Science Fiction World

Looks like a sequel to M. Night Shyamalan's excellent superhero comic book movie, Unbreakable , staring Bruce Willis and Samual L. Jackson could still happen.

If asked to name a contender for the helm of Marvel Studios' forthcoming Thor movie, I can guarantee one name that would not have passed my finely-tuned sense of the improbable is that of Kenneth Branagh. But what do I know? The word from Variety is that Branagh is indeed in negotiations to direct the live-action movie based on Marvel Comics' character Donald Blake, a disabled medical student whose alter-ego is the hammer wielding Norse god Thor.

If The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor demonstrates anything, it's that the pen is far mightier than the sword when it comes to killing off the undead. Well, an undead movie franchise anyway. No need for an archaeological dig to investigate what caused the collapse of this appalling ruin of a movie: every scene, every piece of banal dialogue and off-target one-liner points to the script penned by the writing team of Alfred Gough and Miles Millar.

The web is abuzz with news that Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, the writing team that adapted Lord of the Rings for the screen, will be reuniting to script the two Hobbit movies. If only for continuity with the Rings trilogy, this would be good news, but it's worth remembering that one of the eleven Oscars garnered by the third movie in the trilogy, Return of the King, was the Oscar for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay.

There was bad news for fans of the Harry Potter movies on Thursday with the announcement by Warner Bros. that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has been rescheduled for a 17 July 2009 release, a frustrating delay of eight months beyond the original release date (November 2008).

Last year we wrote with some optimism about Howard McCain's forthcoming Viking Sci-Fi adventure Outlander (or is it a Sci-Fi Viking adventure?). Back then it still had a projected release of early 2008, a date which came and went without word. Well, according to the official Outlander site the movie has now been completed and will be released later this year, unless you happen to live in Latvia where it has already been released! For the rest of us, a couple of trailers are now available.

Rumour and speculation about who will be cast in Guillermo del Toro’s two Hobbit movies are like fog on the Barrow Downs, dense but insubstantial! A lot has been said, with very little if anything officially confirmed by the Studio.

The Hugo Award winning DC Comics graphic novel, Watchmen, is set to be released as a movie in June 2009. Directed by Zack Snyder of 300 fame, the Warner Brothers/Paramount Pictures/Legendary Pictures production will star: Malin Akerman; Billy Crudup; Matthew Goode; Carla Gugino; Jackie Earle Haley; Stephen McHattie; Jeffrey Dean Morgan; and Patrick Wilson. Not huge names, all of them, but then 300 was cast with some relative newcomers too.