pages, deals with the adventures of Peter Piper and Max Piper (also known as the Pied Piper). The novel, written by Willingham, will feature illustrations by Steve Leialoha, as well as an 8-page comics story that will tie the novel into the regular series. The art shown at the panel looks great, and as a Fables fan, this is one I’m eagerly anticipating [...]

Just this past weekend at San Diego Comic Con 2009, James Cameron made the mega-announcement that August 21, 2009 would be Avatar Day, and that fans would be able to head out to participating IMAX theaters to see 15 whole minutes of glorious 3-D footage from the upcoming movie (Read: SDCC 09: See 15 Minutes of James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ In 3D Imax For Free On August 21), which will be released on December 18, 2009. This gives movie-goers the chance to really see what the movie is all about and how it hopes to change the cinema experience as we presently know it.

Now comes details via a press release that there will indeed be a whole lot more to Avatar Day than just the 15-minute preview that was announced — in fact, a multitude of Avatar goodies are on the way on August 21!

For those of us who aren’t able to get our hands on tickets to the epic preview, the official trailer will in fact also be released on August 21. That’s right, every single one of us will be able to finally get a look at the movie, whether it’s in theaters on any type of screen, or even just online. Of course, it won’t look nearly as good on a little computer screen in 2-D, but it will give us a small idea of what to expect, in the very least. [...]

The Strain is the first book in a trilogy of novels from Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan that dives into a dark world inhabited by vampires. Once upon a time, it was said that the plan was to turn the idea into a television series, but when pitched to everyone’s favorite station, Fox, they asked that it be turned into a comedy more like Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead of being dark and horrifying. This not-so-successful TV pitch is what eventually lead to the decision to write the books, instead.

Now it appears that a TV series is again just as possible as ever before. It’s being reported that that Grady Twins Productions — a newly established company from talented female duo Marti Noxon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Dawn Parouse Olmstead (Prison Break) — has begun working with del Toro to develop a series that is planned to run at least three seasons. The plan is to put something together and begin shopping it around to potential buyers next year after the second book in the series is released. [...]

We love a good Shatner story, and today we have a few to share with you.

Earlier this week, William Shatner made an appearance on The Tonight Show, where he recited Gov. Sarah Palin’s resignation speech as poetry. Palin had promised her supporters that she’d keep in touch via Twitter and she most certainly has been doing so. So, Shatner went on The Tonight Show again last night to recite her most interesting tweets.

You can watch both video segments here below.

In other Shatner news, the Star Trek vet put the pressure on Hewlett-Packard this week, leaving a company-wide voicemail message for staff of the computer giant.

“This is William Shatner. You, HP, promised me a toxic free computer by 2009. Now my friends at Greenpeace tell me I will have to wait until 2011. What’s up with that?… Please ask your leader, Mark Hurd, to make computers that are free of toxic PVC plastic and brominated flame retardants just as Apple has done.”

At last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, we were able to snag posters and a few sets of the Twilight trading card samples for a giveaway.

This year at the Con, we braved the crowds at the Summit Entertainment booth once again to bring you some Twilight Saga: New Moon posters and trading card samples! We have 3 sets of cards and 3 posters to give away to some lucky fans.

The sealed New Moon sample trading card set includes five trading cards: one each for Jared, Paul, Embry, and Sam with character bios and quotes on the back; the fifth card contains an image of all four of them, with info on the Quileute Wolf Pack on the back. See image here at right (click for larger, full view) of the front of the cards. The poster is the teaser seen here: ‘The Twilight Saga: New Moon’ Teaser Poster.

Three (3) winners each will receive:

– One (1) New Moon sample trading card set
– One (1) New Moon teaser poster

What do you have to do to get a chance to win? Glad you asked ’cause it’s really easy. Just make sure you’re a subscriber to our email digest, and then go ahead and fill out the handy dandy form [located in the contest post]. Good luck! [...]

Dead Space is a fairly popular video game from Electronic Arts that came out on October 14, 2008, and is now officially being turned into a feature film. The man given this newest challenge of turning a video game into a successful movie, is D.J. Caruso. The director has a Shia Labeouf double-feature under his [...]

The Gold Box deal of the day today at Amazon is Futurama — Volumes 1-4 on DVD for only $42.99 (down 64% from the list price of $119.96).

The set contains DVDs for Seasons 1-4 of the popular animated FOX television series from Simpsons creator Matt Groening. Each DVD comes with bonus features, such as deleted scenes and commentaries.

This is a great deal, considering that the individual season DVDs are currently going for $20-$24 a piece [...]