Summit Entertainment, distributors of the soon-to-be-released and much anticipated Astro Boy full-length CGI animated movie, have October 23, 2009 as the official release. YIPPEE!!

Imagi, the grunt behind this fantastical graphical wonderment, have recently posted a few more snapshots of what we can expect here and there are now two trailers and the original teaser showing off some incredible CGI magic.

Do not doubt for one second that the depth and darkness of the original Astro Boy — created by the unquestioned God and creator of Manga, Osamu Tezuka — will not be nipped and tucked for the family friendly demographic that the trailers seem to be aiming for.

Let’s be honest here, over the years Astro Boy has been reworked in cartoon format at least three times [...]

Right around the time that Sylvester Stallone was finishing new installments in his Rocky and Rambo franchises, it was made clear that more movies in each franchise was not completely out of the question. Some times has passed, Stallone is nearing the completion of his next flick, The Expendables, and it is being reported that Rambo 5 has indeed been greenlit.

Nu Image/Millennium Films, who also handled The Expendables, were the ones who gave the go-ahead to this new Rambo project. The movie’s premise looks to take John Rambo away from the jungles and toward the United States/Mexico border, where he will take on human being traffickers and drug lords while attempting to rescue a kidnapped little girl.

The first three movies in the franchise, First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), and Rambo III were action movie staples of the ’80s. The movies all starred Stallone as a Green Beret Vietnam veteran who, after realizing he has no place is normal civilization, uses his immense stable of violent talents to assist in important, high-risk operations. [...]

Bob Weinstein, head of The Weinstein Company with his brother Harvey, has announced to the LA Times that they are already developing a third chapter in the re-booted Halloween franchise, that they will be calling Halloween 3-D — a loving tip o’ the cap to ’80s horror threequels.

Shock rocker turned film maker Rob Zombie directed the first two movies in the resurrected franchise, but decided a while back that Halloween II (which opened this weekend) would be his last work in this world. Not to waste any time at all, the Weinsteins say that they already have another director lined up and in-negotiations, who does have experience with horror movies, and has an entirely new vision for Michael Myers — which means this may already be an whole new reboot within the reboot [...]

In an announcement that caught comic book fans by surprise, The Walt Disney Company has purchased Marvel Entertainment for the tidy sum of $4 billion dollars in cash and stock. Details are short at this time, but the press release from Disney said that the move has been approved by both companies’ boards and must now get clearance from the government as well as Marvel shareholders.

If everything goes through, Disney will then have access to the Marvel stable of over 5,000 characters, which includes popular superheros like Iron Man, Spider-Man, the X-Men, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, and Thor.

What does this mean for Marvel as a company and the industry as a whole? One can hope that it’s a good thing. Marvel now has a stable base of money, much the same way that DC does (because of their relationship with Warner Brothers); however Marvel must now answer to a different set of business people that it never has before, and who knows if or how they may interfere with the publishing arm [...]

The Green Hornet has battled its way through some serious struggles on its trek to a theatrical release. Transferring from one pair of hands like Kevin Smith to the current set of caring hands, Seth Rogen, who is also leading the movie as Britt Reid. The struggle to find a director and actors, which began with Stephen Chow first attached to the job along with starring as Kato before he walked away from directing, and ultimately, the entire project. Since then, that little mess has been cleaned up with Michel Gondry hired to direct, and Taiwanese star Jay Chou cast as Kato.

The movie was first settled into a June 25, 2010 release date before moving back slightly to a July 9, 2010 date. Now it’s been confirmed that the movie has been given another hefty shove back to December 17, 2010 — a whole extra five months to wait…before filming has even started [...]

The trades are reporting that Columbia Pictures is now developing Bad Boys III. The studio has hired Peter Craig to write the screenplay with no promise that director Michael Bay, or stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence will return. The plan is simply to get a script done, and if it’s good enough, eventually, everyone will agree to reunite and make the movie.

