News Bites: Turtles and Transformers

News Bites LogoThis week’s assortment of news bites largely consists of superhero movie news and other adaptations. There are a few denials of things, a few rumors, and a few confirmations. There’s also a distressing amount of Michael Bay news. Such is life.

Read on to find out what’s going on. Continue reading

News Bites: Star Lords and Wars

It’s Friday morning, time for the weekly dose of news bites. Now, normally I’d just list the few tidbits straight in the post without using a jump cut, but this week the press releases have been coming out in abundance. So for those of you seeing this on the front page instead of a direct link, hit the “Continue Reading” link to see what’s new this week. What’s on the docket? Some big time movie plans, and a whole lot of upcoming TV series. Continue reading

Weekly Weblinks: Robots and Rita

Thanks to last week’s delayed post, this Friday’s edition of the Weekly Weblinks is perhaps just a bit lighter than usual (or maybe it just seems that way to me), but there are still several good blog posts and news articles to read. Some fun semi-obscure films are reviewed, and some movie franchises have new information being released. So read on for this week’s batch of the Weekly Weblinks. Continue reading

News: Bay Back for More Battling Bots

Michael Bay is confirmed to be back in the director’s chair for the fourth live-action Transformers film, as part of a deal between him and Paramount to secure him for the next entry in the franchise by agreeing to fund his upcoming film Pain & Gain (which will feature Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson).

No cast or characters have been selected for the film yet, though obviously Optimus Prime and Bumblebee are expected to be major characters. Producer Lorenzo DiBonaventura says he expects it will be “an evolution” of the franchise, not a re-doing of it. Which really doesn’t explain a whole lot… if they’re not doing a reboot, there are only a few places they can go with the story; to wit, Galvatron and/or Unicron or a new story featuring either villains nobody’s heard of or that were so minor before that nobody will care (since they already kind of blew it with Shockwave.)

Of course, no characters or cast have been selected because the story hasn’t been selected yet; they’re still waiting on a script. The film already has a release date set, at June 29, 2014. This means they have almost exactly the same amount of lead time that gave us Revenge of the Fallen and Dark of the Moon (possibly less, as they might very well have started on the scripts for those before the preceding movie was released in each case.) That… isn’t encouraging, especially for those of us who were hoping for a Bay-free franchise reboot.