The original 1995 Bad Boys was Bay’s first movie and didn’t leave too much of a huge mark on the cinema world — it received mediocre reviews and only scored $66 Million at the box office. Bad Boys II was made when Michael Bay was a hell of a lot more Michael Bay-ier and came with all the spectacular bangs and booms that netted it a more respectable $138 Million box office take. Consensus on the movies seems to be fairly split: you either think they’re a lot of popcorn fun, or you hate them with a passion. Considering the current star of Will Smith and how much money Bay’s movies make (not to mention his desire to step away from giant robots), this could actually make some sense. [...]

We’ve all seen the movie Jurassic Park (I assume). The method to the madness of bringing living, breathing dinosaurs back to life in that movie, was to find prehistoric pieces of amber with bugs perfectly preserved inside and extract their blood — assuming that they’ve fed on dinosaurs and contain their DNA. Though it’s likely that scientists have attempted to try this, it’s not something that many expect to actually work. Now comes word that a scientist in Canada has a whole new plan to possibly bring dinosaurs back to life.

Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at Montreal’s McGill University, Hans Larsson, believes the fact that dinosaurs are ancestors of birds may just hold the key. He believes that while a chicken is its embryonic stages, he can literally go in and alter this, change that, and replicate what once was, hundreds of millions of years ago.

Larsson has been studying the evolution of birds for a decade now, and truly believes that in time, he could find a way to do the unthinkable: hatch a live prehistoric creature. [...]

Daniel Craig has been around for quite some time, but didn’t really catch eyes until 2002′s Road to Perdition. Since then, he’s appeared in movies like Layer Cake, Munich, The Golden Compass, and of course, as the latest and greatest James Bond in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. Craig has now added a new job to his schedule with the announcement that he’ll star in the Universal Pictures and Morgan Creek psychological thriller, Dream House.

The movie will be directed by Jim Sheridan, the celebrated writer and director of critically acclaimed films like My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown, In the Name of the Father, The Boxer, and In America — three of which featured Daniel Day-Lewis, who’s well-known for choosing his roles very cautiously. He’s currently working on the film Black Mass, which tells the story of the infamous and elusive fugitive mafia godfather, Whitey Bulger. Sheridan has been nominated for an impressive six Academy Awards, but has yet to win one. [...]

Silber Media does a lot of things, and one of those things is making tiny little hand-written, hand-drawn mini comics that are about the size of match books. The makers of these little comics have released a new batch for fans of theirs to check out.

Lost Kisses # 9 & #10

Lost Kisses is a series that follows characters in their simplest form: as stick figures. These stick figures like to offer up a lot of thoughts and philosophies about the world around us, and more specifically, they dive into the ruthlessly painful world of romance and relationships.

Worms #4

A bit of a trippy mind-screw of a ride, Worms tells the story of a girl who mysterious wakes up in a hospital, attached to an IV filled with worms that are making their way into her system. Over time, the girl begins to find herself getting stronger as she attempts to escape the evil hospital. [...]

The Official Twilight Convention is underway in Parsippany, NJ, this weekend and long-time Friend of Doom and Twilight fanatic, the lovely CrueChik is on the scene for Geeks of Doom.

The convention kicked off yesterday with guests like Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke and stars Gil Birmingham (Billy Black) and Edi Gathegi (the vampire Laurent) and members of the Wolf Pack from New Moon on hand for Q&A panels and autograph sessions.

Our reporter has called in a few times to let us know the happenings at the Con and sent the image here at right (click for larger, full view), which is a sign at the entrance to the Con (there’s another sign with an arrow pointing the other way for ‘Werewolves’ — CrueChik is on Team Edward, which is why we have such a bias pic). But, I think she’s living it up so much that she hasn’t had much time to write in her official report (we don’t blame her — we told her to party hardy!) [...]

The clever folks over at io9 have put together a video montage of science fiction moments from the NBC hit comedy 30 Rock.

Fans of the show who know their scifi know that quite often the show’s leading lady, Liz Lemon (Tina Fey), loves to spout out references to scifi and other items of geek culture, and even wore a Princess Leia costume to jury duty to get out of serving. One time she was so impressed with an apartment that she exclaimed, “By hammer of Thor!” You don’t hear much like that on TV sitcoms. The sitcom has also incorporated spoofs of popular scifi and has had some primo scifi alumni guests like Carrie Fisher and Adam West [...]

Halloween II
Directed by Rob Zombie
Starring Tyler Mane, Brad Dourif, Chris Hardwick, Mark Christopher-Lawrence, Jeffrey Daniel Phillips
Rated R
Released date: August 28, 2009

A few years ago the Halloween franchise was in dire need of a change in direction worse than anything. The logical step from a Hollywood studio standpoint was to take the series’ iconic masked madman Michael Myers back to his roots and start anew. The idea of a remake of the original Halloween wasn’t warmly accepted at first among the franchise’s longtime fans with good reason but the series had long since scraped the bottom of the barrel so clean you could eat off it. The time had come for a new director to take the reins of Michael Myers’ gory exploits and put their own unique spin on the beloved horror series. Musician and filmmaker Rob Zombie was an odd choice for that job and the movie he ultimately delivered in the late summer of 2007 was greeted with the kind of warm enthusiasm Michael Myers usually reserved for his murder victims. I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve seen the remake several times and I even own it on DVD. It’s not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination but I regard it as a fascinating failure possessing greater re-watch value than 95% of the horror remakes being released these days.

Zombie did the best job he could when you consider the circumstances but the slow-burning narrative of his remake’s first two acts was crippled in the third act by the crude insertion of a compact rehash of the original that gave us no time to really get to know the other characters. Even the character of Laurie Strode, one of horror cinema’s greatest heroines, was reduced to a giggly, perky cipher I had little or no sympathy for. Zombie was heavily criticized for attempting to give Michael Myers a detailed origin complete with a broken home, a family who couldn’t give much of a shit about him (with the exception of dear ol’ mum Deborah, a fine performance by the underrated Sheri Moon Zombie, the director’s missus), and a society that has written him off before they even knew him [...]

While doing a conference for the new Kate Beckinsale movie, Whiteout, mega-producer Joel Silver was asked about what projects he might have coming up and his thoughts on the new and improved 3-D technology that’s sweeping the business. Collider was attending the conference, and reports that Silver revealed that he does in fact have a project that he’s held the rights to for a period of time now, and that he believes would be perfect for the 3-D treatment. That movie: Swamp Thing!

Swamp Thing is a DC Comics character created by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson that was turned into a 1982 horror/superhero movie of the same name that was written and directed by Wes Craven. It told the tale of a scientist who was transformed into a half man, half swamp life being after a lab accident. After the accident, he eventually moves into the swamp and begins fighting the various threats to his new environment. A sequel called The Return of Swamp Thing was released in 1987, but wasn’t received as well — though many would say Swamp Thing himself looked a-lot more bad-ass in the sequel. [...]

Five new portrait shots have been released of the Volturi vampires from The Twilight Saga: New Moon, along with three new production stills from the upcoming film.

The portraits are of coven leader Caius (Sweeney Todd‘s Jamie Campbell-Bower ), Jane (Dakota Fanning), Marcus (Christopher Heyerdahl), Alec (Cameron Bright), and Aro (Underworld‘s Michael Sheen). The three new production stills feature one of Jane, one with Cullan clan member Alice Cullen (Ashley Greene) with another Volturi vamp Demetri (Charlie Bewley), and one with three Volturi together.

The Volturi coven, based in Italy, is supposed to be the most powerful of vampires in the Twilight universe and they’re seen for the first time in New Moon [...]

Director Rob Zombie‘s sequel remake Halloween II is being released in theaters today, and already, negative feedback is flowing strong. As with any director who tries to take a classic of any genre and remake it, moviegoers need to be truly blown away for it to find success, and so far, Zombie hasn’t done so with the Halloween franchise. Instead of retracting back to his original concepts in the realms of shock horror (House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects), it’s being reported that Zombie will be moving right into another classic horror remake: The Blob.

The 1958 movie tells the story of a mysterious object landing on Earth that turns out to be a gelatinous red blob that absorbs human beings and grows huge as it moves along. The Blob has been remade before — with an updated version in 1988 — but it appears that Zombie’s version will be a true remake with a bold, bold move. [...]